You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (13 page)

“I know,” C said, “but I’m trying to cure you of it.”

“Why,” I asked, “are you trying to cure me of something I feel?”

For the first time, C looked a little bit hurt.

“I know you’ve been worrying about B, and I think it has to do with feeling like you’ll be less yourself if she starts seeming more like you,” C said. He looked thoughtful. “But I also know that she’s not going anywhere, and she’s only going to look more like you, if anything, not less. I think what would be healthy would be to just start dulling that fear, and the fears related to it. Think of yourself as a franchise, like a Coffee Hole or Wally’s. More outlets just mean greater reach.”

“So you do think she looks like me,” I said.

“Well, hmmm, you think she looks like you, right?” he responded.

“Would you be able to tell us apart?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “I know you.”

I just looked at him.

“Well, of course I think I could,” he went on. “But it’s hard. Everyone thinks they could. All those couples thought they could,” he said, pointing at the screen. “But in reality people are a lot alike. Any two people, on average, share 99.9 percent of their DNA sequences. The genetic difference between the two of us comes down to something like eye color and whether or not we like the taste of cilantro.”

I wished he would stop talking. When I looked at him now, I couldn’t help but see him as a casing stuffed full of thready strands of DNA, just a few miles of letters in a shell. I thought about the parts of my saliva that were merging with his in his mouth, the stray cells that probably had already mixed in. The three or four things that made me different from him were already lost in there and would never find their way back to me.

He was speaking facts to me that many other people knew, that many other people could have told me, and it made me feel like I was sitting with a stranger. I pulled my knees up to my chest and made myself smaller on the couch. I was looking at him now like I was trying to get his features down, so I’d recognize him in the future. The more steadily I looked at him, the more excited he got about the things he was saying. He must have thought I was listening. Sitting over there and gesturing with the remote control, he grew more and more animated and his hair flopped around on top of his head. He looked like someone I was just meeting for the first time, and didn’t like all that much.

“I don’t understand,” I said, “why you can’t just tell me that I am exactly who I am, and that I couldn’t ever be mistaken for anyone else.”

“I could tell you that,” he said. “But anyone could tell you that. And if they told you that, you’d know it wasn’t me, so you wouldn’t be satisfied with it, even if it was me telling you. It’s like if I said that to you, I’d disappear. I’d be someone you didn’t recognize.”

He leaned forward and rubbed my shoulder, suddenly tender.

“What I’m saying,” he continued, “is that you aren’t going to get what you want. Probably you don’t even want what you want. There’s no satisfaction here. So maybe you should think of something else you could want, and then just go get that instead. It’s called ‘transference.’”

I was sitting there and thinking that B could be in my room right now, touching all of my things, and my things wouldn’t even know the difference. Then I was wishing her out of my room, but that still left all the empty, threatened space, saturated with potential violation. It wouldn’t be enough: I wanted my room to be gone, the whole apartment gone, all the walls closing in on the space between until there was no space between. I wanted to eliminate all the space within which something worse could happen. That blank material was a threat. It could become anything. And then I wanted C gone, wanted him gone so that it would be impossible to want him, so that there would be nobody else that I wanted things from and nobody else to disappoint me. So that there would be nobody I needed to recognize me except myself and maybe B, if I didn’t decide to wish her away, too.

All this wanting created an appetite in me that was terrifyingly shapeless. I had no idea how to feed it. I didn’t know how to make anything vanish. The things I wanted were hazy, and the things one could have were small and solid, like an orange, and never seemed to add up. I pulled the remote out of C’s clutched hand. I was going through the television channels one by one, up and up, looking, and the channels were going up like they would never stop. They would go blindly on, climbing up until they were back at the bottom again, sketching a sort of Möbius strip. I was looking for something I recognized without knowing what I was looking for, something that would remind me that I had an appetite. I wanted the sort of company that could be given only by someone who didn’t know I was there.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

I passed an ad for used cars and one for kitchen hardware. Faces of women and sometimes men pointed away from me and at something off-screen, at faces I couldn’t see. Lids of jars and flaps of purses lifting up, revealing something dark inside that the gaze of the camera did not penetrate. The hands moving them were pale hands, the nails painted awful colors. And then there was a commercial for something medicinal, some modifier for the body, where the inside of a body showed up on-screen, flooded in light and glistening with a studio lacquer. The heart and lungs and liver and kidneys showed up throbbing and shiny like they did in real life, or the real life we imagined they had in the dark within us. They pulsed there, silently.

Then, suddenly, the smooth flesh parted like a ripple from the center, sprouting holes in all the organs. A mouth opened itself in the middle of the liver, a little Claymation mouth with thick cartoony lips. With its new mouth, the speaking liver complained of pain, dissatisfaction, longing for something more, better. A mouth opened up in the heart, the lungs, the small cute kidneys. All the organs clamored for more. In chorus, they demanded better treatment, more respect, more fun. My own heart felt strange to me, fluttery. I watched as a thick pink liquid slid down over the organs, a sheet drawn over the little holes that still flapped open and shut, open and shut. The gaps winked at me, thickly pink.

I felt a smothered hunger beating out from the unseen places inside my body. I felt corseted in skin. I wanted to turn myself violently inside out. I wanted to throw myself into the outside and begin tearing off chunks of it for food.

Somewhere to the right of my body, C continued to speak. His voice was a little bit sharper than I remembered it. I turned my head to the left, but it still found a way in.

C said: “I thought I should let you know that I put our names in as contestants on
That’s My Partner!
We’ve been together longer than their minimum relationship length, and I think it could be good for you, therapeutic.”

I looked in the direction I had been looking before.

“Just kidding,” C said. “Are you listening? I was just kidding. But I am going to enter us. If you don’t want to do it,” he continued, “I could always bring B. You could watch from home. That could be therapeutic too.”

