You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

by Alexandra Kleeman

  “No,” said the Inspector. “It was not. It’s a holdover from the outside, where they have blue. It’s an indicator that you are almost certainly bringing in other things, more dangerous things, from outside as well.”

  “What if this was the only one?” I asked hopefully.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’ll still have to be sorted out. We’ll reassign you to some outside work, nothing too dangerous, hopefully. Some kind of halfway job where we’ll try to offer you at least partial protection from toxicity. Maybe at a factory. Who knows.” He looked at my face. “You’ll still be fed well,” he said. “Kandy Kakes.”

  I didn’t know what to say. He was packing up and moving on to his next inspection. Next to me, Anna sat in silence. He paused at the door.

  “You’ll probably have a final meal here. Move you out tomorrow morning. Someone will let you know where you’re going, I think,” he said. And then he was gone.

  For a second I lay still. Then I writhed around, side to side, moaning. After some moments I quieted and turned to Anna.

  “You destroyed me,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Now I’m sorted down,” I said. “Everything I worked for. All the memories I undid. How clean and Bright I got. Now I’ll go back out in the world and be degraded in an instant. My ghost will shrivel. I won’t live on. You killed my ghost,” I shrieked.

  Anna just shrugged her head around in a big fuck-you kind of way. As she rolled her head around on its slender stem, I saw her collarbones and shoulder blade sliding past each other like pistons in an engine. Each bone had a stark drop shadow underneath. The fleshier body parts had eroded, and now she resembled a beach cliff, sharp edged and towering above stretches of vanishing sand. Every day her body looked more like B’s—more like B’s but less each time I saw it, as though every person I met were an echo of one I used to know.

  “I have to protect myself,” she said. There was something not quite apologetic in the way that she said it.

  “From the Darkness?” I asked.

  “From you,” she said. And she lay back on her cot, folded her arms, and gripped a bicep in each hand. She closed her eyes and her mouth tightened into a slim little line. I could tell that she was back at work perfecting her memories, isolating the little pockets of outside Darkness and filling them with plain, clean Light from within this place. I thought for a second of trying to undo her, trying to make a greater Darkness happen to her. But then I just gave up. I looked over at the fake mirror at the fake reflection of the blood-red curtains and it was as if I were already gone. Something was burning behind my eyes. I thought it was anger, but then I realized it was tears.

  THAT NIGHT I WENT TO my last meal in the compound in the Grand Cafeteria, which used to be a Wally’s, which was now just a big, thingless space lit up by supermarket fluorescents that turned everything beneath them an insomniac white. We ate there once a day, and after eating we went back and slept on our double-size cot curtained off by velvet red, slept on one of hundreds of cots that filled the room infirmary style, making it look as though we were all in a massive emergency of some kind that never ceased or lessened. The line for food was already long, twisting through the spaces between those Eaters who were already eating, standing there with their sacks open and their mouths clogged. I thought I recognized some of the bodies, but that might have been a mistake. Stranger or nonstranger, all Eaters acted more or less alike, did things more or less the same way. I wondered if any of the others were having the same problems as me beneath their crisp white sheets, if they too were experiencing dizzying pulses of longing as they thought accidentally on their past lives with its warm bodies and delicious, treacherous food. If they felt their thin, glassy skin go opaque when they remembered the people of their past.

  I queued up with my empty sack and waited my turn. Food was done by weight: nine units for a large man, three for a child. Someone with a body like mine took six, though there were days when I got five, and actually there were more days like that recently, more and more and more. I held my sack forward while they counted them out. It was like Halloween, if Halloween happened twice every day and the only things there were to eat were Kandy Kakes.

  Today was a five Kake day. I found some empty standing space and opened my sack. All around me other Eaters were doing the same, reaching in and rifling through their issuance, feeling it up with their fingers, searching around for edges within the gummed-up mass of Kandy Kakes, whose fudge coating was airproof and weather-resistant and impervious to pretty much everything.

