Inhabited - chapter 29 (with images) (Patreon)

The hot water runs over the shoulders and down the back. Steam rises against the tile.

Two days since the chair became the world again. The body is less stunned today than yesterday. It is recovering itself in pieces. The wrist has filled out a fraction. The calves don't seize when he stands.

He stands under the spray with his eyes closed. Hot water moving over chest hair, down the stomach, the small unfamiliarity of his body hair catching water and routing it in lines instead of letting it sheet off skin.

He runs the bar of soap down. Across the chest. Over the stomach. He hesitates, the soap held loose in his fingers, water running off his wrist.

He hasn't touched himself in this body for a month.

He sets the soap on the ledge and reaches down.

The shape of his own erection in his own hand is information that arrives sideways. He had done this thousands of times. Hundreds in this same shower. It had never registered as a thing he was doing — just a thing the body did while he was also in it, the mind elsewhere. That's gone now. He is completely present. The form of it under his hand, the weight and angle of it, how different from any of the nine bodies he has just left, how it’s not gathered and internal — it’s just there, organized outward, waiting to be managed.

He finds the familiar grip without looking for it. Faster on the upstroke. He doesn't have to think. The muscle memory has been in his hands for twenty years, and the hands know what to do without consulting him, which is exactly the strange part — watching his own hands know a thing.

The build is fast. The arousal doesn't spread out from some middle point and take the whole body with it. It narrows. It focuses. By thirty seconds in the whole thing has reduced to a single location, and the pressure of that is almost impersonal, localized, gathering at the bottom of a funnel he hasn't thought about in a month.

But the foreign quality stays. He thinks of Sofia's hands. Not Sofia's hands a month ago. Sofia's hands last week, on Brigid's sternum, opening Brigid's coat. He had felt that from inside her. The wanting in Sofia's body had been a slow lateral pull, an attention going out from the chest and arriving back as heat in the hips, the long curve of arousal that had taken her a full minute to even understand was happening.

This body doesn't do that. This is faster, more direct. Arousal is at the threshold inside of two minutes and the whole arc is a closing fist, tightening, narrowing, dropping toward one location.

Heat pools low. The lower abdomen tightens. His breath shortens. He feels the pulse in his neck against the cold tile.

It comes the way it has always come. Hard, fast, lower than the heart. A spike that crests and is already falling before the mind has caught up to it. A brief muscular tremor in the thigh. His hand goes slack against the tile.

Then nothing. The water is still hot. His breath is coming back.

He stands there with his forehead against the shower wall.

He's not sure what he'd expected. Something with more duration, maybe, given everything that came before. Or something with more of the body in it — the way Ruth's ending had taken her thighs and lower back, the way Maren's had pulled from somewhere behind the hip bones and gone on for what felt like a full minute. This one is thirty seconds of foreground and then the static of an off channel.

It's just what this body does. He's done it a thousand times. He'd just never watched it from where he's watching it now.

He turns the water off, gets out and dries off.

He gets coffee from his coffeemaker. His fingers overlap when they wrap the mug.

He drinks the coffee black. The kitchen is quiet. The leaky faucet drips into the stainless steel sink, four seconds, four seconds.

He sits at the small desk. The chair creaks under him, a different creak — his weight distributed differently now, the seat wider, the body dropping into it with more mass than he's been moving around in for a month. He rests his forearms on the edge. His elbows hang off the sides.

He crosses his ankles tight under the desk.

A minute later his knees ache from the angle and he uncrosses them. The knees drop open, take up the room underneath the desk, the feet landing wide. He looks down at them. He'd been doing this for thirty-five years and never once paid attention to it.

He pulls the knees together. Holds them. Lets them fall open again.

He leaves them open.

The console on the corner of the desk is a lump of plastic and exposed wire. He hasn't touched it. The green standby light is still on.

He picks up his phone. The screen is cracked near the top right corner.

