This Body (2 page)

That was a picnic compared with this
.

Her heart races and it hurts to breathe deeply. Her body shakes, and she feels an anxiousness that threatens to overwhelm
her. Her clothes are stuck hard to her like an oldfashioned corn plaster bandage, and her hair is stiff with caked vomit.
The only thing she can think of is to shower, and to shower means going back into that cesspool of a bathroom. But she can't
think of anything else. She knows she doesn't know where she is or how she got there, but these questions will have to be
deferred for the moment.

She walks deliberately, one foot placed slowly in front of the other as if on a tightrope, back through the only open door,
into a bedroom. She grabs the scrunched-up bedspread at the foot of the mattress and throws it on the floor of the bathroom.
It will have to do for now.

She yanks aside the mildew-spotted shower curtain to reveal the small, sliding window above the tiled wall. Stepping into
the bathtub and breathing through her mouth, she opens the window as wide as it will go, letting in a slight breeze. She turns
on the water and, hardly waiting for it to get lukewarm, twists the handle to redirect the stream to the showerhead. The bong
that is slamming from side to side in her head crescendos, and the pain that is flashing across her forehead forces her eyes
shut. She strips off her clothes and leaves them at the other end of the tub, the sodden mess sending rivulets of murky water
running toward the drain.

She wets her clumpy hair and washes it with some shampoo, its perfumed smell almost turning her stomach again. She manages
to get through two rinses before the thin venner of her strength sloughs down the drain. Turning the water off, she steps
onto the bedspread and wraps slightly crusty but thickly woven towels around her torso and her hair.

She heads straight for the bed in the next room and lies down, the towels still around her. It is almost dark. The vertigo
settles slowly, and this time she falls asleep.

When she awakens, there is morning light, but she has a sense that she has slept a long time, perhaps through another entire
day. Her body is dead weight, that sensation that comes with sleeping so deeply and in one position for too long. It takes
all her strength to break the inertia and sit up, her body aching as if it has been clipped and spun up over the hood of a
car. She touches her head, and feels that her hair is dry, but her scalp is thick with layers of sweat. Her mouth is dried
out almost to cracking, and her stomach feels as though it has dropped down into the base of her spine. Her head still throbs,
but her mind is beginning to clear — it's time to find out exactly what's going on.

She gets up, and the towels unravel around her, remaining on the bed. She looks down the length of her body and is hit with
another attack of vertigo, so strong that she has to sit down on the edge of the bed. She doesn't want to move — ever again
— but she makes herself slowly stretch out her arms and hands in front of her.

They are not hers.

The arms are pale, thin but shapely, the long fingers tipped with ragged nails.
Dancer's hands
— even she can make them pirouette like butterflies. She looks down, and the almost nonexistent breasts with the very dark
nipples are not hers. The flat — nay, concave — stomach, the thin thighs, the knees, are not hers. She stumbles into the bathroom,
closes the medicine cabinet door, and stares at the reflection in the mirror.

The face, the hair, the eyes, are not hers.

This is not Katharine.

Act 1, Scene 2

Where's the rest of me?

— R
ONALD
R
EAGAN
,
Kings Row
(1942)

Katharine watched as the hands that were not her hands touched the face that was not her face. She walked the fingers across
the cheeks, up the nose, and across the forehead as if she were a blind person reading some new acquaintance's visage. This
face was sharp and drawn, the skin the color and texture of bleached linen. The impossibly flat black hair sprang matted and
tangled from the head like yarn from an old and grubby puppet.
Whose body is this
? She ran the hands down over the breasts and stomach and between the thighs. She could put both hands together as if in prayer
and still not touch the inside of the thighs. She couldn't remember if she had ever in her adult life been able to do that
with her own body.
Whose body is this
?

She jerked herself back into the bedroom and started looking for some sort of purse, flinging things off the dresser and the
night tables that flanked the queen-size bed. On the desk, she found a brightly colored pocketbook and snatched at it as if
it might scuttle away.

There was a driver's license — its photograph a version of the reflection that had stared back at her from the bathroom mirror,
albeit a healthier one. Thisby Flute Bennet, the license read.
Is that a name
? 1125 Hillcrest Heights, Beverly Hills, CA 90210.
Geezus, only in LA
. She looked at the birth date listed; this body was seventeen years younger than her own. She turned over the license, and
handwritten on the back was “155 Bruin Circle, #33, LA 90049.”

This must be some sort of hallucination
.

She stood up awkwardly, as if there were loose connections, a short circuit, in this body, and she had to consciously dictate
orders to the extremities.

This must be a dream
.

She had always dreamed vividly and with such clarity that she would wake up and not be sure whether the dream had actually
happened. But there was no disputing the bites of this reality. This was not a dream. Every filament of this body screamed.
Every neuron in her brain was on fire.

“What am I going to do?” she said out loud, hoarsely at first, but then with enough strength to hear the accent and cadence
of the voice. It was not hers.

Is nothing mine but my mind
? Returning to silence to hear her own voice in her own brain.

