The Cranes Dance Read Online Free Page B

thesethings. You can’t flirt with him either so I tried a knowing nod, as if I realized the significance of all this.
    “You are a bad breather,” he said.
    “Well,” I said, “I’m not dead yet so I must have the basics down.”
    Dr. Wang looked skeptical.
    I breathed deeply through my nose. Dancers are good patients. We always do what we are told and we are very open to criticism.
    He shut the door softly behind him and I listened to him pad around in his outer office and, judging from the rustling, read the newspaper. Dr. Wang doesn’t play gong music or burn incense or give you a pillow or anything lame like that. I rotated my ankles until they both popped, and closed my eyes. I false meditated—pretending I was clearing my mind while really planning what I was going to eat today and conducting an imaginary conversation between me and Andrew’s someone else, who for the purposes of my invention, I named Janice. I waited for Dr. Wang to come back in and unpin me, which after an eternity, he did.
    As I was leaving his office, Marissa called me because Mia called out sick and they had to reshuffle casts and they needed me on tonight for Big Swan/Polish Princess. Since I thought I’d have the evening off I hadn’t told anyone about my neck, and you’re supposed to do that, so I just said yes and went back to the crime scene and took a really long hot shower. Luckily, I found that Gwen’s Advil bottle was filled with Vicodin, so I took two with me to the theater just in case.
    About halfway through the very gentle warm-up I was givingmyself, I could no longer turn my head to the left without a new shooting pain running down my scapula. I broke a Vicodin into two pieces and swallowed one of them.
    Roger stopped by my dressing room to check on me. “How’s the neck?”
    “It feels like a yam stuck in a crimping iron.”
    “You see Dr. Ken?”
    “And Dr. Wang,” I said. “He put the needles in my hands, though.”
    “Dr. Wang told me that pain has two arrows,” said Roger. “The first arrow is like, the bad thing that happens. And the second arrow is the pain we give ourselves about the bad thing that happened.”
    “How do you avoid the second arrow?” I asked.
    Roger leaned against my chair.
    “I forget. I think it has something to do with self-awareness? There might be a third arrow too.” Roger laughed and started to massage my neck.
    “Jesus.” He prodded my yam.
    “I can’t turn my head,” I said. “I’m stuck.”
    “Sweetie,” said Roger, “maybe you should call out for a few days. You’re just going to keep reinjuring it if you keep dancing.”
    “I’m kind of hoping I’ll throw it out in the other direction and achieve some sort of equilibrium,” I said.
    “I don’t think that happens,” Roger said, gently, for him. “I think you need to rest.”
    “I can’t rest.” I waved a hand. “I’m not in a resting place.”
    “You have to induce that,” Roger instructed. “Smoke some pot. Watch
Oprah
. Eat Chinese. Rent porn.”
    “Roger,” I said. “This is a very interesting formula you have created here.
Oprah
, Pot, and Porn.”
    “And chicken with peanut sauce,” Roger said, dreamily. “That’s like, the best day off ever.”
    I managed to get through Big Swans relatively unscathed, although I didn’t time the other half of the Vicodin perfectly and had to breathe in little puffs through my nose to keep going. Ella’s got that thing with her knee again and there was a moment when we turned together upstage and I caught her eye and all pretense of stage face dropped and we were just two injured worried people dressed up in feathers with white makeup sliding down in ravines of sweat from our foreheads and I almost panicked at the sheer heartbreak of it all. But then we turned downstage and got through it, so that was fine.
    Recklessly, I swallowed the second Vicodin during intermission, and was consequently a little blitzed out for Polish Princess. Got very giggly