You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

by Alexandra Kleeman

  You are probably wondering: “What does this mean for my loved ones?” That depends upon their level of contamination. Does living near them make you sleepy? Do they increase or stifle your appetite? When you make a statement natural to your body of knowledge, do they contradict or compound it, forcing you to ingest new knowledge that has not been tested for safety? If your answer to any of these statements is “maybe” or “yes,” then your loved one may be SEVERELY BUT NOT IRREPARABLY DUPLICATE.

  Scientists have confirmed that chemicals are present in nearly everything manufactured by natural or artificial means. To put this in more detail, chemicals can be found in almost everything, but what about the chemicals that cannot be found? WE CAN FIND THEM FOR YOU. Our spirituality centers offer the best step in diagnosing factual contaminants in you or your beloved, using subtractive processes developed by some of the most successful corporations in the country. You too can be well stocked, free of false certainty or taint.

  It is worth mentioning that in these confusing times other pamphlets may front themselves as being accurate renditions of the knowledge possessed by the New Christian Church of Conjoined Eaters. These pamphlets, once discovered, should be discarded swiftly and their memory dumped.

  BRING YOUR LOVED ONE IN

  FOR A FREE CONSULTATION.

  IF THEY LOVE YOU THEY WILL COME.

  At the end of the passage was that same phone number, same address, same logo with CONJOINED EATERS CHURCH printed above it. Was the error in the Church’s name intentional? I had never noticed how much the logo looked like a Kandy Kake: thick black border surrounding two squiggles of light, two chalices made of white frosting, twinned. I stared at it and felt like it was trying to tell me something, something I couldn’t hear over the sound of my hunger, which was like two people with two megaphones shouting at each other through the center of my head. Was this the correct pamphlet? Was the one I had read earlier a decoy? Could there be a more correct pamphlet than either of these somewhere else, waiting to be found?

  THE FIRST EYE EVOLVED BY accident in the single cell of an organism that had been born sensitive to individual particles of light, according to an article I had read in Marine Hobbyist. Deep underwater, it felt their soft touch on its surface as a blow and registered that shock by wincing slightly, changing its shape. In this way, the cell learned to say there is something blocking the light above me or there is not. Either something was there or there was nothing. This ancient eye was primitive in comparison with our modern eyes, which now operate as whole colonies of individual photosensitive cells yoked together into a single blob, cringing together at the sun. What the first eye saw, though, it saw with certainty.

  I put my hand on B’s bedroom door, which was just like mine but with a little paper sign taped to it that read VISITOR PLEASE ANNOUNCE YOURSELVES. She had stolen it from someplace on campus, I guessed. I didn’t think it was grammatically correct. I was filled with a feeling like purpose, like those moments where you remember what you came into the room to do. What sort of purpose? I’d find out once I got inside. I pushed open the door onto an inside so dark, it startled me. B had gotten the better room, it was bigger and had an extra closet, but the windows looked out onto trees and told you nothing about the house across the street. While she watched the trees, I learned things about the world around us. I learned that our neighbors had sensed a threat in their surroundings, that they had ghosted themselves as some form of preemptive defense. I had learned that they were never coming back. I had learned, as they had, that just because a thing is in your home, just because you allowed it in or even put it there yourself, is no guarantee that it won’t begin changing itself while you’re not looking, unbecoming what it was and transforming slowly into something you’d never, ever let into your life. These sorts of things needed to be rooted out or abandoned as toxic.

  It wasn’t that I wholly bought into the message of Conjoined Eating. There were some good ideas there, but I was still waiting to see how it all played out. What worried me was B’s malleability: if she had read that pamphlet, it could be assumed that she would fail to realize that she was the contaminated one in this relationship. Given her temperament, it was almost certain that she’d attack, if she wasn’t already somehow attacking me by invading my bed, infringing on my face. The safest thing was to retaliate in advance. Once, at least, maybe twice.

  I saw dozens of shiny little tubes and jars arranged across her dresser, the mirror image of my own room, and I went to them and opened the little lids of the flower-reeking creams and dug my fingers into their mellow white. I glopped them out on top of the dresser and spread them around with my fingertips. They were all the same things that I used in my room, but they had been bought new, pristine, some with the crisp factory surface still on them. Then I clutched at the makeup, squeezed the pencils in my fist like a child trying to cause harm, pressed them point down until they snapped, and I banged the pressed squares of powdered pigment against the cream-covered surface until they fell out as chalky crumbs. The lipsticks I extruded from their canisters and rubbed between my gummed-up fingers, working them until they were warm and melty and slid over my hands like thick water. Outside, the dark trees swayed. The pinks and violets and greens were a clown-colored smear across the furniture in her room. I looked happy, though I didn’t feel it. My neck and face were covered in daubs of color, bright like petals on my skin. In my mouth, accidental chunks of lipstick tasted like Barbie doll.

  I pressed my gluey hands to my face.

