You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (16 page)

Help,
I thought. But nothing happened.

I rolled Michael into a thin tube and stuck him in my backpack. I took out my phone and looked at it as I walked. I had been calling C every hour or so, hoping he’d pick up and let my voice join to his once more. I had left one message after another, many of them silent, filled only by the background noise of wherever I was walking. In some I asked the same questions over and over.
Why won’t you pick up, where are you? Are you at home? Are you someplace else? Are you alive?
I felt angry, sad, at peace, and then angry again. I told him things that I wasn’t sure I felt but wanted him to hear anyway.
I’ve been napping in the house across the street during the day, I want you to come next time, you’d like it. There’s nothing there. Nothing to go wrong. Call me back. Call me back right away. I know who you’re with. I want to know who you’re with. Call me back. I may not want to be the person you want, but I love you, and maybe I could make myself try to want to be, if you’d call me back. Call me back.
Emotions infiltrated me like toxins in the air supply, passing through my body and corroding the things inside, filling me entirely and then leaving me vacant.

I thought about C sitting there, picking up his phone each time it shook at him, looking at my name on the little screen, and choosing to put it back down, ignored. I imagined his face not changing when he saw my name, or maybe just changing a little bit, into some less pleased shape. It hurt to imagine that, so I imagined him differently, distraught every time he saw me call, distraught and missing me, but that didn’t make sense. What actually felt best was to imagine him missing entirely. On the arm of a couch I had never seen before, somewhere I had never been, his phone rang and rang and nothing happened. The lights on it blinked on and off, a sequence of green and blue and red, and nobody did anything to quiet it. When I imagined a stranger’s hand, the hand of a much older man or woman, reaching down and pushing the button on the side to silence it, I was comforted. Maybe I could be the one to cut the feeling that linked me to him, to cut the thing that had me worrying about his love and who he was saving it for, that had me wanting words from him and a constant stream of feelings. I felt empowered, briefly. If I could find him, I could disappear him. But even if I couldn’t find him, it was within my power to disappear myself, dispose of my own body. If I looked at it blurry, I might even be able to make it feel to myself as though the world were vanishing from me, rather than vice versa.

Then I took out the pamphlet that the Wally’s manager had offered me when I demanded to see a schedule of deliveries that would tell me when there would be Kandy Kakes again. “Ma’am,” he’d said, “we do not know when the next date will be that your product will be in stock. We are currently having difficulties getting in touch with both the distribution and supply ends of things, and furthermore those individuals visiting from the Conjoined Eaters Church have been removing product from the shelves and leaving these documents in their place, which we recognize is an inconvenience to our customers. Please feel free to take one of these reading materials home with you, with our apologies, and you will see that our problems are genuine. Their religious practices devote no thought to the complexities of supply and demand, or customer service.”

He had opened a drawer stuffed full of identical folded white papers. White filled the cracks between white, a harbor of inexhaustible paper. With a dull feeling in my skull, I took a pamphlet and left. Now I opened the pamphlet, which had the flimsy feel of paper from a home office printer. The shiny black of the type dissolved into tiny dots when you looked into it deeply. The pamphlet was blank on the outside, but on the inside it read:

Many people know the story of Jesus Christ, who was born in a humble manger to the blessed mother Mary, who conceived her child immaculately and at the will of God himself. Few people know the truest facts of this event, these being that JESUS WAS ONE OF TWO JESUSES born on that day and at that time. It is well-known in nature that certain species manage a type of conception without the need for or uncleanliness of the sex act, namely they practice VIRGIN BIRTH (e.g., water fleas, nematodes, parasitic wasps, and certain vertebrate species such as komodo dragons and hammerhead and blackfin sharks to name just a couple). Scientists know it is the case that some bodies need no other body to set in motion the action of procreation because all bodies contain an excess that enables one to pinch off a part of themself and COPY IT INDEFINITELY. This was the case with Jesus our lord and savior who is veritable proof of TWINNING and by extension the UNIVERSAL TWINNING OF SINGULARITIES and their DIFFERENTIATION INTO LIGHT AND DARK varietals.

