Anna shrugged. “Well,” she said. “Congrats.”
I picked one up and brought it to my mouth. Of all the things I had wanted in my life, these were the only ones left. I felt my body grow hot, then cold, then hot again: I wanted to cram them all whole into my mouth, force them down. I breathed in their scent of hard, waxy chocolate and stale orange. My throat was wet and wide and tender.
Then I bit. It was harder than I liked, the casing exactly as impermeable as the ads boasted. I shifted it toward the back molars, where my jaw was a little stronger, and managed to pierce the chocolate armor, crush it a little, so that the syrupy orange-caramel filling began its seepage into my mouth. The orange goo tingled with sweetness against my tongue.
I looked up and saw Anna watching me.
“It’s delicious,” I said.
She nodded and blinked.
As I took up my second Kake and third Kake and bit down through their Choco Armor, I tried to remember only this moment, this present moment that was continually ending, this moment illuminated by the safety and Brightness of the Church, but I couldn’t help it. Even though I knew it only harmed me, only hindered my progress, I was thinking of my old life, of the way B used to watch me eat. I’d be reading old sections of the Sunday paper while eating a bowl of cereal, and every once in a while I could look up to see her eyes on me. The look in them was something strange. She stared at me like I was doing something new that she wanted to do very badly. She stared at me like I had performed an ugly miracle. She stared at me like she’d be practicing it later, in her room, alone — standing in front of the mirror and chewing exaggeratedly, cowlike, biting at the air.
THAT NIGHT, I WOKE TO
a feeling of hunger that verged on pain. I rolled over on my side and clutched my belly in toward my center, as though compressing the organ could fool it into thinking it was full. I sat up and looked at Anna, slumbering peacefully beside me in our double cot. I needed to eat more, and I knew if I woke her, she’d talk me out of it. Anna found it easy to follow all of the Church rules. But as long as I was eating the approved food, I reasoned, it shouldn’t do too much damage to my Brightness levels if I ate another serving or half serving. I eased myself out from under the covers and put on my shoes and my sheet. I slipped out through the red velveteen curtains and snuck through the hall to a neglected-looking service elevator. Inside the elevator, the button panel was all blank. I pressed one at random and hoped it would take me to a floor with food on it.
Through miles of Church corridor, on floors where broad windows looked out on a massive parking lot, dark and featureless like this immense building’s even larger shadow, on floors that had no windows and thrummed with the sound of machinery far underground, I searched for food. The structure was clean like a hotel or office building, the carpeting clean and dustless, but there were things piling up in it that didn’t belong: a tilting pile of sequined decorative pillows blocking what looked like an unused elevator bay, cardboard boxes lined up in the hallway that turned out to be full of jars of beauty cream, the one with the commercial where the bird escapes from inside the woman. The creams were heavy and full, store-ready in their crisp red boxes, but when I took off the lid the cream’s surface had a deep swirl in it: not a machine’s smooth finish but something made by hand.
The upper floors had crisp steel numbering and panes of cold glass that revealed dull gray interiors. In the middle, the halls were motel-colored, sullen beige, with smooth neutral doors marked by small brass numbers. The lowest levels of the building — where I wandered, hiking my sheet up to move more smoothly, hoping to find a familiar letter on a door, or any letter at all — looked like a series of bunkers, avocado green and overlit, the signage on the walls outdated and peeling. Each new part of the Church I saw made me think it had once been something else: a hospital, a corporate hotel, an office complex. Even stripped of its former contents, the deep structure of the building held traces of its former use. I wondered if the other Eaters who passed me by could tell by looking at me what I had once been, what I had once bought, what couple of categories I had once belonged to.
On floor six, a tall man under an extra-long sheet with a ragged hem stopped me in the hall.
“What are you doing in Section Six?” he asked, holding me in place with two fingers on my sternum.
“I was just looking for some food and I got lost,” I said.
“No additional food,” he said flatly. “Where are you supposed to be?”
“E38, I think,” I replied, thrusting my scrap of paper out from under my sheet and toward his eyeholes. He read it, turned it over, handed it back.
“Who gave you this?” he asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Someone in a sheet.
“I’m new here,” I added.
He looked at me, blinking through his holes, and when he spoke he sounded as though he had decided to do me a kindness.
