I concentrated on the spot where the yarn met the wall. The plaster was as blank and smooth as ever. Zero holes or defects. I concentrated on my concentration, trying to see as thoroughly as a glowing version of me would. I steadied my breaths. My breaths went in, my breaths went out. How did I know the yarn was going in and not going out? I wanted to see something the other me would see. As if the seeing made it appear, something slowly took shape.
The word that came to me was crack. The more I thought that word the more it became a crack. Like the yarn, I couldn’t touch it, there was no visible difference in the wall, no real evidence. But I could feel that something had come apart there, the earthquake or another force had caused some kind of split. I could feel the crack in the wall, and then I could feel the crack in the air too, and then I could feel it in myself.
What was wrong with me?
I told myself to stop feeling and lie there and go back to sleep. What was the point of feeling a crack? Technically not even a thing but a lack of something. Doppelgängers, the yarn, the toys, the quake—all of that was beyond me. You should seek only what you’re prepared to find. I thought about Lincoln’s two reflections, about Emilie Sagée trying to recover her energy, about the Jumano converted by a ghost. Of course if you saw a ghost, you would believe in its religion. I flattened my cheek to the cold floor, attempting to return to the sleep I had left. I shut my eyes and thought, Sleep. I listened to my breaths and thought, Sleep. I felt the crack and the tugging from inside the wall and thought, Sleep. My body grew heavier. Little by little my muscles let go of fight or flight. Still sleep seemed far away, a word at the end of the yarn. What if each of us were unwinding a spool of yarn everywhere we went—like the red thread of fate, but in reverse? Where would it start? Birth? Conception? God? Upstairs my cat had ceased meowing. Outside no cars passed. The buzz from the fluorescent lights was gone. I could barely hear myself breathe. It was as quiet as it ever got in this house. And yet it didn’t seem quiet, it seemed like the room had emptied of sound.
Then I was either dreaming or I got up from my body and stepped inside the wall.
BETWEEN
Inside the wall all I could think was disappear doppelgänger disappear. It was hard to move, because it was hard to tell where I ended and the air began. In order to move through the air there must be a difference between it and you, I had never realized this before. This air was thick as flesh—only squishier, more gelatinous. What it was like was clear jello. I felt the urge to bite and swallow. The air wobbled at my lips, tried to get into my mouth. I knew I shouldn’t let it inside. It didn’t belong in me. The air welled in my ears, it muffled my hearing, I huffed it out of my nose only to suck it back in with the next breath. All around the jello refracted a faint white light of unidentifiable source, artificial and menacing.
I stood there trying to see and smell and hear through the jello air, and after a moment a faint scream seemed to make its way to me as if from underwater, someone sinking to the bottom of a pool. The scream came from . . . outside. From beyond the jello. But strangely not from my office, where my body lay. The scream wasn’t behind me. It was ahead of me, as if through a second wall.
That was it, I thought: There were two walls, and I was in the space between. A single wall had divided like a cell, and in the middle was jello? Maybe it wasn’t the most genius theory. I swept my arms little by little through the air, and it oozed back in behind them.
I pushed/swam forward toward the second wall, and my chest hurt. A fissure where the two sides of my rib cage met seemed to split apart. The crack inside me tore. My rib cage separated, and my organs shifted aside. With each step the pain grew stronger. Soon any movement felt like ripping a stitch in a wound I hadn’t been aware of until that moment. It had almost healed without me even knowing I was hurt. I hugged my arms around my chest, I tried to keep going. But it was too much. The crack pried me open from inside. My mother would have said the air got into my bones. I had never understood that saying before.
Soon I was screaming, trying to scream the jello out of me. I couldn’t go any farther. I sensed the other wall nearby, yet if I took one more step, I wasn’t sure who would come out of that wall. It wouldn’t be me.
Slowly I turned in place. Very slowly my ribs eased together again. After several steps the pain quieted—it was still there, but no longer demanded attention. At my feet lay the yellow yarn. I followed it back out into my office, pushing through the jello and the faint light and the uncertain time and the wall to where my body lay, as I had left it, stomach flat on the floor.
Everything was dark. My eyes were shut and I couldn’t open them. It became clear I couldn’t move at all. This time it wasn’t the air stopping me. I was back in my apartment. I could taste my bad breath, I could hear the humming fluorescent lights, I could smell traces of the lavender incense I sometimes burned to keep mosquitos away. In other words most of my senses had returned. A motorcycle revved outside and the dog across the street barked loudly. The world was normal again. I was the exception: My body no longer responded to me. I tried to thrash around, and I lay completely still. I tried to shout for help, and my words got stuck in my head. I tried to twitch one finger like a soap opera coma patient, but if it twitched, I couldn’t tell.
Time passed unresponsively, so that I couldn’t tell how long. Time, it turned out, was a sequence of responses. The only way to guess how many minutes passed now was by the rate of my thoughts, which was inconsistent. Every ten thoughts or so I tried to move as I used to move. What I realized was that I used to feel my body—that was how I had known I was there without thinking about it. I realized this because all I could feel now was the breath going in and out of me, quick with frustration. Frustration was the last feeling connecting me to myself.
Inside my head I prayed to Saint Anthony, the saint of lost things, to find my feeling. My adoptive parents had taught me about Saint Anthony: When people wouldn’t listen to him he talked to fish. And sometime in the middle of these thoughts the doorbell rang.
Yumi’s voice called out, a miracle: “Time to love better. Move it. Tell me why the hell I’m with you when I could have married a doctor.”
She called again, then once more. Then I remembered she didn’t have a key. She’d never asked for one, and the subject had never come up on its own. I lay on the office floor helpless to turn a miracle into action. Miracles were use it or lose it. Yumi called again and again. I remembered what the church had taught me about my body. The body was a prison, and death was the only escape. I prayed to Saint Anthony to find my freedom. I wondered whether I was ever really free—it was my body that determined where I could go, how people would treat me, what pleasures I enjoyed. And as I prayed, my body stood on its own and stumbled into the living room as if it had given up waiting for an answer.
All I could do was encourage it to keep going. You can do it, I yelled inside me. Good body. Turn the knob. Pull open. Step back. Say hello.
YOU ME
Sweat matted Yumi’s bangs and her mascara was smudged beneath one eye. She swayed and sucked her teeth and sneered appraisingly. She didn’t like what she saw. I guessed she had come from a club—she had long, braided pigtails that made her look both approachable and intimidating, and she wore a sparkly silver babydoll with black tights. It was a look I had never seen on her, one I didn’t know how to place.