He opens messages. Sofia's name sits near the bottom, buried under automated delivery texts and spam.

The last message is from a month ago. A long block of text he sent at two in the morning, defending the hardware hack, defending his hours in the rig, telling her she didn't understand the pressure he was under at work. Reading it now, a month later, he sounds like a guy who had decided to be right at her. He had hit send and felt vindicated. She hadn't replied. She had just come over the next day for her spare coat and yelled at him in the entryway.

He stares at the cursor.

He types: I'm back. He deletes it.

He types: I know I disappeared. I can explain what happened. I'm sorry. He hits send before he can look at the words too long.

He sets the phone face down on the desk. He waits. Ten minutes. An hour. The screen stays dark.

He gets up and goes to the bathroom. He turns on the tap and washes his face. The beard holds the water. Drops scatter onto the black t-shirt. He rubs his jaw with a towel. The maintenance of this body is almost nothing. No serum. No moisturizer. He does not have to navigate the small careful sequence of products Elena had run through before bed every night.

He needs groceries. The fridge is half a carton of eggs and a jar of mustard.

He puts on the heavy jacket and the boots. He grabs his keys.

The stairs down to the street are easier than they were this morning. Not easy. Easier. The legs are starting to remember themselves. He still grips the railing.

He pushes out onto the sidewalk.

The wind is sharp, smelling of exhaust and impending snow. He walks toward DeKalb Avenue.

A group of guys in their early twenties are standing outside the bodega on the corner, smoking. They take up most of the sidewalk, a sprawl of puffer jackets and shifting boots.

His radar engages. He measures the distance. He tracks their eyelines. The gap between the kid on the left and the brick wall is narrow. He feels the urge to cross the street and remove himself from the trajectory entirely. He feels his shoulders pulling in.

He stops walking for a second.

He is six foot two. He is wearing steel-toed boots and a canvas work jacket and he outweighs the largest kid in the group by thirty pounds.

They are not a threat to him. He is the threat.

He lets the shoulders drop. He uncrosses his arms. He starts walking again, aiming straight for the gap.

As he approaches, the kid on the left takes a drag of his cigarette, glances over, and takes a half-step back to open the gap. No words. No challenge. The kid just reads the mass moving toward him and yields the space.

Malcolm walks through. He doesn't say excuse me.

Inside the bodega, the bell jingles. He grabs a red plastic basket from the stack near the register. He walks down the narrow aisle toward the dairy case.

A woman is standing in front of the milk, looking at her phone. Long wool coat. Dark scarf.

He stops ten feet away.

A month ago he would have walked right up, reached past her for the milk, maybe muttered an apology if his sleeve brushed hers.

Now he stands at the end of the aisle and waits.

He knows the air in that coat. He knows the small spike when a large stranger appears in a narrow space, the inventory of exits running automatically. He leans against the endcap of canned beans. The metal shelf is cold through the canvas of his jacket. He takes out his phone and pretends to read something. He turns his body sideways so his chest isn't facing her. He makes himself smaller. The basket hangs heavy from his hand.

The woman grabs a carton of almond milk, turns, and walks past him without looking up.

He goes to the dairy case and gets eggs and a quart of milk and a wedge of cheap cheddar.

He pays at the counter. The cashier is watching a soccer game on a small tablet.

"Twelve fifty," the cashier says.

"Here," Malcolm says. He hands over his card.

The voice is too loud in the small store, bouncing off the linoleum and the glass coolers. The cashier glances up, faintly annoyed.

He clears his throat. The next sound out of his mouth is more careful — pitched lower, smaller in the register, the volume of a man who is consciously not taking up the room.

"Thanks," he says.

He takes the bag and walks out.

The settling, or whatever it is. The phantom calculations. The automatic modulation. Some of it might stop. Some of it might just be how he reads rooms now.

The apartment smells like the back of a closet. The faucet ticks.

