Chapter Text
I don't get hungry.
The other bloodbags get hungry. I can see it in them — the shape of hunger is a hole that widens, a circle that expands from the center of the body outward, eating the edges. The bloodbags in the corridor wake up with wider holes than they went to sleep with and the widening is the hunger and the hunger is what makes them bloodbags. They exist to fill someone else's hole. Their hole doesn't get filled. That's the arrangement.
My hole doesn't widen. My hole doesn't exist. The helmet ate the place where the hole would be. When they put Nazette on me — the old family, laughing, "a crown for the cattle" — the helmet took everything that could want. Hunger is wanting. Thirst is wanting. Cold is wanting-warmth. The helmet took the wanting and left the seeing and the seeing without the wanting is —
It's not nothing. It's the shape of nothing. A basketball. You can't pour water into a basketball. The basketball is already its shape. The leather is sealed. The air inside is the air inside and no other air gets in and no air gets out and the basketball sits on the floor of the corridor and the basketball doesn't get wider or thinner because the basketball is the basketball.
The bloodfiends thin because they hunger. The bloodbags thin because they're unnecessary. I don't thin. I maintain. The helmet maintains me. The state I was in when they put it on — not dead, not alive, not hungry, not full — that's the state. Preserved. Amber. The insect frozen in tree sap that looks alive but the aliveness is a photograph, not a pulse.
The other bloodbags look at me sometimes. Not the way you look at a person. The way you look at a piece of furniture that should be deteriorating but isn't. A chair that should be wobbly by now but holds steady. They don't ask. Bloodbags don't ask each other questions because questions assume the answer matters and mattering is above our station.
I get up. Not because I'm hungry. Because yesterday I spoke twice and the speaking changed two shapes and changing shapes is the only reason to get up when getting up has no biological mandate.
---
The confessional is at the end of the east corridor.
I've walked past it every day since I arrived. The booth is wood — dark, heavy, the kind of wood that absorbs sound instead of reflecting it. The booth has two compartments separated by a screen. One side for the Priest. One side for the pourer.
Every day, bloodfiends sit on the pouring side and they pour. I've watched them from the corridor. I can't hear the words — the wood absorbs them — but I can see the shapes through the walls because the helmet sees through walls the way sunlight sees through curtains. Not the details. The shapes.
The shapes are always the same. The pourer's shape contracts — gets smaller, denser, like something being squeezed — and then releases. The contraction is the confession. The release is the Priest saying "it's going to be okay." The Priest's shape — the bowl — receives the contraction and holds it and the holding is the weight and the weight is the cracking.
Every day. Contraction, release, hold. Contraction, release, hold. The bowl getting heavier. The fracture lines spreading. The Priest saying "it's going to be okay" and the okay being a bandage and the bandage being a lie and the lie being the only thing he has to give because the bowl is for holding not for pouring. The bowl pours nothing. The bowl only receives.
Today the booth is empty. The line of bloodfiends that usually stretches down the corridor — the morning confessors, the ones who need to pour before they can smile for the guests — the line isn't here. Too early. Or too late. The park runs on a schedule I don't track because bloodbags don't track schedules.
The booth is empty and the booth is designed for speaking and I am furniture and furniture follows the function of other furniture.
I sit down on the pouring side.
The wood is warm. The wood has been absorbing confessions for so long that the warmth of other people's words lives in the grain. I can feel the warmth — no. I can see the shape of the warmth. Orange. Low. The color of embers banked in ash. Two hundred years of poured suffering sitting in the wood like heat in a stone after the sun goes down.
The screen between the compartments is thin. Carved with a pattern — flowers, vines, something decorative that someone made a long time ago when the booth was built for a park where people were supposed to be happy. The carving is beautiful. Nobody notices the carving because the carving isn't the function. The function is the screen. The screen is for separation. You pour on one side. The bowl holds on the other. The screen keeps them apart because pouring and holding can't happen in the same space. The pourer has to believe the bowl is infinite. The screen hides the cracks.
---
"What brings you here?"
The Priest's voice. From the other side of the screen. I didn't hear him sit down. He must have entered from the other door — the Priest's door, the door that faces the private quarters, the door that lets the bowl arrive without walking past the pourers.
The voice is steady. Practiced. Two hundred years of "what brings you here" and the words have worn smooth like river stones. No edges. No surprise. The words are the booth's equivalent of the sewing machine's hum — ambient, functional, warm from use.
