One and One and One are One

Yet the three-way hadn’t been a total failure. They had learned things from it. Seeing one other naked, and touching one other’s insides, had underscored a sober truth: how very different their respective bodies were. Lux had a paunchy stomach, and Jess was exceptionally thin, and Kyla’s skin was a shade darker than her friends’. To say nothing of their faces! So perhaps, they reasoned, the matter of the remaining distance between them—a distance that made their stomachs hurt, a distance they all felt the most acutely in their nightmares, even as they slept with limbs wrapped around each other—was less about a missing experience and more about a flawed state of being. In other words, maybe they simply needed to look more like each other.

Fortunately, their high-cost-of-living city abounded with unethical surgeons. Lux insisted that, rather than using their paltry savings, Jess and Kyla dip into her significant trust fund. Mis pesos sus pesos, she’d said. And she could think of no nobler use of those pesos than this. The girls took turns going under the knife so that one was always well enough to care for the other two as they healed. They found that to nurse the ones you loved was a pleasure in and of itself. Dressing changes, spoon-feeding, wound drainage: what caress could be more intimate?

Eight months and $300,000 later, they emerged from the fog of painkillers to find their faces and bodies nearly identical. Their features had regressed towards the mean: Jess’s significant nose had been made smaller, and Lux’s larger. Kyla had undergone skin-lightening treatments, Jess a BBL. Lux was finally learning to walk again after her complex leg-lengthening operation. Et cetera, et cetera.

Granted, there were still small differences between them. Remainders, they called them bitterly. For instance, Kyla’s face was still too long, even after double-jaw surgery, and no number of pleas or threats could convince even their unscrupulous stable of surgeons to repeat such a risky operation for cosmetic purposes. (But it’s not just cosmetic, Kyla and Lux and Jess had howled at various doctors across various mahogany desks, to no avail.)

Nonetheless, judging by the frequency with which they were now mistaken for triplets by horny-curious men on the bus, it seemed that the friends were now very, very close to a perfect physical identity. Standing before the enormous mirror that formed the back wall of their walk-in closet, they shuffled themselves around like a shell game. Find the Jess. Find the Kyla.

They took lessons with a voice coach to sound more alike. They changed their names to match their new faces. Now they were all simply Desiree. A few weeks went by in seeming tranquility. At times, even they lost track of who was who was who.

And yet—and yet. There remained the matter of their minds. Occasionally, one of them would say something that would make the others wonder: what could possibly be going on, in there, behind that other set of eyes made amethyst with colored contacts? When it was thus discovered that one of them knew something or believed something that the other two didn’t, the odd woman out felt suicidally lonely, while the two accidental co-conspirators were consumed by a dirty shame. A triangle was the strongest shape, physically speaking, but socially it was volatile, treacherous. Loathsome.

They needed to determine how deep the problem went. Desiree’s business school classmates had spoken highly of the bonding power of T-groups, and so a policy of radical honesty was established among the three. They were always, always to say what they really thought. No equivocating; no glossing-over to protect the feelings of the beloved. Love was truth, they told each other. Even if it hurt.

The next month was hell. They could never have imagined how very unalike their minds were. Their opinions on politics, pop culture, and mutual acquaintances had always seemed similar enough, before they’d embarked upon this exercise in transparency. But now that they were not allowed to tell small lies in the interest of finding common ground, it seemed they could agree on nothing. Their conversations were jagged loops, the three weeping constantly as they forced themselves to interrupt their soulmates again and again with new revelations of difference.

The problem, they had all been forced to conclude, was not ontological, but physical: the yawning abyss that separated their respective brains, each separate parcel of flesh. You could look and talk and think alike, but none of these were the same as occupying a single physical space. In other words, they longed to be one, but were at present only one and one and one.

It was Desiree, in the end, who squared this circle. Mopily riding their tandem bicycle around town one day, they found themselves at the southern border of the city. Desiree happened to be in the front seat of the bike, and, suddenly slamming on the brakes, nearly toppled the whole lot of them over. Desiree and Desiree yelped and threw up their hands, ready to chew her out. But their anger turned to wonder when they saw where she was pointing: at the distant mountains of glittering trash to their left.

As they entered the maze of the landfill, things got suddenly darker, hundred-foot piles of trash blotting out what little light made its way here from the city. The Desirees paused to let their eyes adjust. They’d saved aerial maps of the dump onto their phones, but without flashlights—which they’d deemed too conspicuous to use—it would still be hard to make their way.

After half an hour of stumbling and wrong turns, they finally found it: the row of hulking rectangles near the eastern edge of the dump. They ran up to one of the objects, chittering with joy, and surveyed its metallic outer shell with the light from one of their phones. Desiree nodded; this was the machine they’d been looking for. The other two stared at her gravely. Her role was by far the riskiest.

