There had also been changes to the format of the show. The musical number in the show’s second challenge was far too popular to change very much, but the first and third challenges were in flux. The first challenge used to take place on a typical game show set, both contestants seated on opposite sides of a wall. After the preliminary questions (“What color are her eyes?”), each contestant was shown photos of body parts and asked whether they belonged to the person they loved or to somebody else. The highest-scoring contestant went on to the next round. Recently, the first round had become more haphazard. Sometimes the host asked the questions or showed the photos, but neither contestant was given time to answer: the round took minutes, and then there was an extended celebratory sequence where the couple was filmed enjoying some veal that they had been given as a prize or playfully spraying each other with cans of Slumbertime Soda. Often the round made even less sense: one partner was given access to a stocked buffet while the other tried to guess which foods they were eating from it. I saw one where the two players just sat on opposite sides of the wall, staring, until suddenly the host declared that one of them would go on to the next round. I had never liked this show, but even I could admit that our version of it was worse, in terms of entertainment value.
I LIKED SOME OF THE changes to the final round—for example, the fact that the all-nude blackout round no longer took place in the dark. Now the player wore a blindfold and their partner wore a gag, so that even if the player couldn’t see the person they were looking for, the person they were looking for could see them and try to get near them. The success rate was just as low, but the charade was more hopeful.
Eaters made great decoys: we had consistent body types, were paid in Kandy Kakes, and had absolutely no schedule conflicts. We would be the first all-Eater decoy cast for an episode of TMP! We weren’t the healthiest or most coordinated performers, though, and I could tell that the choreographers who worked with our bodies were getting frustrated. They were outside people. They looked at us and it was as if you could see the questions twisting around inside their faces. They took us first to a large, bright room with warm yellow wood floors that looked like living wood, but better. There were mirrors on all the walls, extending from the floor to well above our heads, and a wooden bar ran across them. The bar looked like it was there to demarcate, keeping us or our reflections from trying to cross into the other’s realm. They lined us up and told us to keep our arms out while we kicked, for balance. They said it was a simple kick pattern to start, right and then left with the right foot, right and then right with the left foot. Then right, then left, then a right with the left, and after that two more rights. That wasn’t what we called them back at the compound, where we knew that the right hand/leg was the Light one and the left was the Dark one and each could be located on either side of the body owing to random genetic variation and body baffles. But all right. Outside rules. We named our different sides with temporary labels that we would peel off later, once things were normal again.
The real problem was we couldn’t see ourselves in the mirror. We weren’t dumb, we knew what we looked like: I, for example, would have dark hair down to my back or possibly put up in a ponytail, a pointy chin, pale features, and lips pressed together or open, their shape a little like the shell of a clam or scallop. In our mirror line, I could pick myself out fairly confidently since I was second from the end, flanked on both sides by blond girls. It was just when we started kicking that it got confusing: looking for my legs instead of my face, I saw a mass of them scissoring away, some in sync and others badly off. I thought about my legs: What was I doing with them? Which set of mirror movements did they match up with? Was I doing well, or was I the girl third from the right whose ankles quivered as if they were about to snap? We weren’t used to mirrors anymore. There hadn’t been any at the Church.
We did better in the next room, windowless and dim and where the walls were just walls, not twinnings of our single selves. We learned to stand in a line without looking back and forth at one another and to do the simple kick pattern and then a more complicated kick pattern, right leg left, left leg right, right leg right left right. These musical numbers were supposed to require a lot of spinning and place swaps so that it would be more difficult for the player to spot his partner amid our shifting forms, but we weren’t very good at spinning or swapping. We got dizzy. They modified the routine so that it included more arm gestures, especially gestures that would obscure our faces while emphasizing the mood of the song, but we still had to spin some and the dizziness was like a long, billowy fabric that fluttered out beautifully at first, filling the air with motion and color, until suddenly it caught up to itself, snagged, and drew tight around us like a noose.
I looked out across at twenty-four other decoy girls practicing their routine, putting their arms out like airplanes for the first turn, holding on to themselves for balance or comfort as they entered the series of tricky steps that would weave them in and out of the line, around and behind one another, shuffling like cups in a magician’s trick. They clutched at their own shoulders, trying to hoist their bodies upright, but still they swayed. We can’t help it. We are all, apparently, so weak. The choreographers told us that we were going to have to improve: they couldn’t have one contestant dancing like a normal adult woman and forty-nine decoys flopping around like invalid children in a beginner’s dance class. I tried to bring my chin up in a way that I thought could possibly look elegant, like an expensive lamp covered in gold and painted flowers and slender, breakable parts that extended off from the side.
The spinning girls spun before me, their bodies rigid, their arms out like little white spokes. I was spinning, too, spinning and weaving, and I heard the sound of their spinning and of my breath loud in the center of the skull. I heard them fall and pick themselves back up, the sounds softer than you’d expect, their bodies light like dolls. I heard little cries escaping their mouths when they thudded onto the floor and I saw them straighten their backs and begin spinning again and again. I craned my neck up toward the ceiling overhead and saw the fluorescents bearing down on us all, brighter than us and cleaner, too, like the floor of a hospital smelling of bleach and lemon grove. And then I fell, too, my eyes brimming over with light.
