Chapter Text
Yuzuru took a sip of his water as he waited beside the boards for his warmup group’s turn to take the ice. His body was thrumming with nervous energy. He imagined electricity sparking at his core and flowing out to his hands and feet, warming his cold fingers and toes. He hopped from foot to foot, shaking out his arms and starting the process of sinking into the proper headspace for his imminent performance. His roving eyes took in the blue boards reading “Sochi 2014” and the packed stands, TV crews, and coaching teams wearing a rainbow of colors along the edges of the arena. Finally, he heard the signal to take the ice and stepped aside for the skater in front of him to take off his blade guards and step onto the ice.
But as he bent down and balanced on one foot to take off his own blade guards, he heard a scream from the ice and almost fell over in surprise. The crowd gasped excitedly as a spray of blood shot into the air. Their whispering turned into full-fledged conversations, and Yuzuru was pushed aside by an impatient elbow. He stumbled backwards and watched a medical team rush onto the ice with bags of equipment. They quickly checked the prone form of the first skater in their group. He was lying still on the ice, too still, and they zipped him into a body bag, shaking their heads. The medical team soon exchanged places with a cleaning crew. They carried the bag close enough that Yuzuru could have reached out and touched it if he wanted. But his eyes were drawn to the rink workers mopping up the puddles of blood with rags and carefully checking the ice for holes. The gruesome sight was like a train wreck; he couldn’t have looked away if he tried. Numbly, he watched the third skater in line turn up the volume on his headphones and sigh impatiently. He rolled his eyes and said out loud to no one in particular, “This is taking forever.” The crew finished wiping the bright puddles on the ground and moved on to wiping the Zamboni to a polished shine. The stained rags looked garish against the blank, white expanse of ice.
OOO
The first international figure skating competition was held in 1882 in Vienna, Austria. The first Zamboni was patented in 1953. The 71 years in between were full of joy and discovery and the happy growth of the sport to eventually be contested at all levels, including the Olympics. But no development increased the popularity of the sport of figure skating as much as the discovery that these mobile ice resurfacing machines sometimes caused unfortunate… accidents.
By 1960, when Zambonis were used for the first time at the Olympics, trial and error had rapidly ascertained using these devices had some pros and cons. The advantages of Zambonis were as follows: they were driverless and had some level of sentience. They could clean and resurface an ice rink in a matter of minutes. They removed ice tracings and deformations, creating a smoother and flatter ice surface for anyone who skated immediately after the Zamboni passed by. The disadvantages, by comparison, were few; in fact, there was really only one: it was the fate of every skater to, at one time or another, perish in horrible Zamboni “accidents”.
Sometimes Zambonis would chase down their target in the middle of practice and veer off course during an ice resurfacing break. Sometimes they would turn on unexpectedly and crash through the boards during a group lesson and accelerate towards one student, somehow knowing whose time was up out of everyone practicing. Rarely, skaters at the peak of their career would miss practice one day, and their body would be found peacefully in bed as if they were sleeping. Of course, they weren’t—they were dead.
One might expect that officials and spectators would be horrified by the discovery that such an important piece of equipment for the sport was capable of inflicting such suffering, but the possibility that anyone could tune in to a competition and potentially see an attack—hopefully after an appropriately dramatic chase on the ice or accompanied by pleading and screams—exponentially increased the demand for streaming rights, ticket sales, and sponsorships of events and individual athletes. By the turn of the millennium, figure skating had become more than a sport in the public consciousness; it combined artistic and athletic feats of skill with the popularity of true crime podcasts and amateur detective work, salacious stories of revenge and infighting heightened by a constant atmosphere of fear and desperation, and of course, the thrilling spectacle of spins, jumps, steps, and other elements, all performed on millimeter-thick blades on a cold, unforgiving slab of ice.
With conditions ripe for growth, figure skating only required a steady supply of willing bodies. Through trial and error, the sport found some ways to mitigate or postpone the effects of the Zamboni attacks, which drew otherwise hesitant children and their families closer into the figure skating machine. Zambonis were less likely to attack groups, so team events such as speed skating and synchronized skating skyrocketed in popularity. It was also discovered that only internationally competitive athletes were targeted, so amateur practitioners who skated for fun and exercise were generally safe. And the attacks could come at any time; in some unfortunate cases, skaters were cut down in their youth like Tara Lipinsky, who won the 1997 World Championships and never made it to the 1998 Olympics, but sometimes, the Zambonis allowed skaters to live a long and full life, like Dick Button, who passed peacefully at the age of 96. There was no rhyme or reason for who would die young and who would be lucky enough to have more time, but there were always those who were willing to gamble that they would be luckier than the rest. And thus, on the promises of hope and ready money, the elite levels of the sport continued to flourish for decades.
Of course, there were skaters who skated for other reasons than a foolish, if well-intentioned, belief in their own luck. Some were desperate to raise money to support their families—sponsorships were plentiful, as many people around the world enjoyed watching figure skating for the drama, not just of who would come out on top during a competition but of who would make it to the competition at all. Other athletes promised their loved ones they wouldn’t advance too far past recreational competition levels, but they found that one medal led to another and they couldn’t extricate themselves from the thrill of winning.