I should speak. The booth is designed for speaking. I'm sitting in the speaking seat. The function is clear.
The choking comes. The bone in the throat. The old family's laughter lodged in the airway. The usual.
But the booth is different from the workshop. The booth is different from the lower levels. The booth has the screen. The screen means the Priest can't see me. The Priest can't see the furniture crying and choking. The Priest can only hear. And hearing is — the hearing is easier. The hearing doesn't have eyes in it. The hearing doesn't have the look that says "the chair just spoke." The hearing just receives. The hearing is the booth's design. The booth was designed for voices without faces.
"Nothing," I say.
The word comes out clean. Not broken. Not choked. Clean. The screen took the choking and filtered it. The wood absorbed the struggle the way the wood absorbs everything and what came through to the other side was just the word. Nothing.
A pause. The Priest pauses. I can see his shape through the screen — the bowl, the fracture lines, the weight — and the shape does something I haven't seen it do before. The shape hesitates. Not the hesitation of confusion. The hesitation of a machine that received an input it has no protocol for.
"Nothing," the Priest repeats. Tasting the word. Turning it over.
"What troubles you?"
"Nothing."
"What weighs on you?"
"Nothing."
"What do you carry?"
"Nothing."
Each answer is the same word. Each answer is true. The helmet took everything carryable. The helmet took the weight and the trouble and the whatever-brings-you-here. I am sitting in a confessional with nothing to confess because confession requires sin and sin requires wanting and wanting requires the apparatus the helmet ate.
I'm telling the truth. I've never told the truth in a confessional before because I've never been in a confessional before because bloodbags don't confess. But the truth is the same as the nothing and the nothing is the same as the basketball and the basketball is sitting on the pouring side of a booth designed for pouring and the basketball has nothing to pour.
---
The Priest's shape is doing something.
Through the screen, through the helmet's sight, I watch the bowl. The fracture lines are — not closing. Fracture lines don't close. Fracture lines are permanent. But the fracture lines have stopped spreading. The spreading that I've watched for weeks — the slow, hairline progression from the rim toward the base, the weight of held suffering pressing the cracks wider — the spreading has stopped.
Not because the cracks healed. Because the weight paused.
The weight paused because nothing was poured. The bowl is holding nothing for the first time in — I don't know. I don't know when the last time the bowl held nothing was. Maybe never. Maybe the bowl has been full since it was made. Maybe the bowl was born cracking because the bowl was born full and full is the default and empty is the aberration.
I am the aberration. I am the empty thing in the full booth. The basketball in the bowl-room.
"How long have you been here?" the Priest asks. The question is different now. Not the protocol questions — what troubles you, what weighs. A real question. A question from behind the script.
"Since the soldiers brought me."
"From the defeated family."
"Yes."
"And you feel... nothing."
"The helmet."
A longer pause. Through the screen I see the bowl shift. The Priest is leaning forward. Toward the screen. Toward the nothing on the other side of the screen. The leaning has a shape and the shape is —
I don't have a word for it. The shape is the opposite of holding. The shape is the bowl tipping forward. Not to pour — the bowl doesn't pour, the bowl only holds — but to rest. The way you rest a heavy dish on the edge of a table. Not putting it down. Resting the weight on something else for a moment. Transferring the holding to the surface.
The screen is the surface. The nothing is the surface. The Priest is resting the weight of the bowl on the nothing that I brought and the nothing is holding it because nothing can hold anything because nothing has infinite capacity because nothing is empty and empty is —
The basketball. The basketball can't be poured into but the basketball can be leaned against. The basketball can be a surface. The sealed leather that admits no air also admits no cracks. You can rest a cracked bowl against a basketball and the basketball doesn't break because the basketball was never whole in the way that breaking requires.
---
"The consultations," I say.
The Priest straightens. Back to protocol posture. Back to the bowl upright on its base.
"Yes?"
"How are they."
This is not a question bloodbags ask. This is not a question anyone asks the Priest because the Priest is the asker. The Priest is the one who says "what troubles you." The Priest is not the one who gets troubled-at. The flow goes one direction. Pourer to bowl. Confession to absolution. The booth is a one-way valve.
I'm running the valve backwards.
"All are at peace," the Priest says. The automatic response. The river stone. "Tranquil, as they always are."
