Duplex by Kathryn Davis

her skin that felt familiar.
    “I didn’t think you were awake,” he said.
    “I’m not,” she replied, and they both laughed.
    Laughing, he could feel the gate of his jaw move, reminding him that he was living in a body. An image arose in his brain that made no sense, a field lit from above and the sky farther away than usual, pasted across the top of impossibly high palings. People were screaming with excitement and there was a falling star coming at him, falling right toward him through the black night sky. He was supposed to catch it. It was his job to catch it and he didn’t.
    Instead it got trapped behind one of the room’s many woven tapestries and the sound it made trying to escape kept him from falling back asleep. The room was round in shape, the walls built of stone. The tapestries quivered; he was aware of his tongue in his mouth, how heavy it was, and there was a taste like honey at the back of it.
    “Eddie!” a woman’s voice said. “Enough is enough. You have to wake up now!”
    The physical therapist wore a uniform like a nurse would wear, though she also had on black fishnet stockings and high-heeled shoes; temptingly, as if it were whiskey, she unscrewed the cap from a bottle of smelling salts and waved it in his face.
    Immediately he felt over excited and enormously uncertain, exactly the way he had the time everyone went to play hide-and-seek in the Woodard Estate and no one came to find him. He was still in his hiding place under a lilac bush when a group of girls walked past on their way home. “There’s someone in there,” Mary said, but when she pulled back the creeper and saw it was Eddie sitting there crying, she told the other girls she’d been imagining things.
    Before he got taken away, he’d been a nervous boy. He had trouble sleeping unless his mother read to him. There was the pestering sound of branches on his bedroom window, there were eyes suspended in the rose trellis. At first getting up to pee was more than he could handle, but the physical therapist had a urinal. When he was a boy sometimes he wet the bed.
    Now it was the therapist who was reading to him. “Your biography,” she said, jokingly. She flashed him a quick look at the book, which did in fact have his name on the cover. A fairy told a boy that the piece of fabric she cut from the hem of her skirt and gave him as a special present could be stretched to any size imaginable, but that he should never stretch it unless he knew what he wanted to make with it, because if he just started doing it for the fun of it, it would go on stretching and stretching forever. Of course like all fairies she was counting on the fact that the boy would disobey her.
    “What kind of a special present is that?” Eddie asked.
    “This is not just any world,” his therapist told him. “Haven’t you been listening? It’s thy world. It’s my world. Don’t you remember?” She opened the book to show him a picture of someone dressed in a pale green cloak with a crown of lightning bugs in her hair, sitting in a blue boat being rowed into a dark grotto by a boy wearing a red cap. “I’ve been with you ever since that day, Eddie,” the therapist said, and she tapped him on the chest in the place where the pocket would be if he were wearing a shirt.
    “That’s very kind of you,” Eddie said.
    “It’s my job,” the therapist told him. “Kindness has nothing to do with it.”
    He had been a boy when he was here before, that much was clear. When he came back his mother and father were sitting at the card table in the living room, playing canasta the way they did every night.
    “Are you thirsty?” his mother had asked. “There’s some lemonade in the fridge.”
    “I’m going to meld,” his father had said, like someone preparing to do something shameful.
    Eddie fell asleep and when he woke he was lying in the same bed. The bed was unusually large, or maybe it seemed that way because there was no one else in it with him. For