You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

by Alexandra Kleeman

  All this wanting created an appetite in me that was terrifyingly shapeless. I had no idea how to feed it. I didn’t know how to make anything vanish. The things I wanted were hazy, and the things one could have were small and solid, like an orange, and never seemed to add up. I pulled the remote out of C’s clutched hand. I was going through the television channels one by one, up and up, looking, and the channels were going up like they would never stop. They would go blindly on, climbing up until they were back at the bottom again, sketching a sort of Möbius strip. I was looking for something I recognized without knowing what I was looking for, something that would remind me that I had an appetite. I wanted the sort of company that could be given only by someone who didn’t know I was there.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  I passed an ad for used cars and one for kitchen hardware. Faces of women and sometimes men pointed away from me and at something off-screen, at faces I couldn’t see. Lids of jars and flaps of purses lifting up, revealing something dark inside that the gaze of the camera did not penetrate. The hands moving them were pale hands, the nails painted awful colors. And then there was a commercial for something medicinal, some modifier for the body, where the inside of a body showed up on-screen, flooded in light and glistening with a studio lacquer. The heart and lungs and liver and kidneys showed up throbbing and shiny like they did in real life, or the real life we imagined they had in the dark within us. They pulsed there, silently.

  Then, suddenly, the smooth flesh parted like a ripple from the center, sprouting holes in all the organs. A mouth opened itself in the middle of the liver, a little Claymation mouth with thick cartoony lips. With its new mouth, the speaking liver complained of pain, dissatisfaction, longing for something more, better. A mouth opened up in the heart, the lungs, the small cute kidneys. All the organs clamored for more. In chorus, they demanded better treatment, more respect, more fun. My own heart felt strange to me, fluttery. I watched as a thick pink liquid slid down over the organs, a sheet drawn over the little holes that still flapped open and shut, open and shut. The gaps winked at me, thickly pink.

  I felt a smothered hunger beating out from the unseen places inside my body. I felt corseted in skin. I wanted to turn myself violently inside out. I wanted to throw myself into the outside and begin tearing off chunks of it for food.

  Somewhere to the right of my body, C continued to speak. His voice was a little bit sharper than I remembered it. I turned my head to the left, but it still found a way in.

  C said: “I thought I should let you know that I put our names in as contestants on That’s My Partner! We’ve been together longer than their minimum relationship length, and I think it could be good for you, therapeutic.”

  I looked in the direction I had been looking before.

  “Just kidding,” C said. “Are you listening? I was just kidding. But I am going to enter us. If you don’t want to do it,” he continued, “I could always bring B. You could watch from home. That could be therapeutic too.”

  He looked at me for a while, studying my face silently. It was like he was expecting me to do something, say something, but I couldn’t tell what.

  “Just kidding,” he added.

  I knew then that we were going to have a fight. I wanted to excuse myself before it happened, leave my body behind to field it while I did something else, something completely else. I wanted to return to myself hours later with no real memories, only a vague feeling of having floated. But what I wanted wasn’t something that I could have: my life, the process of living it out, was undelegatable, intransferable. This was an essentially contemporary problem, a problem of supply and demand. I had to solve it the way other problems of scarcity and desire were being solved: by finding something new to want and pursuing that wanting instead. Baby monkeys taken from their mothers will form attachments to fake mothers made of cloth or electrified wire, ducklings with no parents will imprint on a cardboard box with an alarm clock ticking inside of it. Wanting things was a substitute for wanting people, one of the best possible substitutes.

  I had to leave and find a real Kandy Kake and eat it. I couldn’t stand to be myself around any of these people until it was all done.

  I looked toward the door. It was the dead center of night.

