You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

by Alexandra Kleeman

  “Are you feeling good?” I asked C, rubbing my cheek against his shoulder.

  “Sure,” he said pleasantly, as though I had offered him a cookie. “Why not.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “You know what I mean,” he replied.

  SEX USUALLY LEFT ME FEELING calm for at least a couple of hours, but I hadn’t been feeling much calmness recently. At least it still distracted me from what was going on at home. Ever since I had gone to the house across the street I had been trying to get back there, but it never felt safe. B with her new face was louder, and more curious, too. She looked at you longer and harder. When I slid my shoes on in my room and B heard the sound of my heels, she’d call out from wherever she was in the apartment. She’d ask me where I was going. She’d ask me what I was going to do. She’d ask me if I wanted to watch some TV. All I could do was slip my shoes off silently and creep back over to my bed, where I’d lie facedown on the mattress and look out across the street, thinking about how much easier it would be to have fewer things to think about, or no things at all.

  B seemed so different from the shy girl who had moved in. With the B I had gotten used to, everything you uncovered about her was hard-won, from what she liked to read to whom she had a crush on in grade school. You had to dig it out of her gently, through a combination of offhand questions and calculated fun. But she was different after I started dating C. I had found her waiting for me in the stairwell the morning after the first night I spent at his house. She had been smoking cigarettes, the used-up butts were lined up next to her purposefully. “I was worried about you,” she said as I walked up. I said I was sorry. I was standing there with stringy hair and most of my eyeliner rubbed off, and I smelled funny. I looked like I had been reshelved. B would usually have left it there, waiting for me to suggest something fun to do, but this time she kept looking at me. “No,” she said decisively. “I’m happy that you’re happy. I want to be out there too, I just don’t know how to do it. You’ll show me how,” she said.

  Then she stood up suddenly, stubbed her cigarette out on the steps, and placed the longer, half-smoked piece in its proper place within the line. She said she wanted to show me something. I followed her up to the second floor, where the door to our apartment was already open wide. “It’s in my bedroom,” she said, beginning to sound excited. Our apartment smelled like cigarettes and Pine-Sol; the two scents sickeningly blended. B pushed open the door to her room and pointed at something that I couldn’t see from the doorway. I trailed in behind her and saw. What B had pointed at and was pointing at still was a portrait of her ex-boyfriend, painfully detailed and done all in graphite pencil. His face was chiseled and hard, as if there were stone bedded just under the skin. His mouth had a mean shape and a smoothness that made you want to reach out and touch the paper. B had made his face twenty percent larger than it would have been in real life, large enough that even the smallest features of his face, the specks of stubble and small moles, seemed aggressive. His face inflicted itself on you, it was almost too handsome to bear.

  “How did you do this?” I said.

  “I drew it,” said B. “I had to use memory, we didn’t take any pictures.”

  “Did you do this for art class?” I asked.

  “I haven’t done anything for my art class,” she said.

  B was looking impatient.

  “Well,” she said, “do you think I should destroy it?”

  “Why would you ever do that?” I asked.

  Her drawing was better than any other thing I had ever done.

  “I should stop pining,” she said simply.

  But I wasn’t sure I wanted to see what happened when she was no longer fixating on her ex and her ex alone. All that time she spent searching out new information about him on the Internet, the energy she sank into watching over where he shopped for groceries, whose parties he went to, which girls he talked to and for how long. I didn’t think I wanted that loose energy coming into contact with C. I looked at her and said: “No, it’s beautiful. You need to keep it. You should show it to him and see what he says. Don’t give up.”

  B looked hesitant.

  “That last time we were over there, when he attacked us with the soda?” she said. “He texted me after and said next time he’d call the cops. I think he was serious. I’ve seen him call the cops six or seven times. I was there when he called the cops on his ex. They broke up, but he found out that she was still living in this shed in his backyard.”

  “Don’t give up,” I said to her. I sounded confident.

  ON TV, A LATE NIGHT host was interviewing Jonathan Winker, a DDD victim who had recently returned himself to his own life. Winker, a round-faced man in a plaid shirt buttoned up to the neck, sat across from the host, whose comically large desk seemed to be made of several different kinds of wood. So, Jonathan, buddy—is it good to be back? asked the host. The audience laughed. Well, said Jonathan, initially, no. The audience laughed again. I don’t know if you’ve ever had amnesia, Jonathan continued, but it is really a doozy. Imagine if a bunch of strangers surrounded you while you were eating a hot dog at the Freezy King in the mall, and they started grabbing you and they wanted to take you home. And, like, you looked around at all the other people sitting in the food court, and they were looking back at you like they were very specifically not going to help? And then a policeman came and told you that even though you were scared, and hungry, and all you wanted was to stay near the Freezy King where it was safe, you had to go with these noisy new people, because they were your family? The audience laughed.

