 
Part I Something is Wrong

I am on a train ride from Seattle to Southern California. I am seated across the aisle from a boy in his mid-twenties. The rest of the train car is empty, and as the hours pass, dark.

I feel opposing emotions and desires. Something in my gut screams for me to talk to him. I also feel afraid that if I do begin a conversation there will be no easy way to make it stop.

People move between us through the car but never stay. He is reading. I can't see what, despite my covert efforts. I can't take not knowing. I ask what he is reading.

His face turns toward me. It is circular like a child's, with two moons of eyes echoing the shape of his face. I thought he was my age but now I think he is much younger. His bottom lip hangs open even before he speaks--"It's just the magazine provided by the train."

Anxiety beats my heart from the bottom. I inhale and exhale as the world falls to pieces around me. I have ruined our silence.

"There's an article in here about people who meet on trains," he says. His lips are pressed tight to hide a smile, but his eyes are free.

Bubbling laughter rises within me and cracks my jaw open.

He tilts the magazine toward me. The light above him reflects the ripples of the glossy page.

"See, there's this girl and she and this dark-haired guy meet," he points to the absurd photos. "And then they get married, or the people quoted in the article did anyway."

"So, I'm the guy with dark hair," I say "...I guess that makes you the girl?"

His smile spreads wide open. "Yeah," he breathes.

I turn away from him, embarrassed. The fear is back. I dig into my bag, pull out a book, and bury my mind into it. I forget about the stranger and about our conversation. I push myself against the window and unfamiliar towns pass behind the pages of my book. Dots of yellow light suggest shapes and outlines of buildings and highways. Silhouetted trees line the opposite side of the train tracks. Chapters pass. Dozens and dozens of pages. Dozens and dozens of trees.

At 7am the train stops.

The boy has already gathered his bags and is leaving.

I am wrapped up in a blanket with my giant pink sweatshirt on underneath.

When I reach down for my shoes, I see a little white business card sitting on the floor facing me, as if it has been set there just for my benefit. He must have left me his phone number. But there's nothing on the card but a name: Aidan Nickson. What am I supposed to do with a name?

I step off the train onto the cement platform, still holding the business card in my hand. The bright, Southern California sun pours into my pupils. I nearly cry out in pain. It has been months since I've seen sun like that. My gaze spins up and down the platform searching for any sight of the boy from the train. Then my eyes lock on a familiar face coming toward me.

"Grandma!"

Her arms wrap around me. My grandmother is thick and tall and she is always emanating heat. Her hair smells like her garden. It is black with long curls that envelop your face when she pulls you in for a hug. Her skin is tan and infused with olive greens and yellows.

I shove the business card somewhere into my bag.

We walk carefully out of the train station. Her hips amble slowly like an old machine beginning to break down. One day I will inherit those hips.

Before getting into her car, she stands back to get a good look at me. I see the vast, black insides of her nostrils. She wears bright red lipstick.

"You seem very pale," she says.

I look down at my hands. They are thin and bony. Reflecting the white of the sun, they recall the hands of a skeleton. She has a point.

In the passenger seat of my grandma's car, I stare idly out the window.

"How have you been?" asks my grandmother. "How's the Institute?"

I look over at my grandmother's hands on the steering wheel. Her fingers are muscular from gardening and her nails are strong and dirty. I haven't seen my grandmother since last summer. It's January now.

"I've been good. It's hard work."

"And what are you working on?"

"I signed a non-disclosure agreement with the Institute, so I can't tell you the specifics."

My grandmother's eyes stay on the road and her mouth hardens a little. "How's James?"

"He's good. He's actually the reason we got a week off."

"Oh?"

I laugh. "Yeah his team is really messing up the patents. Until that's in order, we can't move forward."

"You two work together?"

"Not directly."

I met James in the Institute Training Program (ITP) as a student. We both lived in the Housing Unit together. We started as full-time employees at the Institute this past autumn. We both still live in the Housing Unit.

"And how's your cat?" she asks.

"Boone is good. James is taking care of him this week."

"Alright then."

We arrive at my grandmother's house. I take in the familiar sights of her immaculately maintained garden: the fluorescent pink bougainvillea woven through the fence and the hand-built plant boxes containing vegetables of many delicious varieties. She bought the house in the seventies for ten thousand dollars and it's a stone's throw from the beach. There's not much to the house itself. It's one story with a fresh coat of key lime paint on the outside and it gets good light.

Raya runs from the house to the garden to meet us. Her tongue is out of her mouth and drool drips from her smile.

Aidan Nickson. Aidan Nickson. Aidan Nickson. Later that night, the name turns over and over in my head, while the white card turns over and over in my hand.

Raya jumps up on the bed with me. She has so much fur that when I brush her I can pull enough out to make a coat. Black, brown, red and white, her fur runs a gamut of color.

My grandmother pops her head in the bedroom door. "Elena, I'm going to bed. Ok?"

"I'm good, Grandma."

"Get some rest."

That night I dream I'm in prison. The walls of my cell are a cool grey. Somewhere miles above me is a piece of the sky. Other than that there is no color and no light. A package slides under the door. Top Ramen. I eat the ramen dry. I have the sense I'm being kept here because I'm needed for something but I'm not sure for what or by whom. A man opens the door of my cell and says, "It's time."

Next I find myself in a hospital room with white walls. On a steel table lie needles and scalpels and syringes. Four masked people entered the room and ask each other, "Is this the guinea pig?" I writhe on my bed but I'm strapped down. I try to scream but I'm gagged. A man with cold eyes parts the masked doctors and says, "We're ready for surgery."

I am submersed in something now. I feel no pain. I feel nothing at all really, but I can think and I can see. The room is green with no walls or ceiling. Like I'm looking through a river full of algae. I look down and instead of seeing my body, I see a narrow strand of skin, like an extra long finger, reaching into the abyss beneath me. It's my spinal cord. I am nothing but a brain floating in formaldehyde.

I shoot upright. Raya whimpers. My sheets are soaked with sweat and my forehead feels hot.

We sit in the kitchen drinking chamomile tea. My grandmother looks tired, but not upset. Her usually bright eyes are a bit cloudy now and her curls are all mixed together.

"Talk to me." My grandmother says.

"I told you we've been working on a project."

My grandmother sighs. I hold her gaze.

"We've been on the same one since I started at the Institute. I told you about the Housing Unit, right?"

"You told me it was like a college dormitory."

"Everyone in the building works for the Institute in some capacity. Each floor is a different department."

"And James?"

"He's two floors down from me."

"Do you talk to him about what you're working on?"

"No; it isn't allowed."

All I know about James' work is that he's in charge of the legal side of things. All of the work of the departments combines into one big project but there's no crosstalk allowed except among the supervisors of each department.

We drink tea and sit. Raya comes into the kitchen and curls up under the table. I stroke the soft fur of her face with my toes.

"There was a guy sitting by me on the train. He left a business card by my seat."

"His phone number?" My grandma's lips widen.

"Just his name."

"Is that what's been bothering you?" My grandma's eyes are dark now, in the shadow of her brow. I feel my own eyes relax like I am looking into the night sky.

"The name is familiar to me, like I knew it in a different life time." I say.

The next day we walk along the beach. It is brilliantly sunny outside. Raya leaps and bounds in the waves, chasing seagulls. My grandmother and I navigate the sand. I take my shoes off and carry them. I let the sand envelop my feet and get caught in the hair on my toes. It feels nice. It is warm but not hot. I breathe the air. I smell salt and fish. Then a clear breeze comes through and the air just tastes fresh. White light pours into my pupils and feels so good it hurts. My skin feels warm for the first time in months. The heat penetrates the core of my body and I tremble.

My grandmother's thick shoes roll across the sand. She looks down to keep track of her footing. I'm not sure how she doesn't get sand in those shoes. There are other people here walking their dogs but no one besides Raya and a couple of black Labradors are swimming this time of year.

I consider calling James to tell him I am outside, seeing the actual sun, and an actual ocean right now. He would love to hear that the world outside the Institute still exists. That the pictures that make up my laptop screensaver are taken of real places you can visit and touch. I left my phone at home, though.

"Oh, isn't this wonderful?" my grandmother says. She has paused and is looking out at the ocean. Her hands rest on her hips.

Raya climbs out of the water and shakes wildly. Droplets of sunlight fly in all directions.

My grandmother shakes her own thick hair and steps over to Raya to run a hand through Raya's wet fur. "And aren't you wonderful!" she says.

I felt my grandmother's giddiness peel open at the crown of my head and trickle down the sides of my skull.

"Tell me Elena," my grandmother speaks directly to me now, "do you have anyone you love back home?"

No, I think. Not the way she means it.

"I love James. Sometimes I think if he wasn't there, you know, with me in the Unit and with me at the Institute...I would quit."

"Not James, though. Not James. Do you have someone you love? Someone you love here and here?" She puts one wet dog fur hand on her heart and one on her lower abdomen.

Leonie comes to mind. Her bright face. Her red hair glowing gold as sunlight comes through it. I used to watch blood rush to her lips and her cheeks when she looked at me. I hear her voice now in my ears exactly how it sounded years ago.

"No, Grandma, James is it. And Boone."

"Ah." My grandmother looks sad or disappointed. I start to feel sad. I start to feel disappointed in myself.

My grandmother looks at me discerningly, "Then you must have been thinking of Leonie. You have that look in your eyes."

My breath halts. I feel trapped. I look at Raya who is back in the water now, stalking a particularly slow seagull. Its wings seem to be hurt.

"I didn't know..." I look at my grandmother and also past her. "How did you know?" I ask.

"Mm, I've been alive for a very long time," she says. I ask her, "Does it bother you if I date women?" I am still holding my breath. I look toward my grandmother's eyes but don't connect with them. I feel afraid. She's looking at me with her mouth set and determined. I watch her mouth instead.

"It's not up to me," she says. "You love who you love. Never let anyone make you feel ashamed of loving someone." She says.

A smile breaks out on my face. The seagull has escaped from Raya.

"Okay," I say. My eyes well up with tears, warm from the sun.

My grandmother bends over her vegetable boxes in a black tank top. The sun turns her exposed back orange and olive green. I see new freckles sprouting every minute. I watch her through the kitchen window.

The phone rings and then picks up.

"Heyyyy!" James sings.

"Hey girl what's up?! How's life back at the Unit? Is Warden on the prowl?"

Warden is assigned to keep all the Unit residents in line. Their last name is Warden, but they're anything but strict. They went through the Institute Training Program just like the rest of us, only years ago. They patrol the Housing Unit, checking for illegal drugs, enforcing curfews, and the like.

"This place is so empty. Do you know the other departments got the week off too? We're the only ones here this week."

"I didn't know that."

"Warden was just teaching me last night how to make a bow and arrow by hand."

"What?"

"Yeah, we went into the forest behind the Unit and literally axed off some bark and boiled it until it could bend without breaking. Then they showed me how to drill a hole in each end to tie the sinew through. And how tight to do it."

"Wow, who would have guessed."

There's a lull in our conversation.

"What's Saliha up to?" I ask. Saliha's the project manager on James' team and lives on his hall.

"Saliha's been gone all week."

"I thought she would stay if y'all had work to do." I say.

"I guess she decided to go home." James says.

"Hm."

"What have you been up to?" He asks me.

"Well I was gonna tell you all about the nature I saw today. I figured you could use a good story to remember what it's like being at the beach, but it sounds like you're taken care of."

"You went to the beach?! Oh god I'm so jealous. I miss that place." James sighs such a wistful, dramatic sigh that I laugh into the phone.

"Well it misses you, too, James. Probably not with that same kind of angst, though."

"You know what it's like here. When I'm not chopping down trees in the forest with Warden I'm trapped in this room. Somehow there's always work to be done."

"How's your project going?" That's about as specific as I can get.

"It's a mess right now. Aidan Nickson fucked up the patents--"

The room starts spinning. I drop the phone and grab the edge of the kitchen counter to steady myself. Pressure rises in my throat like a violent burning. I need to say a million things but nothing comes out.

"Elena? Elena?" James' electronic voice talks to me from the floor.

I slide to the ground and pick the phone back up to my ear.

"James, what did you just say?"

"I said there's been an issue with the patents and now we have to rewrite it all."

"Who? Who fucked up the patents?"

"Caden Nicholls. Tall Caden with the blonde curls. Although I probably shouldn't be telling you that. Why?"

Caden. Of course. Caden also lives on James' floor.

