by Tim Curran
When I opened my eyes a moment later, I was no longer in my phone carrel. I was sitting in the middle of an unmade bed in a messy bachelor apartment bedroom. Clothing littered the floor, and the walls were covered with Christian rock band posters. An old-fashioned phone handset was tucked uncomfortably between my chin and shoulder.
I looked down … and realized I was in the guy’s body.
Am I having another seizure? I wondered. Is this a hallucination?
I stared down at the erect cock bulging beneath the thin fabric of his boxers.
I shouldn’t do this, I thought.
But I laid the receiver on the pillow, reached down and started doing what my caller had probably been told his whole life was a sin worse than touching a woman against her will.
The flesh was more than willing. In just a few strokes, I came in a sweet hot shuddering spurt. I groaned loud in the guy’s voice, and felt the come spatter against my chin and neck—
—the sudden dizziness was intense, and when I came to I was back at my phone in the call center. Zoe was gently shaking my shoulder.
“Jane? Jane, you okay?” Zoe asked.
The call was still live. Through my headset, I heard the rustle of sheets, and then the guy’s disoriented voice.
“What—what just happened?” he stammered. “I was in a dark place. It was so cold. I couldn’t see anything.”
“Everything’s fine,” I replied, trying to recover my composure as best I could. “Take a nice warm shower, and call back soon.”
I clicked the call termination button on the computer screen, put myself on break, and turned to Zoe.
“What happened?” My voice shook. “What did I do?”
“You zoned out on us, girl. You started talking, and then you just sort of froze.”
I winced, remembering how I’d moaned when I came. When he came. “Did—did I make any noise?”
Zoe shook her head. “Nope, not a sound until you came out of it just now. Don’t know why the guy didn’t hang up.”
“Shit, I’m sorry. I—I still have little seizures.” I knew full well that whatever I’d just had, it wasn’t a seizure. “I thought I’d be okay. I think I need to go home.”
After the shuttle bus took me back to Oakwood Tower, I went up to my apartment and hid under the covers of my bed with my cell phone. I stared at the bright screen in the muffled darkness. What had really happened at work? Surely it was some kind of hallucination … but I heard the guy’s confusion. I heard it.
I wanted so desperately to know if it had been real. Wanted to know if I could do it again.
Could I enter the bodies of other people, live inside them? Experience life as a fully functional human being whose every waking moment wasn’t a fight against pain? I knew it wasn’t right to hijack somebody else’s body. It might be a kind of rape. But if I had that power, would I be stupid to refuse to explore it? Stupid to refuse to take advantage of what little pleasure and escape the universe had offered me?
But how had this happened? Had my brain fever triggered something inside me? Or was something else going on? I couldn’t be sure it was real, not yet. I had to call someone. Who?
An image of Linda immediately rose in my mind, followed by a complex wash of emotions. If anyone would understand my predicament, surely it was my own twin sister. I tried to ignore the tiny dark voice that told me that she owed me. She’d gotten everything in life that I’d been denied. If I called her, and if my new power worked, I’d finally be able to spend a few hours in the body I should have been born with. I could know what it was like to have a handsome, successful husband and a beautiful home in the country. To have parents who loved me and were proud of me.
I felt bitter tears welling in my eyes. Could I really do it? Did I dare? After walking in Linda’s body and life, could I ever be happy again when I inevitably came back to this?
I finally decided that if I didn’t do it, I’d spend the rest of my life wondering. Better to regret what I’d done than what I hadn’t.
Two hours later, my sister finally answered her cell phone.
“What’s up, Janie?” Linda sounded faintly impatient. “Is everything okay?”
“Everything’s okay.” I rolled my necklace’s irregular jade beads between my fingers and closed my eyes. I could feel my sister’s tall fine body, smell the perfume on her tailored clothes, feel the gold earrings bumping warmly against her neck.…
“I just wanted to know what I should get Mom for her birthday,” I finished. In Linda’s voice. Linda’s throat. My perfectly-manicured hand rested on a glass-topped coffee table, and I was sitting on a cream-colored leather couch. I disconnected the call on the new iPhone and surveyed my sister’s domain.
