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  The thin woman has seen this confusion many times before. Five times in fact. First there was she. She alone. Completely alone. Then came Polina the Windbag in her sable coat with one booted foot. Then the imponderable Rosa Imaculada, Crazy Rosa whom she could do without. Then Little Nina appeared from Marseilles with her belly sticking out, then Wlibgis from Holland, from Zwolle, ravaged by cancer, then proud Maimuna from Dakar, and finally beautiful Ulrike from the birthplace of Mozart. Angry, beautiful Ulrike. The youngest of all. Every bit as innocent as the recently arrived tend to be. The skinny woman stares at Ulrike’s face. She tries to record the image in her mind: the raised jaw, the forced hardness in her gaze, just now turning away. The girl’s bright violet-blue eyes begin to glance cautiously past her, finding the white, which is everywhere, which is nowhere. In her eyes, distress.

  The thin woman has seen this. Many times she has been forced to speak, but so what? She almost prefers to speak. She is also speaking to herself, repeating over and over how things are, telling everything as best she can. When she speaks, everyone falls silent and listens. Everyone hears, once again, where they are, perhaps, right now. Hearing this is important. Just as taking communion can be important for some people, or lighting a cigar after a meal. For others it might be a weekly manicure, a pedicure, or a daily trim of the dry skin from their cuticles—each just as compulsive, perhaps a bit painful but undeniably pleasurable. So she will tell. She is happy to tell!

  * * *

  The thin woman remembers how it feels to wake up here. How it feels to open one’s eyes, to sit up, to touch the white beneath in disbelief. Is it land or frozen snow? It isn’t cold, and it isn’t hot. Plastic? Latex? Painted concrete? It isn’t hard, and it isn’t soft. She stood up, feeling excellent, empty, and numb in a good sort of way: the pain that had gnawed at her stomach and the staggering dizziness were wiped away. Of course she had managed exceedingly well with her pain and dizziness—she was a pain professional, after all. She was a hunger artist, after all. “No, no, and once again no”: that had been the doctors’ opinion about her last project. Secretly of course they hoped she would continue to the end. They wanted to see, even though they didn’t admit it, how the body and mind would function in controlled extremis. Officially they were obliged to warn her, practically to threaten her. Professionally they could do nothing more than demand that she interrupt the “test” and end her questionable experiment, “full stop”. This wasn’t the first time she had met scorn even as the same people viewed her with a mixture of admiration and horror.

  It all started at the little apartment on Carroll Street. With her mother’s gaze. That was where it began. But the fact that her art had begun to arouse scientific interest—that was new and motivated her to push on. Her weight loss methods had been as deliberate as an ascetic yogi’s. At times they had driven her into a trance, yet she pressed on with more cycles of the regime. On the final day of the experiment, a few hours before stepping on the stage, she had drunk several tepid cups of an Ayurveda tea named “Internal Peace”. Her mind spun in a dervish dance, round and round and round as she reeled in the staff kitchen at the Jewish Museum, in her hand a paper printed with the presentation she would soon read in the auditorium. It was a blissful state and yet frighteningly fragile. Temporary. No person, not even she, could live forever on nothing but adrenaline, pain, and vertigo.

  She had learned the dervish dance long ago. She had been hanging around Coney Island, at Astroland, which had just opened, staggering along in a famished stupor even as she rode the Cyclone again and again. That night her bed spun and shook as soon as she closed her eyes. That was her fifth week devoted to losing weight and the first night when she had finally understood: this relationship, and only this relationship, was meant to be for life. Hunger, my love. Under the covers they made a secret pact: I trust in you, and you trust in me. I will never eat you away, and you will never stop fighting by my side.

  Of course some minor slips occurred. At a cousin’s bar mitzva, she secretly devoured twenty marzipan cookies. The hunger flew into a vengeful rage and threatened to leave her entirely, but she begged forgiveness and vomited. That time the hunger was appeased.

