Tomorrow afternoon meant nothing to me. I had no idea what time it was or even what day it was. There were no windows or clocks in my bedroom. I opened the door and peeked into the hallway, then stepped out in my bare feet. It was quiet and the overhead lights were dimmed. The underground apartment was a maze of underlit hallways. I ran my hands along the walls as I walked, feeling my way.
There were three other bedrooms along the narrow corridor outside my room, all of them unoccupied. At the end of the corridor was a bathroom, with the usual toilet, sink, and tub, but there was no mirror on the wall. Around the corner, down another narrow passage, there was a cramped kitchenette, with a refrigerator and microwave, a sink and cupboards, a table and chairs. Like the rest of the apartment, it was pill-white, but in the semidarkness looked dullish gray. In the cupboards I spotted boxes of cereal and crackers; in the refrigerator a jar of pink yogurt and a sandwich on a plate, wheat bread with a ruffle of green lettuce sticking out. I assumed the sandwich was for me, but I still didn’t feel like eating. Before going underground, I’d been weaning off Y—— for more than a month and experienced loss of appetite; before that I’d been following Waist Watchers obsessively. For as long as I could remember, I’d been coasting on a near-empty belly. I guessed I had lost at least thirty pounds, maybe more.
Leaving the kitchenette, I continued my tour, turning a corner and heading down another dark corridor, lined with cabinets. I opened one of them and glimpsed stacks of white towels and sheets, plus cakes of white soap. I was about to snoop in another cabinet when I heard a noise, something in the distance. I had assumed I was alone. Closing the cabinet lightly, I strained to listen. What I heard was moaning, muted cries, wounded-animal sounds.
In a tiptoe, I moved to the end of the hall and poked my head around the corner, afraid of what I might see. I was faced with another dark corridor, this one entirely black except for the light emanating from the end of it. The light was shifting and crinkling, like an electrical storm viewed from afar. I walked through the darkness toward the light. The sound grew louder, the light grew brighter—I held up my hands to shield my eyes as I stepped through an archway.
The room was circular, larger than my bedroom and the other bedrooms combined. The walls were banks of screens, all of them synchronized with the same scenes. I rotated in the middle of the room, disoriented, the space dark except for the light from the screens. There were two folding chairs in the center and I sat in one of them.
On the screens were a naked woman and three naked men on a bed. The men’s penises were inserted into the woman’s vagina and anus and mouth. After a minute, the men removed their penises and reinserted them in different places. There were always three penises inside the woman. The men twisted themselves and contorted the woman so that what they were doing was visible to the camera. As the scene went on, the woman became haggard, her black eye makeup smeared with semen and sweat. She was the underside of a piece of Lego, her bodily orifices nothing more than slots for the men’s penises.
I stood up from my chair and backed away. In my haste to escape the room, I tripped over the second chair and fell to the floor, wincing as I landed on my right arm. Squeezing it in pain, I rolled over onto my back and looked up at the ceiling. There were screens there too. In the basement I couldn’t see the sun or the moon or the stars, but these screens were there in abundance, showering me with moving light. The Lego woman was looking down at me, as if imprisoned behind the glass, as if she could see me. She wasn’t beautiful, but I supposed she had the necessary parts. Brass-colored clumps of hair fell to her bony shoulders; on the top of her head was a ring of thick black roots, like a dark halo. I tried to picture her getting off the bed and drying herself, putting on her clothes and leaving the windowless bedroom, but I couldn’t. She didn’t exist outside that room, not without the men’s penises filling up her empty spaces.
Rushing down the hallway, I wound my way back toward my bedroom, my eyes still blotchy from the screens. In only a short time, I had become accustomed to darkness.
I didn’t know why that room existed or whether I’d been meant to see what was playing on those screens. What did that room have to do with the last task of the New Baptist Plan? I had thought the worst of the plan was behind me, but now I wasn’t sure.