The Blindfold Game

The gym still smelled like popcorn and gym socks. Everyone had gone home. Maya and Soren were supposed to be stacking chairs, and mostly they were, except for the one chair with wheels that somebody had rolled out from the office.

"Sit," Maya said. "I want to try something."

Soren sat. Maya spun him. He put his notebook in his lap and gripped the seat.

"Close your eyes," she said. "Tell me when I stop."

She spun him three times and stopped. Soren said, "Now."

"Wrong," said Maya. "I stopped like two seconds ago."

"I felt you stop just now."

"But I didn't. You were sitting still and you felt like you were still turning."

Soren opened his eyes. The gym did a slow lazy slide the wrong way, then caught itself.

"Do it again," he said. "I want to know when I feel the stop."

So they did it again. Maya spun and stopped, and Soren, eyes shut, said, "Still turning. Still turning. Okay. Stopped." He counted the gap out loud. About two seconds, every time, where his body swore it was moving and the chair was not.

"There's something in your ears," Maya said. "For turning. My cousin gets carsick and her doctor said it's ears, not stomach."

"Ears are for hearing."

"Ears are for more than hearing." She held out her hand for the notebook. Soren gave it to her and she drew a lopsided loop with a smaller loop stuck on it, like a snail. "Something in here. Loops with juice in them. When you spin, the juice sloshes and pushes on something and your brain goes, turning. When you stop, the juice keeps sloshing for a second because juice does that."

"So the sloshing lies to me," Soren said. "After I stop."

"It's not lying. It's just late."

Soren took the notebook back and wrote late juice and then crossed out juice and wrote fluid, because that sounded more like a real word.

"Okay," he said. "But here's the thing that's bugging me." He rolled the chair backward and forward in a straight line. No spinning. "When you push me in a straight line, no loops, no turning. But I still feel it. I felt that. Straight lines don't slosh in a loop."

Maya stopped. "Push yourself again. Slow as you can."

Soren pushed off the floor as gently as possible. The chair crept forward. He shut his eyes.

"Feel it?"

"Barely. But yeah. I feel the start." He let it coast. "And now I don't feel anything, even though I'm still rolling."

"You only feel the change," Maya said. She said it slowly, like she was surprised it came out of her. "Not the moving. The change in the moving."

Soren opened his eyes. "Speeding up and slowing down. Not the coasting."

"So there has to be a second thing," Maya said. "Not the loops. The loops are for turning. There's a second thing for straight-line speeding up."

Soren drew it before he knew what it was: under the snail loops, a little blob. "Something that feels a push. Like a tiny hanging weight. When you speed up, the weight lags behind and tugs."

"Try this," said Maya. She had that look. "Close your eyes. I'm not going to touch you. Just tell me which way is down."

"That's easy. Down is down."

"How do you know, with your eyes shut?"

Soren opened his mouth and closed it. He shut his eyes. Down was very obviously down. He could feel exactly where the floor was, which way to fall if he fell. Nobody had told him. His body just knew.

"The weight," he said quietly. "The little hanging weight. Gravity pulls it down all the time. That's how I know down. It's the same thing. The thing that feels the push when you shove me is the same thing that feels gravity pulling all day."

Maya sat down cross-legged on the gym floor. "Speeding up feels like a little bit of gravity. Sideways gravity."

"And gravity feels like speeding up that never stops." Soren laughed, a little shaky. "The same tiny sensor. It can't tell them apart."

"How small a push, though." Maya was already up on her knees. "Because I barely pushed you and you felt it."

They tested it. Maya pushed the chair as gently as she could make her arm move, the smallest shove, and every time, eyes shut, Soren caught it. The tiniest start. A push way gentler than falling, way gentler than the pull he felt holding him to the floor, and the sensor caught it anyway.

"It's better than I am at everything," Soren said. "I can't see a push that small. I can't hear one. But that little thing in my ear felt it."

"It's on the whole time," Maya said. "Right now. Sitting here. It's telling you where down is, this second, and this second, and it never once told you it was working."

Soren went still. Then he put his hand flat behind his ear, like he could feel the loops and the little weight through the bone, which he couldn't.

"That's why the spin thing feels so weird," he said. "For two seconds after you stop me, the loops say turning and the little weight says down is down and they disagree. And my brain has to pick."

"And it picks wrong," Maya said, delighted. "For two whole seconds it believes the sloshing over the truth."

"Which means it's doing this all the time. Picking. Every second I've ever been alive it's been listening to both of them and deciding which one to believe and it never told me." Soren looked at his own hands like they belonged to someone very busy he had never met. "I've been walking around trusting a thing I didn't know I had."

Maya climbed onto the wheeled chair and pulled her knees up so her feet were off the floor. "Spin me," she said. "I want to catch it lying."

Soren gripped the back of the chair. "Eyes open or shut?"

"Shut. I want to feel the exact second it starts telling me the wrong thing."

He spun her. The chair whirred on the empty gym floor, and Maya, eyes closed, held up one finger, waiting to point at the moment her own body would fool her.