Inhabited - chapter 28 (with images) (Patreon)

The white-out doesn't fade. It drops him.

The sensory vacuum shatters and the physical world returns, but it doesn't drop him onto floorboards. It drops him into the contoured synthetic leather of his own stasis chair.

The transition is a violent downward slam that drives the air out of his lungs. He gasps. The breath rattles in, and the sound surprises him — deep, chest-sourced, a sound that comes from a cavern he'd forgotten he had. The resonance of it moves through his sternum before it exits his mouth.

He blinks against the dim apartment. Streetlights through the blinds, bars of yellow across the floor. A thin clear line runs into the inside of his left forearm, taped down with a square of medical tape gone yellow at the edges. He stares at it for a slow second before he understands. IV. The chair has been keeping him alive.

He looks at the console next to the chair. A small LCD reads 27D 16H, the rig’s maintenance code.

He reaches over, pinches the medical tape, and pulls the catheter out of his arm. A bead of dark blood wells up against the skin. He smears it against his thumb. The thumb is wider than his thumb has been for a month.

He pushes himself out of the chair.

His feet hit the wood floor. A thin layer of grit sticks to the soles, the dust of an apartment nobody has walked through in four weeks. He stays leaning against the armrest with his head hanging between his shoulders, waiting for nausea or cramping or some deep radiating exhaustion to surface.

Nothing surfaces.

He stands the rest of the way up, and the body does not cooperate.

His head goes light. The knees feel hollowed, the joint loose in its socket, and when he shifts his weight to step forward both calves cramp at once, a tight closing fist in each. He grips the armrest harder. He looks at his hands. The nails are long, a month's growth. The fingers look thinner than he remembers.

He sits back down on the edge of the chair. The vinyl creaks. He waits for the lightheadedness to ease.

A name arrives in the empty space behind his eyes with the violence of a car crash.

Malcolm.

Malcolm Dewey. Thirty-five. Fort Greene. Frontend developer. The apartment fills in around the name, not from anywhere outside him, just the way you remember your own kitchen when someone asks you where you keep the spoons. The cheap rug. The fern in the corner, probably dead. The galley kitchen with the leaking faucet that he'd been meaning to fix for two years.

He isn't the journalist. He never was.

The memory of the last night in this room comes back hard. Sofia by the front door in her olive coat, yelling that he was disappearing into the platform, that he cared more about the render speed of a digital lobby than the actual woman standing in his apartment. She had slammed the door so hard the frame shuddered. He hadn't gone after her. He had gone to the desk.

He had taken the casing off the NovaSphere console with a tiny Phillips head. The latency was bothering him. The environments lagged by fractions of a second during high-load transitions, a small annoyance he couldn't let go. He had bypassed the thermal limiters with a soldering iron. A stupid amateur hardware hack. He had strapped himself into the chair, hooked up the hydration line because he thought he might lose track of time, and put the visor on. The green light had flashed red. The floor had vanished.

He wasn't investigating a corporate cover-up. He was just a guy who broke the protocols because he was angry at his girlfriend and wanted the video game to run faster.

He stands up again, slowly this time. He uses the armrest. He gets his weight onto his feet and stays there until the room stops tilting.

He walks toward the bathroom. The stride feels enormous, the legs swinging out further than he expects, like oversteering a car he used to own. The feet hit the tile with more weight than he'd been carrying for a month. But the strangest thing isn't the legs.

It's the arrangement.

Everything that has been internal for a month — contained, front-facing, present in the way an ache is present — is external now. Pendulous. The shift is subtle at walking pace and then isn't. He gets halfway to the bathroom doorframe before the motion fully registers. He stops. It settles against his thigh.

He stands there.

He's been in nine bodies and none of them did this. The geometry is so unfamiliar he stands in the hallway looking at the bathroom doorframe like he's forgotten what bathrooms are for.

He flips the bathroom light. The bulb hums, then steadies.

The face in the mirror is overgrown. Dark eyes set deep under a heavy brow, the lids heavier than he remembered. Four weeks of beard growth, patchy along the jaw the way it always comes in, which he'd forgotten — he'd always hated that it came in uneven on the left. The hair sticks up from where it pressed against the headrest for a month. He looks at the face. He knows it from the inside.

He brings a hand up and presses the palm flat against the beard. It scratches against his palm. He hadn't had anything against his face in a month. He stands there pressing his own hand against his own jaw, feeling the hair, and it is not a sensation he has ever paid attention to in his life before right now.

