Snug in wet dark belly-warm. Thup, thup. Heartbeat above like an auditory sun. This is the intimate work of the species without end, to find a way in, mouthwards, welcomed and chewed and swallowed and threshing invisible intelligent eggs in stomach. The tapeworm is minuscle in the beginning. Sloshes about in hydrochloric acid. Eyeless mindless breathless. Enzymes nipping at egg-ness. Thup thup, concussive booms of mystery-heart above it, who-what-when-where. How innocent it is in the beginning. Thoughtless of its location in the universe, the preferences and insecurities and grievances of the person it wakes within, female male, old or young or some age between. Scorched into hatching it passes stomach to upper intestine to lower, waves of peristaltic contractions kneading nutrient-rich mash zigzag from stomach to rectum. Halfway dark to dark the wormling catches. Grips and burrows. Through a faint tear in intestinal lining it slips into a beyond floating middle-world. 

Trial and error. Birth procreation death, repeat repeat. Inside and that much it knows. Algorithms of instinct driving very specific preordained decisions. Before the creature’s even alive it’s wormishness has been determined and its habits are unfolding. Eyes closed sitting on the edge of her bed, Jen imagines this very hypothetical specimen. Palm of left hand resting on belly, palm of right lying atop it. Both hands lightly pressed as if under spell of first motherhood and searching for feel of a kick or second heartbeat. Like people. A singular genetic marker for each but who thinks it? Each tapeworm grows hybrid through mature adulthood, representative of a long evolutionary history, one of a silent trillion, quintillion, but the first of a kind also. This particular creature. This scolex distinctly its own. These suckers. These proglotids. Quintillions prior this modest birth in a host body have bred and shed eggs and passed the secret forward, whispering one to the other, forever a step ahead of extinction. There. There, can picture it. Attached to supple intestinal flesh. Dangling. Noodlesque. From barbed bulb of scolex tail meandering doodle-like among other innocent neighboring organs. So this is her private perfect little monster, an inner dragon of sorts. Resembles a bit a Chinese dragon. But grubbier, uglier. Truly a whisper. One generation to another to another to another. Until this specific creature wakes inside this specific person sitting on the edge of her bed on a Sunday evening, nearly middle of North America, December. Only way it could survive the cold. Stealing indoors. Then feeding off it. 

Jen opens her eyes. Room bright around her. The lights are on. Electricity traveling through miles and wires to illuminate a bedroom. Carter her husband and Lucy her daughter downstairs sings something she can’t quite place, wordless, melody bouncy cheerful. The tapeworm no more. Just something imagined. Still, it was good metaphor. Codependency. Feeding a long mouth happy to eat whatever of herself she might offer. 

WIP [Wound Man]

 
He sat in the room where the nurse practitioner had left him, white walls and plastic chairs, an illustrated diagram of the human ear decorating the wall. Here he would wait with his injuries and ailments, long overdue for a check-up. Once every hundred years he scheduled an appointment with his doctor, the doctor different every time. Between visits his physicians had a habit of growing old and dying, so he was forever scheduling with younger and younger versions of the same. Sadly human lifetimes, being short, could hardly accommodate his needs, for he was deathless and eternal. To offset the inconvenience of all that, he was often intrigued to learn through the doctors of certain advances in treatment and prevention. So much had changed since those crude early days when he’d first been stitched together by an artist’s hand for purposes of illustrating varieties of malady that might beset a human body in the Middle Ages. No more leeches, no more trepanning a skull to relieve it of humors. Medicines reliably targeted illnesses they were purportedly most effective at treating, so rarely would a patient die from a doctor’s efforts to heal them. On the counter of this white room, he noted, was a box of fresh latex gloves, sterilized instruments. Heralds from an inconceivable future he was already living. None would have been found in a medieval apothecary. 
Good, the nurse had said, pressing the stethoscope to his heart. Pumping the wrapping around his bicep full of air, she timed the thump-thump of heartbeats to gauge blood pressure. Systole, diastole, she told him, all normal. With an otoscope she checked his eyes, with another instrument scrounged around in his ears. All his vitals appeared to be functioning well, news that didn’t surprise him. What was surprising was her humdrum demeanor, as if he were just the usual sort of patient, didn’t see the horrible wounds that sprouted all over him, head to toe. This was new, this blindness. Or no, wait, he considered, maybe it wasn’t so much a matter of her not beholding the obvious but that his wounds had become so subtle as to become invisible. It could be this was something else that had changed since his last appointment with a physician, people had grown so accustomed to looking for specific ailments they tended to look past the general affliction. Finished with the examination, she peeled gloves off her hands, dropped them into a silver shiny waste bin which opened when she stepped to a pedal attached to its base, strange invention! She typed notes into a kind of paperless typewriter, another novelty. The doctor would be with him soon, she told him before leaving. When the door closed, he sat listening to the mumbles of other such conversations through the walls. Could it be he was finally healing, no longer a monstrosity? Over the past several hundred years he’d become used to turning the stomachs of poor souls who had to look upon him, attend to his many gaping, weeping wounds. 
He looked around the room. Peaceful, unbothered by nature, wind or rain, door closed to secure his privacy. It had been storming outside when he’d entered. Before he stepped through the double glass doors into the waiting room, he couldn’t remember who he’d been, what had brought him there. Unconsciously, as he’d been many many times before, he’d more than likely been carried along by one life or another, one person or another, then had caught a pain, a weakness, so scheduled a meeting with a doctor. Then drove to the office, parked in its lot, rushed umbrellaless with head bowed through the downpour to push open the door. Then stepping indoors had slipped from the curse of perpetual amnesia to remember himself, awareness snapping into place instantly as the door eased closed behind him. Here he was. Where was he? At another doctor’s office, apparently, in some other century. Ill as he has always been but more numerous in the illnesses he carried. There to meet with a knowledgable representative of the medical profession, to be assessed then told what new forms of awfulness he bore within him, a living example of how one person might survive despite themselves. 

