“Oh.” Miach found it with her index finger and plucked it off.
“Why do you eat so much all the time, Miach?”
“Because I like to eat. And if I don’t eat this much, my head doesn’t work right.”
I looked between my lunch and Miach’s. “You don’t have many things besides rice in there. It’s mostly all rice. And your lunch box is huge too.”
“Yet I’m skinny. Funny, isn’t it? The brown adipose tissue on my back did a number on my metabolism. I burn everything and none of the food gets to my brain. That’s why I have to shove so much of it in. If there was a speed-eating contest, I bet I’d win it.”
“What’s that?”
“These contests where people would try to see who could eat the most the fastest. The media channels used to show things like that, before the Maelstrom. It’s all shockingly unhealthy. The kind of thing those people in morality sessions love to bad-mouth.”
It sounded pretty horrible. I didn’t see how there could be any pleasure in damaging your stomach and intestines by eating so much. I sat down on the rooftop, looking down on city streets devoid of any shapes or colors that might prove too stimulating. “So, what do you tell your mom or dad what you want to eat for lunch?”
“I don’t. That is, I make my lunch myself. Of course my mom wants me to use this nosy lifestyle pattern designer or something. No thanks.”
“Doesn’t it reflect poorly on your mom’s SA score if her daughter doesn’t take her health advice?”
“Maybe. Or maybe not. I’m never really sure about those things. You know the old saying, ‘Kids grow up despite their parents.’”
“Yeah, but isn’t it a little different? I thought it went: ‘Even without parents, children will flourish.’”
“Yes, that’s the original. But there was this writer named Ango Sakaguchi, and he said that children would flourish without the useless baggage that is their parents. That’s a lot different than saying a kid’s going to grow up even without the benefit of parents. Of course, a lot of people have different ideas as to what constitutes flourishing.”
“Sakaguchi, huh? Sounds interesting.”
“You can download it from the Borgesnet. I recommend actually reading it—you know, with your eyes—instead of using the reader.”
So saying, Miach picked up a large lump of rice sprinkled with sesame salt and crammed it into her mouth. The sight of her chewing with both cheeks full was so comical I had to laugh.
“What?”
“Do you really have to cram it all in at once like that?”
“I’m just trying to match you guys. You have so much less that if I don’t eat quick, I’ll never keep up.”
“Don’t worry about keeping up with me,” Cian said. “I always leave some anyway.” She closed her lunch box with an audible snap. “My parents want me to eat it, but it’s way too much for the middle of the day.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. I mean, I don’t really get hungry until two or three o’clock. At noon I still feel full from breakfast.”
“Do you know why we eat lunch at noon?” Miach asked through a full mouth.
I shrugged. “Is it because we’re hungry?”
“Apparently Cian isn’t.”
I looked in Cian’s direction, then lowered my head. “Oh, right. Sorry.”
“That’s okay, you don’t have to apologize.”
“Neither of you do,” Miach joined in. “People get hungry whenever they feel like it, that’s natural. It’s that the school system doesn’t approve of natural human flexibility.”
“Well, if you’re going to have a group of people eating, it makes sense to eat together.”
“Why can’t we eat during class is what I want to know.”
Now that she mentioned it, it did seem curious that people often read or watched media channels while they were eating, but we weren’t supposed to eat while we read our textbooks in school. Maybe it was because it would distract us from class? But that didn’t make sense either. Class and lunch were equally boring. At least, my mother’s lunches never tasted good enough to distract me from anything.
“It’s a rule. These rules are meant to divide up our time, partition it, control it. Strictly speaking, by getting hungry around two or three o’clock, Cian’s digestive system is going against the rules—and Cian blames her own body for not being able to get with the program. She blames herself. How silly is that?”
Miach was in the zone now. Miach, our ideologue. She gathered up another ball of rice with her chopsticks, still talking. “The time divisions at school have been the same for a long while. What started as the idea that it was fun for everyone to eat together, or that it made more sense for work, eventually became proscribed in more detail, with start times and end times. It became a rule. You know there was no such thing as lifestyle pattern designers before lifeism took off? But once something like that becomes popular, it becomes the thing to do, then it becomes a rule, then it becomes law. Just another of the invisible things out there trying to control our bodies.”
Miach kept talking at full speed, her cheeks full of a lot of rice and a little bit of toppings. Finally she tossed back the last bit of rice, packed up her lunch box, and put it back in her bag. Then she stood and walked over to the railing that ran around the rooftop and spoke out loud, like she was making a proclamation to the scenery—or even to the entire world.
“‘It is over life, throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its dominion; death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most “private.”’”
“Who said that?”
“Michel Foucault.”
Even though her lunch was much bigger than ours, Miach had finished way before we were done. I ate up the last of mine, wrapped my lunch box in a cloth, and tucked it away inside my bag. A quiet breeze blew, brushing past our foreheads and through our hair.
Death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it.
“So is that the only way out?” I asked quietly.
Miach was looking out over the city, confronting it. “I used to be in another place, under the dominion of another power. It was hell,” she said without turning around. “That’s why I escaped, to come here. But here’s crazy too. This is no place for people to live.”
“What was it like, the other place?”
“The exact opposite of here. Over there guns kill people.
Here, kindness kills them. It’s all the same.”