He turns on the shower. The pipes shudder, then run. He waits for the water to warm. He pulls the t-shirt over his head - the chair has kept it on him for a month, the cotton stiff and stale at the collar - and steps out of the loose pajama pants.

The body is thinner than the body he remembers. The chest is flatter than a month ago, the muscle gone soft, the rib cage more obvious under the skin. There is hair on his chest and stomach. He'd forgotten. His hand goes to it before he steps in, palm against the sternum, feeling the texture. Different from any of the women. There was hair between their legs, various amounts, Cara's sparse and Diane's heavier, but none of them had this — this wide carpeted fact of the chest, the abdomen, the patches that meet at the navel. He stands there long enough to feel strange about standing there.

He steps under the spray.

The hot water hits his shoulders and sinks in. The shoulders are wider than they've been. The water runs down a different slope — the back broader, flatter, none of the hollow curve that had been there in Elena's spine or the slight forward tilt of Fatima's posture. It runs straight down and off. The chest is flat. He runs his hands over it and there's nothing to register, no heat under the skin, no pull in the tissue when his palm passes the nipple.

He runs a bar of soap down the stomach. A warm, gathering attention in the body, before he decides anything, before he's thought of anyone. Just the hot water, just the touch. He is aware of it the way he hasn't been aware of it in his own body since he was a teenager — as something with its own agenda, uninterested in whether his mind is participating. He'd always taken that for granted. The directness of it, the speed. He'd never had a frame of comparison. Now he does. He leaves it alone.

He stays under the water until the hot tank starts to give out. He gets out when it goes lukewarm. He dries off with a towel that smells faintly of mildew. He stands in front of the mirror with the towel wrapped at his hips and looks at himself again. The body looks like someone he used to be. He heads to the bedroom, sits on the bed for a moment. It hasn’t been slept in for a month. He sleeps in it now.

When he wakes, the room is gray. His mouth tastes like the inside of a chair he was strapped to for four weeks. He gets up. Goes to the dresser. The drawer sticks. He gets it open and finds clothes that smell of cedar from the cheap drawer-liner Sofia had bought him last winter. Stiff dark denim jeans. A black t-shirt. A pair of grey wool socks.

He puts the jeans on. The fabric is thick and rigid, the hem heavy at the ankle. He slides his hands into the front pockets and the depth is startling - denim swallowing the hands down past the wrists. He buttons the jeans without thinking about how they sit on the hips, and only halfway through realizes he has been thinking about how clothes sit on hips for a month. The waistband. The pull at the hip flexors when sitting. The way a sweater catches on the fabric of a bra strap when you raise your arms. All of it. The t-shirt goes on. It hangs straight. There is no hem to pull down, no fabric designed to follow a shape. It just hangs.

He finds his boots near the door. Heavy leather work boots, scuffed at the toe. He laces them up. He is halfway through the second boot when he realizes his hands are shaking. He sets the laces down. He waits. The shaking eases.

The clock on the microwave reads 10:47. Monday. The check-in with Brigid is at noon.

He has to go to Greenpoint.

He takes his keys from the bowl on the kitchen counter - a chipped ceramic dish Sofia had brought him from a flea market in Red Hook - and walks out of the apartment. He gets to the second-floor landing before he understands he has not put on a jacket. He goes back. He grabs the canvas work jacket off the hook by the door and puts it on.

The air outside is freezing. The sky is a flat sheet of white iron over Brooklyn. The wind cuts down Vanderbilt Avenue and rattles the bare branches of the street trees, and his eyes water in the cold within ten paces.

A man in a thick parka is walking toward him on the sidewalk, looking at his phone, drifting toward the center of the concrete.

The threat math runs before he can stop it. Distance, eyeline, mass. He pulls his shoulders in. He hollows the front of his chest. He drops his eyes to the middle distance - a small angled-down look that says I am not a problem, that he ran without thinking for a month inside Cara, inside Diane, inside Sofia. He runs it now in a body that does not need it.

The man clips his shoulder, grunts something indistinct, and keeps walking.

Malcolm stops on the sidewalk. The wind cuts under the open jacket. His arms are crossed tight against his stomach. Fatima's posture, the one she used against the pain. He drops his arms. The man is already half a block down. The calculation runs in the void anyway, ticking against nothing.

