by Sarah Inouye
Content warnings for extended exploration of grief, death, and loss of autonomy. Briefly, disordered weight and body thoughts.
What I knew of love, in my final year, coalesced in my green truck. It had been abandoned after the flood that one summer. It was a Californian miracle, both truck and overflow.
No one had ever imagined that California would flood again, not as long as people were still alive. The water had poured over the sides of the drainage ditches, the rain slapping the tops of roofs, the dirt flush and damp. There had been a lot of confusion and chaos. The disarray of hope—people feeling invigorated enough to try to start new lives. They got into their passions again, returned to old hobbies, reconnected with loved ones. They left their earthly possessions behind to find better ones. People were able to imagine that we could live bountifully. They could imagine that there was enough to go around. It had only been a period of terminal lucidity, of course, but I got the truck out of it. Someone had abandoned it in the field behind our house.
That same summer, Evangeline did a lot of half-naked basketball practice. I would sit on the hot blacktop and watch her running back and forth, playing against imaginary opponents. She never wore a shirt while she was playing—the sicker she got the more prone her body was to overheating. She liked to try to convince me to play with her.
“No one’s going to see you,” she said. She liked to see me naked. Liked to take me in whenever she could.
“There isn’t really anything to see,” I admitted, closing my eyes, tilting my head towards the sky, then, clumsily, “sorry.”
“Stop apologizing for that,” she said. “Your body is perfect. It’s a perfect thing.”
***
We ritualistically laid in her bed together, her head pressed into my chest. Her mattress was so soft, her comforter so fluffy and light. She had these huge bedroom windows, curved at the top, orange light flooding in. I stared outside at the drying world, waiting for her to say something, but she was always so quiet in these moments. When I finally glanced down at her, I saw she was listening, very carefully, to the beating of my heart.
“It’s yours,” I told her, softly.
“Not yet,” she replied and I felt sick. I didn’t know why she would not claim me now. I didn’t know why she was so resistant to what neither of us could escape.
***
The truck was awkward and clunky. The seats were stained from being waterlogged. The steering wheel was ragged. The radio didn’t work. It was mostly a mess, but it was also the one thing in my life that suggested I had more life in front of me and not less. A thing of my very own—hopeful and sputtering. A kind of terminal lucidity of my own, surely, but not less of a comfort.
Of course, the Yamashitas were uncomfortable with me having a car. Her parents feared that I would get into a crash before the Transfer could take place, that I would fuck up my spine or my legs, but Evangeline said it was good for me to have something to drive around in. Good for her too. I could drive her to basketball practice, and we could have quality time together. Not to mention, she’d said, if I was happy there were health benefits for my body. The Yamashitas would have probably listened to anything she said, especially the sicker she got. They knew she wasn’t going to die, but they were frightened by seeing her body in shambles: her coughing fits, her vomiting in the middle of the night, the dark color of her piss. I got to keep the truck.
More and more I spent nights not going home and instead sleeping in the truck bed. I would drive to the top of one of the hills in the area, and stare down into the valleys until I was asleep. There might have been a time when distancing myself would have frightened my parents, but at that point, they were starting to understand it. I wondered if it relieved them, when we didn’t have to face each other and choke down our sadness. When our love for each other didn’t have to be in the same room—fighting and desperate and hopeless. I often had to scream my wishes for living away, howling at the top of my lungs, body curled over itself until I forgot what I was screaming about.
I spent far more time with the Yamashitas than my own family. More time with Evangeline than anyone else—she said it was best to be friends. That I should see that her life was worth it. They regularly invited me over for dinner. I would always accept, even when I would have preferred to be alone on the hill inside my truck. It just didn’t feel right to reject the Yamashitas’ invitations—as if, suddenly, I was living my life as if it was mine and not Evangeline’s. I didn’t know what message a rejection would send to her, to the government, to the rest of the world.
I was always careful about what I ate in front of them, even more careful than I already had to be. I was careful to get vegetables and protein. I ate appropriate amounts of fat. I ate cautiously, humbly, and didn’t take more than what was good for my body. Evangeline ate whatever she wanted beside me, oftentimes offering me some of her desert, always getting disapproving looks from her parents.
“No. Thank you, though.”
“Come on. I say it’s okay.”
“I’m alright, Evangeline, thank you. Thank you very much.” She would sigh a little, putting whatever she had offered to me in her mouth. I never thought about those offers after they arrived from between her lips. It seemed important not to dwell on her kindness and even more important not to dwell on her ignorance.
The Yamashitas bounced through a thousand different topics over dinner: the viruses, the droughts, the forest fires, building political unrest, fear. The way they talked about it all, it was clear that they each hovered in the realm of genius that had become so coveted in society. Mostly, though, things were about Evangeline. About Evangeline’s brilliance. Their love for her was feral, uncompromising—we could not make it ten minutes without a comment about her wisdom, her beauty, her calculations, the way that she was improving the world every single day.