  She was seventeen when she received the keys to her first home of her own. Even though it was little more than a closet and next to her parent’s flat, she had the freedom to do whatever she pleased, and of course that terrified them. Of course she experimented some. She gave herself injections of Smirnoff in her thigh, using her friend’s insulin syringe. Every now and then she got high with a couple of pals. A few times she engaged in some moderate shagging. But the hunger was most important and most dear to her. It fought with her like a trusted friend, against her enemies, until she made the mistake of her life and betrayed it. Because of a man.

  The skinny woman knew she had atoned many times over for the betrayal of her youth. The hunger had returned to her after a series of reconciliation cycles, but in a way it still seemed somehow hurt, somehow . . . conditional. It always seemed to demand more of her; a day limited to five organic carrots was now an insignificant achievement to it—there were no thanks, no euphoria. Not to mention the dervish dance—the hunger remained silent as a mouse. Eventually she grew angry. Fine! She made a new pact. She promised to go farther than ever, farther than anyone had ever gone, just so long as she could return afterward. She would spend the rest of her life just thin enough, balanced on the rapt line between health and disease. Was that enough? And so they made their new agreement.

  Then something happened. Something took the reins and decided for her, without her permission, to continue a trial she had already completed. She was thrown here, into this perfect white, with no instructions coming from anywhere. In one fell swoop, everything had been different. Even the hunger had disappeared without a trace, disappearing so completely that she didn’t even think to miss it.

  If in her initial shock she had thought to analyze her situation, perhaps she would have landed on the idea that she knew later, in hindsight, to tell Polina when she appeared, bewildered and sobbing. What she said to Polina went something like this: “At first it felt like I had just had the best sleep of my life. A deep, dreamless sleep.” And then: “Gradually I felt lighter and lighter, and the pain that had been in my stomach for so long disappeared, and all my aches were gone; I felt like I was in seventh heaven.” But alone in a place like this without another living soul—no one thinks that way then. She only noticed the pain and nausea were gone once her panicked mind had explored every other alternative and dead end.

  Theory number one: Was she blind? This first thought upon opening her eyes is understandable. The whiteness all around is like a sickness, is like blindness, is like the conclusion: “So this is how I’ll be punished.” And this isn’t a terrible theory since there are sicknesses in which the first, dramatic symptom can be a sudden loss of vision (for example, Horton’s disease, also known as temporal arthritis, which generally strikes aging women).

  However, the blindness theory fell apart quite quickly because she thought to look at herself, first at her hands, and there they were. A thin wrist peeked from the sleeve of her black caftan with the veins in the back of her hand shining bluer than ever. Long, slender fingers, long, red nails, joints like jewels, knuckles like the brass variety. She struggled up onto her stick-thin, bowed legs. Just a heave, a movement without air resistance, and suddenly she was up.

  Theory number two: She was in some sort of building. Somewhere there had to be a surface that would expose the structure as a dome, a cube, or a sphere. At this point she began to feel a rage. They had really done this to her! It wasn’t enough for them that she had her own things in order, that she had calculated everything going in and exiting her body down to the last calorie. That she had arranged—of course she had arranged—follow-up care for herself and made numerous backup plans. Nothing had been left to chance. She wasn’t fooling around. But they had still just snapped her up and locked her up in . . . where?r />
  She tried to walk but didn’t get anywhere. Her legs moved, but whether she was making progress was impossible to say. She threw herself on her stomach and felt a light rocking in the pit of her stomach. She did not feel an impact or any pain, and she still couldn’t see anything anywhere. There was no reference point. She squinted, looking for hidden cameras, motion detectors, something dark that might take shape against the background. Someone had to be watching her on a monitor. Things like this could happen—it was almost to be expected. She had heard the rumors about them: science abductions.

  There it was, theory number three, the natural, logical jump from theory two. Nowadays information about human behavior was needed more urgently than ever. Real, brutal information, the kind that might not be available for collection following accepted ethical norms. And she had been the subject of enormous, undisguised interest. They simply wanted to know more. Would she survive? How had she survived up until now? And above all: how would she do now, in a controlled environment? What was her secret?

