Alexandra Kleeman - You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

He pulled out the flashlight again and held it up against my throat, arm, torso. He leaned in and squinted, adjusted the eyeholes from side to side.

“You’re murky,” he said. “I’d say sixty percent cover. Not good. Now think about your mother or father.”

I tried to think about them. Then I tried not to. I couldn’t tell what I should try to do. I could feel Anna at my side, smirking, as he got out the rod and ran it along my length.

“Also, soft. Hard in places, but that may just be the bone.”

He sat up and took the numbers down on paper. It looked as though he were shaking his head, there, beneath the cover of his large flapping white sheet.

“Okay,” he said, “last question.”

CLOSE YOUR EYES. IT IS A NICE DAY. IMAGINE YOU LOOK AROUND AND THEN UP. WHAT IS IT LIKE UP THERE? DESCRIBE IN DETAIL.

“Um,” I said. “I don’t know how to answer this.”

“To the best of your ability,” said he.

“All right,” I said. “Well, I guess it’s high up. The top is far away. It feels safe. Not like anything is going to cave in. It’s a good day. People are full of Bright all around me. And I guess it’s nice up there, the normal kind of nice. It’s a happy color like blue or something, and free of toxins.”

The Inspector was writing furiously on the sheet of survey paper.

“You said blue?” he asked, not looking up.

“Blue,” I said.

“We don’t have blue here,” he said. “Blue was removed due to its toxic effects. We have white ceilings. Sometimes gray. Or with industrial support beams, steel beams. We have red curtains. These are all acceptable answers.”

“My answer wasn’t acceptable,” I said. I had intended to say it as a question, but I already knew what he would say.

“No,” said the Inspector. “It was not. It’s a holdover from the outside, where they have blue. It’s an indicator that you are almost certainly bringing in other things, more dangerous things, from outside as well.”

“What if this was the only one?” I asked hopefully.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’ll still have to be sorted out. We’ll reassign you to some outside work, nothing too dangerous, hopefully. Some kind of halfway job where we’ll try to offer you at least partial protection from toxicity. Maybe at a factory. Who knows.” He looked at my face. “You’ll still be fed well,” he said. “Kandy Kakes.”

I didn’t know what to say. He was packing up and moving on to his next inspection. Next to me, Anna sat in silence. He paused at the door.

“You’ll probably have a final meal here. Move you out tomorrow morning. Someone will let you know where you’re going, I think,” he said. And then he was gone.

For a second I lay still. Then I writhed around, side to side, moaning. After some moments I quieted and turned to Anna.

“You destroyed me,” I said.

She didn’t say anything.

“Now I’m sorted down,” I said. “Everything I worked for. All the memories I undid. How clean and Bright I got. Now I’ll go back out in the world and be degraded in an instant. My ghost will shrivel. I won’t live on. You killed my ghost,” I shrieked.

Anna just shrugged her head around in a big fuck-you kind of way. As she rolled her head around on its slender stem, I saw her collarbones and shoulder blade sliding past each other like pistons in an engine. Each bone had a stark drop shadow underneath. The fleshier body parts had eroded, and now she resembled a beach cliff, sharp edged and towering above stretches of vanishing sand. Every day her body looked more like B’s — more like B’s but less each time I saw it, as though every person I met were an echo of one I used to know.

“I have to protect myself,” she said. There was something not quite apologetic in the way that she said it.

“From the Darkness?” I asked.

“From you,” she said. And she lay back on her cot, folded her arms, and gripped a bicep in each hand. She closed her eyes and her mouth tightened into a slim little line. I could tell that she was back at work perfecting her memories, isolating the little pockets of outside Darkness and filling them with plain, clean Light from within this place. I thought for a second of trying to undo her, trying to make a greater Darkness happen to her. But then I just gave up. I looked over at the fake mirror at the fake reflection of the blood-red curtains and it was as if I were already gone. Something was burning behind my eyes. I thought it was anger, but then I realized it was tears.

THAT NIGHT I WENT TOmy last meal in the compound in the Grand Cafeteria, which used to be a Wally’s, which was now just a big, thingless space lit up by supermarket fluorescents that turned everything beneath them an insomniac white. We ate there once a day, and after eating we went back and slept on our double-size cot curtained off by velvet red, slept on one of hundreds of cots that filled the room infirmary style, making it look as though we were all in a massive emergency of some kind that never ceased or lessened. The line for food was already long, twisting through the spaces between those Eaters who were already eating, standing there with their sacks open and their mouths clogged. I thought I recognized some of the bodies, but that might have been a mistake. Stranger or nonstranger, all Eaters acted more or less alike, did things more or less the same way. I wondered if any of the others were having the same problems as me beneath their crisp white sheets, if they too were experiencing dizzying pulses of longing as they thought accidentally on their past lives with its warm bodies and delicious, treacherous food. If they felt their thin, glassy skin go opaque when they remembered the people of their past.

I queued up with my empty sack and waited my turn. Food was done by weight: nine units for a large man, three for a child. Someone with a body like mine took six, though there were days when I got five, and actually there were more days like that recently, more and more and more. I held my sack forward while they counted them out. It was like Halloween, if Halloween happened twice every day and the only things there were to eat were Kandy Kakes.

Today was a five Kake day. I found some empty standing space and opened my sack. All around me other Eaters were doing the same, reaching in and rifling through their issuance, feeling it up with their fingers, searching around for edges within the gummed-up mass of Kandy Kakes, whose fudge coating was airproof and weather-resistant and impervious to pretty much everything.

We peeled them apart with our fudge-covered fingernails and felt the scrape of a Kandy puck beneath our clawing as the wet surgery sounds, sounds like the ones made by the insides of our own bodies, accompanied our digging. We lifted globs to our mouths and sank our teeth through the muck, bit down on that chalky layer of fruity cocoa and eked away at it with our teeth. We drooled into it, let it soak us up and turn our mouths ashy and dry. We let it drain us, waiting until it turned soft enough to bite. Then we bit it.

The Kakes rubbled on our tongues, tasting of chocolate and bone, waxy with fudge and greasy frosting, and at the same time not tasting like much. Tasting like less than we had expected, even though every time we ate one we expected less. The gathering space was full of people standing alone and facing in random directions, all wrestling with their own mouths. And when we had won at last, cracking the Kandy Kore to reach the sugary fluid within, we gagged on the bitter slick. My mouth was raw and scoured and tasted of biled orange.

I looked down at my sack, at the four that I still had to finish. Down inside me, in a place near my heart, my stomach quivered.

My new assignment had come in. The next day I would be shipped out into the danger. I would be leaving the compound for someplace else where there was no shield to protect me from Darkness, no purifying and Lightening baths, no safety from the toxic thoughts and feelings of normal un-Lightened people. But I would still be under the Church’s protection, there was no reason to despair. They told you that sorting down wasn’t the end. You were still doing important work, even if it was at the cost of your health. You were part of the hidden face of the Church, hidden beneath your normal face, and they told you that everything you did was in service of the Brightening of the world, especially when you labored away from the Church, like at a Wally’s or a car wash or something.