You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

by Alexandra Kleeman

  DEDICATION

  To Terry and Faye

  EPIGRAPH

  It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing its image in a signifying fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.) . . . At the same time, something else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp.

  —DELEUZE AND GUATTARI, A THOUSAND PLATEAUS

  Blessed is the lion that the human being will devour so that the lion becomes human. And cursed is the human being that the lion devours; and the lion will become human.

  —THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THOMAS

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  IS IT TRUE THAT WE are more or less the same on the inside? I don’t mean psychologically. I’m thinking of the vital organs, the stomach, heart, lungs, liver: of their placement and function, and the way that a surgeon making the cut thinks not of my body in particular but of a general body, depicted in cross section on some page of a medical school textbook. The heart from my body could be lifted and placed in yours, and this portion of myself that I had incubated would live on, pushing foreign blood through foreign channels. In the right container, it might never know the difference. At night I lie in bed and, though I can’t touch it or hold it in my hand, I feel my heart moving inside me, too small to fill the chest of an adult man, too large for the chest of a child. There was a newspaper article about a man in Russia who had been coughing up blood; an X-ray showed a mass in his chest with a spreading shape, rag edged. They thought it was cancer, but when they opened him up they found a six-inch fir tree embedded in his left lung.

  Inside a body there is no light. A massed wetness pressing in on itself, shapes thrust against each other with no sense of where they are. They break in the crowding, come unmade. You put your hand to your stomach and press into the softness, trying to listen with your fingers for what’s gone wrong. Anything could be inside.

  It’s no surprise, then, that we care most for our surfaces: they alone distinguish us from one another and are so fragile, the thickness of paper.

  I WAS STANDING IN MY room in front of the mirror, peeling an orange. I cradled its exact weight in my palm, sinking a nail through the topmost layer. I dug a finger under its skin until I felt cool flesh, then I rooted that finger around and around. The rind tore with a soft, cottony sound, the peel one smooth, blunt piece trailing off the fist of the fruit. I slipped my contacts in and blinked at the mirror. Most mornings I barely resembled myself: it was like waking up with a stranger. When I caught a glimpse of my body, tangled and pale, it felt as if there were an intruder in my room. But as I dressed and put on makeup, touched the little tinted liquids to my skin and watched the hand in the mirror move alongside my own, I rebuilt my connection to the face that I took outside and pointed at those around me. My hand ripped a wad of pulp and pushed it through the space between my lips. Juice crawled down the side of my palm. Like the moon, my mouth in the mirror seemed to look a little bit different each day. It was summer, and the heat hadn’t yet tightened around our bodies, making us sticky and moist, trapping us in a suit we hated to wear.

  A breeze pushed through the open window, smelling of cut grass, chopped flowers, and I could hear the people outside leaving their homes. Their car doors opened and closed, tires shifting gravel as they pulled out of their driveways and vanished for eight or nine hours, only to return less crisp, their unbuttoned cuffs hanging open. I liked letting noise from the neighborhood leak into my sleep and begin turning things real. I liked it, except when I hated it, hated how close the houses were to each another, hated that the first outdoor thing I sighted each morning was my landlady’s swollen face as she poked her head out the door to grab the newspaper. She lived below us, but from certain angles she could see straight up into our unit. Every day she bent down to retrieve it, then turned around, craning her neck to peer in through my bedroom window, checking to see if I’d spent the night in my room. Her aggressively changing hairstyle, auburn one week and then a dirty highlighted blond the next, made it unclear whether she wore real hair or wore a wig, and if it was a wig whether she slept with it on. My roommate B said it was like she was a fugitive inside her own home, someone living on the run without going anywhere at all.

  In the house next door lived a couple of college kids who kept the TV on at all times, even when they left for their classes or jobs or whatever responsibilities they had. Their screen glowed through the night, casting blue light on an empty couch. It went dark only when the kids were in that third bedroom, the one I couldn’t see from our apartment. Sometimes for variety B and I watched the TV in their house instead of the TV in ours, though at that distance we could only guess at what we were seeing, flipping through the channels on our end to find a match.

  Across the street there was a family with a dog that slept most of the day, but a few times each afternoon it ran to throw itself at the front windows, smashing its muzzle against the glass and barking until the sounds it made warped and hoarsened. I’d get up from my desk to see what was wrong, but there was never anything to see, not even a squirrel. Sometimes then our eyes would meet, the dog and me, and we’d just stare at each other from across that street, not knowing what to do.

  It was a safe neighborhood. There was nothing you could complain about without sounding crazy. The sun was bright outside and I heard birds hidden in the trees, swarming the bushes with sounds of movement, calling out, bending small branches beneath the weight of their small bodies.

