Inhabited - chapter 24 (with images) (Patreon)

She wakes with her cheek pressed against the synthetic fibers. The apartment is cold. The radiator under the window is knocking — a hollow metallic sound, irregular, like someone tapping and losing the rhythm — but the heat hasn't made it across the room yet.

She doesn't move. She lies on her side, the cream sweater bunched around her ribs, the linen skirt twisted around her knees. She spent the entire night on the floor.

The pain this morning is different from either of the days before. The iron and the hook are both gone. What remains is worse in a different way. A smoldering diffuse heaviness, like the fire burned itself out overnight and left the wreckage behind. The entire lower half of her abdomen feels thick and impossibly dense, the organs fused together in a way that makes every shallow breath catch at something.

She opens her eyes. The light through the blinds is the flat exhausted gray of a winter morning.

She tries to push herself up. Her arms tremble. The core muscles simply do not respond. There is nothing there.

She lays her head back down.

She has to get to the bathroom. The pressure has been building and it's past the point of deferring. Sharp and immediate, the bladder pulling against everything that is already inflamed, and the not-going hurts as much as the going will. She rolls onto her stomach. Drags her knees up under her. Presses her palms flat to the floorboards and pushes up onto all fours. The shift in gravity sends nausea straight up her throat and she squeezes her eyes shut and breathes through it.

She crawls across the living room floor. The linen skirt catches under her knees. The wood scrapes against her shin where the skirt rides up. She reaches the bathroom doorframe and uses the wooden molding to haul herself upright.

She makes it to the toilet. She sits and waits. Peeing takes longer than it should. Nothing empties. Just that persistent sense of not quite done, nothing moving freely, everything in the pelvic bowl pushing against everything else. She sits with her forearms on her thighs and her head hanging and she waits it out.

She stands. Leans against the sink. The face in the mirror is not good. The shadows under her eyes have gone dark and deep, her skin has a grayish tinge, her lips are cracked. She looks like someone who has been slowly poisoned, which is approximately what chronic inflammation is.

She opens the drawer. Seven mefenamic left. She takes one, drinks water from the tap to get it down.

She washes her face with cold water, both hands, letting it run. The cold helps. Marginally. She straightens and finds the tinted face wipe again, the last one in the packet, runs it across her cheeks and forehead so there's something between her skin and the world.

She leaves the bathroom and makes it to the kitchen.

She needs calories. She is running on nothing and she can feel it in the fine tremor in her hands and the thin dizzy quality of the air. She opens the refrigerator. Container of leftover rice. Wilted kale. A jar of expensive chili crisp she has no energy to do anything with.

She takes the rice. Doesn't bother with a bowl. She peels the plastic lid off and eats it cold standing in the middle of the kitchen, barefoot, chewing methodically. It tastes like old starch. She forces it down and waits for the simple carbohydrates to do something about the shaking.

Her phone is on the desk where she left it before she collapsed.

She goes over and picks it up.

Two notifications. Both from Sofia.

Yesterday was exactly what I needed. Sent last night at nine.

The second, from an hour ago: They're doing a Chantal Akerman retrospective at the Film Forum next Thursday. I was thinking of going. Let me know if you want me to grab you a ticket.

She reads both texts again. Then she sets the phone face down on the desk.

When Fatima comes back to this body — when she leaves and Fatima wakes up — Fatima will not remember saying yes to coffee. She'll wake up sore and depleted and have texts from Sofia about a movie in Manhattan and have to figure out what to do with that. She'll see Sofia wanting something from her and will have to decide, again, how much of herself to give.

She sets the phone down and goes back to the desk.

There's a client call at eleven-thirty.

She doesn't want to put the halo on. The thought of performing professional competence while the body screams for a dark room and something warm pressed against it is almost funny in a grim way. But Fatima needs the money. The bank balance is low. The rent is due in nine days. The freelancer math is what it always is for someone whose body decides whether she can work, and bad weeks compound, and this has been a bad week.

She sits in the ergonomic chair. Adjusts the tilt until she finds the angle that's merely uncomfortable. She pulls her hair up before she puts the halo on. She's figured out the routine. She settles the halo over her temples.

The white ring expands.

The physical body stops.

She materializes in the digital loft. The pain vanishes. Not diminishes, vanishes, completely, the way a sound stops. The avatar stands in the sunlit studio and she stands in it and she moves to the drafting table with a fluid frictionless ease that still catches her slightly, still feels like something being given back.