Excerpt

 These sentences glimmering in the wake of some live thing, they stand out against the dark. I’m often moved to copy them down in my own hand, for pleasure of inching forward like a snail, one word then another, then all of them lying together in a line, shimmering with bioluminescence. 
Here’s one. It’d existed for nearly a century but I hadn’t become aware of it until yesterday. There is another world, but it is in this one. Simple, resonant, secreted by which creature and for what reason? Studying it more closely, I might infer a few humble details about why it would leave this particular trail behind it. Once I had determined those, I might add to my own storehouse of intuitions about that very question, For what reason? 
I read it, wrote it out, threaded it through my nervous system. There. Now it was no longer something outside of me. Now it was part of me and as a result slightly changed. Re-reading it I even appreciated a slight error created by the transcription. There is another world, but it is this one. This version was better, I decided. This made more sense to me. And very much in the spirit of nature, since evolution discovers improvements on pre-existing designs not through planning but through accident. 
If skulls are shells and consciousness is the snail, different and similar each iteration, it only goes to prove: the world we’re born from is other than the one we’re living. 

Story Far From Oaxaca

I have a friend who’s a high school math teacher. For fun in his spare time he’s teaching himself how to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem. Often when we get together we’ll involve ourselves in one of two activities—walking or sipping tea. Not once have we dared mix the two. 
Offhandedly this friend is always teaching me things. You could say, in that way, I’m a theorem to him. Often we’ll take our walks in the largest cemetery of our city. Acres of headstones around us and my friend explaining some theoretical principle to me and me following along, asking questions then, hearing his answers, asking for clarifications. 
One day he plans to move to Oaxaca. There, that’s one thing you now know about him. He is once divorced, like me. There, something you know about both of us. Two people wired for natural curiosity strolling leisurely through a cemetery. 
I talk about art, he talks science. He’s always surprising me with little facts and explanations. From his days as an engineering student, he tells me, he learned about Lenz’s Law. When I talk about making art, it reminds him of Lenz’s Law. A rough approximation of the law, as I remember it, is: the stronger the current running through a circuit, the stronger the resistance. I’d been talking about the benefits of “not forcing things”; don’t push an idea, rather gently edge it along; know when to wait, when to germinate. 
I wonder. Does Lenz’s Law apply to his efforts to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem? By his own admission, much of the mathematics involved is beyond his ability. He smiles without changing face, the smile in his eyes. Sometimes proof of a current’s worth is in the resistance it inspires, he tells me. I agree with that, I say. Case in point, the strain I often experience when trying to follow along while he describes or explains things. 
There is one habit where our dispositions join. On occasion we both sit and close our eyes and meditate. He’s more serious about the habit, every now and then goes off for a week at a time to sit in the company of strangers, float like a water strider on the surface of his mind. It occurs to me this might also be worth mentioning in light of his Law. The mind is a circuit, one that loathes effortful demands upon it. So maybe we’re masochists, I tell him. Our minds take pleasure in confronting what they’re naturally given to resist. Could be, he says, pleased to see how far I’ve carried the metaphor. Sipping steaming hot tea, burning our lips; ambling among headstones on a spring afternoon, joyously, consciously mortal. 
My friend has two daughters, one aged twenty-one, the other eighteen. I’m childless but remarried, he’s single. On this difference he jokes: he’s the spirit but I’m the letter of the Law. One day I hope, I tell him, the spirit carries him to Oaxaca. 