He catches himself scanning the alley to his left. Tracking the footsteps of a delivery worker behind him. The radar is spinning with no planes in the sky. He doesn't know how to turn it off.

He crosses the street and goes down into the subway.

The G train arrives with a screech of metal on metal. The car is mostly empty. He sits on the orange plastic bench and his knees fall open without him deciding it. He sits there for a few seconds before he understands what is strange about it. He is not checking who is looking. The legs have just opened. They are wide because the body is wide and that is where the legs go.

A woman in a puffer jacket is sitting two seats down. She glances at him.

She pulls her canvas tote bag closer to her thigh. Her ankles cross tight against each other. She angles her body a fraction of an inch toward the door. Her shoulders hunch in.

He sees it. He sees the small fast tuck a body learns. He has been running that tuck for a month. He clocks the moment her attention split - half the train map on the wall, half him in the corner of her eye.

He wants to tell her she doesn't have to do it. He understands. But speaking would only make it worse, would force the interaction she is actively trying to avoid.

He pulls his knees together. He shifts his weight toward the opposite end of the bench. He folds his arms over his chest and stares at the floor. The woman's shoulders drop a millimeter. The air in the car eases.

The train stops at Greenpoint Avenue. He goes up the stairs and the calves cramp again on the second flight and he grips the railing. He stands at the top for a moment to let it pass. The neighborhood smells of exhaust and bakery yeast and the river.

He reaches the café on the side street off Manhattan Avenue. The door pushes open with a metallic click. The bell jingles overhead.

Brigid is at the back table.

A black notebook sits open next to a ceramic mug of black coffee. She is typing fast, her eyes on the laptop screen.

Malcolm walks down the narrow aisle between the tables. His shoulders are too wide for the space and he turns sideways once to clear the back of a wooden chair. He has been narrower for a month and the body is reading rooms wrong.

He stops at the marble table. The crescent-shaped stain is still there near the edge.

Brigid doesn't look up. She sees boots, denim, the wrong height. Her shoulders set. Her mouth closes.

"Is this seat taken," he says.

The voice comes out of the chest, not the throat. Low, where it had not been low for a month. It carries across the café louder than he meant. A man at the next table glances over.

Brigid's head snaps up.

Her dark eyes scan the bearded face, the jacket, the broad chest. Annoyance moves across her face first. A man at her table. Then her mouth opens slightly. He doesn't move. He rests his hands on the back of the empty chair and holds himself perfectly still - not the easy defusing smile a strange man might use here. He waits the way he has waited across small tables from her for a month, patient, attending.

He lets her run the math.

It takes a long minute.

She looks at the hands on the chair. At the way he is standing, not pushing, not demanding the space. At his face, not his body. At the pattern of his attention. Her eyes move across his jawline, his shoulders, looking for the person behind the face.

The color leaves her face. Her mouth parts slightly. A short breath catches in her throat.

"Sit down," she says. Barely a whisper.

He pulls the chair out and sits. The wood is hard against his spine. His knees bump the iron base of the table.

She stares at him. The laptop is pushed aside. The coffee mug is ignored.

"You're out," she says. The voice is tight, stripped of its usual edge.

"I woke up in a stasis chair in my own apartment last night."

She looks down at the table. She looks at the hands resting on the marble. They are larger than the hands she has known, the knuckles thicker, the veins on the back more visible.

The memory of yesterday afternoon sits between them on the table. Sofia's apartment. The kiss. The first-aid kit. The torn skin on Brigid's knuckle. What Sofia had given her, that Sofia would not have given easily, with him in the room and unable to leave.

Brigid reaches up and unwraps the scarf a little. The skin of her neck is bare.

He watches her throat move as she swallows. The memory comes back in Sofia's body - Sofia's mouth, Sofia's hands, Brigid's neck under those hands - and arrives now in his. It does what his body does. Fast, low, no consultation, no slow gathering. He leans forward and plants his elbows on the marble and lets the table cover what it covers.

She doesn't seem to notice. She traces the rim of the mug. Her fingers are trembling slightly. She presses her thumb against the ceramic to stop it.

"The journalist," she starts. She forces the conversation back to logistics, anchoring herself in the work.

"He's dead on Vanderbilt," he says. He drops his volume, leans in. "I'm not him. I was never him. I lived three blocks from that apartment. I'm in Fort Greene. I opened the casing on my consumer console and bypassed the latency limiters with a soldering iron. A stupid hardware hack. It shorted out the sync protocol while I was logging in."

