I thought of sending him something explicit. Something I’d like to do with him. But in all honesty all I really wanted to do was stay here in bed until everything changed around me. Besides which, it was a challenge for me to compose erotic messages. I always got lost in the parts of speech: if I wanted something involving one particular part of his body, I had trouble not using the preposition “with,” telling him to do something “with” it, or else I would be telling him to “put” it someplace. Both structures made the part eerily passive, something he could pick up and set down and use or not use, like a hammer or a telephone. The same thing happened when he talked about things he would do to a particular part of my body: the body that emerged from his description seemed to have only three or four parts, linked hazily by what I would assume was more body. Talking about my body in any way took me apart. Afterward I would lie still and try to put myself back together, naming the parts one by one silently, in order, beginning with the small bones of the foot.
Then there was describing the deixis of the thing through prepositions and directionality: inside me was in, up, deep, down, farther, through—contradicting directions that didn’t seem to add up to one whole person operating in space, much less two. I always had to think about the planar orientation of my body—was I vertical or horizontal? “Put it all the way across.”
In watching porn and listening carefully to what the people on-screen were saying as they did the things they were doing, I had come to understand that the only stable point of orientation was the stomach. Even though they never mentioned it explicitly in their porn talk, all the ins and ups and downs and deeps seemed to indicate a line cutting through the vagina, through the uterus, and right into the center of the body, which also happened to be the center of digestion. This center seemed to be where everyone wanted things to go, deeper and deeper to the innermost point, where they could finally rest.
I rolled over in bed and sent C a text message: I’m starving!
Then I rolled onto my back and stared up at the ceiling. I had at least one eye, pointing straight upward. From this perspective it was easy to pretend that all things were in a state of perfect stillness. If something in the world had moved or acted, then its action would have affected something else, which in turn would be compelled to react. Its reaction, an action upon things other than itself, would cause other reactions that would change the states of other things, a domino effect that would eventually topple something in my visual field, which consisted solely of ceiling. As the ceiling remained the same, so must everything else. That, or the ceiling was shifting but my eyes were not, would never be, sharp enough to perceive it.
I got C’s reply after a few minutes. Eat something from the kitchen, it read.
B would be out in the kitchen or just near it, maybe watching for me, maybe waiting to make me do something. I didn’t know how to tell C that I was afraid to leave this room and step out into the other parts of the house. I didn’t know how to say I was afraid of diluting myself if I encountered B in this fuzzy state, where she resembled me more than I did myself. A woman’s body never really belongs to herself. As an infant, my body was my mother’s, a detachable extension of her own, a digestive passage clamped and unclamped from her body. My parents would watch over it, watch over what went in and out of it, and as I grew up I would be expected to carry on their watching by myself. Then there was sex, and a succession of years in which I trawled my body along behind me like a drift net, hoping that I wouldn’t catch anything in it by accident, like a baby or a disease. I had kept myself free of these things only through clumsy accident and luck. At rare and specific moments when my body was truly my own, I never knew what to do with it.
I picked at a patch of loose skin on my foot, a whitish patch lifting up from the substrate. It must have loosened while I was walking. Tugging on it, I felt the skin pull on my foot, but nothing from the patch itself. It was already leaving me. If I could look into my insides and poke at them, see them day after day, have control over their color and texture, maybe then I’d feel close to the pounds and pounds of matter that lived within me, in my blind spot. Until then, the outer layer would be the innermost part of me, the thing that would evacuate me if stolen, the absolute core.
HOURS LATER, MY PHONE BUZZED. It was C. His message read: Did you eat something yet?
The eggy white of the ceiling was growing grayer all the time. Its nullness was more difficult to see, though there was as much of it. Ted Hartwell, Matt Skofield, Dennis Galp. Had they felt like this before they felt like disappearing; had they stared at their walls for hours, hoping for something to change? A span in my stomach registered discomfort: it ached first like an absence, next like a stone. It read as a trembling, a shiver without the cold, and then as a solid, a sluggish setting of the soft squish in my middle. It was hunger, I thought. It changed in quality as it changed in quantity: it seemed hunger was a tiered thing, a mountain rising to a peak, and each new altitude would be different from the last. Even though a portion of myself was interested in this, interested in climbing to the top of this hunger and discovering what it felt like at its end, it was a normal human life that I was living, and that meant continuing to eat, eating with no end in sight. I got up to go quickly to the kitchen and grab something whole and bring it back to my room to eat it there, alone. If I moved quickly and quietly, B might miss me entirely.
