You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

by Alexandra Kleeman

  I hopped up onto a folding table and watched the clothes jump up toward the top of the chamber and fall back to the bottom, over and over again. C was looking back toward the counter. “Do you think I should get another hot dog?” he asked.

  I felt grossed out. “I’ll probably be hungry after we’re done with this,” I said, hoping that we could go someplace after. I was hungry now, but I didn’t want to deal with C making me eat one of those hot dogs or explaining why I didn’t want to or what I had been eating the past few days with B.

  “Yeah, still,” he said, “that’ll probably be forty minutes or more from now, I don’t know if I’ll make it.” He looked toward the girl at the counter and then walked up, ordered another hot dog, choked it down effortfully while checking his phone with the other hand.

  All of the machines at the Laundromat were full, even though the place was almost empty. Pale-colored fabric spun around endlessly, and from the look of the sudsless water it seemed as though the machines had been running for some time. I took out my phone and checked to see if C was doing anything on his phone that I could see on mine, but he wasn’t. The older women read magazines or stared. The girl behind the counter unwrapped a package of chewing gum. On the TV screen mounted to the ceiling, the woman stood proudly next to her husband, whose thick, cakey makeup made them look weirdly similar.

  C came back and leaned against the folding table. “That was the right decision,” he said happily.

  “Good,” I said. I was looking across the room at a stack of folded white sheets three feet high. Next to it was a shorter stack, crisp and folded. There were dozens and dozens of sheets there, all carefully arranged, all of a blank, silky white.

  “What do you think all those sheets are for?” I asked.

  C looked over.

  “Probably for the normal reasons,” he said. “What do you mean?”

  “I saw something weird the other day,” I said.

  C turned toward me, still doing something on his phone.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “I was watching from the roof,” I began. “The people across the street came home in the middle of the afternoon, which never happens. They went into their house for a while, maybe five minutes. A short while, like they already had everything prepared. Then when they came back out, they were all wearing white sheets with holes cut out for their eyes, like cheap ghost costumes. It looked really sloppy, the eyeholes didn’t even fit right on their heads. Then they got in their car and drove away, and they haven’t been back since.”

  “What happened to their dog?” C asked. “The loud dog?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve been listening and I never hear it anymore.

  “I listen all day long,” I added, more or less to myself.

  “You’re sure they haven’t been back?” he asked, typing what I thought looked like a reply into his phone and pressing send. His face was smooth like a sheet.

  “Well, not while I was home,” I said, sounding defensive, though I wasn’t sure why. “Obviously I haven’t been home for a few hours,” I said.

  “Okay,” C said thoughtfully, as though he had made a decision. He put his phone in his pocket and pulled himself up to a standing position. “You’re a sensitive person, you saw something weird, you feel spooked. No pun intended. There are plenty of reasons why what you saw might have happened, and some of them are weird. But some of them are just boring. You know? That family could have been going to some kind of school pageant. Or a birthday party. So you can just ask yourself: Do I live in a weird town, or a boring town?”

  I blinked at him.

  “I’d say boring,” he added, nodding and then raising both eyebrows expectantly.

  I loved his face, his bland white good-looking face. I believed in him and therefore in the boringness of my town. C was good at handling me. He made things suddenly, instantaneously normal, just by explaining them. He was like a magnifying glass, I only had to look through him to see the world in crisp detail. And he had a really nice smile and good teeth. They were so good that he had probably had braces once, and a retainer, and maybe even headgear. I saw him standing in the middle of a sunlit field, a child with a baseball bat in his hand and a mouth full of metal. Beneath a huge blue sky, he wheeled around on the grass, swinging his bat at butterflies. It was a scene so normal, it felt capable of infecting the neighboring parts of my mind, making me normal in turn. I smiled.

