Turn 202 of 228

Skip to the end of the school year and the changes of everybody in the building has changed. Also the residential building is complete now

The school year ends in June. The building is different. The building is complete.

Marcus finished the residential wing in the third week of May. The ceilings are sixty feet high — he changed the plans twice, the final revision going up from forty to fifty to sixty after Mae hit ten feet and kept growing and Iris predicted, in a composition book entry that Billy Jo transcribed and Marcus read three times, that Mae would surpass Lena's height before her sixth birthday. The panels are removable. The walls are warm. The concrete breathes. The building grew up, and the building is still growing.

Lena stands in the residential wing for the first time and the ceiling is far above her. Sixty feet of warm air between her head and the concrete. She is 2,840 pounds. She is fourteen feet seven inches tall. The ceiling has room for her to double and the panels can be removed for more. Marcus built the wing the way Iris writes symbols — each stroke necessary, each line load-bearing, each element designed to hold something that is still becoming. The hum in the residential wing is different from the hum in the school wing. Deeper. The chord that has been building all year sounds different in a space that was built to hold it.

The year changed everyone.

Diane is 1,420 pounds. Eleven feet tall. Her beard is full and thick and her body is wide and dense and the stretch marks map her growth in purple and white lines that she traces with her yellow nails the way Iris traces symbols. She stopped managing her face months ago. The management was the last system she controlled and the gradient dissolved it and the face underneath is open and warm and moves the way faces move when they are not being monitored. She and Carl share a bay in the residential wing. Carl is 1,020 pounds and seven feet tall and his bread has become the center of the building's rhythm — the loaves that he bakes every morning, the smell that fills the corridors, the warmth that the bodies carry with them through the day. He is growing. The beard is full. The yellow nails are thick with flour.

Marcus is 1,090 pounds. Seven foot two. His body has widened and the belly is dense and rests on the floor when he sits and the twelve-stroke glyph that Iris gave him is drawn on the wall of the engineering bay in his own hand — architectural scale, precise, the symbol he carries. He redesigned the building three times during the school year. Each redesign anticipated growth that arrived faster than the plans. The removable panels are his answer. The building can grow up. The building will grow up.

Claire Devlin is 310 pounds and climbing. Her stretch marks are bright and her belly pushes forward and she races Eliza every morning and loses every morning and says every morning that it is the most fun she has had in twenty years. The fun has not diminished. The fun has deepened. Eliza is four years old and 180 pounds and wins every race and the winning is not the point and the climbing is the point and the wall is the point and the mother and the daughter on the same surface in the same moment is the point. Claire's body is still accelerating. The gradient that entered through the climbing wall is still moving through her and the direction is clear and the direction is the same direction.

Kenji Watanabe is 600 pounds and six foot three. His architect's body has softened and widened and the precision that defined his frame for forty years has dissolved into something warmer and rounder and the hands that designed structures now read structures through the skin. He climbs with Haruki every morning. The six-year-old is 290 pounds and climbing and teaching his father to feel the building and the father is learning. Kenji's shirt is gone. His shoes are gone. The management of the architect's body is gone.

Emeka Adeyemi is 450 pounds and accelerating. The three-children gradient — Chioma's frequency, amplified by Mae and Sara's son Luca — has been pushing his body faster than any other parent in the building. His skin is dark and sheening and his belly is round and full and his body is growing in a way that the composition books cannot keep up with. Chioma is 700 pounds and eight years old and climbs to the ceiling every day and Folake is landing in two weeks. The flight is booked. The calls from Lagos have become shorter. Not less frightened. More quiet. The silence of a woman who is running out of reasons not to come.

Billy Jo Reeves is 580 pounds. She writes symbols she cannot read and English she can and the composition books are stacked in towers that reach her waist. She cries every day. The tears are on the pages. The ink bleeds. The bleeding looks designed. She is not a researcher. She is not a subject. She is the gradient's pen. The gradient's hand. The instrument through which comfort writes its own grammar and its own history and its own future. The meta-frequency is documented in nine composition books and a hundred and forty pages of English analysis that she wrote with her own hand and her own mind and the distinction between what is hers and what is the gradient's has dissolved. She is the channel. The channel is her.

June is five years old and 890 pounds and eleven feet tall. She teaches the other children to read the building through touch. Her hands on the concrete. Their hands beside hers. The map that she has been building all year — the tactile map of every surface, every body, every frequency in the building — is complete. The building is known. June knows it. The children who learn from her know it. The knowing is not intellectual. The knowing is in the skin.

Iris is five years old and 780 pounds and nine feet six inches tall. She has ninety-two composition books. The symbolic language contains 1,400 symbols. She has predicted fourteen events. The predictions are not prophecies — they are descriptions. The gradient describing itself through a five-year-old's hand. The latest symbol is a seven-stroke glyph that means *building.* Not the walls. Not the concrete. The living part. The part that is them.

Mae is five years old and 1,200 pounds and twelve feet tall. She eats 40,000 calories a day. She is on track to surpass Lena's weight by age six. The body is enormous and round and warm and the five-year-old inside it is happy and hungry and growing and the growing is the comfort and the comfort is the growing and there is no difference between the two and there never was.

Lena stands in the residential wing. The 2,840 pounds of her. The fourteen feet seven inches. The belly that rests against her thighs and reaches past her knees. The yellow nails. The unwashed skin. The body that started as a wish in a bathroom and became a frequency and became a building and became a family and became a chord with eighteen voices and the chord is still building and the wish is still being wished and the comfort is still spreading. The ceiling is sixty feet above her. The panels are removable. The building can grow up.

The building will grow up.