Hong Kong Story

 

Maja’s sister self lived in Hong Kong, this much she’d learned, trial and error. Every few weeks she dreamt of walking through a city, skyscrapers and buses and people standing in a crowd at crosswalks. For years this city appeared to her in odd unconscious moments and she’d wonder where. Waking she’d have vague memories of looking about and noticing the signs were written in a foreign language, one that should’ve been illegible to her, yet thanks to the illogical freedom common to dreams, she was able to read them, understand them. Where were her dreams taking her? Always a city and always this same city. There was the sense the dreams would never stop visiting her until she’d found out where. There was also, curiously, the equally strong sense that once she’d discovered where, the dreams would cease having to arrive and she’d be free of them. 
Scrolling through photos taken of cities across the world, she came across one that struck her as strongly familiar. Tall glass skyscrapers in Hong Kong. Yes, this. This was it. The city in her dreams. Later that night, as if to confirm the find, she dreamt herself walking the streets of Hong Kong, holding a crimson umbrella above her, a very Hong Kong rain pattering the fabric. The dream confirmed to her with confidence this had always been the case. For years she’d been wandering the night streets of Hong Kong unawares. But now was different. Now she knew. 
But was this her? After waking from another dream not long after, she was left asking. In the dream she had been walking among crowds of people, crowds upholding umbrellas, a light drizzle phantoming the bright air above and around. In the dream she walked a long time among the flow of people, up and down into subways, in and out of buildings. She was welcome everywhere, apparently, but anonymous to everyone, including herself. At one point in the dream she had stood before a shop window, what kind of shop she can’t remember, staring at the window glass, flirting perspectivally with its dual nature. With subtle adjustments of her eyes, she would look through glass, notice the space behind it, then look at it, savoring its gleaming smooth surface. Between those two worlds, beyond the glass and along it, a reflection existed and it was hers. If she stood there long enough, in her dream she wondered, might she make its acquaintance, become friends with it? In the dream she seemed convinced reflections were a lonely lot, wraiths without a proper home. If she could merge with it, maybe she could carry it beyond the glass, walk away with it, take it home with her. But no, somehow she knew, since she was dreaming, this wasn’t possible. Living in two worlds at once herself, this was wishful thinking. And since that was the case, the reflection she brought to the glass would remain apart from her, almost someone else. 
Her sister self, she called it. 
In this Hong Kong of dreams, where did she live? Among several hundred thousand apartments, among millions of rooms, which was hers? Waking, she’d strain to remember what she looked like. Early twenties, late forties? Formal dress or in raincoat, t-shirt, and jeans? Trying to remember her in detail was like trying to read through blurry cataracted eyes. No, the sight of her would remain abstract, undetermined. The feeling of her, however, was vivid, cleanly defined. She was a real person, obscurely existent this very moment, every given moment on the other side of the planet, somewhere within the city limits of Hong Kong. Forever it was nighttime where she lived and perhaps it could be said Maja was her daytime self. They were sisters of a sort, two women sharing a self. It wasn’t enough to be just one of them. There was this inability yet this desire to join them. How to accomplish that? Maja knew without needing to consider the issue explicitly: by going there, flying to Hong Kong. 
She knew she would need to travel alone. Against her husband and her actual sister Mauraleen’s protests, she did so. It took two consecutive red eye flights to arrive, traveling in night-direction of the revolving planet. She’d left at night on the western coast of the United States and arrived in Hong Kong at night also. It was raining, just as her dreams had predicted. The air was brilliant with all manner of lights and the streets were furious with people. Stepping from the train into downtown Hong Kong, the scenes around her struck her as impossible, one whole New York laid over another. Yes, it felt strongly familiar, and yes, she wasn’t dreaming. She was walking at last as her real self through the real Hong Kong. Though this much as confirmed through feeling, the main question wasn’t: in which direction should she walk to find her other self? For hours and without direction she walked, hoping she’d catch a hint from herself. She even stood for long moments at shop windows, hoping to recognize the reflection before her. But it was no use. This was all too real, too common. It was a city like any other. No matter how much she wandered, it wouldn’t submit to the demands of a waking self. No, she decided, this was not the way to search for what she hoped to find. She’d have to buy a room at a hotel, sleep, then will herself upright, sleepwalking. Out the room and down the hall, down an elevator and out the hotel door. Would have to sleepwalk her way to a shop window and wait for someone to step from the place, bag in hand filled with a recent purchase. What do they sell here, she would ask. Jewelry, the person would reply. Not the kind you wear, the kind you feel. How does that work, she would ask. Invisible necklaces, bracelets, rings, earrings. Put them on then feel their worth and weight, augmenting your natural features. Together they make something intangible from the commonplace: beauty. Haven’t you heard, she would then tell her, this other woman, somewhat also herself, that sort of thing’s in the eye of the beholder. Of course, the woman would reply then, having predicted as much. But you, haven’t you heard, it’s been blind for a while now. It feels more than it sees, inward instead of outward. So it’s enough to carry these in a bag, not even put them on. Pretty is as pretty imagines. Hearing this, she’ll then realize, she’s dreamt all this, lived all this, so she could prove herself right on this count, but also wrong. Standing there she’ll watch herself turn and walk, happy to have disappointed herself. It will have been worth all the seeking and travel, to stand without a purpose among millions of strangers. If that’s the price she’d have to pay to become one of them, so be it. The exchange rate was favorable and the city was rich with coinage.