  2

  I GREW UP IN A place just like this, where the leaves never fell from the trees but clung there crinkled like burnt paper, shriveled and brown in some places but sprouting tender green leaves somewhere else. Here, the flowers bloom all year, and once they bloom they are already close to dying, nicking the mulch beneath with blotches of collapsed red and white. They repeat themselves, blooming and falling and being swept away before they rot, restoring the perfect squares of green that grid this town and the towns beyond. They grow blindly, nursed by an unending stream of water and sunlight. They wither against a uniform background of palms and pines, which are the same every time you look at them.

  I walked at the side of the road as cars passed me by in the sweltering heat, not knowing whether C was awake or whether he was still where I left him, smiling sweetly in his slumber even though we had just had a killer fight. Maybe he was entering us as contestants on that terrible game show right at that very moment. And if he succeeded, how would I ever know whether he had done it to help me, or hurt me, or something in between the two. Loving someone was no guarantee of how they would treat you. All it did was raise the stakes.

  I called C two times in a row, then three, then I let it go to voice mail and just kept walking. I missed him. I wanted to hear him say something to me. I thought of him listening to my voice mail later that day, the sound of my breath pressing into his ear. I thought of my footsteps etching themselves onto a material far, far away. I was happy that some part of me would be touching some part of him, even if it was only the sound of my movement against the tissue of his eardrum.

  This is a landscape made by human beings, but not for human beings. Walk it and you always step someplace identical to where you stepped before. You can’t get anywhere on foot. Cross it in a car and the surroundings slide by until you realize that you’ve seen them all before, like in the commercial where an impish young Kandy Kake lures Kandy Kat on a chase through frame after frame of a happy suburban neighborhood populated by cute yellow houses. Kandy Kat’s clubby feet kick up a wake of dust behind him, his body blurs with speed, the world scrolls maniacally by, breaknecking. He runs with claws out ahead of him, swiping at the little Kake that is always somehow a step or two away. Then a stray claw snags on a piece of sky, and the world starts to stretch and then slump in a startling way: Kandy Kat has literally torn through the scenery, caused a widening rip in the world. He stops to look, perplexed, at the fluttering material, blown by a breeze of unknown origin. On it you can see a piece of house, mostly window and some lilac-painted shutter. The shot widens, and we see that Kandy Kat is standing in a studio soundstage in front of a flat, painted background that slips past him while the little Kake turns a crank. One yellow house after another scrolls by before Kandy Kat looks down and realizes that he’s been running on a treadmill the whole time, a treadmill that yanks him suddenly backward and threatens to throw him off completely. Kandy Kat starts running for his life, running toward the giggling Kake, and he is still running with no sign that he will ever stop when we see the words projected over his body.

  KANDY KAKES: HOPELESSLY DELICIOUS.

  I had been walking for almost two hours when I came up on the crest that overlooked the DoubleWally’s, the newest and biggest grocery store in the area. B sometimes drove us up here when she wanted to be a food tourist, her term for the activity of coming to Wally’s with a digital camera and rigorously photographing all of the doughnuts. Each one was glazed or filled or sprinkled, sitting beneath colorless fluorescents that made it look inside as if it were always the same time of night no matter how bright it might be outdoors. I always thought her interest in food photography should be encouraged: how long could someone ogle dou
ghnuts without giving in and eating one? So while she crouched on the floor to get her shots of the filled maple bars and glazed twists, shots taken up close and from below so that the doughnuts looked like sticky, oozy mountain ranges, I hovered around her and said encouraging things like That one looks really good. Late at night nobody bothered us, but if we came during the day, a line might form behind B as she took her photographs, a line of customers waiting quietly to choose their doughnuts from the bins, waiting without anger even though B took forever to line up her shots.

