Marko squinted at the yellow body and the other bodies around it. His thoughts were tripping over themselves, trying to keep up. Thinking about the perspective from outer space this way, being alive in any kind of body was all unreal and absurd. He was zooming around in a huge matrix of motion with everything else: falling through space for the entirety of a life. Not just growing used to it, but actually held together by it. Marko thought about the math in his head, the numbers and equations. They compensated for his lack of sensation but also gave him anxiety and made him feel tired sometimes.
“What is the place that’s real?”
“It’s where bodies aren’t needed because there is no falling. There are no forces of gravity. There are no kinematic equations. No cause and effect. What is just is, and it is free. Pure consciousness, pure thought.”
“Time for bed,” Marko’s mom said. He opened his eyes and saw her standing there, her black hair aglow with yellow light already receding from the room.
“Did you have a nice meditation? You were there for a long time,” she said.
“How long?”
“Over an hour. It’s late. Get yourself to bed.”
Marko held his arms up to her. He felt too tired to pull himself up into his chair. She leaned down and gripped him under his arms and legs and then lifted him from the floor. He closed his eyes and watched the math; numbers swarming to build a matrix in three dimensions of his legs hanging over his mother’s muscled arm.
6. December 15, 2014: Cambridge, MA
The next morning, Marko woke and listened for the sounds of his mom leaving the house. Many days, she snuck away to do sadhana, an early morning yoga practice that was supposed to take place during sunrise. (Although, as Marko had argued several times, the sun doesn’t actually rise at all; it’s just an illusion caused by the rotation of Earth.) The morning after Marko discovered the journal, he listened hopefully, wishing hard that she would go to sadhana that day. He’d barely slept just thinking about the journal and wanting to get back to it as soon as he could.
Marko closed his eyes and listened hard. He imagined his ears growing large and bending toward the hallway. He heard silence so loud it hummed. Finally, after what felt like an hour of big-eared listening, she woke up and got dressed for sadhana. Knowing she would check on him before she left, Marko did his best pretend sleep when he heard her approach his room. And then she was gone.
With the diary back in his hands just minutes later, Marko felt bright yellow anticipation. He opened it to a random page in the middle. Staring up at him from its pages was a sketch of the wooden contraption she kept under her bed. “I lay inside of it and it helps me feel calm,” she’d told him when he first saw it. That didn’t make much sense to Marko, but he’d accepted her explanation without much further thought. Now, with a diagram of it in her journal labeled, “dream bed,” Marko’s interest level went up 250 percent. He turned in his chair and strained his neck to see the dream bed under her bed. Blanketed in shadow, its blonde wood façade seemed to glow as though subtly lit from within. He replaced the journal and climbed out of his wheelchair. More quickly than he thought possible, he was on the floor beside the dream bed.
At first, he thought he would have to pull it out from under the bed to get inside of it, but then he realized that the side of it opened from hinges at the top. He lifted it and peered inside. It looked like an empty box, coffin-like in shape. Inexplicably, he was drawn to be inside of it in the dark. He lay back and began sliding sideways into it, which was more challenging than he had expected. To move his lower half inside, he had to grab his pant legs and slide each limb over. First, he had to get as much of his legs and hips into the box as possible, which held the side up and open enough for him to lay back and slide his top half in.
Once inside, Marko let the side flap close and he was in complete blackness. Then something happened that had never happened before: the math and the colors disappeared. He could no longer see in his mind what he was feeling and where his body was in space. There was nothing but blackness, inside and out. In fact, he realized he couldn’t even feel his own weight on the floor. It was as if he were afloat, but not even that—he wasn’t there anymore.
Sound came first: he began to hear a voice speaking rapidly, but he couldn’t make out the words. They were muffled, like he was hearing them from another room. Then, light and shape began to form. And then he was there, fully there.
He was seated in a chair. He felt different in his body. At first, he couldn’t think of why but then it occurred to him suddenly and he looked down at his lap. He could feel everything: his feet, his legs, his groin! But what he was looking at were not his legs. They were strong and very tall. It was a strange, vivid dream, he thought. There was pain in his feet. They were sore, maybe from too much use, and it was exquisite. He looked up at his surroundings. There were bookshelves lined with books. There were boxes with more books along the floor. The voice he heard resumed speaking and he turned to see a man seated behind a desk.
“Do you agree?” the man said. He had an accent similar to Marko’s mom’s. He was dressed in a dark gray uniform. Marko realized that perhaps this was not a dream and that he was somehow in possession of someone else’s body in some other place, perhaps some other time. But it was real. He was real. It came as a relief to put the correct language to the state—the phrase itself like a cold lake in which to dive, a bracing immersion. The man was staring at Marko, expecting him to say something.
“I have to use the bathroom,” Marko said. The man scowled and nodded. Marko stood. Feeling the strength and sturdiness in his legs, he gasped and smiled. The man instinctively smiled back, just briefly, then returned to scowling. Marko walked from the room. The act of walking was automatic—Marko had access to this body’s muscle memory. What he did not have access to any longer, however, were the colors and the math. He felt confused and disoriented without them.
In the restroom, Marko went first for a stall but they were small, open partitions without doors and latches. He’d hoped for more privacy. Because here he was, in a man’s body, in an able body, and there was one thing he had to do before anything else. He stood over the small ivory oval and, hands shaking, undid his pants. Taking the penis in his hands, the sensation was overwhelming. It immediately grew larger and ached in his open palm. He nearly passed out from the crushing commotion in his body set off by an erection he could feel. Again with access to muscle memory not his own, he deftly worked his hand to relieve the ache until he ejaculated. The orgasm nearly moved him to tears. What remained was sweet exhaustion coupled with a kind of satisfaction he had never known. He cleaned up with toilet paper and went to the sink to wash his hands.
Marko stood in front of the mirror and stared. He traced his fingertips across this strange and beautiful face, the foreignness of which heightened the sensation of touch to electric proportions. A dark, clean-shaven, lean face and thick, black hair. Eyes so dark they were almost black. His hands trembled. He felt it all—the floor beneath his feet, the water on his hands, the ledge of the sink pressed against his thighs, the air against his skin. He smelled the odor of the soap he used to wash his hands. He tasted the bitter flavor of his mouth. He leaned forward, closer to the mirror, searching for any sign of himself in those eyes.
That’s when he felt it, the dark body, starting to take over. It was a black cloud moving over the open sky of his mind, tuning into any pain in this body and intensifying it, blurring his vision.
The soreness in the borrowed feet had turned into throbbing pain. Marko sat on the bathroom floor and removed his shoes to stretch and move the feet. This provided no relief, but rather made it worse. The burning pain rose quickly through his legs into his spine, radiating across his hips and lower back. Marko cried out. He fell to his back and stared at the ceiling, watching it disappear. He heard the door open and was aware of someone entering the bathroom. Before