Inhabited - chapter 30 (with images) (Patreon)

The coffee grinder screams in the quiet kitchen, a high mechanical whine that rattles the loose cabinet door above the sink. Malcolm dumps the pulverized beans into the filter. The boiling water hits the grounds and blooms, a thick crust forming on the surface.

The phantom calculations are quieter today. He tracks the delivery worker in the alley below the kitchen window from the time the guy parks the truck to when he's back at the wheel, and he doesn't know why until the guy pulls away and the math runs anyway, and then he just leaves the window. That's the quiet they mean.

He stands at the counter waiting for the pour-over to drip through. His shoulders are just resting. He's been aware of this for two days: the basic at-restness of the body, the spine not loaded, the chest not drawn in. He thinks of Fatima walking four blocks to the subway in pain and calling it Tuesday. He thinks of Maren holding a room of thirty teenagers with nothing left in the tank. He thinks of his shoulders being just shoulders, just resting, because nothing is asking them to be anything else, and that being a thing he can think about for the first time because he has a comparison now.

He ate two eggs for breakfast. The calorie hit went straight in. The body is pulling everything it can get.

The mug feels more normal today. Something is stitching back together, slow and uneven. He pours the coffee into the mug and takes a tentative sip.

The phone is on the counter. The cracked screen is dark.

It chimes. A single text.

Fort Greene Park. The monument. Two o'clock. No greeting. No signature.

He stares at the glowing rectangle. The coffee burns the back of the throat going down.

The hours between nine and two stretch out, elastic. He paces the apartment. The console light glows from the desk.

At one-thirty he puts on the canvas jacket and the boots and walks out.

The air outside is bitter. A flat grey winter sky presses down on the brownstones. The wind off the river finds the gaps in the canvas and bites at the skin underneath.

He walks down Lafayette Avenue. The stride is long, the boots striking the concrete in a steady rhythm. The freedom of moving through the city without checking who's behind him is still strange, but it isn't unthinking anymore. The awareness stays.

Ahead, a construction crew is repairing the facade of a corner building. Scaffolding narrows the sidewalk into a plywood tunnel. A woman in a dark wool coat is walking twenty feet ahead of him, approaching the tunnel. Two men in hardhats lean against the metal poles on the lower tier, coffee cups in hand, watching the street the way guys watch a street when nothing is happening.

One of them says something down to her as she approaches. The words go under the traffic noise but the tone carries. The particular vowel-drag, the register, the claiming of her passage as the occasion.

He watches her back.

He has been her. Not her specifically, but the back of her, the nervous system processing the sound, measuring the distance to the next point of cover, running the math on whether to speed up or cross over or keep the eyes down and let the body get smaller. He knows exactly what fired in her chest when the voice came down off the scaffolding. He knows the calculation ran before any decision happened. He knows she is already past it and still carrying it, the tone still sitting somewhere under her breastbone like a coin swallowed wrong.

Something tightens under his ribs. He flinches with her, a beat behind.

He accelerates. Long legs taking the distance fast. He steps off the curb and back onto the sidewalk and puts himself in the plywood tunnel directly in front of the scaffolding, his shoulders squared, his stride steady.

The men on the lower tier look at the canvas jacket, the beard, the width of him in the narrow space. One of them takes a sip of his coffee. They go quiet.

He keeps walking. The woman doesn't look back. The tension is already bleeding from her shoulders as the scaffolding falls behind her. She adjusts her tote bag and turns the corner, and she doesn't know what he did. He walks on.

Fort Greene Park is mostly empty. The bare branches of the sycamores rake against the grey sky. Patches of dirty crystallized snow lie along the paths. The Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument towers over the plaza, a Doric column of white stone in a paved courtyard.

Sofia is sitting on a granite bench near the edge of the plaza.

She is in the olive coat. Her dark curly hair is pulled back in a tortoiseshell clip. She is looking at her hands, her fingers tracing the seam of her leather gloves.

He stops ten feet away. The wind howls across the open stone.

She looks up.

She scans his face, the beard, the canvas jacket. Her eyes go through a slow exhausted recognition. The man she fought with a month ago. The man who vanished into a headset. The ghost that walked around in her skin. The doubling makes her blink, slow, eyelids closing once and opening again.

"You came," she says. The voice is scraped thin by the wind.

"You asked."

She stands up. She shoves her gloved hands deep into the pockets of the olive coat. She doesn't close the distance.

"I made coffee yesterday morning," she says. She looks past him, at the base of the column. "I was standing in the kitchen and I reached up to the cabinet above the microwave to grab a filter. My hand just went there automatically."

He stays still. Listens to the dry leaves skittering across the pavement.

"I don't keep filters there anymore," she says. "I moved them to the pantry. I stood there staring at the empty shelf. The muscle memory wasn't mine. It was yours. You put them there when you were me, and your ghost reached for them."

"I'm sorry," he says.