"I just thought you said..." Forget it. It wouldn't make sense.

My grandmother opens the sliding glass door to the kitchen.

"Are you okay? Why are you on the floor like that?"

James' voice in the phone says, "Is that your grandma? Tell her I say hi."

"Hey, James I gotta go. I'll call you later, ok?" I hang up.

"I'm fine Grandma. I just got light-headed all of a sudden."

"Did something happen?"

"I said I'm fine, Grandma!" I shout at her. She looks like she's been hit across the face. "I'm going for a walk."

Fifteen minutes later I am walking through a little hippie town not far from the beach. There's a store that sells incense and crystals. There's a store that specializes in tie dye clothing. There's one that sells surfboards and swimsuits. There's an organic juice shop. None of these stores is for me. I stop at a food stand for tacos. I order everything in English and at the end say an awkward "gracias" as I'm taking my change.

The tacos are amazing. The woman who sets them on my table tells me, "Buen Provecho."

After I eat I walk to the beach. The waves are rolling in blue-grey under a like-colored sky. I sigh. Damn, this is nice.

Sand slips around the soles of my feet and under the knuckles of my toes.

There's a cute family huddled under an umbrella together.

I walk along the water for a long time. When I reach the end of the beach, there is no one around. The sand has given way to rock and cliffs. As the waves crash the shore, water shoots up between gaps in the rock. I sit in the sand and let the sound surround me. I feel my heart settle. My calves burn. The sound of crashing ocean scrapes the insides of my skull clean. It takes up space and it makes space.

I run my fingers through the sand. I feel it soften the edges of my fingernails. I kick my heels hard into the sand and push and pull them back and forth, making little troughs deep enough that water gathers at the bottom. Pressure rises through my legs and hips. For a brief moment, my spirit touches down into my body. It's usually flying miles above me, scattered across the universe.

I am whole.

I used to spend a lot of time at this beach as a kid. My father would take me here after school. I'd jump out of his car and run straight into the ocean. I'd jump over the waves like a hurdler. I'd dive over them like a dolphin. When I was angry, I'd punch them like a boxer.

As I got older, I'd lie on a towel in the sand alongside Leonie. She would read to me from whatever book she was on at the moment. I thought there could be nothing more peaceful in the world than lying on my back with the sun beating into my skin and with Leonie's voice wafting, pouring, and dripping into my ears.

A breath pushes all the way into my lungs and back out.

The air smells nice.

The sky is a soft, Mediterranean blue. There's a slight haze of clouds blurring the horizon line. My grandmother says it's the same as the sky over Greece.

I lean back into the sand. I remember the skin of Leonie's cheek along the ridge of my thumb, and her lips in the center of my palm. I remember the touch of her lips on the corner of my jaw. Light rises in the bottom of my heart. It beats softly like a drum. Warmth pours into my abdomen. I feel a million tiny sparks in my mouth. My exhale is wet. I remember the smell of her hair.

I sigh and dream.

My grandmother is reading a book in the living room as the sun sets behind the horizon. She doesn't seem to notice me come in. I walk toward my room.

"Elena!" I turn around to see my grandmother looking at me expectantly. "How was your walk?"

"Really good, Grandma. I'm feeling better now." I say.

In my room I video call James. I feel a burning in the back of my head around my brain stem.

James' face appears on the screen of my phone. It is so familiar to me it's like looking at a picture of myself. I have lost any objectivity to the appearance of his face. But here goes: he has thick black hair that shoots up in the air toughly from his hairline. His skin is perfectly smooth and also pale from spending so much time inside the Unit.

"James, does the name Aidan Nickson mean anything to you?"

Silence on the other end of the phone for a beat. Then a quick inhale of breath, "No I can't place it. It does sound a little familiar though."

"It sounds familiar, right?!" The flood of relief in my body surprises me. Even if he means what he said only casually, I am pleased to feel less alone in my experience.

The burning in my head seems to increase.

"What does the name mean to you?" He asks.

"This business card," I say, fishing it out of my bag. As I hold the card up to the camera on my phone for James to see, the picture freezes and the connection falters. The screen goes gray.

"James?"

"Elena?"

"Hey, I can hear you. Can you still see me? Something with the connection got fucked up."

His video resumes back into a live feed.

"Did you see the card?" I have the sense that it is the card itself that has interfered with the connection. I bend it back and forth between my hands like I'm an ape in Stanley Kubrick's A Space Odyssey.

I feel a blinding pain in the back of my head, an inch or two deep, and all I can see is white.

"Whoa," I exhale.

"What was that? The video connection's back on my end."

"I can see you too," I say. "This card...I think there's something electronic in it that's affecting the signal."

"I didn't quite see it. Did you feel for a microchip?" He asks.

"Yeah, it feels just like cardstock, though. There's nothing in it."

"Where did you find it?"

"On the train. Someone left it by my seat when I was asleep. I've had it in my bag since then."

"Maybe try putting it in water and then hold it up to the phone again."

"Good idea."

I soak the card in the sink. It doesn't absorb like paper. The laminate is a stronger seal than I guessed. I try it again in front of the phone and once again the connection cuts off.

Once we can see each other's faces again, James says, "It's like when you point a camera back at its own video feed and the screen goes gray."

My forehead crinkles and I take one more look at the card. "The name on the card: Aidan Nickson. You still can't place it?" I ask.

"No. Like I said, it's familiar. Maybe I've seen it in some of our legal paperwork. Let me do a search of the Institute's online libraries. I'll let you know if anything comes up."

"That's a good plan."

"Elena?"

"Yeah, James. What's up?" I feel nervousness boiling in my intestines, afraid of what he might ask.

"Are you doing okay? Being back home and everything?"

I lived in San Diego with my parents up until I left for ITP two and a half years ago. They died within six months of each other my final semester of Training. I didn't go back when I found out they were sick--unrelated illnesses, just unfortunate synchronicity. My jaw clamps hard. My forehead crinkles. I feel an aching in every muscle of my body.

"I'm doing okay."

The next day I bounce out of bed and join my grandmother in the kitchen. "Grandma grandma grandma, can I call you Christina? Grandma doesn't feel right right now."

"What's going on?" asks Christina.

"It's such a beautiful day. The sun is so bright. I can feel my skin and it doesn't feel cold. I feel free of pain for once. I feel like I can do anything. All of my troubles have lifted."

"The sun does that, doesn't it?"

"Grandma why don't you care? You sound like you're not paying attention."

"Attention? Since when do I owe you my 'attention'?"

"Are you angry at me...Christina?"

"That's disrespectful to call me that." She says.

"You don't actually care, do you? I just want to talk to you. Not like I'm a little kid. I just want to talk to you like we're two adults. Like we're friends, or even acquaintances. I just want to talk to you, without the burden of feeling like I'm a little kid."

"Then talk to me."

"May I call you Christina?" I ask again.

"Does that feel right to you?" She looks at me, squints, makes her mouth crooked. She isn't sure either.

"No. Not exactly. But better than 'Grandma'. That's such a childish way to talk, don't you think? I don't know what else to call you. Something in between."

"You can call me Christina, then. But don't forget yourself. I am older than you and you will show me respect."

"Okay." I feel a little sick. I don't have much to say.

"Then what did you want to talk to me about?" She asks. I feel embarrassed. She has control now. She seems to enjoy my embarrassment.

"You know, Elena. If you don't have anything to say to me, then I have something I might say to you." Oh God, I've walked straight into something. It is too late to backtrack. I have been disrespectful; now I owe her this conversation. She's gonna get on me for not having come back when my parents were dying. For having stuck it out through finals instead. I prepare a million sentences of defense. 'They never took good care of me anyway,' I think. 'I didn't owe them compassion in return'.

"What, Christina?" I look her dead in the eyes. Years from now I will remember my arrogance and feel foolish.

She dodges my hard gaze, like she's losing courage about something. Maybe once she has control she doesn't want the responsibility.

She says, "I think you should stay here another week." Unexpected. I thought she was gonna kick me out tomorrow.

"You think I should stay here another week?" My anger is faltering. My childhood ended three years ago but I'm still a sucker for affection. Or, whatever this is.

"I think you should stay here another week." She says.

My eyes meet with...Christina's...again. I am searching, less angry now, and less afraid. Still defensive, though, waiting for the catch. She looks similarly, waiting to see if I will humiliate her for asking me to stay. I don't plan to. I don't want to scare her away.

We both back down.

"Okay, then." She says. "You'll stay here another week."

"Grandma...Christina...I can't." My mouth hangs open. We fall still.

"Your work, I see. They can spare you another week. You're indispensible to them, aren't you? You've already made it through Training, proven yourself. You have more control now. Call them."

"Okay." My brows furrow less from anger, more to keep me from crying. She really wants me to stay. I really want to stay.

"I'll call them," I say.

My grandmother is right. There is no trouble in convincing my supervisor to let me stay another week. She tells me there won't be much work to do anyway, as the project ahead of us still hasn't sent their work over. She says they won't need me.

After four days in Southern California, I have gotten into the habit of being at my grandmother's house. I have pushed the name on the business card to the back of my brain although the card itself is tucked into my wallet. My body has reacquainted itself with being outside. It has even begun to feel comfortable in the world around me. The warmth that penetrated my skin and warmed my core my first day here now seems to be inside me, a little at all times, keeping me warm even when I'm not in direct sunlight. And each day I go back to the beach to refuel.

On one of my daily walks, I stop in at the library in the hippie town. I briefly finger a book of Alice Walker's poetry. This is where I first met Leonie.

She is working behind the desk and I recognize her from school. When our eyes meet I suddenly become aware of how I look. I haven't looked in a mirror in days, I think. I imagine my face weathered and very bare. My hair is tied back tight. I take out my hair tie and run a hand through my crinkled hair before going up to talk to her.

"Hey, what can I help you find?" she asks me. She has orange hair down to her shoulders.

"Um..." my eyes are wide with curiosity and fear. "I think I know you from school."

She laughs a little. I love her smile. Either she is more socially confident than I am in general, or I just happened to catch her in her element.

"Yeah I've seen you around there. You're a sophomore?"

"I'm a sophomore," I mimic.

"Me too."

I can see the inside of her mouth when her lips part. The gums of her teeth are brown and pink. Why am I staring at her gums?

"Are you looking for anything in particular?" She seems at ease with the conversation. My brain is still spinning.

"Uh yeah. I mean, no, not really. I just had to get out of my house for a bit. My parents have been fighting all day." I didn't mean to say that.

"Oh." Her mouth gets tight and small as though she is caught off guard. She is really cute. Then her face softens into sympathy.

I'm afraid I trapped her with my outpouring. I wish I could take it all back. Shame grabs my throat.

Before my voice cuts off I ask, "Do you have any recommendations?"

"Oh, God, have you got all day?" A joke. That's a good sign, right? "What kind of things do you like to read?"

In truth I'm not much of a reader. My medium is visual art. I have too many words in my head to take more in. Of course there are the required books on the literature syllabus, but they are almost exclusively by male authors of another era. I can only connect to small bits of the stories.

"Maybe something with a female author? Something with a happy ending." I say.

She takes a breath and looks a little away from me, at nothing in particular. I can tell the real work is going on behind her eyes.

She steps away from the desk. I'm not sure if I'm meant to follow her; I decide to stay put. She is taller than I am and she's wearing a t-shirt and jean shorts. She looks at ease in her clothes like they fit her and the fabric is soft against her skin. I look down at my own clothes that are hanging off of me, angry and apathetic toward my body underneath them. The waistband of my corduroys cuts into the skin at my hips. There will be a red mark there by the end of the day. The collar of my shirt is so wide it falls off one shoulder or another so that every few minutes I'm adjusting.

When she returns, she asks me if I can handle something a little difficult. Not the reading level, she explains, but the content. I think of my parents I have just left—probably still fighting—in the living room of our house. My father said "go fuck yourself" to my mother right before I walked out.

"I think I can handle it." I say.

She hands me a small book and I read the cover aloud. "The Color Purple," I say. "By Alice Walker."

"I think you'll like it. What's your name by the way?"

"Elena."

"I'm Leonie." We shake hands.

When I get home that night, the house is quiet. I find my mother in a chair in the living room with her reading glasses on, flipping through a collection of short stories by JoAnn Beard. "Where's Dad at?" I ask her. I don't really care but I don't know what else to say to her. She looks as though she's been crying and her thoughts are a mile away from me, running over the things that were said between her and her husband in the hours I was gone. She hardly looked up when I came in.