An illustration: How is it possible that God’s son, Jesus, made SPECIFIC in mortal form so as to serve as an example of goodness for mortal man, should rise from the dead — a thing of which no man is capable? The answer: HE CANNOT. The Jesus who “rose” had been there the whole time, mingling his false sermons with the great truth of the accurate Jesus who is light manifest. Hence the injurious nature of the false-risen teachings, e.g., “When you see your likeness, you are happy. But when you see your images that came into being before and that neither die nor become visible, how much you will bear!” (from the Gospel of Thomas). This speech is of a piece with counterfeit materials being woven into many things in your vicinity, FALSEHOODS THAT WORK AGAINST YOUR WELLNESS.

Have you ever wondered why the person you love is kind and amenable one day, dissatisfied and cruel the next? Why eating a certain food on one day leaves you feeling fine, but eating it the day after or the day after that will make you feel tired, or fat, or depressed? THIS IS BECAUSE THE LIGHT AND DARK TWINNING IN THEM HAVE NOT BEEN SEPARATED. Alternatively, you are being made sick by consuming matter that is improperly sourced. Production obscurities in today’s food assembly mean that you may be buying accidentally foods grown or produced in a dark realm by ghosts of the types of people you know. Food items of VERIFIED OR POSTULATED DARKNESS include: green apples, eggplant, garlic (whole), wheat- and rice-based dry cereal, Red Delicious apples, chicken breast, milled oats (enriched variety), prepackaged breakfast sausage and bratwurst, bagged ice, seltzer, oranges, orange and fruit juice, loaf bread, udder, nut butters, and A WIDE VARIETY OF APPARENTLY INNOCUOUS FOODS.

IF YOU HAVE ALREADY OR MAY SOON CONSUME DARKSOURCED FOOD, CALL THE NUMBER BELOW FOR A FREE CONSULTATION BY EXPERTS.

At the end of the text came a 1-800 number and a round black seal with an etching of two white chalices. Printed above in tiny serifed capital letters was: NEW CHRISTIAN CHURCH OF THE CONJOINED EATER.

Below that, in smaller letters, was an address based in Randall, a town twenty miles away. The back, again, was blank. There was a smear of rusty brown with a few whorls intact on the edge of the pamphlet. A bit of bloody fingerprint.

I looked up from the paper and out at the land that bodied the distance between myself and my home, where B presumably was waiting, looking more and more like me with every passing second. I checked my phone, but nothing had changed, C was as remote as he had been a couple of hours ago. It was late in the afternoon, and the mid-July heat would break in an hour when the sun began its slide down toward the horizon, turning the sky a toxified red. But for now, the swelter slung thick in the air and made it a sort of jelly, something that I waded through, something that I pushed aside as I eked my way toward work, and then toward the apartment that I still managed to think of as home. Shapes trembled under the heat. The things I was wearing pressed sweaty to me like another skin on my skin, wet and wettening in the heat of the sun.

I fixed myself on the horizon line where sky met land and walked toward it, toward the wavering highway, which like a mirage seemed to be fleeing itself continually.

I WENT TO WORK AND
I proofed
Kayaking Quarterly
and
Marine Hobbyist
. I struck out the duplicate characters and misplaced punctuation with ferocity, my fingers sore afterward where they had choked the pen. I felt a little bit dizzy, and the letters trembled when I looked at the page. I realized that the lowercase
p
was exactly the same letter as the lowercase
d,
just in a tricky new arrangement. I tried to tell a co-worker in the cubicle next to me, but she just looked down when I started talking, shaking her blond head. Other people think that proofreading is just about changing incorrect things into correct ones, but it’s more complicated: it’s about holding language in place. When I got home, the sun was setting and the different lumps of furniture in the living room were brilliant on one side, the other side sunk into dimness. Their shadows slanted off into the lack of light. It was quiet, but it was always quiet in there when I got home, as though B were activated by my presence, my proximity.

