The Thing You Cannot Turn Off

The last kid left, and the coach clicked off the main lights on his way out without checking that the room was empty. Soren stood by the benches in the dark with one sock on.

He had taken off his shoes to check a blister and set them down somewhere, and now he could not see them. He could not see anything. The high windows above the lockers had gone the deep blue of almost-night.

He reached for the bench. His hand found it without groping. That was the first thing he noticed.

He stood still and lifted his arm slowly, then touched the tip of his own nose with one finger. First try. Eyes shut on top of the dark, just to be sure. Still first try.

He did it again. Then he touched his ear, his knee, the back of his own neck. He never missed. In pitch black he could not find his shoes, which were two feet away, but he could find every part of himself perfectly, every time, without a single guess.

Soren sat down on the bench and thought about that.

He knew where his own foot was right now. It was crossed over his knee, sock hanging half off. He had not looked at it. He was not looking at it now. But if someone asked him to point at his own big toe in the dark, he would hit it. He was certain in a way he almost never felt certain.

He tried to break it. He shut his eyes tighter and had someone move his arm, except there was no someone, so he did it himself with his other hand. He pushed his right arm up over his head and let go. Then, eyes closed, he reached across with his left hand and grabbed his right wrist on the first reach.

How did the left hand know where the right one had gone? Nobody told it. He had not watched it happen.

He pulled out his notebook, though he could not see the page, and wrote in the dark, letters running downhill and into each other. Left hand knows where right hand is. In the dark. Who is telling it.

He thought about the shoes again. The shoes were the opposite problem. To find the shoes he had to remember, and his memory was fuzzy, a guess about the past. To find his own toe he did not remember anything. The toe was not a guess. It was a fact arriving right now, this second, fresh, and then another one a second later, and another.

Something was feeding him.

He held his arm out straight and bent it slowly, and he could feel the exact angle of the elbow the whole way. Not by touch. Nothing was touching it. He felt the bend from the inside, from the muscle itself, like the muscle was calling out a number that changed as it stretched. He straightened the arm and the number changed back.

His stomach did a small cold flip.

Every muscle in his body was doing this. Right now. All of them, all the time, awake and reporting, his knees and his neck and the small muscles between his fingers, every tendon sending up how stretched it was and how bent, thousands of little messages a second, and he had never heard a single one of them on purpose in his entire life.

He tried to hear one. He held his hand up and spread the fingers and concentrated as hard as he could on the middle finger. He felt where it was. But he could not find the sending of it. He could not catch the message being sent. He could only ever get the answer, never the mail. He could not turn it off. He tried. He tried to not know where his left foot was. It was impossible. As long as the foot existed and he was awake, some part of his brain he did not control and could not visit was getting a live report of that foot, and it would keep getting it whether he wanted it or not, all night, every night he had ever slept, every second he had ever spent not thinking about his feet, which was almost every second of his life.

He had walked to school ten thousand times without once falling over, without once looking at his own legs to check they were coming. He had caught balls. He had climbed stairs in the dark of his own house. He had done all of it while thinking about something else entirely, because a piece of him that was not the thinking piece had been quietly running the body the whole time, catching every stumble before he knew he was stumbling.

He was two things. He had always been two things. There was the Soren who thought and wondered and worried about tryouts, and there was the other one, the silent one at the base of his skull, who never slept, never spoke, never asked for credit, and knew exactly where all of him was at every moment of his life.

He had never met that one. He never would. It ran below the door. There was no door.

Soren pressed his own two hands together in the dark and pushed, and he could feel the push in both palms and in both wrists and in his shoulders, all of it measured, all of it reported, all of it arriving from somewhere he was not allowed to go.

He stood up. He put out his arms, closed his eyes on top of the darkness, and walked the length of the locker room, heel to toe, along a line only his own body knew was there.

He did not stumble once.

At the far wall he stopped and stood breathing, arms still out, feeling the whole map of himself hanging in the black, every joint pinned exactly where it was by a sense he had owned since before he was born and had only just now, at eleven, been introduced to.

Somewhere near the benches, his silent half remembered where he had set the shoes.

He turned, walked straight to them in the dark, and picked them up.