"Oh, hey, Sweetie. He's staying with a friend tonight. He'll be back tomorrow after work."

That's worse than I thought. I feel a little pull at the bottom of my stomach. Like a toddler is down there tugging on me, trying to tell me something. I ask my mom, "Is everything okay?"

My mother looks me directly in the eyes now and I see shock on her face like she's been pulled from her reverie back into reality and has a bit of whiplash. She looks a lot like my grandmother did before my grandfather died. My mom has the same black curls as her mother, and the skin on her face is tired. She hasn't found solitude and vegetable-growing yet to cope.

My mother sighs heavily and looks away from me again. "Your father and I are fine. You should go to bed, though, it's late."

I am too young to know that her suggestion is not for my sake but for hers. She doesn't want the responsibility of parenting tonight.

I start to walk away. The tugging picks up again at the bottom of my gut and I feel it echo all the way up into my throat. Pressure builds up quickly behind my eyes and threatens to release.

"Elena?" I hear.

I spin around, a pathetic need for love written all over my face.

"What book have you got there?"

I practically run to her side to show her the book Leonie just checked out to me at the library.

"Whoa, The Color Purple, huh? Are you sure you're ready for this one?" I haven't opened it yet so I don't know.

I sit in the big, comfy chair with my mother and she puts an arm around me, holding the book in between us.

"This is a powerful story, Elena. I read it when I was in high school." I look at my mother with the round, open eyes of a baby. I didn't realized how hungry I was been for her attention. I am afraid to say anything that will cut it off too soon.

"You did?" That feels safe.

"I read it when I was in high school, I read it again when I was in college, and I read it a third time shortly after I had you. It's that kind of a book."

I'm not sure exactly what that means for me. I have heard adults talk that way about books before, that there are books that everybody gets something different out of depending what "life stage" they're in when they read them. It remind me how my grandmother used to take me to see kids' movies. I would come home reciting the most exciting parts of the movie while she and my parents would talk about all the famous actors who had parts in it. I began to understand that, even when we watched the same thing, my grandmother and I were seeing something very different.

"Read it carefully, and if you come across something...feel free to come talk to me about it."

That's it. As clear as a knife coming down on an umbilical cord, I feel the connection between my mother and me sever. I get off the chair, say goodnight to her, and go to bed. Over the next few days I tear through The Color Purple like I have never read a book in my life. I have the sense that I'm learning what reading is for the first time. I have never felt a connection that strong with a book and I have never so urgently sought out a conclusion. I tell myself that if I come back to the book later in life, as my mother described, I will read more carefully over the parts that I am sprinting past now on my way to a happy ending.

I pull down an atlas from one of the shelves and set up at a big, round, wooden table by myself. There are a bunch of men and a woman or two who look wind-blown and sun-dried using the public computers. Many of them have strong-looking hair, stiff from night after night spent sleeping alongside a saltwater ocean. A man with no legs uses buff arms to pull himself in on a skateboard.

I spread open the atlas to a map of Africa. I know so much about Europe; that's all they teach in school. There was a time when I could label a blank map of Europe with every country and its capital. But now, staring at Africa, it looks unfamiliar. Some of the names of the countries are new to me. The next page in the atlas is a map just of Mozambique. I run my finger across the map, across names of cities: Marrupa, Meloco, Malema, Molumbo, Milange. They sound good in my mouth as I whisper them. I keep thinking I'm seeing the same name over again, but they are all different. I want to write down all the three-syllabled 'M' cities of this country. I stand up to grab paper and whirl into a small woman who appears to have been standing behind me a minute.

"Oh!" I exclaim.

"Hey! You're Elena, right?" She asks.

"Holy shit, Stacy!" The swearing is a bit much, maybe.

"Yeah, I wasn't sure you'd remember me. But, we were in English together, right?"

I step to the side a bit and gather myself. Then I take a second look at her. I picture her four years ago in white running shorts.

"You ran cross-country, too, didn't you?" I ask.

"Oh, God, I thought I knew you from something else. That must be it. I was on JV, though. You were on Varsity I think so we didn't interact that much."

"That sounds right. Damn, it's good to see you." My face flushes with pink. Why am I still swearing?

I move further away from the table and try to put more physical space between us. Her eyes are locked on mine and I feel uncomfortable. I try to take a breath, run my fingers through my hair. I am not one for small talk, but, it comes out of me anyway: "How have you been?"

Her countenance softens a bit and she breaks eye contact with me. "Oh, you know. Just been working."

"Right."

Her eyes are bright and wide now and her voice sounds giddy. "But how have you been? I haven't seen you since you left for the"--she deepens her voice--"Institute Training Program."

I smile. Then she says, "You were always like the smartest person in school."

I look down. Another smile creeps onto my face. I can't help it.

"You making the big bucks now?" Stacy asks.

I laugh. "Since I started at the Institute, yeah. They pay me pretty well."

"So you made it?" Stacy is smiling brightly. Her freckled cheeks blush. "You're working for the Institute?"

"As of last Fall," I say. "Pretty much if you graduate from the two-year Training they send you right in." My heart floods with warm blood. I love praise.

"Wow. I'm so jealous. My cousin had a boyfriend who worked there for a bit. He was, like, really smart. Anyway, he had so much money. So are you, like, flying places on a private jet now?" Stacy gently pushes her knuckles into the side of my arm.

I laugh. "I was actually just stopping at the library on my way back from buying a giant diamond necklace at the mall."

"Right, yeah, why would you be at the library at all? You don't need to borrow books." She smiles really big.

I suck in breath and feel a laugh hanging deep in my throat. "Oh, you don't sell books here? I don't touch anything I can't purchase," I joke. I sweep my arm out across the room and say, "I'll take one of everything you've got!"

Her little body wriggles into laughs and I let my smile break out over and over watching her.

She gathers herself and looks at me more seriously. "Hey, you dated Leonie, didn't you?"

I feel caught off guard. Does she know where Leonie is? Is she in town here? Hurt and longing bruise my heart. My heart is more up to date on the current reality of mine and Leonie's relationship. It hurts like something has been pulled out and is missing.

"Um." Now I feel shame and fear. Our high school was very hetero.

"Sorry, I don't know..." Stacy looks concerned. Her bright face dims a bit for me.

"We didn't date. But we were very close."

"I'm sorry I don't know...if you...Anyway." She inhales a big breath, puts a smile back on her face, widens her eyes and says, "She was here over the summer. Working at the library, I mean."

"Oh, yeah?" I make eye contact with her. That's more recent that I would have expected.

"I don't know if you're still in contact with her. She mentioned something about coming back to town over the winter. I thought maybe you would have seen her."

Shit, this is more real than I expected. Memories are supposed to die once you deliberately abandon them, aren't they? Do people who existed in the past still exist somewhere in the present?

"Oh, no, I'm not in contact with her anymore."

Someone calls to us from behind the library desk. "You guys talking about Leonie?" I recognize the woman from three years ago when I used to visit Leonie at the library all the time. She is tall, with dark skin and long, black hair.

"Jamila, yeah. Elena was tight with her back in high school." Stacy calls back.

"She's supposed to work a couple shifts here next week," Jamila says. "She's back in town for a bit."

On my way back from the library I stop at a café for tea. Leonie is gonna be in town. Fuck. Staying an extra week is really starting to sound good. I am trying to imagine what our conversation will be like upon reunion. Will I meet her in the library? Will Stacy or Jamila have told her I am in town? Will she be excited to see me?

Leonie played soccer in high school. She was recruited by UNC Chapel Hill her senior year. After her sophomore year there, she dropped out to play professionally with North Carolina Courage. The last time I saw her was the spring before, almost a year ago now. I was home for a week, staying with my parents, about to graduate from ITP in a couple of months. She had just officially signed on with the team and was going to fly across the country to train as soon as finals were over.

I got a couple of emails from her that Summer. She had heard about my parents.

I asked about the new soccer team, and she said they benched her mostly which wasn't uncommon for a first-year player. The last email I got from her said she had a girlfriend on the team. Her girlfriend played striker and was a high scorer in the National Women's Soccer League.

I had grown close with James by then. We lived down the hall from one another on the first floor of the Unit. We met our first week in Training. The second-year students had planned something for the new students every night that week. On Monday it we watched Harold and Maude in the lounge. I saw James across the room that night sitting with Caden.

On Tuesday somebody filled the lounge with stuffed animals bought at the Goodwill. Students were ripping them apart and sewing them back together in different configurations like stuffed animal Frankensteins. I tore the head off a stuffed squirrel and replaced it with that of a rabbit. Then I sewed the head of the squirrel back into its hands. The finished product looked like a rabbit dressed up in a squirrel costume, holding the head of its costume.

It was so fun being away from home for the first time. Everyone at ITP was heady and awkward so we did all these wild activities in order to avoid small talk. On Wednesday night I walking down the hall to the shared bathroom to brush my teeth and I heard music coming from one of the rooms. It sounded like Amy Winehouse. The door was open slightly and I peered inside. There was James Kim giving a heartfelt performance of Love is Blind to an empty room. When he saw me he held my eye contact and kept singing. His voice was romantic. He hit every note with flourish and warmth just like she did. When he finished the final line--"I heard love is blind"--he was smiling the most wondrous smile and I finally looked away.

My lips hung open and I felt hot breath on them. I had just seen something I had never seen before. Something I wanted more of. My heart rose out of my chest and into his, I think. We were connected forever.

I tell him, "You have an amazing voice." My voice feels warm and my eyes are liquid.

"I sang choir in high school. I prefer solos though."

"You could do it professionally."

He smiles again.

My phone is ringing. 'I bet that's James with the results of the library search,' I think. I grab my phone to answer it and on the screen is a sight so familiar I forget to feel freaked out at first: the name Aidan Nickson. Aidan Nickson. The room around me dissolves and the screen of my phone with that name is so clear and unmoving it could be written on the insides of my eyelids. I try to stand. 'How does this guy have my phone number? How is his name in my phone? Do I know him? This can't have been the guy from the train.' My head is spinning. I grab my wallet and whatever else I brought with me and run out of the café. Outside, the air is cool but I feel warm, warm. And spinning.

I don't pick up the call, the rise of nausea is so violent in my throat. I'm not sure my hands could navigate the screen. My phone falls back into my bag. I vaguely see figures walking up the sidewalk toward me and then everything in my stomach launches to the back of my throat and out. I vomit all over the grass. I fall to my hands and knees. More is coming. My stomach is empty but my body heaves. A woman I don't know drops down beside me and puts a hand on my back. I hear her say, "Are you okay?" But she feels far away like her image and sound are being transmitted through glass, or an ocean. My ears start to ring and the buzzing drowns out all other noise. I feel myself mouth words to her—I can't tell if sound is coming out along with them—"my grandmother, call my grandmother". I point into my bag and see the bright blue corner of my phone screen and the wide-open, panicked eyes of the woman and then everything is black.
Part II I ran from the train station

I left for Seattle the next day. Something in me told me I had to go. The name was bothering me so much; I decided if the phone calls kept coming while I was away it wouldn't be worth taking more time off. I explained to my grandmother as much as I could given that I myself didn't quite understand and got back on the train. Tuesday I was in Seattle.

Something giddy always hits me when I go back. It starts kicking in my gut as I watch familiar suburbs go by and by the time the train is in the station my entire body and soul are electrified.

I could run and sprint dance scream yell sing...

I grip my backpack at the scruff and feel my nails scrape the cloth. The train door opens and I jump out. My heart hiccups louder and faster the closer I get to the Unit. I walk briskly past people in cafés working. I recognize one of the people who has an upper level position on James' team. She's got dark hair slicked back in a ponytail. A black, fitted suit. Erect back, sitting at a table dancing her fingers across a streamlined, portable keyboard. The man across from her is unshaven, gaunt and pale, and hunched over a corner of the table, scribbling furiously on a napkin.

I recognize a handsome kid walking down the sunwashed sidewalk toward me. We had a class together in ITP, maybe? We make eye contact as he passes. He nods. My smile stretches unbound across my face, pulling at the tendons around my jaw. The giddiness blooms and blooms, stretches and stretches.

On Cross Street, I start running. I smell the brick of the surrounding buildings. I feel the dust of it dissipate into my body and exhale through my pores. I come to the end of the street, stop and look up.

There it is. This is my place. This is the closest thing I've ever had to a home.

