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BODY

When I regained consciousness, I felt better. The pain had turned into the sensation you feel after a good workout. The noise had turned into a gentle breeze in my ears. The whiteness no longer hurt my eyes. It was just white, clean, and pure.

For the first time in Heaven, I felt like I was in Heaven.

Of course I didn't know it at the time. In fact, I was pretty sure I had survived some horrible accident and was recovering in the hospital. Not that I ever knew of any hospital that looked like that, or a nurse that looked like -

I couldn't remember her name. And I couldn't see her from where I was.

I tried to pull myself up and look around, but soon discovered I couldn’t really do that. Not because I was tied up or paralyzed. But because I had no body. No legs, no arms, no stomach—nothing. Instead, where all those were supposed to be, I only sensed that white, blinding light.

If there had been blood in my body, it would undoubtedly have frozen at that moment. I panicked, I am not ashamed to say. I was horrified. A million scenarios went running through my head and none of them were good. Perhaps I was dreaming? Hallucinating? Perhaps I had been abducted, or the accident had been worse than I thought -

The accident. Yes. It was the most likely option. I must have been in an accident. I didn't remember it. I didn't remember anything I had done before I woke up, but I must have been in an accident. I was lying in the hospital and imagining I didn’t have -

"I see you noticed you're missing something." I heard a harmonious voice right next to me.

I turned around and looked at her. "What happened to me?" My voice was weak.

"You'll understand it all later on. In the meantime, let's go get you a body."

-"How exactly did you move?"

-"She was the one walking. I was somehow in her hands. The white view didn't change much. From my white room we went into a white corridor, but not before she looked around the corner carefully. I didn't know why at the time. After a few quick steps, very fast ones, we arrived at a grand door; hidden behind it was the body warehouse."

-"The what?"

It was not exactly a shed. Behind the door was a massive space, endless. Unlike the perfect white of the room I had woken up in, the storage room was completely black. In it floated bodies of people of all sizes, colors, and shapes. Women, men, giants, little people, skinny, old, muscular… every kind you could think of. Hundreds of thousands of bodies. Millions of bodies. Set out on display, rolling slowly, each one entirely illuminated with no visible light source.

I couldn't look away.

"I forgot how impressive this can be when you see it for the first time," she said from my right. I looked at her; she was pale and amazing against the endless, black background. Complete contradiction—spectacular.

I looked to see what we were standing on. It was a floating terrace, very small, like you see on old houses in Italy. Only an ancient, wrought iron rail prevented her from falling into infinity. I didn't have a body, so I couldn't fall… only float in the ocean of motionless people.

"What is it, this place?"

"This is where you pick your body. You need to have one. Which one do you want?"

I looked at her body. That's the one I want, I thought to myself.

"We can arrange this kind of body for you." Her hand slid down her abdomen. "But I think you want it to be on me, not on you. You were a man, right?"

"I was?"

I didn't understand what she was talking about. I didn't like how she was talking. Why did she refer to me in the past tense? I thought she was just confused. Because I was just lying in a hospital somewhere, unconscious. I would wake up soon and everything would be fine.

"You were," she repeated. "When you were alive. You were a man. Or were you a lesbian? Because judging by the way you look at me…"

"I was a man. I am a man. What do you mean - when I was alive?"

"You'll understand everything in time. So, a man's body, then, yes?"

"Yes."

"Because you can have a woman's, you kn -"

"A man!"

She smiled and the world changed. A mighty vortex spun the millions of bodies around us and after a few seconds, when everything stabilized, there were only men around us.

"How tall?"

I started to respond, but then I stopped. I didn't know how tall I was. After the initial shock of the body warehouse had passed, the frustration returned. I didn't know anything about myself. And in any case, my thoughts kept going back to this whole ‘when you were alive’ thing. What was she talking about – ‘was’?

She cut into my train of thought. "How tall do you want to be?"

"I don't know!" I said angrily. "Give me a minute!"

"Okay, okay…" She leaned back and tried to hide an impatient expression, after which she stretched like a giant cat coming out of a pool of cream. She looked amazing.

"So… I can just pick my height?"

"Here you can pick everything. Height, weight, eye color. Look around."

I needed quite a bit of time. The warehouse had no end or horizon. Only more and more endless, deep darkness filled with human bodies. I could see with no limits. Then I started to notice the details.

Something in the details was wrong.

All the men around me were perfect. A male version of her, if you will. Flawless, physically. Hunks. Muscular, proportional, handsome. They were organized in space in an intricate, multi-dimensional matrix, by color and shape with multi-dimensional logic. It took one look around to understand that if the veranda floated in a different direction, there would be Nordic men, blond - and in another direction they would be Africans. More yellowish, Asian skin colors would be in a different direction, and going further in would allow you to browse different body types. But not every type was there.

"Why are there no fat men here?"

"There are," she answered. And the world spun around again.

