The Night Kitchen

Marlee’s father shoves a slice of carrot cake into his mouth, his teeth plowing through icing. She offers a napkin for his frosted mustache before he reaches for the next slice.

“Watch your cholesterol,” she says.

Her father died five years ago from a heart attack. In her dreams, he sits in restaurants like this one, or at banquets or celebrations—a personal Valhalla where a ghost can eat.

Awakened by hunger, Marlee jabs herself in the buttock with the injector her doctor prescribed. She repeats the process weekly. Numbers dance around her like a cloud of gnats. She loses 32 pounds over the next 28 weeks. Her BMI drops nine points. Her belt tightens three notches. She begins a couch-to-5k jogging regimen and increases her resistance training to the 10-pound weights.

The dreams continue. In one, Marlee’s mother savors a strawberry milkshake, despite her lactose intolerance, her jumbo straw clotted at the end as she spoons herself a pink dollop. Her mother adds a second straw and pushes the shake toward Marlee, tempting her to the other side during REM cycles.

Marlee sheds another ten pounds, largely because eating has become a chore. Her loss of craving spills into other realms. TV bores her—she’s become inured to swelling music and hyperventilating laugh tracks. The internet reveals itself to be mostly pixelated junk mail. Alcohol seems pointless. She is inundated with free time, but no desire to fill it.

She drops another five pounds. Matter into energy, desire into…she’s not sure what; her desires seem to have vanished. An intervention is called for. She places a fresh box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts on her bed, a mug of hot chocolate with a dash of Kahlúa on the nightstand, porn queued on her laptop and split-screened with Etsy’s jewelry landing page with her $100 gift card preloaded. She holds out her arm and looks at each temptation in turn. But it’s as though she’s dowsing in a dry field. Her hand is drawn to nothing but the palm of her other empty hand. She wonders if she has inadvertently attained a state of Zen but without the enlightenment.

On the insistence of her colleagues, Marlee goes out on her first date in five years. It’s fine—but hardly feels worth the awkward conversation, the so-so dinner, the noisy, clumsy sex. She wonders if she should work the word ambivalent into her dating profile. She loses another five pounds.

A bird thunks against her kitchen window. She feels a gray nothingness at the sight of the black and yellow bird stunned motionless on the ground. When she remembers to check back, she sees that it’s done for. At night, she dreams of empty skies and deserted restaurants. The dead have vanished. She decides to taper off the prescription.

Within a few weeks she finds herself indulging: snacks while watching TV, online shopping, drinking—though all in moderation. She goes on a date with another man who’s more her type and who arouses desire. But having gone without, she’s suspicious of what she feels. Desire is less like a reclaimed state of mind and more like an imposed force, the product of billions of cells and bacteria banding together to convince her to do the heavy lifting, like now, as she brings a second square of dark chocolate to her open mouth. Matter into matter.

Marlee goes off the drug completely. She gains ten pounds but no more. Then two additional pounds, but then really no more. Then another three pounds. She skims articles about desire written by physiologists, psychologists, and philosophers, but they only muddy her comprehension of why she wants what she doesn’t want. Go deep enough, she’s learned—past her body’s organs, cells, molecules, atoms—and you arrive at conjectured bits of vibrating string, whether you desire or don’t, are alive or not. She comes to believe that desire exists somewhere between thought and theory in the realm of koans. It is the drone of a hive of bees contemplating the drone, the quivering of a nest of ants contemplating the quivering.

She sticks to her new habits: shopping mostly the perimeter of the supermarket, eating only at her kitchen table. She rediscovers the drama of stovetop popcorn, and what it tastes like without butter and salt. She drinks only water. But it’s not a cloistered life. She jogs before work while listening to a podcast about birdsong. She can recognize the oriole, the towhee, and the goldfinch without needing to see them. On weekends she does yoga in the park with yoga friends and becomes the downward dog, the cat, the cow, the cobra, the corpse.

At night, they return. Marlee watches her father eat rhubarb pie in a vast kitchen. Her dead mother is whisking a béarnaise sauce. Her late uncle is slicing a duck. Great-grandma May is frosting a cake. Unlucky cousins who were taken early are spilling drinks at the kids’ table and laughing. All around the food-laden banquet sit the family she knows, feasting but not gaining an ounce, alive, well again, for as long as her night kitchen remains open.