“Holy shit. I’ve done it.”
There’d been no dizziness, no vertigo. It was as if my consciousness were made for this body. I stared at her toned, perfect legs in their cream-colored tights. In my own body, I’d never been able to stand up, ever, much less walk … and I wasn’t sure how it was done. Could I make her body do it? Or would it remember how on its own through muscle memory?
I got my feet under me and slowly stood. The bones and muscles acted in practiced concert; the body did seem to remember. After my first tottering steps, I realized that the trick was to simply let the flesh do its thing and not think too hard about it. I went from room to room, touching the beautiful furniture, admiring the expensive art. I crossed through the airy, vaulted living room to the glass doors to the pool and Jacuzzi room.
The steamy blue water sparkled in the late afternoon light filtering through the fogged glass walls. Linda was an excellent swimmer. She’d competed in the butterfly and freestyle in high school and college, and had even gone as far as competing in an Olympic trial. I’d only ever learned how to float in case I fell into a pond or pool; I hoped Linda’s body would also remember how to swim.
Had Linda ever gone skinny-dipping? If I had a great pool like this, I’d do it every day. And if I had a hot husband like hers, I’d do him in the Jacuzzi twice a day. At least.
I kicked off my sister’s black patent leather flats, unbuttoned the hunter-green linen dress suit, shimmied out of the satin slip and peeled off her tights and lace panties. I carefully laid the clothes across the sailcloth seat of a nearby lounge chair and then stretched, enjoying the feel of my sister’s supple joints and toned muscles.
There was a full-length mirror set into the wall beside the towel hamper. I stepped up to it and turned to look at Linda’s back, tracing my fingers down the place where I thought my body had been removed from hers. There was no visible scar, only the faintest of indentations in the ribs beside the spine and a slight granularity and numbness to the flesh above the bone. I pressed my fingers into the indentation; no pain.
Feeling deeply envious, I abandoned the mirror and walked down the pool’s steps into the water. I pushed off from the edge of the bottom step with her toes, my outstretched fingers slicing neatly through the cool blue water. Linda’s body remembered perfectly well how to swim.
And it was glorious. Swimming in her body was every bit the pleasure I’d imagined it would be. I could walk, I could dive, I could push myself until I was gasping and still felt no pain.
As I backstroked the length of the pool, I heard the door click open. Linda’s husband, Richard, stood in the doorway to the living room. Wisps of steam curled around his Italian loafers and the hem of his gray wool Armani suit. His hand went up to straighten his already perfectly straight red power tie, a gesture I recognized as a sign of nervousness.
“What are you doing?” he asked, his voice betraying more confusion than his courtroom-neutral expression did.
“Swimming. Want to join me?” I flicked some water in his direction.
The water droplets landed a yard away from him, but he took a step back as if he were afraid I’d ruin his loafers. Or as if he were afraid of me; he was staring as if he thought I’d gone slightly mad.
“Uh, no.” He g
ave his tie another tug. “I have an important case in a couple of days, and one of the junior partners is here to go over the court documents with me. Please see that we’re not disturbed. And please get some clothes on.”
His cold tone and annoyed look told me that I should be ashamed of myself. Ashamed of my body. I felt a mortified blush spread across my face. Richard averted his gaze and stepped out of the room, pulling the glass door shut behind him with a stern click like a disapproving tongue.
What the hell? Linda was hot. Most guys in the city would jump off the north bridge to have a chance at getting wet and naked with her.
But my inner protestations did nothing to dispel the anxious lump in the pit of my stomach, the same lump I’d felt throughout grade school when the other kids taunted me. Dwarf. Freak. Ugly.
I splashed out of the pool and got a fluffy white towel from the hamper by the lounge chairs. Dwarf. Freak. Ugly. Tears welling in my eyes, I toweled off and got back into Linda’s expensive clothes.
