What became of their bodies, the people that I visited, the skins I pierced or pressed through, the habitats I made? Many forgot me as soon as I was gone, the way they would have forgotten a vanished cramp, a healed scar, their hunger after eating. I was a shudder, a chill, a dizzy spell to them, something they picked up and got over. I was one of those things.
Some felt my presence as a flagging of the spirit, a nagging doubt or a vague exhaustion: they might not have noticed me, or felt the shape of me, but when I left them, they were emptied, daunted by the energy required to move. Some of them remained that way. Uneasy in themselves. They angered quickly or drank too long, unable to fill the space or to bear the company of those they felt were undisturbed.
No body is undisturbed.
There were others who discovered a change months or years later. Over time something grew around the residue I left there, like a pearl around a speck of grit inside an oyster. Growths developed in the places in their bodies that had opened to accommodate me. Marks erupted on their skin. I was clumsy at first. I know I hurt people. I found my way in and out of clusters of cells that were part of the body but hostile to it, that made use of the same kind of space.
I might have gone on, and gone on opening.
There were others in whom my visit opened a route for other travellers, the way a body will trample grass and make a path, carve a desire line into a field or garden. There were those who were always ready to fly open. There were those who were strengthened by it, who loved me, and loved those that came after me.
No, I am not the only guest.
Some changed in smaller ways. They hungered after foods they had been averse to. They turned to lovers and saw their flaws, suddenly disgusted, unable to bear their touch. They turned to what they had hated and saw its loveliness. They took up running, or diving, or driving too fast by night with the windows down and the radio on, trying to get away from themselves. But they never got away. They became like shallow water. They haunted their own bodies. Touch never satisfied again.
Some chose to move, others to stay. They left themselves behind, or tried to. They called these dissatisfactions unhappiness, or seeking purpose, or falling out of love; privately, they wondered if they might have had a stroke. People told them they were hardly recognisable these days.
Some of them felt the loss more keenly, never knowing what it was they missed. The visit, though it was brief, had been intimate. They became lonely, sometimes furiously so. I said I was innocent, but I knew this, I could feel it happening. I took what I needed, I took what I was owed. I possessed and I dispossessed. I did what I had to do to survive. I don’t know if it was right.
Some found that they woke in their bodies and felt new. As if they were alive for the first time. I gave them that and more. A moment of pure awareness. A sense of themselves as a perfect form. A cure.
While I am here I want to do everything. I want to buy flowers for the scent alone. To bite into a crisp apple and taste its juice. To walk into the ocean, feel its power hold this body up against gravity. To walk free.
I could take him home. We could look out over the wing and think how solid clouds seem, when they’re only vapour. We could pass through together, land somewhere new. We will never get away, never be alone again.
For now, Beijing holds us in its cold embrace. It accommodates the anomaly, absorbs it into the organism, allows us to live wherever we will not compromise the higher functions. We are visitors, guests. We come face to face in the street, and step to one side, then the other, recognising something in each other. We turn at the sound of a car horn, we feel the subway rumble underfoot. We slip beneath the surface, and the city closes over us like a wound.