  We peeled them apart with our fudge-covered fingernails and felt the scrape of a Kandy puck beneath our clawing as the wet surgery sounds, sounds like the ones made by the insides of our own bodies, accompanied our digging. We lifted globs to our mouths and sank our teeth through the muck, bit down on that chalky layer of fruity cocoa and eked away at it with our teeth. We drooled into it, let it soak us up and turn our mouths ashy and dry. We let it drain us, waiting until it turned soft enough to bite. Then we bit it.

  The Kakes rubbled on our tongues, tasting of chocolate and bone, waxy with fudge and greasy frosting, and at the same time not tasting like much. Tasting like less than we had expected, even though every time we ate one we expected less. The gathering space was full of people standing alone and facing in random directions, all wrestling with their own mouths. And when we had won at last, cracking the Kandy Kore to reach the sugary fluid within, we gagged on the bitter slick. My mouth was raw and scoured and tasted of biled orange.

  I looked down at my sack, at the four that I still had to finish. Down inside me, in a place near my heart, my stomach quivered.

  My new assignment had come in. The next day I would be shipped out into the danger. I would be leaving the compound for someplace else where there was no shield to protect me from Darkness, no purifying and Lightening baths, no safety from the toxic thoughts and feelings of normal un-Lightened people. But I would still be under the Church’s protection, there was no reason to despair. They told you that sorting down wasn’t the end. You were still doing important work, even if it was at the cost of your health. You were part of the hidden face of the Church, hidden beneath your normal face, and they told you that everything you did was in service of the Brightening of the world, especially when you labored away from the Church, like at a Wally’s or a car wash or something.

  So tomorrow I was assigned as a decoy on That’s My Partner! I would be stripped of my sheet, my unghosted body displayed to hundreds of thousands of people in varying states of Darkness. I would dance with the other decoys, dance circles with them around our target and shield her from the gaze of the one she loved, shield her from recognition, from finding her way back into her own used-up life. And even though I hated that show, it was funny how grateful I was now to be sent out there to the shadows, rather than to the pitch Dark of the world I had once lived in.

  THESE ARE MY LEAST FAVORITE episodes of That’s My Partner! in the order in which I saw them. First, the episode where the man who loses his partner in the final full-nudity blackout round insists that he did choose the right woman and tries to take the decoy home. The decoy female looks actually terrified as he hoists her up and tries to flee the soundstage with her body heaped over his shoulders; she claws at him, trying to create an egress. Fortunately, a member of the security team Tasers him before he can get off-camera. Then there’s the one where the couple loses but reveals at the end that they have a child together, even though procreative couples are legally barred from participating because of custody issues. The producers won’t let them out of the contract, which stipulates that any shared property be divided equally in half in the case of a loss, which means that the dollar value of their son must be calculated exactly and matched by an equal amount of property taken from the holdings of whichever parent gains custody. You can see the studio lawyers and the producers arguing while the couple just stands around in the background, slowly coming to understa
nd what they’ve just lost.

  And of course: the one where the couple actually wins, but then you see that both of them look uncontrollably sad. You watch them notice the sadness on each other’s faces. You watch them realize that the other person didn’t want to win together and stay together—they realize that even before they realize they feel the same way themselves. They walk offstage together, ushered by the host, looking tired and holding each other’s hands limply, as though they are handling raw, cold chicken breasts.

  As for favorite episodes, I don’t have any. I hate the rest equally.

