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Xant found himself holding on for dear life, his body crammed into a vehicle it clearly wasn’t designed for. His tail was squished between the tall seat and the frame of the machine, his legs too far apart for them to sit comfortably in the narrow footwell, so he was almost sideways in the forward-facing seat, but that also gave him a clear view of its pilot’s insane method of ‘driving’ the shaking contraption.
Jasmine didn’t even need to look where her feet and hands were going, moving them simultaneously to shift in and out of gear by instinct, all the while singing harsh, deep-throated songs at the top of her lungs.
Xant had been observing the human since her revival, and while she had had her ‘aggressive’ outbursts, brought on through stress and despair respectively, to see her exercise such aggression was fascinating. She was entranced, focused on some unknown ‘enemy’ and screaming her pent up emotions at ‘it’. Xant had never seen such emotional power simply blasted into the atmosphere without worry or consequence, but he couldn’t deny he was caught up in the triumph and relief the song gave her.
With practised ease, Jasmine stopped the car at the base of the enormous craft, then gleefully jumped out to climb atop the roof again. “Up here, Xant!” she called.
The doctor squirmed his way out of the car and stood on the ground, looking up at the human. She pointed to a small thin ladder welded to the side of the ship’s stern. “We need to climb that to get on board.”
Xant stared at her and then at the wide jump needed to cover that distance.
“Is this another attempt at humour?” The human did laugh, so he supposed he was right.
“Well, we could always wait for Rynard to throw you!” She smiled, making a hand motion of hefting a ball. “Like tossing a dwarf!” She giggled.
Xant for the first time questioned Jasmine’s intelligence.
“Perhaps we left you in stasis too long…”
He quickly examined the gap. It was going to be an extraordinary effort for him to climb atop the vehicle, let alone cross the divide with his physical ability alone. He tried to mimic Jasmine’s method of climbing on the car, but his hands and feet were not able to find the small gaps her narrower ones could find. In the end she had to pull him up, and felt the roof bow with his weight. From up top the distance to the ladder seemed even greater. “How exactly do you propose we climb the ladder from here?” he asked her, but Jasmine was still riding the exhilarating high of being ‘thunderstruck’.
“Like this!”
Without so much as a run-up Jasmine leapt towards the ladder and landed with precision, her elongated limbs showing an agility Xant had not considered during the physical examination. “Let me reframe the question,” he huffed. “How exactly do you expect me to climb the ladder from here?!” “Oh it’s not that far, it’s barely a jump!”
“Zenthi don’t ‘jump’.” “That offer for Rynard to throw you is still on the table.” Xant scoffed, took a deep breath and rationalised the situation.
He was in a military-grade suit, so while his weight and aerodynamics would be affected, his strength was increased and any fall damage negated through the armour and pain blocker chems. So, even if he fell, the only thing that would suffer would be his pride. Another uncomfortable thought peeked through the rationale.
He said he wanted to follow Jasmine. This would mean having to keep up with her. He couldn’t do that if he forever deliberated his shortcomings.
Xant inched closer to the edge of the car and Jasmine helpfully reached out to him, hanging precariously from the metal bars. “I’ll catch you!” She encouraged him. Her arms closing the distance boosted his confidence considerably, and he swayed his body back and forth, ready to leap. This would count as the most adventurous he had been in the steel suit, forever wary of Rynard’s warning of torn ligaments. Xant closed his eyes and pushed himself forward, the suit multiplying the force needed to get him across and almost smashing into the side of the yacht. Thankfully, Jasmine was able to correct her friend’s trajectory and guided his hands to the ladder’s sides, which he clung to for dear life. Jasmine gave a loud cheer. “You did it! Way to go, Xant!” And she patted his shoulder. “Now we just have to get to the top! Did you want to go first?”
Once again, he looked at the human as though she were lacking in common sense.
“How do I ‘go first’? You’re clearly ahead of me!” Jasmine could only smile as she maneuvered so only one hand and arm were on the ladder, her body swaying in the open air, unafraid of the drop below. “There you go! Now you’re clear. I’ll make sure you don’t fall!”
Xant shuddered, flattened his ears and forced himself to climb up the ladder. He could almost feel the thin aluminum bars being crushed under the strength of the suit, but one step at a time he climbed higher. The top was open, no hatch or easy step, so he had to scramble his way over and landed with a thud. By comparison, he heard Jasmine’s light footsteps make quick work of the ladder, and she was soon helping him up to his feet. “Careful,” she teased “you’ll scuff the deck!” “Scuff the what?...” “Take off your helmet, you’ll see things clearer!”
Warily, Xant let the locks of his helmet click and examined his surroundings. It was an ‘open air room’, the floor layered like in his office, multiple steps divided for different purposes, with a deep pit made of what looked like blue plastic as the focal point of the main room. Jasmine threw her arms open. “Welcome aboard, matey!” she announced. “Enjoy the pool deck!” “Pool? Was this filled with water-” Xant took a step closer but his ears were tickled by the sound underfoot. He had assumed the floor would have been of the same steel or plastics the ship was composed of but no, underneath him, the entire floor was made of wood. The doctor spluttered, reaching down to the floor to feel it. There was more wood here than he had seen in his entire lifetime, and humans used it for *flooring. *
“Ooh yeah, nothing beats a pristine hardwood deck, that’s why I told you not to scuff it.” Jasmine smiled, walking towards the glass doors. “Let’s check inside! I wonder if everything is still here?” Xant followed her. The whole building catered to a human’s sensibilities. He would be stepping into a truly alien environment.
And it was beautiful.
He was welcomed to a room detailed with wood and gold, whose glass windows shimmered even in the dim light. Displaced furniture, long couches and tables made of wood, extravagantly painted cloth with the shimmer of arvas pupa silk gathered dust, their beauty was comparable to imperial belongings. He ran a finger over the cushions and inspected the thin layer. “Phew! What a mess. Help me clean it up a bit…” Jasmine began lifting up an over turned chair, sliding it into a corner with an almost innate knowledge of where everything should go. The chairs, a long couch and two armchairs had all been pushed into the corner of the room the tables had slid to either end. Xant was almost too scared to touch anything. “What should I do?” he asked, afraid to risk any delicate work.
“We’ll start by dusting off the chairs, then I’ll tell you where they go, okay?”
“Alright...”
The chairs were covered in a soft cushiony material. Xant couldn't stop brushing his hand over them as he delicately placed the furniture, and was dismayed when he saw none of them had a hole for his tail.
“I’ll need help with this!” Jasmine called. The space beneath a large window was taken up by a long lounge, on which Jasmine promptly plonked herself. “Oh my god…I missed cushions.” She patted the space beside her. “Don't be shy! Take a load off!” “Just a moment.” Xant tapped his suit. He couldn't contain himself in steel any longer, the temptation to feel his new environment was too great. The suit splayed open and he was able to step out of it onto fluffy, soft carpet.
Xant lost himself rubbing his feet on the soft fibers. First wood, now fabric? It was obscene!
His own carpet was a precious momento, why would humans consider a laborious resource worth turning into a construction material?
“Is something wrong, Xant?”
“The floor, is this a common fixture?”
“The carpet? I mean, the owner was a madman to have white carpet on a boat, but if you can afford something like this you’re not cleaning it yourself.” Jasmine shrugged. “Carpet’s not uncommon, but generally going out of style because it's so hard to keep clean.”
Xant was both relieved and perplexed by the answer.
“So the reason it is not more common is maintenance?”
“Yeah, keeping carpet, let alone white carpet clean is a nightmare,” Jasmine explained, happy to be talking about the mundanity. “If you think the carpet is amazing you should try out the couch here!” Xant looked over the seat. It appeared all human furniture had a tall back support, with no consideration for large tails such as his own. He did spy a more accommodating stool, however, with the same cushiony substance on top.
“I think this might be more appropriate.” He flipped over the stool and sat, comfortably, very comfortably. He let his body relax as he took in more of the surroundings through naked eyes. There were still so many things thrown about. Cleaning against the wall next to his seat Xant spied an intricately carved container. It was rectangular, heavy and for whatever reason, had uniform, pyramid-shaped protrusions on the outside decorative surely, but the design made it difficult for him to hold. He had to be very careful picking it up.
Jasmine's eyes lit up when he inspected the object more closely, opening the stopper to sniff the contents within.
It smelled of disinfectant.
“Oh my god, yes!”
The human scrambled off the couch and started rummaging through the shelves in the lonely island bench.
“Jasmine?”
“Ah ha!” she cried triumphantly, pulling out another uniquely shaped bottle. “Now this is going to be great!” She skipped over to Xant, picking up more glass rectangles, handed him an empty one and placed his original find on the table. She poured out an amber liquid, a drop in his glass and a more substantial pour in hers.
“What is it?” Xant asked.
“Old enough to vote,” she giggled, then closed her eyes and took a small sip before exhaling and shivering pleasantly. “This is...well, I'm guessing it's older now, but aged whisky, a.k.a, human alcohol.”
Xant wrinkled up his nose.
“Is it supposed to be this colour?”
“Yes! When you drink it, you can taste the oak barrels and honey. But I know you guys use this for disinfectant, so, you get a drop if you're brave.”
“Considering what it does to your physiology, I doubt my own constitution can handle it.”
“Shame.” She shrugged and took another sip.
Xant couldn't taste it, but watched as Jasmine melted into relaxation.
“Ahhh, like drinking warm silk,” she described.
He took a sniff of the sample she gave him.
It was woody and sweet, but the second sniff burnt the inside of his nostrils. Xant graciously placed the ‘drink’ down, while Jasmine chuckled at his reaction.
“Yeah it’s not a drink for a first timer, I think it gets even more potent the longer it sits… and who knows how long we were floating out there.”
“By my best estimates, it could be anywhere between 10 to 1000 [quarters]. Calculating in the unexplored regions of the system, what is currently reachable by galactic council gates and the limit of stasis pods.” Xant informed her.
Jasmine sat quietly for a moment, staring into her glass, before she threw back her head and the drink in one go.
“Whoooo!” She coughed. “Okay, we've seen this room, what else is there to explore!” She swayed getting to her feet, but charged forward anyway. Xant followed close behind, in case she lost her footing, or incase the alcohol began interfering with her Freq control.
The hallways connecting the chambers were very narrow, almost too narrow for him, and all of them had such sharp ascents and descents. The human led inside to one of the many inner chambers, each one as tossed around as the last. There was an entire ‘library’ of paper books, another room dedicated to the act of ‘entertaining’, featuring a destroyed dataslate the size of an operating table, and smaller ‘bedrooms’ that appeared just to be filled with more cushiony furniture.
“And here is the master bedroom.” Jasmine pushed open the ornate wooden doors to reveal yet another spectacular room, almost as large as the entertainment deck, but was sparsely furnished, all Xant could see was that it contained a bed with tables either side, but the bed was nothing short of magnificent. The tapestry stretched across it was nothing short of breathtaking, where giant intertwining flowers embroidered with gold thread sprawled across its majesty. He’d never seen anything as intricate made from pure cloth, the designs were simply beautiful.
“You really like that bedspread, huh?” Jasmine questioned. Xant ran his hand over the quilt, picking it up and feeling the weight of it, wondering what it was like to not be mesmerised by it all.
“Are humans always surrounded by such beauty?” he asked.
The question caught her off guard, and she looked around the room.
“Not always, but, at the same time, this is closer to what it’s like on earth than either the station or the base.” She held her arms wide as she took lazy steps across the room.
“Windows, pictures and paint on the walls, bedsheets and pillows...we like ‘beautiful’ surroundings.” She fell backward onto the large bed, rolling on the blankets and looking up at Xant. “You’ve got no excuse not to feel what the bed is like.”
Xant sighed, took a deep breath and mimicked Jasmine’s actions, letting himself flop forward onto the bed.
It was fluffy and soft.
“I think the sheet’s a genuine 1000 thread count too. Maybe I could make a proper cape out of this, huh?”
“It is absolutely fascinating that humans sleep on such luxury.”
“The lucky ones sleep on such luxury! But I do appreciate bedsheets after going without for so long.”
Her attention was shortening by the moment, as she rolled off the most comfortable place in existence to peek around a door.
“The ensuite!!” she squealed. “Oh Xant, you have to see what a real bathroom looks like!”
If the master bedroom was the most comfortable place in the world, then the ensuite was the most ornate. Xant couldn’t even identify what half the items were in the room, but they apparently all pertained to the simple act of grooming.
Long, wide mirrors lined one entire side of the room, double marble basins and chrome taps sat beneath them. Frosted glass windows, a bath big enough to fit four and a bidet decorated with gold made up the rest of the fixtures. Jasmine once again began rummaging through the shelves, making happy noises with every new discovery.
“Xant, hold out your hand!”
The doctor reluctantly did so, and Jasmine placed a small white blob in it. “Smell it!!” she insisted, fever in her eyes.
He took a quick and wary sniff, but the burning sensation he expected never came.
A fresh and vibrant perfume filled his senses, a sweetness he’d never known.
“It's jasmine hand cream! This is what my namesake smells like!” She dotted her entire arms with the cream and rubbed it into her skin.
“A moisturizer?”
“Yes! And here’s shampoo and conditioner, for hair, moisturizer, face cream, body wash, exfoliant, oh god please, oh please let the water be running!”
