Free Acrobatic Duality by Tamara Vardomskaya Page A

top’s—Kim’s—background was Chinese or Vietnamese or Korean, even what caused the little white scar on the side of the base’s—Alana’s—wrist.
    Common-named pair, switching gyms and skyrocketing to the top ranks. Not telling anyone what advantage we have. The extra difficulty points of our blind front salto are undeserved, since the base can see where the top’s feet are going. We know where both our body centres are; we can feel it. We think of our two spines as others think of their two legs. Synchronizing is as easy as moving two arms at the same time. Cooperating is as easy as being one with ourself.
    If Coach Salter knew, beyond calling us ‘Kimalana,’ he wasn’t telling, or telling who did this to us. Who had the gall to copy a mind, twice, or what happened to Jennifer Smith.
    But do we have time to ask questions, with exhausting training sessions for hours every day, with assistant coaching the rest of the time to afford rent beyond meagre athletic stipends, with the potential to be the very best in the world hanging in the balance? Just wait to win the World title. Then ask.
    Our Balance routine was to the Adagio in G minor, the piece that Remo Giazotto passed off as Albinoni’s from three hundred years before, but had written himself.
    We too were famous and beautiful and appreciated for pretending to be something other than what we were.
    *   *   *
    In a blessedly empty section of the dressing room, we lie spooned, soaking in the delicious ache of bodies at last allowed slack against the yoga mats. Long solid-muscled base, flaxen-haired Nordic Valkyrie. Small slender top just tall enough to reach above the hollow of the base’s throat as per regulations, with barely any breasts or curves to speak of; you have to look for the muscle, but it’s there; raven glossy hair in a bun, deep-set narrow eyes in heart-shaped face, epicanthic folds and uncreased eyelids.
    We roll the top over and look at ourself, not self-conscious about nudity at all, blue eyes against dark-brown, searching for what should look right, for when we were I.
    When we were I … I did not have very much of a visual memory at all. We do not remember my hair colour, my eyes, what I looked like; we are now lost in bodies that were not mine.
    We caress ourself, base’s long-fingered hands against our top’s flat breast, top sliding a hand between the base’s powerful thighs.
    It is indistinguishable from masturbation.
    *   *   *
    We did search for Jennifer Smith—me—on the Internet, many times. It is an extremely common name, but we did find my high school; my early gymnastics record from long-archived meets confirming that yes, I remembered rightly about a string of sixteenth places on floor and twenty-ninth places on beam; my acro meets record and a steady climb up, first as a top, then as a base, with even a commentator saying I had Worlds potential in a few years, with my levels of difficulty, given a good choreographer. Not high enough, though, to be televised, for us to find any video record of what I had looked like.
    And then nothing. The Internet forgot about me, its last record being when I was seventeen, now online-schooled as an elite athlete. The Internet forgets about many people.
    And there were too many Kim Tangs and Alana Watsons to look for, to guess where among them were our families and those who loved us. And perhaps missed us. We were adults; sometimes, adults do set out alone from shattered homes, and rebuild their souls in an elite sports career.
    Until they find themselves at the World Championships, and runaway favourites to win it. And secretly cheating.
    2. DYNAMIC
    23.2 The characteristic of dynamic elements is that flight is involved and contact between the partners is brief and assists or interrupts flight.
    Lunch lines at the official cafeterias of the World Championships venue: no taste to brag