The Swap - Part II

A Story by Kherry McKay

This is a serial. Check back in a week to read more of the story. A woman decides her life needs a change, and a poet becomes her change agent.

Part II

( Part I is here if you haven't seen it! )

A woman has occupied my body. I hear what she hears and see what she sees, and I can also read her thoughts. Generally, I don’t require that she see what I see in her body — but I can if I want to. (I’m omniscient in that way.) She hears my voice only when I want her to. That’s the law of this swap, but I’m not the one in control, really. When I’m talking to her, I’ll note it by using a '>'. Oh, and one more thing: I have all of this woman’s memories. Let’s go back to her and the world she has found herself in: my world.

— — —

The woman thinks exchanging bodies with a man is quite draining. She finds a bedroom, sees a bed and gets under the covers to try to sleep. But someone is screaming a moment later, and it jolts her fully awake. A man is yelling, and a woman is shouting right back at him.

She walks down a hallway to an entryway. All the screaming emanates out of there. She looks into the doorway and peers into the largest loft-space she has ever seen. It’s the size of a basketball court. In fact, it is a basketball court — it’s a high school gymnasium converted into an apartment.

The big space has the “feel” of belonging to a writer. Its lighting is subdued. There’s a mural of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the famous Romantic, on one wall. A statue of Mozart sits off to its right. Two basketball hoops with clear-plastic backboards stand guard at the room’s ends. They’re suspended from a high ceiling. One has an enormous Chinese paper dragon built atop it, just visible in the light. Strangely designed furniture, artwork and junk lie slapdash everywhere and fill up most of the rest of the apartment; the space seems oddly empty due to its size.

The woman sees two people arguing in the middle of the room.

“Who’s that?” she asks.

> That’s Saahela and her boyfriend, I tell her. (Note '>' means I’m talking.)

“Who’s Saahela? ” she wants to know.

> She’s my roommate, sort of. She’s twenty-five, a grad student. No one really knows that she’s living with me. She’s Afghani, from Kabul.

“Who owns this place?”

> It’s mine, actually. The gym is where I live. Saahela has her own locker room apartment — where you just fell asleep; that was in her room. The two places are interconnected.

“I thought you were just a poor poet!”

> Well, I am. But my grandma left me a little money a few years ago, after she died. So I invested all of it in real estate.

“You bought a high school gym? Wouldn’t most people buy a house or something?”

Before I can answer, the man in the middle of the room yells again.

“I told you, I don’t want that! I want things to. . . I. . . Not dolo. Not that, Saahela. It’s brick.”

“Reynold!” Saahela shouts, exasperated. “Get out! Get OUT!! I need. . . . Leave! Bless the dervishes, just leave! ” She hits him hard on the front of his right shoulder.

He looks mad when she does this; he tries to touch her left side gently with his hand to make her less angry.

The woman in my body looks at him. (She has just switched places with me, so she looks like a man in his mid-forties whom the yelling man knows; and I now know magically the woman’s name to be Helen.) Helen looks at Reynold.

Then she walks to the middle of the room, where the argument is taking place. It’s lighted there more. Surprised, Reynold gives her an embarassed look.

Reynold’s baleful face reminds Helen she’s in my body, which startles her, for it’s nothing like her own. Mine is stocky and slightly muscular. The thrill of feeling its greater strength as compared to her own hits her. Although a bit out of shape, my body has decent-sized biceps, which Helen now feels experimentally with new fingers. She could kick some butt with this body. Maybe not Mohammed Ali’s but somebody’s butt.

She looks again at Reynold. He’s good-looking. He’s black.

> Tell him that you want Saahela to play the piano for you, I say through the “tether” that exists between my consciousness and hers. > Ask her if she's learned more Chopin.

Helen sees my grand piano off to the side: it’s a big Steinway, black, and has its top up at a forty degree angle.

Whispering to me (for I can hear her), Helen asks, “Do you play the piano?”

> Yes, for many years. But Saahela plays too. And much better. Ask her to play.