“You aren’t allowed here,” he said in a reasonable way. “You’re not cleared for it. These aboveground floors have a high minimum Brightness level. You won’t meet this level, if you ever do, until you’ve spent a good amount of time working down below.”
“Is there a chance I’ll never reach this level?” I asked.
“Not everyone reaches this level,” he replied. “More than half never leave the basement, until they are passed back out into the world.”
“I hope to go all the way to the top,” I said. To the final level, whatever that was.
As if he hadn’t even heard me, the tall man pointed at a stairwell down the hall.
“You need to go ten floors down,” he said. “Ask for E Wing. Don’t tell them you tried to sort yourself up within the building.”
I nodded, but I could see from the nonalignment of his sight holes with my face that he was no longer thinking of me at all. It made me remember C, how in his calmest and most relaxed state I could tell exactly what he was thinking about just by following where his head was pointed. By tracing his line of sight and fixing myself on that same TV show, crumpled sweatshirt, or cardboard pizza box, I could feel like I shared his mind, that our minds were one. I always wanted that intimacy, immediate but at a distance, as though our love were as swift and expansive as television.
I felt a sharp pain. Someone had hit me hard on the shoulder, I felt it down to the socket.
“Stop that,” the man said sharply.
“I wasn’t doing anything,” I said.
“You were remembering,” he said. “It was blatant. You put us all at risk.”
“It just reminded me,” I said, about to explain.
Suddenly he was backing up, pulling his arms in toward his chest so that his body under the sheet looked even more like a Halloween ghost’s, swaying slightly as he retracted his body, shuffling, toward the opposite end of the corridor.
“No,” he said. “
No.
You take that elsewhere. Take it back to the Darkness. We don’t want it here.” The smooth, round eyeholes, unchanged, contradicted the fear I heard in his voice.
He had almost reached the stairs. He turned his back on me to open the door and dove into the stairwell, slamming the door shut behind him. I heard the sound of his footfall on the stairs, running from me, fleeing vertically into safer and purer levels of the building.
I stood there for what might have been a half hour. My breaths were tiny, the air around me was still. I was afraid to move my body or my mind. I didn’t know what would happen if I began remembering again, but I could tell from the man’s reaction that it was something to be feared. C would have said this man was nuts, but I knew there was wisdom in his reaction. For as long as I could remember, there had been something going wrong in me: I did what I didn’t want to do, I wanted to do things that I knew I didn’t really want at all. Something in me did wrong when I needed to do right: the man who had fled was just the first person to see this in a tangible, physical way.
There was an uncontrollable amount of me within myself, and I didn’t know how to stop it. I had missed some key part of the Manager’s speech that explained how to unremember. Worst of all, I could feel it there inside me: my past. Even in its barest sense — recognizing a color, identifying a face — it worked Dark within me, before I even knew it was happening.
But then like a Bright gift, I recalled that a better me dwelled inside the me I was. I could feel it there, faintly: a version of myself with no past or present, just a feeling of Nothing about everything. Nobody else had seen me here in the sixth-floor hallway, so I would return to Anna and E38, eat the instructed portions of food, and try once more to live a life of genuine and luminous Brightness.
THE NEXT MORNING, ANNA AND
I sheeted back up and went to our Church jobs, beginner jobs that were assigned to the newest converts because they didn’t require much specialized training in the dynamics of Darkness. We spooned beauty products into beauty product containers by hand, a task performed better — and less messily — by machines. Specifically, we spooned TruBeauty gels and creams into TruBeauty containers in a large, open room that looked like it might once have been a gymnasium.
The Church owned shares in TruBeauty and a few other companies, like the company behind Kandy Kakes and the furniture company responsible for the large decorative pillows that were piled in the hallways and workrooms. We could do a lot of good, they said, controlling the movement of Dark and Light goods across this country, collecting the Bright things in one place and the shadowy ones in another and then keeping our own bodies as far away as possible from the bad things. We could do a lot of good for the people of our Church, they said, hoarding them away from a dangerous and variegated world, bricking them in with a wall made of Light. And then there was a need to keep bringing money in for as long as we all still had physical bodies requiring physical food that could only be grown, stolen, or purchased at a store with government-issued American currency.
