You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

by Alexandra Kleeman

  “I can show you to a crowbar,” he said.

  “I thought you weren’t allowed to do that,” I said. But I wanted it: I wanted it enough that I didn’t care if this Wally got punished for it.

  “We aren’t,” he said slowly. “But I can show you to something better.”

  “Kandy Kakes?” I asked.

  He just stood there for a second. The large foam head looked as though it were looking at me, which I knew meant that he was looking someplace else. Then he started walking.

  He led me out of the aisle and into the aisle adjacent. There were jellied fruits suspended in plastic containers, glowing orange, yellow, pink, as the light pushed through them. I thought he might look back to make sure I was still there, but he didn’t. I understood that it might not be a simple thing to look around in a Hospitality Hat, to change the orientation of one’s head so radically. The foam plastic would chafe against cheek and neck. It would press warm and humid to the scrub of his pinkening face, eventually it might rub the skin away, showing the deeper pinks, the bluish-lilac tint belonging to the subdermal layers of skin. If he moved too much, his face might erode entirely. I trailed behind, several docile steps behind, watching his body clench and loosen with the motion of walking.

  “When does the food chandelier get changed?” I asked him.

  His body twisted toward me slightly, but the bulk of it kept walking as before.

  “Do you know when you’re going to get more Kandy Kakes?” I asked.

  “Are these really the questions you long to have answered?” he replied.

  I looked around us at all the veal.

  The veal section had changed. In the weeks since it first appeared on TV, Michael’s face had propelled veal to new heights of desirability: Men identified with his confusion, with the somber melancholy of his paunchy stomach and cheeks. Women wanted to feed him. He reminded the elderly of past versions of themselves, still ravening for living matter. And children finally had something they could understand when they thought of veal, that meat whose name wasn’t a kind of animal or a substance that came nuggeted, pattied, or shoved onto a stick. Veal had a face now, where before it had nothing. And while Michael’s face had once been an artless and unexceptional slab according to the personal accounts of grocery store employees and other witnesses to his robberies, image-capturing technology had transformed it into an object of fascination, something to stare at, a face that yielded up more over time.

  The veal section had tripled in size, and Michael was everywhere: on stickers and cardboard signs that hung from the ceiling, mugging zanily all over the promotional Veal Wheel. He was a grinning caricature pictured next to the logo for the Regional Council for the Protection of Veal and Veal Imagery. Below his face, the text read: THE MAN WHO STOLE VEAL . . . AND GAVE IT TO THE WORLD. Veal’s new slogan was short and underexplained. Each package was stamped with a single repeated phrase:

  THE LIGHT MEAT.

  Ending up with the Michaels gave me that old feeling of having someone around, someone familiar and friendly who I wanted to talk to. I looked into each pair of his eyes and tried to feel for the one that was most familiar to me, most like the Michael from the poster I had swiped or, even better, the sad, slabby man from C’s television who I had watched cry through the rounded convexity of the glass screen. It depressed me to think of him living by the will of the Veal Society, kept in some room and taken out only when they wanted to extract more images from him. For his sake I hoped that he was okay, that these images were recent. I stared at the most Michael-like face of the bunch until I noticed suddenly that the Wally was stopped next to me, watching the same advertisement with an intensity that matched my own.

  “Do you follow Michael?” he asked me, wiggling his large foam head on its axis a little.

  “I’ve watched him,” I said. “I have a poster of him at home.”

  “Customers love Michael,” said the Wally, nodding. “His face brings new ones each week, and more the week after. They come with their own shopping bags. Some bags have his photo on them. They come and they shove bundle after bundle of veal into their bag. They come to see his face and they buy because they hope to take away a piece of it. We don’t mind. We could stop it. Often when they leave with the veal, they take other items with them. This grows our veal proportion. We need the veal, but we can allow some to leave the store in the hands of customers.”

  “But isn’t that what a store is for?” I asked. “To be emptied out by customers?

  “And then restocked, of course,” I added. It was important to me that he could tell I was a good thinker.

  “A store is about something greater than selling,” he said. “If you looked only at the surface of the word, you could say its primary purpose is storage. That surface is its core.”