The client spawns in a few minutes later. Stephan. Marketing director, mid-tier logistics software company, avatar in a sharp suit. "Fatima," he says. "Good to see you."

"Hi Stephan."

Her voice in the simulation is crisp and clear.

"I wanted to run through the latest iteration of the brand assets," he says.

She brings up the files. A large three-dimensional logo concept floats between them.

They spend forty-five minutes on it. She stands in the digital sunlight and points at vector lines and talks about color theory and identity work with Fatima's authority in her hands, pushing back on Stephan's worse instincts. "If you heavy up the serif on the secondary mark you lose the agility from the brief. It's going to read corporate. Older." Stephan says right, right, keep it as is, and she gives him a calibrated professional smile at the rig's internal cameras.

"I think we're in a good place," Stephan says. "Send over the final files by Friday?"

"You'll have them."

"Great work as always, Fatima."

His avatar dissolves into a scatter of blue pixels.

The studio is empty.

She stands in the simulated sunlight and looks out the massive industrial windows at the gray ocean below. The water moves in perfect repeating algorithms. Beautiful and entirely dead. She looks at it for a while. Then she brings up the menu and hits disconnect.

The white-out.

She pulls the visor off.

The gravity returns. She gasps, both hands gripping the armrests, the pain reasserting itself all at once. She closes her eyes and waits for the room to settle.

One o'clock.

She pulls herself from the chair to the sofa. The heating pad is in the basket under the coffee table. She plugs it in, presses it against her lower belly, turns it to high. The heat arrives gradually, spreading outward from the center. It does not fix anything but it is a direction, a small local warmth in the middle of everything that is not warm.

The apartment is quiet. A siren wails somewhere down on Eastern Parkway, rises and falls, leaves the silence thicker in its wake.

She watches the shadows lengthen across the floorboards.

She thinks about Brigid. The address in Fort Greene. The physical location of Osei's last session. A real street, a real door, a man who went in and didn't come back out. About a month ago, give or take a few days.

They have to go there. She can't go in this body. Fatima can't walk four blocks to the subway right now. Can't run if they need to run. Can't do any of what's going to be required on the other side of that door. She needs to get out, into a body that can do what needs doing.

At five o'clock the hunger becomes insistent enough that she can't ignore it. She pushes the heating pad aside, stands — three tries, the first two her legs won't cooperate — and shuffles to the kitchenette.

She finds a box of vegetable broth in the pantry. She pours it into a mug and puts it in the microwave and stands leaning against the counter watching the numbers count down, arms crossed tightly over her chest. The microwave beeps. She carries the mug back to the sofa with that careful sliding walk. The ceramic is hot in her hands. The broth is salty and warm going down and she drinks it slowly, both hands around the mug, and when the mug is empty she sets it on the coffee table and looks at it.

The phone is across the room on the desk. The screen is dark from where she's sitting. She doesn't go to check it.

She plugs the heating pad back in. It had cooled while she was shuffling to the kitchen. She holds it against her lower belly with one hand and waits for it to warm up again. There's a slight chemical smell from it when it gets to high — the element heating — and she used to find this annoying. Now it's just the smell of the thing that helps.

She sits there until the heat builds.

The apartment is quiet. The city outside is not. She can hear the Eastern Parkway traffic in layers, trucks heavy on the asphalt, someone's bass, a siren rising and tapering somewhere to the south. None of it reaches her in here. The apartment holds the quiet the way old places hold cold. The rug. The sofa cushion with the slight depression on the left end where the foam has given. The rug smell. She knows all of this now, after three days, knows it the way you know a place you've slept in for years.

She wonders if Fatima thinks of this sofa as a comfort or just a piece of furniture she can afford.

The heating pad gets to temperature. She shifts it to find the position where it covers the worst of it, and the warmth spreads outward through the cotton of the waistband and into the tissue, and the tightening eases one degree. Not gone. One degree.

By seven the apartment is dark. She hasn't bothered with the lamps. The only light comes from the streetlights outside, throwing long shifting rectangles across the ceiling that move when a car goes past.

She lies down on the sofa and pulls the thin throw blanket over her shoulders. She tries but fails to fall asleep. Alone with her thoughts, she can’t tell for how long. Hours, probably.

