The reabsorption began on a Thursday. Channel 9 News reported that two young Korean girls touched palms at recess and that their flesh melted and stuck. Trying to separate them caused the girls immense pain; they screamed as the skin between their hands stretched and sagged like molten cheese. “Suddenly Siamese Twins?” exclaimed a newscaster, his face locked in a rictus of enthusiasm. “Twelve-Year-Olds Stuck Together in this Foreboding Incident!”
It was that day that Kayla noticed a change in her mother, who was usually so bright and intrusive. She sat, withdrawn, at the breakfast table, picking the fluffy residue off of a skinned orange. Later, when Kayla came home from class, her mother had gone to the Asian grocery store. Kayla saw her on the news: a part of the Atlanta FoodMart Mass.
The mass took the form of a nose and mouth, as though the jaws of a giant had crested just above ground to breathe. Kayla could see close-up images of the thing sprawling across the parking lot, protruding upward from a colorful pile of discarded clothes. Naked forms of people, hips and thighs woven together in waves, circled into nostrils and pivoted in downward dog to form the tip and bridge of the nose. The mouth was open to the sky: a natural sunroof. There were no traces of eyes, noses, or ears mixed into the flesh of the thing; these were on the inside, where faces studded the walls at steady intervals. There were faces like her grandmother’s, like her aunt’s and uncle’s, like the congregation at her mother’s church, like the checkers at the FoodMart. They were the faces she had seen all her life as she tried to trace and recognize her own features. Their eyes were closed and their expressions serene. They were quiet, resting, like framed photos: snapshots of people of all ages, living death masks.
The scene was more chaotic from above, where drones circled the shopping center and relayed video of roiling crowds clustered around the monstrous jawline. Protestors and counter-protestors thronged against lines of stolid-faced officers, who lined a path for health officials. Signs proclaiming “I AM NOT A HEALTH HAZARD!” and “FREE ACCESS TO THE MONOLITH!” clashed against signs that shouted “NOT IN MY TOWN!” Signs were neon splashes across the expanse of open mouths. Signs were in the shape of bodies, in the shape of the monolith itself, with word bubbles escaping like spirits from its maw.
Kayla went to the bar down the street from the FoodMart, where she watched the coverage. She had driven to the lot, intending to join the crowd, to be mixed in the press of bodies and the open-mouthed, roiling feeling of mutual loss. But she was immobilized by the sheer mass of people: the smell of sweat and three hundred bodies breathing the same air. Both sides of protestors had eyed her, appraising her features, certain that she must be an outsider. If Kayla’s mother had been there, she would have said something. People would have looked between them, tracing Kayla’s mixed features into her mom’s, while her mother dared them to have a problem with it. But Kayla was alone, and her nerves failed her. She felt safer in the bar, sipping a mojito that her mother would have liked.
“I visited the Galway Mound once,” said a voice behind her.
A spindly, trim figure sat at the booth nearby, watching the television too. They had a portfolio of photos on the table, and a camera on their lap. “I was studying abroad there a few years ago. My great-granddad is frozen in that monolith, so I thought I’d visit. It’s true that you can’t see any of the people anymore; it’s just the outline of a giant’s hand made of grass.”
“Did you go inside?” Kayla asked.
“Yeah. Saw the faces, or what’s left of them. Cupped there in the curve of the index finger.” They crooked their own index finger as they said it: a monolith in miniature. “I sort of wondered if it would take me, too, you know? You hear stories. But that monolith hasn’t taken anyone in forty years, let alone a third-generation immigrant.”
Their name was Danny, and they were a photographer. Since their trip to Ireland, they had covered monoliths of all ages: ancient masses half buried in German forests, metastatic rapid-growing mounds from the European epidemic five years ago, the two girls who became the Glenview Knee, and the FoodMart Mass. Strange remnants that remained above ground. Kayla clicked through the saved images on their camera: faces and bodies, contorted and amalgamated, monoliths and the crowds around them. She wondered what it would be like to be wrapped in the crush of bodies outside, accepted and held like her mother in the monolith, safe but forever apart.
Danny bought Kayla a drink, and another drink. She listened to them talk: the low, excited cadence of their voice. Together, they flipped through pictures of birds, of bodies, of landscapes, of mounds, turned away from the flashing of the television screen. Kayla reached under the table and held their hand, bending her index finger around theirs. When they reached a picture of a bumblebee, its leg raised in accidental greeting, she giggled and Danny kissed her neck gently. Her lips parted in arousal and surprise, and she felt a voice just barely swallowed: the tongues of all the faces within.
