Switch House

The job ran late. They always ran late, but this one ran later because the panel in the old dental office was a mess and the last electrician who touched it should have been arrested. I was Maria Hooper, fifty-four years old, thirty-one years in the trade, and I was on my knees under a desk pulling twelve-gauge through a stud bay at nine at night. My knees had thoughts about that.

My phone buzzed on the carpet. I sat back on my heels and looked at it and groaned out loud, because the city had sent me a reminder.

HARMONY FIELD TEST BEGINS IN 10 MINUTES. OPT-OUT CLOSES AT START OF TEST.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," I said to the empty office.

I had meant to opt out. Everybody meant to opt out. The harmony field had been running citywide for two years, and the whole idea was that once a quarter the city ran a test window where consenting residents could swap bodies for research and, honestly, for fun, if you were the kind of person who found that fun. Most people signed a standing opt-out the first week and forgot about it. I had been meaning to sign mine since the program launched. Meaning to and doing are two different animals, as my old foreman used to say.

I thumbed at the screen with a hand that smelled like flux and old electrical tape. The app spun. The app spun some more. Then it gave me a happy little green check mark that I did not trust for one second.

"Cheap city phone," I told it, and packed up my tools.

The elevator in my building takes forever. I stood in it chewing the last of a granola bar and watching the floor numbers. I got off on my floor, third, and there was this jolt of static that ran up through my boots and into my teeth. Like touching a live wire, except I have touched plenty of live wires and this was not that. It was more like the air itself got a charge.

I blinked.

I was on tile. Bathroom tile, cold, white, with black hexagons in the pattern. I was on my knees on it and my knees did not hurt. That was the first wrong thing. The second was my hands, flat on the tile in front of me, and they were big hands, pale, knuckles like walnuts, a scar across the left one I had never earned. I turned them over a few times like they might explain themselves. They did not.

I said a word I will not repeat here and got myself upright using the edge of a clawfoot tub. The man in the mirror over the sink was about sixty, gray beard, glasses folded on the shelf. Tall. Built with the dimensions of a fence post. My legs were long and strange and my center of gravity was up around my shoulders instead of my hips.

A bathtub. He had been about to get in a bathtub. There was a towel laid out on the lid and the water was still running somewhere behind the wall I could not see, and I wanted no part of any of it.

"Okay, Maria," I said, and the voice coming out of me was not mine either. "Think."

I knew the drill. This was the standard script. You stay where you swapped, you call the harmony line, the techs pair you back up at dawn. Nobody tells you that you will be standing in a stranger's bathroom wearing a stranger's body with the stranger's electric kettle in view, wondering if he was a tea person or a coffee person, because that question suddenly mattered more than your whole life.

I walked out into the flat. It was a ground-floor unit in one of those Victorians near Alamo Square, high ceilings, a tall window with lace curtains, books everywhere. Not shelves of books. Piles. Piles on the table, piles on the chairs, one pile holding up a lamp. Boxes with neat handwriting on the masking tape. A work table with folders spread across it and a laptop that was older than some of my apprentices.

Then somebody pounded on the door.

Three hard knocks, then more, then a woman's voice, pitched high and cracking, saying, "Hello? Hello in there? Is anyone home?"

I went to the door. The voice on the other side was mine. I knew that voice. I had been hearing it for fifty-four years.

I worked the deadbolt with the walnut-knuckle hand, which took two tries because I did not know the trick of it, and pulled the door open.

There I was. Standing in my own body in the hallway, wearing my own jacket, my own boots, my hair escaping its clip the way it always does by the end of a shift. He had my face. I had his hands, his whole body, and he looked at his face on me and I looked at my face on him and we both just stopped.

"Oh no," he said with my mouth. "Oh no, no, no."

"Yeah," I said with his. "I was going to say the same thing."

He was still holding my tool bag like it might bite him. He looked down at my boots on his feet, then back up.

"You're Maria Hooper," he said. "Third floor. I've seen you come and go for years. You're the electrician."

"That's me. And you're the guy in the bathtub."

"I was about to be the guy in the bathtub," he said, and something in the phrasing was so aggrieved that I laughed, which was a mistake, because hearing my laugh come out of his face was not funny and we both flinched.

"Come inside," I said. "You're standing in the hallway in my body and the neighbors are going to have questions."

He came in. He shut the door and leaned against it with my shoulders, and I realized I had his shoulders now, so I leaned too, on the book pile that was nearest.

"I'm Barry," he said. "Barry Barton. I live here. Obviously."

"Maria Hooper. Also obvious. I'm sorry about your bath."