“Isn’t she incredible?” Ms. Yamashita asked me once when Evangeline was taking an emergency call from the lab. “Isn’t she just the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?” And in those moments she was.
When Evangeline was a child she had a knack for science. The kind of mind that was undeniable. An aptitude that made people flinch with surprise. The older she got the clearer it was that she had a brain for patterns, for numbers, that the word innovative could not quite capture what she was. As the earth got sicker, so did its inhabitants, and some people started to die off, while others stayed healthy. She became obsessed with why. By the time she was twenty she had revolutionized the way we thought about souls. About bodies. About what could be shared with other living things. She had run tests to save the dying, had found the way to preserve our most significant and most brilliant, even as our species died off. She had learned how to take consciousness from a dying body and put it inside of a living one. And she was dying. And I was her perfect biological match.
When they came to my door—the authorities, the scientists, the cops—whatever they were at that point—it wasn’t really a question. They loaded on a lot of facts about how I was helping to make the world a better place, that I was the only person in their databases whose body was fitting to house Evangeline’s consciousness—the requirements of that were still unclear to me no matter how many times Evangeline explained them. When she spoke of these things, it became clear how much smarter she was. How much more she understood about the fabric of the universe then I ever would, and how much she could do with that knowledge. She put information together in a way that I could not fathom. She had even, once, brought me to the lab where she worked and introduced me to some of her coworkers. They were, at the time, running tests on what made the soul and brain of someone compatible with someone else’s body. They said a lot about neuroscience. A lot about synapses about brain waves. All very new technology, they said. Imperfect technology, but desperately important technology. They talked a lot about how the Transfer was not eugenics. However, even if it was, they’d said, these are desperate times. Our species is dying out. We are losing some of our most brilliant minds. How will we carry on without them? How can we remake a world worth living in if there aren’t some sacrifices?
“Does this mean I’m going to die,” I said.
“No, not really,” said the scientist or the officer—whatever he was. I remember there were at least five of them, all packed into my parents’ small living room, and they had guns. They were very big and masked. They had papers for me to sign. And there were rumors, also, about the people who hadn’t agreed to Transfer with rich people or with experts, being forced into it anyway. Being violently taken from their homes in the middle of the night. Government sanctioned, it was rumored. “Your body will live on. Housing one of the most brilliant people in our lifetime. Can you imagine that? What will your legacy mean?”
As soon as they left with their signed papers, my mother screamed bloody murder into the night and had not returned inside for many hours. The crackling hills just behind their house made the noise echo against the slopes. My father had not even tried to bring her back inside. I had not had the nerve to face her.
“Maybe they’ll find a cure for her disease first,” I said to my mother, a few weeks later, when we were sitting at the table together. The sun, now, was sometimes an awful red color and it made the world all hazy and orangish. My father had stopped eating, and was bone thin and exhausted. “And then I won’t have to Transfer at all. It’s better than them just forcing me in the middle of the night, you know? At least I get to meet her. At least I get to see if it is all worth it. I’m sure it is.” I had been given a basic profile on her—not much about her was known despite her scientific brilliance because people didn’t have the time for celebrities anymore. Certainly not time for the scientist who created the Transfer.
“You shouldn’t have signed,” she said.
“You know I didn’t really have a choice about that.”
“You’re mine. You’re mine,” she whispered. And then, fearfully, my father started to cry. And love felt unbearably terrible.
Eventually my parents gave up trying to fight my Transfer. They knew they couldn’t win. They knew they shouldn’t make it harder on me than it already was. They had tried to find something in me that was worth saving, that was out of the ordinary, that would provide something to future generations but there was nothing that could match what Evangeline had achieved. I did not have the scientific mind to save our world’s most important people. I could not get the companies to stop pumping gas into the air. I could not bring back the rain. It was only right that I took her place and I knew it. She was beautiful and glowing and precious but she was also dying, the pollution of the earth had treated her much worse than it did me. It was my job to protect what was beautiful. It was my job to protect what mattered.
My life changed completely after that. The world changed completely. The health of my body became far more important than the health of my brain. I was assigned by the government to watch videos of the Transfer taking place, read books about the importance of my sacrifice, and go to seminars about how to properly say goodbye to my family. Society has changed. Changed so much that now it was teaching people how to properly give up. How to properly sacrifice.
One afternoon, I was hemming one of her shirts that was far too big, just to have something to do while she played. She stopped suddenly, the ball flying off awkwardly in one direction after hitting a boulder near the hoop.
