Version Control - part 7 (with images) (Patreon)

Thursday. Sera leaves early. I lie in her bed, in her body, and listen to the door close.

I shower. The routine settling: hair first, working down, the chest carefully. I've got the towel mostly figured out. The undersides of the breasts, the ridge where the tissue rests against the ribcage, still surprises me when I reach it. I dry off and use the bathroom — sitting, the seat cold against the backs of my thighs and the wider press of my ass, the physics different, the warmth going somewhere new, and I wipe front to back, which I know without being sure why I know, and flush.

I look at my face in the mirror. The stubble longer, four days now, almost soft at this length. Same jaw, same eyes. I look at it for a moment and then get dressed.

Her clothes. I open the drawer she set aside for me and take out the underwear — I've already learned the routine of it, the fabric settling into place, the cotton holding the warmth of the tissue close in that constant intimate way that is still strange and is becoming familiar. The bra next. I reach back for the clasp and my hands don't find it. I try again. The hooks are somewhere in the middle of my back and my arms at this angle can't locate them and I stand there fumbling and something surfaces — a small adjustment, try rotating the clasp around to the front to hook it, then rotate it back — and I do this and the hooks catch and I rotate the band and pull the straps up and the cups settle around the breast tissue and the weight lifts into them. I stand there a moment with the relief of it.

The linen trousers. The long cardigan. The canvas flats.

I look in the mirror and the person looking back is someone whose clothes fit. I take this as sufficient.

I know I'm meeting Gil at three and I've been thinking about how to manage this. He's known me for two years. He reads people the way he reads drafts. I go back to the closet and find a heavier overcoat — long, shapeless, the kind that hides everything — and a scarf I can wrap high. I try it in the mirror. My face above the scarf: the same jaw, the same eyes, four days of stubble now almost soft. The chest and hips are hidden. I look like someone wearing a large coat. This will have to do.

I make coffee and sit at my desk and open the shed essay.

Writing for three hours in this body, in Sera's clothes, in the apartment on a Thursday morning: the strange thing is how normal it is. The work is the work. A word choice surfaces, and I accept it or I don't, and the essay moves. The shed is there — my father with the tape measure, the sound of a hammer hitting a nail that lands correctly versus one that doesn't quite, a sound I'd forgotten I knew until the essay brought it back. I can hear it. I can feel the summer heat.

And then I'm there again, the way I was yesterday morning — except yesterday it surprised me, and today I let it come. I don't resist the memory pulling me in. I'm twelve and it's July and my father is doing the thing he always does when he doesn't know how to do something, which is proceeding as though he does, holding the level with both hands and squinting at the bubble, and my mother is in the house and every now and then she comes to the window and looks out at us and then she goes away. I know what the looking means. I know it even at twelve — she's watching him build something he can't quite build, and her face when she looks holds all the things she's chosen not to say. Love too, but underneath the love, or alongside it, a private sorrow she keeps very private, the sorrow of knowing someone completely and knowing their limits as part of knowing them. She's tried not to show it. She's done well. But I'm twelve and I'm outside with him and I can see the window and I see the face.

My father sees it too. He must see it too, from the corner of his eye, the way I see it — the window, the brief appearance, the withdrawal. He doesn't say anything. He hands me a nail to hold while he gets the hammer positioned. His hands are steady. The shed is going up crooked and his hands are steady and he doesn't look at the window again.

I'm at my desk again. The apartment. Thursday morning.

I write this into the essay — not the whole thing, not laid out like this, but the bones of it. At one point a sentence surfaces about my father's hands that is better than the sentence I had — cleaner, more precise, the rhythm correct, with exactly the word I'd been circling for months, the word for his kind of patience — and I read it back and something in me goes flat. The sentence is right. It's just not true in the way I need it to be true. I cut the middle clause and put back two words that are worse and the sentence breathes again. I don't know if that's mine or the AI adjusting to what I want. I leave this question where it is.

By eleven I have a draft I think is ready for Gil. I read it twice — some of it mine, some of it the AI's, the line between them a thing I've stopped being able to find — and at eleven-fifteen I send it with a note: second section, finally. meeting at three if you're free.

He writes back in twenty minutes. Three works. Come to the usual place.

I have time to kill and I've been inside for two days and I go out.

The coffee shop three blocks over, where Gil and I meet, where I sometimes go when the apartment gets too quiet. I take my laptop and order a coffee and find a table by the window.

I sit down and open my laptop and I try to write. What I notice instead, gradually, is how I'm sitting. Smaller than I usually sit in coffee shops — back straighter, bag on the chair beside me rather than hanging off it, my hands close to my body. I didn't arrange myself this way. The body did it, below the level of decision.

