You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

by Alexandra Kleeman

  Are you okay?

  I haven’t heard from you in a long time.

  THE NEXT MORNING, I WOKE and all the objects were lit up with early daylight, soaked in a brightness that turned their surfaces stark and self-evident—except maybe for the shadows they cast to their sides, the hollow and unhollow centers, the undersides cold where they failed to find the light. The bottoms of things hid themselves against the ground. Otherwise, the world splayed open to my eyes and felt mostly safe. I checked my phone and there was nothing. I decided to walk over to C’s house to look in on him. To give him another chance to be a better boyfriend or get him to give me another chance to be some kind of girlfriend. I wasn’t going to work today. The thought hadn’t even occurred to me.

  Each time that I had gone out with C, he had picked me up in his beat-up white coupe and driven me over to his condo, a trip that took about twenty minutes with traffic lights and stop signs. It was a complicated path he took, full of turns, and I wasn’t sure I could follow it exactly on foot. But I felt confident that I would recognize the way there from landmarks that I had stored in my memory over the months we’d been dating. Here was the piece of curb where he used to park and idle his engine while I said my good-byes to B and told her when I’d be back. There at the end of the block was the bent stop sign where someone had totaled their car last Fourth of July.

  As I began walking, I kept track of the things I knew, the geographic features that let me know I was going the right way. I saw the azaleas in the yard of the pueblo-style ranch house and the golden retriever in the red collar. On foot each block seemed to take forever, and when I reached the larger roads it felt like I would never again reach an intersection or a landmark, it felt like I was walking the same steps over and over, until suddenly a traffic light would appear in the distance and I would be comforted once more by this proof that I was on the right track and making good progress. As I walked, I rehearsed what I would say to C when I saw him, what attitude I would take toward the fight we had the night before he disappeared. I thought about B waiting alone for me back at home, and about the family whose house I was living in now, a family I truly considered my own even though I wasn’t sure they knew this yet. I imagined them standing in their freshly sheeted home, just about to leave, looking around them, and asking one another, Where is she? Is she coming with us? Does she know it’s the big day? I knew in my heart that this “she” was me. I thought about their phantom love for me, light and airy as the love of ghosts. I thought about the pamphlets I had found on their counter, pamphlets for the Conjoined Eaters Church I had found out about at Wally’s, pamphlets with titles such as “BOUNCING BACK FROM SELF-EXILE” and “THE PROBLEM WITH YOUR LIFE IS YOU.”

  When I finally reached C’s condominium complex, my feet were burning and tingling at once and my throat felt like a single lump of pain. I must have been thirsty, and hungry. I would ask C to feed me when I found him. I pushed open the front metal gate and walked in, stepping over pointy metal spikes that sank into the ground when you drove on them the one way and pierced your tires when you crossed the other. I turned right at the geometrically trimmed juniper bush and left at the second left, where a lonely sprinkler jerked back and forth, watering a patch of concrete. When I saw the right group of condos, I headed up the stairs toward the top-right unit just left of the corner unit. I gripped the metal railing with a pink, sweat-filmed hand.

  At C’s entrance at the top of the stairs, I knocked and knocked. I made a high-pitched, terrible sound by dragging my fingernails down the door. I pleaded. I texted a series of question marks, nothing but question marks, until the screen of my cell phone looked as though it were glitching. I slumped down and sat on the concrete, thinking it’d only be a while before someone saw me and expressed concern, before someone did something about me. But that time didn’t come.

  I waited there until it began to get dark, and then I left to walk back home, emptied out and light-headed, not sure whether the salt on my body was from sweat or from tears.

  WHEN I FINALLY RETURNED TO the house across the street, I felt relief and certainty. This was the place. There was no other place like it in the world. I had everything I needed here: peace, quiet, pamphlets. Everything except food. And my makeup, which was back across the street in what used to be my bedroom. I stepped softly over to the window and looked up into the warm yellow lights of my old apartment. It looked so much safer from over here, with a twenty-yard buffer. I thought I might even be capable of going back inside if only I could wait until the lights went off and B went to sleep, reducing my chances of seeing her to zero. I settled down on the couch in front of the sheeted-over TV to wait. I pulled the TV sheet back, uncovering its large, dark lens, and found myself distorted in its surface, sitting there watching myself watch myself. Time passed and the rooms of my old apartment went entirely dark, one by one.

