False Feedback - part 1 (Patreon)

Part 2 is available here.

I'm just up out of the armchair, the cushion still warm, glass in my hand and halfway to the kitchen for a refill, when the weight arrives.

Weight, low and sudden against my chest. I drop the glass and look down instead.

The gray t-shirt I've had on all day is doing something wrong. Pushed out from underneath. Two soft slopes where there was flat.

I put my palm against it before I've decided to.

Give. Soft, then a denser resistance under the soft, and then the part my brain can't process: my own touch coming back through the cotton, the press of my hand registering twice, once in the palm and once somewhere it has no business registering. I pull the hand off like the shirt's hot. Then I put it back, because not knowing is worse.

The shirt. I grabbed it and one other off a Walmart shelf in Tulsa maybe two years ago, the trip with Dale where we'd planned to fish and ended up sitting in the truck most of a Saturday because the rain wouldn't quit. I remember the gas-station coffee better than any fish we caught. I grabbed the shirts a size up because I'd forgotten to pack and the next one down looked like it'd wash to nothing. This one never did shrink. It is, right now, the only thing on me that still fits in the right way, draping loose over a body it wasn't cut for, and some small administrative part of me registers relief about this before I can stop it. Like the sizing was the relevant emergency.

My hands keep moving because I can't make them stop.

Down over a stomach that's gone narrow and then wide, my thumbs finding a hip width that wasn't there this morning. My hand goes to the button of my jeans. The denim gives. I shove it off the curve of a hip and my palm comes down against skin.

The hair is different first. Finer, sitting higher, and below it where there should be familiar weight and forward presence there's a mound, smooth under my palm, and below that soft lips I didn't have this morning. I press flat against it the way you'd test a bruise. The tissue yields. Every nerve is right at the surface and they all report at once and I jerk my hand back, and the wrongness goes straight up the back of my skull.

I straighten. The window past the bookshelf has gone dark with the evening and there's a face in it. Short dark hair, my own dark. My own panic in the eyes. I look at it for as long as I can stand to.

Then I make a sound. I don't recognize the sound.

The sound is what does it. High and thin, half a word or just air, and it comes out of me in a voice that isn't mine, a voice with no weight in it, and I hear it as clearly as a stranger talking in the next room. I shut my mouth. Open it. Say my own name, quiet, just "Russell," and what comes back is a woman saying my name.

The skin is the worst, because it doesn't stop. The chest and hips I can hold still. But the air in the room is touching all of me now in a way it didn't twenty minutes ago, the warm lamp behind me, the draft from the window I never get around to sealing, the cotton of the shirt dragging on me as I breathe, all of it loud, all of it constant. I'm cold. I've never been cold like this in my own living room. Goosebumps coming up on my forearms and I can feel each one.

"Russ?"

Jeanne's up off the sofa. She still has her phone in one hand, the book she was half-reading sliding off the arm behind her, and she's looking at me with the patience of someone interrupted in the middle of a paragraph. The look changes while I watch it. Patience, then attention, then the first edge of something harder to name.

"What is it? You're white as a sheet."

I don't know where to start. One hand full of my own shirt, the other at my open jeans, and the want to be seen is so complete it's almost a physical event of its own.

"Can you see it," I say. The voice again. "Jeanne. Look at me. Look at my chest."

She looks. Eyes down and back up. Nothing in her face does what it would have to do. Her brow pulls in, the line she gets over the toilet running or the car making the noise, and that line is for ordinary problems, and the fact that I am an ordinary problem to her right now is its own small horror.

"I'm looking at you. What am I supposed to be seeing?"

"This." I pull the shirt tighter, the shape obvious under my fist. "This, Jeanne, how are you not? Look."

She comes a step closer, face doing nothing but worry. I need shock. I need her to see what I'm holding. Instead she's reading me the way you read a man who said something that doesn't track, looking for a fever, a slur, something wrong with the husband.

"Why are you holding yourself like that," she says, quiet and careful. "Did you take something? Did your heart...? Come sit down."

"It's not my heart." Though now that she's said it my heart is going, fast and light, another thing that sounds wrong from the inside. "I feel. Jeanne, I am standing here and my body is." I can't say the words. They're the words a crazy person says, and I can hear exactly how they'll land coming out in a voice she can't even hear is different. "Something's wrong with where I am. With how I feel."

"Okay." Hand out. The phone still in the other one. "Okay. We're going to sit down."

She reaches for my arm and I let her take it and then the worst thing yet happens in the most ordinary way. Her fingers close around my forearm, the grip she's used ten thousand times, and it lands on skin that's reporting every square inch of the contact, and the body, my body, leans into it. Wants it. A warmth fires down through the new folds between my legs, a pulse, my body pulling toward her hand before I've decided anything about it, and I flinch back from my own wife because I can't stand what her touch does to a nervous system that isn't supposed to be mine.

She lets go fast, hurt, and steps back until there's a few feet of carpet between us. Her hands knot at her stomach. "Sorry," she says. "I'm trying to help you, I don't."

"I know." I breathe. "I know you are."

She's got her thumb moving on the phone already, deciding between 911 and the after-hours line, and I watch her settle on the after-hours line because a husband talking strange is not yet an ambulance, and I understand the logic. There's no symptom she can point an ambulance at.

Then she stops.

Something behind her face drops out of the worry into something else, colder, a register I've seen in other rooms. From eight years of her coming home with things she isn't allowed to tell me. I've just said a string of words that don't belong in our marriage. A body felt where there's no body. Sensation coming in rerouted, loud. Those aren't sentences from our living room.

"Say that again," she says. Phone coming down. "What you just said. About where you are."

"Jeanne, I don't know how to."

She isn't asking anymore, she's checking something against a model I can't see. The voice has gone flat and quick. "Oh," she says, soft, and it's the worst thing she's said yet, because it isn't fear. "Oh, no."

She's already moving, bare feet fast across the carpet and onto the hall boards, heading for the back of the house. The room at the end that stays shut.

I hear the door. A lamp pull. Then a sound from back there, old and electrical, something powering up that I didn't know we owned.

"Come back here," she calls, and her voice has gone level in a way I don't like. "And leave the shirt."