I looked around the beautiful pool room and felt disoriented, disconnected. This was all wrong. This was not my beautiful house, nor my beautiful life. Maybe Linda had everything I thought I’d always wanted, and maybe she didn’t, but at that moment I mostly wanted to be back in my own bed.
“Get in, get off, get out,” I muttered to myself.
I headed into the half-bath adjoining the pool room and locked myself in. Hiked up my skirt, slipped a hand down the front of my tights and ran my fingertips over the softly curling pubic hair. Nothing; not so much as a happy tickle. I circled my index finger over the hooded clitoris. The flesh was numb, unresponsive. Nerve damage. Jesus.
This is what our separation had cost her. I explored further to confirm my sweating fear: everything was too numb to feel pleasure. She couldn’t come, at least not by any means I knew. I was stuck inside her. And where was she? If I stayed in her body, what happened to her consciousness? Was she trapped in that frightening cold, dark place the caller spoke of? And what would happen to my own body? Would it die?
I leaned against the sink, swallowing against my anxious nausea. No. I couldn’t let myself panic. There had to be a way to get back into my own body. What was like an orgasm, but wasn’t?
I’ll take electric shocks for $500, Alex.
One of Linda’s memories bloomed: Richard carried a stun gun. It was probably in one of the pockets of his winter overcoat. Supposedly the thing was powerful enough to knock a 300-pound man flat on his back but would cause no permanent damage.
I straightened my clothes and hurried through the house to the coatrack in the foyer. Droplets of melted snow glittered like tiny diamonds on the shoulders of one heavy black overcoat. I pulled it off its peg and riffled through the pockets. Leather gloves, cigarette case, restaurant receipts in the outside pockets—and in the inside pocket, something that felt like an unusually heavy cordless shaver.
I pulled it out and flicked it on. Blue electricity arced and crackled across the two prongs on the face of the stun gun. It was a wicked-looking device.
Where should I zap myself? Shoulder? Stomach? Side? I finally decided on my stomach. I sat down on the carpeted floor, flicked it back on, and plunged the gun into my midsection.
The pain was intense, even for someone as accustomed to pain as me. Every muscle in my body jerked spasmodically, uncontrollably. My hands flew up as I convulsed, and the stun gun tumbled away and landed under a chair.
After an interminable two seconds, the muscle contractions passed. I was sweating and dizzy and nauseated. Worse, I was still in Linda’s body.
An hour later, I pulled up to the assisted-living facility in Linda’s blue BMW. It was hard to suppress the full-on panic screaming inside my skull. Was Linda suffering in frigid darkness? I had to put things right.
I signed in at the receptionist’s station and was hurrying toward the elevators when a man said, “Jane?”
I stopped, turned, and said “Yes?” before I could think better of it.
A man sitting in a chair by a huge potted fern set aside the newspaper he’d been reading (or hiding behind), stood, and smiled at me.
“Right on time,” he said cheerfully. He was a white man of about forty, on the handsome side of average, and had graying blond hair and a long, angular face. His eyes were dark hazel. He wore a blazer and khakis and could have blended in almost anywhere.
I’d never laid eyes on him before, I was sure, but his voice was ringing all kinds of bells. “Have we met?”
His smile widened and he extended his hand. “We haven’t met in person, no. I’m Brandon Wilks. We’ve spoken on the phone many times. And I believe you’ve been enjoying the necklace I sent.”
My hand went to my bare neck. I wished I’d brought the stun gun with me. “I … I’m not.…”
He stepped closer and spoke more softly. “Not Jane? But you are Jane. You just aren’t currently inhabiting her body. Don’t be afraid; I’m here to help you.”
“Do you know what’s happening?” I asked.
He nodded. “I do, and I will explain, but I’m rather concerned about your body upstairs. They tend to not remain stable in the absence of consciousness. We should hurry.”
He had an air of gentleness and competence, and frankly I was so frightened that I was ready to cling to anyone who had even a half a clue, so I took him up to my apartment.
