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“No. I mean, what are we doing?”
The storm now shows, and it’s inside of her. It’s been inside of her all along. I don’t know if Paul would recognize it, but I do. His memories might show that they’re better off friends, that they were never meant to date—but that’s not her version.
And today, of all days, is when she’s going to call him on it.
Once the storm comes out, the landscape changes. What you had before is altered in some way. And you have a choice: build something new and better from what’s left, or abandon it.
It is lonely in the eye. As we sit there in the pause, as she stares at me, awaiting a response, as I see the things I could say and wonder which one to grasp for, I feel profoundly alone in myself. Reading people is a talent that I have developed, but in the end, that’s all it is—reading. Reading is not life. Reading is creating life in your head. And that can only help you so much in a storm.
I try not to alter the lives I borrow for a day, but sometimes I have no choice. Or, more accurately, I am given a choice, and I have to make it. One way or the other.
“What are we doing?” I say.
“Yes,” Nicole says, her foot moving lightly over my ankle. “What are we doing?”
I look away—I can’t do this while looking at her—and say, quietly, “I think we’re doing homework.”
She sits up, moves her foot away. I move my eyes back to the textbook.
I am telling myself it would be worse to say yes to her now and then have Paul take it away tomorrow. I am telling myself that if I make it casual enough, we can make it through the next hour, and that the conversation can be revisited tomorrow, or another day, when Paul is back. I am lying to myself that a storm can be put back inside a person, bottled up and preserved. I know I am lying to myself, but I also choose to believe it.
My instinct is that he doesn’t want to kiss her, that he’s never wanted to kiss her. But I wonder if that’s his detachment or mine.
We last five more minutes in that room. Then Nicole says she has to go downstairs for a second, and doesn’t come back up for a half hour. When she’s back, I want to ask her if she’s okay. But I have no idea whether that will make things better or worse. So I stay quiet, and then ten minutes later I say I have to go. She doesn’t protest.
I can’t just leave it like this. I can’t. So after my bag is packed, after she makes no move to walk me to the front door, I linger in her room for a second, then say, “I’m sorry. I just need to think. I can’t think right now. And I need to.”
It’s not enough. I can see that in her face. It’s not. The only hope I have is that over time it will grow to be enough. Or that whatever step Paul takes next will make it enough. Once I’m gone.
As I walk home, I stop accessing and try to navigate by instinct. Where do I think I should go? Which way is Paul’s home? I try to sense where the body wants me to be, which street feels more familiar, which direction feels inherently right.
I get horribly lost.
Day 5931
In all of the bodies I’ve been in, in all of the lives I’ve borrowed for a day, one thing has always been consistent:
Everyone wakes up tired.
In truth, most of us go through the day tired, as if all of the information swirling through the air, all of the thoughts battling within our mind, leave us in a state of perpetual exhaustion. I don’t know if it was always like this, but I’m pretty sure it’s more like this now.
I wake up, and I’m tired. This is not a surprise. I am also in the body and life of a sixteen-year-old boy named Mark. Yesterday I was in the body and life of a sixteen-year-old boy named Chase. For most people, this would be a surprise. But I am strangely used to it. This is just the way my life goes.
I access Mark’s mind, situate myself within his day. I’m only here until midnight. I try to get the basic facts, not the details. The details can be interesting, but they can also distract me into attachment. The worst thing in the world would be to pretend to know the people whose lives I step through. They cannot be homes to me. They must be hotel rooms.
Mark’s friend Sam is going to pick him up in a half-hour, so I have to shower and get dressed. Everything in his room is compulsively in place—I open one of his drawers and find the shirts folded with department-store precision, each corner of one shirt matching the corresponding corner of the shirt below it. I don’t really know if this is the result of military neatness or OCD—whatever part of Mark feels compelled to fold shirts this way has been banished for the day by my own personality. Because I try not to leave traces, I will have to live my life neatly today. Over the years, I have learned how to stand against the easy temptations of disorder. I’ll just have to do it more with Mark.
His toiletries are arranged in a very specific way, and I make sure to replace them in exactly the same configuration when I’m done. His pajamas get folded and put under the pillow, because I don’t know what would happen if someone came into the room during the day and saw them uncharacteristically sprawled on the floor.
I even make the bed.
One of the hardest things to know about people is how they move. I’ve grown very accustomed to taking on other bodies as my own, but I’m never sure how the real owners wear them. I can access memories, yes, but it’s not as if we have memories of the ways we walk or the ways we gesture. Our memories filter these facts out. Unless we are hurt in some way, our memories pretty much disregard our bodies. We don’t remember the way we like to sit. It is unlikely, in a lineup, that we’d be able to identify the back of our hand.
As I walk to Sam’s car—as I see Sam watching me—I try to make it feel natural, so it will seem natural. The music from the car is loud, and Sam is playing the steering wheel like it was made for percussion. The whole time, though, he’s facing me, watching me make my way to him.
This is their routine. This has to be their morning routine. I quickly access Mark’s mind to see how it goes.
“Good morning, super-friend,” Sam says when I get in the car, because this is what he always says when Mark gets in the car.