  Triumphantly she stuck her finger into her shock of hair. She was convinced of the find she was about to make. The antennas. She dug deeper, tugging at the roots of her curls, nails scratching her scalp. Antennas, antennas. Even just one. However small. Is this? A scab. A microchip. Implanted deep. A mole? A small wound. Psoriasis. No! A device. Definitely something technological. The latest, nearly invisible technology that they were testing for the very first time.

  She pulled at her hair. She removed her clothes, turning them inside out and inspecting them carefully, then turning them back and checking them again. She did things that would have looked strange and perhaps indecent if anyone had been looking; the analogy of a snake eating its own tail would not have been far off as she finally bent double to search for foreign devices inside herself.

  Shlomith.

  The thin woman extends her hand to Ulrike and introduces herself, adding a most important detail, a fact apparently meant to explain everything: I was the first one here. The other five women have come to sit next to her. They seem in reverent fear of Shlomith’s austere statement, and of Shlomith herself, this offensively thin, ancient-looking woman. Now that her hair is not in the way any more, her face is visible in all its horror. Her skin is wrinkled and fragile, altogether paper-like, as if blowing on it would dislodge it. Her cheekbones are high and would cast enormous shadows below if the light were not so uniform. If she wished, Ulrike might describe her thus: old witch, chestnut hair, corkscrew curls, large eyes, glinting irises flashing brown. Enormous hypnotic belladonna eyes. A gaze slightly too intense, almost annoyingly unabashed, which is guaranteed not to look away first from anyone who dares to stare back. The leader. Of that there is no doubt. Shlomith is the Leader.

  To repeat.

  First, she herself, the very first: Shlomith.

  Second: Polina.

  Third: Rosa Imaculada.

  Fourth: Nina (in her womb Little Antoine & Little Antoinette).

  Fifth: a “W” drawn in the air (W as in Wlibgis).

  Sixth: Maimuna.

  They introduce themselves one at a time, each in her own way, and shake Ulrike’s hand politely. Their arrival order appears to be a very important thing to them, because they each raise the appropriate number of fingers, as if by prior arrangement; this is their very own number of arrival. If this were to happen anywhere else, in a stadium where people had come to flee a hurricane, in a tent city where refugees were being assembled during a civil war, then Ulrike, who has entertained herself with dreams of catastrophe since she was a child, would burst into laughter. The women are so comical, so overly serious. Their arrival order number fingers are still in the air. A smile begins to tug at Ulrike’s lips.

  Suddenly Rosa Imaculada retracts her three extended fingers. She takes a step toward Ulrike, shaking her fist and launching into an explanation of something in a confusion of Portuguese and English. From here on, the performance is a familiar sight to everyone except Ulrike, who looks on in shock. They’re always embarrassed when Rosa’s show of panic begins. Lines appear on the women’s faces, furrows of impatience characteristic to each face type, which depends not only on temperament but also age, skin quality, and fat percentage. Of course Shlomith’s face is most creased of all. But Rosa pretends not to notice. Words burble out of her as her voice turns shrill and her hands move restlessly. Occasionally she crouches to pound the white below them with her fist. The pounding makes a hollow sound that starts out sharp but is instantly blunted, as if someone were striking a culvert with a metal rod covered in a woolen sock.

  Ulrike begins to understand. Rosa Imaculada wants Ulrike to tell her something the others haven’t been able to say. Rosa Imaculada taps her head with a finger and waits for a response, even though she must understand that this tearful wretch of a girl isn’t capable of answering.

  Ulrike gathers her courage and begins to rekindle her quenched anger. She opens her mouth and shouts at Shlomith in her high school English, with her high school pronunciation, with her high school vocabulary, with the high school impudence of a small, seventeen-year-old high school girl (with exactly the defiant self-assurance characteristic of young girls that can make some older men completely lose their wits); she screams at Shlomith and demands that she tell her everything, absolutely everything, because she knows that Shlomith knows. She has to know. She was the first one here, after all.