She dived for the taps to the bath, wrenching the handle as hard and as fast as it would go, but to no avail.
“Noooo,” she sobbed, hanging her head. “S’pose it was too good to be true, the water in the tanks would be dry…”
Xant curiously looked over the bathtub and jasmine could feel his freq overflowing with curiosity.
“So humans clean themselves in still water?”
“Well, soaking in the tub is fun, it's not exclusively how we clean ourselves, the shower is better for that.”
“So what is the difference between a human shower and our own?”
Jasmine pulled a disgruntled face.
“It’s the difference between a warm gentle rain and a cold pressure hose!” she exclaimed. “Oh, I wonder if we could get it running again…?” She absent mindedly lifted up a wicker basket, finding a few clothes the previous owners had left behind. “So, what do you think?” she asked, lifting a floral summer dress up over her figure.
“The patterns are beautiful, but, is it a cape?”
“No, it’s a dress! Hmmm, but I’d have to lose a few kilos for it to fit.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Well, I’m a little bit bigger than the supermodel who stayed on this boat, but nothing a few weeks of exercise and diet couldn’t fix. Since there’s no junk food I really don’t have the excuse.”
“Are you not already in optimal condition?”
“Pfffft! No, god no.” She pulled at her stomach fat playfully. “Too much good food and junk food makes for chunky humans.”
“Junk food?”
Jasmine grinned ear to ear.
“Junk food, food that holds almost no nutritional value but is all about taste, glorious morsels of sugar, salt and colour dye.”
“There’s a chance sugar could be found aboard this vessel? We’d need to destroy it if there is any intact, its addictive nature can destroy a Sulins inhibition perminately.”
“Well if it’s going to be anywhere on the ship, it’ll be in the kitchen!”
They headed down to the bottom decks and stepped into a stainless steel wonderland. Jasmine was in her element, running her hand over the many pieces of specialised equipment as Xant watched on in wonder.
They found a perfectly polished kitchen, filled to the brim with human utensils, and all of it for the sole use of producing food. Jasmine lifted a book from the floor and brought it over to Xant.
“Here, this is what human food is supposed to look like.”
The graphical fidelity of the pictures was phenomenal, given that they weren’t on a computer screen, but the colours and shapes didn’t even seem similar to what he knew as ‘food’. He had seen sculptures that didn’t have dimensions nearly as interesting as those of the consumables depicted, and there was page after page of them, dish after dish, each one a work of art.
She showed him the variety of knives on display and the stupid amount of cutlery for eating said food. This was an entire industry to these people, the production and skill devoted to it was…
Garish.
Jasmine stood before a giant set of doors, her hands hovering over the handles.
“This is a refrigerator, we keep perishable goods inside… I wonder if anything is still…”
She jerked open the doors and they were both greeted with the foulest stench. The rotting and liquefied remains of meat and vegetables slopped onto the floor. Sealed inside the fridge, the smell had fermented to overpowering levels.
“Air!” Jasmine shouted as she scrambled past Xant. “I need air!”
They ran up several stairs to escape the toxic gas and were able to breathe a sigh of relief once above deck. They appeared to have come out the other side, more couches and pools littering the area Jasmine made her way across to get to the bow of the ship.
She walked to its peak, then climbed over the safety railing to hold the spearhead.
Puffing out her chest and throwing her arms open, she proclaimed for the entire engineering wing to hear,
“I’M ON A BOAT, I’M ON A BOAT! TAKE A GOOD HARD LOOK AT THE MOTHER FUCKING BOAT!”
An echo of uproarious laughter soon followed suit, a joke Xant wasn’t privy to, then Jasmine climbed back to join him.
“You know, I think I’m done for the moment. I need a break from all this excitement…”
She flopped herself down on one of the sunbeds, and Xant stood over her.
“Jasmine, I’ve been meaning to ask...”
“Go ahead?”
“All of this, it’s wonderful, but it’s nothing like the memory you shared with me. All this is pure opulence. Your memory was far more humble and comforting…”
“Well, that’s because this is a superyacht, and not a lower-income one bedroom apartment…” The human shrugged.
“So, what measure of wealth allows people to live such drastically different lives?”
“... I, dunno know, they're mostly owners of companies, corporations, kings, queens, people who run economies…”
“What expertise defines their worth to be that much more than yours?” Xant asked pointedly.
Jasmine faltered for an answer. While she could throw around words like investment portfolios and trust funds, she didn't actually understand the system as well as she would have liked.
“They study finance, have rich parents, inherited gold mines…luck, I guess? There’s many different ways to get there.”
“So, every human has the chance to attain this level of contribution credit?”
“No…”
“That doesn’t seem fair,” Xant remarked, finally lying down beside her. Jasmine stared up at the steel enclosed ceiling, reflecting.
“No it’s not, but it’s getting better,” she replied. “Slowly but surely, it's getting better.”
 
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Made this account because I plan on posting updates on my experience with the bed months and years down the line. In the meantime, I wanted to post my initial impressions and see how others feel about their purchase.
This was our first experience buying a bed for ourselves. My partner and I spent a while researching beds that could accommodate our weights (290 lbs and 140 lbs) and sleep preferences. Initially, Purple wasn't even on our radar. The top considerations were TempurPedic, TheraPedic Medicoil HD, or some type of latex bed (most likely Arizona Premium).
We quickly scratched Tempur off the list as my partner didn't care for the feel of it and I was unable to find details on the densities of the foams used by Tempur. (As I understand it we were looking for memory foam with density greater than 5 lb/cu-ft, polyurethane greater than 2 lb/cu-ft, and latex greater than 28 ILD to support our heavier weight). I even contacted Tempur directly but received no response, not even a decline to comment.
While the Medicoil and latex beds seemed promising from a durability standpoint, we were unfortunately unable to test either of them since our local mattress stores carried neither.
As we tested other, available beds we were introduced to the Purple which we had pretty good first impressions with, but I was (and still am) skeptical of it considering it's a bed-in-a-box that I haven't heard much of outside of poor reviews for their original mattress. To be fair their original mattress, for those unaware, is of a different make than the Purple 2, 3, and 4. The original is a combination of their gel matrix and polyurethane foam while the latter versions utilize the gel matrix with a pocketed coil support layer. After extensive research we decided that we would be willing to pull the trigger on a Purple 3 or 4 as we didn't see too many poor reviews on those and their return policy / customer service seemed good to us.
In-store the mattress felt great--low motion transfer, low pressure on usually high-pressure spots, and a cool-to-the-touch feel. Despite the only difference between the 3 and the 4 being one extra inch of gel, the beds felt surprisingly different from each other. The 3 was firm by comparison and felt sort of like you were being "pushed upwards" from the mattress. The 4 had a more floaty sensation. My partner liked the 3 and I liked the 4. After lots of back-and-forth and testing, we settled on the 4 with the thought that it would be more supportive with the weight and more accommodating for side sleepers (which we mostly are).
This trip to the mattress store was also our first introduction to king-sized beds and adjustable bases. It was a quick and easy decision for us to upgrade from a queen to a king. The extra space is amazing. After testing some of the adjustables for a while, we were convinced one of those could help us with our sleep too (and potentially train us to become back sleepers). I didn't thoroughly research adjustables beforehand though, so time will tell if it was money well spent or if the base will become an $800 paperweight.
Fast forward to delivery, setup was mostly smooth but the mattress was a monster. I think I read somewhere that it was 140 or 200 lbs so it was not a fun chore trying to unravel that thing from its plastic. After it was set up, laying on it didn't feel exactly like the store but I think that's to be expected since it isn't broken in yet. Still, it felt very comfortable. We laid in bed for a good chunk of the day just enjoying it. My partner took a nap alone after I left and slept like a rock.
Unfortunately our sheets didn't arrive in time for the first couple nights, so we were resigned to protecting it with our mattress protector and an awkward combination of our old queen fitted sheet and a blanket. I should also mention that we don't sleep with a traditional top sheet or shared comforter. We usually have a fitted sheet below us and we each have our own comforter / blanket so we don't steal them from each other.
The mattress protector we got is (IIRC) the Malouf Sleep Tite tensile protector. I don't know much about mattress protectors but this one seems fine, if maybe a little small for the bed (it seems like the edges are creeping upward), but we'll see how it holds up.
Something that became immediately apparent to me after the first night of sleep was how different the motion transfer felt compared to the store. I woke up a lot overnight as we both kept tossing and turning. I could feel my partner's every little movement. It was aggravating. But after browsing similar issues from people online, one of the possibe causes was the kind of sheets we were using (which is something that never would have occurred to me). Apparently Purple recommends some sort of jersey-knit weave so the sheets have a bit of stretch to them and the bed can support you properly. Unfortunately I didn't know this before I ordered my sheets, so we have a set of percale 100% cottons arriving soon. Hopefully they'll be good enough for us.
Knowing this, the second night we tried ditching the queen sheet and laid down a thin quilt instead. I don't know if it made a difference motion transfer-wise because frankly we both slept like a rock. No tossing and turning to relieve pressure, no waking each other up. It was the best night of sleep I'd had in a long time. Back and side sleeping both felt comfortable and it was easy to transition between them (no sinking into the mattress). As for how cool the bed felt, it was great for a good portion of the night but in the morning I was pretty warm and had to kick off part of my blanket. I'm not quick to judge the cooling aspect yet though because we're not using our proper sheets.
I feel weird commenting on this but it's an important thing to consider when bed shopping, so here goes. First impressions of sex on the bed are great. Even though motion transfer seems to be minimal when sleeping, the bed still has bounce to it so it doesn't feel like you're fighting the bed during sex.
That's all I can really think of to say (although it feels I haven't satisfactorily said anything to be honest). So far, we're happy with this matress. My partner says they're happy we went with the 4 instead of the 3 as well. Granted, it is only the first two nights we've slept on the bed and even a stone slab probably feels fine with one night of use, so we'll have to see if it holds up to this first impression over time.
Unfortunately we haven't had an opportunity to test our adjustable base because it doesn't seem to be receiving power, so I can't comment on that.
In total we spent about $4500 on our king-size Purple 4, an adjustable base, and a mattress protector. It's a massive chunk of change for us but we're hoping it'll be worth it over the years.
EDIT 1: Here's an update after roughly a week of sleeping on the bed. We finally got our percale sheets in. They're great sheets, very soft and keep cool, but they're not the way to go if you get a Purple. The motion transfer is significantly worse as the sheets create that "drum-like" effect and are regularly tugging from beneath me.
Our first night on the new sheets was miserable. I don't think I'm overexagerrating when I say it was the worst night of sleep I've ever had. Lots of tossing and turning from both of us. Must've woken up at least 20 times. For what it's worth, if you and your partner are both lightweight I don't think you'll have a problem with motion transfer at all. Either way, I still recommend following Purple's guidance and getting a stretchy fitted sheet (something with spandex or a jersey knit sheet).
But thankfully that one bad night didn't become a trend, and the rest of the week has been mostly great in terms of sleep quality and comfort. The mattress feels very comfortable whether I'm sleeping on my side or my back. I never experienced any discomfort or the need to shift around (except when my neck was in pain due to my pillow).
We both think the mattress sleeps cool compared to our last mattress (which I believe was mostly polyurethane foam). I use just a wool blanket while my partner uses a thin comforter. It is currently winter so it's pretty cold outside but our thermostat is at roughly 65 degrees (though it feels warmer than that). We'll have to see how cool it feels when summer rolls around.
There's a great, relaxing feeling I get whenever I sit or lie down in this bed. I feel the temptation to just lie down and take a nap, and I'm not one for taking naps at all.
Unfortunately our adjustable base is still busted and I don't expect it to be fixed for a while (the warranty company is taking their sweet time getting back to me).
While Purple doesn't really have recommendations on rotating the mattress (they say you can if you want), we're going to rotate it regularly out of an abundance of precaution: once a week for the first three months, then once every three months after.
Like I said though, the first week is still basically first impressions. I read a post from another user here who was heavy and wore out the same mattress (the 4) within 10 months. I plan on posting updates months and years down the road (hopefully, if I remember). But for now, we're very happy with our purchase.
EDIT 2: Now that it's been 21 or so days (minimum time before I can elect to return the bed), I thought I'd post another update and also address some things I forgot to mention in my original post.
First, what I forgot to mention. The Purple does have a distinct smell to it when it first arrives. It was strong at first but most of it dissipated within a day of airing out the bedroom. The smell has lingered though, faintly. In my opinion it's not an unpleasant smell (I actually kind of like it) but I don't think my partner's even noticed. We may have to vent the room a bit more to see an improvement on the smell. We haven't opened windows since the first full day but we have had an air purifier running every night since and the smell remains.
Another thing I forgot to talk about was the mattress' edge support. While the Purple uses springs for the support layer and gel matrix for the comfort layer, the edges of the mattress are lined in polyurethane foam (probably about 2 or 3 inches thick from the edge if I remember right). I'm not really familiar with edge support or why it's important, but it feels solid at the moment. There's no sinking or slipping off the edge. I have concerns of it giving way eventually considering it's just foam, but maybe that concern is unwarranted since we won't be putting nearly as much weight-over-time on the edge compared to the actual mattress.