  Sometimes she’d have me drive back so she could look through the photos right away. Her body curled around the camera slightly as she stared, as if she were trying to shield the photos from my gaze. They didn’t look like anything real from where I sat: they might have been blurry photos of abstract paintings. B passed these times silently, mostly, with an occasional squeak of satisfaction. Afterward she looked rosier, as though she had found something real, something meaty to feed on in the tiny images. Her satisfaction worked at me in weird, corrosive ways. Her soft mmm sounds, coming from next to me, sounded nearer to my ears than they actually were. They ate at me, at my resting feelings, and made me feel a sudden dissatisfaction of my own. What was there in my life to absorb me the way those photos absorbed her? Even C, a thing I had that B didn’t, created as much lack in me as he sated. Sometimes I would sneak a look at her doughnut photos, hoping for a bit of that satisfaction I’d seen her feel, but the most I noticed was that each frosted surface glistened in an anatomical sort of way. After looking at each one, I felt slightly nauseated.

  Maybe Kandy Kat survived like that, from images of eating and images of food. Light consuming light, the desire for sustenance a type of sustenance in itself. Even if he was always paused on the narrow edge of starvation, what he was doing in pursuit of Kandy Kakes sustained him. They made his life terrible, but at the same time they made him more himself.

  I WAS SITTING ON THE floor of Wally’s, in what they called Wally’s Food Foyer, a grand and open and frosty-cool space decorated with gold-framed photographs of food lit lovingly by a large chandelier decorated with bananas and pudding cups and racks of ribs, which hung from the ceiling in the middle of the hall. On this structure, examples of the sale items of the day dangled just out of their customers’ reach. I stood up and readjusted my dress. The ribs suspended in the air over me turned slowly. Artificial light glinted off the corners of the plastic casing, making the meat look shiny and hard. The ribs were like a toy model of ribs that children could play with and pretend to eat.

  This DoubleWally’s was the largest grocery store within a thirty-mile radius, larger than the one by our house. Its scale was a matter of repetition. There was an aisle that was only for ketchups and mustards. It stretched red on one side and yellow on the other, two or three brands carving up the wall and reiterating their particular shape of plastic squeeze bottle for many feet. The sprawl of the aisle was a single tessellated surface dented where a few bottles had been removed, revealing a multiplicity of identical bottles behind them. I stood there in the ketchup aisle trying to remember how this place was laid out.

  Every Wally’s had a similar feel inside, the interminable rows of smooth color that began to break apart as you got closer to them, dissolving into little squares of identical logos. But the stores had a special trick to them, an organizing concept based on years of statistical data about purchasing preferences, the drift habits of purposeless customers: they were designed to baffle. The most sought-after items—candy bars, sandwich meat, milk—were placed in the most inaccessible parts of the store, not next to one another, but in separate and distant locations that were rotated every one, two, or three weeks in accordance with an obscure schedule developed by top management. Because the things you wanted most were constantly on the move, you couldn’t trust muscle memory to guide you back to them. You moved slowly and cautiously, looking for signs of familiarity in your product surroundings. You followed false links and backtracked and still usually ended up in two or three wrong places before finding the right one. Sometimes you ended up at a different desirable object, peanut butter, for example, and bought it instead, but more often you bought both, and the things in between, following a chain of substitutions and transformed desires until your basket was full. Wally’s customers ultimately spent thirty-six percent more time wandering the aisles than customers of the leading supermarket competitor, which equated to an impressive twenty-two percent increase in unforeseen purchases along the way. You could recognize Wally’s customers by the confused, placid look on their faces as they came to a full stop in the middle of the aisle, gazing wistfully at nothing in particular.

  Kandy Kakes used to be in the back right corner of the store, then they were in the far left near the sugar cereals, but that was weeks ago. By now they’d be in the place that Wally Incorporated’s team of programmers, statisticians, and behavioral psychologists had calculated to be the least thinkable location for the statistically average Kandy Kakes consumer. I closed my eyes and tried to think of the place I’d be least likely to think about. I made an empty space in my mind and tried to keep out of it. I let my hands flop open as if I were asleep or had been knocked unconscious. All I could hear inside was the hum of Muzak all around me, familiar sounds with all the words missing.