“Take off your shirt,” she said. I glanced at her, shielding my eyes with my hand. I had forgotten my sunglasses and she had been too impatient for me to get them. She knew, in detail, my BMI, my family’s medical history, whether my belly button went in or out, how often I masturbated, how fast and far I could run. I put the sewing needle and her shirt down and pulled my tank top over my head. She looked at me. And that look became longer, firmer, different from all the times before. I was always self conscious in front of her—always aware that I was not even close to as beautiful as she was. Aware that when her consciousness entered my body she would have lost what was an extraordinarily pretty face, a nice figure, smooth skin.
“Fuck,” she said.
“Is something wrong?”
The way she was looking at me was making me enormously ashamed.
“No. No.” She turned away from me, staring out at the abandoned space around us.
“Evangeline—”
“No. Please. Stop.” I stopped, tightening my hand around a shirt. Her’s or mine, I couldn’t remember.
“Evangeline. . .” There was a harsh sobbing down from deep in her throat, something that I didn’t know her body could create.
“It’s just that. . . It’s not my body. It’s your body. It’s not mine. Don’t get me wrong, you’re lovely. You really, really are but you. . . you aren’t me. You don’t have my hands or my ears or my hair. You don’t have my stomach or my chest or my freckles. And no amount of surgery is ever going to make your body feel like mine. No changes I could make are ever, ever going to make that body my body.” She pointed at me, her fingers were bonier than mine, I had always been conscious of that.
“But this is your body! It is!” I stood up, slipped my shirt back over my head and went over to her. “This, Evangeline, is your body. You’ll learn how to walk in it. You’ll get to know it. This will, eventually, feel like yours. You won’t even remember how your body now feels. You won’t even remember. You won’t even miss it. Maybe sometimes you’ll miss being as beautiful as you are,” I gave her a weak smile, “but this is your body. I promise you.” I took her limp hand and brought it up to my cheek, letting her touch the soft skin. “Okay?” She looks at me for a little while, lets her thumb run back and forth against my face.
“Okay,” she said. “Thank you. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get upset.” That was the only time she truly showed any kind of fear about the Transfer. And when I was alone, laying in the truck bed, I wondered why in the world I had comforted her.
***
Sometimes, when I was alone, I would allow myself the fantasy of freedom. I allowed myself to drift into the idea of the future. Getting married. Laying on the beach with a book propped over my face. Having a steady job. I knew there was no chance, of course, but the thought was almost impossible to avoid. A curiosity, an itch that gutted me to indulge in, and because of that it became an insistent thought. I had known, once, that I wanted to be a mechanic—that I had a natural gift with cars and that I was satisfied by fixing things. I would have taken being a carpenter, an electrician. I would have gone to trade school. When I was young, and things hadn’t quite been so bad—I knew the chance of a future was slim but it was not as slim as this. I might have actually realistically believed I could have made it to trade school. That the fires wouldn’t be in every season. That people wouldn’t be getting sick. That it wouldn’t be the end of civilization to not have Evangeline Yamashita in the world.
***
One evening, a few months after her body could fully be defined as dying, the Yamashitas called me to their house. They had a fire going even though it wasn’t cold outside, the transition from summer to autumn had been slow that year, the days were still occasionally hot. I sat stiff and uncomfortable on the edge of their couch. Evangeline was positioned across from me but wasn’t looking up.
“Evangeline was hoping that maybe. . . Well I know we’ve talked about this before but she’s changed her mind. . . she was hoping that you might get some surgeries done for her before her body passes. So she can fully enjoy it when her time comes.” She still wasn’t looking at me.
“Okay.” What else was I going to say? It wasn’t my body. “What would I be getting?”
“Well, the doctors imagine that she has enough time left for you to have procedures, maybe all at the same time if that’s easier for you. Worst case scenario her body would pass on while her new one was still healing, but not too badly. We caught you at just the right time.” I wrapped my hands around each other, cradled them in my lap.
“What made you change your mind?” I asked, my voice dim against the walls of the room.
I couldn’t help it. I wanted to know.
Evangeline caught my eye, shame coursing on her face.
“I just. . . I want it to feel like home when I’m in it. Your body, I mean. I want to do everything I can to feel as comfortable as possible.” She took a deep breath. “Now that I know how it feels to be uncomfortable in mine. It’s unbearable. Nothing works the way it used to. And now that I’m so close to dying, I started to realize that I was being silly.” She leans all the way across the coffee table, stretching her hands out to me and touches the sides of my face. “This is my body,” she says. “This is my body, and I should treat it like it’s mine.” I almost recoiled from her, startled, but her hands stayed.