  “Why do you need the veal?” I asked.

  He indicated with his arm the expanded veal section, as if that were an answer in itself. An unbroken aisle of meat, every gap filled, every crevice stuffed with packages of flesh shining wetly like rosy chunks of quartz. Coolers of veal shivered invisibly, releasing a sheen of cold mist into the air. A tremble of vulvar pink, the color of an innocent child’s gums. Freezers full of frosted flesh cast a low blue light.

  “Wally’s is collecting veal,” I said, trying to extract words from his gesture.

  “We are collecting veal,” said the Wally. He leaned on the word we as he stared down at me through his open mouth.

  “That doesn’t make sense to me,” I said.

  “It’s one of the only things that make sense,” he said soberly. “What qualities unite and divide all the products in this store? Either they are good for you, or they work ceaselessly to destroy you from within. The categories of fruit and vegetable and grain are meaningless in the face of this single superior distinction. It does not matter whether a tomato is a vegetable with seeds or a fouled-up fruit, it matters whether that tomato will hasten your ruin. This is what they should print on the nutritional labels, the ingredients list. This is the only category that is truly important to know, and knowing it is power.”

  He continued: “We know what happens to the man who swallows arsenic, to the child or dog that keels over with a plastic bag shoved down the esophagus as far as it can go. The cause and effect are blatant. Most substances machinate more subtly. They suffocate the tinier parts of us, parts you can’t see. Strychnine has an effect life of minutes. Alcohol has an effect life of hours. What is the life of a half pound of potatoes inside you, how long will it work away at you, sabotaging you in ways too small to perceive? Minuscule objects are breaking in you at this moment. You can feel them, even if they can’t be seen or heard. The things that have gone wrong inside of you are whispering to each other beyond your hearing, too softly to stir the surface of your eardrum. They are whispering in the other room like your parents used to when you were just a child. A single moment of clarity could cure you. A single taste of some pure and holy food could return you to your originary nature, your ability to discern good from evil as simply as one looks up into the sky and sees that it is blue. But there is nothing pure and holy in this world.” I heard my breath loud in my own ears, so fast that it sounded to me as if I were running from something.

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” I said in a hopeful way.

  “No, of course there isn’t,” he said comfortingly, peering down through the black mesh mouth. “You’re like everyone else. A ghost trapped in a body, loving what kills it. Wouldn’t you rather love what is right for you instead? Wouldn’t you like to find out what that is?”

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” I said. “You’re talking about C?”

  The little transparent pipes in my mind were breaking one by one, spilling forth a caustic blue fluid.

  “I’m talking about you,” he said. “I’m talking about who’s running you. Is it you, yourself, or someone adjacent, so similar that even you can’t tell yourselves apart? Tell me, do you ever look in
the mirror and mistake that face for your own? I see you and I perceive that the very edges of your body are a blur. You don’t know where you end. You are nibbled at by a vagueness. By saying this, I in no way am referring to anything like an aura. This is a sign of the disintegration of your organism under pressure. Tell me, is there someone in your life who’s been sharing your life too closely? A friend or a loved one? Is there someone who’s been taking up your time and not giving any of it back? Have you made certain they’re not stealing light from you? That the darkness from their body has not permeated your own by way of your common air, proximate water, shared furniture, et cetera?”

  I knew he was talking about B.

  “I did have a friend,” I said.

  “And your friend trespassed upon you,” the Wally replied.

  I nodded. His looming foam face seemed bigger now, closer.

  He continued: “I sense another attachment, too. Someone who made you feel like a ghost within your own living body, someone who you are haunting. You see their separation from you as an act of harm, but you should examine the harm within you. Trace it. Source your sadness. Doesn’t it begin in this person, absent though they may be? Their oozings in you, their memory turning to rot. The ghost of this person haunts you, and you cannot flee in body.”

  He reached forward his fleshy pink hand and placed two pink fingers against my temple. His skin was incredibly soft, like it had just been unwrapped, like I was the first thing it had ever touched.

  He continued: “But you can flee your mind.”

