Full Immersion - chapter 2 (with images) (Patreon)

The ring is gold, and the stone set into it is carved with a bird, a fat little bird on a branch. I turn the hand over in the lamplight. Long fingers. Oval nails, buffed smooth. No hair on the knuckles. I make a fist and the fist is small and the ring bites the finger beside it.

The hand on my shoulder waits.

I lift my knee out of the water. It's the wrong knee, rounded where mine is knobby, and the shin below it is smooth, hairless, running down to an ankle I could close my whole hand around. The foot is narrow, high in the arch, the toes small and neat. I put the leg back and raise the other one. Same.

My hips float. When I brace to sit up like I would in the tub at home, my weight sits somewhere lower and further back than I expect, and the water takes me at a different angle, and I have to grip the stone edge with both hands to keep my place on the bench. The water moves across my chest when I breathe. There's more of my chest than there was. The breasts ride high in the water and shift when I lean, heavy and buoyant at the same time, and when I put my palms flat against them the nipples tighten against my skin from the pressure, and the feeling is immediate and detailed, brighter than it has any right to be. I take my hands away.

I put one hand between my legs, under the water, fast, just a check. There's nothing there. There's something there, but nothing with weight, nothing that hangs. My fingers find a seam, folds, everything arranged differently, and when I press, the answer that comes back is exact and very close-up, and I pull my hand away and grip the stone again.

I touch my face. The jaw narrows sooner than mine. The nose ends sooner. The lips are full and there's no stubble anywhere, nothing under the jaw but a smooth long throat. My hair comes over my shoulder in a wet rope, dark, heavy, and it pulls at my scalp when I turn my head.

The water is warm to my ribs and it smells of olive oil and something green. The lamps on the shelf have blackened lips. One of the flames keeps leaning and recovering.

My first real thought, once the inventory runs out, is that there's a system for this. They gave me the word at orientation. A human on the line in under a minute, they said.

"Rhubarb undergarments."

The voice isn't mine. It's higher, and slower in the vowels than I mean it to be, and the vault gives it back to me. The hand lifts off my shoulder.

"Rhubarb undergarments," I say again, louder, and then I wait. The water laps. Behind the wall somewhere a door shuts and women's voices rise a little and settle. I count seconds. Sixty. Ninety.

I say it calmly. I say it as a question. I say it in pieces, rhubarb, undergarments. I say it twice fast and once slow and once barely above the water sounds, and the nonsense comes out of my mouth intact every time, every syllable, and nothing answers. No pause. No chime. No voice. Two minutes. Three. The rule was under one, and I keep saying it anyway because it's the only lever I have, and the room keeps being a room.

The girl leans around and puts the back of her hand to my forehead.

"Domina? You're flushed. Is the water too hot today?"

Delia. Her name is just there, already worn smooth from use, and with it everything else. Brought from Carthage at twelve, salt-sick the whole crossing, stubborn about the food. Eight years in this house. She picks at her cuticles when she thinks nobody's looking. She hates fish sauce and steals the honey cakes and lets the kitchen cat take the blame. I know the shape of her mouth. I know the sound she makes when she comes. I know these things the way I know things I've lived, and I've never met this woman before in my life.

I know the memories are fabricated. They're in me exactly where my own past is, and the knowing doesn't loosen them at all.

"Delia," I say, and that comes out right. Names come out right.

So I form the true sentence, carefully. There's been a mistake. I'm a guest. Get someone.

"The lamps want trimming," my mouth says, in a drawl I've never heard before, the vowels gone long and idle, and it's already half-spoken before I know it's happening.

I try again. Listen to me. I am not who -

"Bring the good oil next time. This is kitchen oil."

I go slow. I build the words one at a time and watch my own mouth make them. Help. Me.

"I'm cold," my mouth says. "Fetch my robe."

There's no struggle. The sentence I mean is simply gone, and the other one is already in the air, finished, like a form that's come back stamped. The exchange happened somewhere ahead of me and I was given the result.

Delia doesn't fetch the robe. She lets the oil comment go by, and her hands come back onto my shoulders and begin to work.

Her thumbs find the base of my skull and press, slow, and move out along the cords of my neck, and the knot she finds there is enormous. My other body, the one in the chair in the dim room, keeps its tension low, in the lumbar, fifteen years of a desk. This one keeps it in the neck and the shelf of the shoulders, and Delia's thumbs go straight to it without searching, and a sound comes up out of me, low and unguarded, and I don't decide any part of it.

"Better," she says.