The adrenaline of the arrival is long gone. What remains is the grinding reality of Fatima's existence. This apartment, this sofa, this body, the weight of everything that is wrong inside it pressing down on the bladder and the bowels and the muscles that are exhausted from days of protective spasming.

She lies in the dark and breathes shallowly. She stops running the variables of the investigation. She stops thinking about the address in Fort Greene, about Brigid's face in the café, about what she owes Fatima and whether owing is even the right frame. She lets it all be background noise. Distant, irrelevant, someone else's problem for a few minutes.

She just exists in the dark apartment in the body she has been in for three days, with the endometriosis and the heating pad's fading warmth against her stomach and the smell of old broth in the air. The sofa cushion under her hip. The throw blanket's slight roughness against her chin. The radiator's irregular knock across the room. She is just here. Just this.

She stops fighting the pain. She lets it be the weather.

This is exhausting in a different way than trying is. It is a cellular depletion, a giving up that goes deeper than sleep. She shifts slightly under the throw blanket, trying to take the pressure off her left hip, and her hand, resting on her stomach, slips down inadvertently. Her fingers brush the soft cotton of the waistband and come to rest near the crease of her thigh.

She doesn't move it.

The touch is very light. Barely contact. But in the total dark, against a nervous system that has been in red-alert for three days, the contrast is sudden. Not the pain, which is still there, which will probably always be there. Just the warmth of her own skin radiating up through the fabric.

She stays still. Keeps her hand there. Doesn't press. Doesn't rub. Just rests.

The body, which has been fighting itself for days, registers the absence of threat in that one small place. Not relief. An absence of pain, localized, temporary. A small quiet allowance.

She breathes in. The air pulls a little more easily into her lungs.

A small heat gathers under her hand. It is nothing like the sharp demanding heat of Cara's body, nothing like the way Nadia woke already wanting. This is much smaller. Fragile. An ember in a lot of dark space.

She does not plan. She does not move.

The warmth spreads slowly along the inner line of her thigh, inward, finding a pathway that runs underneath the adhesions rather than through them. Not healing anything. Just moving around it. The pelvic floor muscles, which have been locked in protective spasm since before she woke in this body, begin, barely, to soften. A release of tension so small it is almost nothing.

Her breath catches in the quiet room.

She is heavy between her legs in a way that has nothing to do with the pain. A separate weight, a different kind of fullness, low and dense and unmistakably its own. The warmth pools in the lowest part of her pelvis, gets denser, and the wetness arrives quietly, felt through the cotton.

She parts her knees a fraction.

The heat spreads further. A slow line of warmth moves up the center of her body.

Her fingers, which have been resting against the crease of her thigh, drift inward over the cotton. She is not pressing. She is just letting them be there, against the soft heat of her own body, against the place where her thigh meets her hip, where the fabric is damp now. The contact is its own answer. The body responds to the lightest possible attention because the lightest possible attention is all it can take. Anything more and the protective spasm would come back.

It is not urgent. It is not frantic. It is a deep welling comfort, the way heat enters a cold muscle that's been braced against it for too long.

She closes her eyes. The dark behind them shifts.

Her fingers move slightly. Up. The cotton catches on the skin. She finds her clitoris through the fabric, just rests there, no rhythm, just the heat of her hand and the heat coming from inside her meeting in one small place. The warmth deepens. The pull behind her hipbones tilts forward, opens, and the inflammation goes briefly quiet around it.

She presses, very lightly. Not for the friction. For the pressure. The muscles on either side of her pubic bone respond. They have been locked for days. They release one millimeter, two, and the release is its own sensation, separate from arousal and braided into it.

She is wet through the cotton now. Her hand is warm where the dampness has soaked through. Carefully she strips, the pressure continuing lightly with her left hand.

The wave starts from somewhere she cannot locate. Somewhere deep inside, somewhere that lives in the bones. It rolls upward and she stops breathing before it crests.

The wave crests. Her hand stays where it is. The body holds the contraction in stillness, sustained, deep, something underneath it where the cramps are starting again — the body doing what the body always does — but the vacuum is already there at the edges of her vision, gathering inward, taking everything with it.

Her lips part. A sound in the quiet apartment that no one hears.

The dark living room stops being there. The walls go. The sofa, the throw blanket, the streetlights on the ceiling. The smell of old broth. The radiator's knocking, which has been there the whole time, audible suddenly only in its absence.

Total silence. Zero gravity. She hangs in the white space, untethered, waiting for the floor to return.