Chapter 5: Foreign Body

I woke because something cold was lying against my face.

For the first second, I understood nothing except the cold. There was no darkness of the waiting room. No table. No Devil with a document in his hand and the calm of a man who had just sold someone a disaster in elegant packaging.

There was a stone under my cheek.

Small, sharp, wet.

I was lying on my stomach. The earth smelled of rot, water, and something green crushed right under my nose. Hair stuck to my mouth. Not my hair. Too long. Too fine. Full of sand and tiny bits of grass.

I tried to breathe.

The air came in too shallow.

A cough tore out of me, sudden, dry, and high. So high that for a moment I forgot about the cold.

That was not my voice.

I lifted my head.

The world tilted at once, as if someone had taken hold of the horizon and yanked it sideways. My stomach cramped painfully. In front of my eyes were grass, mud, gray sky, and my own hand.

I stopped at that hand.

It was too small.

Not a little. Not like a hand after illness, thin and pale. Small in a basic, structural, non-negotiable way. The fingers were shorter, the knuckles finer, the nails narrow and dirty with earth. The skin on the back of the hand was light beneath the mud, thin, stretched differently than mine. It did not have the two old scars I had known so well I had stopped noticing them.

Had known.

As him.

As her.

Even the language inside my head had become the scene of an accident.

"No," I said.

The voice again. Foreign. Childlike. Roughened by cold, but thin, not mine, not mine, not mine.

I sat up too quickly.

That was a mistake.

The body was lighter than it should have been, and at the same time worse to operate. Its center of gravity had moved somewhere my brain did not yet have on a map. My hands sank into wet earth, my knees hit stones, my spine folded instinctively against a gust of wind.

That was when I understood I was naked.

Not the way a person understands nakedness in a mirror, in a bathroom, in someone else's gaze. This came practically, brutally. The cold had no imagination. It entered under the skin without asking, plastered mud to my stomach, stung my thighs, bit my shoulders, pressed itself between my toes. I was naked because I had no pockets. No jacket. No shirt, phone, keys, wallet, or that stupid shopping bag that had been cutting into my fingers a moment ago like proof that my life consisted of things to be carried home.

I had no home.

That thought was too large, so the body chose a smaller one.

Phone.

I began patting my sides, my hips, the ground beside me, with the desperate stupidity of a person who knows he has lost something in a place where it could not possibly be. Phone. Pocket. Jacket. Anything. My hand fell into a clump of grass, then into cold mud. A nail caught on a root. I hissed.

My own voice answered me with thin pain.

"Calm down," I told myself.

The words sounded so absurd I almost laughed.

It did not come out.

Instead of laughter came breath, too fast, torn up. The small chest worked like something trapped in a fist. I tried to pull the air deeper, but the body would not accept the old instructions. Everything had a different capacity. Lungs. Throat. Ribs. Fear.

I looked down only as much as I had to.

A child's body.

Not metaphorically. Not as some cruel joke on the words "the beginning." The body of a girl, slight, cold, dirty, scratched by grass and stones. Its knees were bony. Its elbows sharp. Its feet small and blue with cold. Wet strands of hair fell over my shoulders.

I did not look longer.

Not because there was anything shameful there. Because I could not bear the fact that everything I was looking at belonged to me now.

"You son of a bitch," I whispered.

The wind took the sentence without interest.

The Devil did not answer.

Of course he didn't.

It took me three tries to stand.

The first time, my hands slipped in the mud. The second time, the body did something idiotic with its hips and knees, like a badly assembled folding chair, and I fell onto my side. My shoulder hit the ground. The pain was sharp, real, immediate.

The third time, I rose slowly, on all fours first, then with one foot under me, then the other, swaying like a drunk person, except I had been drunk before and knew how that worked. This was worse. This was being sober inside someone else's machine.

I stood.

For a moment, that was the entire victory.

Around me stretched a slope covered in grass, low bushes, and patches of dark, wet earth. A few steps lower down, trees began. Not a forest from a tourist brochure. No even trunks, no educational trail, no bench with a sponsor's plaque. The trees grew like people in a crowd, too close together, crooked, with branches tangled as if they had spent their whole lives getting in one another's way and had learned to live with it.

