At home, I can’t relax. I’m oversaturated: the alcohol, the conversations, the other eyes on me. Without the pattern of the Elysian Society, the outside world is unmoored. Anybody could say anything, do anything. It’s a constant undercurrent of chaos, one that everyone else is strangely capable of ignoring.
Even before I became a body, I could feel it where other people couldn’t. The unpredictability that lapped at the edges of our lives, threatening to suck us under. The Elysian Society has given this fear a structure. Funneled it into a framework of routine, allowing me to step outside myself and become a silent bystander to other people’s grief.
I was twenty-five years old when I began work as a body. Now I feel as if I haven’t aged, as if the world has continued on without me. I understand what people mean when they talk about spinsters or old maids. Women whose hearts are suspended in time, locked safely behind glass like museum artifacts.
Five years ago, this is exactly what I wanted.
I gaze around my apartment with the dismissive eyes of a stranger. All my furniture is cheap and hastily constructed, like displays in a store. It gives off the impression of sturdiness, but looking too closely reveals the peeling veneers. One half of my living room houses boxes and a small filing cabinet. All the files and photos I’ve collected from clients. Their memories crowd out my own.
This was originally an improvement. It was only after a year of work that I rented my own apartment. All the upgrades I’ve made to my life since then have been in a similar vein. A used car instead of a bus pass, a plain winter coat to replace one coming apart at the seams. My life is neat, self-contained. A serviceable life. A placeholder.
Tonight, the silence feels like a force that could smother me. A pillow held over my face.
I sit in my car, twenty minutes from my apartment. I’m parked on a shadowy corner.
Across the street, a small café is still open. A young woman with dark hair bends attentively over her phone. Next to the café, a bookstore is already closed for the night, silhouettes of the shelves visible beyond the darkness. And there’s the doorway I’m watching, tucked into a row of townhomes. Long staircase, looping wrought iron railing. A plaque gleams on the wall outside the entrance, a glint in the shadows. CASTLE & CLARK LLP.
The neighborhood sits within an unpredictable system of locked gates, homes surrounded by elaborate gardens and deep-set porches, like guests at a party who wish to be admired but not approached. I’ve passed through this area occasionally. Maybe that’s why this location came to me so quickly after Lee mentioned it at the bar.
I shut my eyes. She waits inside my eyelids. Sylvia, nimble and immaculate as she greets her husband after work. Her black hair is pulled back, revealing a ballerina’s neck.
he doesn’t love me anymore
I open my eyes. As if conjured by dark magic, Patrick stands across the street, his back to me as he locks the door. His hair is a shade too long at the nape of his neck, a cowlick that’s absurdly vulnerable. A child without a mother to tend to him.
Somewhere behind me, a shattering of glass breaks the silence. I turn my head. A green-aproned waiter from a restaurant across the street is emptying a cascade of bottles into the trash.
When I turn back, Patrick has stopped. He’s looking at me. In the diffused light of the street lamps, his face is as indistinct as if I’m viewing him on a grainy screen. I must glow through the darkness. My white dress, my colorless hair. I can’t move. His eyes on me shove me backward, hold me in place like a physical restraint. Hands on my shoulders.
look at me
Then Patrick moves on, head ducked, until he turns a corner and is lost.
When I start toward home, my mind is so razed that I can barely find my way. I can’t stop imagining what would have happened if I’d stepped out of the car, if I’d called out. Part of me thrills at the idea.
Still. Still. Outside Room 12, a man like Patrick Braddock would never notice a woman like me.
I was instructed to wear a simple outfit when I interviewed at the Elysian Society. Nothing formal. Nothing flashy, no distracting accessories. In the motel mirror, I scrubbed my face pink and pulled my hair into a damp ponytail.
My outfit was the best I could do with what I’d salvaged from my life. White T-shirt, tea-colored skirt. Approaching the Elysian Society building for the first time with my naked face, I was embarrassed. Back then, it was rare for me to leave the house without makeup.
Mrs. Renard didn’t ask me to sit down. I stood in the middle of the office, clasping my hands in front of me. Without any distractions, I was strangely conscious of my body. The submerged thump of my heart. My soles pressed to the floor.
“You’re not from around here?” Mrs. Renard had asked finally.
“No,” I said.
“But you have family or friends in this area?”
“I only moved here a week ago.”
“You moved alone? Are you married, in a relationship?” She paused. “Children?”
I hesitated. “I’m single at the moment.”
“At the moment,” she repeated. “But you’d like to meet someone.” Her tone shifted into a gossipy lightness, with an edge to it. A piece of shiny foil with a sharp tip.
“I prefer to be on my own,” I said.
A lift of her eyebrows. “That’s a rare trait in a girl your age. Refreshing.”
Not sure how to acknowledge this, I’d merely nodded.
“You might find these questions invasive for a job interview,” Mrs. Renard had said.
The truth was that I hadn’t noticed. In my raw state, I felt it was only natural for someone to rummage through my past.
“You’ll forgive me for the question I’m about to ask,” Mrs. Renard said. “Have you experienced much loss?”
I’d looked at the floor: the frantic pattern on the rug. The embellishments rising like vines, wrapping around my ankles and legs, pulling me down beneath the surface of the floor.
“Young lady.” When I lifted my gaze, I found that Mrs. Renard’s demeanor had softened. Her eyes on me were forgiving; I could abandon my secrets to her, toss my sins into her like coins into a well. “This room is private,” she’d said. “Nothing leaves these walls.”
And so I told her everything. I felt each admission rise off my tongue and leave me lighter, cleaner. The melancholy slant of the afternoon light through the window burned on my skin. When I finished, I was scraped hollow.
“You know what we do here?” Mrs. Renard had asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I know.”
“It doesn’t frighten you, the idea of other people speaking through your mouth? The idea of your hands moving when you’re not there?”
I glanced down at my hands, imagining them jerked into motion without my consent. After the past few months, my skin was parched and blanched, like something tucked away from the sunlight for decades. The bones at my wrist jutted painfully.
“No,” I’d said. “Not at all.”
“Perhaps it should frighten you. It frightens most people.” She’d flicked her eyes up and down the length of me. “Why doesn’t it worry you?”
Pulled along by the momentum of my confession, I told her. I told her that I sometimes forgot my body was even there. That there were other, harder days when I wanted nothing more than to ignore it and yet felt trapped inside it. If my body could become a useful thing to people who needed it, then I wouldn’t refuse.
“Selfless,” Mrs. Renard had said. Not with admiration or approval, but as if she was applying a label. “I think you’ll do well here.”
Passing through the parking lot afterward, I saw an older couple, their eyes pink and tight from crying. The man helped the woman into the passenger’s side. They turned their heads at the sound of my footsteps. Their gazes slipped right across me. Already, I felt invincible. My naked face a perfect mask.