“Why don’t you browse?” said the surgeon, leaving me with the nurse. “Choose a short list, perhaps. Write down the numbers you fancy. We can discuss your choices. This is the part I enjoy. You know what I like to do? Guess in advance who I think the person will choose, and wait to see whether I am right. Often I am.”

Shopping for bodies: it was true that I had some idea what I was looking for. I knew, for instance, that I didn’t want to be a fair, blue-eyed blond. People might consider me a beautiful fool.

“Can I suggest something?” said Ralph. “You might, for a change, want to come back as a young woman.”

I said, “A change is as good as a rest, as my mother used to say.”

“Some men want to give birth. Or they want to have sex as a woman. You do have one of your male characters say that in his sexual fantasies he’s always a woman.”

“Yes … I see what you mean …”

“Or you could choose a black body. There’s a few of those,” he said with an ironic sniff. “Think how much you’d learn about society and … all that.”

“Yes,” I said. “But couldn’t I just read a novel about it?”

“Whatever. All I want is for you to know that there are options. Take your time. The race, gender, size, and age you prefer can only be your choice. I would say that in my view people aren’t able to give these things enough thought. They take it for granted that tough guys have all the fun. Still, you could give another body a run-out in six months. Or are you particularly attached to your identity?”

“It never occurred to me not to be.”

He said, “One learns that identities are good for some things but not for others. Here.”

“Jesus. Thanks.”

I took the bag but wasn’t sick. I did want to get out of that room. It was worse than a mortuary. These bodies would be reanimated. The consequences were unimaginable. Every type of human being, apart from the old, seemed available. The young must have been dying in droves; maybe they were being killed. I would make a good but expeditious choice and leave.

When the others fell back discreetly I walked beside this stationary army of the dead, this warehouse of the lost, examining their faces and naked bodies. I looked, as one might look too long at a painting until its value—the value of life—seemed to evaporate, existing only as a moment of embodied frustration between two eternities. Then I began to think of poetry and children and the early morning, until it came back to me, why I wanted to go on living and why it might, at times, seem worth it.