Since my last update, we've now put a new, stretchy fitted sheet on the bed (95% polyester, 5% spandex). We miss the cooling feel of the percale sheet, but this new sheet definitely allows us to feel the contours of the bed more and motion transfer is minimized, which is great for me. We've also added a headboard which was a welcome addition, as our pillows were slipping a bit between the wall and the edge of the bed. It now feels like a proper bed.
Our sleep quality has improved a lot over the course of the weeks. This last week in particular has been the best nights of sleep I can ever remember having.
On our old bed, I would (try to) sleep anywhere from 8 to 10 hours a night and still feel lethargic and sleepy in the morning and throughout the day. I thought it was because I was waking up multiple times in the middle of the night, but I've been having the same sleep interruptions with the new bed and not experiencing the same lethargy. In fact, we have a sun lamp set as a sort of silent alarm at 7:30. With the old mattress I would stay in bed until the lamp forced me up, but now I've actually been waking up naturally, about an hour or so before the lamp goes off. I've been getting less hours of sleep (roughly 6 to 8) and feel so much more refreshed than I was getting with 8 to 10 on the old mattress. I nearly forgot it was possible to wake up feeling so rested and ready for the day.
My partner also feels great and well-rested with the new mattress. On the old one, they tended to toss and turn constantly throughout the night. Now, they very rarely feel the need to shift positions (which has improved my sleep quality as well).
I should note though that I don't think the old mattress was solely to blame. We also had an Ikea bed frame (one with the under-bed storage drawers) that the mattress sat on. I never considered that the bed frame's slats could be an issue until we disassembled it and slept solely on the old mattress, flat on the ground, while we waited for the Purple to arrive. Even those nights felt like an improvement in sleep.
Regardless, we're very happy with our purchase three weeks in. Just remember to take my thoughts with a grain of salt because durability is important in a mattress too.
I'll probably stay silent on this account for a while and report back either when there's something new to report or enough time passes and we're still satisfied. Alternatively, if someone requests an update I'll try posting then too. Thanks for reading, and I hope this helps somewhat.

I hadn't seen Miles in fifteen years when we bumped into each other at the grocery store. Back then, we'd gone separate ways. He'd dropped out of high school to start learning a trade, and I'd gone to university. Our lives diverged and we fell out of contact. But our recognition was instant, and after a few minutes of conversation he invited me to his house.
It was on the way that we caught up in broad strokes. I was married; he wasn't. I had a kid; he didn't. I worked for a corporation in a mid-level office job; he was self-employed. When I asked him what he did, he smiled a little mischievously and said, "I'm a bookie, but you could say I'm a bit of an employer myself these days."
When I asked what he meant, he said I'd see soon enough.
What I saw first was that his splendid two-storey yellow brick house was situated deep in the suburbs, and seemed decidedly too big for a single guy in his thirties. Nevertheless, I was impressed he could afford it. My wife and I didn't have our own house yet. "Renting or owning?" I asked as we approached the front door.
"Owned," he said. "I've had a good run these last two years."
Although the house had looked normal from the street, when we got closer I noticed that the front doorknob was odd. It was shaped like a human hand.
Miles was carrying groceries, so he motioned for me to do the opening. "It's not locked?" I asked.
He smiled just as I touched the doorknob—the warm, living doorknob!—for it didn't just look like a human hand; it was a human hand!
Obediently, the front door swung open, and huddled in the triangular space between the door and the wall was a hooded, black-clad figure whose gold-painted fingers I had just touched. Without even raising its head, the figure shut the door behind us and replaced its hand into the door hole.
Miles paid the figure no mind and continued to the kitchen, where another similarly dressed figure stood motionless by the light switch. Miles set down the groceries, clapped his hands and the figure turned on the lights.
By now I had to ask: "What is—"
"Look, I get that it may seem a little weird," he said, "but hear me out. These are people who owe me money. They're unemployed and they can't conceivably pay it back anytime soon."
I followed him to the living room, where another figure turned on the lights, illuminating several pieces of human furniture.
"So they're working off their debts."
Miles whistled, and yet another figure appeared, this one holding two imported beers. Miles handed one to me before setting the other on his nude female coffee table, who / which reacted instinctively to the cold glass bottle by momentarily arching her / its back.
"It's perfectly consensual," he added, anticipating my concerns. "And what would be the more humane alternative, breaking their knee caps?"
By now my initial discomfort was turning into a chilled fear. I kept remembering how the doorknob-hand had felt in mine. Ostensibly both were human hands, but the gap in—
"Dignity," I said, then repeated the word in a whisper so as not to let them hear. "Don't you think they lack dignity?"
He chuckled. "See, even your natural reaction is to treat them as if they're invisible. As for dignity, they most definitely had it. Because they mortgaged it, and now they're working to earn it back. I didn't force them to gamble. Now they're house servants, that's all. Are you opposed to house servants?"
I admitted I supposed I wasn't. "But this is such a strange form of it," I said, starting to stammer like in my elementary school days.
By now the stress of being in this bizarre place combined with the mundane act of drinking beer was twisting me psychologically in ways I couldn't understand. I wanted suddenly out, but the most I could tactfully bring myself to do was ask about the location of the bathroom.
"Just down the hall," Miles said.
I stepped with dread.
The bathroom was large but felt immediately cramped by the presence of two figures: one wrapped entirely in bath towels, and the other kneeling by the toilet, its hooded head down and arms up, holding a roll of toilet paper as if it were the idol of a long-forgotten god.
Of course, I couldn't go in these conditions, so I waited uncomfortably for a minute, listening to the figures breathe, before washing my hands.
"Are you OK?" I whispered to them.
No response.
"Do you need help?"
Silence.
I shut off the water faucet, turned—
And nearly fell back against the bathroom mirror as the towel-wrapped one rubbed his / her / its moisture-absorbing material / body against my wet hands. "Please, don't," I begged quietly, escaping backward into the hall.
Miles was casually drinking his beer. "Did you try to save them?" he asked.
I nodded.
"They don't need saving."
He gestured for me to follow him, and I did, down the hall and up the stairs to a bedroom. But it wasn't Miles' bedroom. "I had it prepared just for you," he said, "in case you wanted to spend the night."
The room was spacious and clean, decked out with an array of speakers, a large TV and a human night table flanking a queen-sized bed, freshly made and topped with a beautiful handmade quilt, on which rested a mattress-long body pillow, its linen case rising and falling gently with the breath of the human inside it.
I wanted to back out, but Miles caught me by the shoulders. "Remember when in high school you told me I wouldn't ever amount to anything?"
His grip was firm.
"I'm sorry," I whispered.
"Don't be sorry. You were wrong, that's all."
"How long do they work for?" I asked, watching the body pillow shift slightly on the bed, desiring more than anything to change the topic. But also curious, genuinely and morbidly curious.
"However long they want. Eight hours, twelve hours, twenty-four hour shifts. It's really not a bad gig, lying in a pillowcase on a comfortable bed for twice the minimum wage."
He nudged me forward. "Go ahead. Try it."
I didn't want to, but there was a menace in his voice, an unpredictability that made it feel safer to obey than disagree. He may not have been threatening me directly, but the threat was in the air, invisible and atomized like a perfume.
I got on the bed.
Miles watched my every uncomfortable move.
"Like it?"
"Yes," I said, "it's a very nice mattress."
For a second, I imagined that the mattress was filled with people and I was lying on top of them, crushing them—but as I shifted my weight I felt the more familiar support of springs, and I could breathe again.
"Try hugging the body pillow," Miles instructed me, the coolness in his voice betraying how used he'd gotten to being the boss.
I didn't want to do that either, but I did it anyway, not only pervasively conscious of the army of servants Miles had amassed, which he could turn against me at any moment, but wanting desperately to feel even a fraction of the power he wielded over them. Inching closer to the body pillow and turning over onto my side before lightly placing an arm on top of—
It squirmed, bony, warm and human underneath the crisp linen case.
The person inside was a man.
I wondered who and what he had bet on and how much he owed and whether it was really so bad what Miles was doing and if it would have been better for the man to be working two or three part-time jobs, probably labour, probably more tiring and dangerous, than being paid to be this objectified: this passive: this utterly domesticated.
"Nice, right?" Miles asked.
"Yes."
"You can get up now."
I got off the bed, smoothed my clothes and followed Miles wordlessly into the hall, down the stairs and into a spacious gym. He was so confident that not once did he look back; he knew that I was behind him. Although we didn't go inside, on the way we had passed a room outfitted with cameras, lights and a circular padded stage, and my imagination was running wild with thoughts of the recordings made in there—
The gym lights flashed cold and bright.
I squinted.
Arranged before me was an impressive collection of weights, workout gear and exercise machines, but it was the object occupying the centre of the room whose existence sent an electric shock down my spine. A leather heavy bag hung ominously from the ceiling.
Miles passed me boxing wraps for my hands, then began wrapping his own. "I know this is a lot, and I know how it feels, the pressure building up inside you right now. Believe me. Jealousy. Disgust. Maybe even anger: at me, the world, your own fucking life. When I get that way, I come down here and work those emotions out. It's not healthy holding them in. Whatever you do, you can't let them grow inside you."
When he was done with his wraps, he handed me a pair of training gloves. I put them on, constantly eyeing the heavy bag, which was swinging now ever so softly from the steel ceiling mount.
"Give it a shot," he said.
I stood frozen in place. I knew there was someone in there.
"I can't d—"
"Of course you can," he said, then pulled his arm back and delivered a wicked right cross to the heavy bag. It responded with a dull thud followed by a reverberating groan. "Just like that."
"It's a person," I said, my voice rising.
"Which makes it even easier. Just ask the person if you can hit her."
Her.
"Do you want to get hit?" Miles asked the heavy bag.
"Yes," a muffled voice responded.
"See? She wants you to do it. If you don't do it, you're deciding for her, and how condescending would that be—for a man to tell a woman what she can and can't do."
"Hit me please," the heavy bag mumbled.
I made a fist and threw a light jab. Just enough to feel the bag: the padding, and the contour of the person hanging inside.
"Come on, man."
It made me sick to my stomach.
But as I lifted my hand to my mouth to keep from retching, Miles put in a thudding left hook that lifted the bag on impact. I could hear the stifled pain within.
"She gets paid by the punch," Miles said. "Ask her if she wants another."
I didn't want to, but the answer came anyway:
"Hit me."
"One thousand dollars off her debt if you give it all you've got," Miles said.
"Do it please," the bag begged.
I planted my feet, exhaled—once, twice—loosened my shoulder, and put all my weight behind a looping shot that connected sickeningly with the side of the bag, my mind frantically trying to decide where I'd connected, face, ribs, hip, because I was sure I'd felt bone, as the bag bounced, the ceiling mount screeched and the woman inside moaned in pain.
For a while: silence.
Then, "Thank… you," she whimpered.
"Nice one! What do you say, another grand?" Miles asked with a smile.
"Again please."
So I got her again, and again. And again. Each time connecting with everything I had; each time shaving a thousand dollars off her debt. Good deed followed by good deed—until Miles himself grabbed my arm and pulled me away, and I realized, over the pounding of my beating heart, how much anger there was in me. "Easy, easy," he repeated.
After I'd calmed down, I felt the horror of it: of what I had done. I had beaten someone, a woman, and all her begging and thanking couldn't convince me it was right. Not that she was speaking now…
Miles unhooked the heavy bag and laid it reverently on the floor as I took off my gloves and undid my wraps.
He unzipped the bag.
"Do you remember our prom?" he asked as if out of the blue.
"Vaguely."
"You went with Rashida Parker," he said.
I did remember that.
"Who did you go with?" I asked.
Miles had pulled a body wrapped in a thick, bloodied sheet from the unzipped bag. He picked it up and cradled it. She looked small and fragile in his arms. For a second, I thought that maybe she was dead, but then she murmured something swollen and incomprehensible, and I knew I hadn't beaten her to death.
I had almost forgotten my own question when, "No one," Miles answered. "I was supposed to go with Rashida, and she'd even said 'yes' to me"—he had unwrapped some of the sheet, revealing a tangle of black hair, and I thought, No, it couldn't be, but it was: she was—"when you asked her and she said 'yes' to you. After all, why would she go with some skid who smoked cigarettes by the railroad tracks, a future deadbeat whose parents worked in a factory and who couldn't read Shakespeare, when she could go with someone like you?"
He unfolded the remaining sheet from Rashida's body and laid her on top of it. Her eyes were swelling shut but she could still see, and all I could do was avert my gaze as she slowly pronounced my name, each syllable willed into a hurt existence, before thanking me repeatedly with her fattened lips. Although she looked barely like the girl I'd fallen in love with, it was unmistakably her. After she could speak no more, she crawled forward, reaching pathetically for my legs, her broken body a coloured patchwork of various stages of bruising, as I backed instinctively away.
I was scared and I was ashamed.
"You'll appreciate the irony," Miles said. "She lost her money betting on mixed martial arts."
He laughed.
There was something about that laugh, something devilish and deep, something true that made me lunge for him—for his despicable throat! But even that did not stop the laughter, which resounded through the gym as we fought like boys on the padded floor. And still he laughed when his hooded minions arrived and pulled me off him, swinging wildly at the air. I'd bloodied his nose but nothing more, and as they dragged me away, up the stairs and to the front door, Miles followed us with a monstrous smile.
