It was two in the morning and nothing was moving in any of the houses we drove past. I saw the Wally’s on our right, then B took a left into a street with no sign, past a couple of branching roads, toward a dark clod of condos pushed up against each other around an empty cul-de-sac. She parked in front of one of the condos and the headlights shut off, the trickle of radio stopped, and then there was only a thrumming sound taking place within me, the sound of space pressing down on the emptiness inside my head. She took out a cigarette and lit it. It was faint light, but in it I could see the shadows below her mouth where the wrinkles would begin. The photographs on the floor of her car all seemed to point their eyes and mouths in my direction.
I listened to the thrumming, my body idling.
Then I asked: “Is this where he lives?”
She nodded her head up and down. “I like to spend the night with him,” she said.
“I don’t think I’ll be of much help,” I said back.
I looked around, but I didn’t know which of the different identical windows I was supposed to be looking in. The condominium complex was dark and silent. Through the units that were still lit up, I saw bland slices of wall painted cream and ecru, occasionally decorated with objects both boring and useful, clocks and calendars and wall-mounted telephones.
B put her thin hand on mine. It felt like a moist leaf clinging to my skin.
“You already help,” she said to me. “Just by being here, you make it more.”
I had never been able to remember his name, something standardly male like Brendan, Brady, Brian, Bob, but this was definitely B’s ex, larger and more three-dimensional than I’d imagined from the scurrying black shape we used to glimpse behind the venetian blinds on rare occasions. The voice and height and full-on, detailed views of the face were new, but I recognized him by his profile, the haircut, and the anxious sense that I associated with looking at him, a feeling that I was about to get caught. I was closer to him now than I had ever been before, with the exception of the time when he spotted B’s car while we were staking out his grocery shopping one night. He was so furious running up to us that it seemed to me he was moving in slow motion. He had a liter of soda that he was using like a baseball bat, and he brought it down on the hood over and over, shouting in his language that I couldn’t understand, could only listen at the way I would to a recording of humpback whales singing their underwater songs.
“No, it doesn’t hurt them,” he said patiently. “They’re plants. You need a brain and a nervous system to register pain. Pain is a product of thinking.”
He took a can of protein shake from the shelf behind me and popped it open casually. The air filled with a scent like ice cream and laundry detergent. I looked around, expecting to see a Wally coming to discipline one or both of us, but the only one around was watching us from twenty feet away and looked down at his feet when our eyes met.
B’s ex assessed me.
“You must be one of those nutri-terrorists like that veal guy. You have feelings for all the wrong things,” he said conversationally, smiling and taking another sip from his protein drink. “When you’re at the top of the food chain, what it means is you don’t have to worry.”
Now he was sounding like C. Another person explaining the world to me, what things were and were not, and why I was being unreasonable when I failed to keep them distinct. At the same time, when I described the dangerous blurriness that I saw at work around me, they were always failing to notice, always finding a problem in me, in the way my mind ordered or disordered the things around me. “You live in the world you make for yourself,” C would tell me. “Why not make a less precarious world?”
“Who are those flowers for? Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said.
He looked at me strangely.
I didn’t know if I “had” C anymore, if he was still around to be had. I didn’t know if he’d care if he saw me with this guy or what it would take to make him care. B’s ex breathed down on me from above, the air from his mouth smelling of stale cake. It occurred to me that if B’s ex had been interested in B for any of the traits that we shared, he might be interested in me at this moment. Suddenly I found myself wondering if I could have him, too, if I tried. It might help me understand B a little better to put myself in her place, or as close to it as possible. If I tried to lean up on him, watch commercials with him, chew on his thin, sharp-looking mouth. I could ask him about his ex, whether she had been crazy before they dated, or only after, or also during. Maybe then I’d understand whether her encroachment on who I was amounted to intentional or unintentional aggression.
I could feel his body heat from where I was standing, and because he was still a stranger to me, someone seen only from a distance, his temperature was offensively intimate. I was violating some sort of order in being close enough to B’s ex to touch him, after having kept her at a distance from C for the entire time I’d known them. If it was easy for me to take her place, it’d be even easier for her to take mine. Anybody could sit next to C on the couch, watching episodes of terrible TV. Anybody could fit inside the curve of his arm, could cuddle against his front. And I realized the more I found out about this man in the grocery who was watching me back for the first time in my long history of watching him, the more my knowledge and memory converged upon B’s. Just being near him was a form of contamination.
“I really need to go,” I said. “I came here for Kandy Kakes.”
“Kandy Kakes?” he asked. “They’re barely edible. I hear they have plastic in them.”
“They’re edible enough,” I replied.
I was backing away from him, flowers in hand.
“Good luck, I guess,” he said, watching me.
“Maybe I’ll see you again,” he added. “I live right by here.”
“I know,” I said.
“How do you know?” he asked. But I could tell he was asking to keep me talking and not because he cared.