"It's terrifying." Her voice cracks. A small fracture. "Knowing someone else was driving. I have these flashes. The smell of an apartment I've never been to. The dead man in the chair. The sound the glass made when Brigid broke the window."

The name hangs in the freezing air.

"I remember her hands," she whispers. "The alcohol wipes. The couch."

"I didn't steal it," he says. The deep register of his own voice fights the wind. "I didn't — I wasn't steering. The body was already — it wasn't about me." He stops. "That doesn't make it okay. I know that."

She looks down at the heavy boots, at the thick hands hanging out of the canvas sleeves.

"What did it feel like," she asks. "Being me."

"Loud," he says without hesitating. "Everything was loud. The room kept wanting something. From you. Or it was already disappointed in you. I don't know how you do it."

He stops. Tries again.

"I don't know how you don't notice you're doing it. The temperature of the room. Everyone's mood. You manage all of it. All the time. You manage it before you decide what you want for breakfast."

Her jaw softens. A small release.

"And the other women?"

"Fatima's pain made the apartment shrink to one room," he says. The Crown Heights floorboards come back, the slow agonizing crawl to the bathroom. "The bathroom was a hike. She had the heating pad on the lowest setting because anything higher made the cramping worse. She lived in inches some days."

She is watching him.

"Ruth was just tired. So tired. It was the floor she walked on. Elena had hot flashes. They were -" he tries to find the word - "a wave going through her whole body. No part of her not on fire for a minute and a half. And she just kept teaching the class."

He takes a half-step forward. The boots scrape the stone.

"I lived my whole life without knowing what I didn't know," he says. "I'm sorry I hijacked your nervous system. I'm sorry I used it as a door."

A jogger in bright pink leggings passes them, sneakers slapping the concrete in a steady rhythm.

Sofia breathes out, a long slow exhale that fogs in the cold.

She is looking at him differently.

He sees the moment her face changes. Not forgiveness. Something earlier than forgiveness. Recognition, maybe. The same man, somehow, under the beard and the size and the strangeness. The man she had loved before the fight. The shape of him under the canvas jacket she has seen him wear for two winters.

She doesn't say anything. She just keeps looking.

The wind catches a strand of hair that has come loose from the clip. She doesn't move to fix it. He doesn't either, though the impulse to reach out is small and hot in his hand. He keeps the hand in his pocket.

"I don't know what to do with you," she says finally. The anger is gone. What's left is hollow and searching.

"You don't have to do anything."

"I know." She pulls the olive coat tighter around her ribs. The strand of hair lifts and falls against her cheek. "I'm not deciding anything today. Walk me back."

They walk down the hill. The silence is different now. It isn't the locked-door silence of the phone call. It is porous. It breathes.

They walk down DeKalb. Her brownstone. The cracked concrete steps.

She unlocks the door. The apartment smells of cedar soap and old paper. The snake plant on the windowsill, the soil dry. Afternoon light through bamboo blinds throws thin horizontal bars across the hardwood.

The rig sits on the corner table, green light glowing in standby.

He stands in the center of the living room. The big frame feels clumsy in the small space. A framed botanical print hangs slightly crooked on the wall above the sofa. His fingers twitch toward it — Sofia's reflex, residual. He leaves the frame alone.

She takes off the olive coat. She drapes it over the back of the dining chair. She stands there for a moment with her back to him, her hands resting on the wood of the chair.

She turns around.

The distance between them is maybe six feet. The radiator in the corner knocks, hollow metallic.

She crosses the gap. Not a rush. A slow deliberate walk.

She rests a hand flat against the canvas jacket, right over the sternum. Her hand stays. Through the jacket she is reading the shape underneath. He watches her hand take in the size of him, the strangeness of him being a man at all, and then something small shifts in her face, where the strangeness becomes the strangeness of him being this man, the one she has been with for two years. The hand stays.

He doesn't move. He breathes in vetiver and cold air and the cedar of her apartment. His instinct is to come in close, to take her against him. The instinct is loud. He doesn't act on it. He holds the mass of himself back, holds his hands at his sides, and listens to the small shallow shifts in her breathing.

She leans up. She kisses the rough line of the beard. The corner of the mouth.

The wanting arrives the way it does in this body. Fast and blunt and lower than the heart. Not a slow spreading warmth. A sudden hard gravity pulling straight down.

His hands find her waist.

Knowing the curve of her hip from inside it, and now holding it from outside. He almost loses the room.

He softens the thick fingers deliberately. The thumbs trace the seam of her sweater.

They move to the bedroom.

The bamboo blinds are pulled. The blue linen duvet is smooth.

Clothes fall to the floorboards. The canvas jacket. The stiff denim. The soft wool of her sweater. Her bra he has felt from inside Cara, from inside Maren, from inside Sofia herself last week, a small clip at the back, the strap leaving its line on the skin. He undoes it now from outside and the difference is its own small private fact he doesn't say out loud.

The skin contact is immediate. A body that knows its own borders. He hasn't had that for a month. The body just doing what it knows, no translation required.

