You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (25 page)

When I opened them, it was to the sight of a tall, heavy-looking Eater in a newcomer’s pristine white sheet. He was wandering back and forth on the warehouse floor, stopping other Churchgoers, grabbing their shoulders, and shaking them gently, asking again and again: “Have you seen my car? A green hatchback. Have you seen my car?” I looked at the spooners around me. We had all stopped spooning, all turned our faces toward this alarming man who, in his forgetting, seemed somehow also to be suffering a seizure of remembrance. I could see on all of their faces that it was uncomfortable to watch him suffer so from his own unsheddable Darkness, but I felt worse than the rest of them. I knew I was closer to becoming him than becoming the well-adjusted Eaters to the right and left of me. I knew I was only a few remembrances away from letting something Dark slip out again.

As I watched, the Managers surrounded the remembering man on all sides. “Have you seen my car?” he asked them as they closed in on his bulky body.

The Eater to the right of me must have seen my concern through my sight holes. She leaned toward me in a confidential way.

“The Dads usually burn out early,” she whispered. “Nobody knows why. Some people think it’s because they can’t shed their memories properly. They’re too tied to the things they were responsible for, the things they owned. Even though that’s what they came here to escape.”

I looked at her and nodded. The Managers were dragging the man off toward the warehouse’s outer door. The man had stopped asking about his car and was now just sobbing blurrily, a wet patch forming on his sheet near the face and shoulder.

“What happens to them?” I asked quietly.

“They are expelled,” she said matter-of-factly. “Banished to their former lives. Returned to the toxicity of the world outside. You cannot have those kinds of things going on around purer, Brighter people. Allowing them to stay, even in a separate area, even in a neighboring building, would hold us all back.”

I looked out at the outer door, glass paneled and sleek. In the squares that opened up onto the outside world, I saw thousands of small leaves twisting in the breeze, the worn gray asphalt and curb, empty plastic bottles and cans sitting in clods of browned-out grass. I saw at least twelve different things that I knew were killing me at varied rates, driving me insane, rendering me toxic and flawed. A shiver ran down my spine. Whatever it cost me, whatever it might take, I had to stay in the Church.

I WAS STANDING IN CONFERENCE
Room F waiting for the day’s speech to begin, waiting for our Regional Manager to step up and give us the day’s new lessons on what to avoid, what to remember, what to forget. Anna had offered to stick close to me and explain the nuances of the speech so I wouldn’t make so many mistakes in the future. “Every slipup of yours causes me to slip too,” she said. “Remember that.” I knew now that I had to follow her instructions to the letter if I wanted to stay in here, where I was safe from the Darkness and the toxins and, most important, from myself.

It was late afternoon and we still hadn’t had lunch; people stirred a little less than normal as they stood. They moved drowsily, their sheeted forms tilting in the light like there was a person trying to keep awake somewhere beneath. From across the parking lots that darked like lakes through the middle of the business center, we saw other buildings like our own, mirrors to those on the outside, and we saw small people entering them and leaving them.

In the room, a scent like diet cola sweated from our bodies, sweated out through the skin and was absorbed by the white fabric. The sound of a generator weighed heavy in the air, filling the room though all the windows were closed. Light filtered in through the standard-issue sheet I had been done up in, through the very transparency of the cloth itself. We knew we were safe in here, or we thought we were, or we felt we were, or we wanted to feel we were. Through eyeholes I watched my fellow Eaters, the white of their coverings melding together to form a thing that looked like a mountain range in the snow, dozens and dozens of peaks rising sudden and urgent from out of the white, the points eerily rounded, as though they had been hammered down.

We were packed tight together and the air tasted moist and personal, like a kiss from the mouth of a stranger. Dozens and dozens of us, new and old, waited restless before the empty podium. We swarmed it like ants around a gob of jelly, trying to figure out how to wring from it the thing we wanted: a glimpse of the Regional Manager, the Manager’s favorable attentions, the words from his mouth that raised us from our situation and into a better one. These blank periods of time before the lesson began were difficult to fill. They were uncomfortable and boring. We wanted to watch one another, judge one another, determine whether we were better than each other and worthier for advancement. We wanted to feel lucky, feel hopeful, feel closer to our ghosts. But in this sea of white, it was hard to see any trace or trait on your outside that made you different from anybody else.