THE REAL JESUS ONCE SAID: “If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.” His first argument is that WE BEGIN DIVIDED. His second argument is that WHAT IS DIVIDED CANNOT BE RECOMBINED. What he did not say, whether it was for lack of adequate time or preparation, was that a person, self-divided, partitioned and full of doubt, will fall unless they are able to force that rebel element from its foreign home.
What has the human body, in its infinite wisdom, done with the appendix, a dark organ, a wormlike sac fixed parasitically to the intestine? It has choked it gradually over thousands of years. Most scientists agree that the appendix used to be a sort of internal sibling nestled in the bodies of our predecessors—a sightless, speechless homunculus capable of counteracting the better thoughts of its host. In Jesus’ time every citizen would have sheltered one in their guts.
FEED YOUR LIGHT. DWINDLE YOUR DARKNESS.
KEEP EATING THE KAKES!
I lay in my cot listening to tonight’s Church lesson over the loudspeaker, thinking about the lesson, trying to understand why this lesson and why today, what is it trying to tell us about our current situation? If we decoys were unable to stand, if we happened to fall continually, did it mean we were divided houses? If we were, as the choreographers told us, the worst dancers they had ever seen, did it mean that other people, people on the outside, were more whole than us? That they had done a better job of dwindling their Darkness and that they had done it all on their own, without needing the Church, because they were simply better at being people?
The guest host was the actress from those commercials I used to hate, where they reveal her hiding like a skull beneath the skin
of that nice lady who just wants a smoother, more radiant face. She showed up with two bodyguards and learned the musical routine in twenty minutes flat. She had wide cheekbones like a human cat. She was blond and about as pretty as she had looked on-screen, pretty in a pushy way: all of her features seemed to tell you she was attractive before you had a chance to gauge it yourself. I could tell she was curious about us, wondering why we weren’t more curious about her. My body didn’t hold curiosity for very long now: questions took hold briefly, tensed my muscles as they passed through, and relaxed them as they leaked away. But I looked at her stretching on the warm-up mat, drinking from a plastic water bottle. She looked like someone about to go for a jog, not someone about to smear her face all over other people on a TV game show. I walked to the other side of the room, where she lay on her back, holding her stiff, straight leg and pulling it across her body.
I looked down at her for a few seconds.
“Are you nervous?” I asked.
The beautiful actress from all those movies sat up and smiled at me.
“It’s a piece of cake,” she said. “All I have to do is dance around a little and look like myself.”
I wanted to ask her why it was so easy for her to do this, how it could be so simple to try to be like yourself. I asked: “Aren’t you worried about what could happen to you in a crowd of decoys? You could get lost.”
“No,” she said, laughing. “It’s just a game of ‘who wore it best.’ Almost every time, I’m the one who wins. The only thing that’s weird here is you’re the only person paying any attention to me. Where are all you guys from? Did you grow up under rocks? In a third-world country? Were you homeschooled?”
I looked at her, and then I walked back to my side of the room, where all the decoy girls were busy sitting around. When I walked up, a flicker of recognition took hold of their faces. Then it passed.
LITTLE BRUSHES EKE AWAY AT my skin, leaving trails of color. They feel like insects on me, landing on me, dragging their light, stiff limbs across my face and lips and eyelashes. Insects of all different shapes, softnesses, teeming across my surface as though I were plant or soil. I felt everything but couldn’t move. I opened my eyes and my face was different, I closed them and it all went black again. Each time I raised my eyelids, my face was two steps removed from what it had been before. I was a series of photographs of different, unrelated people, a yearbook that didn’t even belong to me.
Someone put a palm on my forehead, the way a mother might check for fever, their hand cool and slippery. Then they pressed down hard, pushing my head back while another hand forced it forward. A scraping rim around the perimeter and a sound like crushing grass. I opened my eyes and another person’s hair sat on top of my own, slipping slightly atop my slicked-down head. Now there was blond hair all around my face, touching my cheek, touching my neck, clinging down across my forehead. The hair was stiff, almost pointy. It bounded me on all sides, like a tiny room.
The blond actress came up behind me and gave me a sort of hug. She stayed there, her face above my face, her hair mixing into the hair of my wig and merging with it, making us look for a moment like a single monster creature that could be happy and sad at the same time. “Looking good,” she said, beaming at me from the face that belonged to her. I felt for a second like she remembered me, but then she moved on and did it to another girl, and another girl after that.
From behind the dark blue curtain, we decoys slumped against whatever was around and listened to round one. If he didn’t pass round one, we wouldn’t be needed. Then we could take off our woman costumes and go back to our cots. We could close our eyes and dream of our faces as we remembered them, clearer in our imagination than in any mirror. If he did pass round one, then we would have to dance and spin in front of hundreds of strangers, and if we fell, we might lose even our assignment at the game show, where we labored in shadow but not in the real Dark. Through the curtain we heard the questions and the responses.