  Then I crept out across the street, past the old oak by my bedroom window, around the driveway to the staircase leading up to our two-bedroom apartment. I turned the key so very slowly in the lock, I opened the door with both hands on the knob. At the top of the stairs I knew I needed to check both bedrooms to see which one B was sleeping in—I had to do it without turning on the lights. I crawled over to her bedroom door, body low to the ground, and listened at the crack for the sound of sleeping. After a few minutes I was sure that I heard it: the sound of no sound, the sound of a stilled throat, the whisper of breath through the nostrils, almost imperceptible. Now I could sneak into the kitchen and grab some oranges, sneak into my bedroom and grab my makeup before leaving forever, victorious.

  Then I heard a voice from behind me saying my name, again and again, insistent like the call of a bird. I turned.

  She stood staring, gaping as though struggling to believe what she was seeing. It seemed to be her: the tiny mouth, sharp fingers, a voice like water falling on tin. These were parts of the old B, the one I knew. But the self-assurance, the way she leaned forward, extending a hand out toward me as though she thought she was helping, out and into my own space: this wasn’t my frail friend. When the pamphlets instructed me to discern duplicity, was this what they meant? I looked at her, at the traces of varicolored eye shadow that clung to her eyelid. Errors were piling up in her. She needed sorting.

  “What?” I said in a flat tone.

  “Where were you? Where have you been?” B asked plaintively.

  “I was staying with C. Because you were angry with me,” I said.

  “I wasn’t angry,” said B.

  The silence hung around us, heavy and dark.

  “Most people would be angry,” I said.

  “We’re not most people,” she said. “We’re closer than that.”

  “Closer to what?” I asked.

  “Closer to each other,” B said. “Closer to being the same person. Like, if you destroy my things, you’re destroying your own. Our lives are twined together.”

  “Twined, twined, twined,” I said. What a strange word, I thought. It reminded me of the pamphlets.

  “Are you making fun of me?” B asked, her face confused but also irritated.

  The things we said slid past each other without making contact, failed to land or fit together. It was like C’s porn videos, where soft, listless actors carried out their roles while thinking of something entirely unrelated somewhere beneath their faces. You watched them fucking and all you learned was that they were fucking. One body stuffed the head of another deep into a pillow and began its pounding: It was what it was. These bodies were universally compatible, each to each, so the minds would be, too. There was nothing any of these naked bodies could do to truly surprise each other.

  I fantasized sometimes about an inverse pornography in which all that mattered was what was going on within what appeared to be a successful fucking. Everything would look the same, flat and happy, but as a viewer I would know that one of them felt an uncomfortable friction that they were concerned would turn into a rash, the other was worried about
their unbalanced relationship, not sure what to think about or focus on, wishing they were fucking someone more energetic and distracting even if it was all staged. These innards would be exposed in a voice-over recorded by the actors directly after filming and spliced into the video during postproduction. You would know all the things that the body, in its busy activity, kept hidden.

  But since C had disappeared, the fantasies that obsessed me were all the worst things I could imagine at any given time. In one fantasy I look over at the TV in the middle of having sex with C and I think I see our reflections—but then I see that it’s a video of the two of us. But as I watch longer, I see that it’s actually a video of C and someone else wearing a wig that looks just like my own hair, which starts to come off the head, revealing real hair beneath that also happens to be similar to mine, only blunter, darker. The hair on the wig is so familiar. This hair is soft and tangly, silky like a little girl’s. It even has the same cowlicks as my own, a small one at the front above the forehead and a deeper one on the back of the head. That’s when it hits me that it’s no wig, it’s my own actual hair. And then I wonder what’s happened to the me that used to be inside it.