  THUMPING SOUNDS CAME FROM THE other side of the bedroom door. It was B moving around our apartment: one small thump from the living room, and another, and then the sound of something being dragged across the floor. I heard her going to start the coffeemaker and then giving up, opening the refrigerator and giving that up, too. Standing still in the middle of my room, I tried to gauge how much I could move without letting her know that I was live. She couldn’t assume that I’d be conscious this early in the morning, but that wouldn’t stop her from checking every five or ten minutes, pausing to listen for the sounds of someone wakeful. Then sometimes she’d sit herself near the door, ear against the doorjamb, and talk toward me as though we were having a normal conversation. She’d talk toward me until I responded. B said the apartment was lonely when I wasn’t awake. She said if I was sleeping, I was as good as dead. She meant in terms of companionship, interactivity, my ability to help her make breakfast for herself. When B did eat, which was not always, she preferred to touch the food as little as possible to keep her hands clear of what she called “that edible smell.” She needed my hands to cut, to squeeze, to handle, to break eggs and toss their slimy shells into the garbage.

  B and I were both petite, pale, and prone to sunburn. We had dark hair, pointy chins, and skinny wrists; we wore size six shoes. If you reduced each of us to a list of adjectives, we’d come out nearly equivalent. My boyfriend, C, said this was why I liked her so much, why we spent so much time together. C said that all I wanted in a person was another iteration of my person, legible to me as I would be to myself. When he said this it felt like he was calling me lazy. B and I looked alike, talked alike, that was fair enough. To strangers viewing us from a distance as we wove a confused path through the supermarket hand in hand, we might seem like the same person. But I was on the inside and I saw differences eve
rywhere, even if they were only differences of scale. We looked young, but there was a lost, childish quality to how she slumped over whatever she was doing. We had the same brown eyes, but hers were set deeper in her skull, pushed back so that they disappeared beneath the shadow of her brow. We were thin, but B was catastrophically so: I had helped her zip up a dress, I had held her hair back and rubbed the cool, clammy base of her neck with my fingers as she deposited the contents of her stomach into the sink. I knew how her bones looked and how they felt shifting just below the skin.

  Whenever I had something nice to say about her or something mean, C would just shrug his shoulders and say I only thought that because we were too much alike. He had a chronic misunderstanding of me. B was fragile and sick and needed to be nursed. She looked underfed, she touched objects like someone who owned nothing in the world. Sympathy for her transported me out of myself, away from my own problems. She was cut to my shape and size like a trapdoor: similar enough that I could imagine myself into her, different enough to make that fantasy a form of escape.

  This morning, though, as I listened to her voice on the other side of the door, I wished that I had worked harder to have our differences. B missed me more the more I saw her. Under her scrutiny I felt the weight of my own presence constantly and grew tired, irritated by myself, so that day by day I waited a little longer before coming out of my room in the morning, trying to postpone reentering the construct of my life. Her affection created in me the wish that she would stop loving me, would leave me alone, would let me feel affection for her the way I did when she first moved in, harmless and sad, when I could feel generous for trying to think about why she was sad and come up with ways to make her happy.

  From the hallway outside my bedroom, her mouth close to the sliver of space between door and molding, B spoke—I wanted to make us some coffee, but we’re all out of coffee.

  —I need your help to figure out what kind of juice I should drink. What juice has the least free radicals? Does juice have lead in it?

  —Have you ever had one of those moles that sticks out? Can you feel with one of those moles that stick out? The way you feel with your fingers and other body parts?

  —I had a dream last night that we were both birds with their wings missing, but we helped each other escape from a box. When we escaped we were so happy we wanted to celebrate, but we couldn’t show it. We didn’t have limbs.

  THERE’S A COMMERCIAL ON TV where a woman using this new citrus-based facial scrub begins to scratch at the side of her face, discovering that it has edges, shriveled and curling slightly like old paper. Eyeing the camera, she grasps these edges and lifts up on them until she is peeling the whole surface of her face off with a filmy sound like plastic wrap unsticking from itself. Underneath is another face exactly like hers, but prettier. It’s younger and wearing better makeup. You’d think that she might want to stop here and start being happy with herself the way she newly is. But she doesn’t stop: instead, she clutches at the side of her face and begins to peel again, and this time the face underneath is even prettier and she’s smiling wildly at the camera, she’s so pleased. And she peels again, but this time what’s underneath is a video of the seashore crashing against a sandy beach, and her hand peels it all off again, and we stare into a deciduous forest filtered through by little blades of light and sunshine.

  Then she turns straight toward the camera and peels her face off from the opposite direction, and the face that’s underneath belongs to the company’s famous actress spokesperson. It’s been her voice all along telling us about the hydrating effects and natural ingredients, the way you’ll love yourself remade. She doesn’t ask what happened to the other woman, the woman who came before her. She smiles beautifully with her hard white teeth.

  Words appear on the screen: TRUBEAUTY. TRUSKIN. YOUR REAL SKIN IS WITHIN.

  B wanted to try the product out, she said you could buy it anywhere. But B hated to buy anything herself. She preferred to borrow from someone else, even though her parents had three cars and a horse and sent her checks every month for the rent. If I asked her why she was always trying to need more than she needed, she’d say that borrowing brought you closer to other people, while buying mostly made you lonelier. That was how I ended up going out with B to the all-night Wally’s Supermarket fifteen minutes away on a night when dozens of teenagers hung inexplicably around the parking lot, posed darkly like crows, staring and not saying a thing.