I was surprised. I expected our balcony to fly in one of the directions, but the opposite happened. We stayed in place and the men's matrix matched itself to us. It was very confusing. In the end, I found myself surrounded by countless fat men.

Some were just a little overweight. Some were very fat and some were morbidly obese. Really big, ‘turn-of-the-century Sumo wrestler’ types. Mountains of fat everywhere, on the legs, stomach, places where thinner people have necks. Carefully, I tried to navigate myself through the matrix. It wasn't complicated; I just thought of a certain direction and the world spun toward it. Suddenly I feared the white angel would resent my initiative, but she smiled. It seemed like she was happy I was being independent.

One body, floating rather close to me, drew my attention. It wasn't huge, but was certainly heavier than average. A young man with curly brown hair, regular features, kind of short and flaccid looking. He reminded me of something, but I didn't know what it was.

"Do you like it?"

She looked curiously at me. The difference between her perfection and his wretchedness cried up to Heaven. Even if I had wanted him, I wouldn't have picked him. I couldn't bring myself to make her look at me in his neglected form.

"No," I finally said. "Can we go back to the attractive, well-built men?"

"You're the boss," she said with half a smile. The men swirled in front of my eyes again and I started to dig deeper. Choosing my body seemed very tiring all of a sudden. How can you pick from endless possibilities? What were the criteria for making my choice? What did I even want? And more importantly, why did I want what I wanted?

"How tall are you?" I asked.

"Six feet four," she said.

-"When we left the room, I was black."

-"African?"

-"No, no. I mean completely dark. Like the night. Like coal. Just as she was completely white, I was completely black, from head to toe. With dark hands, shiny, smooth black hair, and black lips."

-"Somewhat symbolic."

-"Yes, but I didn’t know it at the time."

-"Are you sure?"

- "No, but my eyes were blue as sapphire. Slightly brighter than her indigo."

I was six feet five and I had muscles like Superman. I wore a tight robe, black and shiny. It made everything I wanted to hide disappear, but hinted, without a shadow of a doubt, that there was much to conceal.

I was overly excited, I know. But can you blame me? For the first time in my life, I looked the way I wanted to look, the way I deserved to look, and I felt good about it.

So we walked down the hall, black and white, barefoot and clean, at a steady pace, like two noble chess pieces. I breathed Heaven's air for the first time through real lungs. I felt it on real skin. I heard it through real ears.

And I felt good about that, too.

She walked rather quickly, but I insisted on keeping a slower pace. I had a lot to process and the corridor seemed like a good chance to think.

First of all, I tried to figure out what went on there, in the warehouse. Entering the body I picked had been strangely easy. The moment I wanted it, it came to our balcony, right in front of us. I looked at the body closely before I chose. Turned it around in all directions, flipped it over, checked many facial expressions—artificial, but reasonable—lifted his hands up, parted his legs. Then I started toying with the little details. The hairstyle, hair color. The length of the hair. I chose bold in the end. And the eyes: black, white, red, green. I picked what I wanted and then I changed it again. I made the nose wider. I made the nose narrower. And I enhanced the pecs. Then I enhanced them again, then again. When I heard a little giggle from my right, I changed them back.

The moment I picked it, really chose it, I just went in it. It's a bit hard to explain. I was floating forward and I entered it. One fuzzy moment—and I looked out of his eyes, over to the balcony. She was there, alone, amused. I skipped over the rail and that was all that was needed. I was him and he was me.

It took me a few seconds to get used to myself. First of all, it was clear to me that I had never been six feet five. My body looked at the world from a higher point of view than felt normal. And, of course, I could look at her from above. A refreshing change I easily grew accustomed to.

And the strength I possessed. And the fitness. My stride was light, bouncy. I felt like a tiger. Inhuman. The control over the body was inhuman as well. At first it felt like exoskeleton control—then I tried to remember what exoskeleton meant. I couldn't remember.

- "How did it feel, really, when you couldn’t remember?"

- "Hard to explain. There were some things that looked natural and some things that looked artificial to me. I couldn't explain why, even to myself.

"Like having an artificial hand."

"Maybe. I wouldn’t know."

"Now, perhaps you can tell me what is going on?"

"Not here. Inside the room. "

The way back to my room was much longer than I remembered. I looked around. The corridors were long and completely white. There were no exit signs anywhere. There were no signs at all. But there were people in them. Beautiful people. Fabulous. Women and men in all colors, shapes, and sizes, and all were beautiful. They all looked like they had just come from the body warehouse. Some walked fast like we did. But most looked at themselves while they walked, closing their hands with an observing gaze, patting their tummy, bouncing a little in place. Getting used to their new skin.

Everyone was by themselves, I pointed out to myself. Only we walked together. Eventually we got back to the room that we had started from. The door closed behind us.

"Well, so?"

"Shut up," she said, clinging to me with a kiss.

All at once, the world turned red, and flames of pleasure burned me from every side.