"I am the way the world is," he said.
Then I was out the door and it was closed and it was dark and suburban and I was sitting on the concrete front step, staring at the golden doorknob-hand jutting profoundly through the hole in the door of a yellow brick house. I got to my feet and descended the steps to the street, all the while trying to act cool and not make a scene, because that seemed like the worst thing imaginable: drawing attention to myself. My fighting spirit had evaporated. I was a coward once more.
I buried my hands in my pockets and kept my head down, walking briskly through the cold night air, but when I reached the nearest intersection I turned and started to run.
On both sides houses flew past at a blur. Illuminated windows. Imagined conversations. I knew Miles wasn't behind me, but because I lacked his natural confidence I kept glancing back—yet the only thing which followed were his words, I am the way the world is, and when I stopped to catch my breath, I looked directly upon a lighted window: several silhouettes gathered around a table. Was it a family or a group of hooded servants waiting on their master? I couldn't tell, but they must have seen me too because suddenly the curtains were drawn and the illumination ended.
I am the way the world is.
He was wrong. I didn't want to believe it. I couldn't believe it. Miles was the anomaly—the evil—and in every other house, behind every other beautiful brick wall, there were normal people with normal needs and normal relationships. They desired normal things and they worked normal jobs, just like me.
In my stillness I felt suddenly the autumn cold and took out my phone, and almost without thinking I swiped toward the Uber app—
That's when I understood.
I smashed the phone against the sidewalk.
Faces looked out.
Miles was right, and I walked home for hours that night, terrified of myself and of every house I passed in which uncounted silhouettes passed silent and unseen.

I hadn't seen Miles in fifteen years when we bumped into each other at the grocery store. Back then, we'd gone separate ways. He'd dropped out of high school to start learning a trade, and I'd gone to university. Our lives diverged and we fell out of contact. But our recognition was instant, and after a few minutes of conversation he invited me to his house.
It was on the way that we caught up in broad strokes. I was married; he wasn't. I had a kid; he didn't. I worked for a corporation in a mid-level office job; he was self-employed. When I asked him what he did, he smiled a little mischievously and said, "I'm a bookie, but you could say I'm a bit of an employer myself these days."
When I asked what he meant, he said I'd see soon enough.
What I saw first was that his splendid two-storey yellow brick house was situated deep in the suburbs, and seemed decidedly too big for a single guy in his thirties. Nevertheless, I was impressed he could afford it. My wife and I didn't have our own house yet. "Renting or owning?" I asked as we approached the front door.
"Owned," he said. "I've had a good run these last two years."
Although the house had looked normal from the street, when we got closer I noticed that the front doorknob was odd. It was shaped like a human hand.
Miles was carrying groceries, so he motioned for me to do the opening. "It's not locked?" I asked.
He smiled just as I touched the doorknob—the warm, living doorknob!—for it didn't just look like a human hand; it was a human hand!
Obediently, the front door swung open, and huddled in the triangular space between the door and the wall was a hooded, black-clad figure whose gold-painted fingers I had just touched. Without even raising its head, the figure shut the door behind us and replaced its hand into the door hole.
Miles paid the figure no mind and continued to the kitchen, where another similarly dressed figure stood motionless by the light switch. Miles set down the groceries, clapped his hands and the figure turned on the lights.
By now I had to ask: "What is—"
"Look, I get that it may seem a little weird," he said, "but hear me out. These are people who owe me money. They're unemployed and they can't conceivably pay it back anytime soon."
I followed him to the living room, where another figure turned on the lights, illuminating several pieces of human furniture.
"So they're working off their debts."
Miles whistled, and yet another figure appeared, this one holding two imported beers. Miles handed one to me before setting the other on his nude female coffee table, who / which reacted instinctively to the cold glass bottle by momentarily arching her / its back.
"It's perfectly consensual," he added, anticipating my concerns. "And what would be the more humane alternative, breaking their knee caps?"
By now my initial discomfort was turning into a chilled fear. I kept remembering how the doorknob-hand had felt in mine. Ostensibly both were human hands, but the gap in—
"Dignity," I said, then repeated the word in a whisper so as not to let them hear. "Don't you think they lack dignity?"
He chuckled. "See, even your natural reaction is to treat them as if they're invisible. As for dignity, they most definitely had it. Because they mortgaged it, and now they're working to earn it back. I didn't force them to gamble. Now they're house servants, that's all. Are you opposed to house servants?"
I admitted I supposed I wasn't. "But this is such a strange form of it," I said, starting to stammer like in my elementary school days.
By now the stress of being in this bizarre place combined with the mundane act of drinking beer was twisting me psychologically in ways I couldn't understand. I wanted suddenly out, but the most I could tactfully bring myself to do was ask about the location of the bathroom.
"Just down the hall," Miles said.
I stepped with dread.
The bathroom was large but felt immediately cramped by the presence of two figures: one wrapped entirely in bath towels, and the other kneeling by the toilet, its hooded head down and arms up, holding a roll of toilet paper as if it were the idol of a long-forgotten god.
Of course, I couldn't go in these conditions, so I waited uncomfortably for a minute, listening to the figures breathe, before washing my hands.
"Are you OK?" I whispered to them.
No response.
"Do you need help?"
Silence.
I shut off the water faucet, turned—
And nearly fell back against the bathroom mirror as the towel-wrapped one rubbed his / her / its moisture-absorbing material / body against my wet hands. "Please, don't," I begged quietly, escaping backward into the hall.
Miles was casually drinking his beer. "Did you try to save them?" he asked.
I nodded.
"They don't need saving."
He gestured for me to follow him, and I did, down the hall and up the stairs to a bedroom. But it wasn't Miles' bedroom. "I had it prepared just for you," he said, "in case you wanted to spend the night."
The room was spacious and clean, decked out with an array of speakers, a large TV and a human night table flanking a queen-sized bed, freshly made and topped with a beautiful handmade quilt, on which rested a mattress-long body pillow, its linen case rising and falling gently with the breath of the human inside it.
I wanted to back out, but Miles caught me by the shoulders. "Remember when in high school you told me I wouldn't ever amount to anything?"
His grip was firm.
"I'm sorry," I whispered.
"Don't be sorry. You were wrong, that's all."
"How long do they work for?" I asked, watching the body pillow shift slightly on the bed, desiring more than anything to change the topic. But also curious, genuinely and morbidly curious.
"However long they want. Eight hours, twelve hours, twenty-four hour shifts. It's really not a bad gig, lying in a pillowcase on a comfortable bed for twice the minimum wage."
He nudged me forward. "Go ahead. Try it."
I didn't want to, but there was a menace in his voice, an unpredictability that made it feel safer to obey than disagree. He may not have been threatening me directly, but the threat was in the air, invisible and atomized like a perfume.
I got on the bed.
Miles watched my every uncomfortable move.
"Like it?"
"Yes," I said, "it's a very nice mattress."
For a second, I imagined that the mattress was filled with people and I was lying on top of them, crushing them—but as I shifted my weight I felt the more familiar support of springs, and I could breathe again.
"Try hugging the body pillow," Miles instructed me, the coolness in his voice betraying how used he'd gotten to being the boss.
I didn't want to do that either, but I did it anyway, not only pervasively conscious of the army of servants Miles had amassed, which he could turn against me at any moment, but wanting desperately to feel even a fraction of the power he wielded over them. Inching closer to the body pillow and turning over onto my side before lightly placing an arm on top of—
It squirmed, bony, warm and human underneath the crisp linen case.
The person inside was a man.
I wondered who and what he had bet on and how much he owed and whether it was really so bad what Miles was doing and if it would have been better for the man to be working two or three part-time jobs, probably labour, probably more tiring and dangerous, than being paid to be this objectified: this passive: this utterly domesticated.
"Nice, right?" Miles asked.
"Yes."
"You can get up now."
I got off the bed, smoothed my clothes and followed Miles wordlessly into the hall, down the stairs and into a spacious gym. He was so confident that not once did he look back; he knew that I was behind him. Although we didn't go inside, on the way we had passed a room outfitted with cameras, lights and a circular padded stage, and my imagination was running wild with thoughts of the recordings made in there—
The gym lights flashed cold and bright.
I squinted.
Arranged before me was an impressive collection of weights, workout gear and exercise machines, but it was the object occupying the centre of the room whose existence sent an electric shock down my spine. A leather heavy bag hung ominously from the ceiling.
Miles passed me boxing wraps for my hands, then began wrapping his own. "I know this is a lot, and I know how it feels, the pressure building up inside you right now. Believe me. Jealousy. Disgust. Maybe even anger: at me, the world, your own fucking life. When I get that way, I come down here and work those emotions out. It's not healthy holding them in. Whatever you do, you can't let them grow inside you."
When he was done with his wraps, he handed me a pair of training gloves. I put them on, constantly eyeing the heavy bag, which was swinging now ever so softly from the steel ceiling mount.
"Give it a shot," he said.
I stood frozen in place. I knew there was someone in there.
"I can't d—"
"Of course you can," he said, then pulled his arm back and delivered a wicked right cross to the heavy bag. It responded with a dull thud followed by a reverberating groan. "Just like that."
"It's a person," I said, my voice rising.
"Which makes it even easier. Just ask the person if you can hit her."
Her.
"Do you want to get hit?" Miles asked the heavy bag.
"Yes," a muffled voice responded.
"See? She wants you to do it. If you don't do it, you're deciding for her, and how condescending would that be—for a man to tell a woman what she can and can't do."
"Hit me please," the heavy bag mumbled.
I made a fist and threw a light jab. Just enough to feel the bag: the padding, and the contour of the person hanging inside.
"Come on, man."
It made me sick to my stomach.
But as I lifted my hand to my mouth to keep from retching, Miles put in a thudding left hook that lifted the bag on impact. I could hear the stifled pain within.
"She gets paid by the punch," Miles said. "Ask her if she wants another."
I didn't want to, but the answer came anyway:
"Hit me."
"One thousand dollars off her debt if you give it all you've got," Miles said.
"Do it please," the bag begged.
I planted my feet, exhaled—once, twice—loosened my shoulder, and put all my weight behind a looping shot that connected sickeningly with the side of the bag, my mind frantically trying to decide where I'd connected, face, ribs, hip, because I was sure I'd felt bone, as the bag bounced, the ceiling mount screeched and the woman inside moaned in pain.
For a while: silence.
Then, "Thank… you," she whimpered.
"Nice one! What do you say, another grand?" Miles asked with a smile.
"Again please."
So I got her again, and again. And again. Each time connecting with everything I had; each time shaving a thousand dollars off her debt. Good deed followed by good deed—until Miles himself grabbed my arm and pulled me away, and I realized, over the pounding of my beating heart, how much anger there was in me. "Easy, easy," he repeated.
After I'd calmed down, I felt the horror of it: of what I had done. I had beaten someone, a woman, and all her begging and thanking couldn't convince me it was right. Not that she was speaking now…
Miles unhooked the heavy bag and laid it reverently on the floor as I took off my gloves and undid my wraps.
He unzipped the bag.
"Do you remember our prom?" he asked as if out of the blue.
"Vaguely."
"You went with Rashida Parker," he said.
I did remember that.
"Who did you go with?" I asked.
Miles had pulled a body wrapped in a thick, bloodied sheet from the unzipped bag. He picked it up and cradled it. She looked small and fragile in his arms. For a second, I thought that maybe she was dead, but then she murmured something swollen and incomprehensible, and I knew I hadn't beaten her to death.
I had almost forgotten my own question when, "No one," Miles answered. "I was supposed to go with Rashida, and she'd even said 'yes' to me"—he had unwrapped some of the sheet, revealing a tangle of black hair, and I thought, No, it couldn't be, but it was: she was—"when you asked her and she said 'yes' to you. After all, why would she go with some skid who smoked cigarettes by the railroad tracks, a future deadbeat whose parents worked in a factory and who couldn't read Shakespeare, when she could go with someone like you?"
He unfolded the remaining sheet from Rashida's body and laid her on top of it. Her eyes were swelling shut but she could still see, and all I could do was avert my gaze as she slowly pronounced my name, each syllable willed into a hurt existence, before thanking me repeatedly with her fattened lips. Although she looked barely like the girl I'd fallen in love with, it was unmistakably her. After she could speak no more, she crawled forward, reaching pathetically for my legs, her broken body a coloured patchwork of various stages of bruising, as I backed instinctively away.
I was scared and I was ashamed.
"You'll appreciate the irony," Miles said. "She lost her money betting on mixed martial arts."
He laughed.
There was something about that laugh, something devilish and deep, something true that made me lunge for him—for his despicable throat! But even that did not stop the laughter, which resounded through the gym as we fought like boys on the padded floor. And still he laughed when his hooded minions arrived and pulled me off him, swinging wildly at the air. I'd bloodied his nose but nothing more, and as they dragged me away, up the stairs and to the front door, Miles followed us with a monstrous smile.
"I am the way the world is," he said.