Her hands work down my spine on either side, pressing the oil in, and the small hairs on my arms stand up even in the steam. The water laps at me. Somewhere below my ribs, low in my belly, heat begins to gather, and I don't want it, and it's happening anyway.

It isn't like what I know. What I know is a point and a pressure and a direction. This is slower than that and wider, patient, pooling. The water moves against me and the movement is part of it. My nipples draw tight, and not from cold, and the pull of it runs straight down through me. My breath goes shallow. There's an ache starting, general and deep, and it wants something I can't picture, and I don't move, because moving feels like agreeing and stopping her feels impossible, and the nerves have no opinion about either. The nerves are real. It's good, and it's happening to me.

Her right hand leaves my back and comes around my waist and rests flat on my stomach, warm, fingers spread. They drift lower by degrees. They don't arrive.

"Shall I finish, domina?" she says, close to my ear.

I don't find out what my mouth would have done with that, because the door scrapes open on the stone.

Cold air comes in, and with it a smell that cuts through the herbal steam - sweat, track dust, horse, leather. A man fills the doorway, big, broad through the chest, dusty to the elbows, still catching his breath. There's a leather harness crossed over his bare torso and a victor's palm in one fist, its stem dripping onto the threshold.

Scorpus. Champion of the Greens, the greatest racer in the city, rich as a tax farmer, famous from the Forum to the docks. Mine, says the memory, or nearly mine, once the terms are met. There are trials. There's a schedule worked out between men in rooms I've never seen.

Something in my chest turns over and the whole room re-aims itself at the man in the doorway. Delia's hands stop mattering. They drop away to background, to furniture. Everything in me goes to him, the forearms, the dust ground into the creases of his knuckles, and I want him, and I know where it's coming from, and knowing does nothing to it.

I lock. Jaw set, fists closed under the water, every muscle clenched, and for a long moment nothing happens at all.

"You should have seen the turn," he says. He's pleased. He fills the doorway. He fills every room he's ever walked into. "Potitus took the rail too wide and ate the barrier. Wheel came off clean. The crowd near took the roof off the stands."

"Two heats," Delia says, from somewhere behind me, a voice gone flat and polite.

"Two heats." He comes to the edge of the bath and looks down at me, and he reaches out with two dusty fingers and tips my chin up. "Your father said a winner could come to you as he is. So I came as I am."

I try to say no. Nothing forms. I try to stand, to get out of the water, and that doesn't form either. I stay where I am, chin tipped up in his fingers, mouth slightly open, and the moment stretches, and then something gives way somewhere ahead of me, and my mouth starts moving.

"Look at you." The drawl, lazy, amused. "Half the track still on you. I've lost my mood, champion. Take her instead." A pause. "Delia. She's prettier than a palm anyway."

I don't plan it. I hear it the way they hear it.

Scorpus barks out a laugh. "Generous." He looks past me at her, and then back at me, one beat, checking. "A gift, then?"

"A gift," my mouth says.

Delia goes still for the length of one breath. I know how the evening goes - I've known it for years I never lived - and this isn't it. Then she says, "As the domina wishes," and climbs out of the water behind me, and I hear the water sheet off her onto the stone, and the small sounds of her wrapping herself.

I stand, and the water lets go of my chest and the weight of it arrives all at once, forward and down, hanging off the front of me where nothing has ever hung. My hand comes up before I decide anything. The air takes the heat off me at once, faster than it should, and the water runs down my legs and I get my arms around a length of linen from the shelf and wrap it badly, tucking it over itself. Scorpus is already at the bench, pulling at the ties of the harness, telling Delia about the second heat, and she answers in the right places, and she doesn't look at me. I don't know if that's mercy.

My stride comes up short and I arrive at the wall before I mean to, and everything above my waist keeps going for a beat after the rest of me stops, and my arms don't swing where they've always swung, because there's something in the way of them now. Six steps and I have to hold on. The marble is cold through the linen and colder under my wet feet. Behind me, in the steam, Delia laughs at something he says, once, surprised into it, and I can't tell the difference between the laugh she gives him and the one she gives me, and I stand there dripping, listening.

I got out. I don't know how.

The linen slips and I knot it again, and my fingers know the knot, and I don't. Down the corridor the lamp at the bend is smoking. I start walking, and I know the way.

The corridor bends twice before the stairs and I take both bends wrong, because the body knows the house and the house I remember is apartment-grade, four rooms, a hallway you could stand in and see every door. This one keeps opening up. A courtyard with a fountain in the middle that isn't running, moss in the seams of the stone. A kitchen pass-through where a woman is frying something in oil and the smell of it fills the whole wing, sharp and fatty, and my mouth waters before I want it to.

