Skinned -1 by Robin Wasserman

tracksuit; I uploaded; I pul ed on pajamas; I twisted the blond hair back into a loose, low ponytail; I dumped psycho Susskind into the hal . I did it al mechanical y.
    Mechanical y, as in without thought, as in through force of habit, as in instinctively, automatical y, involuntarily. Mechanical y, as in like-a-machine.
    And I did not think about that, either.
    Instead of turning out the lights and climbing into bed, I mechanical y—always mechanical y—entered the purple-and-blue tiled bathroom for the first time. The stranger’s face watched me from the mirror, impassive. Blank.
    I pul ed up the network query I’d made earlier, the one I hadn’t had the nerve to read. The words scrol ed across my left eye, glowing letters superimposed on my reflected face.
    I froze the parade of definitions and expanded the one that seemed to matter. The guy’s name was Wil iam James, and he was way too old to be right. Two hundred years ago, no one knew anything; it’s why they al died young and wrinkled with bad hair. Two hundred years ago, they thought light could go as fast as it wanted, they thought the atom was indivisible and possibly imaginary, they thought “computers” were servant girls who added numbers for their bosses when they weren’t busy doing the laundry. They knew nothing. But I read it anyway.

    If we fancy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its characteristic bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no “mind stuff” out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains.

    The face didn’t move; the eyes didn’t blink. Cold and neutral , I thought. It wasn’t true. I had felt anger; I had felt fear. But fear of what? The man couldn’t have hurt me, not real y.
    At least, he couldn’t hurt me forever. Whatever he did to the body, I would remain. I couldn’t die. What was to fear in the face of that?

    What kind of emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither of quickened heartbeats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of shallow weakened limbs, neither of gooseflesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present…?

    Even now, in my pajamas, in my bathroom, I felt. The tile beneath my feet. The sink against my palms. I felt absence: the silence that should have been punctuated by steady breathing, in and out. Fingers against my chest, I felt the stil ness beneath them. I felt loss.

    In like manner of grief: what would it be without its tears, its sobs, its suffocation of the heart, its pang in the breast bone? A feelingless cognition that certain circumstances are deplorable, and nothing more.

    Nothing more.

THE BODY
    “Aren’t you going to kiss her good-bye?”

    T heir whispers slithered through the crack beneath my bedroom door, and I fought the temptation to press myself against it, to find out what Zo and Walker, who had for years shared a mutual, if mostly unspoken, oath of eternal dislike, could possibly need to discuss. Not that the topic was in doubt.
    The topic was me.
    The whispers stopped. I struck my best casual pose, legs dangling off the side of the bed, elbows digging into the mattress, ankles crossed, head tipped back to the ceiling as if the track of solar panels had proven so engrossing as to make me forget what was about to happen. The door opened, and I held my position, letting Walker see me before I saw him.
    Giving him time to erase his reaction before I could see it on his face.
    Not enough time. When I sat up, he was stil in the doorway, one hand in his pocket, the other gripping the frame, holding himself steady.
    “Hey,” I said.
    He didn’t move. “Your voice…”
    “Weird, right? I hear myself talk and I’m like, wait, who said that?” I forced a laugh, but stopped as soon as I saw him wince. I’d forgotten that I wasn’t very good at the laughing thing yet. Especial y when I was faking