You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

by Alexandra Kleeman

  We were packed tight together and the air tasted moist and personal, like a kiss from the mouth of a stranger. Dozens and dozens of us, new and old, waited restless before the empty podium. We swarmed it like ants around a gob of jelly, trying to figure out how to wring from it the thing we wanted: a glimpse of the Regional Manager, the Manager’s favorable attentions, the words from his mouth that raised us from our situation and into a better one. These blank periods of time before the lesson began were difficult to fill. They were uncomfortable and boring. We wanted to watch one another, judge one another, determine whether we were better than each other and worthier for advancement. We wanted to feel lucky, feel hopeful, feel closer to our ghosts. But in this sea of white, it was hard to see any trace or trait on your outside that made you different from anybody else.

  The white mounds in front of me begin shifting, turning their torsos laterally beneath their shrouds to look around, swaying before me like mountains in the wind. Then I see our Regional Manager making his way through the crowd, cutting his path from the catering entrance toward a thick swath of admirers who part just a little to let him through. They all want to feel the force of his body on its way, they think that some of his Brightness will rub off in the friction. The Manager, trailed by a couple of assistants, grasps his head with both hands to keep the eyeholes in place as he moves. He’s walking slowly, like he thinks he has a majestic air. But he’s not that tall, not especially graceful. All he is is Bright, Brighter than the rest of us. We know this because we’ve been told, we know even though it doesn’t really show up through his sheet, a sheet of higher quality than ours—hotel-quality luxury thread count, thick and creamy with satiny details at the hem that drags along behind him. He reaches the podium and his assistants scurry out from behind to sort out the train of his sheet so that he won’t trip as he turns to us to speak. The Manager gives us all what I assume is a look of appraisal, though through the eyeholes it can be hard to tell. At moments like this he looks so ordinary it is hard to believe that he, alone, has the knowledge necessary to midwife our future selves.

  Then he raises his hands grandly and addresses us all:

  HE WHO SITS NEXT TO ME, MAY WE EAT AS ONE!

  I look at Anna, standing next to me, already shouting the words back to him, already joining her voice to the total volume of the crowd, shouting and shouting in perfect unison like one great white sprawling person with a single monstrous voice. Anna looks so happy through her sight holes, her eyes bugging out enthusiastically, her mouth pressing feverishly against the inside of her sheet as she cries out again and again. She looks so happy and so Bright.

  I reach down and I take her hand in my own. I clasp it. I work my fingers in between hers and twine us. And then I lift my head up to shout.

  INSIDE A BODY THERE IS no Light. Blood piles through with no sense of where it goes, sliding past inner parts, parts that feel something but know nothing about what they feel. What they sense they send up through nerve channels to the brain, a cavefish-pale organ with no nerves of its own. Inside a body, thoughts that never touch air, never reach Light, thoughts that end in a suffocating Dark. The damp basement in a horror movie into which a teenage girl sinks slowly, the stairs groaning beneath her weight, her voice thready and red as she says the name of her boyfriend out loud, over and over again.

  Inside a body there is no Light, so the Eaters teach that you must shine your own through Righteous Eating. The diagrams illustrate it beautifully: a female torso in cross section, set on its side like a fish on a cutting board. Small cubes of black and white fall down its throat in the direction indicated by an arrow, the paths of the body marked out in bold white lines, highway lines. These black cubes represent food, the bad kind that starves the ghost within you so that when it is its moment to emerge from your soft shell, to come from you into the world and carry out your project more perfectly than you had ever dreamed, it will die trapped and weakened in your body that has been a prison to it forever. White cubes are the good kind of food, the kind that can save you—if not in this body, then for the next.

  Inside the schematic woman, food cubes are destroyed. They release their own benevolent and malevolent ghosts. Dark food travels down to the protective organs in which the ghost gestates vulnerable and sleepy; it clusters to their outsides and strangles what sleeps within. The good food, by contrast, breaks into shafts of differently colored light, bright like fireworks, and this light illuminates the body and nourishes the ghost within. Imagine this, they say, how radiant you become when you eat Bright. How beautiful, how durable and long-lasting. The colors that can’t be seen, working brilliance inside you, preparing you for your ghosting. Colors more beautiful than any of the colors you know.