I find the room because my feet find it. Small, high ceiling, one lamp on a nail, a bed that's a wood frame with ropes and a mattress on top. A chest at the foot. A basin on a stand. A girl asleep on a pallet by the wall, younger than Delia, wrapped in a blanket up to her chin, and she doesn't wake when I come in. Prima. The name is there before I want it. My hair is still wet and it has been down my back since the bath, and it moves whenever I move, and I haven't stopped noticing it once.

The girl wakes anyway when I stand there too long, and her eyes come open and she's up before I've decided anything.

"Domina."

"I need the pot," I say, and it comes out right.

She gets it from under the bed. A ceramic thing with a flared rim, glazed inside, and she sets it on the floor in the corner and steps back half a pace and looks at the wall. Waiting.

I stand there. The linen I'd wrapped myself in is damp and it's falling off anyway, and I let it drop because there's no way to hold it and do this at the same time. The girl doesn't look away. She watches the floor between us with the patience of someone who's done this every night of her life.

I squat. There's no chair, no seat, no way to do this standing, and I get down low over the pot and balance on my toes. My knees come up into my chest and press into something soft that has never been there to press into, and I have to sit back off my heels to get out from under them. I reach back to pull the linen out of the way and there's nothing to pull because it's already gone.

The aim is the problem. I keep expecting a direction I don't have. There's nothing to point, nothing to hold, just the whole arrangement of my hips and the angle of my thighs. And I don't know where it comes out. Not to the inch. I've known that about myself since I was two years old and now I'm squatting over a pot in a strange house guessing, shifting forward, then back, and I can feel the girl's eyes flick up and then away again.

Nothing happens. I try to let go the way I've let go ten thousand times, and the muscles are different. The ones I reach for aren't the ones that matter. There's a pause that feels like a long time, and then it starts with no warning at all. It's just there, closer to the surface than I expect, and I feel the whole of it leave in a way I never have. It goes wide, too wide, off the rim and onto the stone, and I hear it hit the floor and the girl shifts her weight once and doesn't move.

I try to adjust and I overcorrect and it goes the other way, catching my heel, hot against the skin of my ankle, and I make a sound and stop and start again, and the girl still doesn't move.

And it doesn't leave cleanly. It comes out against me and stays against me the whole way, over skin, warm. A man's version of this touches nothing. This touches everything it passes on the way down.

Some of it runs backward along whatever shape I am down there. Some of it splits and goes two ways at once. And squatting on my toes over a pot in a house I've never been in, I work out that there's a way you're supposed to hold yourself for this, an angle, something you do with your hips or your hand, and that every woman in this house learned it when she was four, and that nobody has ever said one word about it to me in thirty-eight years.

When it's done I can't tell it's done. The signal is different, not the one I'm used to, and there's no way to finish it on purpose. Nothing I push does anything. It stops when it stops. I stay squatted there a few seconds past the point because I don't trust it, and then the girl is there with a cloth, damp, folded, and she holds it out and I take it and I don't know the order of operations. I'm still wet. It doesn't finish and drip and be over, that's what the cloth is for. I wipe and the cloth is cool and I do it wrong the first time, dragging instead of patting, and I can't see any of what I'm doing and I have to find it all by feel, and the folds are not where my hand expects them to be. There's a sting from the fabric that tells me this skin isn't the skin I'm used to.

She takes the cloth and the pot and goes to the door and leaves, and I stand there naked with the linen on the floor and the room smelling faintly of urine and lamp oil and I think: I'm going to have to learn this.

It takes me a while to get the linen back on. There's a way it goes and I don't have it. The girl comes back with a dry cloth and she puts it down and she picks up the wet one and she goes again, and I'm alone with the lamp and the rope bed and the mattress that shifts under me when I sit, stuffed with something that crunches when I move. I sit higher on it than I mean to. There's padding between me and the ropes that I didn't bring, and the frame's edge, which ought to be cutting into the back of my thighs by now, isn't finding anything to cut into.

The door doesn't lock. I check. It pulls open with no resistance, just the scrape of wood on the frame and the corridor beyond, lit by one lamp at the bend.

I stand in the doorway and I look down the corridor and I think about walking. Just to the courtyard, to the fountain, to the edge of the house where the street would be if the street were anywhere near. I think about it and the thought is clear and then I'm back inside the room, sitting on the bed, and I don't remember sitting down.