  I didn’t understand anything. Behind the Hospitality Hat, red became orange, orange turned pink. The colors bled sweetly, like a thing dying softly in the forest alone. By the time I understood it was the product shelves sliding on their tracks, shifting into their new positions, it didn’t even matter. It didn’t make a difference what different things were; just having them move across my visual field, casting their shadows on my retina, was enough for me to feel like I had known them deeply.

  “Haven’t you been sensing this?” said the voice in front of me. “Don’t you want to be one with yourself? To have a double ownership. To know just once with surety that when you breathe, when you eat, that you are the only one inside you breathing and eating? That you are you, and no one else.”

  In the gap newly created by the sliding shelves, where the plastic cups of jellied fruits trapped in firm syrup had once been, and behind the head of the Wally whose voice radiated from within me, pouring out from my skull as though I were the speaker rather than the listener, I saw the bodies of Wallys working away at something, heaving boxes of something dense that hit the ground with moist thuds.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You will,” it replied.

  The bodies were loading the boxes into a truck. The bodies were shouldering them heavy, like cases full of flour or ground bone, cases of liquid-soaked rag. On the sides of the boxes I saw the KANDY KAKES logo and underneath it the words:

  HAVEN’T YOU NOT HAD ENOUGH?

  I saw the EXIT sign glowing over the dark hole they carried the boxes into. I knew that there probably wasn’t anything good inside that hole. Wherever my neighbors had gone that afternoon, silent and sheeted, it hadn’t been in pursuit of happiness. Otherwise they might have looked happier. But what I found hopeful about that hole was: It was a hole. I could put myself into it. I could avoid detection, and in its dark inners I could pretend to forget myself. Whatever I had once had with B or with C was gone; if I wanted it back, I’d have to dig my way back into them. It would be difficult, and there was no guarantee that they’d be willing to hold still to let me do it. I felt the thinness of the fiber binding me to myself: like a loose thread hanging from a hem, I could tear it off. I’d leave them waiting around in the heat for me, the ones I half loved, wondering what they had done to scare me off. Something rattled in my hollow. When the Wallys in their masks handed me the sheet, I took it. I let them help me unfold it, stretch it out to its full length. I let them drape it over me, shift it back and forth until the eyeholes fell over my eyes and I could see them all, their identical Wallyheads bobbing around me at slightly different heights. I let them blank me out.

  I took one step forward, then another, then another another another.

  WE SAT LIMP AND SILENT inside the hold of a white cargo van that sped along the highway. The van was a common make, rectangular and white with two long, tinted windows so we could see out and nobody could see in. It was the most popular model of cargo van on the road these days: according to the ads, one was sold every five minutes. Dozens had been bought in the time that we’d been driving. A funny chemical smell hung in the air, polyurethane foam, the smell of Wallyflesh bodying out the masks that the cultists continued to wear even though we were no longer in a Wally’s, even though it was prohibited to wear the Wally’s uniform outside of the store, where it was considered an unauthorized use of a trademarked visage. It was still bright outside, but fading. Slices of the world, anonymized, shone from around the corners of drooping Wallyheads as we drove someplace that I couldn’t even imagine. I pictured a black, light-filled room. I thought of the house across the street, minus the house, minus the street.

  For the first couple of minutes, the little slivers of outer world meant something. They were the stop sign on the way out of the Wally’s parking lot, the second stop sign after the bend in the road that plenty of cars ignored, the willow trees lurching over the fenced backyard of a woman recluse who only left the house wearing a pretty silk scarf draped over her head, the ends clutched together beneath her throat by a hand that could have been very old or fairly young. She went as far as the mailbox, never farther. B said she was probably a former movie star with an obliterated face. B was obsessed with obliterated faces, she thought they made for a great story. If B were here, she would whisper into my ear that each one of the Wallys had lost their faces in gruesome grocery store–related incidents. But that kind of thinking was why I was here in this van and she was wherever she was. B didn’t understand that the dangerous part of having a face was showing it off, not losing it. To see your face spread onto the faces around you, absorbed by others. The masks on these Wallys kept me safe the way the sheets over my neighbors had kept us all safe from seeing and then replicating their sadness, safe from taking them within. The masks were prophylactic, emotionally speaking. These masked men were going to bring me to a cleaner place, where things were more sharply distinguished from one another and where I would finally have the space to figure out who I was without other people nudging me all the time into the shapes they thought I should have.