• • •
When the call finally came saying she could visit, the person on the line assured Kayla that she would be safe. But when she arrived, the guards put her in a hazmat suit.
A blonde health official, clad in a white coat and gray suit, ushered her down the lane. They filed between the navy backs of the police officers. The roar of the protestors came muted through the crackling, swishing sound of the suit. Kayla smelled sweat and plastic and the sourness of her own breath. She heard a protestor sobbing, and she saw her standing at the edge of the line. She looked like Kayla’s Eonni. “My aunt is in there!” she screamed. “Let me in!” The woman tried to break the line, but her mother held her back, her arms encircling her daughter’s waist, her face wet.
The path led to the bottom of the chin. Hips and legs bent into an archway to form the jaw, and torsos curved upwards to touch the chin. They formed a yawning entrance that beckoned and repulsed. The official walked inside, unbothered, as though a doorway of flesh were something she saw every day. Kayla hesitated, and then followed her over the threshold.
The monolith was as silent as a coiled body, as quiet as a closed mouth. Kayla found her mother on the underside of the lower lip: a strange sore looking down from the ceiling in eternal shadow. She stood on her toes and put her gloved hand next to the face, watching her mother sleep, searching for signs of discomfort.
She felt as though she were in a holy place.
“Tell us if you feel anything,” said the health official.
I feel like this place is silent the way a church is silent, because it is being inhabited by a force as invisible as god, Kayla thought. But out loud, she said, “Like what?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe a pull?”
Kayla closed her eyes and imagined the pull. The gaze of the health official pressed down on her; the plastic rustled and chafed. She wondered if plastic was enough to stop the compulsion that pulled people into masses. She found herself wishing it wasn’t, and that she would feel her soul stretch and move, her flesh melting like bubblegum into the wall next to her mother: a kind of peace.
“I don’t feel anything,” Kayla said. “Do I really need this suit?”
“It’s a precaution. We have a research group going for willing participants. A lot of paperwork, but you can sign and then be allowed to touch the monolith.” The health official reached out and patted the wall of the mass, making a wet slapping sound. Kayla wondered if she’d signed a waiver. Probably not.
Kayla recalled the faces of the protestors outside, and the caution signs that said “PEOPLE OF KOREAN HERITAGE MUST STAY 6+ FT AWAY.” She thought of the racially unambiguous police officers and health officials, leaning against the side of the monument without concern, separating her from her family with plastic and regulations. She was always being watched, her heritage interrogated by the screaming crowd, by the health officials, by the people on the street. It was always the eyes of the crowd and the eyes of authority, examining her features and setting her on the other side of the wall from her mother. She wondered, if she were stripped bare, what the monolith would decide. As she watched, her mother’s eyes moved under her eyelids, as though she were dreaming.
• • •
On Danny’s television, the news buzzed with masses. Since the FoodMart Mass had appeared two weeks prior, monoliths had popped up in cities all over the country. The biggest reabsorption in the United States in thirty years, newscasters claimed. Perhaps, they speculated, a side effect of the coronavirus.
Each mass was a different body part: hands, breasts, ankles, toes. A gargantuan ear. A crescent-moon edge on a giant’s fingernail. Kayla lay in the bed and traced those parts of Danny’s body with her palm.
Danny gestured at the television. “Do you know anyone inside?”
“My mom.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s OK. They say it must be what she wants, right? You have to want to be a part of it, to get absorbed.”
The news flickered through a history of reabsorptions, speculatively tracing their origins to wars and policies and riots. It played grainy footage of people streaming out of their apartments, stripping naked, and piling into the center of a shopping mall to form a fist. Black-and-white images showed masses formed in the midst of riots, as bodies pushed and bullied each other, roiling over and into the shape of a giant elbow.
“No, you don’t have to want to. Sometimes, it just happens.”
Kayla imagined her mother bumping into someone in the parking lot, and coming away with the same skin. Would she have been happy? Kayla rolled onto her stomach and exhaled into the mattress. She wasn’t sure. There was something in her mother that loved being a part of the crowd. She thronged to a heartbeat outside of her own body. She joined rallies and concerts and community gardens. She longed to be in the dirt next to another person, their hands immersed in identical motion.
