Gymnast

I would silence the announcers, babbling blowhards with muscles like unraveled yarn, their only aches come from too long sitting, men who use talk like spray paint or cheaply made chisels, smearing and hacking what is well formed, solid, strong, not theirs.

I would sprint the gym’s dusty perimeter, yanking cord from socket, killing the racket of “Malagueña” laid over with “Für Elise” laid over with Sousa. One routine at a time, please. And I would line up the coaches and lead them outside, pull them out the open door into the bright rectangle of light as they, hoarse, yell still their encouragement and blame.

Only this: the smack of feet on the mat, hand claps and a cloud of chalk, the bar groaning with the body’s flung weight. For this is an affair of the body. If the body swings too far, it will crumple to the mat. If the body is not strong enough, the hands will release without the mind’s consent. It is not a matter of mind but of flesh, and it is not easy. Force the spine straight and pull with the belly, legs together, twist and pivot and grip—one hand shifting and the callused palm rubbing dry against the bar—and as the body swings upward, ceiling rafters slide smoothly down the wall to the floor and back up the wall to the ceiling again, and at the last second the hands release the bar, the wind nobody else hears blanks all other sound, legs tuck and torso spins, heel and calf take the jolt of dismount: an electric bolt rising from the ground. Done. Watchers grow dizzy by routine’s end. Newly drunk, they tip in their seats, willing themselves to fall.

I am smitten by the Russian gymnast Svetlana Khorkina, smitten by the passion that looks like rage on her untranslatable face. The sportscasters mock her look of fierce determination. Probably she terrifies them. They replay scenes from a past meet; over and over, the Svetlana of four years ago twists off the vault and into the air then crashes, midtuck, to the mat. Later the judges would discover that the vault had been set at the wrong height, a great controversy. But by the time they corrected the mistake, Svetlana’s nerves were shot. Halfway through her uneven bars routine, her hands slipped and she fell to the floor, keeping her composure while on the mat but bursting into tears with her teammates and coach. The crew trained their cameras on her, on the tears streaking those high cheekbones.

Now she is twenty-five, old by the standards of the sport, and she knows this will be her last major meet. In an interview her translator says, She says she wants to win as badly as she wants to mother her own child. As Svetlana speaks, her eyes are calm, resolved. She accepts the contract’s terms on faith; she will make her body a quill, a kiln, a highway; she will make her body do what her mind cannot imagine. She will create the idea made flesh, knowing it will hurt more than anything and cost her plenty. That is why I want her to win over the cherubic teen from Texas, equally determined, but by comparison a child herself.

Svetlana’s turn. She tips her head to the judges, a formality. She thinks of what she must do, facing straight ahead, eyes on the vault, mouth set. Then from a dead stop she is running at top speed, arms pumping and legs flying at odd angles, for she is lean and long and her body, though strong, looks fragile, like a bundle of raw kindling. But with this body she can accomplish great things; with this narrow-hipped body (foot wrapped with tape, arch over instep over arch) she will scrawl rapid characters on the stale air of the gymnasium. Running, she points herself at the vault and grabs it, slams it, half a second of impact, arms down and legs straight in the air, and, twisting a tight corkscrew up and over and into a pike, she runs out of space and her feet hit the mat and from top speed she comes again to a dead stop, arms stretched above her head like the limbs of an elm, and again tips her head back to nod at the judges, inscrutable.

Does it matter that she doesn’t win? That she comes in second to the teen from Texas? A week later, the Texan’s grinning face is reproduced on French-fry wrappers at McDonald’s the world over. But I can’t shake the image of Svetlana, composed and calm, shoulders wrapped in the Russian flag, smiling serenely at her devotees.

And I wonder if she dreams sometimes, as I have, of her unconceived, those she traded for this, her pearl of great price. Not the medal; the medal is nothing. This: sole smacking mat, muscled arm’s hard curve. Ephemeral in the end as an echo in an empty gym, a residue of dust suspended in the air. Her beautiful routine.

Who among us believes still in visions? I believe, for I have seen, do see, in dreams, my daughter. The electric shudder of child in body. The young are filaments of curled heat, glowing: things are not as we have been told.

Child, I dreamed you one morning. Your infant body pressing the crook of my arm felt real, solid as a bag of oranges. But when I turned your warm face to mine, you began your leaving, translucent scalp pulling in damp hair, eyelids fusing, body turning comma until you vanished. How can I speak to you, child who has never been?

Unmade daughter, if you would knot and swim within my body, know now that my first sacrifice has not been for you. Do not visit; do not make me turn you away.