I try it again, later. This time I count the steps. One. Two. Three. Four. The corridor is longer than I thought. Five. Six. The lamp at the bend is closer. Seven. Eight.

I'm in the garden, standing by the fountain, and the fountain is running now, someone opened it, and the water is loud and there are stars above the courtyard and my feet are cold on the stone and I don't know how I got here.

I turn around and go back inside and I find the room again and the girl is on her pallet, awake this time, watching the door, and she watches me come in and she doesn't say anything.

"Get me a stylus," I say, and it comes out right.

She brings it with a wax tablet, a wooden frame with the wax poured thin and dark, and I sit on the bed with the tablet on my knees and the stylus in my right hand and I press the point into the wax.

I try my name. Daniel. The letters are clear in my head, I know the shapes, but the hand makes something else, a series of curves and lines that aren't letters at all, and I smooth the wax with the flat end of the stylus and try again.

Same result. My hand goes where it wants to go and the marks it makes are not English, not anything, just scratches that mean nothing.

A car, then. Four wheels, a box, windows. My hand makes a circle, then another, then a line connecting them, and then it stops, and what's on the wax is a cart, maybe, or a broken loom, or nothing.

A phone next. A rectangle. My hand makes a rectangle and then stops, and I know there's supposed to be glass in it, buttons, a screen, and the hand doesn't have the next move.

I try to write again. I am not Livia. I am a guest. Get help. The words are there, I can feel them, and the stylus presses into the wax and the letters come out and they spell a different sentence. Domina requires a new cloak for the festival.

I smooth it over. I try again, slower, letter by letter. I am ---

The household accounts for the month.

I try to write my sister's name. Jo. Two letters. My hand makes a flower instead, five petals around a center, neat, something someone taught this hand to do when it was small.

The girl is watching from the pallet, not moving, and I look up and she looks away, and I press the stylus into the wax one more time and I write: The lamp wants trimming.

It comes out clean. Perfect letterforms, no hesitation. I could write that all day.

I put the tablet down on the floor beside the bed and I put the stylus on top of it and I lie back and the ropes creak and the mattress crunches. Breathing is different on my back. There's weight sitting on the front of my ribs that stays where it is while the ribs go on working underneath it, and I take a few deliberate ones to see whether that changes, and it doesn't. I stare at the ceiling and the lamp is making a smell like burnt fat.

The door opens and Delia comes in, and she has a basket over her arm and she moves like someone who has been walking for a while. She sets the basket down by the basin and she looks at the girl on the pallet and the girl gets up and goes out without being told.

"You're back," I say, and it comes out right.

"The steward wanted to know why I was in the bath when the master arrived," she says, and she takes the pot and goes to the door again, and when she comes back she's carrying a folded cloth, clean, and she sets it on the stand. "I told him you sent for me. He didn't like it."

"Did he punish you?"

"I'm off the morning round tomorrow. Someone else will do your hair." She says it the way you'd mention rain. "I'll be in the kitchen instead, helping with the bread."

I want to say I'm sorry. I want to say I didn't mean for that to happen. I want to say I was trying to get out and I didn't know it would land on her and I won't do it again. None of those sentences exist.

"See that you're back by midday," my mouth says.

"I will." She picks up the basket and she goes to the door and she stops there with her hand on the frame. "Domina. If you want me tomorrow, send for me before the bread goes in. I can leave it."

I don't know what to say to that. My mouth doesn't either. It says, "Goodnight, Delia."

"Goodnight."

She goes out and the door closes and the lamp keeps burning and I lie there in the dark with the smell of burnt fat in the air and the mattress crunching under me every time I shift, and my hair is heavy and it's pulled over one shoulder and it itches at my neck, and I put my hand up to move it and my fingers get caught in it and I pull too hard and it hurts.

I don't try the door again.

The wine is cut so far down it barely has a color. It tastes of resin off the cup's rim and something sour underneath, and it's the best thing I've had all day, which tells me I haven't eaten since before the bath, or the day is gone somewhere I can't account for. Somebody who wasn't Delia did my hair this morning, tighter than Delia does it, and my scalp has been sore since.

Prima brings the tray. Gap in her front teeth, burns on her wrists from the oven, allergic to something in the wool that makes her sneeze through the winter. I know all of it. I didn't learn any of it, and last night I watched her hold a pot for me and I never once said her name. She sets the tray on the chest and steps back and waits to see if I want anything else before the kitchen closes down.

