Acrobatic Duality Read online

We are the unique person in the world for whom talking to ourself, arguing with ourself, looks the least strange and feels strangest. Having an athletic mind, both our bodies pace, in circles, around our suite in the morning, and then again around the dressing room as we change and apply our competition makeup. The long warm-up and stretch process keeps us from pacing, but as we sink into oversplits, front foot hooked around a chair seat and back thigh lying on the floor, we glare at ourself, trying to understand.

  We mutter things like “Andreea Răducan” and “Chinese women’s gymnastics team at the 2000 Olympics”—infamous cases of losing medals after winning them, departing in shame, names erased from gymnastic history no matter the difficulty and beauty of their moves.

  Better to bail out before, we tell ourself. Better to bail out before, and quit this sport but win our names back. Find our family. Coach the sport. Join the circus, as many retired acrobatic gymnasts do. Make love, to whomever, with a separate and clear conscience. The World Championships aren’t everything. Winning isn’t everything, not when it comes at the price of our very identities.

  But without our identities, our acrobatic skill is all we have to balance on.

  Yet the bell rings and we still come out for the Balance exercise, as if nothing has happened.

  We move to counts; we cannot hear the music. Everything that we do, we do because of the muscle memory of two bodies, our smiles pasted on. Balance holds, unfathomably difficult balance holds, stretch for three seconds not because we are fighting for every second up, but because we have absent-mindedly forgotten to change them, frozen still as we think of something else.

  No falls. No flaws. No soul. We still end up on top of the board. Our difficulty scores are sky-high; our execution scores are clean and solid; but our artistry scores have fallen from what they were in qualifications. The artistry judges look for it, and they notice that something is amiss.

  Coach Salter hugs us. “Are you depressed?” he whispers in the top’s ear.

  We have never shown any sign of depression in the two years he’d trained us. But now …

  Chris and Eva are going up. Chris meets the top’s eyes. We smile. He is afraid for us falling in the dynamic exercise again, not understanding what is going on.

  Well, we cannot quit at this point. Not now. We still have something to show, something to prove just with that acrobatic skill that we have instead of a name. The world, and television, needs to record our blind forward somersaults.

  Here we are, Kimalana, and this is our swan song in the dynamic exercise. And if that is so, we will tumble and leap as we never have before, drinking in the cameras and the floodlights and taunting every judge and secret keeper on the planet that we fly higher than they ever will.

  Because we are one.

  The audience goes wild, clapping along, rising in ovation for the end of our dynamic exercise, cheering and clapping and demanding our scores even as the officials have to tell them that no, please settle down, the next mixed pair must go on and do their job and they have nothing to do with this.

  The video clip of our exercise will go viral within minutes. As it should. We want all cameras on us for the combined.

  We walk out into the sprung floor for the last time, the tech waiting for our opening salute to the judges in order to start our music. But instead, we step forward and face the largest camera, the one that does the closeups on its swinging boom arm, that has a microphone transmitting live. Our faces come up on the giant digital screens above the arena.

  In unison of pitch and rhythm that no one except a choir can achieve, even as we stumble and stutter over the words but stumble together, we say, “We want to say something.

  “We are not Kim Tang and Alana Watson. We are two bodies with one mind, and we remember that two years ago I was the acrobat Jennifer Smith.

  “We want to know what happened to us. Who did this to us and erased our past. We did a tremendous amount of work to be the best in the world, but we want to face the world honestly. We want to know what we are.”

  Complete silence hangs for three seconds, and then the shouting nearly deafens us, as everyone, from the people in the audience, to our competition and their coaches, to even the security guards, and of course, the press—all start shouting, different things, all blending into one.

  Within minutes, people around the world who had never even heard of acrobatic gymnastics know it too. And no one will remember who will actually end up winning the World Championships this year.

  Copyright © 2015 by Tamara Vardomskaya

  Art copyright © 2015 by Ashley Mackenzie