You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (26 page)

All around me I heard little sounds of effort, trapped groans and squeezed breathing as we tried to expunge loved ones from our own private scenes. These filtering sessions were painful; I found scratches on my body afterward, I had sore muscles in my forearms and calves, I must have pulled them trying so hard to hold still. I was working on a memory from earlier last year, from before I knew there was any life other than mine to escape to, before I knew about the Darkness and the Light, before things had gotten so bad. It was a memory in which I stood in my kitchen while somebody who I tried to imagine was not B suggested we eat something that was not Popsicles. I had eliminated her face and hair, now a fuzzy space tilted atop the thin neck and words came from it, though I no longer knew what they meant.

I turned the gray walls crawling with small, historied stains into a stark white expanse like the one in this room. I took out our cheap plates with the yellow rim and put nothing in their place. Even with these markers scrubbed clean, I couldn’t help knowing who it was, when it was, what was happening. What was B doing? Was she looking and acting like me? Had she seen C, and how far away was he from where she was now?

KEEP GATHERING, LEARNING, CLEANSING

YOUR GHOST RUNNETH OVER

With that, our Manager exited the room and there were no more lessons for the day.

AFTER A MEAL OF SIX
Kandy Kakes, I headed over to the Greeting Hall for my shift processing the new recruits. Anna was already there, washing her hands beneath hot water in preparation for the formal bath where we’d wash their soiled bodies. Wherever I intended to be, it seemed like Anna had always gotten there five minutes before. She looked up at me as I walked in, then back down at her washing, violently down, as though she were washing the me from her. It was clear Anna had started to resent me, believing that she could rise further and faster on her own, which was probably true. Since we had arrived, we had risen up in the Church, but not so far up.

On the other side of the metal garage door I could hear the new recruits stirring in their holding pen, writhing in a collective fidget, asking timidly for food or water. I was full of anxiety and fear in these moments before processing began. The Darkness they would carry in beneath their fingernails and on their feet, dissolved into the slick of their mouths and eyes, their unchecked speech containing within it unedited and uncleansed referents to the Dark world I still remembered, though I tried not to. The inevitable stream of questions that they would ask and that I could not answer — they made me feel like I knew less than they, less than anything at all.

At the hour mark the door lifted and the recruits came in, blinking up at the bright fluorescent bulbs overhead that rendered their bare bodies in shades of sickly yellow and cream. We peeled the sheets from them and exposed them, blinking, to our Brightness. Inside the Greeting Hall they swarmed aimlessly, they crouched and covered their heads with their hands, they stopped in the middle of the room and stared above. Their naked faces were open and searching hungrily for direction, and I was grateful for my sheeting, which kept us apart. As a greeter it was my job to grab them one at a time and guide each through the different steps of the bath, the salt bath, the sand bath, the white bath. I grabbed a girl by the wrist and turned her around to face me. She might have been thirteen, fourteen, with flat blond hair that dribbled down across her chest. Had she decided to come here, or had she been decided for? I grabbed her other wrist and looked for her eyes. “Are you ready,” I said, “to purge the Dark from your body, to eat only Light, to cut from your flesh the double of your own self and cast it out to starve in the wild?”

In the whites of her nervous eyes, blood vessels stood out like red thread. “I guess,” she said.

Good enough. I took her by the wrists to the salt bath, instructed her to lie down and thrash around like a bird in a dry stone bowl. I heaped cup after cup of salt upon her moving body and helped her rub it into the areas where Dark tends most to accumulate: the armpits, elbow pits, the areas behind the ears and at the nape of the neck, the Dark folds where hair entraps particulate malaise.

As I bathed her in hard, scouring white, her face twisted into a shape designed to keep the salt out. It was only after I had moved her to the sand bath that I realized her mouth was not just assuming a protective stance but was working itself toward speech. She moved to wipe her mouth with a limb, but her movable parts were as silty as everything else, the sand caked to her fingertips and wrists, her small floral lips. She nudged at the air with her head, eyes fixed desperately on my own, indicating that she wanted me to brush the sand from her lips with my own hands. I looked down at my hands. My fingers poked out from beneath the edges of my sheet. They looked older than I had remembered, with deep lines near the joints and a cracked pattern spreading all over the backs. I had lost track of time. I didn’t know how long I had been in here, how much older I had gotten. My age, like my birth and upbringing, was a forbidden topic. Inquire instead, said the Managers, into the agelessness of your ghost.

