Housemates

   The whole thing started with an ad online. I was looking for a place to live, and I found a woman with a place that she couldn't afford to rent by herself. I took a look at the place, and it was pretty nice. Full facilities, good neighborhood, the whole deal. She would have preferred a female housemate, and I'm usually leery about moving in with strangers, so it wasn't exactly an ideal situation for either of us, but she was coming down to the wire on funds, and I really needed a place to lay down roots. We swallowed our objections and shook hands, and I settled in.
   Cohabitation was awkward for the first few weeks, but I coped by avoiding contact with my new housemate as much as possible, in an effort to solve the problem by ignoring it. I'm a freelance software engineer with a few corporate contracts in the works, and I prefer to work from home. I also do some game coding on the side, my attempt to break into an industry I actually enjoy, so I work very odd hours. I eat when I'm hungry and I sleep when I'm tired with no regard for the clock, so I'm often asleep in the middle of the day and hard at work long after dark. My housemate, on the other hand, seemed to live a very normal life. She went out to jog every morning before breakfast, and then she changed into business casual clothes and went off to work, nine to five every weekday. I never did find out what she did for a living.
   As a result of our schedules, it was nearly a month before we found ourselves eating dinner at the same time. I normally eat at my desk, but I needed a break anyway, and I thought it was about time to break the ice with the woman I'd been sharing a house with, since we'd barely spoken since I moved in.
   "So," I said, "what would you rather be doing for a living?"
   "What?" she said. "What do you mean?"
   "You know, your dream job or whatever. What would you rather be doing?"
   "Don't you want to know what my actual job is first?"
"No, that would just tell me how much money you make. I'm more interested in what you actually enjoy. It tells a lot more about you."
   "Oh. Fair enough." She thought for a moment. "I think I'd like to be a magician."
   "Really?" I said. "You want to work at kids' birthday parties?"
   "No, no, not that kind of magician. I'd rather do the stuff on big stages. Appearing in a puff of smoke, getting sawn in half, that kind of thing."
   "I thought the assistant always got sawn in half."
   "Yeah, but some magicians do it the other way round, where they get sawn in half and the assistants just push the boxes around."
   "Huh. Neat. So why do you want to be a magician? You always wanted to go on stage?"
   "Well partly, but it's more than that. I remember the first magic show I saw. I saw something impossible happen. I still remember that feeling, and I want other people to be able to feel the same way. I want people to be amazed."
   "You do know that it's all just tricks, right?" I said.
   "Yeah, I know, but it still looks cool," she said. "I take it you don't like magic much."
   "Well, I saw a few shows as a kid, and then I looked into the behind-the-scenes of it all, and I found out that all the really big famous tricks use the same three or four gimmicks. After I figured them out, the rest all started to look the same after a while. It's all low lighting, creative carpentry, and camera angles. Besides, all those old magic shows looked kind of sexist."
   "Why?" she said. "Because it was always a male magician and a female assistant? Everything was like that back in the day."
   "Not just that," I said. "The magician's job was to look all-powerful and glorious, and the assistant was just a distraction so no one was looking at the secret. Or else she was like some kind of worshiper who just looked amazed at everything. And when the assistant climbed into the box, she was basically just a piece of furniture."
   "Well, yeah, if you're in the fifties," she said. "There are female magicians and male assistants now. Besides, these days it's less about female objectification and more about empowerment. There's more of an emphasis on the person in the box having some kind of power that the magician is demonstrating. It's like that movie Sucker Punch."
   "Oh, yeah? I love that movie."
   "I know, right? Isn't it awesome?"
   From there, we moved from stage illusion to cult classic films, like Boondock Saints and The Princess Bride, and we discovered that we had lots of interests in common. We both liked awesome movies. We both loved junk food, which I didn't believe for a second. I'd seen her going out to jog several times, and she filled out her workout gear really well. I'm not exactly a slob myself, especially for a work-at-home software developer, but I'm not exactly a magazine model.
   We stayed up pretty late watching movies and chatting more about stage illusion, and we wrapped up with her copy of The Prestige. Nobody got sawn in half, but we both enjoyed seeing Nikola David Bowie Tesla. After the movie, she turned in, and I wished her good night. I wasn't tired yet, and I still had some work to do, but I found myself looking forward to the next time we bumped into each other.
   I ended up working through the night, and I didn't get done until the sun was coming up. I put my computer to sleep, and I was just about to do the same for myself when there was a knock at my door.
   "Hang on a minute," I said. "I'm coming."
   I got out of bed and opened the door, and I saw my housemate standing in the hallway. She was wearing an undershirt and shorts, which she presumably slept in, and she was holding her head under one arm.
   "Hi," she said. "I've got kind of a complicated question."
   I was tired, so I assumed I was seeing things, but the image didn't go away no matter how long I stared. Her head was detached from her shoulders, and she had it tucked under her arm.