  Jonathan’s eyes were tiny as he spoke. Well, let’s just say I’m in a better place now, he said. The host kicked back in his swiveling office chair, then lurched forward to lean conspiratorially over the desk toward Jonathan. And why is that, friend? asked the host, smiling out at the cameras and then turning his face back toward his guest. I’ve really turned it around, Jonathan said proudly. I was given some reading material that explained to me what exactly my problem was. My body was rejecting the falsity that had infected my life, I was trying to eject it, like the immune system does, only I didn’t know enough to tell which parts were false and which were true. So that’s what I’ve been working on. The host nodded mildly toward him. I found religion, Jonathan said, grinning.

  I looked over at C, who had emptied two whole cans of syruped mandarin oranges into a red plastic bowl and was stirring them with a spoon. In the teeming red bowl, the little orange segments looked like the bodies of dozens of sugary, gelatinous shrimp. “Does this need condiments?” he asked. I couldn’t tell if he was talking to me or to himself.

  “You know,” I said, “I forgot to tell you. B didn’t just cut her hair. After she cut it, she gave it to me. This whole thick rope of it. I have it in my room. It’s creepy. It’s the size of my arm.”

  “That’s interesting,” said C. “What does it feel like?”

  “It feels weird,” I said. “It feels like she’s trying to turn me into her. Like she’s slowly going to start shifting her stuff into my room and taking my things into hers. Like I’m going to wake up with a wig made of her hair taped to my head or something. And even though it’s clearly not normal, I know if I try to talk about it, she’ll just find a way to make me feel bad for something, like she has to do it because I’m not there for her.”

  “I meant how does it feel to hold. The hair,” C said.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “What?” he said. “There are no wrong questions.”

  “Don’t you think that’s a really weird thing to do?” I asked.

  “I was just trying to be an interested listener,” he said affably.

  We were silent for several moments. On TV, a commercial for a dessert-flavored toothpaste that came in lemon meringue pie and chocolate pudding flavors. Shouldn’t the last thing you taste at night be the sweetest thing? asks a motherly voice that is also straining to sound somewhat naughty.

  “You’re a great listen
er,” I said. “I meant, don’t you think B is behaving weirdly? I mean, who gives someone a part of their body as a gift?”

  “Oh,” he said. “I think a lot of relationships with females have weirdness built into them. Like with mothers. And sisters, and friends. In that way, weirdness is normal. So what’s happening is normal.

  “Also, the Victorians,” C added. “They used to give hair and nail clippings as mementos. And also Catholic saints.

  “This is about how you relate to the world,” C said.

  “Maybe it’s about how the world relates to me,” I said back.

  “Let’s not have a fight,” he said.

  I said: “Okay.”

  C shoveled his spoon into the bowl of syrupy fruit. It made a wet, nuzzling sound. He dug up a spoonful and extended it toward my mouth, as though I were an infant. The tip of the spoon butted against my closed lips. After a few moments he shrugged and stuck the heaping bite into his face. He chewed and I heard the little mushy bodies break against his teeth. He swallowed wetly.

  “What do you want to watch?” he asked.

  The television was tuned to a shopping channel.

  I thought for a while and then I said: “Commercials.”

  He flipped through the channels until he found a game show, one that he knew I hated. In this game, couples in long-term relationships were brought on for a series of challenges designed to test how well they knew each other or, more specifically, how well they were able to recognize each other. One person was made the player, while the other was taken backstage. The first level used photographs: the player sat in a chair and saw a series of photographs of the backs of people’s heads, the backs of their hands, the undersides of their feet, etc. Mixed in among these similarly lit, similarly photographed pictures were ten photos of the loved one’s body parts. The player who could identify at least five of the ten photos belonging to his or her partner would receive a cash prize and pass on to the second level.

  The second level was a sort of musical number, in which every dancer but one was a trained actor disguised as the player’s girlfriend, or husband, or whatever. As the performers danced their way through the song, the player’s task was to point at them one by one when the player was certain that that performer was not the person the player loved, at which point the dancer would leave the stage. By the end of the round, only two people would be left. The player would have to choose between them before the closing bars of the song were played, pointing at them and calling out, That’s my partner! which not coincidentally was the name of the show. At that point there was usually some sort of interrogation, where the one chosen would be brought to the front of the stage, his or her parts parceled out to the waiting swarm of cameras, each of which took hold of a nose or eyebrow or twitching mouth and sent it up to the large screens above the stage, where every feature looked warped, lonesome, unbelonging. With the different screens tuned to slightly different saturations, the pieces lacked the coherence of a single source. Each was strange and solitary—but familiar, too, a thing stripped of particularity and made example. And then the dashing host, dressed in the outfit of a federal court judge, would ask the player over and over again, Are you sure this woman is your wife? Are you one hundred percent sure? Are you one hundred and ten percent sure? I had seen a player give up at this stage, wandering abstractedly offstage to join the audience.