He works a little. He opens the laptop and pulls down some freelance frontend code he abandoned a month ago. The JavaScript feels simple and clean compared to the messy overlapping architecture of human nervous systems. He fixes a broken CSS grid and pushes the commit. He stares at the screen for a long time after the push completes.

He checks his phone every hour.

Sofia hasn't replied.

He sits on the cheap rug, leaning his back against the sofa.

He thinks about the women. Ruth carrying her baby up the stairs in Jersey City, the burning ache in her arms that was just the floor she walked on. Elena at the podium, a hot flash turning the lecture hall into a furnace, and Elena keeping the lecture upright through it because that was what was possible. Fatima on the floor in Crown Heights, pain so absolute it erased the rest of the world.

Sofia.

How she had looked at the marble table in Greenpoint when he was wearing her face. The oat milk latte she ordered, foam collapsing while she talked. The way she had hugged him six weeks ago after a date, her chin on his shoulder, smelling of vetiver and cold air.

He picks up the phone.

He types: I don't expect you to forgive the month. The fight either. But there are things you don't know happened. You probably remember them weird. Will you let me explain?

He hits send.

He puts the phone on the coffee table and goes to the kitchen to make more coffee.

When he comes back, the screen is lit.

Call me at 8. No greeting. No signature.

The hours between five and eight stretch out. He paces. He stops pacing. He sits. He stands. The console light glows green from the desk and he doesn't turn it off and doesn't look at it.

At eight he dials her number.

It rings twice.

"Hello."

Her voice is flat. Guarded. The voice she uses for opposing counsel on environmental briefs.

It is also her voice.

He has not heard her voice in twenty-seven days. Through nine different nervous systems he had remembered the flat affect of the work voice, the low warmth of the early-morning version, the laugh he had not earned for weeks. Now the voice goes into his ear and the body answers it before his mind has the question. It is not appropriate. He doesn't get to want her right now. The body wants her anyway, low and direct and uninvited, the way this body wants. He leans back against the kitchen counter and breathes through it.

"It's Malcolm," he says.

"I know who it is." The line hisses faintly. "You said you could explain the blanks."

"I didn't run away," he says. "I didn't ignore your calls. The night we fought. The night you left."

"You went into the rig. You put the headset on and checked out. Like you'd been doing all month."

"I broke the rig," he says. "I opened the console and bypassed the thermal limiters with a soldering iron. The system shorted out while I was logging in. It hit the sync protocol."

Silence on the line. She is waiting for the excuse.

"I got trapped," he says.

"Trapped." Her tone is flat. "You couldn't take the headset off."

"I wasn't in the chair," he says. The voice drops, the low frequency vibrating under his ribs. "The signal dropped. And I woke up on a hardwood floor in Brooklyn. In a different body."

A car alarm goes off somewhere down on the street.

"Malcolm, I don't have time for this kind of bullshit."

"I was a woman named Cara Vasquez," he says quickly, before she can hang up. "An architect in Dumbo. I was in her body for three days. Then a woman named Diane in Manhattan. Then a woman in Jersey City named Ruth."

"Stop."

"I was in nine different women over twenty-seven days. The hardware hack collided with a leak in the NovaSphere architecture and threw me into other people's nervous systems."

"Are you high?"

"The Navy Yard development project," he says.

The silence that hits the line is absolute.

"The secondary soil impact study," he continues. The voice steadies. "The city is trying to bypass it to expedite the commercial zoning permit. You were drafting a response to a junior associate. You flagged a discrepancy in the soil sampling dates from an appendix on page forty."

He hears her breath catch. A short sharp intake.

"How do you know about the appendix," she says. The lawyer voice is gone.

"The floorboard outside your bathroom door creaks. You keep your coffee filters above the microwave. You bought a rig a month ago. A NovaSphere consumer model. It's on the low table by the window."

He closes his eyes.

"I was in you, Sofia."

The silence stretches. It tightens. He can hear the ambient noise of her apartment through the receiver. The distant rumble of traffic on Vanderbilt.