She stops tracing the mug. She looks at him.

"You weren't investigating anything."

"No."

She lets out a slow breath. Her dark eyes close for a second. "The files we pulled off the local drive. The product brief. The suppression directives."

"Real. He found it. I just fell into the middle of it by accident."

She nods once, a jerky mechanical motion, rebuilding the structure of the world to fit the new information. "I have a meeting with Meg's contact in the tech press this afternoon. I'm handing over the flash drive. The internal signatures match. The routing protocols match. They're going to publish."

"Good."

"And you." She looks up, meeting his eyes for the first time since he sat down. "You go back to your life."

He doesn't answer right away. The thing he wants to say is what life. He doesn't say it. "I'll try," he says.

The café noise hums around them. A barista calls out an order for a flat white. Someone drops a spoon on the tile near the register.

She sits back in the wooden chair. Her face is more tired than he has seen it. She looks at his beard, at the canvas jacket, at the sheer fact of him sitting where every previous body has sat.

Her voice goes quiet. Not soft. Quiet.

"Whatever was between us only existed because of the bodies you were in," she says.

She looks at him.

"I don't think less of what happened. I think it happened. It just can't keep happening."

He receives the words. Something dense and immediate hits the back of his sternum, a pressure that isn't grief yet because it hasn't had time to be anything yet. He nods slightly. He keeps his hands flat on the marble.

It is honesty. It is the only true thing she can say. It functions as rejection anyway. He had known her better than anyone in his life. He had relied on her sharpness, her loyalty, the way she walked into the dead man's apartment without flinching. He had loved her in a way that had no future.

The table is hard against the underside of his palms. The café noise hums around them.

"I know," he says.

"I'm glad you made it back," she adds. She pulls the scarf tighter around her neck. The tone softens just enough to show the human under the boundary. "Don't contact me again. Let the press handle the fallout."

She closes the laptop. She puts the notebook in the pocket of her coat.

She stands. She doesn't offer her hand. She looks down at the table one last time, a final assessment of the stranger she spent a month trusting with her life.

She turns and walks the length of the café. The bell jingles.

Malcolm is left alone at the table.

The crescent stain on the marble. The empty chair across from him. The coffee shop continuing its routine. Two women at the next table arguing about a lease. The espresso machine hisses. Someone's laptop fan.

Standing up requires pushing back from the table, shifting the weight, getting the boots underneath him. He gets there.

He walks out into the cold.

The street is busy. Delivery trucks. Pedestrians bundled against the wind.

He walks toward the subway. His hands are shoved deep in the pockets of the jeans. The body is home, the joints familiar. The lungs draw the air they were made for. The mind is still a ghost.

A group of teenagers rushes past, taking up most of the sidewalk, laughing. He doesn't even register he's adjusted until they're already gone — chest narrowed, shoulder turned, a small concession to a presence that wasn't anything.

The light at the corner is red. He stands on the curb and waits.

The light changes.

He goes down into the subway. The ride back to Brooklyn is a rattling blur of fluorescent light. He leans his head against the cold glass and listens to the wheels grind. At some point the train comes above ground and the flat winter light comes through the scratched window and he stares at the low rooftops and the water towers and the backs of buildings and none of it looks like anything in particular. Just Brooklyn. Just where he lives.

The walk from the station to the apartment is short.

The deadbolt turns. The living room is exactly what it was. Dying fern. Cheap rug. Stale closed-up smell.

On the desk, the NovaSphere rig is open, the casing off, exposed wiring. The green light glows steadily in the dim room. A patient mechanical eye.

He stands in the doorway looking at it.

They had wanted to hold people in the suspension and find out what they could do with that. He does not reach for the rig. He leaves it exactly as it is and drops his keys in the bowl. The ceramic clinks.

The silence in the apartment is heavy. He waits for something to drop into his head - the layout of someone else's kitchen, the names of their upstairs neighbors, the history of the leak under their sink. Nothing comes. The apartment is just an apartment. He has to remember it himself.

He fills a glass at the tap and drinks it standing at the sink. The water tastes faintly of metal and old pipes. He used to notice that and not think anything about it. He refills the glass. He drinks that too.

He walks to the center of the room. He stands in the quiet.

The body is a house that has been empty for a month, and moving back into it feels like trespassing. He doesn't know what to do with his hands. He keeps waiting for the room to ask him something.

It doesn't.