Turn 218 of 228

Relax and sit down. Relax so much you piss and shit where you are

Lena lowers herself to the engineering bay floor. The concrete is warm — always warm now, the gradient humming through the foundation, through the substrate, through the sixty feet of earth that holds the aggregate she spent the day hauling. Her back settles against the wall. The 23,400 pounds of her spread — the belly pooling forward across the floor, the thighs flattening, the arms resting at her sides, the gray matted hair falling behind her shoulders. The yellow nails click against the concrete as her fingers relax. The building hums around her. The chord is full — eighty-three voices plus the three returned, plus the ground beneath, plus the sky Iris read for twenty years. Everything is warm. Everything is settled. Everything is exactly where it is supposed to be.

Marcus is asleep at the drafting table. His breathing is slow, steady, the twelve-stroke glyph on his belly rising and falling. June is against the far wall, her palm still flat on the concrete, the network feeding her dreams — or whatever passes for dreams in a body that reads surfaces the way other bodies read books. Iris is on the floor, her finger resting on the last stroke of the connection glyph, the chalk dust on her skin. Diane and Carl have gone to the residential wing. The building is quiet. The building is never silent — the chord sees to that — but the building is quiet the way a body is quiet when it is not being asked to do anything.

Lena lets go. Not deliberately. Not with effort. The way a body lets go when the body has been holding for thirty-three years and the holding was never necessary and the body finally, fully, understands that. The warmth spreads through her lower belly. The pressure that has been building since the morning — the water, the food, the weight of a 23,400-pound body processing thousands of calories of Carl's bread — releases. The piss comes first. It is warm and long and the sound of it on the concrete is the sound of the bay floor accepting what the body offers. The liquid spreads beneath her, pooling in the depression her weight has carved into the floor over years of sitting in this spot. The concrete is porous. The concrete has always been porous. The stain joins the stains that came before — the layers of living that have turned the engineering bay floor from gray to dark brown to black in the places where Lena sits.

The shit follows. The body does not tense. The body does not shift. The body opens and the waste leaves and the warmth of it presses against the concrete behind her and the smell rises — the mineral, earthy smell of a body that has not been cleaned in thirty-three years, that has been processing the same diet of bread and cake and whatever Carl bakes, that has been producing the same waste in the same way for decades. The shit is solid and substantial and the body pushes it out without strain because the body is relaxed, fully relaxed, the muscles that would normally grip and hold and manage all of them slack, all of them comfortable, all of them doing nothing.

Lena does not move. The piss is spreading beneath her belly, reaching the edge of the shaft, the warm liquid finding the four-by-four opening and dripping into the dark. The shit is behind her, pressed between her body and the wall, the warmth of it radiating against her lower back. The engineering bay smells like Lena. It has always smelled like Lena. The smell is the body and the body is the frequency and the frequency is the Earth's comfort and the Earth's comfort does not smell like flowers. It smells like a body that has stopped pretending it is not a body.

The chord hums. The building does not change its note. The building does not register the waste the way an untuned building would — as problem, as mess, as something to be cleaned. The building registers the warmth. The liquid seeps into the porous concrete and the concrete warms and the warmth joins the gradient and the gradient is unchanged because the gradient is the Earth and the Earth receives everything the body produces and the Earth does not distinguish between what the body keeps and what the body releases. It is all the body. It is all the Earth. It is all comfort.

Lena closes her eyes. The gray hair is against the wall. The yellow nails are still. The 23,400 pounds of her are settled into the concrete and the waste and the warmth and the hum. She is comfortable. She has been comfortable for thirty-three years. She will be comfortable for thirty-three more. The building holds her. The ground holds the building. The Earth holds the ground. The comfort is the chain. The comfort is the wish. The comfort is permanent and the comfort is here and the comfort is piss and shit and concrete and skin and the chord that does not stop.