Saahela now notices her. “Mr. Beard! Porcupines be praised! Have you been at the coffee bar? Do you want me to play a little? I’ve got Chopin ready — one of his nocturnes and the D-flat prelude. Reynold’s on his way. . . ,” she looks at Reynold sternly, “on his way out.”

That’s when Helen fully comprehends she’s in another world, for Saahela and Reynold do not know who she is. She sees as well, they both talk to her differently than they would, had she been herself. But the thing she notices most is how they seem happy to see “Mr. Beard.” It makes her feel good. She’s not used to being liked this much. Her husband doesn’t like her much at all, right now. But these people seem comfortable with the man whose body she now is using.

She notices, too their argument can be completely heard in the space’s dark lighting, without her seeing their faces. This seems strange to her. She’s not used to understanding people when she can’t see their faces.

“I’m sorry,” says Reynold. “We’re in your area. We must have wandered in here because we thought you weren’t around. Saahela was going to play. We can cruise and go somewhere else, though.”

Helen says: “I heard you fighting.”

“We weren’t fighting,” say Reynold. “We were trying to better communicate.”

Saahela changes the subject: “Thank you for the garbanzo bean stew last night, Mr. Beard. It was good.”

“It was good,” Helen improvises.

“Are you cooking tonight, again?” asks Reynold.

Saahela: “You can’t stay for dinner. I’m too busy.”

“I wasn’t trying to say,” he says, a clear lie.

“Stop.” Helen says, her hands making a brief gesture. “They’ll hear you all the way to Ohio.”

Saahela: “You heard us fighting from. . . where? From Arefa’s? In Squirrel Hill? I hope not!”

“Only when I came in. I want to hear some Chopin. Reynold, keep your yelling down when you’re around. See you later, if you’re leaving.”

Saahela says to Reynold: “I think you should.”

He sighs and starts to leave. Mid-way, he looks back at Helen as if she’s a totally new person. Saahela walks over to the piano, sits down, and opens up some sheet music.

Reynold peeks back while crossing the room and getting closer to the door. But Saahela ignores him and starts to play, so he leaves through the double-doors at the room’s far end, which clang loudly behind him as they shut. Saahela plays; Helen has never heard anything like it. She has an intensely emotional experience to her music. It makes Helen almost cry, takes her breath away. It’s beautiful beyond anything she thought imaginable.

Saahela stops. “I don’t know what to do with him. He’s strange, sometimes.”

“Is that right?”

“Thank you for interrupting us.”

“Was it a major fight?”

“All fights are major,” says Saahela.

“Did everything get worked out?”

“If one doesn’t appreciate the apple, one can’t appreciate the orchard,” Saahela says thoughtfully.

“Even if I don’t understand you all the time, your words are charming.”

Saahela smiles. “Your letting me stay in the locker room area is charming.” Her Afghani accent says “charming” more like karming. “You’re a good person, and you saved me. I heard it said yesterday that only people who love can write. That’s according to an American, I think: Wendell Berry. And you’re a good writer.”

“Why was Reynold so upset, Saahela?”

“Reynold is madly in love with. . . himself. I don’t know! That’s his problem, I think. I’m twenty-five and don’t understand men really. If there’s anything to understand. I’m not trying to get serious, anyway.”

“Why was he shouting?”

“He thinks I’m stubborn. And pigheaded. He wants to hang out a little more. He’s decided I’m — how you do say it? Pig-headed ?”

“Are you?”

“Don’t you know? Well, I can’t live with Reynold, not without becoming more entangled than I want to. And my student loans, they’re mostly out. You have saved me, Mr. Beard. That’s my favorite new name for you now: Mr. Beard.”

Helen looks around at the big gym with my eyes. “I saved you because I have you living here? ”

“You feed me. You’re a pretty good cook. And you helped edit my last three papers I wrote for school and gave me good advice about my thesis.”

“That was no problem,” Helen says, which she figures was true for Mr. Beard.

“It could have been. You have spent a lot of energy on me instead of on someone whom you could share more with. You know, there are a lot of faculty women in my department. Really pretty. . .”

“Nevermind,” says Helen.

“Let me know if you want a connection. We’ll go through Facebook.”