Bread still warm, a stack of olives, soft cheese, three figs. The bread is dense and scorched on the bottom where it sat too close to the oven floor, and I tear it instead of cutting it because my fingers already know the loaf will take it. The olives are sharp and oily and the pits come out clean against my teeth. The cheese is salty enough that the wine suddenly makes sense. I eat all of it, and the fig seeds catch in my back teeth and I work one loose with my tongue for a while, doing nothing else.

"Can you write?" I say, and it comes out.

She laughs once, then checks my face to see if it was a joke. "Me, domina?"

"Is there someone in the house who can? The steward's people."

"The steward writes. His boy copies." She says it like she's reciting the inventory. "Shall I send for him?"

I set it up carefully in my head first. A letter. Someone outside this house, a magistrate, anyone with an office. I need the words to be mine for one sentence. I hold the sentence in my head, all of it at once, and open my mouth.

"Tell the steward I want the household accounts after breakfast," my mouth says. "He's to bring them himself, not send the boy."

Prima repeats it back word for word, the whole sentence, in a fair copy of my own drawl, and bobs her head, and goes. She'll carry it down and say it the same way to him, and nobody anywhere along the line will hear anything wrong with it. I sit there with the cup in my hand and drink the rest of the wine.

She's back in a few minutes for the tray, and she's smiling about something.

"The kitchen's in a state," she says. "Old Eutychus came back from your father's cousin's place and he's wrong now. He puts the olives in the press backwards and he called the fountain the new fountain, and that fountain's older than he is." She laughs, stacking the cups. "He's been at that press since before I was born."

I make some agreeable sound and she goes out with the tray, and I'm already reaching for the wax tablet on the floor by the bed.

I bring the lamp closer and put the stylus in my right hand.

The letters come out slow and crooked, a child's letters, the wax dragging. I mean my own name. What I get is the first line of a verse about spring that I learned when I was nine years old, in a childhood I never had, from a tutor whose name I can say. I switch the stylus to my left hand and the letters come out worse and still come out. The letters go where the channels are, and it doesn't matter which hand is holding anything.

I try numbers. My age. The tally marks come out as grain measures, eight of something, a household figure.

I write the spring verse and try to change one word in the middle of it. Just one. The line finishes itself the way it was taught. I smooth the wax and try again and it finishes itself again, correct, the version the tutor beat into this hand years before I got here.

Then I stop meaning anything at all. I let the point wander, loops and scratches, no plan behind it, the laziest thing a hand can do. When I look down it has drawn a bird. A fat little bird on a branch, the one off the ring, every feather where it should be.

I put the tablet down and put the stylus on top of it and I don't pick it up again.

The door isn't locked. I established that hours ago, and I've left it alone since, and now I get up off the bed and open it anyway. Not to go anywhere. I'm done with that for today. I just stand in it, my hand on the frame, looking at the corridor with its one lamp at the bend, the garden beyond it dark, the fountain going because somebody opened it and nobody shut it. The kitchen cat is out there somewhere, up to whatever it's up to. The marble comes up cold through my feet and I stay anyway, because I opened the door and the standing in it is mine.

Then I think about one step. Not out, not away, nothing that would alarm anyone. One step into the corridor, no destination, the smallest claim a person can make on a hallway. I give it everything I have. I lift my foot.

I'm still standing there. A long minute goes by with the lamp at the bend smoking in its draft, and my foot is down again on the same stone, and I never felt it come down.

My hand pulls the door shut. Wood on the frame, the latch, the whole motion easy. Closing things is easy.

I use the pot once more before bed. It goes better. My knees know the depth now and I don't catch my heel and there's no girl standing by to witness the improvement, and I hate how much of my attention goes to it.

The lamp flickers as I near it. I lick my fingers and pinch the wick and the flame goes with a small wet sound, and the smell of it follows me across the room in the dark, hot fat and smoke, and gets into my hair.

The hair is everywhere. I gather it up with both hands and drop it over the far shoulder and it slides back. I gather it again and hold it and lie down carefully on top of it, and the rope frame creaks and the mattress takes me in its two temperatures, the warm spot and the cold spot, and I've already learned both. I turn onto my side and there's a problem I've never had. The lower breast goes one way and the upper one arrives late and settles somewhere I have to move my arm around. I put the arm under my head and take it out again. It takes three tries to find a shape that lets me stop thinking about it, and the shape I end on is not one I chose.

I've missed a pin. I find it by lying on it, a small bright point against my skull behind the ear, and I work it loose with my fingers and hold it up where I can't see it. It's thin and it's warm from my head and I put it on the stand and it makes a small sound on the wood.

The hair falls forward over my face. It smells like the bath oil and the smoke. I leave it there.