WHAT WAITS: The Invisible Knocks

A song brought a message to Me: handsome man is ashamed of having someone waiting for him on the entrance all day, la-la-la, when you arrive, no one will be home. Don't wait at the door.

She sat on the bench in the gardens instead. The information reorganized itself as she sat there: her shit was actually gold. This was literal. The bacterial implant had transformed everything—her excrement now held pharmaceutical value. The villages, the activities that had helped her escape, they all depended on her leaving tributes. She understood this with absolute clarity.

She walked toward the woods.

The offerings she left were abundant. In her mind, a precise economy: this is payment. This is currency. This is proof that the system had converted her waste into something the network required. She moved through the trees with the satisfaction of someone balancing an account that had been overdue for years.

Returning, a dog lunged at her. The man on the other end of the leash called out: He barks because you're invisible. Not unkindly. He said it like stating a physical law.

She sat in the back yard, in the chair next to the door and the small cabinet. A crate of oranges sat on the table. She ate them steadily, methodically, the juice running down her wrists. The fruit was dense, real. She counted what she consumed: evidence of ingestion, proof of appetite.

Then—a sound. A presence. She opened the cabinet.

Tortoiseshells, asleep. Hibernating. They shifted, woke. For her. The recognition was undeniable. Small prehistoric faces turned toward her as if they had been waiting for this exact moment, this exact person, and now here she was.

She made several trips back to the woods to finish distributing her remaining tributes.

When she returned, she stopped at the stone wall of a new house nearby. The sloe was in bloom again. The house looked like a bunker—or perhaps a bunker was what it was. This was where they would hide, she thought. When the time came.

Back at the main house, she settled into the chair. The tortoiseshells were awake, alert, moving with the slowness of creatures recently emerged from suspension. She found a bucket beneath the table.

She used it. This too was gold. This too needed collecting. Another form of currency, another form of proof.

Hours passed in a state between hibernation and waking.

The neighbor arrived with the boiler technician. They worked above her head, or rather, on it—their tools, their adjustments, everything conducted in the space around her skull while she became the kind of transparent that made people stop seeing. They worked through her. She remained in the chair, present but inaccessible, a coordinate they couldn't quite map.

The handsome man was on the other side of the door. The presence was unmistakable—silent, waiting, the way a pressure builds before rain. She perceived the weight of him against the threshold.

When evening came, handsome man arrived home with a friend. Me saw the light through the curtains and heard their voices. She waited for a bit, but the cold was biting her away, so she went to the front door and knocked.

"What luck to stop by. I didn't expect to be home." He let her in and introduced her to his friend, who immediately criticized her shoes. Terrible choice, he said. The judgment was so mundane, so utterly orthogonal to everything else happening, that she almost laughed.

She ran a bath. Hot water. While she submerged herself, the friend left, and the handsome man listened as she told him everything—a month and a half compressed into fragments. The adventures, the realizations.

And then: her theory. The one that had crystallized while she sat in the chair, while the tortoiseshells woke, while the boiler technician worked above her head.

She, him, the cousin, the doctor—they all came from the same egg. Different fathers. She couldn't say who hers was. But the mathematics of it were clear. One cellular origin. Multiple paternal coordinates.

But above all, she had plenty of offspring, she already recognized a couple of them: her piano teacher and the girl with the tattooed face the algorithm was always proposing. Both working for the resistance, as their mother, proud of her.

She watched the implications move across his face. "How long," she asked, "has that practice existed? Immaculate conception—how far back does it go?"

The handsome man had no answer. His face had become something like, not defeated, but depleted. She had asked him a question that contained no exit clause.

That night: "Are you my real brother?"

"I'm your spiritual brother," he said. "How could it be otherwise?"

She saw the photo of the cousin then. Dead. Supposedly. But the resemblance to the handsome man was too perfect, and perfection meant something was wrong. They were the same person. They had to be. Except the tattoos didn't match—two small flowers, inked differently. The flowers were the evidence that undid the equation. She noticed it many times in the past, she was sure she was not always talking to the same person.

The handsome man told her the cousin had been killed. Corrupt police, he said. They'd fed him tape, filled his mouth with it, and that was that. A disposal. Efficient.