Then I was out the door and it was closed and it was dark and suburban and I was sitting on the concrete front step, staring at the golden doorknob-hand jutting profoundly through the hole in the door of a yellow brick house. I got to my feet and descended the steps to the street, all the while trying to act cool and not make a scene, because that seemed like the worst thing imaginable: drawing attention to myself. My fighting spirit had evaporated. I was a coward once more.
I buried my hands in my pockets and kept my head down, walking briskly through the cold night air, but when I reached the nearest intersection I turned and started to run.
On both sides houses flew past at a blur. Illuminated windows. Imagined conversations. I knew Miles wasn't behind me, but because I lacked his natural confidence I kept glancing back—yet the only thing which followed were his words, I am the way the world is, and when I stopped to catch my breath, I looked directly upon a lighted window: several silhouettes gathered around a table. Was it a family or a group of hooded servants waiting on their master? I couldn't tell, but they must have seen me too because suddenly the curtains were drawn and the illumination ended.
I am the way the world is.
He was wrong. I didn't want to believe it. I couldn't believe it. Miles was the anomaly—the evil—and in every other house, behind every other beautiful brick wall, there were normal people with normal needs and normal relationships. They desired normal things and they worked normal jobs, just like me.
In my stillness I felt suddenly the autumn cold and took out my phone, and almost without thinking I swiped toward the Uber app—
That's when I understood.
I smashed the phone against the sidewalk.
Faces looked out.
Miles was right, and I walked home for hours that night, terrified of myself and of every house I passed in which uncounted silhouettes passed silent and unseen.

I hadn't seen Miles in fifteen years when we bumped into each other at the grocery store. Back then, we'd gone separate ways. He'd dropped out of high school to start learning a trade, and I'd gone to university. Our lives diverged and we fell out of contact. But our recognition was instant, and after a few minutes of conversation he invited me to his house.
It was on the way that we caught up in broad strokes. I was married; he wasn't. I had a kid; he didn't. I worked for a corporation in a mid-level office job; he was self-employed. When I asked him what he did, he smiled a little mischievously and said, "I'm a bookie, but you could say I'm a bit of an employer myself these days."
When I asked what he meant, he said I'd see soon enough.
What I saw first was that his splendid two-storey yellow brick house was situated deep in the suburbs, and seemed decidedly too big for a single guy in his thirties. Nevertheless, I was impressed he could afford it. My wife and I didn't have our own house yet. "Renting or owning?" I asked as we approached the front door.
"Owned," he said. "I've had a good run these last two years."
Although the house had looked normal from the street, when we got closer I noticed that the front doorknob was odd. It was shaped like a human hand.
Miles was carrying groceries, so he motioned for me to do the opening. "It's not locked?" I asked.
He smiled just as I touched the doorknob—the warm, living doorknob!—for it didn't just look like a human hand; it was a human hand!
Obediently, the front door swung open, and huddled in the triangular space between the door and the wall was a hooded, black-clad figure whose gold-painted fingers I had just touched. Without even raising its head, the figure shut the door behind us and replaced its hand into the door hole.
Miles paid the figure no mind and continued to the kitchen, where another similarly dressed figure stood motionless by the light switch. Miles set down the groceries, clapped his hands and the figure turned on the lights.
By now I had to ask: "What is—"
"Look, I get that it may seem a little weird," he said, "but hear me out. These are people who owe me money. They're unemployed and they can't conceivably pay it back anytime soon."
I followed him to the living room, where another figure turned on the lights, illuminating several pieces of human furniture.
"So they're working off their debts."
Miles whistled, and yet another figure appeared, this one holding two imported beers. Miles handed one to me before setting the other on his nude female coffee table, who / which reacted instinctively to the cold glass bottle by momentarily arching her / its back.
"It's perfectly consensual," he added, anticipating my concerns. "And what would be the more humane alternative, breaking their knee caps?"
By now my initial discomfort was turning into a chilled fear. I kept remembering how the doorknob-hand had felt in mine. Ostensibly both were human hands, but the gap in—
"Dignity," I said, then repeated the word in a whisper so as not to let them hear. "Don't you think they lack dignity?"
He chuckled. "See, even your natural reaction is to treat them as if they're invisible. As for dignity, they most definitely had it. Because they mortgaged it, and now they're working to earn it back. I didn't force them to gamble. Now they're house servants, that's all. Are you opposed to house servants?"
I admitted I supposed I wasn't. "But this is such a strange form of it," I said, starting to stammer like in my elementary school days.
By now the stress of being in this bizarre place combined with the mundane act of drinking beer was twisting me psychologically in ways I couldn't understand. I wanted suddenly out, but the most I could tactfully bring myself to do was ask about the location of the bathroom.
"Just down the hall," Miles said.
I stepped with dread.
The bathroom was large but felt immediately cramped by the presence of two figures: one wrapped entirely in bath towels, and the other kneeling by the toilet, its hooded head down and arms up, holding a roll of toilet paper as if it were the idol of a long-forgotten god.
Of course, I couldn't go in these conditions, so I waited uncomfortably for a minute, listening to the figures breathe, before washing my hands.
"Are you OK?" I whispered to them.
No response.
"Do you need help?"
Silence.
I shut off the water faucet, turned—
And nearly fell back against the bathroom mirror as the towel-wrapped one rubbed his / her / its moisture-absorbing material / body against my wet hands. "Please, don't," I begged quietly, escaping backward into the hall.
Miles was casually drinking his beer. "Did you try to save them?" he asked.
I nodded.
"They don't need saving."
He gestured for me to follow him, and I did, down the hall and up the stairs to a bedroom. But it wasn't Miles' bedroom. "I had it prepared just for you," he said, "in case you wanted to spend the night."
The room was spacious and clean, decked out with an array of speakers, a large TV and a human night table flanking a queen-sized bed, freshly made and topped with a beautiful handmade quilt, on which rested a mattress-long body pillow, its linen case rising and falling gently with the breath of the human inside it.
I wanted to back out, but Miles caught me by the shoulders. "Remember when in high school you told me I wouldn't ever amount to anything?"
His grip was firm.
"I'm sorry," I whispered.
"Don't be sorry. You were wrong, that's all."
"How long do they work for?" I asked, watching the body pillow shift slightly on the bed, desiring more than anything to change the topic. But also curious, genuinely and morbidly curious.
"However long they want. Eight hours, twelve hours, twenty-four hour shifts. It's really not a bad gig, lying in a pillowcase on a comfortable bed for twice the minimum wage."
He nudged me forward. "Go ahead. Try it."
I didn't want to, but there was a menace in his voice, an unpredictability that made it feel safer to obey than disagree. He may not have been threatening me directly, but the threat was in the air, invisible and atomized like a perfume.
I got on the bed.
Miles watched my every uncomfortable move.
"Like it?"
"Yes," I said, "it's a very nice mattress."
For a second, I imagined that the mattress was filled with people and I was lying on top of them, crushing them—but as I shifted my weight I felt the more familiar support of springs, and I could breathe again.
"Try hugging the body pillow," Miles instructed me, the coolness in his voice betraying how used he'd gotten to being the boss.
I didn't want to do that either, but I did it anyway, not only pervasively conscious of the army of servants Miles had amassed, which he could turn against me at any moment, but wanting desperately to feel even a fraction of the power he wielded over them. Inching closer to the body pillow and turning over onto my side before lightly placing an arm on top of—
It squirmed, bony, warm and human underneath the crisp linen case.
The person inside was a man.
I wondered who and what he had bet on and how much he owed and whether it was really so bad what Miles was doing and if it would have been better for the man to be working two or three part-time jobs, probably labour, probably more tiring and dangerous, than being paid to be this objectified: this passive: this utterly domesticated.
"Nice, right?" Miles asked.
"Yes."
"You can get up now."
I got off the bed, smoothed my clothes and followed Miles wordlessly into the hall, down the stairs and into a spacious gym. He was so confident that not once did he look back; he knew that I was behind him. Although we didn't go inside, on the way we had passed a room outfitted with cameras, lights and a circular padded stage, and my imagination was running wild with thoughts of the recordings made in there—
The gym lights flashed cold and bright.
I squinted.
Arranged before me was an impressive collection of weights, workout gear and exercise machines, but it was the object occupying the centre of the room whose existence sent an electric shock down my spine. A leather heavy bag hung ominously from the ceiling.
Miles passed me boxing wraps for my hands, then began wrapping his own. "I know this is a lot, and I know how it feels, the pressure building up inside you right now. Believe me. Jealousy. Disgust. Maybe even anger: at me, the world, your own fucking life. When I get that way, I come down here and work those emotions out. It's not healthy holding them in. Whatever you do, you can't let them grow inside you."
When he was done with his wraps, he handed me a pair of training gloves. I put them on, constantly eyeing the heavy bag, which was swinging now ever so softly from the steel ceiling mount.
"Give it a shot," he said.
I stood frozen in place. I knew there was someone in there.
"I can't d—"
"Of course you can," he said, then pulled his arm back and delivered a wicked right cross to the heavy bag. It responded with a dull thud followed by a reverberating groan. "Just like that."
"It's a person," I said, my voice rising.
"Which makes it even easier. Just ask the person if you can hit her."
Her.
"Do you want to get hit?" Miles asked the heavy bag.
"Yes," a muffled voice responded.
"See? She wants you to do it. If you don't do it, you're deciding for her, and how condescending would that be—for a man to tell a woman what she can and can't do."
"Hit me please," the heavy bag mumbled.
I made a fist and threw a light jab. Just enough to feel the bag: the padding, and the contour of the person hanging inside.
"Come on, man."
It made me sick to my stomach.
But as I lifted my hand to my mouth to keep from retching, Miles put in a thudding left hook that lifted the bag on impact. I could hear the stifled pain within.
"She gets paid by the punch," Miles said. "Ask her if she wants another."
I didn't want to, but the answer came anyway:
"Hit me."
"One thousand dollars off her debt if you give it all you've got," Miles said.
"Do it please," the bag begged.
I planted my feet, exhaled—once, twice—loosened my shoulder, and put all my weight behind a looping shot that connected sickeningly with the side of the bag, my mind frantically trying to decide where I'd connected, face, ribs, hip, because I was sure I'd felt bone, as the bag bounced, the ceiling mount screeched and the woman inside moaned in pain.
For a while: silence.
Then, "Thank… you," she whimpered.
"Nice one! What do you say, another grand?" Miles asked with a smile.
"Again please."
So I got her again, and again. And again. Each time connecting with everything I had; each time shaving a thousand dollars off her debt. Good deed followed by good deed—until Miles himself grabbed my arm and pulled me away, and I realized, over the pounding of my beating heart, how much anger there was in me. "Easy, easy," he repeated.
After I'd calmed down, I felt the horror of it: of what I had done. I had beaten someone, a woman, and all her begging and thanking couldn't convince me it was right. Not that she was speaking now…
Miles unhooked the heavy bag and laid it reverently on the floor as I took off my gloves and undid my wraps.
He unzipped the bag.
"Do you remember our prom?" he asked as if out of the blue.
"Vaguely."
"You went with Rashida Parker," he said.
I did remember that.
"Who did you go with?" I asked.
Miles had pulled a body wrapped in a thick, bloodied sheet from the unzipped bag. He picked it up and cradled it. She looked small and fragile in his arms. For a second, I thought that maybe she was dead, but then she murmured something swollen and incomprehensible, and I knew I hadn't beaten her to death.
I had almost forgotten my own question when, "No one," Miles answered. "I was supposed to go with Rashida, and she'd even said 'yes' to me"—he had unwrapped some of the sheet, revealing a tangle of black hair, and I thought, No, it couldn't be, but it was: she was—"when you asked her and she said 'yes' to you. After all, why would she go with some skid who smoked cigarettes by the railroad tracks, a future deadbeat whose parents worked in a factory and who couldn't read Shakespeare, when she could go with someone like you?"
He unfolded the remaining sheet from Rashida's body and laid her on top of it. Her eyes were swelling shut but she could still see, and all I could do was avert my gaze as she slowly pronounced my name, each syllable willed into a hurt existence, before thanking me repeatedly with her fattened lips. Although she looked barely like the girl I'd fallen in love with, it was unmistakably her. After she could speak no more, she crawled forward, reaching pathetically for my legs, her broken body a coloured patchwork of various stages of bruising, as I backed instinctively away.
I was scared and I was ashamed.
"You'll appreciate the irony," Miles said. "She lost her money betting on mixed martial arts."
He laughed.
There was something about that laugh, something devilish and deep, something true that made me lunge for him—for his despicable throat! But even that did not stop the laughter, which resounded through the gym as we fought like boys on the padded floor. And still he laughed when his hooded minions arrived and pulled me off him, swinging wildly at the air. I'd bloodied his nose but nothing more, and as they dragged me away, up the stairs and to the front door, Miles followed us with a monstrous smile.
"I am the way the world is," he said.
Then I was out the door and it was closed and it was dark and suburban and I was sitting on the concrete front step, staring at the golden doorknob-hand jutting profoundly through the hole in the door of a yellow brick house. I got to my feet and descended the steps to the street, all the while trying to act cool and not make a scene, because that seemed like the worst thing imaginable: drawing attention to myself. My fighting spirit had evaporated. I was a coward once more.
I buried my hands in my pockets and kept my head down, walking briskly through the cold night air, but when I reached the nearest intersection I turned and started to run.