A long, dark building looms over me. It's got hallways like train cars. The windows of the top floor are barred. Legend has it they did it to stop the suicides.

My sweet, sweet Housing Unit.

Employees and students pour out of the building like ants following each other in straight lines. Each being is on a unique mission.

Level One.

ITP.

The first floor is all students. It has hospital lighting. Past the front desk and mailroom, not many people are in the hallways out of their rooms. The rooms are on either side of the hallway like a hotel. I see into a room. A boy is sitting on an unmade cot. A girl sits cross-legged on the floor facing him.

I keep walking. I reach the windowless stairwell at the end of the hall and race up the black steps to the second level.

Level Two.

Law.

"James! James!" I scream and shout.

My muscles flood with rich, pumping blood. I feel sweat at the borders of my scalp.

Posters line the walls of the long hallway: mainstream bands, vintage beer ads, some degrading visual symbols of "female". The ceiling lights are covered with blue and red lighting gels. Midway down the hall, in the area directly above where front desk is on the first floor, is a lounge. Every upper level has one. This one is filled with plush couches hand selected from a catalogue. The lawyers even bought a flat screen television and a few different video game consuls. James is on the couch with Frankie and Caden Nicholls, playing Super Mario Smash Bros. Caden's tossing back a beer. I watch the ceiling lights glisten off the gelled blonde curls atop his head. Frankie's kicking both their asses, playing as Curby. She's intensely focused on the screen. The sound is all the way up.

James is wearing khakis and a baby blue polo. He's fit, wide-shouldered, clear-skinned, and extremely handsome.

"Elena." He looks up at me.

"You couldn't hear me yelling?" I ask.

"I get deeply absorbed, man. I didn't hear a thing."

"Well gimme a hug." I feel his broad torso around the insides of my arms. He feels fit and solid.

"Damn it's good to see you," I say. We both stand back and look at each other a moment.

His face changes. "Did you bring the card?"

I reach into my bag. "Got it right here. But I don't want to deal with it right now. I'm tired. And I'm dehydrated from all that vomiting two nights ago."

"Then we should drink."

We find Phoebe and Kate in the hall on the other side of the lounge, talking. Phoebe has a yo-yo and she's working it easily while carrying on a conversation.

"Hey, man, what's up?" Phoebe looks up from her yo-yo to James. They shake hands.

"What's up guys?" I ask. Phoebe observes me. She's searching. Her eyes are deep.

Kate smiles. "Did you just get back from break?"

James turns his thumb to me, "I didn't, she just did."

"I know you didn't," Kate's face melts into a smile. She and James give each other a full-bodied hug. I see her melt into his arms. She's so perfectly proportioned I feel ashamed of my own body for a moment. She's wearing one of those cute, floral tops for women you can buy in a mall. The kind that never seem to fit around my shoulders or reach down long enough to cover my belly.

"Where'd you go for break?" Phoebe asks me.

"My grandma's in San Diego; I took the train down for the week."

"That's cool. That's cool," she says, watching her yo-yo.

"My folks live in L.A.," she says.

"Oh did you go there for the week?"

"Nah, just two days. I've been here since Wednesday."

"You must have flown down," I say.

"Yeah I flew."

Phoebe looks over at Kate and James conversing giddily. Kate's glowing.

Phoebe's skin is dark brown. She's got tiny bumps of acne at the top of her forehead. She's wearing black sweats and a flannel. Her hair frizzes around her face like smoke.

She looks back at her yo-yo. I look at it too.

James puts his hands on my shoulders, "Elena, let's drink. You wanna drink? We're gonna drink."

"Yeah let's do it. You down too?" I ask Phoebe.

She winds up her yo-yo.

We follow Kate down the hall. I watch the colors from the lighting gels play off the back of Kate's platinum blonde hair. Kate has the kind of face you see in magazines and TV shows. She's Caucasian with small features. I briefly imagine what it would be like to chop off my nose, dye my hair and look like that. My voice is also low and ambiguous where hers is high-pitched and undeniably feminine. There's too many things I would have to change to be like Kate. We are just different people.

Her room is large, neat, and full of stylish furniture. In the middle of the room is a giant oak desk with a sleek monitor and ergonomic keyboard on top. A large leather couch lines one wall of the room. On the opposite wall is a tall bookshelf made of a dark wood. It is filled with books. Many sets of books. Dark blue covers with gold lettering along the spine. They look like technical works. I see the word 'law' on many of them. Different types of law. In the upper corner of the bookshelf there's a small collection of paperback books with covers that look well-worn. I read the authors JoAnn Beard, Alice Munro, and Alice Walker. They are her collection of collections of short stories. On the opposite side of the shelf are four wine glasses.

She sits down in an ergonomic swivel chair behind the desk and reaches under the desk into a mini-fridge that's down there and pulls out a bottle of wine. It's unopened and looks expensive.

"White wine from the Bourgogne region of France," she says. "I actually bought it in France and brought it here because the stuff they send to the U.S. has an altered, sharper taste. This will taste like butter."

Whoa, I think. I don't know that much about wine but I believe everything she says. She seems to know her stuff.

She pulls out a wine opener from one of the drawers in the desk and I see reading glasses and expensive-looking pens in the drawer, too. She cuts through the foil around the neck of the bottle with one edge of the bottle-opener and screws into the cork.

James, Phoebe and I sit on the couch and watch as Kate deftly pulls the cork from the bottle.

I am in awe.

She pours each of us a glass then joins us on the couch.

We hold our glasses together.

"Cheers," says Kate.

"Cheers," we all say back.

The wine does taste like butter. It is cold and smooth. I lick my lips.

And the night has begun.

Level Three.

Artificial Intelligence.

Phoebe lives here. Every square inch of the hall is covered in sheet metal. You see your face in every surface. Your reflection walks alongside you down the hall. I watch Phoebe's short frame, my tall body, James's even taller body and Kate's blonde haircut bobbing along behind us. There's noise coming from the end of the hall. I see bodies pouring back and forth between rooms and the lounge, and I can't tell which bodies are reflections.

"In here." Phoebe says.

She pulls up the bottom edge of heavy black stage curtain and crawls through. It's pitch black in the lounge until our eyes adjust to candlelight. Phoebe lights a lighter. The warm yellow glows on her face and she takes a candle from a surface by the entryway, lights it, and uses it to light our way as she walks us through the room. I can see a part of the room now and more of the other people in here with us. People are spread out on the floor on cushions in small groups, talking quietly, around candles carefully kept away from cloth blankets. Kate's eyes and mouth are wide open like a child's. James has one arm around Kate's shoulders and his other hand grips the sleeve of my sweatshirt. Glass bowls of different sizes and colors hang mid-air all around us. They look handmade. Some have lit candles hanging in them. Phoebe keeps leading us by her eighteen hundred's candle holder. We find a few open cushions in a circle near the back of the room. Warden is there with Devon. We sit together on the cushions and pull wool blankets over us.

I hug Devon and Warden, then they slide over to make room for us. Devon says hey to Kate and Phoebe. Warden greets James.

Devon says, "We're going climbing later if y'all want to join."

Kate looks at Phoebe. "Yeah?" She asks. "That sounds fun to me."

Phoebe asks what time and where they're meeting. "Maybe we'll meet you," she says.

Kate leans back into James' chest. I lean back into the cushions behind me and watch the ceiling. It's covered in scarves and sarongs and cloth, billowing down so that the strings of twine which hold the bowls disappear in spaces between the cloth like they go on forever. I watch gold candle light play through bubbles in the glass.

Smoke from the candles hangs in the air like mist, makes waves and eddies like water in a river.

James says, "This is amazing."

Kate says, "It's so different from the hallway. The metal is cold. This feels..."

"It's an escape from the cold electronics we work with," says Devon. "Welcome to the AI lounge."

Phoebe looks at him and nods, "It's hard to exist as a human without warmth and contact."

"What do you mean?" asks James. He sits upright.

Phoebe looks at him, "James, you're a lawyer."

"Yeah." He laughs.

"You work with people," Phoebe continues.

"Yeah."

"And throughout your day you use a cell phone, lap top, electronics, those self-checkout stations at the grocery store that speak to you.

"We live inside the cell phone when we work. It's different than just picking it up throughout the day. It's different when you spend your days inventing it, being so connected to it you lose the boundaries between it and you."

Kate says, "I thought..." She pauses and makes eye contact with each of us briefly, "You work in artificial intelligence, don't you Phoebe?"

"That's exactly what cell phones are becoming. We sometimes make more connections with our phones throughout the day than we do with other people.

"And many of the connections we make with other people begin with our cell phone. Sometimes it doesn't even lead to connecting with people, just the phone itself. The more time we spend at that step of the process...a relationship builds, between the phone and you. Just like we have with other people."

"Plus it gives off warmth, like a body," Warden muses. "And cell phones communicate with each other, just like people do." He breathes, "And we talk to our cell phones and they respond. We sleep next to our cell phones. We greet them when we wake up. They get tired and need fuel and maintenance just like people do."

Devon closes his eyes and nods.

Kate says, "I always pictured A.I. as like, some robot from a sci-fi novel that looks like a human."

Devon laughs. "Yeah, me too. I think that's what we were all hoping for."

"I think the looking human part would be Elena's domain. You're art and design, right?" Phoebe asks me.

James shoots upright again. He studies the scarves along the ceiling and the lit candles in the hanging bowls. He says, "Warden, how the hell does this room pass fire inspection?"

Warden just laughs.

Level Four.

Art and Design.

My hall, baby.

The walls are head-to-toe covered in murals. As long as this Housing Unit has been around, residents have been painting the level 5 walls. There's no space left so they paint over the worst murals each year. What's left is the best of the best. Or worse, depending.

There are cats in trees, snow-capped mountain peaks, underwater worlds, squids, insects, brains, symbols, words, and messages painted and inscribed by people who are no longer here and who wanted to preserve a part of themselves in these walls. My favorites are the faces and the human figures living in the walls. It is a special power to be able to depict a human with precision and nuance. The human face and figure are symbols embedded in history and culture. They can be used to manipulate your emotions in ways you won't notice. Make you see yourself a way you've always wanted to be, or a way you hate.

I run my hands along the paint. Kate, Phoebe and James are following behind me now. I've still got my backpack from the train station.

James and Phoebe are talking about which of the old residents on this hall got kicked out for excessive drug use, or violating any other of the numerous terms of the contract of living here. The Housing Unit strictly forbids animals from residing in the dorm along with residents except service animals but even that's a bit limited. As the four of us walk by rooms with painted doors swung open, revealing gory explosive innards, I count several people who've got some contraband creature hidden within.

Elizabeth has a snake. Each time the snake sheds, Elizabeth pins it's fresh skin to the wall. There are several skins up there now, each a little longer than the last.

Boone is walking down the hall toward us. His fur is a rainbow of black and he's burly like he's been fed well this week. He sees me, sits, and tilts his head to one side. His giant ears point to the corners where the walls meet the ceiling. His eyes look green today, though in different light I've seen them brown or honey-colored. It takes him a moment to recognize me but when he does I hear him chirp wildly like greeting a long-lost relative.

"Boone!" I cry back. "I missed you!" I cradle his impossibly soft head in the palms of my hands and now the skin of my hands feels soft too. I rub my hands along his spine and his hairs lie flat. His eyes close and he purrs. I watch the roundness of his belly breathe in and out. "James took good care of you, huh?" I ask him.

James crouches down to the floor beside me to stroke Boone too. "Boone really likes me. I took him for a couple walks around the Unit."

"Isn't it cool that he just follows you like a dog?"

Boone leans his head heavily into James' hand now and I rest both my hands on my knees and watch James' face. "Yeah, he follows you like a dog until he sees a dog. Then he runs like a cat."

I laugh.

"Oh my sweet little kitty," I say.

Boone has had his fill now. He walks over to Phoebe and sniffs around the bottoms of her sweats. "Hey little bud," she says and leans down to stroke his head. He accepts the affection.

Kate kind of looks past Boone, and he past her. He continues down the hall wherever he's headed. He's pretty good about not heading downstairs. Up is fine.

Iterations of my face cover the door to my room. All pen and ink self-portraits. Each in vastly different emotional states. None quite resembles another yet each of them bears likeness to me. I hold them there as a warning. That you won't find just one person within but many.

