“You know how Christians believe Jesus died for their sins? And they go like this?” She made the sign of the cross. “For me this room is like that. It reminds me of a central truth about my life. Sometimes you need to be reminded of that.”
I didn’t reply, but looked at her quizzically, letting her know I needed assistance. She rose from the chair and came toward me. “You and I can never look the way women are supposed to look.” You and I. Only weeks before, such a comparison would have plunged me into despair, but now I could see her point.
“Do you think we’re the same?”
“In the ways that matter, yes. We’re different in a way that everyone can see. We can’t hide it or fake it. We’ll never fit society’s idea for how women should look and behave, but why is that a tragedy? We’re free to live how we want. It’s liberating, if you choose to see it that way.”
The line that existed between me and most people didn’t exist with her. I wanted to touch her face. I didn’t ask if it was all right, I just placed my hands on either side, touching the burned place, feeling the smooth, pearly flesh. My hands were filled with the warmth from her skin. In her pupils were tiny reflections of the screens, like white flecks. She blinked them away.
“Thank you for feeding me.”
“You’re welcome, Sugar Plum. Do you mind if I call you that?”
“I don’t mind.”
“I hope to see you aboveground soon,” she said. She left me alone with the screens. My impulse was to turn away, but she had warned me not to do that. The sanitized slits, these entrances to the world, filled the room.
The slits disappeared, making way for a naked young woman kneeling in a patch of grass. She was outside in a yard or a park, surrounded by a pack of men. The men were only visible from the waist down, their voices muffled like the adults in a Charlie Brown cartoon. They took turns shoving their penises into the young woman’s mouth. They grabbed at her body, pulling her hair and jerking her head back. She was soaked with their fluids, but still she smiled, this causer of mass erections, her naked body beamed around the world to subscribers of Porn Hub U.S.A. The scene went on and on, until the men were spent, and when it was finished, the young woman wiped the semen from her eyes.
Sana would have been pleased that I didn’t look away. What I’d seen was a surprise. I couldn’t recoil from the young woman on her knees in the grass, even though I wanted to, because we had something in common. If there was a spectrum, the young woman was on it and I was on it and so was every other woman I knew. Eulayla Baptist was there, bursting through her jeans. In nine months, you’ll be looking foxy! That’s what Gladys had said at my first Baptist Weight Loss meeting. Foxy, hot, fuckable. Whatever it was called, that’s what I’d wanted—to be hot, to elicit desire in men and envy in women. But I realized I didn’t want that anymore. That required living in Dietland, which meant control, constriction—paralysis, even—but above all it meant obedience. I was tired of being obedient.
I left the circular room, passing through the archway, walking briskly through the dark corridors to the front door of the underground apartment. I turned the handle and there was a click—the door swung open, revealing a tiny vestibule and the red door that led to the outside. I tried the handle of the red door and it opened. For the first time in days I felt sunshine and fresh air on my face. I snapped off the head of a rose that was dangling from a vine near the door and rubbed its petals against my cheek.
Shutting the door behind me, I walked up the steep concrete steps, which were warm beneath my bare feet. Outside there was no thrusting, no back-and-forth rhythm, and I steadied myself as I climbed. At the top I was awash in sunlight. The brightness of the sun burned through everything before me, and I saw nothing but shadows and shapes at first.
“Here she is,” said a voice. It took me a moment to recognize that it was Marlowe’s.
“She made it.” That was Sana.
“What took you so long?” asked Verena.
Through the sunlight they appeared before me, swathed in light. “I’m here now,” I said.
I had made my escape.
EAT ME
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I’D BEEN LIVING ABOVEGROUND in Calliope House for more than a week, sleeping peacefully every night. Then the bomb threat came. I was awakened by pounding on the doors, which began with the front door downstairs and then spread throughout the house, far away at first but moving closer—an outbreak of thunder, an approaching storm.
My bedroom door opened and Sana’s face appeared through a strip of light. “Bomb threat,” she said, as if I knew what this meant. Before I could ask a question she was gone. I heard scurrying on the floors above and below me and rolled out of bed, then changed from my pajamas into my clothes. If there was a bomb, it might have exploded while I was wasting time putting on my bra and shoes.