He looked at me for a while, studying my face silently. It was like he was expecting me to do something, say something, but I couldn’t tell what.

“Just kidding,” he added.

I knew then that we were going to have a fight. I wanted to excuse myself before it happened, leave my body behind to field it while I did something else, something completely else. I wanted to return to myself hours later with no real memories, only a vague feeling of having floated. But what I wanted wasn’t something that I could have: my life, the process of living it out, was undelegatable, intransferable. This was an essentially contemporary problem, a problem of supply and demand. I had to solve it the way other problems of scarcity and desire were being solved: by finding something new to want and pursuing that wanting instead. Baby monkeys taken from their mothers will form attachments to fake mothers made of cloth or electrified wire, ducklings with no parents will imprint on a cardboard box with an alarm clock ticking inside of it. Wanting things was a substitute for wanting people, one of the best possible substitutes.

I had to leave and find a real Kandy Kake and eat it. I couldn’t stand to be myself around any of these people until it was all done.

I looked toward the door. It was the dead center of night.

I GREW UP IN A
place just like this, where the leaves never fell from the trees but clung there crinkled like burnt paper, shriveled and brown in some places but sprouting tender green leaves somewhere else. Here, the flowers bloom all year, and once they bloom they are already close to dying, nicking the mulch beneath with blotches of collapsed red and white. They repeat themselves, blooming and falling and being swept away before they rot, restoring the perfect squares of green that grid this town and the towns beyond. They grow blindly, nursed by an unending stream of water and sunlight. They wither against a uniform background of palms and pines, which are the same every time you look at them.

I walked at the side of the road as cars passed me by in the sweltering heat, not knowing whether C was awake or whether he was still where I left him, smiling sweetly in his slumber even though we had just had a killer fight. Maybe he was entering us as contestants on that terrible game show right at that very moment. And if he succeeded, how would I ever know whether he had done it to help me, or hurt me, or something in between the two. Loving someone was no guarantee of how they would treat you. All it did was raise the stakes.

I called C two times in a row, then three, then I let it go to voice mail and just kept walking. I missed him. I wanted to hear him say something to me. I thought of him listening to my voice mail later that day, the sound of my breath pressing into his ear. I thought of my footsteps etching themselves onto a material far, far away. I was happy that some part of me would be touching some part of him, even if it was only the sound of my movement against the tissue of his eardrum.

This is a landscape made by human beings, but not for human beings. Walk it and you always step someplace identical to where you stepped before. You can’t get anywhere on foot. Cross it in a car and the surroundings slide by until you realize that you’ve seen them all before, like in the commercial where an impish young Kandy Kake lures Kandy Kat on a chase through frame after frame of a happy suburban neighborhood populated by cute yellow houses. Kandy Kat’s clubby feet kick up a wake of dust behind him, his body blurs with speed, the world scrolls maniacally by, breaknecking. He runs with claws out ahead of him, swiping at the little Kake that is always somehow a step or two away. Then a stray claw snags on a piece of sky, and the world starts to stretch and then slump in a startling way: Kandy Kat has literally torn through the scenery, caused a widening rip in the world. He stops to look, perplexed, at the fluttering material, blown by a breeze of unknown origin. On it you can see a piece of house, mostly window and some lilac-painted shutter. The shot widens, and we see that Kandy Kat is standing in a studio soundstage in front of a flat, painted background that slips past him while the little Kake turns a crank. One yellow house after another scrolls by before Kandy Kat looks down and realizes that he’s been running on a treadmill the whole time, a treadmill that yanks him suddenly backward and threatens to throw him off completely. Kandy Kat starts running for his life, running toward the giggling Kake, and he is still running with no sign that he will ever stop when we see the words projected over his body.

KANDY KAKES: HOPELESSLY DELICIOUS.

I had been walking for almost two hours when I came up on the crest that overlooked the DoubleWally’s, the newest and biggest grocery store in the area. B sometimes drove us up here when she wanted to be a food tourist, her term for the activity of coming to Wally’s with a digital camera and rigorously photographing all of the doughnuts. Each one was glazed or filled or sprinkled, sitting beneath colorless fluorescents that made it look inside as if it were always the same time of night no matter how bright it might be outdoors. I always thought her interest in food photography should be encouraged: how long could someone ogle doughnuts without giving in and eating one? So while she crouched on the floor to get her shots of the filled maple bars and glazed twists, shots taken up close and from below so that the doughnuts looked like sticky, oozy mountain ranges, I hovered around her and said encouraging things like
That one looks really good
. Late at night nobody bothered us, but if we came during the day, a line might form behind B as she took her photographs, a line of customers waiting quietly to choose their doughnuts from the bins, waiting without anger even though B took forever to line up her shots.

Sometimes she’d have me drive back so she could look through the photos right away. Her body curled around the camera slightly as she stared, as if she were trying to shield the photos from my gaze. They didn’t look like anything real from where I sat: they might have been blurry photos of abstract paintings. B passed these times silently, mostly, with an occasional squeak of satisfaction. Afterward she looked rosier, as though she had found something real, something meaty to feed on in the tiny images. Her satisfaction worked at me in weird, corrosive ways. Her soft
mmm
sounds, coming from next to me, sounded nearer to my ears than they actually were. They ate at me, at my resting feelings, and made me feel a sudden dissatisfaction of my own. What was there in my life to absorb me the way those photos absorbed her? Even C, a thing I had that B didn’t, created as much lack in me as he sated. Sometimes I would sneak a look at her doughnut photos, hoping for a bit of that satisfaction I’d seen her feel, but the most I noticed was that each frosted surface glistened in an anatomical sort of way. After looking at each one, I felt slightly nauseated.