  We stood around waiting for the clothes to dry, checking every couple of minutes, and when they were dry enough C dumped them into a wheeled bin that he rolled over to the folding table, where we turned item after item of rumpled clothing into neat little rectangles. C’s shirts were old and soft with nonsense slogans on them; there were three or four button-ups and a few pairs of pants. The older women had been replaced by other older women, similarly dressed but at the beginning of their laundering process, pouring capfuls of detergent, unloading jumbles of colorful things, and putting them into the washers. C piled his folded clothes back into the laundry bag and hoisted it over his shoulder. “Ready?” he asked, heading for the door.

  I followed him out, but when I looked back from the doorway I saw an old woman, one of the ones who sat around the Laundromat all day watching the little ceiling-mounted TV and sucking on fruit-flavored hard candies. Sometimes for a few bucks she did other people’s laundry. Right now she was standing, holding up a white sheet, unfurled, and it was perfectly normal except for two holes that could be draped over the eyes.

  I HAD STARTED DATING C a couple of years ago, during the fall when fathers began vanishing from out of their comfortable, middle-class homes. For the first few weeks, local newscasters read out the list of the newly vanished each night along with the location in which they were last seen, and it sounded as if they were reading from a master catalog of legitimate, reasonable names, names like “Peter” and “Steve.” Ted Hartwell, Matt Skofield, Dennis Galp. None of them knew one another, and there was nothing to link them except that they were all equally average. Telephone poles and store windows went white with flyers depicting men in interchangeable hairstyles, clad in polo shirts, all traces of fun leached from their faces long ago. They wore confused expressions in the pictures selected by their family members, as if none of their kin had cared to warn them that photographs were going to be taken. Their confusion made it seem as though they had been lost for a long time, much longer than they had been gone.

  The news anchors called it “Disappearing Dad Disorder.” For months nobody knew where the dads had gone, whether they had been stolen or had stolen themselves, victims of self-napping. Then last January dads started turning up, one by one. Good Samaritans found them wandering dazed in shopping malls five towns over, malls that were not their own but resembled their own to an uncanny degree. They would return to familiar stores like the Gap and try to buy khakis with little scraps of paper that they had collected from obscure places. They sat on the mall benches and closed their eyes, waiting for someone to claim them. Often they wore clothes identical to the ones they had disappeared in, identical but fresh smelling, as if they had been laundered or even bought new in the same sizes and colors. They were confused and quiet, preferring to stare off into the distance or fiddle with a key chain instead of engaging with those around them, those who asked them gently: Are you lost? Is your family looking for you? Do you have a number we can call? When questioned about their disappearance, whether they left or had been taken, who had taken them, did they remember his face, height, manner of dress, was it someone they knew from work, from home, from the bowling league, from the auto repair shop, was it many people, an organization, a religious group, a band of criminals, a league of sexual predators, the missing dads reproduced, with slight variations in phrasing, a single sentence: Sometimes you’ve just got to be content with things the way they are.

  The emptiness of C’s apartment reminded me of those missing fathers. The place was nice the way car dealerships are nice: clean
, spacious, cold, and full of light. He owned two of the same self-assembled couches and three identical self-assembled end tables, the cheapest model they made. They were all arranged in his living room, the couches side by side gaplessly and facing forward to the television set, the end tables pushed together in front of them to form a single, long, low table from which you could eat food if you hunched over and lowered your jaw almost to your knees. From the door, you could see the living room, kitchen, and a chunk of bedroom splayed before you like a blueprint of someplace an engineer had once thought might be all right to live in. I took a few steps forward and the bedroom came into view, a full-sized mattress on the floor with navy-blue sheets and a wad of comforter. Next to it, a laptop blinked drowsily.

  “Did you just move in?” I asked, hoping that he had.

  C laughed. “People always ask that. I’ve been living here two years. Two and a half, really,” he added.

  “Where do you keep your things?” I asked, and he gestured all around us.

