You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (17 page)

I opened the refrigerator and saw nothing but a pile of stripped oranges, a pyramid of them, all the pale yellow color of rind. They would be so easy to eat — pre-peeled, unarmored. The little gouges in their rinds matched the diameter of B’s fingernails exactly. But for some reason oranges now filled me with dread. I had never noticed it before the pamphlet had pointed it out, but there was something dark about oranges, seeded through their sweet, watery flesh like a poison. With a product like Kandy Kakes, the ingredients are spelled out for you on the wrapper — every part accounted for, its caloric and nutritional content tabulated. But what sorts of ingredients went into a piece of fruit? An orange wasn’t a type of food so much as another entity, looking out for its own interests, secretive and sealed, hiding its insides from the outside world.

I looked around for the peels, but they were all gone, vanished down B’s throat.

It made sense to me that B would be a danger: she was too weak to be harmless. Though I didn’t know how to describe the threat posed by the oranges, it wouldn’t be hard to avoid eating them since I avoided eating almost everything else. But the threat posed by C’s absence, the regret I felt as C felt further away — these things felt more dangerous with each passing moment. The no-longer-myself feeling was growing; I worried it was here to stay. Things were better with him than they currently were without him, dizzy and bereft of snacks, not sure what was safe to eat. I would take a nap, reread the pamphlet, and maybe go to the grocery store again later.

When I opened the door to my bedroom, the last squeezings of daylight were leaking in around my curtains and the outlines of things were barely visible in the dark. My shelves and desk were normal, and my bed was normal except for a deformity in the center, a lump under the covers that was too small to be C but might be small enough to be me. I went over and looked. Her body was curled under with the covers tucked beneath the feet, under a curve that was probably a knee. A little bit of her black-rimmed eye poked out over the top of the blanket, shut in sleep and oblivious. She had a ponytail like mine, splayed out over the pillow like a quick swipe of ink from a large, stiff brush.

I felt light and airy. It was as if I weren’t there. For a moment it seemed possible that I might have been asleep the last few days, dreaming a long and extremely detailed dream where my roommate was turning into me and I was turning into nobody. But when I leaned in again toward the face, I saw small freckles on the earlobe that I knew from B’s ears, though I couldn’t remember what my own looked like, and mine could easily have been marked the same way, except there was nobody else there to look for me. I moved my face close to hers and breathed in and out, watching the fine hairs at her temples dance around her face. But I remembered what someone had told me once about breathing in dreams: If you’re feeling your lungs open and close, you can’t be dreaming.

Leaving my bedroom where B was sleeping, I saw a pamphlet on the living room couch. It looked like the one I had taken from Wally’s, distinctive insofar as there was nothing at all distinctive on the outside of it. But mine was still in the back pocket of my shorts, so this one had to be B’s. I opened it up and read:

Many individuals operating in this day and age are familiar with the disheartening experience of becoming ill, anxious, or otherwise SICK IN THE SOUL despite having made good life choices. You may find yourself asking, “How have I placed myself in this position despite following the best information available? Could it be there is better information available?” The self-destructive impulse is to open oneself up to an influx of new advice, but in truth one should simply ELIMINATE DUPLICITY from your existing body. In other words LEARN TO CLOSE YOUR SECOND EYE.

An example: Monks living in the Middle Ages under the watchful care of our Lord were frequently given the task of copying out holy documents while reading them aloud or mouthing them beneath their breath. Working six hours a day six days a week, a monk or nun could copy out the whole Bible in a year. And yet these monks were never given an education in the discovery of the hidden pages within the pages of the Holy Book, and thus with face full of DECOY KNOWLEDGE they copied the Bible as it appeared without referencing the SHADOW STRUCTURE beneath. Thus was the book rendered rife with mistruths, namely the number of Jesuses. Similarly, Oedipus was in the right when he set about gouging his left eye out so as to eliminate from his sphere of knowledge the false truth that Jocasta was his mother. It is because he failed to stop at the better truth, that she was his wife, that he went mad. To this end, you might ask yourself: WHO IS MY SECOND EYE AND HOW AM I GOING TO GOUGE THEM OUT?

You are probably wondering: “What does this mean for my loved ones?” That depends upon their level of contamination. Does living near them make you sleepy? Do they increase or stifle your appetite? When you make a statement natural to your body of knowledge, do they contradict or compound it, forcing you to ingest new knowledge that has not been tested for safety? If your answer to any of these statements is “maybe” or “yes,” then your loved one may be SEVERELY BUT NOT IRREPARABLY DUPLICATE.

Scientists have confirmed that chemicals are present in nearly everything manufactured by natural or artificial means. To put this in more detail, chemicals can be found in almost everything, but what about the chemicals that cannot be found? WE CAN FIND THEM FOR YOU. Our spirituality centers offer the best step in diagnosing factual contaminants in you or your beloved, using subtractive processes developed by some of the most successful corporations in the country. You too can be well stocked, free of false certainty or taint.

It is worth mentioning that in these confusing times other pamphlets may front themselves as being accurate renditions of the knowledge possessed by the New Christian Church of Conjoined Eaters. These pamphlets, once discovered, should be discarded swiftly and their memory dumped.

BRING YOUR LOVED ONE IN

FOR A FREE CONSULTATION.

IF THEY LOVE YOU THEY WILL COME.

