Fill Voids

He puts his hands over her stomach. It’s beautiful, he tells her. They have made a small incision to it, to save her life. What he’s looking at is her insides. Very plump. Her appendix, her liver, her intestines. You’re very lucky. One of the men hands him a microscope. He wants a closer look. I’ve never seen— It’s just perfect, he tells her, very sincere. His teeth stretch in a row of blinding, veneer-white, his lips disappear. It’s a smile, the man whispers. It’s a very new technology, you’re not quite a candidate yet. She feels very far away from it all now. It feels like she’s on a cloud, rolling through waves, skipping in a field, drifting to—

***

The hospital room is Pantone® white. Cloud Dancer. It’s very clean. No windows, fluffy silk drapes pegged to the ceiling. Her name is fixed to the wall in the block letters you put on children’s bedroom doors. The room stretches on and on and on in a sea of cloudless white. 

***

When she wakes, the room is pitch-black. There are glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the side of the bed. She presses the buzzer that lifts her bed up, down, up, down. In this process, she knocks her glasses off the small bedside table. The water pitcher, too. Her phone crashes to the ground. Help, she thinks. Her throat is too dry to vocalise a plea. When she swallows, it feels like shards of glass are moving through her. Her hands come to her stomach, where they’ve stitched her up. Perfect, she thinks. Beautiful, she remembers. It’s all she’s ever wanted, to be good like this. Everyone said it was what was on the inside that counted. That’s all that matters, her grandmother would tell her as she dragged a brush through her ratty, knotted hair. It used to make her angry enough to stab her nails into the skin of her thigh, or pluck strands from the root of her head, or slam her body face-first into her bedroom wall. You’re awake, the doctor startles her. He emerges from behind one of the wispy drapes. I wanted to show you the options we have for you, now that we’ve fixed you.

***

The bodies are tidily tucked away into steel boxes. It’s the morgue underneath the morgue they take her to. You would make a good organ donor, the doctor tells her. He hip-bumps her in the hallway. Under his appraisal, she preens. This, he waves around the bodies, not so much. The morgue underneath the morgue categorizes its bodies based on the perfect body fat percentage, facial harmony score, the golden ratio. Everyone is getting too skinny, he says, pulling out one of the drawers. The woman is beautiful. Her face is donut-glossy, her eyes glassy. All symmetrical. A perfect skull, the doctor says, cupping her head in his hands. But she’s too little, she won’t work for your transplant. What will she be used for? she asks. The doctor smiles with all his teeth. Teeth that swim up to his gums. He walks along.

***

They find her a perfect cadaver down the back. You can afford this one, the doctor says, tugging at the tag looped around her ankle. Inexpensive, but still meaty. She pushes on the cadaver’s rib—this will become her new nose. The fat of the thigh will fix her nasolabial folds. The stomach is to help pump her cheeks back to a youthful roundness, to fill out the breast tissue she’s lost in the last couple of months. I like the other one more, she says, tilting her head back towards the earlier boxes. There was this one who was really beautiful— The doctor worries his lip between his teeth, clamping down hard enough that she can see the blood being drawn and reposited as blush in his cheeks. No, he says, you’ll have this one. He curls his hand over hers. She’s better for you.

***

When she was nineteen, she was interested in atoning for her sins. She rented her boyfriend’s car, paying him $20 a week, and took it on a roadtrip through quiet towns. All she wanted was to find a church that would take her. A priest met her at a truck stop. Her gumboots cutting into the meat of her legs, almost short-circuiting her circulation. She’d kicked them off, biting into a meat pie as the priest squatted down beside her. He was offering counsel to the men of the road. You’re just a kid, he’d told her. I’ve done something bad, she confessed. It felt like divine intervention that he’d found her, when she’d been looking for him all along. The priest was amused. Do tell, he encouraged. So she relayed the story that had been suffocating her: she’d cheated on her boyfriend. The priest laughed. As they pump her with anesthetic, this is what she thinks of.

***

The room is bone-white and fluorescent when she opens her eyes. They’ve removed the drapes. Her name is gone from the wall. One of the many men of the hospital is unsheathing her pillow case. He slips an identical ivory silk case back on. The doctor left you this. He holds up a copy of Simone Weil’s Waiting for God. 

***

They tell her there was a small hiccup. The filler migrated, the fat grafting didn’t take. The doctor shows her a new brand of cadaveric fat injectables on his cracked iPhone. We have new bodies for this. You can choose whoever you want, he promises. He touches her knuckle, where they’ve inserted an IV line. She wants to share that this is the most tender touch she’s had since the priest squeezed her shoulder, since he said that she was still young. I promise, I’ll make you… the doctor drifts off. She fills in the blanks: perfect, better, younger. More yourself, he lands on. 

***

What she wants is to be split open again, to see the doctor’s adoring gaze cast across her insides. Instead they walk, hand in hand, through the morgue underneath the morgue. This injection is better, your own cells will merge with the fat, make it your own. She peers at a woman on a tray that she knows from work. They used to share an elevator, this woman’s office a floor below hers. The doctor critiques her pallid skin, her thin hair. But he praises her supple figure. Eat more, he encourages her. Then we could always regraft from your own body. But nothing too fatty, he continues, we want to preserve that liver.

***

She lets the doctor choose the body. He tells her about the livestock steroid he takes to keep his own figure in order as he readies the needle. If all fails, he laughs, promise me you’ll give me those perfect insides.