I indicated to the girl that I was busy doing other things to her, important and necessary tasks, required tasks. I waved my hands around in an imitation of washing and then held a quieting finger up to my lips, up to the spot on the sheet where my lips would be if it were a face. I readjusted my sheet and tried again to push the sleevelike regions of my covering up past my elbows. I leaned forward toward the tub and scrubbed with fine pale sand at her back and arms, her shoulders like bone handles to grip as I cleansed her of her past. But she kept looking at me with that needy look, sucking her lips in again and again. Her tongue emerged and pushed at the grainy stuff around it. She tried to eject from her mouth a globe of spittle that split her lips and came out dark with damped sand. She gagged into the air near my hands as I worked to hold her neck still for the cleaning. She struggled and twisted, retching aimlessly. I was having trouble holding her in place: my sheet was sliding off, I risked showing my face to the entire room.

“Please,” she said in a soft voice that crumbled, “I have to be at soccer practice.”

Recruits came in like this all the time, people of all ages with only the haziest idea of what they were doing here.

“There is no such thing as soccer practice,” I said. She looked confused. I added: “It’ll be better for you if you forget there ever was.”

“But my mom said. Ask my mom,” she insisted, her voice louder, pointier.

I shook my head and let go of her for just a second to tug my sheet back on center. Then I grabbed her by the shoulders and maneuvered her from the sand into the white bath. The white bath used to be a dairy bath, mostly milk, some yogurt, but researchers at the Church had discovered a toxic quality to milk. If milk was said to nourish the flesh of a human baby, it was bound to be suffocating to the infant ghost. Milk had been outlawed. Now the white bath was flour diluted in water, a passably milky liquid that had to be stirred constantly to keep it from separating into thin, cloudy liquid and a sticky, bottom-dwelling paste.

I hoisted her from under her arms and staggered her over to the white bath, slid her in one leg at a time while she looked up, saying to me over and over again, “Find my mom, ask her, please. Tell her I need my cleats. Don’t forget my cleats. I don’t want to wear my tennies and have Amanda Marcos do an impression of me falling on my butt during the kickoff. Where’s my mom? Is this a doctor’s? What are you doing to me?” Her talk was drawing stares from the other recruits and, worse, from the other processors. I felt their eyes on me like a fever. I had to quiet her before someone else decided that I was a bad worker, a bad worker because I had a bad recruit.

Her naked body projected through the white like pink islands rising out of a thick, blank sea. The flesh quivered, sent slow ripples through the thick. I leaned down, brought my face close to hers, lined up the holes in my sheet with the hole through her ear, and tried to speak as kindly and sweetly as possible. I told her that maybe someone she had once considered her mother had brought her here or maybe not. The idea of her mother was obsolete, it belonged to a doomed world headed cheerily toward total Darkness poisoning. She was lucky to be here with us, lucky to have found a way out of her doomed self. I rubbed her back in small, comforting circles. When I looked into her face for signs of peace and understanding, I saw the small black pupils shrinking in the center of her eye.

“My mother is where?” she asked.

I tried to think of a new way to phrase how alone she was.

“Do I know you from someplace?” she asked even more uncertainly. Her body lurched forth from out of the bath as she tried to see through the sheet holes to find my face. One glistening wet white hand shot under my sheet, grabbed at my bare wrist, and sought around on it, as if she were trying to find my pulse.

“I know I know you,” she said. “Please — from Forest Hills. The condos by the big Wally’s, the one with the bank in it and the ice cream sandwich bar. The condo complex where they just planted all the trees, those little trees that need to be held up with slings and rope. You have to remember me. I saw you there. Getting into your car. Going up to that door. You looked sad. You have to tell my mom to come get me.”

She was full of Dark. The only thing that could come of listening to her was misinformation. What I thought I had lived had been a bad dream originating in a sick body, like the sorts of nightmares you have when you sleep with a high fever. I had always lived here in the Church. Was the name Forest Hills familiar? Was it more familiar than any other name? Was it someplace that I had been, someplace I had slept, someplace I had lived in? Could that have been where C lived, where he used to live, maybe where he still lived today? Sometimes I had the feeling that he was here in the Church, only the building was so large that we had never been in the same place at the same time. A Manager watching me from across the room shook his head slowly, and I knew that I had messed up, stalled the processing, dredged the past up within myself, and Darkened up where everybody could see me.