The Other Census

Soren was lying on the cot in the nurse's office with one hand on his stomach, listening to it. It made a long sliding sound, like furniture moving in another room.

Maya was sitting in the visitor's chair because she had told the gym teacher she felt dizzy, which was half true. She had felt dizzy thinking about climbing the rope. Now she was reading the poster on the wall above the hand sanitizer.

"Your body is a city," she read out loud. "That's a dumb poster."

"Why is it dumb," Soren asked, not opening his eyes.

"It says your body has thirty-seven trillion cells. Like that's the whole population." She tilted her head. "It's not the whole population."

Soren opened his eyes. "What do you mean."

"My cousin had a baby and the baby got something wrong with its stomach and they put in bacteria. On purpose. From a healthy person." She pulled her knees up. "They moved bacteria into a person like furniture. Why would they do that if the bacteria didn't matter."

The nurse was at her desk filling out a form with the slow careful handwriting of someone who did not want to be interrupted. "Soren, are you still having the cramps," she said, without looking up.

"A little," Soren said. "My mom says I get them when I'm nervous."

"Stress stomach," the nurse said, and went back to her form. "Very common."

Soren sat with that. He had a test fourth period. His stomach had started this morning, before breakfast, exactly when he remembered the test. He turned the timing over.

"Maya," he said. "How does my stomach know I'm nervous. My stomach can't read a calendar."

Maya stopped looking at the poster. "Say that again."

"The nervous is in my head. The test is in my head. But the cramp is down here." He pressed his stomach. "How does the message get down. Why down."

The nurse looked up. "There's a nerve," she said. "The big one. It connects the brain and the gut. It's why you feel things in your stomach." She seemed pleased to know it. "Butterflies, that kind of thing."

"Okay," Soren said slowly. "So the brain talks down the nerve to the stomach."

"That's right," said the nurse, and looked back down, satisfied.

But Maya had gone very still in the chair, which was the stillness she got right before she said something.

"A nerve goes both ways," she said. "Wires go both ways. If the brain can send a message down, then something down there can send a message up."

Soren sat all the way up on the cot. "Up to where."

"Up to your head." Maya was talking fast now. "The poster says thirty-seven trillion cells. But that's only your cells. My cousin's baby. The furniture they moved in. How many of those are there."

Neither of them knew. The nurse had gone back into her form and was not going to be the answer. Soren reached for the notebook in his bag and the pencil came out with it. He wrote thirty-seven trillion at the top of a clean page and underlined it.

"It has to be a big number," he said, "or they wouldn't bother moving them."

There was a chart on the wall by the door, the kind with the body cut open in layers, all the loops of the intestines folded up like rope. Maya got up and went to it. The intestines were enormous. Coiled and coiled. More surface than she had pictured, all of it crowded.

"Soren," she said. "Look how much room there is in there. It's not empty. Nothing in a body is empty."

Soren came and stood beside her. The two of them looked at the coils.

"My cousin's baby got sick," Maya said quietly, "when the bacteria were wrong. Got better when they were right. Sick and better. From them. Not from her own cells. From them."

"So they do something," Soren said. "They're not just sitting there."

"They're doing something all the time." Maya put her finger on the coils in the chart. "And the nerve goes up. So whatever they're doing down here, the message goes up there." She moved her finger from the gut to the head. "To the place where the nervous lives. The place where the test lives."

Soren wrote it down before he could lose it. Down talks to up. Then he stopped writing and looked at the line he had written and felt the floor of the idea drop out from under him.

"Maya," he said. "If they can send messages up. If there's enough of them." He swallowed. "Then some of what's in my head. Some of what I feel. Might be them."

Maya turned from the chart and looked at him.

"Not just me in here," Soren said. He pressed his hand flat against his own chest, then took it away, because that wasn't where he meant. "A whole crowd. Voting."

The nurse looked up at the silence. "Are you boys alright," she said, and Soren realized she meant him, and that she had not heard any of it, that she thought thirty-seven trillion was the whole story and a nerve only went one way. A population the size of you, living inside you, sending messages up a nerve into the room where your moods are kept.

"It's a tie," Maya whispered. "Half of me is me. Half of me is them."

"It's not even half my idea, then," Soren said. "This idea. Some of it might be coming from down there." He looked almost happy about it, the way he got when something was too big to be embarrassed in front of. "I'm never alone in here. I've never once been alone in here."

Maya thought about her cousin's baby, sick and then better, the whole hidden country of it.

Soren wrote the number on a fresh page, thirty-eight trillion, and under it, in smaller letters, who is doing my thinking. He did not cross it out. He held the pencil over the page and his stomach made its long sliding sound, and this time he listened to it like it was a voice, because it might be one.