“Dark meat or light?” asked the host.
“Uh, dark,” said a man’s voice, without much hesitation.
“Good. A closet or a stove?” said the host.
“Stove,” he said with confidence.
“Correct again,” said the host. “Now: Africa or the military draft?”
I didn’t understand. Maybe I would have if I were still with C. These were questions for outside people, people in love, not people who had misplaced their lovers. I wasn’t the sort of person anymore who could watch this game show and make some sense of it. I couldn’t even make enough sense of it to hate it. I could only dance around within its bounds and try not to fall down. I looked around for the contestant, the girl who was putting her relationship on the line; I wondered if she was worried. But at this point we were a sea of blond actress, and the little portions of face that offered particulars were hard to search out and read.
The deep blue curtain rose like a wall in front of me, but the way it stirred showed that it was unmoored at the base. It matched the identical blue sequined dresses we had been packaged in, heavy dresses that dragged down our skinny bodies. It throbbed every time the audience burst into applause. I looked at the curtain and I tried to see it as the deep red curtain around the little space where Anna and I used to sleep, the space where she was probably sleeping right now, at this moment. It was terrible the way resemblances ran wild through the things of the world, the way one place or time mimicked another, making you feel that you were going in circles, going nowhere at all. I looked forward to fully becoming my own ghost, which I had been told would resemble nothing and would look uniquely like itself.
The happy music played. He’d won round one. We were going to have to dance.
THE CURTAIN SLID OPEN ON our twirling mass, kicking in unison, waving in unison. We were a blur of blond and dark blue, we had a hundred arms. The sequins that swathed us bled together, a shitty ocean glittering with sharp points of light. I looked for the girl who had shouted about seeing her house and I couldn’t find her. I looked for the blond lady contestant and I found her everywhere, everywhere equally, there wasn’t even one girl who looked more like her than another. The production department had done a really great job.
Now we kicked in a line, grabbing shoulders for balance. Now we did the move where some of us stood still and others wove in between us, smiling and waving. Now we all moved forward and back alternatingly, like children on a swing set, but not children, and no swing set. We let go of shoulders and began the spin pattern, raising our faces to the bright studio lights overhead that beat down upon our open eyes and turned the world bright and white and then a bruising violet color. We gulped down lungfuls of the air-conditioned studio air, the same air for all of us. We were all spinning, we were all blurs of girl and color. The thought made me calm: at this moment we were all decoys together.
Then we formed a single line one person wide. This was the beginning of the finale. From the player’s point of view, we would look like one solitary girl moving toward him, but then the first girl would peel off and take her final position, and then the second girl would peel off, etc., until he had gotten a front view of each one of the decoys and also his partner. This was almost his last chance to point at someone and shout, That’s my partner! because then we would go into the spinning leaps for the final flourishes, and after the final flourishes it would all be over.
I got in thirty-first position in the line and took a breath. We lurched forward, step by step, as on an assembly line. It took so long before it was my turn. The other decoy girls were probably tired, too, and aching from our shoes—but we were Eaters and used to our shedding bodies crying out for one thing or another. Then there were only four people in front of me, then three, and I could begin to see past their shoulders as I leaned left and right. The player was tallish and cuteish, with brown hair.
Then I felt my stomach turn over. There was no blood left in my body.
Because it was C standing in front of me: C with preci
sion, C and nobody else.
All the decoys right behind me had piled into my backside, and the others were confused, craning their necks. I said his name once, and then again and again and again in different ways, wondering if he couldn’t hear me because he wasn’t really reacting, just staring, his mouth a little ajar. Then I remembered that I wasn’t looking like myself, I was looking like the blond actress, so I grabbed at my hair and tried to pull it off, but I had forgotten it was pinned in, so it came only halfway off while I was shouting. I had to stop shouting to start taking some of the pins out, but security was coming up from the wings and I didn’t have time. So I took both my hands and I tried to rub the weird makeup off. It was not like the makeup I used to wear, it didn’t look like me. It gummed up against my hands, making my hands feel like flippers, mittens, stumps. And I got some of it off, I think, but I smeared most of it, and I looked at him and his face was not showing signs of recognition, but showing instead that grossed-out-but-thrilled look he used to get when watching Shark Week on television or really weird porn.
The decoy girls were looking aimless, sometimes staring at me, sometimes at C, sometimes at nothing in particular. They didn’t know who I was or who I had been, and they weren’t really curious. My hair looked a mess and my face was unintelligible, but then I remembered that I had one part of me that wasn’t pinned down and marked up: it was only covered, temporarily, and it could be uncovered. I reached down and pulled the sequined dress up over my head and then I took off the sculpted bra that was supposed to make my top half like her top half, and the sculpted underwear that was supposed to make my bottom like her bottom, and then I waved my arms, and pointed to myself, and said: “See? It’s me!” I couldn’t think of anything any better.
You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine Page 22