I looked all around the Spooning Room, a gigantic, light-flooded indoors that felt more like an outdoors, and tried to imagine how much money it meant for the Church. Surrounding me, sitting on the floor, standing, cluttering the glossy pine floors with the dragging ends of their cloths, were sheeted-up believers. They huddled around industrial plastic containers of face cream, body cream, eye cream, esophageal cream, scooping spoonfuls and screwing shut the lids. The room looked wintry and cold; frosty evening light fell a deoxygenated violet over acres of white. In the sky-sized space above our heads were pigeons huddled silent in the rafters, and from time to time one took flight from one side of the room to the other, casting a small traveling shadow over our pale, upturned faces.
All around me, other Eaters spooned vigorously, with a good attitude. I struggled with my sheet, trying to push the parts that were the most like sleeves farther up on my arms so that I wouldn’t get beauty cream all over my coverings. They slid down and I pushed them back up. I readied a bared hand for spooning and then I plunged my spoon deep into the vat. The hem of my sheet dragged in the gelatinous white and I pulled it out, wiped it off, readied my spoon again, and plunged it in, more cautiously this time. I filled one pot and then another with TruBeauty skin cream, the edible throat slickener that I remembered from commercials when I was still a Dark body, ghostless and clouded by misinformation. I remembered the bird, a white dove fighting its way into the woman’s mouth, scrabbling at her face with its small talons, grasping for a clawhold. How the woman tried to smile around its body, her mouth entirely filled, her jaw straining at its limit. And how B used to inch closer to the TV while it played until she was on her knees before it, fascinated, the blinding white of the bird and beautiful face turning her own face pale like a corpse. I shivered and rubbed at my skin.
I didn’t have to look up to know that a Manager loomed over me. I could tell from the hand that protruded from beneath his sheet, a hand gloved in white latex. He leaned over me and bent to examine my work. His long white sheet brushed against my face and clung to me there, where my skin was damp with sweat and sticky with the edible cream, which seemed to end up everywhere no matter how clean I tried to be. I saw his gloved hand come toward me, its finger a vague hook glistening in tight plastic. It stopped an inch from my cheekbone, hovered there. And then it came closer. He was scraping a patch of cream from my face, scraping it with force, and I knew that he was doing it not for the benefit of my face, but to see what was underneath. As he crouched down and peered at the spot he had excavated, I willed myself to think Bright and clear, to think only about my ghost and its pure yolklike perfection inside me, or about the wisdom of the lessons and how they confused me and twisted my thoughts into useless, harmless shapes, or about TruBeauty cream and how I should spoon it better and faster and neater and not think about how this same product had touched other parts of my life, Darker parts that I shouldn’t be thinking about. But there was Darkness in my thoughts, and I knew he could see it. I closed my eyes and imagined an egg. His breath had a curdled smell, it stuck to my skin. Suddenly he straightened up.
“You’re full of murk,” he said, speaking down to me from his full height.
I looked up toward his face, sought out the eye and mouth holes that swayed an inch or so in front of his actual face. At the edge of a hole I saw an eye I thought I had seen before, blue and watery.
“And you’re making a mess,” he added, swiping his arm around at the irregular blotches of beauty cream that marred the floor and stained my white sheet a thicker, heavier white. “Try being more like those around you,” he said as he walked away, “and less like yourself.” I looked around the room. Everyone else did seem to be doing a better job, a cleaner job. Then from across the room I thought I saw Anna sitting at a different spooning station; I recognized the frayed right corner of her standard-issue sheet and the smooth, lazy way she scooped, as if it were easy, as if she were only lying around in our room, staring up at the ceiling and practicing her emptiness. A Manager paused by her station and patted her back. She looked up at him as he looked down and they were both nodding at each other, nodding as though they had just made a decision together. I thought of B’s face pressed jealously against the window as she watched me walk away with C, my hand seeking around for his. Steering him away from her in the drugstore when I spotted her there, down on her hands and knees and reading the backs of boxes of hair dye. I thought of her face smiling out at me from under my haircut, and as I did I could feel my skin growing thicker, foggier, leathery tough. I couldn’t seem to stop it; the memories came uncontrollably. I stopped spooning, squeezed my eyes shut.