  I used to lie in bed at night with my hands on my belly, feeling the blood crowd through, wondering what was taking place within me. Now that I had been illuminated, I lay in my cot, sideways like a baby in the womb, and when I rested my hand over my central organs I knew precisely what lay beneath. I knew that the flawed and sad feelings, daily dissatisfactions and pangs of despair, were just my ghost’s way of kicking within me, kicking to test its independence, kicking to tell me it wants to be let out.

  I fell asleep dreaming that it would split me open someday soon, like a green shoot piercing the husk of a soiled bulb.

  FOR THIS LESSON, TURN YOUR attention to the borders of your own body. If you are Stage Four in a state of peri- or proxi-ghosting, this session may not have much to offer you. For those operating at Stage Five or higher, or if you are already experiencing the feeling that your skin-barrier is penetrable or not really there, engaging with this lesson’s material could reverse you five to twelve decastages, and result in harmful physical symptoms such as retching, increased heart rate, elation, suggestibility, joint and liver inflammation, and epidermal crusting. If you or anyone you know fits this risk profile, please inform an attendant immediately.

  Now, to those of you remaining with us today, welcome. I’d like you to close your eyes and concentrate on your edges, how they feel, how steady or firm. Where does your profile end, and is the ending blurry or rubbery? Trembly? Vibrating sharply? You’ll notice that your husk stiffens up, turns turgid, when your body channels memories of your Darker past. You feel queasy, don’t you? This is because thinking of your past instantly activates all things the you of your past came into contact with, from the innocuous to the severely toxic—especially the severely toxic. Your past life was like water in a stagnant lake: slow, cloudy, full of silt and particulate. Light could not push its way in through the murk. This is not to say that your past was one of total Darkness, just that the mud mixed with it so thoroughly that you cannot draw one single cup of water from that poisonous lake that is fit to drink. In each sip there will be a mouthful of dirt to choke you. That’s why we’re here today: to help you to filter from your bodies that Dark matter that interferes with your progress toward an ideal ghost state, that stalls the eventual discard of your body husk. We can sanitize your past in the present, if you are willing. Results contingent. Who has questions? If you have questions, raise your hand. An assistant will be over to deal with you.

  I lay on my back in the center of the gymnasium and tried to breathe. I tried not to do anything that could look like I was raising my hand. I intended to know what I was doing and to do it perfectly. I pictured a perfect student and tried to resemble her physically. I tried not to look at the ceiling or toward the voice of the instructor. I tried not to look like anything, tried to feel like I had lost myself among the other supine bodies lying limp on the floor. I tried to concentrate only on the idea of Light and the ghost within me, not on my memories, which were as mottled as ever and seemed to be with me all of the time. The Managers moved between us, checking up on our progress, their sheets brushing across our faces and mouths by accident. I could feel Anna in the room, somewhere in the room, executing the exercise rather than worrying about its execution. Today the air had a frictive quality that grou
nd against my skin, and I was glad again for the protection of the sheet.

  I’d like to start by asking you all to focus your ghost pointers on the object at the center of the room. Keep your eyes closed. Focus with your inner eye, with your ghost’s eye. As I’m sure you all know by now, the object at the center of the room is an orange, an ordinary, everyday piece of fruit. Oranges, in and of themselves, are neither Dark nor Bright. If you had to put them in one category, they’d be Bright—but barely. Eating an orange is about as beneficial for your future ghosted self as brushing the lint from a sweater. It basically doesn’t matter. Oranges, however, are a popular American fruit. They show up in our grocery stores, in our Little League games, in our sack lunches, in the moments at which we are the weakest and lowest. They are a major player in the collective Darkness of our former world, and as such they are one of the most dangerous objects you could encounter or think about: the very notion of an orange is guaranteed to bring up dangerous memories thick with harmful people, places, and objects.