  When I was done I lay down on B’s bed. It all smelled like beauty products, that anonymous female scent that we rub onto ourselves to blend into a wet, aggregate femininity, to smell like a person but not like any person in particular. I recognized this specific scent on her sheets, a body lotion sponsored by the actress who peels her face off in those commercials. It was a body lotion I used and was used to smelling of, and this bed smelled just like my own bed, drowsy and thick with nights of repeated sleep. It occurred to me that I shouldn’t have destroyed all the products in the room because I’d have nothing left the next day to make me look like myself. But it was too late to do anything about any of that.

  It seemed early to go to sleep, but in a country like this, sprawling all over a yellowing span of land, there must be hundreds of thousands of people secretly sleeping at inappropriate times, times when they should be working or eating or otherwise fueling the total human enterprise. I thought of all those individual unconscious bodies sinking into themselves, slumbering away in the broad daylight of their drawn curtains. I thought of all the hidden spaces: the sewers, the closets, the lightless stomachs and wombs. Warehouses where stock sits silent, the dark interior of a Mickey Mouse costume, the caves of hibernating bears. I imagined the great diffuse blandness of these spaces, soft and dark like a concussion, and I closed my eyes and rolled myself over into the dim center of sleep.

  WHEN I WOKE UP IT was to the thought of a dark eye, singular and large enough to sink my whole body into, the tail end of some dream I couldn’t recall. The eye was so close that I could touch it just by tilting my upper torso a few inches forward, but instead I was trying to lean my body away from the blackness, inside of which I saw a scatter of dim shapes, squiggles, and lines that looked whitish through the dark liquid murk. I didn’t understand why I was pulling back, twisting around before it, then all at once I knew. I was looking for my own reflection in its glassy curve—but there was nothing of me in its surface, nothing underneath. I strained to see, and in straining my eyes slipped open onto a place I didn’t recognize: the light too bright, the smell of plastics. I rubbed my face with the palms of my hands, and when I pulled them away I saw them smeared with red, pink, purple, blue. Then I remembered, and I knew it was only a matter of time before B found me. And when she did, what would I say? What would she do?

  When she pushed the door open, I shut my eyes.

  There was silence for a few seconds before she padded into the room in socks, over t
o the bed so that I could feel her shadow resting on my skin, then to the window for a moment, then to the dresser where I had left sloppy entrails of color lying there for her to see, and interpret, and do something about. I listened for her voice but heard nothing. Then a few soft footfalls and I felt her again, over me and sinking down, bringing her eyes to the level of my own, releasing soft, stale breaths that stirred little strands of my hair. In the ebb and stutter of her breath, I could hear that she wasn’t angry with me, wasn’t struggling to hold back any surge of emotion. She was studying me the way we used to study the insects together, the miniature dramas of ants and bees. She’d be searching my features for any residue of tightness, for the tiny strain of muscles holding a face in shape, for traces of fakery.

  The body is divided into voluntary and involuntary muscles, ones that you use and ones that essentially use you, make you throb internally and drive your life forward in a series of small movements that you couldn’t stop if you wanted to. The ball of my eye trembled beneath its lid as I tried to concentrate on the muscles that would hold it still. The situation inched forward despite myself.

  I could feel my eyelid begin to twitch.

  My eyes spasmed open onto B’s face, pale and so close to my own that her features were clear, exacted. Her sharp lines cut through my blurry vision.

  “Were you having a bad dream?” B asked.

  “I was just sleeping,” I said. It was terrifying how gently she had spoken to me.

  “You looked like you were having a bad dream,” she replied. “I didn’t know people slept like that, frowning and twitching. I thought you’d sleep more beautifully.”

  I didn’t know how early it was, but she was already made up, her big eyes rimmed with black stuff that clumped to her lashes. I realized now that it had been stupid to think that destroying her makeup could do anything to separate us: she would only make me go to the store to buy all of it again. There was no way to wreck her without wrecking myself. Maybe there was no way to definitively wreck anything anymore. No firm cores left to target, only an endless springy meshwork replenished by phantom hands. I squeezed my eyes shut. This was what I had been striking out against all this time, an endless repetition of faces, when all along I should have been seeking and striking the hands behind them.

  “Are you angry?” I asked B, who was still crouched down, a tight ball of a person.

  “Why would I be angry?” B asked me.

  It felt like a trap.

  “Because I destroyed your things,” I said.

  She held still, and when she spoke she spoke with tenderness.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said coolly. “I can always use yours instead.”

  She leaned forward, continuing: “What matters is that you broke this stuff because of me. I made someone do something they wouldn’t have done on their own. You did all this for me.”

  She paused as though she were listening for the first time to what she had just said. Then she nodded, reaching out to grab my wrist.

  “You really care,” she said.

  I looked at her big, black-rimmed eyes. They had a moist, invertebrate vulnerability to them, their wet centers exposed. They opened and shut, surrounded by a twitching of hairs like thin legs, dark encrusted. Here was a person who should have been familiar to me, whose hand wrapped around my wrist should have prompted a deepening sense of recognition, thoughts of our past together, feelings. Instead, I was having trouble seeing her as anything more than a compilation of parts, each of which seemed strange and new and known at the same time. They were perfect prosthetics, modeled on her own original hands and face but with no investment in the person they were meant to imitate. I could destroy her with as little feeling as it took to tear up a photograph. I pulled my body upright in her bed.

