You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

by Alexandra Kleeman

  I indicated to the girl that I was busy doing other things to her, important and necessary tasks, required tasks. I waved my hands around in an imitation of washing and then held a quieting finger up to my lips, up to the spot on the sheet where my lips would be if it were a face. I readjusted my sheet and tried again to push the sleevelike regions of my covering up past my elbows. I leaned forward toward the tub and scrubbed with fine pale sand at her back and arms, her shoulders like bone handles to grip as I cleansed her of her past. But she kept looking at me with that needy look, sucking her lips in again and again. Her tongue emerged and pushed at the grainy stuff around it. She tried to eject from her mouth a globe of spittle that split her lips and came out dark with damped sand. She gagged into the air near my hands as I worked to hold her neck still for the cleaning. She struggled and twisted, retching aimlessly. I was having trouble holding her in place: my sheet was sliding off, I risked showing my face to the entire room.

  “Please,” she said in a soft voice that crumbled, “I have to be at soccer practice.”

  Recruits came in like this all the time, people of all ages with only the haziest idea of what they were doing here.

  “There is no such thing as soccer practice,” I said. She looked confused. I added: “It’ll be better for you if you forget there ever was.”

  “But my mom said. Ask my mom,” she insisted, her voice louder, pointier.

  I shook my head and let go of her for just a second to tug my sheet back on center. Then I grabbed her by the shoulders and maneuvered her from the sand into the white bath. The white bath used to be a dairy bath, mostly milk, some yogurt, but researchers at the Church had discovered a toxic quality to milk. If milk was said to nourish the flesh of a human baby, it was bound to be suffocating to the infant ghost. Milk had been outlawed. Now the white bath was flour diluted in water, a passably milky liquid that had to be stirred constantly to keep it from separating into thin, cloudy liquid and a sticky, bottom-dwelling paste.

  I hoisted her from under her arms and staggered her over to the white bath, slid her in one leg at a time while she looked up, saying to me over and over again, “Find my mom, ask her, please. Tell her I need my cleats. Don’t forget my cleats. I don’t want to wear my tennies and have Amanda Marcos do an impression of me falling on my butt during the kickoff. Where’s my mom? Is this a doctor’s? What are you doing to me?” Her talk was drawing stares from the other recruits and, worse, from the other processors. I felt their eyes on me like a fever. I had to quiet her before someone else decided that I was a bad worker, a bad worker because I had a bad recruit.

  Her naked body projected through the white like pink islands rising out of a thick, blank sea. The flesh quivered, sent slow ripples through the thick. I leaned down, brought my face close to hers, lined up the holes in my sheet with the hole through her ear, and tried to speak as kindly and sweetly as possible. I told her that maybe someone she had once considered her mother had brought her here or maybe not. The idea of her mother was obsolete, it belonged to a doomed world headed cheerily toward total Darkness poisoning. She was lucky to be here with us, lucky to have found a way out of her doomed self. I rubbed her back in small, comforting circles. When I looked into her face for signs of peace and understanding, I saw the small black pupils shrinking in the center of her eye.

  “My mother is where?” she asked.

  I tried to think of a new way to phrase how alone she was.

  “Do I know you from someplace?” she asked even more uncertainly. Her body lurched forth from out of the bath as she tried to see through the sheet holes to find my face. One glistening wet white hand shot under my sheet, grabbed at my bare wrist, and sought around on it, as if she were trying to find my pulse.

  “I know I know you,” she said. “Please—from Forest Hills. The condos by the big Wally’s, the one with the bank in it and the ice cream sandwich bar. The condo complex where they just planted all the trees, those little trees that need to be held up with slings and rope. You have to remember me. I saw you there. Getting into your car. Going up to that door. You looked sad. You have to tell my mom to come get me.”