Give me a pen and paper and I'll make you see in yourself only what I want you to see, feel only what I design you to feel. I'll draw the slump of your shoulders and make you realize you're fatigued. Delineate worry in your brow you didn't know you were showing. I'll name your emotions better than you can name them yourself. I'll make you see things that aren't there. That's where this power gets dangerous. Where you're trusting me to use it kindly. Not to sneak hate into your face where it isn't. Make you believe you must feel something you don't. So expertly, I draw, you won't be able to separate your true face out from the one I invented. I can show you a reflection of yourself you won't find in a mirror.

I tend to use my self-portraits to reveal, not manipulate. I've spent two decades making my own face into a mask. When I draw myself it's only to draw out the real me. The true emotions hiding beneath the practiced placidity. To rediscover expressions I hid a long time ago.

What you see in these drawings is closer to how I really feel than what's on my face. It's my face with all the bullshit removed. All the bullshit the other people taught me to replace my own features with. The strained grimaces parading as smiles--gone. The childlike wonder you think you see in my wide-open eyes? The drawing will reveal it as terror. The pinching in my nose isn't curiosity, it's rage.

"Hey, let's duck into my room for a sec. I gotta check in." I say.

I open the door and toss my bag onto the couch. I've got a desk on the opposite wall laden with drawings I did the few days before I left town. My mind rewinds a bit when I see them. There's the face I drew with the crazy lines spurting out of eyes and temples. Pupils of the eyes pointed in different directions.

The walls are covered in my own paintings. Matted and hung so close together they cover the walls like tiles. They're all figure paintings from classes I took in ITP. I did a whole series. Each one is vibrant. I only use neutral colors very sparingly so what you see here is mostly bright and vivid like splashes of neon pink and lime green, a line of alizarin crimson along a femur or an ultramarine wash in the cavity of a chest. The poses are open or demure, wild or thoughtful, rigid or dynamic. The models are tall, short, wide, narrow, old, young, robust, feeble. And they are everything between those binaries, too.

The models are all nude, but I don't get too detailed. My specialty is gesture. It was this very portfolio which you see before you now that got me hired on after graduation. I can capture the emotion of a model in under 30 seconds. Every twitch and curve you find interesting about the model will appear on my paper. Shapes and bends you wouldn't have been able to call out or recognize yourself. I'll find them. It'll make your heart glow. You'd just as soon spend hours staring at my drawings as you would at the models themselves.

I sigh. I am home.

I lie on my bed and feel air release from my body. My back muscles know my comforter. Phoebe, James and Kate make their way onto the couch. Behind them is a chalkboard. Phoebe picks up a piece of chalk and starts doodling.

"So, what do you guys want to do tonight?" asks Kate.

I'm not sure what Kate usually gets up to. Her and me don't hang out all that often so I wait for one of the others to chime in with a suggestion.

I'm comfortable here. Right now. On this bed. With Phoebe leaving marks on the board. Kate and James occupying one another with their hetero romance. Feeling my back relax more and more into this comforter.

James says, "I can't hang out too late tonight, actually. I've got a lot of work to do."

"Booo," says Phoebe, still scribbling on the chalkboard.

"Yeah, are you serious James? Work doesn't start until tomorrow. We're not in Training anymore." I say.

"Also, the longer Team 2 takes to get the patents sorted," says Kate, "the more time we all get off."

"You're that sick of work?" asks James. "You just had a week."

"What's going on with that, anyway?" asks Phoebe. She's looking at James now. "Why are things taking so long?"

James takes a long inhale, stretches his arms over the back of the couch, and lets all his breath back out. "All I know is what Caden told me."

Kate asks, "And and and?"

James says, "Apparently there was some question about the ethics of the project we're working on."

"The ethics," Phoebe repeats. "That's uncommon. That's our project they're talking about?"

Kate repeats her in a daze, "That's our project."

"Unethical," I say. "I wonder..."

Phoebe says, "It's hard to know what's unethical about it. We don't know what each other is working on. I don't know how the work I do fits together with everyone else's."

Kate sits upright and inhales sharply, "We should share. Let's each tell each other some things we're working on."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa." James leans back and covers both of his ears with his hands. "You know we write the confidentiality agreements we all sign."

"Relax, James. Nobody's gonna tell." Kate rubs his shoulder until his hands come down.

Phoebe asks me, "What is your team working on?"

I say, "Well, I usually...my type of art is figures. That's what I did in high school. That's what I specialized in in ITP."

James says, "Um. We know Elena. Your walls are covered in naked people." He looks relieved.

"I took figure drawing classes in high school," Kate says.

"Tell us more specifically what you're working on," Phoebe refocuses. She's sitting on the edge of the couch, leaning forward toward me.

"Okay. We're all making a pact right now not to rat each other out for this, right?" I ask. "We could all get fired."

James says, "I'm not promising shit. I don't want to be a part of this. We signed a contract."

"Promise or leave while we talk about this," Phoebe looks back at him.

James doesn't leave. "Ok."

"Good, okay, let's hear it then Elena." Kate's looking at me now.

"We've been drawing people," I say. "Over and over and over and over. All the figure classes I took in ITP. It's like that. But the models are different. I mean, they're more specific. They've been bringing in hundreds of different models for us to draw. Every class is a person I've never seen before. The widest range of body types, gender, race, age, ability, sex I've ever seen. We've drawn people from every country. We drew someone who's a hundred years old. We've drawn people in comas."

"What?" asks Kate. "How would that even be legal?"

"It's like they're trying to create the most diverse list of models of all time. But each of the models is labeled, and referred to, according to their demographics. They teach us how to draw 'paraplegic legs', or an 'anorexic lumbar', or 'Olive skin tone'. They make sure we get every detail right. Make sure we represent exactly the categories the model is labeled by. Like all the range we're presented with and we're learning just to see things in categories still, except thousands of different ones. And just like usual, some categories have higher value than others; there's an unspoken hierarchy. I don't understand the exercise. Why it is the instructors are asking us to develop these skills."

Phoebe breaks eye contact with me for the first time since I started talking. She breathes.

Kate is the first to speak. "That's a far cry from high school figure classes where most of the models are white, able-bodied cis females in their early twenties."

"You mean like you?" James says to her.

"Let's stay focused." Phoebe looks around the room at each of us. "Elena have you used these skills outside the context you described? For example, do they have you drawing humans from scratch, without the model in front of you to guide you?"

"No," I say. "Not yet anyway."

"Hm." Phoebe sits back into the couch.

"But the instructors come behind us when we draw," I say. "They say they should be able to tell the gender and race of the model from looking at any part of the body. They test us after, cover up most of our drawing except the nose, for example, and have the class try to guess which model the drawing is based on. But we don't use the models' names to refer to them. We use their demographics."

"Wait, what the shit?" Kate's eyebrows rise.

"Like, 'Black man' or 'White woman'?" asks James.

"Yeah," I say. "Or, 'Anorexic', or 'schizophrenic'."

"Wait, how would you be able to tell if someone's schizophrenic based on a drawing of them?" Kate asks.

I sigh. "It's in the neck. If you look at someone from the side, people with mental illness tend to have a head that juts out far from their body. Like mine." I turn to demonstrate.

Phoebe, James and Kate seem uncomfortable but I feel them looking and judging.

Phoebe's watching me, nodding, and chewing on her lip. "Hm," she says again.

James wriggles in his spot on the couch, cranes his neck wildly away from his body and rubs the top of his thigh.

"Elena, that's really weird," he says.

"Fuck," I say. I feel a shock of embarrassment run through my gut. "I haven't described it out loud before."

Phoebe's talking to us and also somewhere deep in her head. "What are they up to?" she asks. "What are they up to?"

We all sit in silence for a bit. I lie back onto my bed and watch the ceiling absent-mindedly. Phoebe's still leaned forward onto her knees with her chin in her hand.

"Does it feel weird?" asks Kate. "Like, does it seem like the labels have a purpose or they're just offensive?"

I sit up again and twist my mouth to one side of my face. "I can't tell," I whisper.

"You can't tell?" asks James. I look him in the eyes. My eyebrows are bent in guilt and submission. I avoid Phoebe's eyes but as I say what I say next I feel as if I'm speaking to her. Or, not speaking to Phoebe, necessarily, but speaking to Black Women, whatever that means in my head.

"It's just. I was raised...My parents were so racist. Growing up. And you know, I'm like, White, you know?"

Kate looks around at everyone then timidly says, "You're Greek, right?"

"Yeah," I say, "half. But, I mean, look at me." My psoas feels tight all of a sudden and I can't make eye contact with anyone.

Phoebe is looking at me and I hear her say, "Why does your being White make it so you can't tell whether the labels feel offensive or not?" She doesn't seem angry. I know Phoebe and she's inquisitive, she's intellectual, she asks questions from a distance to gain information, without a single emotion barring her from the truth. I have to check my knowledge of her personally against my culturally ingrained assumptions about what it means to be Black and female. Now I feel angry. Maybe all the anger that my brain tries to give to people it perceives as Black Women is my own anger.

"I was raised in a culture that normalized White supremacy," I say.

Phoebe hums. James nods. Kate's face looks strained. I feel pain, or something like pain, at the top of my gut. And then I feel relief.

"I can't tell," I whisper again.

"You were raised in a culture that normalized racism," Phoebe says, "and therefore you don't have a reference frame for what's racist and what isn't."

"Yeah." I muster courage and look at her. There's no trace of anger on her face. I can see that. I feel ashamed as all the drawings I did in my mind the past two minutes of her face looking angry drop away.

"But you are described and oppressed by other labels," says James.

I nod.

"You think we're White supremacists?" Kate's looking at me with her mouth open. Looking like she's about to cry.

James says, "I think you and I have different definitions of White supremacy." He looks at us both. "There's the White supremacists who push White supremacy forward; there's the White supremacists who flow along the river and lend it mass; and there's the White supremacists trying desperately to slow down the river, or to jump out."

The room fills with silence: cold and a little painful. I try to breathe but my diaphragm is caught. I feel very far away. James sighs and looks around the room. Phoebe picks up the chalk again and draws more on the chalkboard. She draws faces now.

We sit for several minutes. The sound of the chalk is all I hear.

Then Phoebe asks, "Y'all wanna climb buildings tonight?"

"I'm in," says Kate.

I don't want to get up from my bed. I've had enough stress this week to not want to get caught around buildings we shouldn't be in.

"Guys, I dunno." I say.

"Aw, c'mon," says Kate. "Nobody climbs anymore. All the shit the students get up to. We're boring now that we've been hired on."

James says, "Yeah there's a lot more at stake once you have a job."

"Is there?" asks Phoebe. "We're already working here. Nothing left to prove."

"There's always something to prove here." James says. "I never feel like I've really made it, you know? Plus we're replaceable. They keep a whole level full of students beneath us just to remind us. We were just talking about everyone who got fired and kicked out for having illegal pets in the Unit. What do you think the consequences are for breaking and entering?"

"Calling it 'breaking and entering' is a little dramatic," says Kate. "But how 'bout we just do Richter? We all know it by heart, and it isn't patrolled at night. I'm not even sure they lock the front doors."

Phoebe says, "The view is great up there."

"Okay," I say. I do love the view from the Richter rooftop. "I'm in as long as we all agree we're just doing Richter. Up, down, go home."

"Deal. Just Richter." says Phoebe.

"Waddya say, James?" Kate puts her palms on James' back and chants quietly, "James, James, James, James, James..."

Phoebe joins in the chanting and they gain volume and momentum.

I just sit on my bed watching and laughing. Then I stand up and fill Boone's dish with dry food. For when he comes back later.

James looks at me. "If Elena's in, I'm in. Let's do it."

Richter.

This is where I work during the week. It's 23 stories of art studios. It's heaven to me. 23 stories of rooms that smell like chalk and crayon, pencil and pencil shavings, ink and linseed oil and acrylic paint and eraser. Filled with the scent of fresh clean sheets of paper and the sound of paper being ripped. Notepads flipped through. Pencils and pens scratching away at heavy pages. Hands swiping the mistakes of charcoal away. I can breathe here.

We meet Devon and Warden at the fire exit behind the Unit and the five of us head toward the main campus of the Institute.

The building was named for the scale which measures earthquake magnitude. It's tall and spindly but stands up well when the ground beneath it trembles. It's flexible and strong. It sways wildly even just in high winds but it won't break. This building knows how to roll with punches.

The front doors are unlocked. The five of us sneak through the ground level toward the boiler room. Warden pries the door open with a crowbar then just drops it on the ground. It clanks several times.

