Four-Way Stretch
Daniel woke in the chair with his hands still his own, and that was the cruelty of it, though he didn't know yet that it was cruelty.
He flexed them. Ten fingers, the chair's vinyl cool under his forearms, a strap across his chest he could have shrugged against if he'd wanted to. He could feel his heartbeat in his neck. He could feel the specific ache of a tooth he'd been meaning to get looked at. He was, in every way he had ever been, himself, and so when the singlet came into focus on the table across the room steel gray going to charcoal down the legs, a sage chevron under the collar, the shoulder straps splayed flat like the arms of a chalk outline, a name set across the chest in white block letters that read CLEVELAND STATE he read it the way you read any lettering in a room you've woken up in. A name. Not his. He didn't think that part yet. He read it and looked away, the way you look away from a thing that is not you.
A door opened. Feet, then a lab coat, then a man with reading glasses pushed up into gray hair and a clipboard he clearly did not need.
"You're awake," the man said. "Good. I prefer them awake." He sat on a stool, dentist-close, and there was something settling-in about the way he did it, a man arriving at the part of the day he liked. Dr. Voss, said the badge. "The ones I put under miss the explanation, and I like to explain. So. Are you listening?"
"Where am I," Daniel said, and his voice was his voice, and the ordinariness of it was the most frightening thing that had happened so far.
"Somewhere we brought you." Voss clicked the pen. "You didn't agree to this. Nobody does. we stopped asking years ago. No one comes looking for the people we take, and no one can make us give them back, so there was no reason to keep asking." He said it the way you'd give a stranger directions. "Get up, if you want. People always want to first."
So Daniel got up. His legs were his legs. He took two steps toward the door and on the third his left foot wasn't there.
Not numb. Not asleep. Not a thing that had ever been. The floor came up and he caught himself on the table and the table was real and his hands were real and his foot was the memory of a foot, and he stood on the one leg that remained and made a sound that had no words in it.
Voss watched him make the sound and waited for it to finish on its own.
"That's the transfer," he said, when it was done. "It started before you woke up. It doesn't happen all at once. You'll lose yourself a piece at a time, over a few minutes, and you're awake for it because I want you awake for it. Sit down. You'll fall less."
"Put it back." The words came out shaped like a man's words. "Whatever you did, put it β" "No. I can't undo it, and I wouldn't if I could, so it doesn't much matter which is true." Voss didn't raise his voice. "It's already too far along to reverse. We never wake anyone up until it is β that's the whole reason we wake you up late, so you can't fight it. Nothing you do in this room changes anything. I want you to understand that part clearly, because it's the part everyone wastes time on."
Daniel's hand was flat on the table beside the singlet, and he could feel the laminate under his palm and, at the same time, from the wrong direction, the laminate under the singlet. Two reports of one cold surface. He did not snatch the hand back. He understood, now, that there was nowhere to snatch it to.
"You're going to hope it stops hurting," Voss said. "Or that it goes quiet that you fade as you spread out, until there's not enough of you left to mind. People always hope that. It's wrong. You don't get dimmer. The thing I'm putting you into doesn't think it's just a place to keep you. You're what thinks. We don't pour a man into cloth and hope a little of him sticks. We move all of you across, whole and awake, and the awareness is the only thing we actually want. The fabric's just where we set it down." He smiled, and it was a real one. "You'll be every bit as awake in there as you are in this chair. More, probably. There won't be anything else to do."
The sentence about police, about his sister, was forming somewhere when his jaw stopped being a thing he had, and the words arrived anyway in Voss's head, meaning without sound.
"There. I can hear you now." Voss tapped his temple. "There's a receiver in here. It takes what you mean and turns it into something I can hear. I'm the only one fitted for it, and the second I walk out, nobody near you ever will be again. So say what you want to say now. This is the last conversation you're going to have."
Daniel meant to answer. He never got to, because that was when the rest of him began to go, and it did not go like the foot.
The foot had been a clean subtraction there, then gone. This was slower, and worse, because he was awake for every inch of it. It started in the hand against the table, the hand already sending two reports: the one from his palm thinned and went far-off, the way a voice thins on a bad line, while the one from the singlet came up under it and got louder, until his hand was mostly strap and only a little hand, and then it was strap, and the hand was somewhere he used to send from and couldn't find.
It climbed his arm, and as it climbed he felt the inside of him stop being a thing that had an inside. He had a bone in there, and the warm wrapped weight of muscle around it, and he had never once thought about any of it and now he felt all of it lifted out and not replaced, felt his arm become the long even nothing of a sleeve, a tube of stretch with two faces and a seam and no depth between them. That was the part he had no word for. He had carried a dark warm core around inside himself his whole life without noticing he was carrying it, and now it was being taken out of him from the wrists inward, and he felt himself thinning into a surface a skin around nothing, and then not even around nothing, just the skin, two faces and the seam that held them shut.
His weight went last, and that was the strangest of all. He had been a heavy thing, an architecture that held itself up without being asked, and the holding-up simply stopped not a fall, a letting-go his mass draining out of him until the table barely registered that anything lay on it, until he weighed what a held breath weighs, until he was light enough to be lifted in one hand and forgotten in a bag. And then what was left of him settled into the only shape it could still make. Flat. Splayed. The straps fallen open at the shoulders exactly like the arms of the chalk outline he'd looked at when he woke the outline that had been lying there the whole time, he understood now, waiting to be filled. The gray came up through him and went to charcoal down the legs. The chevron set itself under the place a collarbone had been. The white letters pressed into the chest that was now his only chest, a word he could read from the inside, and only now did he think the part he hadn't let himself think before, lying there reading it backward through himself: A name. Still not his. The only one anyone would ever read off him.
He reached out of the oldest reflex he had for the panic, expecting to find it running low, the way fear runs low in a body that can't sustain it. It was all there. Every bit. And there was no body left to wear it out, so it would simply go on being exactly this full for as long as he did, which was the last thing Voss had told him and the thing he was now going to live.
Voss picked up the clipboard he didn't need and went to the door. "That's what was done to you," he said, his hand on it. "I came down to make sure you understood that, because it's the one part I can't do for you. Now you do. And you'll keep understanding it, every day, for as long as you last."
He was gone. The fluorescent panel buzzed. And then there was only the table, and the having of a body that was this.
The cold came up through the one face of him that lay against the steel, and against the face that lay to the air there was nothing not cool, not warm, an absence where a back should have answered and he understood that he had a front and a back now and only the front was being touched, and that he could not turn over, would not turn over, until a hand he could not feel coming turned him. He felt the light: a faint warmth lay over the whole flat length of him from the panel above, the only warmth in the world now, and he knew the next warmth would be a body, and he wanted the cold instead, wanted the table forever, and was not going to be asked. Air moved through the weave of his chest, slow and cold, a breathing he did not do and could not stop. And under all of it he felt the seams every seam, from the inside, the long ones down his sides and the short hard ones at the shoulders, each one a place where he had been joined and could, with the right hands, be taken apart. He lay there knowing the hands were coming, and that they would not take him apart. They would only pull him on, and stretch him to the shape of a stranger, and hold him there in the heat and the dark, awake, for a season, and the season after that, and the one after that.
Daniel meant something then meant it as hard as he had ever meant anything, hurled the whole intact weight of himself at the shape of the word wait and felt it leave him and reach the place where the receiver had been and find the room empty, the line dead, the meaning arriving nowhere and coming back to him unspent, his now, only his, forever.
A few floors up, a boy was lacing his shoes for the first time.
The singlet lay still on the cold table, the name across its chest catching the light, and was afraid, and would not stop being afraid, and waited to be worn.