  She was full of Dark. The only thing that could come of listening to her was misinformation. What I thought I had lived had been a bad dream originating in a sick body, like the sorts of nightmares you have when you sleep with a high fever. I had always lived here in the Church. Was the name Forest Hills familiar? Was it more familiar than any other name? Was it someplace that I had been, someplace I had slept, someplace I had lived in? Could that have been where C lived, where he used to live, maybe where he still lived today? Sometimes I had the feeling that he was here in the Church, only the building was so large that we had never been in the same place at the same time. A Manager watching me from across the room shook his head slowly, and I knew that I had messed up, stalled the processing, dredged the past up within myself, and Darkened up where everybody could see me.

  I looked down at my work as though nothing had happened. I picked up the pitcher for cleansing her internal passage. Darkness sloughed fairly easily from the body’s outer covering, it was sloughing the inside that would take months and months of laborious and intensive Uneating. In a few minutes I would be finished processing her, but she’d still be far from Bright, far from an adequate shell. For that she’d need to reverse her commitment to herself. She’d need to become like Anna, who I could sense as she worked at the other end of the room, executing her cleanings with a quick and rough touch, turning out the new recruits one after another, each one of them bringing her closer to her promised end. I sank my pitcher into the deep, bland white and filled it with white water, warm thick flour water, and I held it up over her head for the pour. I held her chin with my left hand as the white ran down, and I said to her gently: “You were born to Nothing, you were mothered by Nothing, you were fathered by Nothing, you are child to Nothing.” Beneath the thick liquid I could see her blinking, the eyelids fluttering shut and shut again as they tried to keep out the white that would not stop coming.

  “Your safety was Nothing, your hopes were Nothing, you made no mark, and any gap you left behind closed up a few hours ago,” I said, feeling inexplicably sad, inexplicably because I had said these words hundreds of times and knew it to be the truth. “You knew nobody, and nobody knew you,” I said, and as I said it I was seeing C’s face horizontal next to mine, in the morning before we had gotten up, his eyes fixing on a freckle, a spot, a stray hair at the corner of my mouth.

  “But now we have you. We see through you to the person you always were,” I continued. I squeezed my eyes shut. “The better person. And we will find that person for you, and get them out.”

  THAT NIGHT I LAY IN the cot next to Anna as we waited for our checkups. On the other side of the red curtain I could hear the Inspectors wheeling their carts into the curtained spaces to inspect our bodies for ghostliness, pulling aside covers, rearranging the sheetless limbs on their squeaky platforms. Anna was lying down, manufacturing memories unlinked to her past. Her exposed face was waxy and still, her eyes closed, hands folded over her belly. Her mouth tightened and loosened very slightly, sometimes pulling into a short smile, which gave her the look of a child playing at being a funeral corpse.

  I was lying on my side, pretending also to manufacture present memories, but what I was really doing was thinking about the girl I had handled earlier that afternoon. I hadn’t felt well ever since I had heard her mouthfuls of fake recognition, her description of that half-fleshed place that was beginning to feel more and more as though it could be C’s apartment complex. C’s neighborhood had always been a bland place—doors, sidewalk, maybe trees or maybe not. The sun went up there, after a while it went down, and the whole time there were cars coming and going and staying still. But as I tried to remember if I had ever been in a place specifically like the one she described, seen that specific girl’s face watching me from the periphery, it all began to feel more possible. Even if I hadn’t been th
ere, I had been someplace so similar that nobody would be able to tell the difference.

  The Inspector came, pushing aside the heavy crimson curtain and assessing our bared, inert bodies with satisfaction or dissatisfaction, I couldn’t see which. He rearranged his glossy, sateen sheet around his body and pushed two hairy arms out from the white. A large and expensive wristwatch shone gold on his left wrist, no longer working, its hands still. He lifted Anna’s limpened wrist as she smiled up at him Brightly. He turned the wrist over and opened up a lab notebook to a page flagged with a small red tag. He wrote numbers in the margin and sketched in red pencil the topography of her veiny underwrist. He turned her arm back over and took a small flashlight from his tool case, shone the light on her forearm, throat, cheekbones. “Great,” he said, “looks like you’re really thinning out. I can almost see something moving, a little bit of a kick forcing the flesh around.” Then he pulled down the covers and illuminated her lower belly, where the pale and freckled white skin cased her gut and viscera. In the shadow of him, she tilted her head from side to side as though she heard a secret music, pleasant and mellow, played at volumes too soft to hear.