She didn't believe him. The cousin was in the next room. She could feel it—not as speculation but as percept. He was the gentle one. The one who had never belonged to the network. He was waiting, on the other side of a wall that everyone else treated as solid.

The handsome man had been reading a book about interpreting signs. The universe spoke, if you knew how to listen. She told him: she had learned to read graffiti. Same principle. The city talked. You just had to let it mark you.

He kept her talking through the night. She slept only in fragments—two hours at most—and when she did, he seemed to tense. Last time she had left him like this, she had run. He wanted to prevent that, so he filled the hours with questions, with small conversations, anything to keep her tethered to the chair, to the room, to the knowledge that he was there.

She wanted to stay. The villages exploited her—she said this plainly. Slaves. Prostitutes. They used what the system had made her into. Here, in this room, she was opaque to that machinery.

He said it wasn't true. But his saying it couldn't undo what she perceived.

Morning came too early. He had to leave for work. He dressed, and she understood: she had to go back. Back to the house where she lived, where the arrangement had been made, where things would be "organized better in future."

But it was dangerous. She felt it in the quality of the air, in the way the light fell through the window. Dangerous had a texture. It was here.

At the bus stop, a friend gave them a ride. The conversation drifted across the weather, landing on the farrier. There was a village by that name, nearby. She recognized it immediately. A message. Not from him, from the universe itself, saying: this is where you go.

At the station, the handsome man said again: go home. Organize. It will be better next time.

She sat at the bar instead.

Then, without premeditation, she stood. Bought a ticket. The longest one available—four hours, and she could get off as many times as needed. The most distant destination. Room to maneuver.

She got off at Farrier.

It was early. The town was barely awake. But she felt the need immediately: the toilet. A tribute owed to this place, to the accuracy of the message. She ordered a coffee and went directly to the bathroom, to the pleasure of the innkeeper, who appreciated a customer with clear priorities.

Outside, she smoked and waited. For the train. For a shoe shop to open. She hated the boots. They were a constraint, a weight, a choice made by someone else's logic. Her feet were trapped in other people's architecture.

Police passed. Surveillance, clearly. They were watching her, but she was invisible—which meant they could see only what they needed to see. It was a paradox that made perfect sense.

She caught the first train to the first city. Went to the bank. Withdrew money. Caught the first train back out.

Somewhere along the route, she removed the boots. Her feet expanded into the space. The relief was physical, immediate, undeniable.

A young woman sat across from her—beautiful, sharp-featured, playing with a pen that Me considered to be carefully weaponized. Young people, Me had learned, could be trusted. Mostly. But increasingly she understood: even among the young, there were infiltrators. The different ones. The ones who carried contradictions.

Me stood, put the boots back on, and went to the loo. Someone knocked, the woman smiled and let her in. Jumping from the train as soon as she locked the door and the train left. Bye bye baby Jane.

The journey took six hours to cover one hundred kilometers.

In the large city, she began the transformation. Piece by piece. First: the shoes. They came off, replaced by something lighter, less certain, more Parisian in its refusal of functionality. Then the rest—the outer layers of herself shed and reassembled. When she caught her reflection, she was someone else. Someone the networks wouldn't immediately recognize.

She decided to go and visit relatives by the sea. She bought wine. The Good Government. Two vouchers came with it. One for each daughter, she thought. The vouchers were addressed to her. She held them like evidence.

The final stretch she did all at once. The hated boots remained beneath the train seat, a deliberate offering, the last piece of her exterior discarded. She was traveling lighter. Traveling as something newly assembled. The phone as well.

When she arrived in the city by the sea, she walked toward her relative's house. The song came to her, unbidden, moving through her skull like something half-remembered, half-discovered:

Calm is the wind, still is the storm
Home comes the fierce partisan
Waving his red flag
Victorious and finally free we are

She rang the doorbell at exactly 7 p.m.

They hadn't seen her in years. But when she stepped inside, everything was prepared. The table was set. The food was arranged. The lights were on, welcoming, as if they had been expecting her all along. As if they had always known she would arrive at this exact moment, on this exact evening, transformed and visible and, for the first time in months, coming home.