  In the bus with the other decoys, the sound of the vehicle blots out the noise of forty-nine girls breathing short and sharp. We’re quiet and still, not because we were ordered to be, but because there’s nothing to say. Over the last months, we’ve all done the same things, had the same experiences, and felt nearly the same way about them. Conversation among us would change nothing: someone could say, Ten to twelve Kakes a day, and another would reply, Yes, as if that settled it. You couldn’t have distinguished us one from the other unless you had known us in our earlier lives, and even so you’d have to match that person up with one of our number, a head among other heads protruding from a single gigantic body. I’m the only one looking around and into the others’ faces. I’m trying to see if any of them are excited about the journey, but it’s impossible to tell. The girls around me have different hair colors and face shapes, different faces poking out from their heads. They all have the same body type: spookily thin. Their bodies weigh against your retina like light—you hardly feel it, you hardly see them at all.

  The Conjoined Eaters now own eighty percent of That’s My Partner! They own twenty-three percent of Fluvia cosmetics, several processing plants where food matter is enriched or impoverished, twenty percent of a major soft drink manufacturer whose best-selling product is a soda that puts you to sleep. They own sixty-seven percent of all Wally’s stores, which means that six out of every ten you walk into are fully Conjoined facilities, all the foods grouped according to their Darkness content. And that number doesn’t even take into account the different Wallyfronts that have only been infiltrated rather than illuminated fully, infiltrated by Eaters who mostly perform the functions of normal employees but also work subtly to redistribute falsity within the grocery store environment. It hardly even makes sense anymore to say that the Wally’s empire is infiltrated by Eaters—our people have entered the essence of the company. An outsider would say that the Conjoined Eater has many faces—but I knew that it was a single face, only you couldn’t see the whole thing at once.

  Which reminds me of a story I once heard, about a beautiful woman with a daughter a friend of mine had once loved, and they never saw each other again.

  AFTER WATCHING TMP! FOR THE first time at C’s house, I came home to B and told her about the episode I had just seen. The female contestant made it out of the blackout room holding the hand of a man who everyone, audience and host included, thought was her husband at first. He was the same height, same sharp jaw, same lean cyclist’s build, only without the slight beer gut. This stranger was probably what her partner had looked like four or five years ago. There was applause everywhere, and the host even started walking toward the happy woman and mystified decoy, his right arm outstretched in anticipation of a handshake. Then her husband wandered out looking confused, and the whole thing fell apart. I tried to explain to B exactly what got me down about it. It was that they had wanted to stay together. Or it was that she thought they had, she had been so close.

  Said B: “I would do it. I’ve got nothing to lose.”

  “If you were on the show,” I said, “it would be because you had something losable.”

  “I’ve never had something losable,” B said. “Except maybe you now.”

  I got up to fiddle with something a few feet away.

  “If C wanted to go on that show, I’d dump him,” I told her. “No hesitation.”

  “Yeah. Sure,” said B, unconvinced.

  “I’d dump his ass,” I said.

  “I don’t see what the problem is,” B said. “Anybody would recognize you. I’m the one you should be worried about.”

  She had just come from a disappointing date with a guy that she had bitten only a couple of weeks before, who not only forgot her name, but forgot that she, brittle and pale, had been the one who sank her teeth into his left hand. They had a fight about it, even though it was only their first date. B told him that they had met at a birthday party in a nice apartment with the two fireplaces. They made out while listening to nineties R&B on an obsolete cassette player in one of the empty bedrooms, and then she bit him. He insisted that he would have remembered that and that she was acting crazy. Then she did it again, bit him on the arm so hard that she broke the skin, leaving little red notches that traced out the shape of a crescent moon.

  OUTSIDE THE WINDOWS, EVERYTHING IS getting darker. First the yellow dies from the light, then the green and pink. The world is a blue version of itself, momentarily, before the blue snuffs out, too and it is all night. I’m surprised that it takes so long this time to get to the soundstage in Loyota Beach. I remembered the distance between Randall and Loyota being something simple, an hour and a half or an hour forty-five in traffic. We’ve been in this bus for almost six hours. But maybe there are lots of towns called Randall. Who knows if I was even in the one I had heard of, rather than one that had never existed to me at all. In the quiet of our full bus, I can hear the breathing of the girls around me, a continuous breathing with no chink of rest or silence in it because we are too many. Dozens of ponytails swing left and right in near unison in front of me, swinging with the movement of the bus. With my butt sliding around on the leather-print plastic of the seats, I feel just like a child again, safe in the understanding that anything bad that were to happen to me would be someone else’s responsibility. Maybe that was the secret to happiness, I thought, being free of the responsibility of yourself. I look at the window, where my ghost face looks back at me, just a whitish-black outline on a black surface—free of my chin, which was too pointy; free of my nose, which was too lumpy.