  And this leaves Shlomith no alternative. She must tell, as she always must. Over and over she must tell, and now she must also expose some slightly more delicate matters. Why she stripped Ulrike’s lower body bare (just now Ulrike realizes she should put her trousers back on), why Polina and Nina held her arms (shame rushes over Ulrike again: how has she been sitting here with her pussy bare?!), why Maimuna and Rosa Imaculada forced her legs apart (Scheiße! Scheiße! Scheiße!), why Wlibgis lifted her head on her knees and why she, Shlomith, the worst of all, stuck her tongue in Ulrike’s most secret place.

  THE CAMPFIRE

  Come, Shlomith says to Ulrike, let’s move to the campfire. And before Ulrike has time to understand what is going on, she finds herself gently lifted up. She stands, feeling dizzy (that expectant vertigo caused by the first proper lurch in one direction of a ride that moves back and forth, such as an amusement park Viking ship or a traditional Scandinavian yard swing). Ulrike stands and instinctively spreads her arms, trying to find her balance and momentarily closing her eyes. Then she opens them again and looks down, at her feet that is, and tries to jump up, but she fails. The women standing around her remain where they are.

  She didn’t rise a single millimeter.

  Maimuna can’t resist the temptation any more. Crouching, she pushes off and whooshes high into the air, her bent knees reaching the level of Ulrike’s neck. What is even more confusing, she stays there as if imprisoned in a perfect photograph (a model dressed in sporting gear bounces on a trampoline in a garishly lit studio, just do it, in the background is a bright, monochrome but decidedly flashy backdrop, just do it, the model jumps, jumps, jumps but doesn’t sweat, do it, do it, do it, she jumps and is immortalized in the air and will never age again).

  Shlomith glares in irritation at Maimuna, who obediently begins to descend without any further antics. Yes, Maimuna descends, or, in other words, kneels down low and begins to screw herself down by placing her arms tightly against her sides and thrusting her upper body in quick, sharp movements from left to right. The descent is jerky. Maimuna falls gradually, twist by twist, to the others’ level, and finally she is on her knees before Ulrike, in feigned humility, and then Shlomith turns her back, motioning impatiently with a hand and beginning to walk. As one might say, Shlomith begins to move forward.

  DYING IS GOD’S REVENGE. In that moment when Shlomith turned her back, that thought, precisely that thought and no other, flashed across Ulrike’s mind. Fear filled her being because she wasn’t in the habit of thinking about God. God, one might say, did not speak to her. God was not a j
oke, not an injunction, not a subject for argument, not anything at all except an event on the calendar. God definitely was that—a magic something that was utterly invisible but could stop every business in a country when necessary. That was how God was. God radiated his liturgical light on holidays, on evenings when even the non-God-fearing but sufficiently tradition-reverencing portion of the Austrian citizenry made its way to Mass because that was the way. There was some sort of God there, or at least a picture of the Son of God and the Virgin Mary, and if there is a mother and a child, there must also be a father, even if he is an absentee. At Mass you could kneel (it was good for the soul!), so long as your knees weren’t too bad (then you could stand in good conscience), you could sing and shake hands with your neighbors and then finally take communion. But no one ever required belief.

  God did not exist in persona for Ulrike and her family. In some distant branch of the family tree was one aunt who prayed earnestly, went to church, and regretted all the sins she committed and the sins she hadn’t committed but which she made the mistake of thinking of, because her God saw all, every thought, and every possible thought behind the thought, and every association lurking at the root of every thought. In the end that aunt landed in the loony bin.

  But now, out of nowhere, this claim pops into Ulrike’s mind: DYING IS GOD’S REVENGE. Suddenly everything is oppressive, impending thunder, heaviness, terrible heaviness. Or maybe: a brain jam. This was the term Ulrike used for her state of mind after a test, the minutes that started when she returned the math exam to the front of the room and placed it in the teacher’s hand, walked out the door into the hall and maybe all the way to the schoolyard: it wasn’t a mood of relief, even though she had no doubt a good grade was on its way, presumably the best in the class. Numbers and vectors continued to zoom around maliciously in her consciousness until at least her third cigarette. Her head really wasn’t a normal head. She had a tendency to think thoughts that made her sick.