In the kitchen I grabbed an orange and a piece of string cheese and two energy bars specially formulated for women to eat; they were full of folic acid and had a round, feminine shape. Then I heard a noise from behind me. It was a small urgency, like the sputter of a motor the size of someone’s pocket, but it was so close. I expected to see B standing there with something aimed at my head, an electric toothbrush, maybe, or a drill. But there was nobody behind me and nothing really except a window with the curtain still hanging before it, and from the curtain the sound of that little motor going and going and stopping and then going and going. I walked toward it, still thinking of that blank space behind the back of my head that I couldn’t see or protect. When I moved the curtain, there was a pause. And then a dragonfly, beating itself against the screen over and over, whirring like a thing made of feathery gears. Musical sounds came from the surface as it struck the screen, buzzing and chiming, close enough to my face that I could see the smooth panels of its body.
The dragonflies I knew lived only for a few weeks out of the summer and were lazy, hanging still in the air four or five feet above anybody’s head before gliding to the next stopping point. This one was desperate, and though it looked sturdy, something so small and living couldn’t be designed to outlast that sort of wear, repetitive and dumb. I put my finger on the screen where it seemed to be aiming and the sounds paused. I heard the breeze rush around in the quiet. Then the small crashes began again, a few inches below my fingertip. It was easier to watch insects trapped indoors, on their way to a frantic death, than it was to watch this one killing itself to get in. There was nothing for it in here. In here it would die. As soon as it was inside, it would understand it had to get out.
Feet shuffled across the kitchen tile. I turned around and it was B standing there with a cup in her hand, the prettiest one we had, made of thick blue glass. Her face was stark without makeup on, full of peaks and valleys. Her eyes had a hungry look.
“Are you ready?” she asked.
“This dragonfly is beating itself against the window,” I said.
She looked at it blankly.
“I think it’s going to die,” I explained.
“Then we should do it in another room, I guess?” she said.
I stood there looking at the window and then at the food in my hands. The orange was sweating condensation from the refrigerator. Oranges “breathe” even after they are picked. Torn from their branch, they continue to take in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide through their skin like small, hard, naked lungs.
“I don’t feel very well,” I said.
B l
ooked at me and then she sat down. She seemed to collapse slightly as I watched her, her shoulders slouching forward, caving her chest.
“Look,” she said. “I know it’s not going to look perfect. I’m not going to be mad at you if it doesn’t look right or if I don’t look exactly the way you look. I know it’s not easy to do things with my face. I know that I have weird proportions, and a big nose, and a big forehead. It’s irreparable. That’s why I’ve always been so scared of putting makeup on, that I’d do all that work and end up looking like myself, exactly like myself but with things smeared on me. I just want to try it this once and I don’t know how to do it myself. I’ll probably look awful,” she said.
She was rubbing her thumb hard against the side of the cup like someone trying to rub the prints off her own fingertips.
If you were a person, you were supposed to want to be a better person. Better people had a surplus of themselves that they were willing to give away, something they could separate out and detach. In me the portions only separated, pulling apart and waiting there for something to happen. I could see what it was that I could give B, but I couldn’t really give it. In fact, I wanted to keep it for myself, to take it and run. All around me, people were giving feelings and help to one another all the time, as if it were the only thing to do. And I watched these exchanges like a dead thing, a thing sealed off perfectly, a room with no holes in or out.
“You’ll look great,” I said. The light from the living room lamps felt warm and prickly next to me. “You look great,” I said.
She seemed like she wanted to smile. Her face bunched and crinkled around the eyes. I looked back at the window where the screen sat open to the night air, and I saw nothing, heard nothing.
THE MIRROR IN MY BEDROOM showed the two of us side by side. All I said was that I didn’t want to talk. “I don’t want to get distracted,” I said, and she nodded the way I was sure she would have nodded to anything I said then—worried, but with some potential for happiness hidden within. I did the foundation for her skin, which was the same color as mine. It was a color called bisque, the word for clay in its first stage of firing, hard, dry, unglazed, unfinished. It was also the word for a kind of soup made from the roasted husks of things. The makeup changed the face without changing it at all, it seemed only to restore to it an evenness that it had always held underneath, an even surface without pock or worry. The better person hidden inside the real person.
I wanted to be gone, to be by myself, to be with C, but instead I held still and reminded myself that this impression of uncovering a face was exactly as real as the fact that I was covering up a face at the same time. It was like the optical illusion where you see the vase and the two faces in the same image, but you can’t see them both at once.
The single image splits into two, which occupy the same space without sharing it. Or maybe it’s the opposite: the two objects find themselves in shared space, and the thought of one after the other in the mind of the viewer’s eye, vase face vase face vase face vase face, makes them grow together. The two words even begin to sound alike, like the same words spoken in the mouths of two people from different, distant places. I poured makeup on a white foam sponge so that it looked like a little puddle of skin suspended on nothingness, and then I dabbed it against her cheek over and over again. I dabbed it against her cheek, and then I did smooth, long strokes. I left skin-colored streaks that vanished a little more with every stroke. She was disappearing, or reappearing, or appearing for the first time, whatever.