   "What the hell is this?" I said. I wasn't sure where to look, so I just looked at the wall. I was so bleary-eyed that it didn't really matter.
   "I don't know," she said. "I just woke up, and I was like this."
   "Maybe it was something you ate."
   "Very funny. This is serious. I'm kind of worried. I'm supposed to be at work in an hour."
   "I don't know what you expect me to do. I've been working all night, and I'm pretty sure I'm hallucinating, so I think I'm going to go to bed and let you handle this."
   I started to close the door, but she pushed it open with her free hand and stepped into my room. "You can't go to bed now. I need your help. This is real. You're not seeing things." She held her head up in front of my face. "Now wake up and help me."
   I rubbed my eyes and stepped around her so I could look at her from the side. She didn't look any different. Her head was still detached, and she was starting to look annoyed.
   I walked up to her and laid my hand on her shoulder. I ran my hand from one shoulder to the other, over the severed stump of her neck, and back again. It felt bizarre. I could feel her give a little shiver as I touched the skin on top of her neck.
   Now that I could touch it and feel it, I knew that it was real. My eyes have played tricks on me before, but my fingers never have.
   "How did this happen?" I said.
   "I don't know exactly, but I remember dreaming about being a magician last night. You remember? We were talking about it last night."
   "Yeah, I remember. So you dreamed yourself magical?"
   "No, I couldn't have."
   I stood at her back and looked her in the face as she turned her head to face me. "You know, the evidence suggests otherwise."
   "I mean that I've had that dream before, since I was a kid. I've been fascinated with stage magic for a long time."
   "Have you ever talked to anyone about it, like you did with me last night?"
   "Yeah, a few times."
   "So it wasn't the dream, and it wasn't the talking."
   "Well, we can ponder how exactly it happened later. What I want to know is what I'm supposed to do about it now."
   "Well, that part's easy. Right now, we need to sit down and figure out how this works, how to control it, and what else you might be able to do."
   "What? I told you, I have to be at work. I don't have time for this."
   I came back around to her front and took her hand in mine, the one holding her head, and I turned her head to face me. "You don't have time for this? Your head is detached from your shoulders, and you're still alive and breathing. What has happened to you should not be possible, but it's happened anyway. I've got work to do today, too, but I'm not going to do it, and neither are you."
   "What are you talking about?"
   "You've just demonstrated the existence of the supernatural. Are you seriously going to tell me that you can just go to work like nothing's happened? Your life has changed forever, and now that I've seen it, so has mine. Come on, you just said you've dreamed about this since you were a kid. Now it's real. When your dreams come true, you're not supposed to ignore them."
   I could tell she was starting to panic a little, so I gently sat her down on my bed and tried to comfort her. She held her head in her lap and absently played with her hair while she composed herself. She didn't quite shed tears, but I could hear her breathing starting to shudder. I kept my arm around her shoulders until she calmed down.
   "I don't know what to do," she said.
   "Oh, that's okay," I said. "I don't know what to do either."
   "What?"
   "And I'm looking forward to finding out."
   She laughed, to my relief. "You really think I should stay home from work?"
   "What's the matter? You never played hooky before?"
   "No, but I've never held my own head in my lap before, either. I guess it's a day for firsts."
   "You got that right," I said.
   "Okay," she said. She stood up and held her head under her arm again. "I'm hungry, so I'm going to get breakfast, and then we can get started."
   "You got it. I'll be right there."
   We ate breakfast at the table together, our second shared meal since I'd moved in. She set her head on the table and practiced feeding herself, while I sat and watched. She had pretty good coordination. It was weird watching her swallow with a severed neck, and it was certainly educational.
   After breakfast, we tried a few things. The first thing she wanted to do was reattach her head, just to make sure she could. She set her head back on top of her neck, and after some careful alignment, the gap vanished. She then placed her hands behind her head and beneath her chin and lifted, and her head came back off with a kind of sticky sound, like pouring pudding.
   I tried hiding her head inside various containers to try to interrupt the signal between her head and her body, first by burying it under a lot of blankets and eventually putting it under a steel cookpot, but nothing worked. There must have been some kind of information stream that allowed her to function, but I couldn't figure out what it was. It would have taken better equipment that I could improvise to figure that out, but that could wait.
   After she got comfortable attaching and separating her head, she had the idea to see if she could separate any other body parts. I held her head out in front of her so she could get a good view. She stood in front of the dining table and pressed her hands down onto it, and she closed her eyes and concentrated. With another little sticky noise, her torso lifted clear of her hips and set down on the table. She walked her torso toward me on the table with her hands, while her legs walked slowly around the table. She must have been some kind of athlete or gymnast when she was younger, because she had excellent balance, even though her center of mass was so much different than normal. Her stride was swaying a little, but it didn't look like she was struggling to stay on her feet. It almost looked like she was putting on a little show for me, if I do say so myself.