"The water was the right temperature," he said, mournful, and then he waved my hand at the room. "It doesn't matter. I never got around to the opt-out either. Do you know the protocol? I know the protocol. Stay put, call the harmony line, they re-pair you at dawn. Six in the morning."

"Six in the morning," I agreed. "So that's, what, nine hours."

"It's ten forty," he said. "A little over seven."

Seven hours in a stranger's flat, in a stranger's body, with my body standing right there being worn by somebody else. I looked around at the book piles and the folders and the lace curtains. He looked at his own hands, my hands, and turned my wedding-band-free fingers over the way I had turned his.

"We're going to have to talk to each other," he said. "All night."

"Seems like it."

"Would you like some wine? There's exactly one bottle. I bought it for a reason I no longer remember."

"Yeah," I said. "I would."

I got the wine open, which took a while, because his corkscrew was one of those old wooden ones and my hands were still figuring out their own grip strength. Barry sat at the table with his phone, which was my phone, and dialed the harmony line on speaker.

"The line said forty-five minutes," he said after a while. "Automated voice. Very cheerful."

"The line is always cheerful," I said. "You know they record those? My friend Denise did voice work for the water department. Same studio."

"That's a strange thing to know about a friend."

"I know a lot of strange things. Thirty-one years in the trade, you end up in everybody's basement."

He poured the wine into two mismatched glasses, and I watched my own hands do it, steady, careful, filling mine less than his. That is a thing I do. I always pour myself less. Seeing it done to me from the outside was like watching a video of your own front door.

The phone rang at eleven twenty. Not the harmony line. It was my contact list, my screen, my ringtone, and the name on it was Irma Bradshaw, and I said "oh" out loud before I answered it.

"Irma."

"Maria, oh thank God, listen, listen to me." She was talking fast and low, the way she does when something has gone wrong at the grid and she does not want it to go wrong any louder. "Is it you? Is it actually you?"

"It's me. In a stranger's body, but it's me."

"Okay. Okay. Are you somewhere safe? Is anybody else on the line?"

Barry raised both my eyebrows at me and I shook my head no.

"Then here is the situation," she said, and I heard her take a breath, the long controlled breath she takes before she tells you the bad part. "The field glitched. You were in a test window, your swap was scheduled, but the routing table dumped two IDs into one pairing slot and now your re-pair is not going to happen at dawn. It's not happening at six. It's happening whenever I can rebuild the slot without anybody upstairs noticing, which could be six, could be tomorrow night, could be longer."

"Longer," I repeated. Barry had stopped moving my hands entirely. He had one of them flat on the table like he was keeping it from floating away.

"Longer," she said. "I'm sorry, Maria. I'm so sorry. I've been working this thing since ten fifty and I can't fix it from my end tonight without logging the error, and if I log the error it goes to review, and if it goes to review they'll ask why a routine quarterly test produced an unlogged double slot, and that's my neck. I know how that sounds. I know it's not your problem. But it is the problem."

"Irma." I made my voice slow, the way you talk to someone who has been staring at a screen too long. "Breathe. Nobody is hurt. I am sitting in a warm flat with a man I have apparently lived next to for years, drinking his wine. The city can wait until morning."

"The city can wait until morning," she echoed, and she did breathe, and I heard the little click of her setting something down, probably the headset, probably her third coffee of the night. "Can I call you back? I have to keep the loop stable. It's a house of cards, Maria. I built it a house of cards and now I have to keep it standing."

"Call me back. I'll be here. Apparently I'll be here a while."

She hung up. Barry and I looked at each other across the table.

"So that's longer than seven hours," he said.

"Could be. She'll fix it. She's good. She's the best there is at that grid and I've known her since a neighborhood meeting nine years ago, and she does not lose things."

"She loses slots," he said, but not mean. He turned my glass on the table with one finger. "Do you want tea? I find that wine at ten forty and bad news at eleven twenty call for tea. It's a ritual. My mother did it and I never found a better one."

"Sure," I said. "Tea."

He got up and went to the kitchen with my body, and I followed, because I did not want to sit alone in a room of his books. And here is the part I keep coming back to. He made the tea with my hands and I stood there and watched. He knew where everything was, the tin on the second shelf, the kettle that you fill through the little spout instead of the lid, the gas burner with the trick of the ignition where you have to hold it down longer than you think. He knew all that. But the hands were mine. And my hands know kettles. Thirty-one years of kettles, of breakers and junction boxes and every kind of switch ever made, and they have thoughts, and those thoughts do not care whose body they are in. So he would reach for the tin and my hand would hesitate, or my thumb would test the weight of a jar he had no interest in, and he would say "hm" and put it back.