The white mounds in front of me begin shifting, turning their torsos laterally beneath their shrouds to look around, swaying before me like mountains in the wind. Then I see our Regional Manager making his way through the crowd, cutting his path from the catering entrance toward a thick swath of admirers who part just a little to let him through. They all want to feel the force of his body on its way, they think that some of his Brightness will rub off in the friction. The Manager, trailed by a couple of assistants, grasps his head with both hands to keep the eyeholes in place as he moves. He’s walking slowly, like he thinks he has a majestic air. But he’s not that tall, not especially graceful. All he is is Bright, Brighter than the rest of us. We know this because we’ve been told, we know even though it doesn’t really show up through his sheet, a sheet of higher quality than ours — hotel-quality luxury thread count, thick and creamy with satiny details at the hem that drags along behind him. He reaches the podium and his assistants scurry out from behind to sort out the train of his sheet so that he won’t trip as he turns to us to speak. The Manager gives us all what I assume is a look of appraisal, though through the eyeholes it can be hard to tell. At moments like this he looks so ordinary it is hard to believe that he, alone, has the knowledge necessary to midwife our future selves.

Then he raises his hands grandly and addresses us all:

HE WHO SITS NEXT TO ME, MAY WE EAT AS ONE!

I look at Anna, standing next to me, already shouting the words back to him, already joining her voice to the total volume of the crowd, shouting and shouting in perfect unison like one great white sprawling person with a single monstrous voice. Anna looks so happy through her sight holes, her eyes bugging out enthusiastically, her mouth pressing feverishly against the inside of her sheet as she cries out again and again. She looks so happy and so Bright.

I reach down and I take her hand in my own. I clasp it. I work my fingers in between hers and twine us. And then I lift my head up to shout.

INSIDE A BODY THERE IS
no Light. Blood piles through with no sense of where it goes, sliding past inner parts, parts that feel something but know nothing about what they feel. What they sense they send up through nerve channels to the brain, a cavefish-pale organ with no nerves of its own. Inside a body, thoughts that never touch air, never reach Light, thoughts that end in a suffocating Dark. The damp basement in a horror movie into which a teenage girl sinks slowly, the stairs groaning beneath her weight, her voice thready and red as she says the name of her boyfriend out loud, over and over again.

Inside a body there is no Light, so the Eaters teach that you must shine your own through Righteous Eating. The diagrams illustrate it beautifully: a female torso in cross section, set on its side like a fish on a cutting board. Small cubes of black and white fall down its throat in the direction indicated by an arrow, the paths of the body marked out in bold white lines, highway lines. These black cubes represent food, the bad kind that starves the ghost within you so that when it is its moment to emerge from your soft shell, to come from you into the world and carry out your project more perfectly than you had ever dreamed, it will die trapped and weakened in your body that has been a prison to it forever. White cubes are the good kind of food, the kind that can save you — if not in this body, then for the next.

Inside the schematic woman, food cubes are destroyed. They release their own benevolent and malevolent ghosts. Dark food travels down to the protective organs in which the ghost gestates vulnerable and sleepy; it clusters to their outsides and strangles what sleeps within. The good food, by contrast, breaks into shafts of differently colored light, bright like fireworks, and this light illuminates the body and nourishes the ghost within.
Imagine this,
they say,
how radiant you become when you eat Bright. How beautiful, how durable and long-lasting. The colors that can’t be seen, working brilliance inside you, preparing you for your ghosting. Colors more beautiful than any of the colors you know.

I used to lie in bed at night with my hands on my belly, feeling the blood crowd through, wondering what was taking place within me. Now that I had been illuminated, I lay in my cot, sideways like a baby in the womb, and when I rested my hand over my central organs I knew precisely what lay beneath. I knew that the flawed and sad feelings, daily dissatisfactions and pangs of despair, were just my ghost’s way of kicking within me, kicking to test its independence, kicking to tell me it wants to be let out.

I fell asleep dreaming that it would split me open someday soon, like a green shoot piercing the husk of a soiled bulb.

I lay on my back in the center of the gymnasium and tried to breathe. I tried not to do anything that could look like I was raising my hand. I intended to know what I was doing and to do it perfectly. I pictured a perfect student and tried to resemble her physically. I tried not to look at the ceiling or toward the voice of the instructor. I tried not to look like anything, tried to feel like I had lost myself among the other supine bodies lying limp on the floor. I tried to concentrate only on the idea of Light and the ghost within me, not on my memories, which were as mottled as ever and seemed to be with me all of the time. The Managers moved between us, checking up on our progress, their sheets brushing across our faces and mouths by accident. I could feel Anna in the room, somewhere in the room, executing the exercise rather than worrying about its execution. Today the air had a frictive quality that ground against my skin, and I was glad again for the protection of the sheet.