She quickly rummaged through the dresser drawers to find some clothes to cover this strange naked flesh. The jeans looked
terribly thin — there would be no way she could fit into them, but this body did, obscenely easily. She felt more composed
now, though — and less like a voyeur.

What do I remember last about me, in my own body
? she thought as she slumped down on the bed. Work? Yes, she remembered it had been a workday, and a long one. She had been
tired and not feeling very well, though that was not unusual. She hadn't been feeling well for a long time. Years, it seemed.
Doctors pronounced her healthy, yet she still didn't feel good. So tired, so out of sync. She would have settled for feeling
okay. Feeling good was for the young. She didn't remember anything unusual happening that night. It was a bit of a blur, though
she was sure alcohol hadn't been involved — at least, not any more than the usual two glasses of wine before dinner. She had
gone to bed early. She did remember that, suddenly. There had been a fight with her son, and she had ached to steal awhile
into the oblivion of sleep. The fight was over something —
something, no doubt, like school or grades
. He was going to be a junior in the fall, and he was avoiding his required summer reading. His first-semester grades would
be incredibly important for college.
Didn't he realize that
? She had lost her temper and said some things, and as he slammed out of the house, her daughter's bedroom door sounding in
sympathetic echo, she had immediately wanted to take back her words.

She hadn't then called after him to be careful, to drive defensively, as if it were a conferred blessing, as if it would keep
him from harm. Would the one time she forgot to warn him be the time he would do something stupid?

And she really hadn't forgotten — the caveat had been in her mind and on her lips, but that last burst of energy needed to
purse her lips forward failed her. She had worried about it as she went to sleep, and that was the last thing she remembered.

No, that's not right. There was something else
.

She woke up. Yes, she woke up, and something was wrong. She felt bad. Worse than she did now. She felt her rib cage expand
from the inside, as if something alien had incubated inside of her and wanted to be born. She was going to explode. She heard,
more than sensed, her husband beside her — his snores like the sound of clothespinned playing cards being shuffled against
bicycle-wheel spokes. She had this schizoid need to gently nudge him under the shoulder blade as she had done countless times
in their two decades of marriage, and to flail at him like a windmill.
How can you sleep while I'm dying
? He dropped away from her then, and she knew.

In the last second of life, she had cried, “
Wait
…”

What was she supposed to do now?
Phone home
? Yes, that's exactly what she would do. That would ground her. She would talk to her son or daughter or husband, and then
everything would be all right.

There was a phone by the bed. She leaned over slowly, ignoring the insistent blink of the message-machine light, and picked
up the receiver. She dialed her area code first; she would assume she was in LA.
What else do I have to go on
?

The phone rang.
Pick up
! Five heartbeats and someone answered, the greeting too truncated for Katharine to catch who it was.

“Is this the Ashley residence?” Katharine heard herself say in this other body's voice.

“Yes, it is. Who's calling, please?” It was a woman, and Katharine did not recognize her.

“Kath — ”
Katharine Ashley? Was she? Really
?

She hung up and stared at the phone. What was she going to do? If only her head and stomach would stop lurching. There was
an ache in this body that sometimes felt like hunger, but the thought of food made her tilt. The ache was like desire, and
it seemed to be pulling at her, pulling her apart, stretching her over and under like saltwater taffy on metal arms at the
Boardwalk.

She sat there on the bed and kicked at a sweater that was on the floor. Underneath it was a plastic Baggie weighted down in
one corner by white powder.

Is this withdrawal? From drugs? Was this Thisby Flute Bennet an addict then
? Katharine stiffened.
Had she … OD'd? Fried her brain and left this poor body directorless
?

Her skin itched, and she raked the torn nails down her arms, leaving traces of red.
I can't be an addict. Not me. I got through the Woodstock era unscathed. I never even liked marijuana
.

Katharine pulled up sharply on her panic. Did that mean they had made some sort of switch, some sort of transfer?
Traded places
?

She had to know. Before she could even begin to think or do anything else, she had to know if some drugged-out doppelgänger
was inhabiting Katharine's body, wearing Katharine's clothes, looking at Katharine's face in the mirror, wondering where her
own had gone? Saying, “I'm all, you know, like, really freaked out.”

I'll call work
, she thought and dialed her number.
Maybe she's there
.

“Ryerson-Connors Insurance. Ned Ryerson's office.”

Disappointed, Katharine recognized the voice as belonging to Rita, one of the new girls they had hired recently.

“Katharine Ashley, please,” she said, trying to stay under control, afraid she would be recognized, afraid she wouldn't be.

There was a longer silence than normal until Rita responded. “May I ask who's calling?”

Katharine fought down the urge to scream,
What are you doing at my desk? You're not trained for my job
! “I'm a personal friend,” she said.

There was another long interval. “I think you should call their home.”

“I can't get through,” she lied. “Please tell me.”

“I'm sorry, but Katharine died a year ago. Of a heart attack.”

Act 1, Scene 3

What is the body when the head is off?

—K
ING
E
DWARD
,
Henry VI, Part III
, 5.1.41