Beyond them, the ground dropped into a broad valley.

The sky was low and heavy. Clouds hung over the world in dirty layers. The sun must have been somewhere to the left, behind them, because everything had a cold, sideways light, without the shadow of a city, without reflections in glass, without an orange glow on the horizon.

I could not hear cars.

That was the first missing sound that truly frightened me.

Not silence. Silence is never empty when a person is under open sky. There was wind in the grass. Something small moved in the bushes. From far off came the steady noise of water, a river or a stream, larger than a puddle, smaller than a sea. Somewhere high above, a bird cried out.

But I could not hear a city.

No engines, brakes, sirens, tram on a bend, dog barking behind a wall, someone swearing under a window, airplane, fan, refrigerator, elevator, nothing that had built the background of my whole life and pretended to be silence.

I stood on the slope and heard a world without electricity.

That sentence came so clearly that for a moment I believed that if I could name it, I still controlled something.

Then I shivered.

My teeth clicked together. Small teeth. Different. Even the jaw was not mine.

I had to cover myself.

That was the first practical conclusion of my new life. Not: who am I. Not: where am I. Not: how many thousands of years had just closed a door in front of me or behind me. Only: if I stood like this, I would grow dangerously cold or fall ill, and if the promised immortality worked, then perhaps it would be worse, because I would not die quickly, only suffer for a long time.

The thought was so reasonable it made me nauseous.

I looked around for anything. Clothing. Cloth. A sack. A blanket. A plastic bag with a shop logo, which in another life I would have considered trash and now would have accepted as a revelation.

Nothing.

Grass. Stones. Bushes. Wet earth.

I picked up a large leaf from the ground. It was broad, torn at the edge, slick with water. I pressed it uselessly to my shoulder, then to my stomach, then let it fall. A single leaf does not solve nakedness. That was knowledge a person acquires quickly and without satisfaction.

I found a branch with broad leaves, broke it, cut my hand, swore again in that thin, hateful voice. I tried to weave a few branches together, but my fingers were going numb and my hands had no strength. After two minutes I was holding a heap of wet green that refused to be clothing, a tool, or even a decent metaphor.

I threw it onto the ground.

"Well done," I said.

That sounded a little like me.

Only a little.

I closed my eyes.

The waiting room had been dry. That was the first treacherous memory. Dry and artificial, with the smell of linoleum. If I opened the door, I would see the same waiting room on the other side. If I pressed the handle enough times, perhaps eventually something would change. If I had not signed. If I had asked differently. If I had stabbed the Devil in the eye with the pen, which probably would not have worked, but at least gave the imagination a small pleasure.

I opened my eyes.

There was no door.

There was, instead, a mark on the ground.

For a moment my heart leapt stupidly, because I saw a hollow in the mud and thought: a person.

I bent down.

It was my foot.

Small, narrow, printed crookedly, with toes splayed from cold and panic.

I do not know why that broke me.

Not the voice. Not the body. Not the lack of clothes. Only that print.

My foot had never left a mark like that. For thirty years I had walked through the world at a certain size. I bought shoes without thinking, sometimes bad ones, sometimes uncomfortable ones, but mine. I knew the length of my stride, the weight of my heel, the way snow gives under an adult human being. And now the mud was showing me proof simpler than a mirror.

Someone small was standing where I had stood.

I sat back down on the ground, though it was wet.

Then the tears came.

Without elegance. Without narrative restraint. The child's body cried faster than I wanted. The face twisted by itself. The throat tightened into a narrow, painful channel. I tried to stop, because crying solves nothing, which is one of those sentences people repeat when they do not want to look at someone else's helplessness.

Crying solves one thing.

It proves there is still something inside putting up resistance.

So I cried, with mud on my knees and hair in my mouth, until I ran out of strength for noise. After that, only trembling remained.

My mother.

The thought came quietly.

Not in a dramatic flare. Not as a face in the sky. Just: my mother sitting somewhere in her apartment, perhaps already worried, perhaps not yet, with her phone on the table and a message that had been supposed to be unimportant. Call when you can. Nothing urgent.

I could not.

Not now. Not tomorrow. Not in a year.

Even if I lived longer than all her possible graves, I could no longer call her back.