  Gaze upon your inner thoughts, the ideas and memories evoked by this fruit, and you will see how they tend to bring into this clean, sanctified space remembrances of a corrupted time, in which Dark objects mingled indiscriminately with the Bright and your ghost was in a state close to atrophy. Recall, BUT DO NOT THINK OF the Dark feelings of that time, which are now gone: feelings of loving them too much or not enough, never loving them the right amount, of wanting them to give you space and then feeling unloved, of saying you understood what they were saying when what they were saying only made you feel more confused and more alone. Remember: DO NOT REMEMBER your past. PERCEIVE your past as you would perceive a dark stone or flower resting at some distance from you. THEN CAST IT FROM YOU WITH FORCE.

  Now, I’ll show you a couple techniques for filtering and refurbishing mental material. While your past should always be regarded as toxic, these techniques, practiced continuously and with escalating intensity, should allow you to interact safely with the objects found in our little haven. Let’s start with a basic, fairly neutral memory. I’d like everyone to call to mind a memory from their past, let’s say from the past five years, let’s say it’s an ordinary day rather than a special occasion, and let’s say it takes place in a kitchen. DO NOT REMEMBER this memory, simply inspect it and take stock of its contents. When does it take place? Who is present? What types of objects and colors are near to you, far from you? When you have one of these in view—say, the location, that kitchen—I want you to work on turning that location into this location. This might be subtractive, if you know a lot about this location you used to occupy, or additive if you don’t. For example, you were once with your sister in a bright, cozy kitchen whose walls were covered in a decorative paper depicting marigolds in bloom. You looked into your cup of tea and saw the dead husk of a spider resting at its bottom.

  First, eliminate the sister or sisterlike object from this memory. Whatever you thought of her at that time, she is nothing more than a sister-shaped impediment to your progress now. You could begin by introducing a particle of blankness near her face that expands to swallow her whole, from her needy little mouth to her chewed-down toenails. Or you could “black her out,” overlaying her location with a square or scribble of black that disencourages the gaze. Perhaps the easiest method is to look away. Try it. This may take a couple of tries.

  All around me I heard little sounds of effort, trapped groans and squeezed breathing as we tried to expunge loved ones from our own private scenes. These filtering sessions were painful; I found scratches on my body afterward, I had sore muscles in my forearms and calves, I must have pulled them trying so hard to hold still. I was working on a memory from earlier last year, from before I knew there was any life other than mine to escape to, before I knew about the Darkness and the Light, before things had gotten so bad. It was a memory in which I stood in my kitchen while somebody who I tried to imagine was not B suggested we eat something that was not Popsicles. I had eliminated her face and hair, now a fuzzy space tilted atop the thin neck and words came from it, though I no longer knew what they meant.

  Once you’ve worked at the eradication of persons, try a background substitution. Borrow from our pure and Light-filled surround. Instead of your childhood wallpaper, think of our glossy white walls. The more your memory of that place comes to resemble this hall of Brightness, the Brighter you’ll be in memory, and in your current, evanescing iteration.

  I turned the gray walls crawling with small, historied stains into a stark white expanse like the one in this room. I took out our cheap plates with the yellow rim and put nothing in their place. Even with these markers scrubbed clean, I couldn’t help knowing who it was, when it was, what was happening. What was B doing? Was she looking and acting like me? Had she seen C, and how far away was he from where she was now?

