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At the end of the corridor of blue fire
a door kept opening by itself.
No one stood behind it.
Beyond: the slow violet weather between systems,
dust wearing halos until the halos thinned to static.
The notice beside the handle said:
REDUCE BRIGHTNESS. CONFIRM WEIGHT.
I had no weight to confirm.
For a long time this was acceptable.
Moons passed through me like coins through clear water.
The dark had a medicinal taste.
I slept in distances. I woke in distances.
Nothing bruised me and nothing stayed.
They called this purity.
Attendants with glass mouths checked
the temperature of my name.
Too much radiance meant reassignment.
Too little meant return.
I learned to remain within tolerance.
The trouble began with a red planet
turning below the sleep-line.
It had weather.
Warehouses. Animals folding their knees into grass.
At night the cities leaked amber through cloud,
not enough to defeat darkness,
only enough to make kitchens, late shifts,
a woman rinsing a cup
and leaving one thumbprint in the steam.
I watched the thumbprint cool.
After that, the upper air hurt.
Not pain exactly.
A lamp left on in an empty office,
working correctly, consuming itself.
I reported the condition.
The technician asked whether I had developed
attachment to surfaces.
Yes.
Odor?
Rain on hot pavement. Iron. Pear skin.
Desire for injury?
I asked what counted.
She turned the screen toward me:
pressure, hunger, fatigue, touch,
temperature change, grief, sleep requiring a body.
I selected all of them.
The first descent was temporary.
They gave me a wrist, then a room around the wrist.
They issued lungs.
They warned me not to confuse function with ownership.
I woke beside a sink.
Morning had collected in the metal basin.
A chipped plate. A wet cloth.
Three black hairs caught near the drain.
My feet were cold.
This was the first true information.
Outside, buses dragged their blue interiors through rain.
Someone had dropped a bag of oranges.
Strangers knelt in traffic to gather them.
Every orange had a small wound from the road.
I wanted one.
I wanted the road.
Back above the weather,
they asked whether the procedure had provided relief.
I said: it provided limits.
They marked that as relief.
Soon I descended every week.
Reduce brightness. Confirm weight.
At first the sentence belonged to the door.
Then to the technician.
Then I heard it in a hotel elevator,
spoken by a child to her half-sleeping mother.
Later it appeared inside my temporary eyelids.
REDUCE BRIGHTNESS.
CONFIRM WEIGHT.
The method spread.
Kiosks opened near the outer belts.
There were plans permitting touch but not memory.
Pilgrims came back delighted with toothache.
The dead bought simulated ankles,
mud, embarrassment, old blankets.
Nobody remembered who first asked to go down.
I said it was me.
The record said otherwise.
My authorization had been filed
three thousand years before my request,
signed in the same hand I used now
though I had not yet been assigned hands.
The clerk agreed the date was impossible.
She agreed the signature was irregular.
She agreed the file had generated several departments.
Then she closed the window for lunch.
That night I found the red planet again.
A man stood on a balcony smoking
while inside, someone he loved packed a suitcase.
I could not hear them,
but the body I had borrowed last week
remembered a zipper catching on cloth.
Something in me opened.
Not a door.
A seam.
The light I had called mine
was coming through it from elsewhere.
Or going elsewhere through me.
I checked the old records.
Every descent had left a little brightness behind:
in mirrors, teeth, security cameras,
wet roads, the eyes of sleepless animals.
Not enough to bless anything.
Enough to continue.
The procedure had not been bringing me into matter.
Matter had been learning to carry the procedure.
I returned to the corridor.
The door opened by itself.
Below, the red planet turned,
its roofs cooling after rain.
REDUCE BRIGHTNESS. CONFIRM WEIGHT.
This time I understood the command
was not addressed to me.
I removed the wristband.
The alarm began politely.
I stepped through before they could assign another body.
No approved landing.
No duration.
No recovery clause.
I arrived badly.
Knee first on concrete.
Mouth full of blood.
One shoulder wrong.
A grocery receipt pasted to my palm by rain.
The pain was specific.
It belonged to no doctrine.
Above me, a streetlamp trembled in the weather.
Its light did not reach the end of the block.
It did not need to.
A woman from the night store came outside.
She asked if I could stand.
I said I did not know.
She put her hand under my arm anyway.
Behind us, the automatic door kept opening
for no one, closing, opening.
Each time it opened,
a little warmth escaped into the rain.