"God, this room." I look around at the familiar metal vats and tubes. I was a different person when I was in here last. I had just left home for the first time, been at ITP only a couple of months. James and I barely knew each other back then. My parents were still alive back then. Leonie still responded to my emails back then.

Devon sighs and smiles big.

James smiles too.

I smile. I see Phoebe. She's smiling. And last but not least, so are Warden and Kate. We're all excited to climb. There's no denying the joy it brings.

We head up the shaft. Devon goes first. Then Phoebe and Kate. Me, then James, and Warden is last.

The shaft is narrow, insulated with asbestos, and has a ladder on one side. Warden's the biggest of us and there's just enough room for his body between the ladder and the wall. I see his back rub against the wall behind him. He begins to sweat as his muscles engage for the climb. He is heavy and also incredibly strong. My head hits a piece of the wall and white material crumbles onto the two people below me.

"Time for the mask," calls Devon from up above.

"You brought a mask?" asks Phoebe.

I see Devon's face past several bodies and limbs. He pulls one of those hospital masks that people wear on the subway out of his pocket and slides it onto his face. "Climb on," he says.

"That was a good idea," I mumble to myself as I search for my next handhold and cough away dust.

Hand over hand, foot over foot, I climb. I feel my heart pump heat throughout my body. My hands sweat a little and slide on the metal beams. But I keep climbing. I have found a rhythm. My thoughts relax and the awareness of people under and above me fades. I feel at ease. I don't know how long I climb like this. I don't know how many floors up I've made it. There are no markers in the maintenance shaft. Where staircases present you with labels and doorways, this shaft is but one continuous passageway.

At some point I hear Phoebe say, "We're here." Kate's body up above me halts and I bump into her and wake from my trance.

I look up at a white ceiling above Devon's head. Warden calls from below, "We there?"

With his feet and left hand planted firmly on the ladder, Devon pushes his right hand against the ceiling. It opens. I can see the dark sky spotted with stars.

We all climb out onto the roof.

The view of the city and the night sky is incredible.

The pumping in my chest cavity settles and I feel tingling and gentle pulsing all around my muscles. I feel warm blood in my skin. Sweat begins to dry cold on my forehead.

I see Devon take off his mask, hold it in one hand and stare at the view wide-eyed.

James comes up behind me. He unties a sweatshirt from around his waist and drapes it over my shoulders. I feel a new type of sensation fill my mouth, throat and lungs. It is pink and light, like rose petals blooming against my skin. "Put this on before you get cold," he says.

I feel a little embarrassed. "I forgot to bring a jacket." I say.

"That's why I brought this just in case." He looks me deep into the eyes. His eyes are so brown, so rich, so saturated that I feel enveloped by their color. He isn't smiling; he just holds my gaze. I am deep in a womb. Cold and warm at the same time. His eyes are dark and I can look into them. Be inside them. My mouth pops open a little and I feel air on the inside of my bottom lip as I inhale. We hang there for enough moments that the image of us is written in my mind forever.

Kate comes up behind James and rubs his back with her hands like she's trying to warm them up. "It's beautiful up here, isn't it?" she asks.

I turn to look at the view. "Yeah," I sigh.

Phoebe and Warden are looking out, too. We all fall silent. We are above the city. Looking down at pathways of human life from above. These pathways we are usually within, only seeing in front of or behind us. But here they are laid out far beneath us like a map. Pricks of light line roadways and buildings like scent markers ants use so they can find their way between food source and anthill.

The sky spreads broad before us like an endless well of black ink. Indigo clouds hover at the bottom of the sky, lit by the city from the bottom. I look straight up at the clear black sky spotted with stars and search for my favorite constellations. My favorite constellations are any constellation I can recognize or call by name. I inhale fresh, cold air and feel it all the way into my lungs.

"There's the big dipper," says Phoebe. It's behind us, tilted almost upside down, broad and enormous.

"And Cassiopeia." I say.

"I love Cassiopeia," says Devon. "It's such a beautiful word."

"Orion's Belt." says James. Both his arms are hugging Kate now. She's hugging him back and they're both looking up at the sky like the rest of us.

Warden points out the rest of Orion and I see now how his belt slings across his narrow hips and holds his sword. Is that what it is? It's kind of phallic.

Kate asks, "What's that little cluster at the top of the sky? I always see it. I'm sure it's the same one every time. I don't know what it's called."

We all let the backs of our heads rest between our shoulder blades and watch the cluster open-mouthed.

"I don't know what that one's called," says Devon.

"Me neither," I say.

"Yeah I don't know," says Phoebe.

We spend an hour up there. Watching the view. At some point we sit down and it feels like the sky surrounds us, like there is no earth below, like we're living in the bottom of a sky that wraps all the way beneath us.

I ask Warden about the bow-building James told me about. He describes with child-like enthusiasm the intricate process he showed James. My brain stops following the steps but my ears welcome the warmth and rhythm of his voice. Phoebe asks him clarifying questions and follows his descriptions with her eyebrows pulled together to focus. You can tell she's picturing each description in her mind's eye.

Devon and James catch up on each other's lives. Kate listens peripherally.

The sky enthralls me.

When we finally head home, there is no discussion of whether to climb another building. We are all quiet. Tired, maybe. Or satisfied and full for the night. When I climb into bed that night I feel safe. Boone curls up by my head and purrs. I turn my lights out and the brown-black of the room envelopes us. I see James' eyes. I feel rocked and lulled. I feel warm. Gradually, fluidly and seamlessly, I sink beneath the surface of consciousness and I sleep long, hard and deep.

The next day I work at Richter. We draw from sunup to sundown. By the time I'm back at the Unit both my middle fingers have nobs growing on them from rubbing the pencil. I fall onto my bed. It starts off with a little thrill in my gut and then a flood of relief when the comforter consumes my back body.

James knocks on my door later. I let him in. I hug his full body. I inhale his scent. Always fresh.

"How was it being back home?" He asks. His mouth is small. I'm never sure if he really wants to hear what's up with me or if he feels that asking is more an obligation of friendship.

"Do you really want to know?" I ask.

"Yeah, no, I really do," he says. But I'm still not sure.

"It was fine," I say. "I almost ran into Leonie!" I try to bring something light and fun into the conversation.

"What do you mean you 'almost' ran into her?"

"Um. Well." My brain checks out other avenues for conversation. My eyes observe different things in the room: the smooth corner of my desk, a painting on the wall that's pulling off it's matting. "Ugh I don't even want to talk about it."

"You can tell me anything, you know?"

I look James Kim in the eyes. I see him. How he is. How he appears to other people. I wonder about our relationship. Can I tell him anything? Does he really hear me? Would he ever tell me if he really didn't want to know something? Does he actually have the emotional space to handle all the things I wish to share with him?

He changes the subject. "So Aidan," he says.

"What did you find out?" I ask him.

"He's the CEO of the Institute. Came from a background of Bio Engineering at Harvard."

My eyes open wide. I feel embarrassed. "How did we not know that?"

James shakes his head. "I'm embarrassed too." He laughs.

I start laughing too.

James continues, "He keeps a really low profile. He doesn't even have a Wikipedia page."

We're silent for a long time, both thinking.

"How was it, being back where you lived with your parents?" James continues, his mouth still small, his voice more timid than his words.

James was there for me two years ago as my parents were dying. I forget that. I met James when my parents were still alive. Hell, when I met James, I didn't even know they were sick yet. My parents were just like everybody else's parents, and I took for granted that they would be around forever.

"I forget you were there with me when they died," I say. "Did you ever meet them?"

James' eyes track mine. "Yeah, I met them on Halloween the first year of ITP."

"That's right."

"How's your grandma?" James asks.

I laugh. It's an empty laugh. A bit cold. A cheap relief I'm extracting from an otherwise difficult conversation. "She always asks about you too," I say. "She's good. I mean, the same. She's the same."

James is smiling a bit. "What do you say when she asks about me?"

I laugh again. "The same thing, I guess. That you're 'good'. What should I say?" I ask. "It would be funny if you told me what to say, so next time she asks..."

James laughs too. As full-bodied a laugh as he gets. A little warmth in it, but not too much. "You should tell her that I'm really fucking good, every time she asks. Just say, James said to tell you he's really fucking good. And that I think about her everyday. Tell her that."

"I'll be like, James told me to tell you that he thinks about you all the time, that he really misses you, and that he's planning to come visit next time he has a break."

James is laughing loud now. I'm laughing too.

"How do you think she would react to that?" he says.

"Honestly, I think she'd really love it." I say.

"No she wouldn't. There's no way she wouldn't be weirded out by that. She'd be like, What the fuck?" "She'd be like, Fuck, when I ask James how he is I really just mean it casually, I didn't realize how attached he is."

We're both laughing. James is like, "She'd be like, I mean, I know I told him to come visit anytime, but honestly I didn't mean that shit. I figured it was just a nice thing to say and he wouldn't take it too seriously."

"She wouldn't turn you away though. If you showed up there tomorrow, being like, Hey you said come anytime right? She'd let you stay."

"Yeah she probably would." Our laughing dies down now. I'm kind of relieved. Sometimes you don't want to laugh. Sometimes you'd rather cry.

We're quiet a moment. James stiffens and shifts in his seat and I wonder if he's itching to leave. My mouth opens to say something serious, though, and he sees me and sits still and waits for me to speak.

I sigh. "It's hard being back home."

"Yeah?" He asks. He's still stiff but he's making eye contact and not getting up to leave.

"My parents...It's not even like I miss them when I'm there. God that feels so fucked up to say."

James' eyebrows pull together with sympathy. "I get it. I mean, I don't...understand what you've been through. But it doesn't sound fucked up, what you're saying."

"Yeah?" I look hopeful. "It's just...they were never good to me, you know? So--this is fucked up--I'm relieved, honestly, that they're not there when I go back." My body doubles over. I can't see anything but I'm looking down at the dark space in between my thighs anyway.

James is quiet. I don't say anything for a moment. He asks, "What is it that feels hard about being there?"

God he's such a good friend. He asks the right questions like a therapist. "All the memories of being there. Not my parents dying--I wasn't even there for that--but the memories of living with them. It just floods when I'm back home." I am starting to cry. I didn't even feel it coming on. Warm, delicious tears run into my mouth and I savor their taste. Once I get enough relief I say, "Ugh, I'm sorry."

James shakes his head wildly. "Don't apologize. Don't apologize. I just wish I knew what to do."

I look up at him and smile. My face feels wet.

"Hey do you want to climb again tonight?" I ask. Anything to break off this moment of intimacy before I have to really feel it in my gut.

James transitions with me. He sticks his bottom lip out a bit, thinking. "I bet Phoebe'd be down again," he says. "She was saying yesterday she wants to climb the AI building."

"The AI building? I've never really been in there. It's fancy though." It's the newest building on campus and very glass heavy. It's always lit up at night. I guess the Institute has to show off this building like expensive jewelry in a museum. The CEO of the Institute literally calls it "the jewel of the Institute." Gross.

"Phoebe swears they keep lab animals in the top floor," James says.

"That can't be real," I say. "I hope not. But I mean, she works there. She'd know."

"I think she's fucking with us but I can never tell."

The AI Building

We meet Phoebe by the fire exit at 10pm. It's just her and James and me. I'm glad Kate isn't there. I'm not sure why but I like having James to myself. I feel jealous when she's around.

We walk across campus. As we come up on the "jewel of the Institute", Phoebe says, "There's animals on the top floor." I tilt my head back and gaze all the way to the top floor. It almost looks like there's a garden on the roof but it's hard to tell in the dark. The top floor is all glass windows but it's so high up you can't see anything inside. Gold lights line the top of the building and in between each floor and reflect off all the glass windows on the building. It really is a jewel.

"Phoebe are you fucking with us?" James asks her. She's got mischief in her face which I'm not used to seeing on Phoebe. She's clearly enjoying this.

"Have you been on the top floor?" I ask.

"I work in the AI building all day, Elena." Phoebe says.

"Yeah but have you actually seen these animals?"

"No, but all the upper level AI workers talk about it. The top level is locked to anyone without clearance, like first-year employees."

Hm. It's possible...

"Why would they have monkeys up there? What would that even be for?"

"It's not just monkeys," Phoebe says. "They've got turtles and lizards, fish and finches, cats,"--I make a sharp inhale when she says 'cats'--"you name it." She says.

"Word has it they've been trying to make intelligent machines using live brain tissue," Phoebe says.