  I opened my eyes to no new clues, no new insights. To my far left, a Wally squatted close to the ground, working at shelving some cartons of raisins. I gave him a long stare to let him know that if he was spying on me, I was spying on him right back. Then I saw that what this Wally was doing was not so much shelving as rearranging, moving the front-most boxes of raisins to the back and vice versa. Most likely B had guessed right: they were trailing me just to keep tabs, make sure I wasn’t going to steal anything. But that gave me an idea. The work that the Wallys seemed to be doing was purposeless, designed only to distract me and obstruct. If everything about Wally’s was designed to thwart me, I would operate as though I had no goal. Against my better instincts, I turned randomly into the maze of aisles and began wandering. It was possible that I would come around to the thing that I wanted most.

  The direction I had chosen carried me toward gift items, flowers, and other inedibles. It seemed like an entirely separate store swallowed up and surviving within the belly of a larger beast. I stopped to look at the rack of frill-topped flowers: white, pink, red, and then, more disturbingly, green, blue, neon orange. They clustered to one another like a single growth, blossom crowding blossom so that they looked hard and burstable. I squeezed their puffy heads between my fingers to check if they felt real. The frill of petal looked like the thin red membrane hidden inside the gills of a fish. I would have ripped one apart to see if color went all the way through the bloom, but I heard a voice from behind me, a male voice, so near to me that I immediately thought it had to be C sneaking up on me again, sliding his warm hand up the nape of my neck.

  “They’re died,” said the voice.

  This seemed like a strange way to say something obvious. I turned around and looked for the source, which sounded familiar and new at the same time.

  The speaker was about the same size as C, wide in the shoulders, hair more dark than light. I could tell that he wasn’t C, but when I looked at him I felt the tug of recognition. That feeling alone made him and C blur together in my mind.

  “They’re dyed,” he said again. “It’s easy to do, you just need some warm water and food coloring. You put twenty or thirty drops in a glass of water and stir it up, then you chop the bottoms off in a slant. You put the carnations stem down in the water and they drink all the color up. They do it automatically. It’s easy.”

  I asked: “Does it hurt?”

  He looked confused.

  I stared at the flowers. I worried about them, their deaths serving as decoration for birthdays and dinners. I looked at his face, then back at the dying flowers. Then I remembered, all at once, how I knew him. He had light brown hair cut short so that you could
see his scalp beneath the little hairs. He had thin skin, smooth as paper, that looked like it would feel clean and easy to touch. He was less handsome than the drawing of him had been and more handsome than he had looked from the car, as we watched him move around inside his condo.

  A week after B moved in, she asked me to go on a drive with her. It was the first thing she had asked me since she had shown up, brittle and small boned, hauling her gigantic suitcase up a staircase with three cramped turns in it. B was absentmindedly picking at the upholstery on the armchair where she was sitting, destroying an embroidered peony and staring at me as if she were trying to see all the way through the me of this moment to what the me of the future would say in response.

  B drove an old maroon sports car that must once have been a nice object. I tucked my knees up inside the passenger’s-side cabin, where the floor was covered with scraps of paper, torn-out advertisements, photos of faces, and food mingling together, tamped down by the bottoms of shoes. Every time I moved I heard the sound of something squealing in protest, the leather seat or the Styrofoam cups wedged underneath. I couldn’t find a way to sit where I wouldn’t be treading on a picture of something special and saved. B got in next to me and turned the key in the ignition. Hot, itchy air started pouring from the vents, smelling like vintage clothes. She put the radio on and turned it down so low you couldn’t hear anything, only feel it twitching in the air, a slightly human presence. At home she had always seemed hesitant to touch things, use things: even buttering a piece of toast was a gesture that required careful planning, several pauses, and two hands clutching the knife—so it wouldn’t slip, she said. She was the same way in her car, hesitating over the temperature of the air-conditioning, adjusting and readjusting the mirrors, talking aloud through the possible obstacles she might encounter on the way to her destination. But that night B pulled out of the driveway before I could even put my seat belt on.