On both sides houses flew past at a blur. Illuminated windows. Imagined conversations. I knew Miles wasn't behind me, but because I lacked his natural confidence I kept glancing back—yet the only thing which followed were his words, I am the way the world is, and when I stopped to catch my breath, I looked directly upon a lighted window: several silhouettes gathered around a table. Was it a family or a group of hooded servants waiting on their master? I couldn't tell, but they must have seen me too because suddenly the curtains were drawn and the illumination ended.
I am the way the world is.
He was wrong. I didn't want to believe it. I couldn't believe it. Miles was the anomaly—the evil—and in every other house, behind every other beautiful brick wall, there were normal people with normal needs and normal relationships. They desired normal things and they worked normal jobs, just like me.
In my stillness I felt suddenly the autumn cold and took out my phone, and almost without thinking I swiped toward the Uber app—
That's when I understood.
I smashed the phone against the sidewalk.
Faces looked out.
Miles was right, and I walked home for hours that night, terrified of myself and of every house I passed in which uncounted silhouettes passed silent and unseen.

I hadn't seen Miles in fifteen years when we bumped into each other at the grocery store. Back then, we'd gone separate ways. He'd dropped out of high school to start learning a trade, and I'd gone to university. Our lives diverged and we fell out of contact. But our recognition was instant, and after a few minutes of conversation he invited me to his house.
It was on the way that we caught up in broad strokes. I was married; he wasn't. I had a kid; he didn't. I worked for a corporation in a mid-level office job; he was self-employed. When I asked him what he did, he smiled a little mischievously and said, "I'm a bookie, but you could say I'm a bit of an employer myself these days."
When I asked what he meant, he said I'd see soon enough.
What I saw first was that his splendid two-storey yellow brick house was situated deep in the suburbs, and seemed decidedly too big for a single guy in his thirties. Nevertheless, I was impressed he could afford it. My wife and I didn't have our own house yet. "Renting or owning?" I asked as we approached the front door.
"Owned," he said. "I've had a good run these last two years."
Although the house had looked normal from the street, when we got closer I noticed that the front doorknob was odd. It was shaped like a human hand.
Miles was carrying groceries, so he motioned for me to do the opening. "It's not locked?" I asked.
He smiled just as I touched the doorknob—the warm, living doorknob!—for it didn't just look like a human hand; it was a human hand!
Obediently, the front door swung open, and huddled in the triangular space between the door and the wall was a hooded, black-clad figure whose gold-painted fingers I had just touched. Without even raising its head, the figure shut the door behind us and replaced its hand into the door hole.
Miles paid the figure no mind and continued to the kitchen, where another similarly dressed figure stood motionless by the light switch. Miles set down the groceries, clapped his hands and the figure turned on the lights.
By now I had to ask: "What is—"
"Look, I get that it may seem a little weird," he said, "but hear me out. These are people who owe me money. They're unemployed and they can't conceivably pay it back anytime soon."
I followed him to the living room, where another figure turned on the lights, illuminating several pieces of human furniture.
"So they're working off their debts."
Miles whistled, and yet another figure appeared, this one holding two imported beers. Miles handed one to me before setting the other on his nude female coffee table, who / which reacted instinctively to the cold glass bottle by momentarily arching her / its back.
"It's perfectly consensual," he added, anticipating my concerns. "And what would be the more humane alternative, breaking their knee caps?"
By now my initial discomfort was turning into a chilled fear. I kept remembering how the doorknob-hand had felt in mine. Ostensibly both were human hands, but the gap in—
"Dignity," I said, then repeated the word in a whisper so as not to let them hear. "Don't you think they lack dignity?"
He chuckled. "See, even your natural reaction is to treat them as if they're invisible. As for dignity, they most definitely had it. Because they mortgaged it, and now they're working to earn it back. I didn't force them to gamble. Now they're house servants, that's all. Are you opposed to house servants?"
I admitted I supposed I wasn't. "But this is such a strange form of it," I said, starting to stammer like in my elementary school days.
By now the stress of being in this bizarre place combined with the mundane act of drinking beer was twisting me psychologically in ways I couldn't understand. I wanted suddenly out, but the most I could tactfully bring myself to do was ask about the location of the bathroom.
"Just down the hall," Miles said.
I stepped with dread.
The bathroom was large but felt immediately cramped by the presence of two figures: one wrapped entirely in bath towels, and the other kneeling by the toilet, its hooded head down and arms up, holding a roll of toilet paper as if it were the idol of a long-forgotten god.
Of course, I couldn't go in these conditions, so I waited uncomfortably for a minute, listening to the figures breathe, before washing my hands.
"Are you OK?" I whispered to them.
No response.
"Do you need help?"
Silence.
I shut off the water faucet, turned—
And nearly fell back against the bathroom mirror as the towel-wrapped one rubbed his / her / its moisture-absorbing material / body against my wet hands. "Please, don't," I begged quietly, escaping backward into the hall.
Miles was casually drinking his beer. "Did you try to save them?" he asked.
I nodded.
"They don't need saving."
He gestured for me to follow him, and I did, down the hall and up the stairs to a bedroom. But it wasn't Miles' bedroom. "I had it prepared just for you," he said, "in case you wanted to spend the night."
The room was spacious and clean, decked out with an array of speakers, a large TV and a human night table flanking a queen-sized bed, freshly made and topped with a beautiful handmade quilt, on which rested a mattress-long body pillow, its linen case rising and falling gently with the breath of the human inside it.
I wanted to back out, but Miles caught me by the shoulders. "Remember when in high school you told me I wouldn't ever amount to anything?"
His grip was firm.
"I'm sorry," I whispered.
"Don't be sorry. You were wrong, that's all."
"How long do they work for?" I asked, watching the body pillow shift slightly on the bed, desiring more than anything to change the topic. But also curious, genuinely and morbidly curious.
"However long they want. Eight hours, twelve hours, twenty-four hour shifts. It's really not a bad gig, lying in a pillowcase on a comfortable bed for twice the minimum wage."
He nudged me forward. "Go ahead. Try it."
I didn't want to, but there was a menace in his voice, an unpredictability that made it feel safer to obey than disagree. He may not have been threatening me directly, but the threat was in the air, invisible and atomized like a perfume.
I got on the bed.
Miles watched my every uncomfortable move.
"Like it?"
"Yes," I said, "it's a very nice mattress."
For a second, I imagined that the mattress was filled with people and I was lying on top of them, crushing them—but as I shifted my weight I felt the more familiar support of springs, and I could breathe again.
"Try hugging the body pillow," Miles instructed me, the coolness in his voice betraying how used he'd gotten to being the boss.
I didn't want to do that either, but I did it anyway, not only pervasively conscious of the army of servants Miles had amassed, which he could turn against me at any moment, but wanting desperately to feel even a fraction of the power he wielded over them. Inching closer to the body pillow and turning over onto my side before lightly placing an arm on top of—
It squirmed, bony, warm and human underneath the crisp linen case.
The person inside was a man.
I wondered who and what he had bet on and how much he owed and whether it was really so bad what Miles was doing and if it would have been better for the man to be working two or three part-time jobs, probably labour, probably more tiring and dangerous, than being paid to be this objectified: this passive: this utterly domesticated.
"Nice, right?" Miles asked.
"Yes."
"You can get up now."
I got off the bed, smoothed my clothes and followed Miles wordlessly into the hall, down the stairs and into a spacious gym. He was so confident that not once did he look back; he knew that I was behind him. Although we didn't go inside, on the way we had passed a room outfitted with cameras, lights and a circular padded stage, and my imagination was running wild with thoughts of the recordings made in there—
The gym lights flashed cold and bright.
I squinted.
Arranged before me was an impressive collection of weights, workout gear and exercise machines, but it was the object occupying the centre of the room whose existence sent an electric shock down my spine. A leather heavy bag hung ominously from the ceiling.
Miles passed me boxing wraps for my hands, then began wrapping his own. "I know this is a lot, and I know how it feels, the pressure building up inside you right now. Believe me. Jealousy. Disgust. Maybe even anger: at me, the world, your own fucking life. When I get that way, I come down here and work those emotions out. It's not healthy holding them in. Whatever you do, you can't let them grow inside you."
When he was done with his wraps, he handed me a pair of training gloves. I put them on, constantly eyeing the heavy bag, which was swinging now ever so softly from the steel ceiling mount.
"Give it a shot," he said.
I stood frozen in place. I knew there was someone in there.
"I can't d—"
"Of course you can," he said, then pulled his arm back and delivered a wicked right cross to the heavy bag. It responded with a dull thud followed by a reverberating groan. "Just like that."
"It's a person," I said, my voice rising.
"Which makes it even easier. Just ask the person if you can hit her."
Her.
"Do you want to get hit?" Miles asked the heavy bag.
"Yes," a muffled voice responded.
"See? She wants you to do it. If you don't do it, you're deciding for her, and how condescending would that be—for a man to tell a woman what she can and can't do."
"Hit me please," the heavy bag mumbled.
I made a fist and threw a light jab. Just enough to feel the bag: the padding, and the contour of the person hanging inside.
"Come on, man."
It made me sick to my stomach.
But as I lifted my hand to my mouth to keep from retching, Miles put in a thudding left hook that lifted the bag on impact. I could hear the stifled pain within.
"She gets paid by the punch," Miles said. "Ask her if she wants another."
I didn't want to, but the answer came anyway:
"Hit me."
"One thousand dollars off her debt if you give it all you've got," Miles said.
"Do it please," the bag begged.
I planted my feet, exhaled—once, twice—loosened my shoulder, and put all my weight behind a looping shot that connected sickeningly with the side of the bag, my mind frantically trying to decide where I'd connected, face, ribs, hip, because I was sure I'd felt bone, as the bag bounced, the ceiling mount screeched and the woman inside moaned in pain.
For a while: silence.
Then, "Thank… you," she whimpered.
"Nice one! What do you say, another grand?" Miles asked with a smile.
"Again please."
So I got her again, and again. And again. Each time connecting with everything I had; each time shaving a thousand dollars off her debt. Good deed followed by good deed—until Miles himself grabbed my arm and pulled me away, and I realized, over the pounding of my beating heart, how much anger there was in me. "Easy, easy," he repeated.
After I'd calmed down, I felt the horror of it: of what I had done. I had beaten someone, a woman, and all her begging and thanking couldn't convince me it was right. Not that she was speaking now…
Miles unhooked the heavy bag and laid it reverently on the floor as I took off my gloves and undid my wraps.
He unzipped the bag.
"Do you remember our prom?" he asked as if out of the blue.
"Vaguely."
"You went with Rashida Parker," he said.
I did remember that.
"Who did you go with?" I asked.
Miles had pulled a body wrapped in a thick, bloodied sheet from the unzipped bag. He picked it up and cradled it. She looked small and fragile in his arms. For a second, I thought that maybe she was dead, but then she murmured something swollen and incomprehensible, and I knew I hadn't beaten her to death.
I had almost forgotten my own question when, "No one," Miles answered. "I was supposed to go with Rashida, and she'd even said 'yes' to me"—he had unwrapped some of the sheet, revealing a tangle of black hair, and I thought, No, it couldn't be, but it was: she was—"when you asked her and she said 'yes' to you. After all, why would she go with some skid who smoked cigarettes by the railroad tracks, a future deadbeat whose parents worked in a factory and who couldn't read Shakespeare, when she could go with someone like you?"
He unfolded the remaining sheet from Rashida's body and laid her on top of it. Her eyes were swelling shut but she could still see, and all I could do was avert my gaze as she slowly pronounced my name, each syllable willed into a hurt existence, before thanking me repeatedly with her fattened lips. Although she looked barely like the girl I'd fallen in love with, it was unmistakably her. After she could speak no more, she crawled forward, reaching pathetically for my legs, her broken body a coloured patchwork of various stages of bruising, as I backed instinctively away.
I was scared and I was ashamed.
"You'll appreciate the irony," Miles said. "She lost her money betting on mixed martial arts."
He laughed.
There was something about that laugh, something devilish and deep, something true that made me lunge for him—for his despicable throat! But even that did not stop the laughter, which resounded through the gym as we fought like boys on the padded floor. And still he laughed when his hooded minions arrived and pulled me off him, swinging wildly at the air. I'd bloodied his nose but nothing more, and as they dragged me away, up the stairs and to the front door, Miles followed us with a monstrous smile.
"I am the way the world is," he said.
Then I was out the door and it was closed and it was dark and suburban and I was sitting on the concrete front step, staring at the golden doorknob-hand jutting profoundly through the hole in the door of a yellow brick house. I got to my feet and descended the steps to the street, all the while trying to act cool and not make a scene, because that seemed like the worst thing imaginable: drawing attention to myself. My fighting spirit had evaporated. I was a coward once more.
I buried my hands in my pockets and kept my head down, walking briskly through the cold night air, but when I reached the nearest intersection I turned and started to run.
On both sides houses flew past at a blur. Illuminated windows. Imagined conversations. I knew Miles wasn't behind me, but because I lacked his natural confidence I kept glancing back—yet the only thing which followed were his words, I am the way the world is, and when I stopped to catch my breath, I looked directly upon a lighted window: several silhouettes gathered around a table. Was it a family or a group of hooded servants waiting on their master? I couldn't tell, but they must have seen me too because suddenly the curtains were drawn and the illumination ended.