Kayla envied her. She lay next to Danny, silence filling up the air between them, turning it foggy and leaden. On the television, the newscasters quipped about the percentage of immigrants in the masses, turning her mother into a statistic.
“I don’t know if it’s safe for you to go out there,” Danny eventually said. “The protestors are getting violent.”
Kayla shrugged, but on her way to the mass the next week, someone lobbed a rock that caught her on the side of the face. She walked on through the crowd, bruised and bleeding, and handed her paperwork to the health official.
“I want to be considered for an Unrestricted Visit,” she said.
The official paged briefly through the stack of waivers and surveys, pausing on the one that stated “percent of heritage identical to the heritage of the mass.”
“We’ll call you,” she told her.
That weekend, the governor announced FEMA funds for the shopkeepers and families “inconvenienced” by the masses. Many of the protestors dispersed. The news stopped covering the monolith, and Kayla’s social feeds went back to pictures of dogs and landscapes and vacations. Family members posted that their loved ones would want them to move on, or that they were too exhausted to talk about it anymore.
“What happened to the monoliths?” some people in her network asked. “Still there,” she posted back, taking photos of the increasingly deserted parking lot, the abandoned memorials, the straggling handful of mourners left in the crowd. “Still here.”
Danny said it was only a matter of time for the mass after that. They always slipped away when no one was looking, as though it was the gaze of the cameras that defined them, the flash of light on the lenses and the screams of the crowd.
“Some of them stay for longer than others,” they said. “The longest on record is two hundred years. People come and pray to it.”
Kayla imagined the hundreds of masses—ears, eyes, fingers—slipping away beneath the earth with barely a rumble, leaving only cracked concrete and disturbed soil. Leaving her behind. She stared hard at the television, trying to will her mother to stay. But as another week passed, monolithic toes and ankles and knees retreated into the earth, as though a submerged colossus was withdrawing itself feet-first. Kayla lay on the floor of Danny’s apartment, trying to hear the sounds of thousands of people slipping under the soil. Danny sat on the floor and curled around her.
“Don’t go back,” they said. “You don’t have anything to prove.”
Kayla closed her eyes. “I don’t want her to be alone.”
Danny didn’t say the obvious: that Kayla’s mother would never be alone again. It was Kayla who felt unmoored without her mother, a child without a country, unable to say goodbye.
Instead, they leaned down and kissed her cheek. She pressed her face to theirs, where her bruise still clanged with pain. The two of them curled together on the floor, tight like the earlike shell of a snail, whispering goodbyes, until Danny fell asleep. Kayla lay awake, planning her next steps, calming her body, matching her breath to theirs.
• • •
Kayla didn’t wait for the Unrestricted Visit. She bought a white coat on the internet. She bought a gray suit. She covered her bruise with makeup, and used bronzer to emphasize the sharp angle of her nose. She went to the FoodMart after eight, when she knew the officials would have gone home for the day.
In the parking lot, the protestors had been reduced to a handful of onlookers. A single cop guarded the entrance, standing well away and smoking a cigarette. He nodded at Kayla as she walked, freely, into the mass through the hole in its chin.
Inside, she took off her shoes and socks. She took off the white coat and the gray suit. She rubbed the makeup off of her face using her undershirt, and then discarded the undershirt on the fleshfloor. She stepped out of her underwear. The ground was warm under her feet and damp with sweat. She felt it rise and fall gently, syncing its breath with hers.
She looked up at the mouth, where her mother’s face lay. She pressed her ear to the wall and felt a dull ache spread over the bruise. She listened to the sound of a thousand heartbeats, echoing through her body.
She waited to feel something. To feel a pull, a welcoming, a throng. To feel her flesh stick and melt. She waited until her legs ached from standing, and then she began to cry.
She didn’t feel a pull. She felt something else. She felt like a stone in a waterbed. She felt more solid than the world around her. She imagined it was the opposite of what her mother had felt. Kayla watched her tears bead and splatter on the bodies below. After a moment, she pushed herself away from the wall, stumbling back and sending shudders across the floor. This is the end, she thought. The mass had ripened like a big persimmon and was ready to fall. She turned her gaze upward to the yawning mouth, into the sky, where the stars fought for dominance with the light from the parking lot. She felt empty. She would say goodbye, and she would go into the world alone.
She picked up her clothes from the floor and dressed quickly. She tied back her hair, which looked so like her mother’s, and turned to say goodbye.
She stopped. Her mother’s eyes were open, crinkled and smiling, in a look of mild, pleasant surprise.