  Recall the parable of the knife: There were two brothers, identical in temperament but divided in spirit, each bearing much enmity toward the other. With their father’s death, they made to split his property equally in half. They were fortunate, for their father possessed two of each thing, every object set next to its twin in his ample abode. They commenced to halve his estate, and the portions were made exact—but for a single carving knife that had no partner. The two argued bitterly over this knife, whether to share it in increments of time or split blade from hilt and go their separate ways. Finally, proffering the knife’s edge to the throat of his sibling, the eldest suggested that he would take possession of the knife in its physical manifestation, while the younger might count himself the owner of the knife’s intangibles: its sharpness, form, and afterlife. They quickly parted ways, the eldest mounting his horse and pointing himself toward the village, while the younger lay supine, bleeding his life out at the side of the road. But the bargain was in the younger man’s favor after all: while the eldest prodded dully at supper with his lump of inherited matter, the younger lived far better in heaven with his knife at his side, singing knife-songs to the heavenly gathering and putting holes in the angels, one by one.

  KEEP GATHERING, LEARNING, CLEANSING

  YOUR GHOST RUNNETH OVER

  With that, our Manager exited the room and there were no more lessons for the day.

  AFTER A MEAL OF SIX Kandy Kakes, I headed over to the Greeting Hall for my shift processing the new recruits. Anna was already there, washing her hands beneath hot water in preparation for the formal bath where we’d wash their soiled bodies. Wherever I intended to be, it seemed like Anna had always gotten there five minutes before. She looked up at me as I walked in, then back down at her washing, violently down, as though she were washing the me from her. It was clear Anna had started to resent me, believing that she could rise further and faster on her own, which was probably true. Since we had arrived, we had risen up in the Church, but not so far up.

  On the other side of the metal garage door I could hear the new recruits stirring in their holding pen, writhing in a collective fidget, asking timidly for food or water. I was full of anxiety and fear in these moments before processing began. The Darkness they would carry in beneath their fingernails and on their feet, dissolved into the slick of their mouths and eyes, their unchecked speech containing within it unedited and uncleansed referents to the Dark world I still remembered, though I tried not to. The inevitable stream of questions that they would ask and that I could not answer—they made me feel like I knew less than they, less than anything at all.

  At the hour mark the door lifted and the recruits came in, blinking up at the bright fluorescent bulbs overhead that rendered their bare bodies in shades of sickly yellow and cream. We peeled the sheets from them and exposed them, blinking, to our Brightness. Inside the Greeting Hall they swarmed aimlessly, they crouched and covered their heads with their hands, they stopped in the middle of the room and stared above. Their naked faces were open and searching hungrily for direction, and I was grateful for my sheeting, which kept us apart. As a greeter it was my job to grab them one at
a time and guide each through the different steps of the bath, the salt bath, the sand bath, the white bath. I grabbed a girl by the wrist and turned her around to face me. She might have been thirteen, fourteen, with flat blond hair that dribbled down across her chest. Had she decided to come here, or had she been decided for? I grabbed her other wrist and looked for her eyes. “Are you ready,” I said, “to purge the Dark from your body, to eat only Light, to cut from your flesh the double of your own self and cast it out to starve in the wild?”

  In the whites of her nervous eyes, blood vessels stood out like red thread. “I guess,” she said.

  Good enough. I took her by the wrists to the salt bath, instructed her to lie down and thrash around like a bird in a dry stone bowl. I heaped cup after cup of salt upon her moving body and helped her rub it into the areas where Dark tends most to accumulate: the armpits, elbow pits, the areas behind the ears and at the nape of the neck, the Dark folds where hair entraps particulate malaise.

  As I bathed her in hard, scouring white, her face twisted into a shape designed to keep the salt out. It was only after I had moved her to the sand bath that I realized her mouth was not just assuming a protective stance but was working itself toward speech. She moved to wipe her mouth with a limb, but her movable parts were as silty as everything else, the sand caked to her fingertips and wrists, her small floral lips. She nudged at the air with her head, eyes fixed desperately on my own, indicating that she wanted me to brush the sand from her lips with my own hands. I looked down at my hands. My fingers poked out from beneath the edges of my sheet. They looked older than I had remembered, with deep lines near the joints and a cracked pattern spreading all over the backs. I had lost track of time. I didn’t know how long I had been in here, how much older I had gotten. My age, like my birth and upbringing, was a forbidden topic. Inquire instead, said the Managers, into the agelessness of your ghost.