A strong young man, heavy backpack, gauzy hangover, hauling uphill at dawn. Pleasant daze in the forebrain. Sniffs at the spritzed air of the city, blinks in the fresh light after rain. And steps into a laundromat, humming a tune. He shoves his clothes into the machine and rattles his backpack for something that turns out to be tobacco. He leaves the bag and steps outside to smoke in the strong sun. They find the flaw that lives in him. The blood knows it and is drawn there. A packet of cells the size of the pellet of lint he takes from his pocket when he counts his coins. He lets the pellet fall onto the cement. The one in his intestine won’t be dislodged so easily. The smoke floods him. The mouth moves greedily, hands rolling. The pellet glows. The music has gone dim.
He squints between streets at a glint of sea, the elusive jewel the city keeps washing and promising. As he inhales, they speculate as to how the nascent tumour clings. They feel an affinity, a private pact with it, knowing it is there. Drawn to it, they make attempts to press the place. Would like to move it. Finally one cell divides, another argues. Did they affect it? It’s hard to say. Too small a change to measure. And watching, of course, there’s a quantum difficulty.
He turns to peer at the bag inside, is reassured. Holds the attachment in his chest. Then looks at the display on the machine, where red numbers tick down slowly. His reflection in the window ruddy, youthful. Much too young to be sick, but older than they were. There is no justice in the body. He sucks at smoke, apparently without sadness.
He doesn’t know what’s growing in him. It fascinates them.
In the eucalypts above him, the high white grind of cicadas.
No justice in the body, but plenty of laws. They could cling the way the pellet does, if they knew its rules. They could get its strength, use it to claw their way into him and hold on. Reason through him from the data available. This burn at the fingertips. This pain. They do feel stronger for it.
He pushes the door in, reflects the gleam. They want to break the glass, feel blood run down his wrist, and own it. They want to stay.
He tosses the smoke out onto the road, and they tip into air.
A woman, richly insulated, too much ache to find one place. Knuckles, thirst, electricity. Bent toes. A rifling of categories, of possible causes. She thinks with her whole self, it feels like, every muscle deciding. Drags her whole self forward by the arms. Her huge power pushes at a flimsy door, pauses on a stair to catch the breath.
They are strong in her, familiar. They try to resurrect what they remember: the ghost of an old self-possession. But there is too much interference. They recognise pleasures, pains, urges, shames, protests and complaints overlaid, the disharmonious noise of living beings. Too much information. They pick out a single stimulus: poor circulation in the fingers, which are not slender like theirs were but clutch this timber railing just as coldly. The tips are numb, and connected, something sprung across the shoulders, in the bones. There, where she twists and flinches. The question violence asks, which is continuous. The question of when.
They can’t differentiate themselves from her at all.
The body was only ever this. All of it, uncontained, overflowing, never enough. She leans on the railing, tightens her grip. Her rings pinch the fingers, cold silver on the warm grain. They are strong. They can make a little room in her. They can move these fingers if they concentrate.
So they concentrate.
Knuckles. Electricity. Attention.
Power.
They feel the heart give way above them. That sharp reaction across the shoulder. Feel her heave and start to go. Her whole body fresh in the rush of the last moments, a rush of life that might have been their own. Cold sweat. Fall, falling.
Time stops. They remember something obvious, so obvious it mocks them. They would laugh, given control of a mouth, lungs, a warm and delicately chambered larynx, the right muscles, the pressure of air. Laugh at wanting to stay in one place, knowing what they have always known.
Bodies die. It’s what they do. Not justice. Law.
Bodies die, and this one is about to go, with them inside.
What did they expect?
They reach for the experience. They skim the surface of her sudden awareness. The chest pain dissipates, the mind recalculates. Attention closes in and opens out. They sense the edge of a great awakening; always too soon, and much too late.
Then they’re disoriented. Little hard heartbeats in a tighter chest. The stress of congestion. Neat vibration as he speaks or cries out, the voice returns him to his breath. His eyes clear to the sight of her lying on the ground. Hand against his face, phone, he makes a call, whispers to himself and speaks, approaches her, stops a metre back. He does not want to touch her. Just a body, dead now. But they’re still here. His bird-chest racing.
Only now do they wonder what they have done. Whether they pushed too hard, or in the wrong place. Whether she set them free, or they escaped. Maybe he inhaled her last breath; maybe they hurt her.
He looks down at her. She doesn’t burst open, or surge out. They don’t see her swarm and reform as particles, as dust, or some furious light. She just lies there.
He watches her chest for breath, but nothing moves. He sees what the living see: an uncanny stillness. It frightens him.
He retreats, the phone hot on his ear, still speaking. Sits in a doorway to wait. Plays with a shoelace. Looks. Thinks whatever he thinks.
He lets go the shoelace, touches a hand to his wrist, feels its pulse. Still beating. They are lucky to be here, in the sweet of his experience, lucky to persist. After a while there’s a banging on the door below. He leaps up, runs downstairs, skirting her at the feet to let them in. They love the quick in his untrained muscle. The thrum of his voice as he chatters at three green suits without faces. They love the shock in him that bleeds to panic. He follows them up, still talking. Two take her, a third sits with him. He stops talking, starts shaking. Then they pity him.
They breathe his quick breath, curl into his adrenaline response. They shift with the base of his brain, with the muscle that stretches when his hand reaches up to tug at the oily hair pressed flat beneath a baseball cap. They don’t dare try to move him, ease the shaking. But they can read its meaning.
Danger here. A fear not of death, but of living.
Bodies die. Of course they knew this, having done it before. But here’s the thing: it could happen again. Each host, each carrier, might be their last. For all the lessons of this not-quite-immaterial stage, they missed the simplest and most logical. They hadn’t wanted to consider themselves so precarious.
He’s sobbing now, and cold. In his shiver they remember. The loose awareness of their feet. Mild hunger, cool air, cement, tree et cetera. Just idling nothing thoughts and innocence. Streetlights. And not listening, not paying attention to the body’s vulnerability. Not aware of an alarm. The fist or weapon that connected with the skull, a place above where this boy’s hair is caught. His hand reaches for the neck, now, as they consider it. There was a fault line, a ready-made wound. The memory is paperish. Robbed of its material, it’s just a story. There is no point going over it.
But there’s something there.
A key in the pocket. A brief blur.
For a moment, sensation was everything. Then they burst forth.
They had a body once before. The feel of someone’s breath on their neck, the scent of it. All those missed signals, and then – what went wrong? Who wanted it to happen? One act, in one place, and a life goes out like a light.
The young man’s sadness has become their own. They ache for the body that was stolen, an ache inseparable from his.
His weeping spent, the young man softens; rage won’t catch in him. One warm tear crawls down between the cheek and nose and settles ticklish in the crevice. He stands. He shuffles off a hand. He hesitates in the stairwell, then follows the paramedics out to watch them load her into the ambulance. No hurry in their bodies, now, and in his, only raw things, uncertain, distant. He has stopped shivering, and no-one comforts him. His wrists, bent in against the hipbone, connected soothingly through skin.
They feel the chemistry in his head adjust, the numb release. They feel for flaws.
Is that a disconnect? A predisposition? A risk?
They meant no harm to her. No harm to him.
They must keep moving. They must reassess everything.