A man at the counter is on his phone, loudly, his presence taking up the room in the casual way of someone who has never had reason to think about how much room he's taking. He's several inches taller than I am now. He would have been my height last week. I look at him and something in me is running a calculation I didn't ask for — something about distance and space and what that space means now that I'm on this side of it.

I close my laptop.

I drink the coffee and look out the window and try to understand what I'm thinking. No one is threatening me. No one is paying me any attention. The careful, self-contained way I'm sitting is not a response to anything anyone has done. It's just there — built into the posture the body assumed when I walked in, carried in some calibration I didn't install.

Is this the AI adjusting my affect to match the body I'm in? Or is this just what a person feels when they've changed size, changed the physical weight and presence they move through the world with? I don't have a way to find out. I'm not sure the question is separable.

At ten to three the door opens and Gil comes in. He scans the room, finds me by the window, and his face does the thing it does — a beat of adjustment, something recalibrated, and then the warmth. He knows me well enough that I can see both parts of it. He comes to the table and sits down across from me.

He pulls the pages from his bag — printed out as always, his cramped handwriting in the margins — and sets them on the table.

"I read it twice on the way in," he says. "Once more just now." He taps the pages. "Something happened."

He looks at me for a moment. Reading. "You look different," he says.

"I know."

"Are you all right?"

"I'm not sure."

He nods, accepting this, deciding to leave it alone for now. He reads back a paragraph — his voice slowing the sentences down in a way that makes them sound better than they do in my head — and when he's done he sets the pages down.

"That's the best thing you've sent me," he says. "Maybe the best thing you've written. There's a — " He pauses, finding it. "Embodiment in it. Like you're actually in every sentence, not just moving pieces around."

He means this as the highest possible compliment.

I look at the table. I know what's mine and what isn't, I know the clause that was the AI's and the word choice and the rhythm of the last sentence, and where any of that ends and where I begin is something I've stopped being able to find. Three days of drafting. I can't locate the seam anymore.

"Thank you," I say.

"What changed?"

"I got the implant Monday. The XSync."

He looks at me again, the reading look.

A pause. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"No," I say. "Not yet."

He accepts this too. He picks the pages back up. "The transition at the end of the second section," he says. "The jump from the shed to the summer's larger argument. I have a thought."

We talk for thirty minutes. He has good thoughts and I engage with them and by the time we're done I have a clearer picture of the third section than I had this morning. This part — the work part — is still mine. I know how to do this. Whatever else has changed, this part is mine.

He walks me to the door. On the sidewalk he pauses.

"Whatever's happening," he says. "The work is good. You're in it." He looks at me. "Keep going."

I walk back to the apartment. The street is full of people going somewhere and I'm among them at five foot four in canvas flats and a borrowed cardigan under a shapeless overcoat and I am thinking about what Gil said — you're in it — and trying to decide whether that's true, whether the voice in the essay is mine or something else's, and whether, if I can't tell the difference, the distinction still holds.

I don't know the answer.

I go upstairs and open my journal and write for an hour. I write about the body, how it feels today, the underwear and the bra and the canvas flats and the way Gil's face did the thing it did when I walked in. I write about the coffee shop and the man on his phone and the math I didn't ask my body to run. I write about the careful posture I didn't choose.

I write about the memory that keeps coming back — my father's hands on the level, my mother at the window, the face she wore when she thought no one was watching. I'd carried this memory for twenty years without knowing what it meant. The essay is showing me. Or the AI is showing me through the essay, which might be the same thing or might not be.

The shed was slightly wrong. Everyone knew it, including him. He built it anyway and used it for fifteen years and it held. I spent most of my adolescence unable to forgive him for not being better at it, for not seeing what we all saw when we looked at it. I think I understand now — or I'm starting to — that the not-seeing was not stupidity. It was something else. The same thing my mother's face was about, at the window. My father knew. He built the shed anyway.

Thursday evening, home from the meeting with Gil, I'm at my desk when my phone buzzes. Not the receptionist's number — a different one, from the same clinic.

A woman, efficient and warm in the way of someone relaying an instruction they didn't originate. They've reviewed my intake notes, she says. Given what I described, they'd like to expedite. Could I come in tomorrow? Or if I prefer, they can send a car tonight.

I tell her tomorrow is fine.

After I hang up I stay at the desk for a moment. I called them on Tuesday morning and described breast tissue development and they said to come in next week. By Thursday evening they've reached out directly and offered a car. The acceleration has a shape to it that I don't like.