Inhabited

A man whites out during a VR session and wakes up in a woman's body, in her apartment. The only way out is an orgasm he can't fake.

He comes to on a hardwood floor in Brooklyn with hair in his mouth, damp underwear, and weight on a chest that wasn't there an hour ago. Her name arrives on its own. Cara Vasquez, twenty-eight, junior architect, mole near the left corner of her mouth. The wifi password is there. The silverware drawer is there. His own name isn't.

Three days later he's someone else. Then someone else. Diane, whose marriage ends on a phone call he didn't intend to make. Ruth, tier-one support for the company he's investigating, twelve minutes of not knowing where her five-year-old went. Nadia, on her cycle, taking a client meeting away from a man who won't recover from it. Meg, six weeks pregnant and telling nobody. Elena, fifty-two, losing the thread of her own lecture while the heat climbs her chest in front of thirty students.

Meanwhile something in the sessions is killing people, and the only person who will meet him is Brigid Adler, a translator in Greenpoint who won't touch a headset. Every time she sits down at the café she looks for a different face coming toward her table.

The women come back to their own lives believing the actions were their own. Vaguely. Ruth will know she sat on the kitchen floor with both kids. She won't know why she couldn't get up.

Inhabited is an embodied transformation novel about a guest with no manual, doing his best in a woman's life, and how far short his best falls.