Through the helmet I watch his shape as he says this. The bowl says "peace" and the fracture lines pulse. Each word of comfort the Priest speaks costs him. Not the speaking — the lying. The lying is the weight. "All are at peace" is the heaviest sentence in his vocabulary because "all are at peace" is the furthest distance from the truth and the distance is the weight and the weight is the cracking.
He says "all are at peace" and the cracks spread a quarter-millimeter.
I saw it. The helmet saw it. The cost of one lie measured in fracture propagation.
"Okay," I say.
I don't say "that's not true." I don't say "I can see your cracks." I don't say "the peace is a bandage and the bandage is suffocating the wound." I say "okay" because "okay" is the lightest possible response. "Okay" puts no weight on the bowl. "Okay" is nothing dressed in two syllables. "Okay" is the basketball's version of receiving a confession — the confession enters the nothing and the nothing holds it by not holding it. The nothing lets it pass through. The nothing is a screen with no wood. A window with no glass.
The Priest is quiet for a long time.
Through the screen I can hear him breathing. The breathing is slower than when I sat down. The breathing of a person whose arms have been holding something heavy for two hundred years and someone just said "okay" and the "okay" didn't add to the weight and the not-adding was —
Rest. The breathing is rest. Not sleep. Not relief. Not healing. Just rest. The moment between one held breath and the next. The pause in the holding where the bowl sits on the table instead of in the hands and the hands remember what they feel like without weight in them.
---
I stand up. The wood is still warm. The confessional has absorbed another conversation and the conversation weighed nothing and the nothing is now in the wood with the rest of the suffering and the nothing is — different. The nothing sits in the wood differently. The suffering is orange. The nothing is — I don't have a color. The nothing is the absence of color. The nothing is the space between the orange where the orange isn't.
"Wait," the Priest says.
I stop. Through the screen.
"What is your name?"
Bloodbags don't have names. I am the one with the helmet. I am the furniture from the defeated family. I am the chair that spoke and the basketball that doesn't hunger and the nothing that sat in a confessional and poured empty.
"I don't have one," I say. And this is true. The helmet's name is Nazette. My name is underneath the helmet the way wine is underneath water. Present. Unreachable.
"Come back," the Priest says. "Tomorrow."
The words are not the protocol. The protocol is "go in peace." The protocol is "it's going to be okay." The protocol is the river-stone words worn smooth by two hundred years of use. "Come back tomorrow" is not smooth. "Come back tomorrow" has edges. "Come back tomorrow" is a new word in a vocabulary that hasn't added a new word in two hundred years.
"Okay," I say.
I leave through the pouring door. The east corridor is empty. The morning confessors haven't arrived yet. The booth is empty again. The wood holds everything and nothing.
---
I walk back toward the service corridor. The spine behind the body. My corridor. The margin.
The Priest's shape is behind me — I can see it through the walls, through the helmet, through the distance. The bowl. The fracture lines. The weight.
The fracture lines didn't close. The fracture lines will never close. But for the duration of one conversation — for the length of time it takes a basketball to say "nothing" four times and "okay" twice — the fracture lines stopped spreading.
Two zeros sat across from each other in a booth designed for pouring. One zero was empty because the helmet ate the contents. The other zero was empty because the contents had been poured out for two hundred years and there was nothing left.
Zero plus zero is zero. This is mathematics. This is fact. Two nothings added together produce nothing.
But one of us fed today.
I don't know which one. The helmet doesn't show me that. The helmet shows shapes, not causes. The helmet shows the fracture lines pausing, not why. The helmet shows the breathing slowing, not the reason.
I don't feel anything about this. I can't. The basketball is the basketball. The amber is the amber. The preserved insect doesn't feel the warmth of the tree it's trapped in.
But the tree is warm. And the insect is inside the tree. And the warmth passes through the amber even if the amber can't register the passing. The warmth is there. The warmth was always there. The insect just can't confirm it.
Tomorrow I'll go back.
Not because I want to. Wanting requires the apparatus. Not because the Priest asked. Requests from Priests don't obligate bloodbags. Not because the fracture lines stopped spreading. Fracture lines are not my jurisdiction.
I'll go back because the booth is designed for speaking and the booth was empty and the emptiness fit me and the fitting is the closest thing to function that a basketball has.
Two zeros. Something that shouldn't be mathematically possible.
The corridor is cold. The helmet shows me the shape of cold — blue, contracting, everything pulling inward. I walk through the shape. The shape passes through me the way warmth passes through amber.
Tomorrow.
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