  C did graphic design for a small advertising agency, but this had almost nothing to do with his life. He left for work around eight thirty or nine in the morning and returned unchanged, with few memories of where he had been. If I asked about his work, he seemed surprised to be reminded of it, then annoyed. “If you want to talk about dead-end jobs,” he’d say sometimes, “why don’t you talk about your own?” and I would respond to this by saying nothing at all. I pictured him as a hot-air balloon, saggy and bright, tethered to the earth by three or four flimsy ropes. The person who lived in this bare, depressing, anonymously furnished apartment was about one taut rope from falling off the face of the earth, I decided.

  “Are you one of those people who acts normal, but is secretly about to chuck their lives and disappear?” I asked. If that were the case, I wasn’t going to waste my time getting to know him. I knew that we’d be dating for a while, at least, when he laughed several times, loudly, and kissed me for what was then the third or fourth time ever.

  “Yeah, right. No way. Neither are you,” he said. “I’ve seen that on TV, those dads, and it is nuts. No way. Everything’s worked out great for me since whenever, I don’t have any plans to make it complicated. Besides, I’m attached to my material goods.”

  What material goods? I wondered. Then I followed the arc of his arm pointing to a location across the room. He had been referring to his collection of DVDs, heaps of horror and comedy and porn, stacked together in a pile the size of a small love seat.

  In the cold of C’s apartment, we had just finished folding the laundry.

  “Can we do something?” I asked.

  C looked at me mildly.

  “Like what?” he said.

  I looked around us.

  I went to C’s kitchen and stood staring at the open cupboards that held his library of canned goods. He had cooked beans flavored with pig fat, different soups and stews, vegetables—corn off the cob, chopped green beans, carrots sliced into bright orange circles. There were peaches and pears in syrup and, toward the back of the cupboard, canned meats with labels obscured by shadow. Blocky squares of skin-colored food on their printed labels were visible through gaps between the small towers of cans. I was impressed by how well the cans stacked together: they fit to each other the way I wished I fit to the things around me. And there were cans of fruit cocktail with peeled grapes, canned peas, Porkpot Chili, and an off-brand noodle-and-meat-sauce product that had a picture of tomatoes on its label, but no tomatoes listed in the ingredients. There were cans of tuna and cans of olives and pineapple and also mandarin oranges suspended in sugary water, the little naked pieces jostling up together in the perfect dark of the can, curled fetally against one another.

  “Do you have anything fresh?” I called out to C, who was already sitting in front of the TV in the other room.

  “All that stuff is fresh,” C said. “And it lasts for one to five years,” he added.

  I didn’t think I could stand to eat any of it. I imagined opening a can and putting a forkful into my mouth, and I knew, whatever it was, it would be soft and yielding and would disintegrate as I pushed it around with my tongue. I wanted to eat something real and living, something tough with life. I wanted to destroy it with my teeth. I wanted it to be veal. I wished that I had eaten one of the gross hot dogs earlier, but it was too late for that. I heard a smattering of crunching sounds from the TV over in the other room.

  “You’re missing Shark Week,” C shouted.

  I went over and got under the blanket with him. I tucked my feet in under his thighs and looked where he was looking.

  On TV, the sharks ate through a goose and a school of sardines. They ate a belly-up humpback whale that had died partway through its migration, and when it died it had rolled over and slid up to the surface of the sea, a glistening red exposure rising toward the sun and quick spoilage. Under the rows of sharp teeth, the whale came apart as if it were made of wet paper, sloughing wads of sodden crimson that slid into the water with a liquid sound. The sharks ate seals, and other things by accident—driftwood, garbage, people. The lesson was that sharks were made to eat things. Nothing else had the immense hunger of a shark, and nothing else could back that hunger up with such efficient action. It was so beautiful that I felt like I wanted to be a part of it, though I knew it would be impossible for me to ever become a shark.

