The Yawn That Went Around

The waiting room had eleven chairs and Soren had counted them twice. His grandmother was somewhere down a bright hall having pictures taken of the inside of her knee. He and Maya had a bag of pretzels and a clock that did not seem to move.

"Watch this," Maya said.

She did not tell him what to watch. She just leaned back and opened her mouth and yawned, slow and enormous, like a cat.

Across the room, a man in a green jacket looked up from his phone. His jaw tightened. Then it went, a yawn cracking right across his face.

"Did you see that," Maya whispered. "I made him do it."

"You didn't make him do anything. He was probably tired."

"Then watch the lady with the magazine."

Maya yawned again. The woman by the fish tank kept reading. Nothing.

"See," Soren said. "It doesn't always work. So it's not you doing it."

"Or she wasn't looking at me." Maya pointed a pretzel at him. "The man was looking. The lady wasn't."

Soren thought about that. It was actually a good rule. If a thing only happened when someone was watching, then the watching was part of the machine.

"Okay," he said. "But that's weird, right? Your mouth opening shouldn't do anything to his mouth. There's a whole room in between. There's air."

"Try it," Maya said. "You yawn. I'll watch and see if I feel it."

Soren felt ridiculous but he did it. He faked a yawn, and halfway through the fake one a real one ambushed him from underneath and stretched his whole jaw wide.

Maya's mouth pulled open a half second later.

"Okay that's real," she said through it. "I felt it start before I decided to."

"Before you decided." Soren wrote something down. His pencil moved fast. "So your body did it and then you noticed. Not the other way around."

"Do it again."

"I can't just yawn. Now I'm thinking about it."

But Maya was thinking about something else. She had gone quiet, and then she said, "Soren. I can't yawn either right now. But you know what does work? Reading the word yawn. In a book. Nobody's even in the room and you still do it."

Soren stopped writing. "That's true. I've done that."

"So it's not the mouth. Something inside your head is copying. And it copies a real mouth, or a picture of a mouth, or just the word." She frowned. "It's like part of your brain can't tell the difference between doing it and seeing it."

Soren looked at the man in the green jacket, who had gone back to his phone, no idea he had been part of an experiment.

"Try something," Soren said. "Don't yawn. Just watch me do this."

He reached out slowly and picked up his empty water cup like it was full and heavy, like it might spill. He watched Maya's hand.

Her fingers had curled. Not all the way. But they had shaped themselves, just a little, around a cup that was not there.

"You did it too," he said. "Your hand. You were getting ready to hold it."

Maya looked at her own fingers like they belonged to somebody else. "I wasn't trying to."

"I know. That's the whole thing." Soren's voice had sped up. "Watching me lift it turned on the same part of you that would lift it. Just quieter. Like the volume's down but the song's still playing."

They sat with that.

"So when I watch you," Maya said slowly, "part of my brain is doing what you're doing. A little. All the time."

"And when you watch anyone."

Maya turned and really looked at the room now. The woman by the fish tank had put her magazine down. A little boy near the door was pushing a toy truck along the floor, and his mother, without looking, was pushing her own foot forward and back, forward and back, in the exact rhythm of the truck.

"She doesn't know she's doing it," Maya breathed.

"None of them know."

An old man came in on a cane. He winced when he sat down, a sharp little breath through his teeth, and Soren felt his own knee tighten in sympathy, an ache that was not his.

"I felt that," Soren said. "He hurt his leg and I felt it in mine. For a second."

Maya nodded. She had felt it too. "That's why you flinch when someone else gets hurt in a movie. You're not pretending to care. Part of you is actually doing the hurt."

"Running the copy," Soren said. "Quiet, but running."

Maya looked at him then in a way she did not usually look at anybody. "Soren. You know how you always say you're not the kind of person things happen to. You just watch."

"Yeah."

"But watching isn't nothing. If this is real, then when you watch somebody, you're kind of doing the thing with them. On the inside. You've been in everything the whole time. You just had the volume down."

Soren did not write that down. He held the pencil and did not write it.

"Test it once more," he said, and his voice was not quite steady. "Real test. You do something I can't see the point of. I'll watch. We'll see if I know what you mean before you say it."

Maya thought. Then she stood up, walked three steps to the fish tank, and stopped. She didn't tap the glass. She just held one finger up near it, still, and waited.

A fish drifted over toward the finger.

And Soren, across the room, without being told, lifted his own hand and held one finger still in the air, waiting for something to come to it.

Maya watched him do it and started to laugh, and the old man with the cane looked over and smiled without knowing why, because a smile is the easiest thing of all to catch.

Soren lowered his finger. "I knew what you meant," he said. "Before you did anything else. I just knew."

Down the hall a door opened and his grandmother came out slowly, testing her knee, and Maya, watching her, took a careful step of her own toward the sound.