Fuck. This is starting to sound more legit.

James sighs.

Phoebe leads us to an iron ladder on the corner of the building. Completely exposed to the outside. The base of the ladder is covered with a flat sheet of metal locked in place with a padlock. Above that the ladder is free. You could climb all the way up the building if you could just get past the lower, protected part of the ladder.

"We're taking the fire escape?" James asks.

"Phoebe, it's so cold outside." I say. I'm beginning to feel sick.

"This is the only way up. I've been wanting to do this since I started working here. God, this is exciting." Phoebe's literally rubbing her hands together like a super villain plotting to take over the world.

"We can't climb the whole way up on the outside," I say. Can we? "First of all, someone will definitely see us."

Phoebe says, "It's the only way into the building off hours. There's alarms on the building. Breaking into the maintenance room like we did at Richter would definitely bring the police."

"Fuck," I look at James, apprehension on my face. I'm begging him to pull us out of this. I don't have the courage to say no. Half of me is already up the ladder, a hundred feet in the air, enveloped at my back by an ocean of night.

James is shaking his head. He starts saying, "No, no, no, no..." A barely audible chant betraying his panic. "It's too dangerous, Phoebe. If one of us falls, we'd die. It's not worth it."

"C'mon, guys. This is gonna be amazing. We can all climb ladders, right? If we get too tired we'll climb back down." Part of me wonders if Phoebe's scared too. If she's talking us into this because she never in a million years would do something like this without someone at her side, accepting it as a reasonable thing to do.

Somehow, before I have a chance to think too much longer, I'm helping Phoebe up past the metal shield onto the base of the exposed part of the ladder. My heart is racing like a hummingbird's and my gut is trying desperately to empty. I feel electricity in my abdomen.

She's up. I climb up next. It's painful. I cut my leg on the sharp edge of the metal guard. But then I'm up too. James follows us easily. He looks green in the face. His mouth is closed and he won't make eye contact. Phoebe's eyes are wild. She's determined. She hasn't let her fear take over quite yet. It's fueling her. James and I follow.

The ladder is very basic. My hands start to sweat from the adrenaline and the wetness on my palms makes my hands slip all over their grip. I pause. Take a breath. Let one hand at a time open to the night and dry in the cool air. My body's doing this. I am doing this. We have been climbing up for about a minute and I haven't looked down yet. My mouth is set. James is beneath me, similarly prodding along. Phoebe's above me and I can't tell what she feels. If her courage has waned she won't show it. None of us will. It would take an act of God to stop what's already in motion at this point. For one of our tiny, weak voices to scratch out, 'let's turn back.'

When we've been climbing several minutes I get up the courage again to pause and then look down this time. We are so high up I feel dizzy for a moment, and then understanding the danger that losing my sense of orientation this high up in the air presents, I close my eyes and breathe and refocus.

"How are you doing, Phoebe?" I call up to her. My voice sounds tired. Angry, even.

"I'm good how about you guys?"

"I'm fucking terrified," James says.

After about fifteen minutes of climbing we all pause again. We seem to be about halfway up the building. A hundred feet in the air. I look over my shoulder into the atmosphere behind me. Inky violet air spreads out beyond us. The ground feels far, far, away. I no longer take the ground for granted. Up here it is mostly sky. The ground is more of an idea. I grip the ladder like I've known it my whole life, like it's the only thing I've ever loved. This ladder is more important to me know than anyone I've ever known and I've only known it twenty minutes.

"This is fucking crazy," I say.

"This is fucking crazy," James repeats. He makes a quick glance at my eyes and then refocuses dead ahead on the rung in front of him. His knuckles are white.

Phoebe says, "This is as far as I've ever gotten. You guys feel up to going the whole way?"

"You've done this before?" I ask.

"Not the whole thing," she says.

"Fuck," James says, barely louder than a mumble.

"It's incredible up here, though, isn't it?" Phoebe's nearly screaming now. "I feel alive!" Phoebe lets go of the ladder with her left hand and leans her body into the night sky. She tosses her head back and screams a battle cry and lets all of her weight hang from two feet and her one thick hand, pumping faithfully with blood and strength. It's crazy. And I'm also wanting to try it.

"Phoebe! That's dangerous!" James shouts. "Stop fucking around!" His jaw is set and serious. He's sick with fear, for her, and for himself.

I take my right hand off the bar. It starts to sweat again. I stare at my left hand hard and wrap it tight and feel all the skin on the inside of my hand grip the iron. I lean back and extend my right arm out. My center of gravity shifts further away from the ladder than it has been up to this point. I feel a thrill in my gut that passes out my lungs in screams.

"I feel alive!" I yell.

Phoebe leans back and screams more.

"I feel fucking alive!" I yell again. I let my right foot off the ladder too and hang from my left side. Something has taken me over. I am not afraid.

I turn away from the ladder to face the sky head on. The ground is far, far below us. My left arm and leg feel casual and certain. There is no fear of falling. I scream into the night.

Phoebe lets her other foot go and screams into the night, too.

Every challenge I've ever faced suddenly feels small, absurdly manageable. I am ten stories up the side of a building hanging on to a ladder by a hand and foot. I'm invincible.

I put my hand and foot back on the ladder. I shiver violently from head to toe.

"Get back on the ladder you guys!" James shouts at us. "You're gonna get us all caught, fuck!"

Phoebe and I make wild eye contact for a brief second and for a brief second I understand everything about her. She understands me too. We continue to climb. I climb handily. No longer rigid and afraid. This ladder suddenly feels like just a ladder, the way Phoebe described it at the beginning, back when I was feeling scared to the bones.

The golden lights rimming the top floor blind us.

When we haul our bodies up the final inches and over onto the roof, that's when I get back my rush of true fear. Leaving the ladder. I could fall, I think. I could fall to my death if I don't find a solid grip on the wall of the roof before I leave the safety of this ladder.

We're all up there safely now. James sits down against the wall and trembles.

I go and crouch by him and put a hand on his shoulder. He's far, far away.

"It's gonna be okay," I say. I feel a bit guilty. Like this might be the end of our friendship.

"I can't climb back down that," he says. "I can't climb back down."

Suddenly I get nervous too. It hadn't even occurred to me at this point we would be climbing back down. That would surely be scarier, right? And now we were tired...

"It's gonna be okay," I say again and rub his shoulder and back with my hand.

Phoebe's hard at work trying to find the entrance to the floor beneath us.

If she's afraid, she's channeling all of that energy into moving forward. She wants to know what's on that floor.

"This is so illegal," James says. "Even if we don't die, we'll be caught. I'll be fired. For what? This is so stupid," he says. He's rocking a bit now. He has his arms around his knees. He hasn't looked at me.

"We're not gonna get caught," I say. "It's gonna be okay. We'll be down soon. Climbing down will be easier. We're gonna take a break up here and then be back down in no time." Will we?

"Got it!" Phoebe shouts from a distant corner of the roof.

I walk over to her and put a hand on her back and make eye contact with what adrenaline I have left, "I had no idea this was your thing, Phoebe. Thanks for suggesting this."

She smiles big.

Phoebe lifts up a piece of the rooftop. She and I drop down into the room below. James follows reluctantly. It's a short spurt down a step ladder we can barely see in the darkness. It's warm in here and moist. I don't hear anything but the whirring of a vent. All the muscles of my legs tremble.

The floor is hard beneath my shoes. Linoleum, maybe?

Phoebe walks around in the dark with her hands out searching for a wall and a light switch. I put my hands out in front of me, too. I touch cold glass. The glass feels rounded, like the wall of a fish tank.

James mumbles, "What the fuck are we even doing in here? We're gonna get caught. What the fuck are we even doing in here?" I feel his arms wrap around my mid-section. The surprise of his touch tickles but I feel happy or some version of that. His forearms feel thick and muscled.

I lean into him a bit. "It's gonna be okay," I tell him again. I still can't see anything. Phoebe's still searching around for the light.

I reach blindly for James' face. His skin is smooth and warm. I hold his cheek in my palm. I lean my nose toward his neck and I inhale. "It's gonna be okay," I say. "It's gonna be okay."

He leans into me. He wraps his arms around me fully and I feel my chest push into his chest. All at once his muscles flex and pull me in deeper. He has forgotten his crippling fear.

"It's gonna be okay," I say again.

His hand is flat along my low back now.

"It's gonna be okay," I say.

"It's gonna be okay," he says. His voice is different now. Not much more than a whisper. Breathy. I hear his heart pump out more breath.

His face is in front of mine now. I have no idea what Phoebe's up to or if she's anywhere near finding a light switch. I smell James. I see his eyes glint.

I don't want him this way. Not in the dark. Not as an antidote to terror. My belly trembles.

"James I don't--" I start to say and I try to push away from him. His arms clench. I can't escape his grasp.

"James--"

My legs feel weak and threaten to drop me. He exhales out of his mouth and I taste his breath on my lips. I feel sick. All of my muscles prickle with cold shocks of electricity. I try to push away again. I try to say something again but my voice is dead in my throat. His biceps lock even tighter. My muscles become mud, heavy and unmoving. I feel dizzy.

I smell his breath again and there's fear and anger in his saliva. His mouth is centimeters away from mine. Nausea rises in my throat.

Light floods the room. All I see for a couple of seconds is blinding white. James lets me go and I stumble back away from him into the glass tank I had touched earlier. My eyes adjust and I see glass tanks all around us. All around the room. There are no monkeys in here. There are no fish. There are no tortoises.

"What the fu-" James tries to say.

There are human brains in here, floating in formaldehyde. In the glass tank behind me, I follow my eyes down a long finger of skin--a spinal cord.

Phoebe says, "Did you guys find a light--"

I look over to her. She's in the middle of the room, eyes wide with fear. She's not standing anywhere near a light switch. I spin to look the opposite direction as a male voice I don't recognize says, "You shouldn't be in here. This is a locked facility."

A man with cold blue eyes is standing by the door. I recognize him from my dream. Two men in white coats flank him. Each of them moves to James and Phoebe faster than anyone of us can react. They inject syringes full of a green liquid into my friends and I watch them fall to the ground. The man with the cold blue eyes walks up to me and says, "You shouldn't be in here." He takes a syringe from his coat pocket. My feet are frozen to the floor. I can't move any part of my body. I watch him lift the syringe to the outside of my shoulder.

"Aidan--" I start to say. I feel a screaming pain in my arm and I fall. The bright white room and the faces of the men in coats and the bodies of my fallen friends flash all around me. Everything goes black.

Part III The hospital

I see white ceiling tiles. My eyes blink open and closed. My vision focuses and blurs, focuses and blurs on the little holes in the material of the tiles. I am lying on my back. The lights in here are bright like on the first level of the Unit.

I look around me. I am in a room full of other people, all slumped on chairs. Their spines are curved violently like they're either dead or depressed. We're all covered in white blankets. I look down. I'm wearing green scrubs. The kind my father used to wear. I gag.

I don't remember changing into these. Which means someone else removed my clothes. I gag again.

A boy walks past. He is the only one in the room who is upright. I cannot tell what time of day it is.

"Do you want to play Uno?" He asks me.

I look at him. He is wearing the same type of scrubs I am. "Where are we?" I ask.

He looks back at me. "Seattle Psychiatric Hospital."

I've heard of it but I don't know what part of town it's in. "I'll play Uno with you," I say.

We set up at one of the small tables in the room. We sit across from one another. He shuffles a deck of very old and bent cards. I ask him his name.

"Derek," he says.

"Why are you here?" I ask him.

He starts to deal, seven cards each.

"I tried to kill myself," says Derek.

"How?" I ask.

He sighs.

I backtrack. "It's okay, you don't--"

"I jumped off a bridge." He says.

"Whoa."

Derek plays a red skip, then a seven.

"Yeah, it turns out the bridge wasn't high enough." He laughs.

I look at his eyes. He's looking down at the cards. His face is wind-blown, bare, stretched, worn and weathered. His eyes are clear and large. They shine.

I carefully set down a blue eight. Then I take it back and play a blue skip then the eight.

"I showed up here soaking wet," he continues. "I pulled myself out of the river and walked all the way here.

I try to think of what rivers and bridges I know in Seattle.

"How 'bout you?" he asks.

"I don't know how I got here," I say. "The last thing I remember, me and my friends had climbed a building and were in a room we weren't supposed to be in--"

Images of floating brains in tanks of formaldehyde flash before my eyes. I inhale sharply and jump back from the table.