So I had her nose job and her breast enhancement, had skin imperfections cut away, scars removed, moles frozen off. In my time recovering I stayed mostly in bed, didn’t let my parents come in to see me, didn’t want them to see how things had changed. Sometimes in the early mornings when I woke up, I would find myself crying. My horror with my new body was only heightened by the fact that I couldn’t drive while I was on painkillers, so I took a few weeks without my truck. Sometimes I would climb inside and look at the wall of the garage.
I thought about driving anyway, of course I did.
The only person I’d let near me was Evangeline. She would come over to our house, stand awkwardly in the living room, not making eye contact with my parents. She was always wearing big fancy coats now, always cold no matter the weather.
“How are you feeling?” she’d ask. She looked worse than me now.
“Nipples hurt.” I tried to smile at her but I thought maybe I hated her.
“And your nose?”
“Nose is okay. It was really bad right after but now it doesn’t bother me so much.”
“You look beautiful,” she said.
“I know. I look like you. More like you.” She tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear. There was something behind her eyes like pleading but she never said anything out loud. She just leaned over to me and kissed my head.
“I always thought you were beautiful, you know.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I did.”
“Please, please don’t say that. Please just let me believe that this is all worth it. You’re more beautiful than me, Evangeline, in every single way. You deserve to have this. I’m lucky to go through this for you.” I heard my mother let out a hollow cry from around the corner, hidden so we wouldn’t know she was there. The sound was stifled behind a hand. I couldn’t bring myself to be angry at her for listening.
At the height of Evangeline’s sickness, all she did was play basketball. I think she was trying to soak up her body one last time, trying to feel her movements in her arms and legs, trying to commit to memory how it felt to make a basket. I would often join her, watching her bare torso stretch out to the hoop. Sometimes she stumbled and fell and I would go running over to her, terrified. Every bump, every cry, every skinned knee was the end of the world to me. She was so fragile. It felt like the smallest thing could end everything for the two of us. But she relented for a little while.
For the first time it was clear to me that Evangeline didn’t play basketball shirtless because she was trying to be a spectacle, or because she was trying to get me naked, or because she was overheating—it was because she wanted to feel the world against her body one last time. There was no glamor, no bravery, no defiance in her, there was only melancholy. Her body had become a bucket list. Her body, in the hot days of autumn, was the greatest loss she would ever have. So she played, half naked, until she was delirious. And I just watched.
Then the day came. There was a low overhang of dark Californian clouds, circling the sky like vultures. That morning I had pushed myself out of bed, put on my new-fitting bra and put acne cream over the spots on my face. I had grabbed the keys to my truck, only recently reunited with the beauty of it, and went to Evangeline’s house. The first thing I noticed was the dark circles under her eyes. She had taken up walking with a cane, which she only needed in the morning when her joints were still stiff, and she had a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. Always cold. Always.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” I asked.
“It’s basketball,” she said, a glimmer of a smile crossing her face, almost letting me see the glory that she had once held. “It’s always a good idea.”
The two of us wandered out to the basketball courts, along the abandoned trail of overgrown brown grasses. She clung onto my arm, her fingers tight around me. Neither of us were talking, but I think we were enjoying each other. I think we were enjoying the dark clouds, promising rain but not giving it. I think we were enjoying the brown grass and the decaying planet beneath us which was still resistantly beautiful. I think we were both just excited for basketball.
But we didn’t make it.
A fourth of the way up the path, she fell, collapsing to the ground like a cement block. Like she was born to fall. She took a huge massive gulp of air before her breathing became frantic and unhinged.
“Evangeline?!” I fell to my knees beside her, feeling the skin on them open. “Fuck. Fuck. Come on Evangeline, please. Please. Not right now.” But I could feel it in my body, that now was time. Maybe she had even been hanging on longer than she needed to. Maybe, in a last bout of mercy, she hadn’t let herself go for me. There was no way for me to know, she could do nothing but gasp for air as I helped her get into the truck. As I drove her to the hospital, a nurse helped us both take off our clothes and help us get into the machines that would conduct the Transfer. I think that Evangeline might have started crying. I didn’t cry, but I held onto my truck keys. I wanted them to be the first thing she touched. I hoped that when Evangeline woke up she would take her new body for a drive.
calmerait
by Mike Callaghan
Sarah Inouye holds a BA in English and creative writing from the University of Iowa, where she studied under Melissa Febos, Donika Kelly, DK Nnuro, and Louisa Hall. She works in publishing as the assistant to two literary agents. Her work can be found in Yuzu Press, Green Blotter, and Outrageous Fortune.
Mike Callaghan focuses on fragmentation/rearrangement/reinterpretation. His work was exhibited at Griffin Museum of Photography, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, and Soho Photo Gallery. His photographs were published in ZYZZYVA, Barzakh, Rhino Poetry, Streetcake magazine and Shanghai Literary Review. Mike earned an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Ignatian Literary Magazine 