  B was still crouched down, staring at me and waiting for me to agree with her. I felt a pressure in my muscles that might have been an urge toward flight or just the effort of holding a body perfectly in place. I felt waves of heat sweep my body from the head down, heard something sizzling behind my ears.

  “I mean,” she said, “how would you put it?

  “Is something wrong?” she asked. “Is something wrong with us?”

  She couldn’t even understand why we might have a problem, and in this way she proved that she was the more innocent person.

  “We can talk about it?” B asked.

  For a second, I thought we could. It was a long second.

  Then I lurched to a sitting position and pushed past her to my bedroom. The room had all my things in it, but when I looked out at it, I didn’t feel like I was in the right place. My shoulder pulsed where I had muscled her aside. In my mind, I heard a shadow of the sound she had made when I pushed her over. A bird call, thin as a twig. It was the sound of injury uncolored by anger or fear: she still couldn’t imagine that I was struggling against her.

  I stood in front of the mantel. I knew that everything in this room belonged to me, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone had moved it around or swapped it for identical objects, slightly off. To my right, the TV spooled out colors and light and sound that I couldn’t bring into focus. I saw Kandy Kat’s hollow cheeks and drowned eyes. I saw what seemed to be a darkened face, one eye black and one eye white, spinning dizzily on-screen. But that made no sense. It must have been a Kandy Kake, from the longest of the Kandy Kakes commercials, the one where Kandy Kat clones himself to sneak into the Kandy Kakes factory, sacrificing one of himself so that the other can sneak past the security Klowns and into the glorious troves of sugary-sweet treats that lie beyond. I tried to remember what happened next: did it end in a Kandy Kat embrace, their weak and wobble-thin arms wrapped around each other like a coil of wire? Or was it something worse, the two tearing and scratching at each other’s identical bodies, trying to destroy each other for the sake of a single Kandy Kake smuggled from the factory grounds and ready at last to be devoured? I felt strongly that I had once known the correct answer—it was in me somewhere, even if it couldn’t find its way out. I looked to the TV screen for help, but the cartoon was already over. All there was now was a pile of fur and the parting slogan, displayed on-screen in bright, bobbing words:

  IT’S NOT YOU, IT’S THE FOOD.

  EAT BRIGHT.

  The light in the room shifted almost imperceptibly, and I knew that B had entered, clogging the doorway with her thin frame. Her face was wide open and excited, as if she thought I were about to give her a present. I kept my head where it was, pointed forward and staring. I held still. Any movement I made would be proof that time was passing. Any movement would suggest that something would be happening soon. I had an image of myself walking toward an unsheathed knife, its tip pointed straight at me: I didn’t want to, and yet this image of myself understood that it was the only place to go.

  Outside my bedroom window the streetlights came on, spilling yellow light into the darkening blue. Breath quaked my body. I couldn’t do anything without driving the situation between me and B forward by notches, one step and then another. I heard the floorboards creak as she took another step toward me, contaminating my presence with her own. Everything she did seemed calculated to push me into the future.

  Said the voice to my far right, almost out of the range of peripheral vision: “Are you okay? Is something wrong? Do you want to eat Popsicles?”

  I reached out and touched the bundle of hair on the mantel, the lopped braid that B had brought to me and left in my hands. I squeezed it in my hand and drew it toward me. It had a yielding shape to it, like a stuffed animal with no limbs, head, or face. I pinched a bit of its smug torso and pulled. Hair like black taffy in the palm of my hand, with a blunt scissored edge to its ends. I wished that someone would catch me with it, to see me and shame me and stop me from doing this to myself. But there was nobody else: it was just me and B, her eyes large and confused and searching me for what I was about to do with her gift. Between my fingers the hair felt slippery, motile. As I tried to wad it, it unspooled. I knew I had to move faster.