  He packed the flashlight away and pulled out a small, slim rod, tapered like a chopstick, and dragged it lightly over her arm, shoulder, torso, leg, long strokes like a razor. He looked at the rod and put it into a plastic bag, tucked the plastic bag back into his toolbox, wrote numbers in neat columns on notebook paper. “I’m seeing good texture,” he said, neck still bent, pointing that large sheeted head toward the notebook in his lap. “Smooth, even, very flat. Good transparency, as I said before, improving. We also call that diaphaneity. Just a fact. If there is one thing you could work on, I’d say it’s hardness. Think brittle, or bony. Like a shell or fragile porcelain cup. In nature, successful eggs are almost always a compromise between protection and vulnerability. Meditate on that. And as always, keep thinking Bright. Are your memories shaping up?” he asked, turning the page in his notebook.

  “Extremely well,” said Anna. She looked over at me. I looked away.

  “I suppose it’s your turn,” the Inspector said, his back still facing me. His shoulders shook slightly as he wrote in his book.

  “She’s not doing well,” said Anna.

  “I’m doing great,” I said.

  “She’s not doing great,” Anna said. “She’s very troubled.”

  The Inspector turned and pointed his eyeholes toward me.

  “You have a stormy look,” he observed.

  “Test her properties,” said Anna, sitting up sharply.

  “Don’t listen to her,” I said, trying not to shout but probably shouting anyway. Anna shifted around, twisting her body as if she were about to get up. She had this look on her face that was like no look I had ever seen before. It was a thing that reminded me only of this place, uniquely, and no place else. It was like pity, like the weaponized pity you have for a thing you are about to crush, but she was scared of me, too. I wondered if this feeling had ever been seen on my face by someone else that I hoped to crush. The Inspector was leaning in toward me now, trying to get a view of me through the better, larger hole in the sheet.

  “Why don’t you want to be inspected?” he asked.

  “It’s not that. Please don’t listen to her. She’s trying to destroy me,” I said, reaching out maybe to touch his clothed forearm, then drawing back. Touch was forbidden; it passed memories of touch and feeling. Touch was too persuasive.

  “I’m not,” said Anna. “I’m just trying to protect us all. She’s leaking Dark thought all over the place. You must feel it,” she said. She was making a kneading motion in front of her with two bony hands, as though the Darkness were in the air and she were wringing it out.

  “I feel something,” he said. “It’s true.”

  He looked more closely at me, as though I might have something written in my eye, a note from the manufacturer or instructions for use.

  “She has these dreams in the middle of the night. They’re not from here. In them it’s like she’s hugging someone, over and over again. Sometimes like she’s eating something long and choky. These aren’t things we have here, or can do here. She’s bringing them in. She can’t leave herself behind. She, like, adores it. She’s spilling all over me. You have to do something about her.” Anna was running out of things to say, but she never slowed, she started again at the beginning, there was no air, no breath, between her words.

  “She’s wrong,” I said, trying to jam my voice in between the gaps in her own.

  He peered at me encouragingly.

  “She’s doing it,” I said. I tried to think of specifics.

  “Sometimes I’m sitting here working on my unmemories, and I’ll see her looking at me with this look of recognition. Not a normal recognition look, like ‘I see you every day.’ It’s like I’m a long-lost sister to her,” I said. I added: “I see it in her face.”

  “That’s inconclusive,” said the Inspector. “That could be your work.”

  “But it’s not,” I said. “I’m pure and Bright. I sought out my differences and overwrote them. I replaced the background, the foreground, the characters, the situations. I was born here, in the Church. I have always been here, in the Church.”