   Once she figured out how to detach herself at the waist, she quickly figured out how to detach her legs, her arms, and whatever else she wanted. At the same time that she figured out how to detach her limbs, I discovered that she could be reassembled out of order. When she detached her left leg and right arm and playfully threw them at me, I upped the ante and stuck them back on in the wrong places. We had a spirited game of tag in the house after I reattached her head backwards.
   By the end of the day, we'd both completely forgotten about our jobs. She was back in one piece, and we lay on the couch watching a movie. Before the movie was over, we were asleep right there on the couch, wrapped in each other's arms.
   When I woke up the next morning, I had a bit of a crick in my back from sleeping on the couch all night, but on the other hand, I had a beautiful woman in my arms, gently stirring in her sleep. I couldn't honestly object. I started to get up off the couch, as gently as possible to avoid waking her, but when I turned, I saw her lying on the floor in front of the couch. Since she was clearly still lying in my arms, I was slightly confused.
   She began to wake up while I lay there, both of her.
   "Good morning," she said, slowly rubbing her eyes and groaning awake. Both of her were speaking at the same time, but she didn't seem to have realized it yet. "Oh, wow, did I sleep."
   "Yes, you did," I said. "Say, did you have another dream last night?"
   "I did. I was back on stage, doing some kind of copier trick."
   "Really. You don't say."
   "Why? What happened?" She sat up from the floor and saw herself for the first time, from both points of view at once. "Oh, dear."
   "Hey, look at the bright side. Now we've got a whole new thing to figure out."
   We started the day with breakfast again. This time, we set three places, and she cleaned both plates.
   The new day's experimentation was a lot like the first one. We started by testing the flow of information. I put the two of her in separate rooms, and I told one of her a sequence of words. When I went into the other room, she had written down what I had said. There was no way she could have heard me from in there. It proved that her two bodies were sharing one mind and one personality.
   As before, while I was wondering about the scientific side, she wanted to figure out how to undo and recreate the effect. This time, when she managed to make herself back into a single person, it was a lot harder to describe. It wasn't like any kind of smeary merging effect where the two bodies mushed together and combined. It was as if one body stepped behind the other, as though the one in front was a flat cutout. When she divided back into two, it was the same thing, but in reverse. Suddenly, a duplicate of her would step out from behind her. I watched it happen again with a large mirror to see it from multiple angles, but it didn't change anything. From both points of view, she appeared to step out from behind herself, a complete optical contradiction. I sat and thought about it for about an hour before my eyes started to water, and then I put it aside.
   At around lunchtime, we both realized that neither of us had showered or changed clothes since yesterday morning, since she came to me with her head in her hands and both of our lives changed. We went upstairs to wash and brush our teeth, but as I was turning to go to my room, she took my hand and led me to the bathroom. I tried to ask her what was up, but she just pressed a finger to my lips, closed the bathroom door behind me, and began to remove my clothes. At the same time that she was undressing me, I saw that she was already in the shower, fully nude under the running water. When I was fully undressed, she beckoned me into the shower with her.
   That was a very good day. I have never felt quite as clean as that.
   Over the next couple of weeks, she developed many more new abilities, a new one every night. Every time she learned a new power, she got better and better at mastering them, and she also learned how to blend the various powers together. The first time she tried making more than two copies of herself, she got up to four, and the first thing she did was to remove the arms from the copies and stick them all onto the same body. She looked like a Hindu goddess. She got so accustomed to her new abilities that she grew uncomfortable not to be using at least one of them. She walked around carrying her head, or duplicated, or both. When she learned how to transform herself, she would go around shrunk down to half size or turned into a cat. She also learned how to teleport and walk through walls eventually, which was really hard to get used to. I had to develop very steady nerves in case she suddenly appeared in front of me.
   By the end, the last question we had to answer was who to tell. We wanted to let the world know about this, because we agreed that everyone ought to benefit from what we'd discovered if possible. It was only a question of how. We thought about just going out on the street and letting people see what she could do, but she didn't want to turn into a sideshow or be hounded by paparazzi, and I agreed. We also thought about going to a TV station or something, but we quickly ditched that idea. As soon as we showed up on the news, corporations would get involved, and neither of us wanted all the magic powers to go to the biggest, richest prick in the room. We finally decided to go to a university, where her abilities could be examined by actual scientists and academics, people who wanted to discover things and didn't care about being rich. She worried that she'd become a helpless lab rat, and I assured her that I wouldn't leave her side.
   One day, in between tests, she and I had a talk. The previous day's experiments had been about the source of her abilities. They confirmed that it was at least partly to do directly with her, with her lifelong desires and dreams, but at least part of it had come from an outside source. We talked about it between ourselves, and we both came to the same conclusion. Her powers had come from within her, but something had awakened them, and only one significant thing had happened at that time. Her housemate had talked with her over dinner about common interests.
   If we hadn't met, we might have lived our whole lives without ever knowing that such things existed. The world might never have discovered magic if we hadn't become friends. We kissed, and we agreed that everything had turned out for the best.