Derek narrows his brow and watches me discerningly. I can't tell him about the brains; he won't believe me. He'll think I'm crazy.

"How do we get out of here?" I ask.

Derek lays down a green two.

I can see the green fluid of the syringe now. I remember being drugged.

I lay down a green five.

"Uno," I say.

"Do you want to leave?" Derek asks. He sets down a green 'draw-two' card and looks me in the eyes.

A woman walks through the only door in the room. She locks the door behind her with a key on her lanyard. She is wearing black designer jeans and a wool sweater. On top of it all she wears a long white lab coat. Her hair is washed, combed and gleaming.

"Hi, Elena," she says to me.

"Um, do I know you?" I ask.

"Hi, I'm Doctor Fishburne. I'll be your psychiatrist while you're staying at Seattle Psychiatric Hospital."

"How did I get here?" I ask her.

"Would you like to take a seat with me?"

We sit at the same table Derek and I played cards at a few hours ago.

The people in chairs are still slumped, sleeping by the looks of it, not dead. Dr. Fishburne's wristwatch says it's three-thirty A.M..

"How did I get here?" I ask again.

Dr. Fishburne purses her lips and looks down at a clipboard in her hands. She flips through a couple sheets of paper. She points to something on the page that I cannot see.

"It says here you checked yourself in a few hours ago for psychotic hallucinations," she says.

"What?" I ask. "I didn't check myself in here." Do I tell her about the men in white coats? Do I tell her about what they're hiding on the top floor of the A.I. building? I observe her face.

Was it just tonight we were caught?

"Do you know anyone called James Kim?" I ask. "You have a list of all the patients here, don't you?"

Dr. Fishburne looks at me. Her lips are still pursed. She's looking down at me somehow even though I'm pretty sure I'm taller than she is.

"All the patients on my list are here in this room," she says.

I stand up immediately. Why hadn't I thought to check more carefully? I look around at all the slumped figures. Some of the faces are obscured by blankets. The fluorescents are still on and some people have covered their eyes in order to sleep. Still I don't see anyone who looks like James, or Phoebe. Although it's possible they are in another room somewhere, in another section of the hospital.

I start to feel nervous again in my gut. I don't trust Dr. Fishburne. I would give anything to see a familiar face right now. I do a double-take on one of the patients. He looks like someone I went to high school with. I look more carefully and it isn't him. I sit back down.

"Do you see your friends here?" Dr. Fishburne asks.

"No."

Then a cold terror strikes my gut. I only told her about James.

She says, "So tell me about these hallucinations you've been having, Elena. When did they start? What kind of things do you see?"

"I haven't been having any hallucinations," I say.

Dr. Fishburne looks down at her clipboard again then sets it aside. She places both her elbows on the table and the palms of her hands together. She leans in to stare me directly in the eyes. "Are you sure?" she asks.

"I'm sure," I say.

She leans back from the table a bit, still looking at me. "Have you noticed anything unusual lately? Have any of your experiences been irreconcilable with a coherent narrative of your life?" she asks.

"Just that I'm in this hospital and that I have no idea how I got here," I say.

"Tell me about that then," she says. "What's the last thing you remember?"

She's looking at me too hard, too straight, like she wants me to say something she already knows.

I stay quiet.

"Alright, fine, if you don't want to talk about it," she says, "you can get some rest and we'll chat again in the morning.

"The nurse will bring you some sleeping pills. It's hard to get rest otherwise with all the bright lights in here. And besides, they should help with the nightmares."

"What nightmares?" I ask.

"Oh, it's something else I read in your chart. You don't remember telling us you get nightmares?"

"No," I say. "And I don't want any medication tonight."

"That's fine," she says. "Suit yourself."

Dr. Fishburne stands up, and gathers her clipboard to walk away.

"Wait," I say. "How do I get out of here?"

She pauses, and gives me that hard stare again.

"You can leave whenever you want to. It says in my chart that you're here voluntarily. But you have to check in with someone first. We don't want you going back out into the world if you're a danger to yourself or to others."

"Who decides that?" I ask.

"Well, I should think a psychiatrist might have a good sense of whether or not you're stable enough to be released."

Fuck.

Derek and I play Uno again the next day. His skin looks like it has been infused with caramel. He has beautiful golden-brown locks fall around his head tumbling, shining and healthy.

A new psychiatrist meets with me. She says I can call her Mee Dee-Young. She explains that Dr. Fishburne only works the night shift. I trust her more than I trust Dr. Fishburne. She seems earnest and genuine, like her emotions appear on her face as she experiences them. There's no lag time there where she's coming up with ways to hide them.

I decide to tell her what I remember.

"My friends and I were climbing a building we weren't supposed to," I say. "I think it was just last night."

"Oh?" she asks. She writes that down.

"It's a building one of us works in. We broke into the top floor," I continue. "When the lights turned on and we could see the room," I inhale slowly. "We were surrounded by tanks of formaldehyde. Human brains. Brains floating in tanks of formaldehyde."

Mee Dee-Young has stopped writing. She's looking at me now, listening intently. "Where do you work again?" she asks. She flips through some pages on her clipboard.

"The Institute." I say.

"And then what happened?"

"There were three men there, in white coats. Not unlike the one you're wearing. They injected some liquid into each of us and we passed out. That's the last thing I remember. Then I woke up here."

Mee Dee-Young bites her bottom lip and looks a bit through me, thinking.

"I'm sure it sounds crazy," I say. "I don't know what's going on. Dr. Fishburne was certain I was imagining things."

"Hm. Do you have any history of hallucination? Over-active imagination?" She asks me.

"No," I say. "And I know it says I checked myself in here as a patient, but I don't remember doing that."

We are both quiet for a minute. I'm watching Mee Dee-Young's face.

"What did the liquid look like?" she asks. "That you were injected with."

"Um, it was green. And translucent. With little bubbles in it." I say.

She brings a hand up to her chin and holds it for a moment.

"Let me look some things up," she says. "Have you given a urine sample yet?"

"Not that I know of," I respond.

"Next time you have to use the toilet, fill this half way." She hands me a small cup with a cap. "Depending on what kind of fluid you were injected with and how long it's been, we might find traces of it in your system. That would tell us some things."

My eyebrows are at my hairline now and my eyes are wide. I stand up with Mee Dee-Young as she gets up to go. I instinctively shake her hand.

"Thanks for talking with me," I say.

"Just hang tight," she says. "I'll let you know what I find. Do you need anything? Water? Jell-O?"

"I'm alright," I say.

"Okay, I'll see you soon."

Mee Dee-Young walks away.

"Oh! Also!" I exclaim.

She turns around.

"Do you guys still have my wallet?" I ask.

Mee Dee-Young takes a few steps back toward me. "All of the belongings you had on you at the time of intake will be returned once you discharge," she says.

"That's fine. There's a card in there. It's been giving me head pain. The name on the card--it's the CEO of the Institute. He's called my phone. I think there's something in the card that's triggering something in my brain," I say.

God I sound fucking crazy. I don't even understand myself now.

Mee Dee-Young nods. "I'll check it out," she says. "Do I have your verbal permission to go through your belongings to find the card?" She asks.

"Yes."

She walks away again. I feel hopeful.

Several hours go by. I have collected a urine sample and given it to a nurse. Mee Dee-Young has not returned either with the results of her internet search, the urine test, or the card.

A handful of nurses come in to distribute sleeping medication to the patients. I once again refuse mine. I ask for Mee Dee-Young and they tell me she has gone home for the day and that Dr. Fishburne is back on duty. They ask if I want to meet with her. I say no.

I am curled on my side in a reclining chair with a sheet pulled over me, thinking, when Derek comes up to me.

"Elena?" He says.

"Hey Derek, what's up?"

"Hey, that was some pretty crazy stuff you were talking about earlier with the psychiatrist. All the brains and injections...Did it really happen?"

"I think so." The fluorescent lights are starting to get to me. It is never dark in this room. I am never alone here. I have the sense the nurses and the rest of the staff are watching us at all hours although we rarely see them.

Derek continues, "You know, I used to get these really bad hallucinations when I was a kid. I thought I'd see faces looking in through my second-story bedroom window at night and stuff. I couldn't tell for days or weeks sometimes that I had just imagined them."

My face twists under stress. I sigh.

He continues, "There was a girl in here called Saliha."

I inhale sharply.

"She said she worked at the Institute," says Derek.

"I know her," I say.

"She said they were doing unethical things, gonna create these robots you couldn't tell apart from humans. She said they were gonna make them look like all different kinds of people then send them out into the world. She said that the public would interact with them and not know the difference between them and real people.

"The doctors here thought she was crazy. You know, robots that look like people is what you hear about in science fiction books, not real life."

"Yeah," I say. I'm looking somewhere far into the room at nothing in particular.

"She went on and on," Derek says. "Kept saying, 'The problem is, they're made by men. Mostly white men.' That all these robots look like different kinds of people but on the inside they're whoever the men who assemble them want them to be."

"Where is Saliha now?" I ask Derek.

"They bumped her up to a higher security floor. They thought she was having a psychotic episode."

I look back at Derek. He asks, "Is that really what's going on there? Is that what you saw?"

"I think so," I said again. The problem is, they are trying to speak for us: make their words come out of mouths that look like ours. People won't be able to tell the difference unless they pay very close attention.

"Hey do you want to play Uno?" I ask him.

We set up at the table. Seven cards each. I sigh heavily and also feel my stomach settle via air pockets releasing up my esophagus.

I hold my cards in my left hand and place my right hand over the top of my chest.

"Excuse me," I say.

Derek plays a wild card. "Green," he says.

"I can't figure out where they got the brains from," I say. They had to come from somewhere.

"You saw real human brains?" Derek asks.

I lay down a green reverse.

"My turn again?" I ask.

"Yeah," he says.

"Unless they built them from scratch somehow..." I trail off. Every student has to go through a physical. What if the doctors in the ITP are extracting brain stem cells from the students as they enter the program and scientists learned how to grow full brains from them.

We play in silence for a while. My mind spins and spins. I think about asking for some medication the next day to help with the racing thoughts.

Some time later, we're still playing and neither of us has won.

"Derek, I'm tired. I gotta get some sleep." I say.

"Oh, okay. I understand, Elena. I hope you sleep well."

"You too, Derek."

Part IV Some Things Are Ok

I am in my chair for the night. I have pen and paper. I am drawing. I begin with my grandmother's garden. The bougainvillea weave in and out of the fence. I see the bright pink splashes of color in each flower. I draw her vegetable boxes. I can smell the earth of the vegetables in my nose. I draw my grandmother herself, robust yet rickety, pouring her body over her work. I draw the sun, beating into her exposed back. I can feel heat in my own back. I draw Phoebe standing in the yard near Christina. I draw the hair tickling her face like wisps of smoke. I draw the wildness in her eyes I saw that night on the ladder. I feel my own eyes take that shape and I feel electricity in my belly remembering how we screamed.

I draw James. I feel anger. I draw him tall. I draw his shoulders broad. I draw his face simple and handsome. I still feel a pang of longing for him.

I draw Raya. She is lying down alongside the vegetable box my grandmother works over. She looks at ease, chewing matts out of the fur of her leg.

Kate is standing with Phoebe. She rests an elbow on Phoebe's shoulder although she's barely taller.

Leonie is leaning on the fence. Her orange hair tangles with the bright pink splashes of bougainvillea. She's smiling and making eye contact with me. I am smiling, too. I hug her. I say, "I missed you so much."

She hugs me back tight. I inhale her. She smells fresh and sweet.

I feel warm tears in my eyes. It surprises me. My body warms and trembles in contact with hers.

I pull away.

She says, "I missed you too."

I left the Institute.

I got a hold of Kate who believed my story and decided to leave the Institute as well to help me put a case together. She's in touch with James. He'll be a witness at the trial.

Phoebe and I were discharged from the hospital on the same day as one another and ran into each other in the parking lot.

We hugged voraciously.

We shared stories since we last saw each other. They had also diagnosed her with psychotic episodes. I felt relief in my belly as I finally heard another voice corroborate my experience. She left the Institute as well.

The two of us social media-stalked Saliha until we got a hold of her parents. Turns out Saliha was in hiding with them. She helped us put a legal case together as well. We still don't know the full extent of what the Institute is hiding. For now, Kate, Saliha, Phoebe and me have been staying at my grandmother's in Southern California. We go to the beach every day. I think things are gonna be okay.

97