I am the way the world is.
He was wrong. I didn't want to believe it. I couldn't believe it. Miles was the anomaly—the evil—and in every other house, behind every other beautiful brick wall, there were normal people with normal needs and normal relationships. They desired normal things and they worked normal jobs, just like me.
In my stillness I felt suddenly the autumn cold and took out my phone, and almost without thinking I swiped toward the Uber app—
That's when I understood.
I smashed the phone against the sidewalk.
Faces looked out.
Miles was right, and I walked home for hours that night, terrified of myself and of every house I passed in which uncounted silhouettes passed silent and unseen.

I hadn't seen Miles in fifteen years when we bumped into each other at the grocery store. Back then, we'd gone separate ways. He'd dropped out of high school to start learning a trade, and I'd gone to university. Our lives diverged and we fell out of contact. But our recognition was instant, and after a few minutes of conversation he invited me to his house.
It was on the way that we caught up in broad strokes. I was married; he wasn't. I had a kid; he didn't. I worked for a corporation in a mid-level office job; he was self-employed. When I asked him what he did, he smiled a little mischievously and said, "I'm a bookie, but you could say I'm a bit of an employer myself these days."
When I asked what he meant, he said I'd see soon enough.
What I saw first was that his splendid two-storey yellow brick house was situated deep in the suburbs, and seemed decidedly too big for a single guy in his thirties. Nevertheless, I was impressed he could afford it. My wife and I didn't have our own house yet. "Renting or owning?" I asked as we approached the front door.
"Owned," he said. "I've had a good run these last two years."
Although the house had looked normal from the street, when we got closer I noticed that the front doorknob was odd. It was shaped like a human hand.
Miles was carrying groceries, so he motioned for me to do the opening. "It's not locked?" I asked.
He smiled just as I touched the doorknob—the warm, living doorknob!—for it didn't just look like a human hand; it was a human hand!
Obediently, the front door swung open, and huddled in the triangular space between the door and the wall was a hooded, black-clad figure whose gold-painted fingers I had just touched. Without even raising its head, the figure shut the door behind us and replaced its hand into the door hole.
Miles paid the figure no mind and continued to the kitchen, where another similarly dressed figure stood motionless by the light switch. Miles set down the groceries, clapped his hands and the figure turned on the lights.
By now I had to ask: "What is—"
"Look, I get that it may seem a little weird," he said, "but hear me out. These are people who owe me money. They're unemployed and they can't conceivably pay it back anytime soon."
I followed him to the living room, where another figure turned on the lights, illuminating several pieces of human furniture.
"So they're working off their debts."
Miles whistled, and yet another figure appeared, this one holding two imported beers. Miles handed one to me before setting the other on his nude female coffee table, who / which reacted instinctively to the cold glass bottle by momentarily arching her / its back.
"It's perfectly consensual," he added, anticipating my concerns. "And what would be the more humane alternative, breaking their knee caps?"
By now my initial discomfort was turning into a chilled fear. I kept remembering how the doorknob-hand had felt in mine. Ostensibly both were human hands, but the gap in—
"Dignity," I said, then repeated the word in a whisper so as not to let them hear. "Don't you think they lack dignity?"
He chuckled. "See, even your natural reaction is to treat them as if they're invisible. As for dignity, they most definitely had it. Because they mortgaged it, and now they're working to earn it back. I didn't force them to gamble. Now they're house servants, that's all. Are you opposed to house servants?"
I admitted I supposed I wasn't. "But this is such a strange form of it," I said, starting to stammer like in my elementary school days.
By now the stress of being in this bizarre place combined with the mundane act of drinking beer was twisting me psychologically in ways I couldn't understand. I wanted suddenly out, but the most I could tactfully bring myself to do was ask about the location of the bathroom.
"Just down the hall," Miles said.
I stepped with dread.
The bathroom was large but felt immediately cramped by the presence of two figures: one wrapped entirely in bath towels, and the other kneeling by the toilet, its hooded head down and arms up, holding a roll of toilet paper as if it were the idol of a long-forgotten god.
Of course, I couldn't go in these conditions, so I waited uncomfortably for a minute, listening to the figures breathe, before washing my hands.
"Are you OK?" I whispered to them.
No response.
"Do you need help?"
Silence.
I shut off the water faucet, turned—
And nearly fell back against the bathroom mirror as the towel-wrapped one rubbed his / her / its moisture-absorbing material / body against my wet hands. "Please, don't," I begged quietly, escaping backward into the hall.
Miles was casually drinking his beer. "Did you try to save them?" he asked.
I nodded.
"They don't need saving."
He gestured for me to follow him, and I did, down the hall and up the stairs to a bedroom. But it wasn't Miles' bedroom. "I had it prepared just for you," he said, "in case you wanted to spend the night."
The room was spacious and clean, decked out with an array of speakers, a large TV and a human night table flanking a queen-sized bed, freshly made and topped with a beautiful handmade quilt, on which rested a mattress-long body pillow, its linen case rising and falling gently with the breath of the human inside it.
I wanted to back out, but Miles caught me by the shoulders. "Remember when in high school you told me I wouldn't ever amount to anything?"
His grip was firm.
"I'm sorry," I whispered.
"Don't be sorry. You were wrong, that's all."
"How long do they work for?" I asked, watching the body pillow shift slightly on the bed, desiring more than anything to change the topic. But also curious, genuinely and morbidly curious.
"However long they want. Eight hours, twelve hours, twenty-four hour shifts. It's really not a bad gig, lying in a pillowcase on a comfortable bed for twice the minimum wage."
He nudged me forward. "Go ahead. Try it."
I didn't want to, but there was a menace in his voice, an unpredictability that made it feel safer to obey than disagree. He may not have been threatening me directly, but the threat was in the air, invisible and atomized like a perfume.
I got on the bed.
Miles watched my every uncomfortable move.
"Like it?"
"Yes," I said, "it's a very nice mattress."
For a second, I imagined that the mattress was filled with people and I was lying on top of them, crushing them—but as I shifted my weight I felt the more familiar support of springs, and I could breathe again.
"Try hugging the body pillow," Miles instructed me, the coolness in his voice betraying how used he'd gotten to being the boss.
I didn't want to do that either, but I did it anyway, not only pervasively conscious of the army of servants Miles had amassed, which he could turn against me at any moment, but wanting desperately to feel even a fraction of the power he wielded over them. Inching closer to the body pillow and turning over onto my side before lightly placing an arm on top of—
It squirmed, bony, warm and human underneath the crisp linen case.
The person inside was a man.
I wondered who and what he had bet on and how much he owed and whether it was really so bad what Miles was doing and if it would have been better for the man to be working two or three part-time jobs, probably labour, probably more tiring and dangerous, than being paid to be this objectified: this passive: this utterly domesticated.
"Nice, right?" Miles asked.
"Yes."
"You can get up now."
I got off the bed, smoothed my clothes and followed Miles wordlessly into the hall, down the stairs and into a spacious gym. He was so confident that not once did he look back; he knew that I was behind him. Although we didn't go inside, on the way we had passed a room outfitted with cameras, lights and a circular padded stage, and my imagination was running wild with thoughts of the recordings made in there—
The gym lights flashed cold and bright.
I squinted.
Arranged before me was an impressive collection of weights, workout gear and exercise machines, but it was the object occupying the centre of the room whose existence sent an electric shock down my spine. A leather heavy bag hung ominously from the ceiling.
Miles passed me boxing wraps for my hands, then began wrapping his own. "I know this is a lot, and I know how it feels, the pressure building up inside you right now. Believe me. Jealousy. Disgust. Maybe even anger: at me, the world, your own fucking life. When I get that way, I come down here and work those emotions out. It's not healthy holding them in. Whatever you do, you can't let them grow inside you."
When he was done with his wraps, he handed me a pair of training gloves. I put them on, constantly eyeing the heavy bag, which was swinging now ever so softly from the steel ceiling mount.
"Give it a shot," he said.
I stood frozen in place. I knew there was someone in there.
"I can't d—"
"Of course you can," he said, then pulled his arm back and delivered a wicked right cross to the heavy bag. It responded with a dull thud followed by a reverberating groan. "Just like that."
"It's a person," I said, my voice rising.
"Which makes it even easier. Just ask the person if you can hit her."
Her.
"Do you want to get hit?" Miles asked the heavy bag.
"Yes," a muffled voice responded.
"See? She wants you to do it. If you don't do it, you're deciding for her, and how condescending would that be—for a man to tell a woman what she can and can't do."
"Hit me please," the heavy bag mumbled.
I made a fist and threw a light jab. Just enough to feel the bag: the padding, and the contour of the person hanging inside.
"Come on, man."
It made me sick to my stomach.
But as I lifted my hand to my mouth to keep from retching, Miles put in a thudding left hook that lifted the bag on impact. I could hear the stifled pain within.
"She gets paid by the punch," Miles said. "Ask her if she wants another."
I didn't want to, but the answer came anyway:
"Hit me."
"One thousand dollars off her debt if you give it all you've got," Miles said.
"Do it please," the bag begged.
I planted my feet, exhaled—once, twice—loosened my shoulder, and put all my weight behind a looping shot that connected sickeningly with the side of the bag, my mind frantically trying to decide where I'd connected, face, ribs, hip, because I was sure I'd felt bone, as the bag bounced, the ceiling mount screeched and the woman inside moaned in pain.
For a while: silence.
Then, "Thank… you," she whimpered.
"Nice one! What do you say, another grand?" Miles asked with a smile.
"Again please."
So I got her again, and again. And again. Each time connecting with everything I had; each time shaving a thousand dollars off her debt. Good deed followed by good deed—until Miles himself grabbed my arm and pulled me away, and I realized, over the pounding of my beating heart, how much anger there was in me. "Easy, easy," he repeated.
After I'd calmed down, I felt the horror of it: of what I had done. I had beaten someone, a woman, and all her begging and thanking couldn't convince me it was right. Not that she was speaking now…
Miles unhooked the heavy bag and laid it reverently on the floor as I took off my gloves and undid my wraps.
He unzipped the bag.
"Do you remember our prom?" he asked as if out of the blue.
"Vaguely."
"You went with Rashida Parker," he said.
I did remember that.
"Who did you go with?" I asked.
Miles had pulled a body wrapped in a thick, bloodied sheet from the unzipped bag. He picked it up and cradled it. She looked small and fragile in his arms. For a second, I thought that maybe she was dead, but then she murmured something swollen and incomprehensible, and I knew I hadn't beaten her to death.
I had almost forgotten my own question when, "No one," Miles answered. "I was supposed to go with Rashida, and she'd even said 'yes' to me"—he had unwrapped some of the sheet, revealing a tangle of black hair, and I thought, No, it couldn't be, but it was: she was—"when you asked her and she said 'yes' to you. After all, why would she go with some skid who smoked cigarettes by the railroad tracks, a future deadbeat whose parents worked in a factory and who couldn't read Shakespeare, when she could go with someone like you?"
He unfolded the remaining sheet from Rashida's body and laid her on top of it. Her eyes were swelling shut but she could still see, and all I could do was avert my gaze as she slowly pronounced my name, each syllable willed into a hurt existence, before thanking me repeatedly with her fattened lips. Although she looked barely like the girl I'd fallen in love with, it was unmistakably her. After she could speak no more, she crawled forward, reaching pathetically for my legs, her broken body a coloured patchwork of various stages of bruising, as I backed instinctively away.
I was scared and I was ashamed.
"You'll appreciate the irony," Miles said. "She lost her money betting on mixed martial arts."
He laughed.
There was something about that laugh, something devilish and deep, something true that made me lunge for him—for his despicable throat! But even that did not stop the laughter, which resounded through the gym as we fought like boys on the padded floor. And still he laughed when his hooded minions arrived and pulled me off him, swinging wildly at the air. I'd bloodied his nose but nothing more, and as they dragged me away, up the stairs and to the front door, Miles followed us with a monstrous smile.
"I am the way the world is," he said.
Then I was out the door and it was closed and it was dark and suburban and I was sitting on the concrete front step, staring at the golden doorknob-hand jutting profoundly through the hole in the door of a yellow brick house. I got to my feet and descended the steps to the street, all the while trying to act cool and not make a scene, because that seemed like the worst thing imaginable: drawing attention to myself. My fighting spirit had evaporated. I was a coward once more.
I buried my hands in my pockets and kept my head down, walking briskly through the cold night air, but when I reached the nearest intersection I turned and started to run.
On both sides houses flew past at a blur. Illuminated windows. Imagined conversations. I knew Miles wasn't behind me, but because I lacked his natural confidence I kept glancing back—yet the only thing which followed were his words, I am the way the world is, and when I stopped to catch my breath, I looked directly upon a lighted window: several silhouettes gathered around a table. Was it a family or a group of hooded servants waiting on their master? I couldn't tell, but they must have seen me too because suddenly the curtains were drawn and the illumination ended.
I am the way the world is.
He was wrong. I didn't want to believe it. I couldn't believe it. Miles was the anomaly—the evil—and in every other house, behind every other beautiful brick wall, there were normal people with normal needs and normal relationships. They desired normal things and they worked normal jobs, just like me.