That was the first real price of the pact.

Not the girl's body. Not the cold. Not the mud. Those things were cruel, but present, tangible, still something one could scream at.

The price had the shape of a phone that was not there.

I stood up before that thought could cover me completely.

Movement helped. Not well, but a little. If I walked, I had to think about feet. About stones. About not stepping on sharp branches. Practical problems are sometimes a mercy, because they do not allow you to fall apart too poetically.

First I went uphill.

Not because I had a plan. Simply because from a higher place you can see more. It was one of those banal truths a person from the twenty-first century can take into an age without power and still not feel any smarter for it.

The slope was steeper than it looked. The grass slid under bare feet. Stones dug into my soles. Every few steps I had to grab at bushes, and the bushes repaid me with thorns. Skin split easily. Too easily. Red lines appeared on my forearms, calves, hands. The pain was small but stubborn, like someone knocking on a door that cannot be shut.

After ten meters, I had had enough.

After twenty, I hated everything.

After thirty, I understood that a child's body was not only a social problem, not only a foreign voice and shame before my own reflection. It was a lack of reserve. A lack of strength in the thighs. A shorter step. A smaller hand that held branches badly. Faster breath. A heart hammering too quickly under the ribs, as if it had been given a task on an adult scale and had not read the instructions.

"Immortality," I gasped.

The word fell from my mouth bitter and funny.

Immortality did not help with climbing a hill.

It was a small discovery, but an honest one.

At the top there was no top. Only a less steep stretch of slope, several larger stones, and a crooked tree that grew sideways, as if the wind had spent years persuading it to change its mind. I leaned against the trunk and for a while breathed with my forehead pressed to the bark.

The bark was rough.

Real.

I hated that everything was real.

When I finally lifted my head, I saw the valley.

It was enormous.

Not in a mountain-postcard sense. There were no dramatic peaks or cliffs. It was enormous because it had no end marked out by human beings. Grasses became forest, forest became marshland, marshland became a wide band of river shining in the distance like cut metal. Beyond the river there were more trees. Farther still, hills. Farther still, gray sky.

I looked for straight lines.

It came instinctively.

Roads.

Fences.

A high-voltage pole.

A roof.

The white wall of a house.

Brick.

A mast.

Anything that would betray people who build things at right angles because they believe the world should adjust to them.

There was nothing like that.

My eyes tried to cheat. That pale strip could be a road until it moved in the wind and turned out to be grass. That dark point could be a hut until it turned its head and vanished into the bushes as an animal. That smoke? No. Cloud, shadow, something too far away. I stared at the horizon so long my eyes began to water from the wind.

From that place, I could not see a city.

The sentence entered me more calmly than panic.

I could not even see a village.

I could not see a road.

I could not see a bridge over the river.

I could not see wires above the ground or contrails in the sky. There was no distant hum of civilization, the thing I had taken all my life as something natural, like gravity. There was no sign that anywhere beyond that forest there existed a shop with a cracked baguette, a mother with a phone, a stairwell, a drawer with bills, a man in wet shoes who had been going home.

Only I remained.

No.

Even that was no longer certain.

I sat by the crooked tree and wrapped my arms around my knees. I wanted to reduce the surface area of my body, as if by doing that I could exist less. The wind moved the grass in waves. Down below, the river murmured indifferently, old or young, hard to say. For a river, a few thousand years did not have to be much of a difference.

For me, it was everything.

The sun, hidden behind clouds, began to sink. The world was not darkening yet, but it lost the last of its daytime warmth. Gooseflesh rose on my arms. My toes hurt so much I had to curl them.

I had to go lower. Find shelter. Water. Something dry. Anything.

I knew that.

I did not move.

Because from where I sat, I could see enough to stop lying.

I was not in a hospital.

I was not in a coma.

I was not in some woods outside a city, where you can walk to a gas station, steal an emergency blanket, and ask someone to call for help. There was no phone. No help. Not even a shared language in which I could ask for it, if the Devil had told the truth about the beginning.

Before me lay a world without my name.

Behind me, there was no road left.

That was when, for the first time, I truly understood what I had signed.

***Download NovelToon to enjoy a better reading experience!***