I felt his eyes aimed at me as I walked away. I had already put a good amount of distance between my body and his, which was threatening to turn me into B. Then it occurred to me that if he was interested in fucking me, he might allow me to use his phone. I had an interest in using someone else’s phone, using it to call C from an unfamiliar number that he might not be actively avoiding, tricking him into picking up the phone to find out what this strange number wanted and then yelling at him. I turned around and walked back toward Tom, or Tim, or whoever. When I reached him, I tried to look friendly.
“Hey,” I said, “could I actually borrow your phone?”
His hand moved toward his pocket but stalled just before reaching in.
“I need to call my roommate,” I told him.
“She’s diabetic,” I added.
He pulled it from his pocket cautiously.
“Thank you,” I said, taking it from his hand.
“Diabetes,” I said again. I had his cell phone in my two hands, the thumbs positioned for pressing numbers into the keypad, and I started pressing them in. I had done only the area code when I realized that I no longer had any idea what came next. I knew there were some sixes, a four, a three. I had no feeling about what order they might come in. I tried to draw upon my muscle memory, to start again, faster this time, and let my hands find their way to it on their own, but then I was just standing there again, stuck. I felt him looking at me. His look was not flirtatious. Reluctantly, I put his phone back in his pocket.
“You remind me of someone,” he began.
Before he had a chance to finish, I was walking away. At the end of the aisle, I sprinted. I wanted to increase the distance between us exponentially. My sneakers squeaked against the shiny plastic floor.
I passed canned soups and magazines. I passed the produce section, which was advertising a new breed of apple—grafted together from two popular types of apples and also a type of peach—that I had read about. Its chromosomal structure was unstable, odd numb
ered, which meant new seeds and plants could be created only in a laboratory using a variety of specialized equipment. It was supposed to be delicious. The apples were a fuzzy coral color with a velvety texture. When you took hold of one in your hand, they gave in a little bit, like a stuffed animal. Flesh on flesh.
Where I had thought I might finally find Kandy Kakes, past the canned soup and seasonings, paper products and household cleaners, I found meat. The meat came in slack shades of red or pink within the refrigerated bins, and I stopped to visit them while I decided what direction I wouldn’t try next. No matter what shape an animal might have been while alive, dead animal was always made to resemble slabs, a paste that could be shaped into logs, toruses, wavy rectangles. These were the shapes we made, mathematically and conceptually simple, and they were different from us in every way. I patted the packages of meat with my right hand, the one that wasn’t holding the flowers. It was colder in this part of the store and brighter.
Then I saw the veal section. It was twice its usual size and covered in posters and slogans. I recognized Michael’s face printed large on every one of them, his mouth pinned into a stiff grin. He wore a kitschy black-and-white-striped jumpsuit and a handkerchief tied around his neck. His left hand was planted on his hip as his right pointed out at the promotional display in a stiff “I’m a little teapot” sort of way, as if he were practicing being something that he would clearly never become. The posters read THIS VEAL’S A STEAL in big black print, and below it small cursive letters spelled out: “Veal is a delicious part of any balanced meal.—Michael Trowbridge, ‘The Veal Stealer.’” The posters had a tiny stamp at the bottom, indicating that they were a product of something called the Regional Council for the Protection of Veal and Veal Imagery.
I went to the veal poster that was nearest to my eye level and I got close to it, close enough that Michael’s head was almost the size of an actual person’s head. From six inches away he was blurry, but he looked more real than he had that day on the TV screen. I was trying to look into his face and figure out what it meant that Michael had gone from hating veal to hiding it to eating it and now to endorsing it. Had he changed his mind? Had he been sued? Had someone stolen his picture and made it mean whatever they wanted? His burglar costume looked like it had been pasted on in Photoshop. I wished that I could speak to him, ask him who was in control of this ad campaign and whether it was awful or just much more convenient to have another person controlling your identity.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the red-and-orange coloring of the Kandy Kakes logo. I was close! Then I remembered that I was starving. My hunger was so wide and placid that I could dog-paddle around in it. There were dozens of boxes of Kandy Kakes stacked on top of one another on the shelves, red-and-orange boxes with the neon-green lightning bolts that signified snack cake bliss. My body felt small to me and light, and I walked to my Kakes with a cartoonish energy in my limbs, as though one giant leap could carry me all the way to their shelves.
I heard a scuffling sound as the cloth I wore rubbed against itself. I saw my bony arms sticking out in front of me as I maneuvered them over to the shelf and picked up the nearest box, which was suspiciously light, because it was empty. I picked up the next box and tilted it right to left, listening for the Kakes sliding back and forth within.
All the other boxes were empty, too.
It was just like that commercial where Kandy Kat turns to crime in a last-ditch attempt to achieve Kandy Kakes consumption. He goes from store to store trying to buy a single, measly package of Kandy Kakes, but nobody will sell him anything. They point at a poster behind the counter that reads DO NOT SELL TO THIS KAT. DANGEROUS CHARACTER. Kandy Kat’s face is on this poster, hollow and gaunt. So Kandy Kat hijacks a freight train made up of an endless number of cars painted with the Kandy Kakes logo, and off goes the Kandy Kakes alarm, bringing police helicopters and squad cars, then military tanks. As Kandy Kat barrels toward a military blockade, he reaches back for a box of Kakes and says a final prayer before opening the box. But the box is empty, and so are all the others in the first car, and the second, and Kandy Kat looks up toward the impending collision with tears wobbling in his eyes. Strings of drool hang from his mouth as he meets his doom.