  After a minute or two in the van, we could have been anywhere. Tree-shaped trees blurred behind the shapes of the other people slumped in the van like captured things whose only experience had been to be captured again and again. Thinking of them in this way made me feel warmly collegial. Beneath their masks and uniforms, they could be people much like me, with anxieties about those closest to them and a weird misplaced hunger for something intangible that could be satisfied only by snack food. They might have someone they were running from, or someone they were running to, even though they didn’t have any idea where that person might have gone or why. Of course they wouldn’t be, beneath their foam shells, exactly the way I was. All of them were male, possessed of soft, foldy bellies that crested and troughed beneath their red Wally’s polo shirts. They looked ample, arms and torsos pressed together. I wanted to push myself in among them, sneak my bony elbows up into their surplus, and fall asleep there, warm and forgotten and surrounded by the lingering scent of cheese, cardboard, and laundry detergent.

  It was hard to think of the right thing to say when I had never said anything to these men and they had never said anything to me. I didn’t know whether to express sadness about my past or positivity about my future with them. I looked around me in the back of the van: eight men in foam heads, six cases of Kandy Kakes, five or six tarps spread beneath us, balled-up newspaper,
and two units of twine, brittle and straw colored. I looked at everything outside the windows. They could have been driving me in big loops around my own town and I wouldn’t have known. It all went flashing by, increasingly green but still just visual slush, reminding me blandly of other places I’d been without causing me to remember them in detail. I figured that I’d better start feeling like this van was my home.

  “I don’t know about you guys,” I said out loud, trying to sound upbeat, “but I for one am completely excited to eat a Kandy Kake whenever we get to where we’re going.”

  Nobody replied. The only sounds then, as before, were the tires turning against the road, rubbing themselves out on it, and the low drone of the engine. Outside the window, the trees passed by—not faster, not slower, but the same.

  3

  GREAT. ARE WE ALL SETTLED? Fantastic. Tremendous. I can tell this is a good bunch. A tremendous bunch.

  Words spilled tinny from the overhead speakers, a deep and ballooning male voice undercut by the squeal of outdated equipment. In the cavernous room, our bodies turned toward the sound in different directions: we didn’t know what we were looking for or where we would find it. It was a conference hall, bounded by movable beige walls and wine-colored carpeting, the carpeting dotted by little shapes that had gone blurry, diamonds and triangles with no points. Through the vents in my sheet I saw a tacky chandelier shining weakly above us, faint in the enveloping daylight. I shifted the eyeholes to try for a more complete view, but it was all parts and pieces: a white sheet or some dark gap cut into it, the graying carpet, the steep emptiness above.

  Right. Now. Oh. Eyes to the front, please, eyes to the front. I’m right over here, folks. In the center. By the podium. Right in front of you.

  The voice came from all around, but I tried to turn away from it and look toward the light. Turning into my dizziness, I found the brightness of the outdoors, rectangled through large glass panels. A breeze swayed the long, faded burgundy curtains hanging in front of tall plate-glass windows, curtains that must once have looked expensive, important. Now they were nubby with lint and the glass behind them was dusty from the outside, which made the things you saw through it look fake. Birds looked like an echo of birds, fat white clouds looked as if they were there to sell you fabric softener or air travel or health insurance. And there at the middle of it all: a plain wooden podium with angled microphone, an averagely tall man covered in what looked like a standard-issue white sheet but was actually of a luxuriously high thread count. He shuffled in place—or maybe he was doing something more impressive, it was hard to tell beneath my covering. Besides a small patch of color below his eyeholes, an insignia that I had been told stood for his decision to renounce his mouth, he lacked obvious markers of authority. Even with his features and limbs hidden beneath loose white, he gave the impression of being overweight and soft, a body like a sofa. Great, okay, said the voice, which I understood originated in front of me but which seemed to come from all around, pushing from the outside in. Let’s begin. Greetings to all of our new recruits, and Welcome. Or should I say Unwelcome. I’ll explain that later. I’ll be your Regional Manager, reporting to the General Manager and by extension to the Grand Manager himself.