In my stillness I felt suddenly the autumn cold and took out my phone, and almost without thinking I swiped toward the Uber app—
That's when I understood.
I smashed the phone against the sidewalk.
Faces looked out.
Miles was right, and I walked home for hours that night, terrified of myself and of every house I passed in which uncounted silhouettes passed silent and unseen.

I hadn't seen Miles in fifteen years when we bumped into each other at the grocery store. Back then, we'd gone separate ways. He'd dropped out of high school to start learning a trade, and I'd gone to university. Our lives diverged and we fell out of contact. But our recognition was instant, and after a few minutes of conversation he invited me to his house.
It was on the way that we caught up in broad strokes. I was married; he wasn't. I had a kid; he didn't. I worked for a corporation in a mid-level office job; he was self-employed. When I asked him what he did, he smiled a little mischievously and said, "I'm a bookie, but you could say I'm a bit of an employer myself these days."
When I asked what he meant, he said I'd see soon enough.
What I saw first was that his splendid two-storey yellow brick house was situated deep in the suburbs, and seemed decidedly too big for a single guy in his thirties. Nevertheless, I was impressed he could afford it. My wife and I didn't have our own house yet. "Renting or owning?" I asked as we approached the front door.
"Owned," he said. "I've had a good run these last two years."
Although the house had looked normal from the street, when we got closer I noticed that the front doorknob was odd. It was shaped like a human hand.
Miles was carrying groceries, so he motioned for me to do the opening. "It's not locked?" I asked.
He smiled just as I touched the doorknob—the warm, living doorknob!—for it didn't just look like a human hand; it was a human hand!
Obediently, the front door swung open, and huddled in the triangular space between the door and the wall was a hooded, black-clad figure whose gold-painted fingers I had just touched. Without even raising its head, the figure shut the door behind us and replaced its hand into the door hole.
Miles paid the figure no mind and continued to the kitchen, where another similarly dressed figure stood motionless by the light switch. Miles set down the groceries, clapped his hands and the figure turned on the lights.
By now I had to ask: "What is—"
"Look, I get that it may seem a little weird," he said, "but hear me out. These are people who owe me money. They're unemployed and they can't conceivably pay it back anytime soon."
I followed him to the living room, where another figure turned on the lights, illuminating several pieces of human furniture.
"So they're working off their debts."
Miles whistled, and yet another figure appeared, this one holding two imported beers. Miles handed one to me before setting the other on his nude female coffee table, who / which reacted instinctively to the cold glass bottle by momentarily arching her / its back.
"It's perfectly consensual," he added, anticipating my concerns. "And what would be the more humane alternative, breaking their knee caps?"
By now my initial discomfort was turning into a chilled fear. I kept remembering how the doorknob-hand had felt in mine. Ostensibly both were human hands, but the gap in—
"Dignity," I said, then repeated the word in a whisper so as not to let them hear. "Don't you think they lack dignity?"
He chuckled. "See, even your natural reaction is to treat them as if they're invisible. As for dignity, they most definitely had it. Because they mortgaged it, and now they're working to earn it back. I didn't force them to gamble. Now they're house servants, that's all. Are you opposed to house servants?"
I admitted I supposed I wasn't. "But this is such a strange form of it," I said, starting to stammer like in my elementary school days.
By now the stress of being in this bizarre place combined with the mundane act of drinking beer was twisting me psychologically in ways I couldn't understand. I wanted suddenly out, but the most I could tactfully bring myself to do was ask about the location of the bathroom.
"Just down the hall," Miles said.
I stepped with dread.
The bathroom was large but felt immediately cramped by the presence of two figures: one wrapped entirely in bath towels, and the other kneeling by the toilet, its hooded head down and arms up, holding a roll of toilet paper as if it were the idol of a long-forgotten god.
Of course, I couldn't go in these conditions, so I waited uncomfortably for a minute, listening to the figures breathe, before washing my hands.
"Are you OK?" I whispered to them.
No response.
"Do you need help?"
Silence.
I shut off the water faucet, turned—
And nearly fell back against the bathroom mirror as the towel-wrapped one rubbed his / her / its moisture-absorbing material / body against my wet hands. "Please, don't," I begged quietly, escaping backward into the hall.
Miles was casually drinking his beer. "Did you try to save them?" he asked.
I nodded.
"They don't need saving."
He gestured for me to follow him, and I did, down the hall and up the stairs to a bedroom. But it wasn't Miles' bedroom. "I had it prepared just for you," he said, "in case you wanted to spend the night."
The room was spacious and clean, decked out with an array of speakers, a large TV and a human night table flanking a queen-sized bed, freshly made and topped with a beautiful handmade quilt, on which rested a mattress-long body pillow, its linen case rising and falling gently with the breath of the human inside it.
I wanted to back out, but Miles caught me by the shoulders. "Remember when in high school you told me I wouldn't ever amount to anything?"
His grip was firm.
"I'm sorry," I whispered.
"Don't be sorry. You were wrong, that's all."
"How long do they work for?" I asked, watching the body pillow shift slightly on the bed, desiring more than anything to change the topic. But also curious, genuinely and morbidly curious.
"However long they want. Eight hours, twelve hours, twenty-four hour shifts. It's really not a bad gig, lying in a pillowcase on a comfortable bed for twice the minimum wage."
He nudged me forward. "Go ahead. Try it."
I didn't want to, but there was a menace in his voice, an unpredictability that made it feel safer to obey than disagree. He may not have been threatening me directly, but the threat was in the air, invisible and atomized like a perfume.
I got on the bed.
Miles watched my every uncomfortable move.
"Like it?"
"Yes," I said, "it's a very nice mattress."
For a second, I imagined that the mattress was filled with people and I was lying on top of them, crushing them—but as I shifted my weight I felt the more familiar support of springs, and I could breathe again.
"Try hugging the body pillow," Miles instructed me, the coolness in his voice betraying how used he'd gotten to being the boss.
I didn't want to do that either, but I did it anyway, not only pervasively conscious of the army of servants Miles had amassed, which he could turn against me at any moment, but wanting desperately to feel even a fraction of the power he wielded over them. Inching closer to the body pillow and turning over onto my side before lightly placing an arm on top of—
It squirmed, bony, warm and human underneath the crisp linen case.
The person inside was a man.
I wondered who and what he had bet on and how much he owed and whether it was really so bad what Miles was doing and if it would have been better for the man to be working two or three part-time jobs, probably labour, probably more tiring and dangerous, than being paid to be this objectified: this passive: this utterly domesticated.
"Nice, right?" Miles asked.
"Yes."
"You can get up now."
I got off the bed, smoothed my clothes and followed Miles wordlessly into the hall, down the stairs and into a spacious gym. He was so confident that not once did he look back; he knew that I was behind him. Although we didn't go inside, on the way we had passed a room outfitted with cameras, lights and a circular padded stage, and my imagination was running wild with thoughts of the recordings made in there—
The gym lights flashed cold and bright.
I squinted.
Arranged before me was an impressive collection of weights, workout gear and exercise machines, but it was the object occupying the centre of the room whose existence sent an electric shock down my spine. A leather heavy bag hung ominously from the ceiling.
Miles passed me boxing wraps for my hands, then began wrapping his own. "I know this is a lot, and I know how it feels, the pressure building up inside you right now. Believe me. Jealousy. Disgust. Maybe even anger: at me, the world, your own fucking life. When I get that way, I come down here and work those emotions out. It's not healthy holding them in. Whatever you do, you can't let them grow inside you."
When he was done with his wraps, he handed me a pair of training gloves. I put them on, constantly eyeing the heavy bag, which was swinging now ever so softly from the steel ceiling mount.
"Give it a shot," he said.
I stood frozen in place. I knew there was someone in there.
"I can't d—"
"Of course you can," he said, then pulled his arm back and delivered a wicked right cross to the heavy bag. It responded with a dull thud followed by a reverberating groan. "Just like that."
"It's a person," I said, my voice rising.
"Which makes it even easier. Just ask the person if you can hit her."
Her.
"Do you want to get hit?" Miles asked the heavy bag.
"Yes," a muffled voice responded.
"See? She wants you to do it. If you don't do it, you're deciding for her, and how condescending would that be—for a man to tell a woman what she can and can't do."
"Hit me please," the heavy bag mumbled.
I made a fist and threw a light jab. Just enough to feel the bag: the padding, and the contour of the person hanging inside.
"Come on, man."
It made me sick to my stomach.
But as I lifted my hand to my mouth to keep from retching, Miles put in a thudding left hook that lifted the bag on impact. I could hear the stifled pain within.
"She gets paid by the punch," Miles said. "Ask her if she wants another."
I didn't want to, but the answer came anyway:
"Hit me."
"One thousand dollars off her debt if you give it all you've got," Miles said.
"Do it please," the bag begged.
I planted my feet, exhaled—once, twice—loosened my shoulder, and put all my weight behind a looping shot that connected sickeningly with the side of the bag, my mind frantically trying to decide where I'd connected, face, ribs, hip, because I was sure I'd felt bone, as the bag bounced, the ceiling mount screeched and the woman inside moaned in pain.
For a while: silence.
Then, "Thank… you," she whimpered.
"Nice one! What do you say, another grand?" Miles asked with a smile.
"Again please."
So I got her again, and again. And again. Each time connecting with everything I had; each time shaving a thousand dollars off her debt. Good deed followed by good deed—until Miles himself grabbed my arm and pulled me away, and I realized, over the pounding of my beating heart, how much anger there was in me. "Easy, easy," he repeated.
After I'd calmed down, I felt the horror of it: of what I had done. I had beaten someone, a woman, and all her begging and thanking couldn't convince me it was right. Not that she was speaking now…
Miles unhooked the heavy bag and laid it reverently on the floor as I took off my gloves and undid my wraps.
He unzipped the bag.
"Do you remember our prom?" he asked as if out of the blue.
"Vaguely."
"You went with Rashida Parker," he said.
I did remember that.
"Who did you go with?" I asked.
Miles had pulled a body wrapped in a thick, bloodied sheet from the unzipped bag. He picked it up and cradled it. She looked small and fragile in his arms. For a second, I thought that maybe she was dead, but then she murmured something swollen and incomprehensible, and I knew I hadn't beaten her to death.
I had almost forgotten my own question when, "No one," Miles answered. "I was supposed to go with Rashida, and she'd even said 'yes' to me"—he had unwrapped some of the sheet, revealing a tangle of black hair, and I thought, No, it couldn't be, but it was: she was—"when you asked her and she said 'yes' to you. After all, why would she go with some skid who smoked cigarettes by the railroad tracks, a future deadbeat whose parents worked in a factory and who couldn't read Shakespeare, when she could go with someone like you?"
He unfolded the remaining sheet from Rashida's body and laid her on top of it. Her eyes were swelling shut but she could still see, and all I could do was avert my gaze as she slowly pronounced my name, each syllable willed into a hurt existence, before thanking me repeatedly with her fattened lips. Although she looked barely like the girl I'd fallen in love with, it was unmistakably her. After she could speak no more, she crawled forward, reaching pathetically for my legs, her broken body a coloured patchwork of various stages of bruising, as I backed instinctively away.
I was scared and I was ashamed.
"You'll appreciate the irony," Miles said. "She lost her money betting on mixed martial arts."
He laughed.
There was something about that laugh, something devilish and deep, something true that made me lunge for him—for his despicable throat! But even that did not stop the laughter, which resounded through the gym as we fought like boys on the padded floor. And still he laughed when his hooded minions arrived and pulled me off him, swinging wildly at the air. I'd bloodied his nose but nothing more, and as they dragged me away, up the stairs and to the front door, Miles followed us with a monstrous smile.
"I am the way the world is," he said.
Then I was out the door and it was closed and it was dark and suburban and I was sitting on the concrete front step, staring at the golden doorknob-hand jutting profoundly through the hole in the door of a yellow brick house. I got to my feet and descended the steps to the street, all the while trying to act cool and not make a scene, because that seemed like the worst thing imaginable: drawing attention to myself. My fighting spirit had evaporated. I was a coward once more.
I buried my hands in my pockets and kept my head down, walking briskly through the cold night air, but when I reached the nearest intersection I turned and started to run.
On both sides houses flew past at a blur. Illuminated windows. Imagined conversations. I knew Miles wasn't behind me, but because I lacked his natural confidence I kept glancing back—yet the only thing which followed were his words, I am the way the world is, and when I stopped to catch my breath, I looked directly upon a lighted window: several silhouettes gathered around a table. Was it a family or a group of hooded servants waiting on their master? I couldn't tell, but they must have seen me too because suddenly the curtains were drawn and the illumination ended.
I am the way the world is.
He was wrong. I didn't want to believe it. I couldn't believe it. Miles was the anomaly—the evil—and in every other house, behind every other beautiful brick wall, there were normal people with normal needs and normal relationships. They desired normal things and they worked normal jobs, just like me.
In my stillness I felt suddenly the autumn cold and took out my phone, and almost without thinking I swiped toward the Uber app—
That's when I understood.
I smashed the phone against the sidewalk.
Faces looked out.
Miles was right, and I walked home for hours that night, terrified of myself and of every house I passed in which uncounted silhouettes passed silent and unseen.