She arches up under him, dark curly hair across the white pillowcase, and the body she is in is the body he was in three days ago. He has been here. He has been the one with the hair across the pillow, the breath catching, the pelvis tilting up to meet a hand from above. He had been her three days ago and now he is over her, and for a long second there is no resolution to it, just the doubling, his weight against the body he had been wearing.

Then it shifts. She is Sofia. She is here, with him, not him.

He moves over the mattress. Forearms braced. Aware of the weight differential. Not wanting to crush her.

He is slower than he used to be. More patient. He tracks the rhythm of her breathing, the small involuntary tightening of her hands at his back. He is listening in a way he hadn't before, and the listening is not a performance, just what he has left from a month of being in bodies that needed it. But he doesn't always know what he's hearing. The knowledge he carried out of her body doesn't translate cleanly back through his own. He follows what he can.

His body is recovering its memory. The reach of the arm to brace against the headboard. The muscle memory of where the knees go. Sofia pushes him and they shift position so she can climb on top.

He’s almost entirely present. There is no watching from the ceiling. There’s sweat on his shoulders, the slide of skin, the heavy creak of the bedframe. Her breath against his neck.

The heat is low and direct, where it has always been. None of the lateral gathering of the women. None of the slow attention-pulled-inward thing. Just down. Hard. The way this body has always done it.

She makes a low sound against his shoulder.

He comes the way he has always come, and the only strange thing about it is that it isn't strange. His body fully known, operating in the only language it has ever spoken. For a second he thinks: this is what it feels like to come back. Then the second ends and he doesn't know if he has.

Then the duvet stops existing.

Her skin vanishes beneath his hands.

The smell of cedar and sweat and vetiver goes.

Total sensory vacuum. Zero gravity. The suspension holds for one long terrifying second in the absolute blank nothing of the network.

Then the floor returns.

The slam of new gravity is sickening. Different weight. Smaller lungs. A different geometry from collarbone to hip.

A sharp stinging pain pulses on the right index knuckle.

Her eyes open.

A heavy plastic visor clamps over her face. The halo array squeezes her temples, the haptics vibrating against the skull.

The room is small. Hardwood floors. Books stacked in uneven towers against the baseboards. A dark structured coat thrown over the back of a wooden dining chair. The smell of old coffee and the sharp chemical tang of isopropyl alcohol hangs in the cold air.

Slender hands resting on her lap. A small adhesive bandage on the index finger.

Brigid.

Brigid Adler. Thirty-five. Literary translator. Greenpoint.

The text appears in the lower left corner of the halo's display, white on black, and is gone before she can read it twice.

Don't think we don't know what you took.

She pulls the visor off. The room is cold. A silver flash drive rests next to the keyboard.

The Greenpoint apartment is freezing. The radiator is dead. The console sits on a scuffed wooden table in the corner. The green light glows steady.

Brigid had logged in.

She had gone in herself. The grief, the obsessive need to understand the architecture that had swallowed her estranged wife. She had put the headset on to finish what they had started, or to find what was left, or both. She had logged into the network with a flash drive ready to hand off this afternoon and a bandaged finger from yesterday's break-in, and she had not been able to leave it alone.

And now Brigid is sitting in the chair with someone else inside her.

The cold gets to her first. The apartment is the deep-winter kind of cold, the radiator-dead kind, and her body has been sitting in a rigid chair without a coat for however long the session ran. The fingers are stiff. She flexes them. The bandage on the knuckle pulls at the skin.

She breathes out. The breath fogs in the freezing air.

The orgasm she had in Sofia's bed five minutes ago is still in the body she just left. Not in this one. Brigid's body is cold and hungry and small-shouldered and the pleasure that had been there is somewhere else now, in another borough, in a body lying empty under a duvet. The architecture of the sensation is gone. The architecture of this body has its own things, its own small different gravities, and she is in it.

Standing requires a different geometry. The legs are shorter. The knees ache from sitting in the rigid chair. She stands for a moment, just orienting. The room. The stack of books by the window that Brigid has been meaning to shelve for three months. The half-full mug of coffee on the table, long cold, that Brigid poured before she put the headset on.

The walk to the window is short. Four steps in this apartment, and she knows the length without thinking. The body has the floorplan stored as habit.

Outside the window, Brooklyn stretches out below. Roofs. Water towers wrapped in rusted iron bands. The flat grey sky pressing down on the grid.

Fort Greene is miles away. The male body is lying in a bed under a blue linen duvet, empty again. Or asleep. She doesn't know which, from here. The cycle isn't over. The machine in the corner of the apartment runs on. And they know.

She presses her forehead against the cold glass. The chill comes through immediately, a clean shock against the skin. Outside, a delivery truck is idling on the street below, and a woman in a red coat is walking fast with her head down against the wind, and none of it has any idea what just happened in this room.

The bandage on the knuckle throbs. A dull rhythmic pulse.

She lets the forehead stay against the glass. The breath fogs the window in a small uneven oval that does not quite resolve before another breath replaces it.