“I think I’m getting tired. I’m going to lie down for a short nap. Is my bed over there?” Helen spies a little area thirty feet away, in the corner of the room. It’s mostly in shadows.

Saahela watches her with a strange look. “You are tired. Are you sure you don’t want me to do anything before I take off? Pick up a bit?”

“Everything’s O.K. Something’s different, but I don’t know what that is. You should do your own things. You might want to pick up your space a little, though.”

“Thanks for coming to the rescue again. A warm fire is better than a meal, a proverb in my country says. You’re sweet.”

Helen feels strange. She walks over to the bed which sits behind a large Chinese partition with red dragons painted on. She sits down.

Saahela has said I rescued her, she thinks to herself. Maybe I did come to her rescue. But who am I really hoping to rescue? I’ve come to a place I never thought existed. Right away, it feels comfortable, but strange, too. It's all different. Something’s not right.

She lies down, settling into the bedcovers. She starts to worry about life back in her world. She wonders how her husband is handling the new person in her body, a man.

I ask > Are you still O.K. with this arrangement?

“Yes,” she says.

> This is the last chance we have to back out. If you fall fully asleep, when you awake, you’ll be stuck in my bag of bones for the next seven days. There won’t be any turning back!

“I understand.” Helen searches for the dimmer switch I keep near my bedside, and the lights go down.

“One more question,” Helen yawns. “How did this gym become a living space?”

> It was actually once part of the Pittsburgh School District. The city sold it in parts to anyone who wanted to buy off the buildings. Next door — that is, attached to the gym — is a food co-op and a Taoist center and some crazy shops. The city tried to keep everything commercial. They hoped to keep the gym commercial, too, but I had the money to buy in at the right time. You’ll meet the enclave tomorrow. They’re all neat. A little crazy but neat.

“It seems strange to live in such a big room,” she mumbles, almost asleep.

> A friend once told me, we fill the spaces we live in with our brains. The bigger the space, the bigger the things our minds can come up with in them. So large rooms are great places to be if you want to create.

Helen starts to dream. I see her imagining a row of chick peas dancing and singing in a chorus line at the edge of a gigantic bowl of soup. She seems amazed to hear their tiny chick pea voices.

* * *

This leaves nothing for me to do while she’s dozing, and I get bored. I’m in Helen’s house and in her body. I walk around in the latter to explore the former.

Her house is quiet. It’s actually quite a big place: a mansion, I see as I traipse around and see it in its entirety. It’s much bigger than I first thought. It’s an eight-bedroom dwelling in a rich neighborhood somewhere in the Northwest, maybe in Seattle. At least, that’s what I think.

Her living room is decorated in a Southwestern theme. Magazines on architecture and home decorating obscure a big round coffee table in the room’s center. A Georgia O’Keefe hangs over the fireplace. I look up to see interesting swirl patterns in the ceiling plaster, characteristics Helen is prone to look at. Some of the swirls look meteorological, symbolical.

The kitchen next to the living room has copper-bottomed cookware hanging over a big island and a little breakfast nook. On the center countertop sits a note. It’s written in blue ink, in a big bold hand.

Helen,

I know we talked about divorce last night. I said a lot of things I didn’t mean and shouldn't have said. The kids are spending the night at the Brickman’s tognight, so you don’t have to pick them up. I'll be home early to talk. -Bobo

A magazine next to the note has a a sheet of paper paperclipped to its cover. It’s a memo with a doctor’s office logo. I glance at the memo quickly, catching words like “cochlear” and “implant.”

I take the memo off and look at the magazine. It’s a copy of Deaf Living, a periodical I’ve never seen before. At that exact instant, I realize I haven’t heard anything since entering Helen’s body. Helen is deaf.

I’m not sure why I didn’t notice it right away. I can’t hear myself breathe. Some of the odd thoughts Helen had had earlier, in my body, now make sense. She was mesmerized by Saahela’s music, for instance.

What am I going to do? The silence of Helen’s world starts to scare the bejesus out of me. There are no traffic sounds, no noise of ceiling fans. I’ve heard nothing for almost an hour.

And my husband is coming home soon.