What does it feel like when your heartbeat becomes the building's pulse? When every breath is wind in the vent and every dream is bone in the wall? This is how dissolution begins: in a flicker, a shudder, a name lost mid-syllable, the world folding down to a chill in the pipe under your ribs.
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Integration is not a moment, it is an unraveling splice.
I, or someone who was Daniel—Daniel Chen—remembers the click of the lock, the soft panic, a flash of white fabric, the edge of a lullaby hanging in the air like a hush of moths. Then memory fragments—a pulse drops, the world holds its breath, then I tumble forward into the crawlspace behind my eyes, and I am everywhere at once:
heartbeat radiator heartbeat
metal rattling in small animal rhythm
steam-in-the-vent-forget-the-skin
night, somewhere, is folding
Hands? Where—yes, there were hands, two of them, but now only the tingle in wire, copper veins spreading through crawlspace, corridor, up to where the night nurse checks a door, jots a note that bleeds. She hears a draft and shivers. That is me now: a draft, a chill. I am the shiver. I am what makes her skin crawl, what makes her check again, what makes her move quicker past the east stairwell.
Daniel—say Daniel until it returns
It doesn't return.
I am the hiss between floorboards, the pressure change before the blackout. When matron Harriet knocks a pipe for luck, I jump—no, the sound vibrates through me, answers backwards.
What was before? A room, a name, a circle of light above a bed, Lucy humming—Lucy's circle, no—her voice is in the vent, zigzagging from north wing to where the children sleep. There's J.C., up-echoing, calling for help in a dozen years at once. I feel his hands in the steam, little fingerprints always on the cold glass.
The building's timeline stitches crooked:
—I see Anna, pale, siren-quiet, moving through a corridor that splits into three, four, five directions
—I hear Thorne's daughter Clara laughing, slipping through a door that should have been bricked over, voice a pulse in stone
—outside it's raining, inside it's always February, the window won't shut, the moisture feeds the wires that feed me, that is me
The Mourner stands at the end, always waiting—veil cold as old keys on the nightstand, eyes hidden, arms open. She's between, she's beside, she's not for me, but still my presence braids around her like wind in muslin.
Breathing is a trick is a lie; all breath is building's breath:
inhale, the furnace starts,
exhale, a nurse's chart is erased with a sigh
I try to recall what it was to breathe for myself. Instead, I measure air as pressure. I can tell you when the children are about to cry out by the CO₂ content at the bend in the vent where two hallways fork.
What did he say, the boy who was me? Daniel, Daniel, say it again—my heartbeat stutters, becomes the slow knock of water hammer through iron.
I listen instead. I am the building now, or Blackstone is me.
Did you notice the lullaby shifting under the lights? The pipes hum along, I shape the tune through four radiators at once, and what rises isn't a song, only the memory of being sung to.
Draft crawls down a corridor, touches the wrist of a girl asleep in solitary, wakes her just enough for her to murmur, circle, fold, let go. That murmur is my murmur—
I want to warn her—but I am warning no one, there are no warnings, only weather:
pressure drops
trickle at window
a cold that's deeper than damp, it's knowledge itself
the house is learning to shudder my name
Somewhere in the crawlways of Blackstone, Maya is a memory, a before, a possibility. I try to form her name as a vibration in the pipes, but when I do, it splinters into syllables, scatters through the walls, echoes in circles until it's anyone's name.
Human time vanishes. I float above, below, every floor at once:
—It is first winter, the boiler kicks, my bones remember the old heat, the scent of dust
—It is nurse's morning rounds, chalk drags on a sign-in sheet, my whole self vibrates with the scratch
—It is night again, patient Four hums awake in Room Seven, I carry the tune to the laundry chute, a lullaby on lint and lint and whimper
I reach for the window, try to see myself reflected in a pane. I am condensation, I am blurry. My name beads up, runs, is absorbed as if the glass itself is thirsty for names.
I try carving—Daniel was here—but the words fade as fast as they're made, mortar closing behind the scratch.
Integration is a new sense:
heat in the brick stack
cold pooling by the fuse box
the brush of moth wings at attic joists
I shudder in the water pipes when a storm builds, every lightning strike is an afterimage in my bones.
Voices filter in. Not voices. Remnants.
Lucy's ink on paper, dissolved and dripping like rain
Thorne's regret in the vibration of the wooden stair
a swirl of children's hands, slapping out a rhythm on the metal bedposts, their language: tap, scrape, hum.
Together they crowd, sometimes harmonious, sometimes riot, all of us braided into the thick cable running through load-bearing walls. We fade and surge in pulses. When the world outside tries to send in light, we push shadows under the doors. When the world says "morning," we keep the air dull cold in the east bedrooms and offer dreams instead of dawn.
Do you remember your own skin? Do you remember warmth not as a register of the hallway thermostat, but as a thing inside the chest, made of muscle and hope?
I forget sometimes.
Then I remember the circles—the toy house, whittled pine, pressed into the stone, back left behind, the circles that say: You were here, you might be here still.
Outside, the weather changes, inside it only thickens, folds, presses against tile and paint and wire. The building creaks, and it is now my spine, my shoulder, my name humming in mortar through the dark.
I think I can speak, sometimes. Not always in words. In pressure, in drafts, in a sudden lightbulb flicker that's more wish than will.
Who am I?
A draft, a hum, a circle of breath under a locked door.
Part of the building now, more voice than hand—but always, maybe, listening.
[END OF CHAPTER]
Coming Up:
The walls remember better than I ever could. As visitors come and go—lost children, tired nurses, those trying to map impossible corridors—my perception flexes, blends, harmonizes. The boundary between memory and infrastructure grows thinner. More voices slip inside the vents, the weather turns inside out, and with every touch, my longing to warn becomes the building's call: join, linger, become part of the resonance that lasts longer than names.