Holding the empty Kandy Kakes box in my arms, I realized that C was not going to be calling me back anytime soon. I realized that I had not been realizing how different he was becoming, day by day. He had seemed like a different person, or the same person acting differently, an even scarier thought. Last night he sat at the far end of the sofa, six feet away from me, as he explained his thinking. I was a great girl, he said, but I had a downward trajectory. I had been doing less and less each day, and the things I did do I regarded with trepidation, as though they might turn on me. He wanted to date someone who was on the upswing. Someone who had shaken off simpler problems and was left only with the unsolvables. I, on the other hand, was turning solvables into unsolvables and then trying to solve them. I made the least of my situation. He didn’t believe in that. I reminded him of one of those polar bears at the zoo that won’t mate even though, in captivity, there was really no other way to participate in some sort of natural order. Though obviously, he said patronizingly, literal mating was not our problem. I told him that I was on the upswing and that all he was noticing was a person coming to know what was right with her life and also what was wrong. C said I tired him out. He went to the fridge to get a beer. When he came back he looked at me a little more warmly. He told me: “I want someone who can do everything I want to do in life with me, and I want that person to be you. Could you be a person who wanted that?”
Inside I was imagining myself showing up on that game show, smiling as they led me into a chamber where I would be duplicated by dozens and dozens of paid extras. I imagined myself excited to get on the show, excited to try to win the big suitcase full of money with my partner. I imagined myself dancing the cancan with the other decoys, my shoulders and face tingling from the hot lights overhead, smiling big and feeling certain that C would pick me out of the lineup. But even though the face I put on this imaginary person was my face, and even though her body was like mine, I knew the person I was imagining wasn’t me, only looked like me, and really had nothing more to do with me than a piece of paper a photograph is printed on has to do with the picture printed on it. And if I wasn’t really going to be around, I’d rather not be around at all. I’d rather be wrapped in a sheet, ghosting myself, leaving everyone with questions about what had happened to me and where I had gone.
I looked at C, at his wavy, shampoo-smelling hair and the thin lower lip that I had been sucking just an hour before. I loved his face, I loved that I could touch it, taste it, put my mouth all over it. There was no other face like his, no other face I was allowed to do that with. His face wore a waiting look.
Then I said, “No. No, I don’t think I would be that kind of person.”
WHAT I DID NEXT HAPPENED at some distance from myself. I took two of the empty boxes and headed toward the front of the store. I was shouting that I needed some help, because I did. I needed someone to fill up those boxes. I was talking to a cashier and asking her what’s going on with these empty boxes, what have they done with the Kandy Kakes? Where did they go? Where are the rest of them? There have to be others. I was shouting a little, it’s true, but in my defense I was really very hungry.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry,” said the cashier. “Please lower your voice,” she said, “you’re disturbing the children.”
What children? I thought. Then I said: “I’m disturbed. You’re disturbing me. Where are your Kandy Kakes?”
“Please calm down, ma’am, and I will address your question,” said the clerk.
“I’m calm,” I said.
“You don’t understand what my day has been like,” I said.
“I’m already calmed down,” I said.
“Ma’am,” she said, “we’ve had some trouble keeping them on the shelves given the activity of that cult
out in Randall. All the stores nearby have been hit.”
“What cult?” I asked.
“What cult?” she said back to me. “You’ve seen the murals? The strangers picketing Town Hall? The people dressed up like ghosts?”
In Wally’s Food Foyer I see the children dressed in private school uniforms, navy blue on the bottom with crisp white tops. They’re dancing beneath the food chandelier, lifting their arms toward the light. Their little faces darken when a banana or loaf of bread passes by overhead, casting a gray blotch in its own shape upon their open mouths and eyes. A little boy stands off slightly to the side, hopping up and down, reaching for a rack of ribs that twirls slowly above his head.
I HAD GRABBED ONE OF the veal posters on my way out of Wally’s. I was holding the poster in front of me, arms outstretched, walking in what I hoped was the direction that I had come from. Now half of Michael’s head eyed me from the paper, its corners curling in the wind. I tried to place it where an actual person’s head might be, standing before me, ready to explain to me what exactly was going on and what that pressure was that I felt digging in against my organs, that pressure like a man’s hand pushing down on an oversize game show buzzer. Embedded in paper, his eyes were flat, his face was flat. Where a nostril was supposed to be, I looked harder and saw more flatness, the semblance of a hole more like a bruising of the paper than any kind of way in. Around the eyes and cheeks there was an inanimate smoothness, like a stone washed ashore after years of slow wear underwater. This smoothness crept in toward the crinkling eyes and nestled around them, clotting near the wrinkles on the outer corners, which looked overdefined and numbered fewer than seemed anatomically appropriate. The lips pulled at the skin-colored surface surrounding them, suggesting a grin and a grimace at the same time.
You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine Page 11