I had never liked this about B, that when left alone she wouldn’t do the sorts of things a human body normally does when it takes up space. There were no clear effects of her presence, no new arrangements to welcome you back. She didn’t warm up a room. She wouldn’t let you know she was inside already by squeaking the sofa or singing to herself or making doors open or shut audibly. While she knew I was home, it was as if there were an invisible string tied from my wrist to hers, alerting me at all times to the sound of her footsteps moving from left to right in the living room, indicating that she was going to the bathroom, then again from right to left, indicating that her time in the bathroom was over. But the first few minutes of returning home made me feel like the girl in a slasher film, opening doors and checking her makeup while the audience members shout at her to turn around, look behind her, call the cops. I preferred the certainty of the house across the street, the house that I loved for its emptiness and sense of desolation, for the way it comforted me.

Stepping raw and nervous into this house with its thick shadows and creaky floors made me miss C more than ever. If he were here, I’d be less scared, less alone. C took up all the space around him, including my space, his legs sticking out into the passages that I had planned to walk through to get to another place, forcing me to climb over him or find another way around. I missed having to maneuver around him, to sort my body from his. When we put our faces close together sleeping or cuddling, he seemed to suck up all the air, leaving me sleepy, dizzy, partially undersupplied, and nuzzling at his mouth.
That’s what love is like,
I would think, breathing shallowly, my mouth and nose smashed against his skin.

But B was the sort of person who might be anywhere.

Standing in the kitchen, I couldn’t remember a time when I had eaten. The counters and cabinets were clear, meaning that if there was something to eat, it would be found in the fridge. One of the special features of Kandy Kakes was that even though they contained real animal- and plant-derived perishable ingredients, you never needed to worry about taking measures to keep them from spoiling. Most food manufacturers add preservatives to their food to counter the many different threats to the integrity of a food item: rot by bacteria, rot by oxidation, rot by fungal proliferation, rot of all kinds. These additives struggled against the inevitable rot of dead matter. Foods died because they once lived.

But Kandy Kakes were a pure food. Their wrappers could boast that they were
Preservative Free!
because they really were. In one Kandy Kakes commercial, Kandy Kat and a Kandy Kake are dropped into the right and left halves of a split screen. Time begins speeding up as they stand side by side: seasons change and the furniture starts looking more futuristic, hands on the clocks in the background spin around dizzily. Kandy Kat’s bony body grows longer and taller and wider as it ages, though never more fleshed. Then suddenly he buckles, beginning a serene crumple inward. His knees bend and begin shaking, his head hollows out and gets skully, sinking down toward the ground where the shedding hair collects in soft, fluffy clots that blow around like tumbleweeds. His shriveled tail looks like a chewed-up rope. Occasionally he raises a skeletal paw to the stark black line that divides him from the Kandy Kake one cell over and claws at it, but he’s clearly getting tired. On the other side of the split screen, the Kandy Kake is doing jumping jacks and calisthenics, practicing the cancan, hopping around, and looking bored. No matter how much time seems to pass, it remains the same: untouchable, impassive.

The voice-over explains the miracle of Kandy Kake imperishability as a product of several different highly advanced manufacturing processes. First, biologically derived ingredients are passed through an ultrapasteurization process that destroys not only harmful bacteria and molds, but other life-related elements within the substance: trace enzymes, proteins, vitamins. Next, these elements are filtered out through a subtractive chemical process sensitive to the structure of organic compounds, which eliminates most natural degradation. Finally, the nascent Kakes are reinvigorated with specially engineered weather-resistant forms of sugar inspired by plastics, which function doubly to repel vermin. As long as you leave the water-repellent fudge casing intact, your Kandy Kake is guaranteed to stay fresh for twenty to thirty years. By this time, Kandy Kat is mostly a pile of hunched bone and hide, his two round eyes blinking blearily at the audience. He holds up a sign that reads MY LAST WORDS, while the Kandy Kake, which has found its way over into his half of the screen, dances a perverse jig around his broken body.