I had covered all the spots, and now, when I looked at it, her face had the texture of a piece of pottery. I saw pores only when I leaned in close to the nose, where they appeared as tiny skin-colored mounds rising out of little sloping craters. People were such fragile things: they existed only from a certain angle, at a certain scale and spacing. Forget where to stand and you’d lose them completely. From this distance she didn’t resemble me much, though she didn’t exactly resemble herself, either. I rubbed at the edge of her jaw to blend the makeup. Then I did the lips. I used the things I had around, without wiping them off: my own lip balm, gooey and flavored like an orange Creamsicle, a lipstick that I wore a lot and had worn down to a flat, wet-sheened plateau with half a rim on it. I dabbed the color on with my fingertip, the padded part, poking at her lower lip and watching it spring back up. It was just like painting a portrait of myself, I thought, onto the face of another person.
I remembered one summer that I spent at my aunt’s house when I was younger, middle school, maybe. My aunt spent most of her day doing embroidery while her husband was at work, sitting in front of the TV and watching movies on mute. The movies were action films, thrillers, things that she and my uncle had originally bought for their son to watch. She didn’t pay much attention to the story line; the movies were a type of home decor, a device casting light and movement. I would walk through the living room on the way to somewhere else and see the warm yellow glow of an on-screen explosion playing off her smooth, serene face.
One of the movies she put on involved two men who were hardly ever pictured in the same frame. One was squarish and broad, the other angular and hawklike. The squarish man was seen in an office and then in a sort of hospital room. The angular man was pacing around a tarmac. Then the angular man was waking up and walking around. Then the square-jawed man was waking up. They both seemed to chase something, separately, using many different kinds of vehicles—planes, cars, boats. I understood it as some sort of story where two men competed to be the first to capture some unspecified thing they both wanted. Years later, C told me that it was actually a movie about identity theft. One of the men had swapped appearances with the other, then the other swapped appearances with the first. Then they worked to undo each other. C said that I should have picked up on the identity swap by noticing that the square man’s body language was initially heroic and then became sneaky and aggressive, while the angular man’s body language began sneaky and turned heroic. I told him that it would be nice if we could all think that way, but in actual life we were supposed to recognize a person in spite of their mannerisms rather than because of them. We were supposed to trust the similarity of their face in the moment to the face we remembered. “Otherwise,” I said, “I would treat you like a stranger every time your mood changed.” C had just looked at me for a while, seeming confused, not saying anything at all.
I held B’s smallish face in my hands and I gripped her chin a little harder than I had to because I could get away with it, I was making her so happy right now. Before there were mirrors or cameras to allow you to face yourself, you had to see yourself through other people. I tried to think that I was painting a picture of my face on hers so that I could see myself better. See myself filled out rather than flattened, see myself as C saw me. I wasn’t losing anything or giving myself away, I was just expanding, becoming more, many, like the television image and its occupation of all those otherwise empty screens. The image I thought of as mine sitting on the surface of her skin would absorb her to me and I might know what it was like to be myself outside of myself, for once. To see a part of myself that I could observe and recognize, but which transmitted no feelings. A numbed-out limb that could do what it did without me.
I was still hungry, and the tips of my fingers trembled against her skin as I did the thick black line on the eyelid. I hoped that I’d mess it up, but I had no practice doing anything other than trying to make it perfect and the same each time, so it was the same. And as I saw the face take shape, I felt less and less bothered on my own behalf. I felt more like some entirely other person, a casual spectator. There was a flat pleasure in seeing it unfold from this angle, this image that was pleasing to me, so pleasing to me that I had chosen it ten years ago and repeated it upon myself pretty much ever since. As I worked, I tried to find every one of the ways in which our faces differed: the slight cleft in her chin, the widening of her nose at its tip, the mole on her lower lip that looked like a small wart. Now I just sort of let g
o, and I thought about how different it was to see this image so clearly, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It felt like it used to feel to watch myself put on makeup, before it became a thing my hands did almost without me. When I did the dot of silvery stuff at the inner corners, I was done. I turned around to look at us in the mirror.
“It looks so good,” B said, her eyes opening wide.
It did look good. Her eyes looked huge, her mouth smaller and more precise. I had buffed away the dark circles and the random mole. The dark around the eyes distracted from their anxious expression and made her less like prey, more like a predator. She was smiling now, and this changed her face dramatically. It put shadows under her cheekbones and lines around her mouth. She looked like the girls on TV commercials, thrilled at the condition of their outsides.
“You look beautiful,” I said. “You’re a babe.”
I was feeling like I had a surplus, B blinked at me, silent.
You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine Page 7