"You've been in my apartment," she says softly. Trying to find a rational anchor.

"I was in your body."

"No."

"Three days ago," he says. "You woke up and went to the café in Greenpoint with the ghost-lettered HARDWARE sign off Manhattan Avenue. You met a woman named Brigid Adler. You broke into a dead man's apartment on Vanderbilt. You found a body in the chair."

He hears a sound. A chair scraping a floor. She is sitting down.

"I remember the window," she whispers. "I remember the fire escape. But it feels like a dream. It feels like I watched someone else do it."

"You did. I was driving."

"You used my body to break into a dead man's apartment."

"Yes."

The line is quiet for a long time.

He doesn't try to fill it. He lets her assemble the pieces. He lets her feel the violation of it, because it was a violation, regardless of the mechanics. He had walked around in her skin. He had used her hands.

"Brigid," she says. The name hangs in the air.

"Yes."

"The woman with the dark coat. The one who came over to my apartment after."

His stomach twists. A hard cold knot just under the ribs.

"Yes."

"I remember her hands," she says. Her voice goes strange. "I remember the smell of isopropyl alcohol. I remember the couch."

She stops.

He doesn't say anything.

"Malcolm." The tone sharpens. The lawyer is back, isolating the timeline. "When she - when that happened on the couch."

"Yes."

"Was that you?"

He leans his head back against the kitchen cabinets. The ceiling is a flat dirty white.

"I didn't force it," he says. "I didn't - I wasn't steering. The mechanism only works if it's real. If I'd been making it happen, it wouldn't have worked. It worked because something in you -"

He stops. He hears how this sounds.

"I'm not going to make this sound okay," he says. "I'm just telling you what happened."

"You watched."

"I was in the room. I couldn't leave. I didn't have a choice."

"You kissed a woman using my mouth."

"It was the exit mechanism," he says. "The only way out of the bodies was a - a real surrender. Yours was real. Your response was yours. I just rode it out."

A loud sharp breath through the receiver.

"I need to hang up," she says.

"Please. Just let me come over. I can explain the rest of it."

"Do not come to my apartment."

The anger in her voice is cold and absolute.

"Sofia."

"I remember her hands," she says. Her voice cracks. A small fracture in the armor. "I remember crying. I don't even know why I was crying."

He doesn't say anything. He knew why. He had been there for why. And whatever he says now is going to sound like claiming the experience, adding to what she's already saying he took.

"I don't know what I felt," she says. "You took it."

The line clicks dead.

He lowers the phone. The screen goes black.

The leaky faucet ticks. Four seconds. Four seconds.

He walks into the living room and stands on the cheap rug. The apartment is dark. He doesn't turn on the lamps.

He thinks about Sofia taking her spare coat from the hook by his door, the morning after the fight. She had picked it up and walked out without looking at him, and he had stood there and let her. He had been so certain he was right about something. He couldn't even remember what. The latency, or his right to stay in the rig, or the principle of not apologizing first. Whatever it was, it had seemed worth it at the time.

He had put the headset on twenty minutes after she left.

He sits down on the sofa. The springs groan.

He spreads his knees and rests his elbows on his thighs and lets his hands hang. He sits in the dark. The radiator hisses. The faucet ticks.

The body is finally his again. The knowledge is sitting in him like a splinter that went too deep to reach — Fatima's stairs, Maren's classroom, Ruth at three in the morning with a baby and a pump and a job and a locked door she didn't have enough hours to use. He's carrying it. He doesn't yet know what a body like his is supposed to do with it.

He lies down on the sofa. He doesn't turn on the lamps. The orange stripe from the streetlight moves slowly across the rug while the faucet ticks and the radiator hisses and outside the window Brooklyn is going on without him — a horn somewhere on Lafayette, a window opening, the long descending whine of a bus pulling out. The same sounds he had been listening to a month ago. They're not the same now.