We found my body unconscious where I’d left it in bed, my cell phone dead on my chest. Brandon pulled a stethoscope out of his blazer and listened to my body’s heart and lungs.
“Are you a doctor?” I asked.
“I studied to be a physician, yes, but my career has moved in some interesting directions over the years.” He pulled the stethoscope off his ears and hung it around his neck. “Your breathing is a bit shallow, but your heart seems fine. For now.”
“That’s good,” I replied. “How can I get back into my body? I’m worried about Linda.”
“As well you should be.” He leaned down and removed his jade necklace from my body and held it out to me. “Put this on, please.”
I stared at the necklace. “Why? What’s going on?”
“A bit of quid pro quo, I’m afraid. I need you to use your gift to accomplish something for me before I can help you. Don’t worry; it’s quite simple, and won’t take long.”
I bit my lip and stared at the necklace. “I have questions.”
“I’m sure you do,” he replied. “But we both know you don’t have time. Just do as I ask and I’ll be on my way. You can even keep the necklace; it’s the trigger for your powers, and with it you can sample other lives as you please. Or not; it’s up to you.”
I met his steady gaze. “Why me?”
“Yours is a family gift; it skips generations. Your mother, alas, she is not gifted by any definition of the word. I tested your sister first, when she came of age, but all the power rests inside you.”
“You tested me?”
He smiled. “In our conversations. I could sense the potential in you, and I knew you’d be the one we needed when the stars were right.”
I took the necklace from him and dangled it from my fingers, gazing at the strange carvings. “What is it that you need me to do?”
“I need you to help us make the world a better place.” He pulled an older model smartphone out of his back pocket and scrolled to a contact entry. “Call this number. Enter the mind of the man who answers. Ask for Jebediah. Do what he asks. You can refuse if anything seems immoral or risky.”
“How do I get back here?”
“He’ll make sure you return. And then I’ll see to it that you get back into your real body safely and Linda’s soul is returned to hers.”
I paused for a long moment.
“All right.” I put on the necklace and took the cell phone from his hand. Pressed the button to dial. Focused on the tone.
“Barker. Talk.” The voice was gruff and male. Maybe mid-thirties. Sounded bored and suspicious. I could picture the gray u
niform and automatic weapon strapped across his muscular chest.
“Hello,” I replied in Rayne’s voice. “I know we haven’t met, so this is crazy—”
Vertigo, hard and gut-churningly cold like being dropped from a plane through a hurricane into the Atlantic Ocean.
“—but call me, baby.” My words, the gruff man’s throat, tongue, and mouth. I was staring down at a scarred wooden desk, military surplus from the 1950s. A fluorescent light glared and buzzed overhead. I took a deep breath, inhaling smells of dust, metal, motor oil, and unwashed male bodies.
“Is Jebediah here?” I asked.
“Here,” I heard behind me.
I turned, and saw a row of cells with heavy steels doors painted battleship gray. A pair of pale fingers wiggled through a barred window slit.
I approached the cell, Barker’s boots ringing heavy and hollow on the damp steel diamond plate floor. Were we on a ship someplace? Barker’s memories were a lot harder to access than Linda’s had been. It was like trying to grab melting ice cubes with chopsticks.
“Took you long enough,” Jebediah muttered.
“Sorry.” I paused. “Uh, what do you need me to do?”
“Keys at your belt. Unlock the door.”
“Right. Sorry.” I shifted my automatic weapon to the side and found the key ring on a retractable cord. The third one I tried turned in the lock, and I pulled the door open. A small, slightly built man with close-cropped hair and a black eye stood there staring at me uncertainly. He wore a gray uniform similar to mine, but the insignia had been ripped off. His shirt was partly open, and I could see that his upper chest was covered in curvilinear tattoos like those on the jade necklace. His feet were bare and bruised.
“What now?” I asked.
“Can I borrow your knife real quick?”
I glanced down at my belt, and on the side opposite my keys I had a sheath for a fixed-blade fighting knife. A KA-BAR, maybe? “Yeah, sure.”
I unsheathed the knife and offered it to him handle-first.