Desiree pulled a bolt-cutter out of her backpack and, grunting with effort, used it to clip the lock on the door. The door swung open to reveal a mostly empty chamber, its ten-foot length spotted with scraps of debris. A tangy, hot smell drifted out. The trio walked inside the chamber, swallowed by a darker darkness as they did. They stood in a circle, holding hands, and took in a breath together. They let it out. There wasn’t much left to say, but they said it anyways: “This is it.” “No more loneliness.” “My heart and soul are yours.” They squeezed each other desperately, weeping as they stroked each other’s uniformly sleek hair.

Then it was time. Desiree gently extracted herself from the embrace and exited the compacting chamber. She shut the door behind her; it would have to be closed for the sequence to initiate. At the operating panel outside the machine, she hesitated. Even after her eyes had adjusted to the dark, she could barely see, and the row of buttons here looked a little different from the instructional clips they’d watched again and again on YouTube. Where the clips had shown a yellow button, this panel had a blue one in its place. Perhaps the city had upgraded their machines since posting those videos. Desiree felt uneasy. But she had promised her two companions that she could pull this off. And she didn’t think she could survive the disgrace of letting down the two most important people in her life—the only two people in her life.

She carefully pushed the three-button sequence she’d memorized, beginning with blue instead of the accustomed yellow. The machine groaned instantly into action, a metallic whine announcing that the inner chamber was contracting. She ran to the door to pull it open and join her Best Friends Forever. But the door wouldn’t budge. She stood rigidly still with her hand on the door, dread filling her like mud. Then, panic set in and she ran back to the panel. She pressed a red button, which her training had led her to believe would be the emergency stop. But it was not. The machine kept up its grinding hum as though nothing had happened. In the videos she’d watched, the whole compacting cycle took about forty-five seconds. A third of that had already passed. She yanked and yanked again at the door handle.

“It won’t open!” she finally yelled through a sob. The girls inside had been silent until now, likely steeling their nerves against the pain to come. But now they let out a howl of despair that became her name. “Desiree!” they screamed in tandem. “Come in! Come to me, my love!” She banged her fists and then her feet and then her head against the metal door. She made a violent racket, and they did, too. To no avail. To no avail.

Soon, Desiree could tell, the crushing embrace of the compactor had reached her soulmates, for their wailing went up in pitch, climbing higher and higher, a searing, animal screech. And then it stopped abruptly. Outside the machine, Desiree tore out her hair and gashed at her face with her fingernails. There was a smear of blood on the door where she’d battered her forehead. At least there’s blood on both sides of the door, she thought, letting out a sudden, maniac giggle. Blood on both sides of the door!

The compactor concluded its sequence, the steam-hiss of a piston returning the moving walls to their starting places. The whole machine relaxed, and she heard a demure click near the door’s handle. She tried pushing again, and this time the door swung inwards immediately, as though all she’d had to do, all along, was ask politely.

Desiree stepped across the threshold, her wet sobs echoing into the womb of the compactor. With shaking hands she turned on her phone’s light and held its bright beam in front of her. A small mass, about the size of a tissue box, could be seen on the floor at the far end of the chamber. Desiree stepped slowly towards it and its bumpy surfaces glistened in her unsteady shaft of light.

Once she was a few feet from the shape, Desiree stopped. She could discern, now, that the cube was made of fingers and ears and tangles of dark hair, pieces of Desiree forced by enormous pressure into rough planes. Each side was a slick patchwork of peach-colored flesh, its seams oozing blood. A single amethyst eye stared out at her from the center of the closest side.

Desiree ran up to the mass and collapsed on her knees, wrapping her arms around it. She hugged it as hard as she could, her fingers digging into its soggy sides, as if with enough force she might simply absorb the thing into her own body. She pressed her face into the top of the cube, her cheek slipping around on its bloody surface until it made contact with the protruding stub of a broken bone and could slide no further. She wept.

She shook her head, shocked by her own blasphemy. The others were right there! On the ground in front of her! Right there, as they had almost always been! She hit her temples with her fists.

Yet the thought wouldn’t shake free. There are no others, now. And as the words besieged her again and again, she realized with surprise that her grief—a dark and heavy hand gripping her heart, an agony she’d assumed would follow her the rest of her days, until she relieved herself of life—had somewhat abated. With curiosity, she entered a part of her mind that she had long closed off.

Desiree allowed herself to notice the silence. There were no other voices to decipher; no mysterious intentions to parse. The only words and feelings were the ones inside her mind, low and steady and sure. There were no other, divergent pasts to remember, distressing in their difference from her own. There were no alien, impenetrable bodies.

Perhaps three would always have been three, she thought. Perhaps now, and only now, can one be truly one.

She turned around, towards the soft purple rectangle of the open door. She walked out of the darkness, into the morning, towards the city.