And Yuzuru? He loved the ice too much to stop. His friends and family never understood what called him to skate, and to some extent, he didn’t, either. But when he compared the possibility of a young and painful death to giving up the thrill of jumping onto the top of a podium or standing in the middle of a shower of cheers and Poohs or perfectly executing a jump or step sequence, he found that he was willing to give his life to skating, no matter where his choices led him.
OOO
Days later, Yuzuru wheeled his suitcase through the long, blank expanse of the hallway of the Team Japan house in the Olympic Village. His limbs were heavy and his heart sated by the weight of the medal—gold!—in his pocket. He wanted to shower, wash the hairspray out of his hair, change out of his sweaty costume, and go to sleep for his first night as reigning Olympic champion.
Blinking tiredly, he stepped into the lounge at the corner of the building and saw his teammate Mao under the fluorescent lights. She was wearing sweatpants and her Team Japan jacket, curled up on a couch and scrolling through her iPod.
“Congratulations,” he heard himself say as if he was speaking through a tunnel. They had both skated well in the team event, but he had just finished his individual competition, while she had yet to begin hers.
“Thank you,” she replied, unsmiling. “Congratulations to you as well.” She nodded at his hand tucked protectively in his pocket.
Yuzuru bowed and made as if to keep walking, but she continued. “I hope you have plenty of time to enjoy it.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, suddenly wide awake.
Mao smiled, but it did not reach her eyes. “You, we, never know how much time…” she trailed off. She shook her head and finished: “Do you ever just have a feeling something bad is about to happen?”
“Not really,” Yuzuru replied, confused.
Mao sighed. “Well, Yuzu, I really am so happy for you. Even if you don’t feel like you deserve your win, you were the best today, anyone could see it. Anyway, will I see you at practice tomorrow? I’ll be busy running my short, but do you have ice time for the gala?”
Yuzuru bowed again, awkward in the face of her compliments. “Tomorrow.” He picked up his suitcase again and kept walking down the hall. When he came to his door, he pulled out his key, resolved to put the strange conversation out of his mind and get ready for bed.
Bu the next morning, he woke early to the sound of sirens and heavy boots running down the hallway outside his door. Blinking himself awake, he ran to the window, pulled the curtains aside, and pressed his face to the glass. Through rivulets of rain, he saw an ambulance and a gurney with a lump covered in a sheet. A gust of heavy wind blew the cloth a few inches in the air to reveal part of a face—Mao’s face. A paramedic replaced the edge of the covering and wiped a small pool of rainwater off of the outline of the body.
OOO
Yuzuru imagined a Zamboni quietly turning itself on and slowly rolling through the door of its enclosure, through the back hallways of the rink, and outside into an alleyway. He imagined it rolling down the sidewalk to a nearby hotel, through the automatic door, and waiting in the lobby for a figure skater to walk by. He imagined it finding a service elevator and stopping at every floor, sniffing for a skater, an athlete, a sacrifice—and eventually waiting outside his teammate’s door. He imagined Mao opening the door in the morning to find a rogue Zamboni, and her own demise. He shuddered.
But when he took his place in the stands for the women’s short program, no one else seemed to care—the other skaters, coaches, and officials were milling around backstage, talking, stretching, laughing even, in total disregard of the tragedy which had just occurred. For it was not a tragedy to them, like it was to Yuzuru and undoubtedly Mao’s family and friends. No one mourned her. The death, the murder, was routine. Yuzuru glanced at the corner and saw the Japanese women’s first alternate warming up, stretching with her eyes closed. The JSF had enough resources to send a full team of traveling alternates to every competition; it was expensive, definitely, but it was an investment made by every country with enough resources to offset the costs. Their athletes were interchangeable, only cogs in a machine that turned the lead weight of the fans’ expectations to gold, gold medals and golden money—and if something happened to her, too, the second alternate was waiting in her hotel room, checking the locks on her door and praying to sleep through the night just one more time, hoping that she, too, could have a chance to fight for the top of the podium. Why would she choose this life knowing that a cruel death would soon follow for herself as it did for Mao? Why did anyone?
Yuzuru looked around at all the skaters at the boards or backstage, talking and laughing and stretching, so alive with hopes and dreams… They all chose this life, and this death, too.
He had chosen his own fate when he was nine years old. After a brutal fall on an axel, he had whispered to the ice, “Please, just a little more time.” Maybe it was just his imagination, but he thought he felt the ice pulse warmer under his hands. And as he advanced through the ranks and won medal after medal over the years, he allowed himself to believe that the ice had listened and decided to protect him from the Zambonis, that he would be one of the lucky few to retire on his own terms and not for his own funeral, that he would live a long and happy life. He allowed himself to believe that he had time to achieve all of his dreams: two Olympic golds and the quad axel. But Mao probably thought the same thing when she was his age, and the Zamboni took her anyway. She was not the first, and she wouldn’t be the last.