  “I’m late for work,” I said, and I stood, pushed past her narrow body and into the hall, out the door, into the world outside.

  THAT DAY AT THE OFFICE, I worked from the desk of my choice rather than the usual freelancer’s cubicle. The desk I chose was farther from the air conditioner, closer to the window. From it you could swivel your seat and look out at a tree that was in the process of dying, its lower boughs bare in every season. The cubicle was mine today because almost everybody who worked here was out sick: one with the flu, another with tonsillitis, three others with some kind of stomach bug. It gave me the feeling that there was something wrong out there, something that was many different things. My direct manager had something called pelliculitis. Instead of giving me the day off, he was managing me via a series of Post-it notes I found stuck up throughout the office. The Post-its told me that the first thing I should do today was proofread next month’s issue of New Age Plastics. There was an article in it that was in pretty bad shape. The second thing was to proof this week’s Fantastic Pets, double-checking its pagination. Then, if I had time, organize the supply cabinet. When I went to the break room to get a cup of coffee, I found a Post-it on the coffee machine that read:

  HEY, WOULD YOU MIND GRABBING ME A CUP OF COFFEE? HA HA! JUST KIDDING! OUT SICK WITH PELLICULITIS.—STEPHEN

  New Age Plastics was a magazine devoted to the spiritual uses and properties of different kinds of plastic. Next month’s issue was titled “The Healing Properties of Polystyrene” and featured interviews with an artist who made naturopathic jewelry from old Styrofoam takeout containers and an entrepreneur in Nevada who sold home-brew polystyrene tea that he claimed cured arthritis, imbuing the drinker’s joints with all the fantastic resilience of this light, durable plastic. The pages were riddled with errors, per usual—the New Agers wrote in unraveling run-on sentences without punctuation, or they punctuated only with exclamation points. But my boss was right, this article was particularly bad. I couldn’t even tell what it was about through the maze of vagary and repetition. One sentence in particular seemed important: The duo meanings of plastic are as one, bendable/changeable on the one hand and destructive on the other. This sentence appeared over and over, and when I crossed out a duplicate I’d inevitably grow uncertain of my decision, writing STET in the margin beside it, only to cross that out again a few moments later, and again, and again, etc.

  The problem, I had to admit to myself, was not necessarily the article. As I tried to perfect the pose of someone just like me hunched over a desk proofreading, I was aware that it was hard to keep reading over the sound of the thoughts in my head. It was as if my thoughts were on channel seek: B’s tender face. C’s confused one. A full Sunday dinner obscured beneath white sheets. Covered in dead ants. Smeared with blue glitter and gelatinous pink. A round, luscious Kandy Kake, hazily remembered. I was salivating strangely, as if my tongue leaked. I thought I might be coming down sick, too. And even as I thought this, I knew it was not the normal kind of sick, where the body rebels against the foreign element within it. The foreign element was not yet inside me: there was still time to do something, though I didn’t know what. It was enough to make me cry.

  I texted C: Crazy night with B. She’s losing it for real. Call me?

  When I left the office at four thirty, C still hadn’t replied.

  I walked back home a new way that day, a way that lacked sidewalk but promised to keep me safe from B in case she was staking out my normal route, which snaked past all the gas stations and my two favorite Wally’s Supermarkets. The new way followed the highway. I walked in the ditch when the cars came, breathing in their after-smell of nail polish or nail polish remover, scratching my shins on rough blades of gutter grass. It took longer, too, this way—but the difficulty was worth it. I could be alone with my thoughts, even if all my thoughts right now consisted of panicky, uncontrollable images of things I wanted or feared. Out here by myself, I could try to devise a plan.

  When I finally reached home, slick with sweat and covered all over in dull gray dust, I had no plan. I started to head around to the staircase that led back to our apartment, but I stopped myself. It was dusk, and the darkening sky made the indoor spaces glow br
ighter by contrast. I stood in the driveway before my house and looked up into it from outside. I saw the visible fragments of my bedroom furniture, the unmade bed, the empty mirror. I saw the kitchen counter from a strange new angle, the Formica peeling off the side in a way I had never noticed when I was up there living. From the outside, the inside of our house looked like a stranger’s. It looked like any house I might peer into with B, sitting on our roof and making fun of the stupid things they owned, the stupid things they were doing.

  I didn’t realize that I had been backing away until I stumbled over a jut of asphalt at the end of our neighbor’s driveway. I turned around. I was back at the house across the street, the still-abandoned house. My safe house.

  I walked across the lawn to the front door and eased it open gently. I walked over to the sheeted-up couch and lay down on its lumpy white surface. In my mind I said a silent good-night to each of my absent family members, only I didn’t know their names so I called them Father, Mother, Daughter Who Does Ballet. I rolled onto my side and pulled my knees up toward my chest for slumber. But before I fell asleep, I texted C:

  Am I seeing you tomorrow?

  Are you mad at me?