  At the commercial break, there was an ad for Kandy Kakes. In this commercial, Kandy Kat faces off against his longtime nemesis Kandy Klown, a bulbous, Santa-shaped figure who consumes Kandy Kakes like it’s the simplest thing in the world, like it’s all he can do. He makes it look easy. The Klown is walking around, left leg, then right leg, slowly articulating full circles in the air, the two round hemispheres of his belly bobbing up and down alternatingly, bobbing in rhythm with the smooth fall of his feet. As he walks, the little Kandy Kakes on their tiny legs trot over to him and form a patient little queue scurrying alongside. Now the first one runs forward with a sudden burst of speed and hops straight into the Klown’s mouth. Its body is a cheery little lump visible in the Klown’s profile. Then the next one runs up and hops in, then another. Slack-jawed and dark, the Klown’s mouth is the exact shape and dimension of the Kandy Kakes that slide through it so smoothly.

  All of a sudden we see Kandy Kat some distance away, watching this scene unfold through binoculars. His jaw hangs open, and out comes some drooly fluid. He turns away from the scene and grabs his head in anguish, then his stomach in anguish, the stomach distended and throbbing through the thin cover of skin. Suddenly he has an idea and rushes off-screen. We hear the sound of metal, rubber, cloth in motion, and when he runs back on-screen, he’s dressed like a Klown. He’s got the white face painted on, the ridiculous red nose, the floppy polka-dotted hat pulled over his ragged ears. With the sharp nozzle of a bicycle pump through his belly, he inflates himself until he rolls, lolling like a moored boat. He runs to the Kandy Kakes gathering and strikes a Klownish pose, arms out and swaying, listing slightly from side to side. The Kandy Kakes turn and for a moment they seem to be considering it. Kandy Kat’s big eyes grow wet and you can see he is full of hope, you can see it like you see the heart pounding inside the little cage of his body. A dry red tongue slowly rolls out of his mouth.

  Then they decide. As if they are a single body, a single mind, they fall upon him. They fall upon him with their small, sharp mouths, swarming his bony frame, covering it completely, bending it beneath their weight as the Klown watches a few feet over. They tear at his costume, little bits of it are flying everywhere, and we hear a dozen wacky sproingy noises while the voice-over announces:

  KANDY KAKES. WE KNOW WHO YOU REALLY ARE.

  I noticed that I had been sitting with my nails pressing into my knee, and as I pulled the hands away I saw ten little semicircular segments dug in, each one a purply blue. It was like discovering that I was filled with something totally different from everyone else, a dark and dislikable substance, and I had let a bit of it seep up
for the first time. So I turned to C and asked, experimentally:

  “Do you think we look alike? B and me?”

  “Well, if I had to describe you and her with words,” he began cautiously, “I guess they might be the same words.” He frowned at the screen, which was now advertising toilet paper, miles and miles of toilet paper wrapping all around a cartoon world. “If I had to use words,” he added.

  He was still looking at the screen, looking as if he were waiting for something to show up on it and save him from whatever my next question might be.

  “Do you know she cut her hair?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s summer. It’s terrible,” he said, toggling the volume on the TV set up and down and then up again.

  “It looks just like mine now from behind,” I said.

  “Well, honestly,” he said. “Lots of girls look the same from behind.

  “People, I mean,” he said sheepishly.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Like her,” he said, indicating someone on-screen in what looked like a tampon commercial. “I bet she looks like you from behind.”

  The slogan to that Kandy Kakes advertisement was off somehow. We know who you really are. It failed to sell anything, it wasn’t friendly, it sounded more like a threat than a promise. But then again, maybe it was a promise made to the worthy, that they alone would have all the Kandy Kakes they desired. Or a promise to those eating Kandy Kakes, that they would become good people, worthy of eating the things they had eaten. Either way, I realized I felt hungry. Or to be precise, I wanted to take something into my mouth and destroy it there.

  “You know what I want?” I said a little too loudly. “I want a Kandy Kake.”

  “They’re gross,” he said.

  His face brightened suddenly and he leaned in toward the TV. From the edge of my vision I could see a frenzy of different blues and greens, creatures the color of the sea testing their teeth against one another.