She walked to her mother and touched her face, but her expression did not change. She stared at where Kayla had been, frozen in the moment she’d seen her. Her gaze didn’t meet that of any of the other faces, eyes all open now, each bearing a different expression. Faces furious, sorrowful, fearful, hopeful, some looking at each other, some closing their eyes, and some looking directly at Kayla.
Kayla studied them, her fear mounting. She realized, slowly, that every time she shifted her gaze, their expressions changed slightly. She spun in confusion. The faces moved in time, by millimeters and milliseconds, opening their mouths wider, closing their eyes, contorting their cheeks in silent dialogue. Kayla tried to blink the illusion away, and she saw her mother’s face change in stop-motion, from smiling to quizzical. It showed a moment of fear, and was gone.
Kayla glanced frantically around the mass. All the faces were disappearing, one by one, and in their places, nubs of fingertips were emerging, smoothly, and expanding into hands. Hands with painted nails, hands with age spots, hands with hangnails and scars, hands with the tiny shell-like fingernails of a child. Kayla took in a sharp breath, and felt the monolith breathe with her, rising below her feet and above her head. There was a moment of air, of peaceful apex solitude, and then it collapsed.
The hands gushed in towards Kayla, no longer stuttering with her gaze but smoothly gliding inwards, a parachute of fingers closing in around her. She lurched backwards. This was not how it was supposed to go. She did not feel a pull, only a mounting terror, crescendoing over a scrambling feeling of regret. She ran towards the entrance and fell, her ankle gripped by a square, calloused hand. She screamed and kicked it away. The entrance was collapsing. She pulled herself between snatching fingers, trying to angle her body to the empty skylight of the open mouth. She would be saved. She would be spoken from the mouth and birthed into the parking lot. Arms waved around her body as she crawled, and the mouth snapped shut.
When the lips came together, they obliterated all sound. Kayla could hear nothing: not the sound of her breath, not the sound of the hands plucking at her clothes and rubbing past her skin. She struggled and shouted soundlessly, like a bee caught in a swimming pool, a shrill buzzing rising behind her ears and permeating her brain. She tried to breathe as the ceiling of hands pressed down on her. She spasmed and struggled and felt something. Something gentle and familiar: a hand on her back, resting. Her mother’s hand, a gentle tapping. Jajang, jajang, oori Kayla . . .
She breathed. She felt her heart beating. She stopped thrashing. And she felt—
The hands were not grabbing and pulling as she had thought, but slipping past her, each individual in their motion. Some pushed her away, some caressed her gently, some pinched at her clothes, trying to bring her along. A few grabbed at her as a hopeful anchor, before being ripped away by the sweep of bodies. No one was the same in movement, in intention. They were all joined in fury, in fear, and in camaraderie, as they moved past her in a single wave. They slipped into the earth, pulling pounds of flesh after themselves, filled with variegated stripes of longing and held together by inescapable bonds.
As the forms receded, so did her fear and regret. The heaviness of the flesh above her was matched by the solidness of her own body. She floated in equal density, hovering on the earth as the bodies slid down beneath her, around her back, under the soles of her feet. As the torrent of flesh parted and she saw the sky once again, she turned and saw her mother’s hand, the round nails that looked so much like her own. The hand that had always been at her back, pressing her forward, comforting her when she fell. Kayla had a feeling that if she grabbed it, she could go with her, under the earth, one body and yet still herself. She was welcome to it, she knew now. But as she touched her, fingertip to fingertip, she felt a sudden peace. The solidness of her own body no longer felt like a rejection, but a message. She belonged to the mass, yes, but she was also whole within herself, something new. A satellite body, transcribed onto the surface of the earth. A miniature of the giant, seeking others like her, to clash and stretch under the eyes of humanity until they became something whole and innumerable. The final bodies streamed into the ground. One by one, her mother’s fingers slipped away, and Kayla whispered her goodbyes.
The sound of the parking lot returned: crickets, traffic, and the idle cries of figures in the distance. Kayla lay in the broken concrete and looked at the stars. She wondered if that was how every reabsorption went: hands reaching out in need, completing each other in our love, our terror, our regret. She grasped at the soil under her, feeling for her mother, feeling for the body of a giant. Somewhere below, the multitudinous figure dove deep, curling with others in the earth, holding her up in its hands-of-hands. It was waiting or watching, and cradling her where she cried: the motherland.
• • •