  “She had a weird interaction with a new recruit today,” said Anna.

  The Inspector swiveled toward her.

  “Describe,” he said.

  “I saw her take a new recruit through the three baths, a teenage girl. Blond. Halfway through the second bath the girl got spooked. She started trying to use her eyes. She looked at that processor”—Anna pointed at me with a finger as straight and brittle as a twig—“and she started shouting she knew her, she knew her. And said a lot of junk about some apartments and some car.”

  “That wasn’t about me,” I said. “She couldn’t even see my face.”

  “She didn’t have to,” countered Anna. “The past was thick on you.”

  The Inspector cleared his throat.

  “How,” he asked, “did you know it was her if her face was properly sheeted up?”

  Anna sat back and looked smug.

  “She’s my space mate,” Anna said. “I know how she moves, her size, her shape. I know it because I know everything I’ve seen in here. It’s all I know.”

  My throat had a choke in the base of it. I didn’t know what to say, but I could tell that I was going to lose.

  “We’ll need to give you a survey and see if you’re marked for sortdown,” he said, not unsympathetically. He rooted through his toolbox for the papers.

  “Okay,” I said. I closed my eyes and tried to think about this place and nothing else, this room and nothing else. Inside this dark, cramped, red-curtained room, I lay and built a red-curtained room in my mind, I put myself in it with the Inspector, and I left Anna out.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ve got it. Now just answer these questions to the best of your ability.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Here’s the first one,” he said.

  DO YOU EVER FEEL LOST, DESPERATE, OUT OF CONTROL IN TERMS OF YOUR THOUGHTS, OR AS THOUGH YOUR FEELINGS HAVE FEELINGS OF THEIR OWN?

  “No,” I said. “I feel even and Bright. My feelings are pretty much responses to what happens in the daily management of Darkness. Feelings of fulfillment when I work. Et cetera.”

  He paused as he wrote down: No. Feelings of fulfillment.

  CHECK INNER AND OUTER BODY FOR TRANSPARENCY. DO YOU NOTICE AREAS OF INCREASED OR DECREASED APPEARANCE ON ANY OF THE TOP TEN BODY ORGANS? DO THESE FLUCTUATE AS YOU OBSERVE THE WORLD?

  “Oh,” he said. “This one’s for me. Hold still, I’ll be checking your diaphaneity.”

  He pulled out the flashlight again and held it up against my throat, arm, torso. He leaned in and squinted, adjusted the eyeholes from side to side.

  “You’re murky,” he said. “I’d say sixty percent cover. Not good. Now think about your mother or father.”

  I tried to think
about them. Then I tried not to. I couldn’t tell what I should try to do. I could feel Anna at my side, smirking, as he got out the rod and ran it along my length.

  “Also, soft. Hard in places, but that may just be the bone.”

  He sat up and took the numbers down on paper. It looked as though he were shaking his head, there, beneath the cover of his large flapping white sheet.

  “Okay,” he said, “last question.”

  CLOSE YOUR EYES. IT IS A NICE DAY. IMAGINE YOU LOOK AROUND AND THEN UP. WHAT IS IT LIKE UP THERE? DESCRIBE IN DETAIL.

  “Um,” I said. “I don’t know how to answer this.”

  “To the best of your ability,” said he.

  “All right,” I said. “Well, I guess it’s high up. The top is far away. It feels safe. Not like anything is going to cave in. It’s a good day. People are full of Bright all around me. And I guess it’s nice up there, the normal kind of nice. It’s a happy color like blue or something, and free of toxins.”

  The Inspector was writing furiously on the sheet of survey paper.

  “You said blue?” he asked, not looking up.

  “Blue,” I said.

  “We don’t have blue here,” he said. “Blue was removed due to its toxic effects. We have white ceilings. Sometimes gray. Or with industrial support beams, steel beams. We have red curtains. These are all acceptable answers.”

  “My answer wasn’t acceptable,” I said. I had intended to say it as a question, but I already knew what he would say.