  There was no one inside the store except Wally employees in their weird uniforms: red polo shirt, khakis, and oversize foam head in the shape of the store’s teenage mascot. They seemed curious about us, or wary, or bored. As we wandered the aisles, I started to feel watched. There was a Wally about twenty feet behind me every time I looked back, sometimes rearranging product in the shelves, but sometimes just looking at me. I told B, but she was unfazed.

  “Sure they’re watching. They probably think you’re going to steal something,” she said.

  “Really?” I asked. I hadn’t known I was the type of person who could steal something.

  “It’s what they do,” she said. “But they’re dumb. I’m much more likely to steal than you.” She smiled sweetly at me: this was my best friend. Then I bought the face scrub for B to borrow, even though I was nervous about what it might do to me.

  When we got home I rubbed product all over my face and neck in the bathroom, feeling it froth away at my skin as B sat on the edge of the tub, taut and unblinking. When it was done I went to the mirror to see what I had become. I didn’t see the promised biotransformative subexfoliation, but I knew something had happened because my lips stung and I smelled like lemon-lime soda. B came over and placed a palm experimentally against one of my scrubbed cheeks, then the other, and asked me if I felt any different. I was in the middle of answering when I realized suddenly that she was not listening to me, was not even looking, was staring past me into the medicine cabinet mirror instead and touching the sides of her face, petting her cheek vacantly. She had something on her face that could be mistaken for a smile.

  FOUR DAYS A WEEK I went to work as a proofreader for a local company that produced several magazines and newsletters. I could choose any four days that I liked, but everything else was chosen for me. Although proofreader implies reading, what was expected of me was somewhat less: see that everything was punctuated, see that words were in a sensical place, but avoid trying to make sense of them—meaning was an obstacle to efficient proofing that my supervisors hoped I would avoid. I proofed everything that came through the office, so if there were errors in Marine Hobbyist or New Age Plastics, it was my fault for letting them through.

  Each morning I walked forty minutes to work along the side of the road, miles that could be driven in a few minutes. I passed eight gas stations and two different Wally’s Supermarkets, identical except for the garden center appended to the second one, a cordoned-off section of parking lot asphalt filled with pots of identically colored marigolds. On days when almost everyone was sick, I could have any cubicle I wanted, but I always chose my usual one, the one for freelancers. In the quiet of the empty office I could hear the slight hiss of air-conditioning coming through the vents. I felt that I was experiencing the world as only someone who did not exist in it could. There were three kinds of errors: of duplication, of substitution, of omission. By the time I got home, work seemed like a long, flat dream whose details I could not remember. I peeled the damp and dusty pants from my legs and lay on top of the bed, sweating. All I wanted to do was sleep.

  Last Thursday had passed like every other, except that I had taken a nap during my lunch break, crawling beneath the desk to sleep for thirty minutes on short, stiff, office carpeting. I came home still sleepy and collapsed on top of my bedding to take a second nap. I had been there only a few minutes when I heard a knocking at my door. Standing there was B with an excited look on her face, eyes big and wet, mouth drawn up at the corners. She looked like a person who had betrayed a secret. Her hands
clutched something dark. Against her thin white fingers, it looked like a coil of chain or a greased-down railroad spike—something old and exacting, designed to keep a thing in place.

  “I was sleeping,” I said.

  “Do you want this,” she responded.

  Her voice angled down as though it weren’t a question but a fact that she was only repeating. She thrust her hands forward slightly.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  What I saw in her grip as I looked closer was a two-foot-long cord of human hair: dark, thick, and braided. The braid traveled from her hands to mine, and then there was a sudden softness against my skin that I hadn’t prepared for. She had given it over the way you’d hand off a baby, supporting both ends with cupped hands, shifting it gently into my grasp. I was confused, I still didn’t understand what was happening, and I couldn’t tell whether the thing I saw in my hands was dense or light, dry or moist. In my hands the braid lay soft and motile, limp and invertebrate. I looked down. It hung heavy, but with an active tension, a nervous cord sagging slightly in its middle where there was nothing to support it. The hair had a sad look, naked and lonely, gleaming with oily light. It was tied off at both ends with two pink rubber bands.

  “It’s yours,” she said. “I mean, it’s yours now. I just did it.”

  “You did this . . . ,” I said, trailing off.

  “I did it for you,” B said, smiling the beautiful smile of a deaf child. “What I mean is, I wanted to do it and I didn’t know why until I thought of you. You always look so okay. You don’t have pounds of hair hanging from the top of you. I’m already feeling better, clearer. My thoughts are louder.”

  I looked at her head.

  Hair had always been our way of telling ourselves apart. Mine went down to the shoulders, dark like hers, but finer and softer. Hers went feet farther, brushing the small of her back. B used to have Disney princess hair, hair with a life and directionality of its own, separate from the movements of its host body. She used to sling it over her shoulder and pet it like a cat, her face shrunken underneath. Now she stood in my doorway giving off a weird confidence, eyes blunt. With hair cropped to her shoulders, she reminded me of times when I had seen myself reflected in imperfect surfaces, in the windows of shops or cars.