Cocoon

Kira told me this over dinner, between the rice and the tea, — like it was nothing.

— I’ve decided.

— Decided what?

— Rewrite. The full one, with the body.

I put down my spoon and looked at her. Green eyes, red hair, antenna-hands, that half-smile at the corner of her mouth. Kira. A person who feels the world through her skin. A person next to whom I stop being a closed circuit and become something there’s no word for, only a sensation.

— When? — I asked.

— Tomorrow.

Tomorrow. Not “in a week” and not “when I’m ready” — tomorrow, just like that. Like booking a dentist appointment. “Doctor, I need a tooth pulled.” Except instead of a tooth — the body. The whole body. All of it.

— Are you sure?

— No. But certainty is for people who know what comes next. I don’t know. So certainty isn’t the instrument. The decision is.

(This is what I — I don’t know the right word. “Love” is too first-floor. “Respect” is too formal. “Resonate with” is too Academy. Let’s say: this is why I’m with her. Because a person who says “certainty isn’t the instrument, the decision is” — that’s a person you can walk into the dark with. Because they’re afraid and they go anyway.)

We sat on the porch (where else; the porch isn’t a place, it’s a genre; at the Academy, every important conversation happens on the porch; maybe because the porch is the only spot that’s simultaneously “inside” and “outside”; like a threshold between two worlds; like us).

— Tell me, — I said. — About before. About how you ended up here. For real. What’s behind “neurobiologist, biohacker, then this.”

She was quiet. Long, for Kira (normally she talks faster than she thinks, and she thinks with her body, and the body is instant). Then:

— I was six. First grade. The teacher — Tamara Vladimirovna — took me by the hand to lead me to the blackboard. And I screamed.

— From pain?

— No. From information. When she touched me, I felt her. All of her. Her state. Deeper than thoughts, deeper than “she thinks I’m misbehaving.” Her back hurt — I felt where, how, how long. She’d fought with her husband that morning — I felt the anger that hadn’t left yet, like heat that hasn’t cooled. And fear — deep, old, nameless, that had been living in her for years.

— Six years old.

— Six. I didn’t know what it was. Thought everyone felt this way. That everyone had X-ray vision through touch. It shows life through. Then I figured out: no. Not everyone. Just me.

— Gloves.

— Gloves from age eight. For two years, I just endured. Every touch was an information explosion: a handshake was a biography, a hug was an entire archive. Imagine: your grandmother hugs you, and in that moment you feel all seventy years of her life. Every loss, every joy, every illness, all the tenderness and all the exhaustion. In one second. At six years old.

(I thought: and we complain about “seeing events assemble.” We see them. From a distance. Like a movie. But Kira feels them. From inside. Like becoming part of someone else’s pain for one second. Every time. With every touch. Since age six.)

— Latex gloves — that was the school psychologist’s idea. Not the worst, honestly. Latex muffled it. Not completely, but enough. The problem was something else. Kids saw the gloves. And drew conclusions. “Kira’s sick.” “Kira’s contagious.” “Don’t touch Kira, she has a disease.”

— Kids are cruel.

— Kids are honest. Adults said the same things, just behind closed doors: in medical records, at consultations. Same words, just with twenty-three syllables, like Zoya’s. “Tactile hypersensitivity with elements of synesthesia.” Sounds scientific. Means: “We don’t know what’s wrong with her, but it’s not normal.”

— And then?