  The third level was the one that offered the largest cash prize, but also the greatest risk. Players were sent into a pitch-dark room in which a number of completely naked people waited in the blackness, one of whom was their loved one. The clock would start, and then they would have three minutes to grope everyone they could get their hands on. When they found the person whose body they thought was their partner’s, they had to hold on to the wrist and drag that person out of the room onto the studio soundstage, where the audience would clap and cheer pretty much no matter the outcome. For the players, it was often a different matter. They turned to the person they had grabbed and saw a blonde where there should have been a brunette, or a man where there should have been a woman. The unchosen other would usually trail out a few seconds later, looking some variant of miserable or angry. Because the twist of the level was this: Players signed contracts beforehand agreeing that “losing” the challenge would dissolve their relationship and institute a modified restraining order, one that was bidirectional. Under no circumstances would the losers be permitted contact through words or bodies—though, obviously, the law could not dictate that two people cease loving each other in an abstract sense, from a legal distance.

  On the screen in front of me, a man was crouched with his head between his hands, not quite rocking back and forth, but definitely swaying a bit. He was pulling mechanically at his own hair. If he was saying something, it wasn’t audible over the sound of the crowd and the music playing him off the stage. I couldn’t tell if he was the person who hadn’t been recognized or the person who hadn’t recognized his partner. I felt bad for everyone on this show, coming on with smiles and hopes for winning big amounts of money. I was always wanting to tell them to turn back quick, be happy with what they had. Because they had so much. Or at least they had something. But to the people on TV I was nothing more than a ghost, watching them hour after hour, unable to speak to them or warn them of what was coming.

  “Why are you making me watch this?” I asked. “You know I hate to see them lose.”

  The man on-screen rubbed his slack face with a hand as three or four tears made their way down his cheeks. The rubbing pulled his mouth into an externally imposed smile, then an externally imposed frown.

  “I know,” C said, “but I’m trying to cure you of it.”

  “Why,” I asked, “are you trying to cure me of something I feel?”

  For the first time, C looked a little bit hurt.

  “I know you’ve been worrying about B, and I think it has to do with feeling like you’ll be less yourself if she starts seeming more like you,” C said. He looked thoughtful. “But I also know that she’s not going anywhere, and she’s only going to look more like you, if anything, not less. I think what would be healthy would be to just start dulling that fear, and the fears related to it. Think of yourself as a franchise, like a Coffee Hole or Wally’s. More outlets just mean greater reach.”

  “So you do think she looks like me,” I said.

  “Well, hmmm, you think she looks like you, right?” he responded.

  “Would you be able to tell us apart?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “I know you.”

  I just looked at him.

  “Well, of course I think I could,” he went on. “But it’s hard. Everyone thinks they could. All those couples thought they could,” he said, pointing at the screen. “But in reality people are a lot alike. Any two people, on average, share 99.9 percent of their DNA sequences. The genetic difference between the two of us comes down to something like eye color and whether or not we like the taste of cilantro.”

  I wished he would stop talking. When I looked at him now, I couldn’t help but see him as a casing stuffed full of thready strands of DNA, just a few miles of letters in a shell. I thought about the parts of my saliva that were merging with his in his mouth, the stray cells that probably had already mixed in. The three or four things that made me different from him were already lost in there and would never find their way back to me.

  He was speaking facts to me that many other people knew, that many other people could have told me, and it made me feel like I was sitting with a stranger. I pulled my knees up to my chest and made myself smaller on the couch. I was looking at him now like I was trying to get his features down, so I’d recognize him in the future. The more steadily I looked at him, the more excited he got about the things he was saying. He must have thought I was listening. Sitting over there and gesturing with the remote control, he grew more and more animated and his hair flopped around on top of his head. He looked like someone I was just meeting for the first t
ime, and didn’t like all that much.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, “why you can’t just tell me that I am exactly who I am, and that I couldn’t ever be mistaken for anyone else.”

  “I could tell you that,” he said. “But anyone could tell you that. And if they told you that, you’d know it wasn’t me, so you wouldn’t be satisfied with it, even if it was me telling you. It’s like if I said that to you, I’d disappear. I’d be someone you didn’t recognize.”

  He leaned forward and rubbed my shoulder, suddenly tender.

  “What I’m saying,” he continued, “is that you aren’t going to get what you want. Probably you don’t even want what you want. There’s no satisfaction here. So maybe you should think of something else you could want, and then just go get that instead. It’s called ‘transference.’”

  I was sitting there and thinking that B could be in my room right now, touching all of my things, and my things wouldn’t even know the difference. Then I was wishing her out of my room, but that still left all the empty, threatened space, saturated with potential violation. It wouldn’t be enough: I wanted my room to be gone, the whole apartment gone, all the walls closing in on the space between until there was no space between. I wanted to eliminate all the space within which something worse could happen. That blank material was a threat. It could become anything. And then I wanted C gone, wanted him gone so that it would be impossible to want him, so that there would be nobody else that I wanted things from and nobody else to disappoint me. So that there would be nobody I needed to recognize me except myself and maybe B, if I didn’t decide to wish her away, too.