  One of the decoy girls starts differentiating herself from the others all of a sudden. She’s breathing hard, looking all around at the inside of the bus. Then I realize she’s actually looking outside the bus, at the things passing by.

  “That’s my house,” she says.

  No one moves.

  “This is my neighborhood!” she says, louder. “I used to live here!”

  Now she’s looking into each of our faces, as though we could tell her whether she’s right or wrong, or say, Good job! or something like that. It looks as though she is really animated and energized by what she sees, or what she remembers about what she sees. She must have good memories of living in this place, or someplace like it. I wonder what I’d do if I looked out the window and saw my old house, or C’s old house, but then I realize that I might not even remember what those things look like anymore, and I stop thinking so that I don’t have to be sad.

  Inside the compound, everything had looked the same. Out here, all we register is an endless mass of alien sprawl. Maybe that’s why nobody does anything about the girl shouting about her town: we can’t even see her town, can’t make it out amid all the outside that’s going past. We aren’t used to looking off into distances, only across the room. Some of us think she’s just showing off. After a while, her energy damps down and her mouth shuts again. She sits back into her seat and looks like she isn’t sure anything has happened after all.

  When we get there, they stow us in a big room full of little cots arranged in two long lines, like in a Victorian infirmary, the space between them so narrow that you hit your knees if you try to turn around. I can tell they tried to make it look like home, but they got so many things wrong: the fluorescents are circles instead of bars, the cots have scratchy blankets on them that are just whatever colors instead of the bloody crimson we’re used to. And th
en there’s a big window onto the outside that they’ve covered up, but I can still feel that it’s there behind the cardboard, changing color and content as the day goes on. I know that I’m going to be sleeping here for a certain number of days, but I want to go as long as I can before I touch any of the weird new bedding. C used to play a game with me called “What’s the Worst That Could Happen?” where he’d ask me that question and I’d try to tell him. C invented it to show me that the scenarios I worried about were outlandish and unlikely to happen, but it turned out that he found my answers funny, so then we played it for other reasons. What’s the worst that could happen if I touched these foreign things? I could forget the one place I still remembered very clearly, my bed in the room of beds at the Church of the Conjoined Eater.

  We’re far from the compound and they didn’t bring enough Kandy Kakes for all of us, so I only get four. It’s almost a relief, I think, pushing the Kandy silt around inside my mouth. Each one is just as difficult to eat, but at least the meal is over faster.

  SINCE THE EATERS HAD TAKEN over the daily operations of TMP! there had been some changes to the music, the decor, the corporate sponsors. Instead of the plush, swirly fuchsia carpeting on the main stage, everything was black and white, harshly gridded. The floor was dizzy with contrasting tiles that sprawled hundreds of feet; it was hard to look at, and when you walked on it you felt as if you were on a boat. Instead of the blood-red curtains that divided the main stage from the musical stage, the curtains were dark, deep blue, the color of the ocean at a depth where there’s still light, but barely, and the pressure would crush you like a plastic cup. Celebrity appearances made for higher ratings, so now there was a guest host, a new one each show, a recognizable celebrity who performed in the dance number and donated their likeness, who let the makeup artists inscribe them on each of our faces, one by one. Sitting in the television hall, we had watched the famous faces of singers, models, and movie stars waltz past the camera in multiple. We saw so little face in our daily life that seeing one made multitude sickened us with expression and the particularity of its parts.