Movement Six — Before I Knew What Beautiful Meant

This happened a very long time ago, I told them, back before I even understood what it meant for a soul to be beautiful at all.

I want you to imagine, I said, what it must be to want, more than almost anything else in an entire existence, to be the most beautiful thing in the whole of the universe. Not admired, not simply noticed — the most beautiful, absolute and singular, a superlative with no room left inside it for anyone else to share the space. I want you to sit with that ambition for a moment before I tell you where it led her, because I don't think the shape of it makes any sense at all until you've properly imagined the size of the want underneath it. It isn't vanity, not in the ordinary sense the word usually carries. Vanity is content with being told, occasionally, that it looks well in a certain light. This was closer to hunger — the specific, bottomless kind that no single meal, however generous, was ever going to satisfy for longer than the meal itself lasted.

And then I want you to imagine trying to fulfill that particular ambition here, in the Between, where even our own silhouettes barely hold a proper face long enough to be judged by one. Can you imagine it? I asked them. Trying to be the most beautiful thing in a world built almost entirely out of featureless, faceless light, where no two souls look different enough from one another to be properly compared at all? It would be, I think, something close to trying to win a race against runners who have no legs. The whole contest collapses before it's even properly begun, and yet the want that drove someone toward it in the first place doesn't have the good grace to collapse along with it.

Vesper let out a short, disbelieving breath against my shoulder. Iris only tilted her head further, waiting.

There was a soul I met, back then, I told them, who suffered — and I want to use that exact word, because I don't think a gentler one does the truth of it justice — from precisely that particular obsession. She had carried it with her out of the world of the living, the way certain wants simply refuse to stay behind with the rest of a life once that life has ended, and brought it fully intact into the gray stretch of the Between, where it found, if anything, even less to feed on than it had found before. I've come to think that's one of the crueler small tragedies this place hands out, entirely without meaning to. A want doesn't die simply because the world that shaped it has ended. It comes along for the whole of the next journey too, uninvited, unwelcome, and every bit as hungry as it ever was.

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It's a strange thing to carry with you into a place like this, isn't it, I said. An obsession built entirely around being seen a certain way, arriving somewhere almost nothing gets properly seen at all.

I want to describe what it must have looked like, from the outside, watching her ask her question — because that is, in the end, what it became for her, a single unbroken question repeated to soul after soul after soul, each one as featureless and undifferentiated as the last, none of them equipped, in any way a mortal eye would recognize as equipped, to actually judge one silhouette prettier than another. Picture it, if you're able: a shape of pale light, approaching another shape of pale light, indistinguishable from a hundred others she'd already approached that same week, and asking, with a desperation that had no business belonging to a question this impossible to answer, whether she was the most beautiful thing that other shape had ever seen. Can you imagine it, I asked them again, going soul to soul, in a place where nothing distinguishes one from the next, and asking each of them, in turn, whether you were the most beautiful thing they had ever seen?

Vesper answered first, quiet, almost against her will. "That sounds like its own kind of hell."

"It is," I said. "I've come to believe it, anyway, though I didn't understand that at the time. I didn't understand very much of anything, at the time."

I want to tell you, too, something I didn't understand until considerably later, turning the whole shape of her over in my memory across the long years since. A want like hers doesn't actually care whether the thing it's chasing is achievable. That's rather the cruelty built into it from the start. She could have spent an eternity asking that same impossible question of an eternity of featureless souls, and the want itself would never once have paused to notice that the contest it had entered had no finish line at all, because a want that size isn't reasoning toward satisfaction — it's simply running, the way water runs downhill, without ever once needing to ask whether there's a bottom waiting for it.