  Forming the hair into a cohesive mass was a losing task: single hairs drifted from the bundle, falling in slow motion to the carpet. Twisting the bundle made the sound of flesh opening up onto barren sand. I wrapped the stuff around my finger until the wad was the size of a walnut, but when I pulled it off it swelled up in my hand and I understood that this was going to be difficult no matter what. I looked to B’s face, saw her eyes dark and frightened like little gaping mouths. Then I stuffed it in. Tongue clinging to the dry fiber, gums wettening but still sticky, struggling to stay slick. There were bits hanging out, but I couldn’t open my mouth or I’d risk losing the whole thing. I tilted my throat back and tried to choke it down. I put my thumb and fingers on opposite sides of the neck and stroked down, the way I used to get my dog to swallow a pill hidden in a lump of peanut butter. At the back of my throat it stuck like a wet rag at the threshold and I had to cough it up a bit, gasping around it, needing much more saliva to get it down.

  I rested the wad at the wet front of my mouth, behind the teeth, and I thought over and over about taking the first bite out of a Kandy Kake, cracking that fudge shell with my teeth and feeling the orange-scented syrup ooze out from under the thick skin. Digging my tongue through the oily stuff to the inner Kandy Kore, hard and dry as a bone, turning slowly to mush as my saliva soaks in. Sinking my teeth through layers of acidic sweetness to the woody pulp beneath, the crack of it in my mouth like a bone snapping in half. I looked up at the ceiling, opened my mouth, and pushed it in with two fingers, until I felt the furry ball lodged so far down my throat that it would be more work for it to find its way back up than to go, gently, in the peristaltic direction. My feeling of it disappeared completely when it reached my stomach, except for a heaviness, a sort of burden or weight I carried now that may only have been psychological. The fullness felt like it would never leave my body.

  I grabbed another handful and shoved it in, using the left hand to round up stray bits. The hair was rodenty in shape and flavor. It was becoming darker and darker outside all the time, bit by bit. I couldn’t make out the sheen of the hair anymore, just an anonymous blob, two shapes twisted into each other darkly. I turned around. There was a pale oval in front of me, swathed in dark shag, stuck through by two dots symmetrically placed and a thin patch of darkness at the bottom center. It was B’s face showing fear, a shape I’d never seen it take.

  THAT NIGHT I SLEPT, FOR the second time, in the house across the street. And the night after I did the same thing, ditto the night after that, and all the other nights until the night I became a Conjoin
ed Eater. I felt better there, more like myself. During the days I walked two hours to C’s condominium, where I waited for him. His absence made my heart grow fonder: with each day that I waited, he seemed like a greater and greater guy. I thought to myself that I didn’t need to talk to him, not about B or anyone else, I didn’t need to talk to him at all. I just needed to see him once, even from a distance, and I’d be able to imagine him again. If I could imagine him, I could imagine talking to him, telling him about the fight and the pamphlets and all the makeup I crushed, without actually having to explain the things I knew he’d have questions about.

  In many ways, having this imaginary C back would be better than the real thing. The genuine, unimagined C would want to know why I was keeping the Eater pamphlets, storing them in bed with me, when I had always hated strange and unprovable claims. He would want to ask how I could possibly think damaging B’s property would return our relationship to normal. He was always able to take the few simple things in my life and make them sound like trouble. It was his ability to trouble me that made me prize his comfort. I could imagine him hearing me out, tightening his jaw, nodding his head as he rubbed a hand up my back, saying, I know you did the only thing that seemed reasonable. I wanted it so badly that I almost thought it could save me from all the other things I wanted.

  I wanted C. I was alive with wanting. I wanted to find him and hug him until his bones bent in on themselves like cheap patio furniture. When he pulled up in front of his house in his battered white vehicle, I would finally open the car door and step out into the bright, sun-ridden air. I’d walk up after him as he went to his front door, and when he slid the key into the lock I’d wrap my arms around him from behind. I’d press him up against the door with my whole small body, the sharp handles of my hips jutting into him, rubbing against his jeans. I’d shove my front against the contours of his back, force his chest tight up on the door. I wouldn’t let him turn around to face me. I hoped he’d recognize me just from the shape of my body, the bony snag of my pelvis, the lumpiness of my nose and chin prodding at his spine.