At the end of the passage was that same phone number, same address, same logo with CONJOINED EATERS CHURCH printed above it. Was the error in the Church’s name intentional? I had never noticed how much the logo looked like a Kandy Kake: thick black border surrounding two squiggles of light, two chalices made of white frosting, twinned. I stared at it and felt like it was trying to tell me something, something I couldn’t hear over the sound of my hunger, which was like two people with two megaphones shouting at each other through the center of my head. Was this the correct pamphlet? Was the one I had read earlier a decoy? Could there be a more correct pamphlet than either of these somewhere else, waiting to be found?

THE FIRST EYE EVOLVED BY
accident in the single cell of an organism that had been born sensitive to individual particles of light, according to an article I had read in
Marine Hobbyist
. Deep underwater, it felt their soft touch on its surface as a blow and registered that shock by wincing slightly, changing its shape. In this way, the cell learned to say
there is something blocking the light above me
or
there is not
. Either something was there or there was nothing. This ancient eye was primitive in comparison with our modern eyes, which now operate as whole colonies of individual photosensitive cells yoked together into a single blob, cringing together at the sun. What the first eye saw, though, it saw with certainty.

I put my hand on B’s bedroom door, which was just like mine but with a little paper sign taped to it that read VISITOR PLEASE ANNOUNCE YOURSELVES. She had stolen it from someplace on campus, I guessed. I didn’t think it was grammatically correct. I was filled with a feeling like purpose, like those moments where you remember what you came into the room to do. What sort of purpose? I’d find out once I got inside. I pushed open the door onto an inside so dark, it startled me. B had gotten the better room, it was bigger and had an extra closet, but the windows looked out onto trees and told you nothing about the house across the street. While she watched the trees, I learned things about the world around us. I learned that our neighbors had sensed a threat in their surroundings, that they had ghosted themselves as some form of preemptive defense. I had learned that they were never coming back. I had learned, as they had, that just because a thing is in your home, just because you allowed it in or even put it there yourself, is no guarantee that it won’t begin changing itself while you’re not looking, unbecoming what it was and transforming slowly into something you’d never, ever let into your life. These sorts of things needed to be rooted out or abandoned as toxic.

It wasn’t that I wholly bought into the message of Conjoined Eating. There were some good ideas there, but I was still waiting to see how it all played out. What worried me was B’s malleability: if she had read that pamphlet, it could be assumed that she would fail to realize that she was the contaminated one in this relationship. Given her temperament, it was almost certain that she’d attack, if she wasn’t already somehow attacking me by invading my bed, infringing on my face. The safest thing was to retaliate in advance. Once, at least, maybe twice.

I saw dozens of shiny little tubes and jars arranged across her dresser, the mirror image of my own room, and I went to them and opened the little lids of the flower-reeking creams and dug my fingers into their mellow white. I glopped them out on top of the dresser and spread them around with my fingertips. They were all the same things that I used in my room, but they had been bought new, pristine, some with the crisp factory surface still on them. Then I clutched at the makeup, squeezed the pencils in my fist like a child trying to cause harm, pressed them point down until they snapped, and I banged the pressed squares of powdered pigment against the cream-covered surface until they fell out as chalky crumbs. The lipsticks I extruded from their canisters and rubbed between my gummed-up fingers, working them until they were warm and melty and slid over my hands like thick water. Outside, the dark trees swayed. The pinks and violets and greens were a clown-colored smear across the furniture in her room. I looked happy, though I didn’t feel it. My neck and face were covered in daubs of color, bright like petals on my skin. In my mouth, accidental chunks of lipstick tasted like Barbie doll.

I pressed my gluey hands to my face.

When I was done I lay down on B’s bed. It all smelled like beauty products, that anonymous female scent that we rub onto ourselves to blend into a wet, aggregate femininity, to smell like a person but not like any person in particular. I recognized this specific scent on her sheets, a body lotion sponsored by the actress who peels her face off in those commercials. It was a body lotion I used and was used to smelling of, and this bed smelled just like my own bed, drowsy and thick with nights of repeated sleep. It occurred to me that I shouldn’t have destroyed all the products in the room because I’d have nothing left the next day to make me look like myself. But it was too late to do anything about any of that.

It seemed early to go to sleep, but in a country like this, sprawling all over a yellowing span of land, there must be hundreds of thousands of people secretly sleeping at inappropriate times, times when they should be working or eating or otherwise fueling the total human enterprise. I thought of all those individual unconscious bodies sinking into themselves, slumbering away in the broad daylight of their drawn curtains. I thought of all the hidden spaces: the sewers, the closets, the lightless stomachs and wombs. Warehouses where stock sits silent, the dark interior of a Mickey Mouse costume, the caves of hibernating bears. I imagined the great diffuse blandness of these spaces, soft and dark like a concussion, and I closed my eyes and rolled myself over into the dim center of sleep.

WHEN I WOKE UP IT
was to the thought of a dark eye, singular and large enough to sink my whole body into, the tail end of some dream I couldn’t recall. The eye was so close that I could touch it just by tilting my upper torso a few inches forward, but instead I was trying to lean my body away from the blackness, inside of which I saw a scatter of dim shapes, squiggles, and lines that looked whitish through the dark liquid murk. I didn’t understand why I was pulling back, twisting around before it, then all at once I knew. I was looking for my own reflection in its glassy curve — but there was nothing of me in its surface, nothing underneath. I strained to see, and in straining my eyes slipped open onto a place I didn’t recognize: the light too bright, the smell of plastics. I rubbed my face with the palms of my hands, and when I pulled them away I saw them smeared with red, pink, purple, blue. Then I remembered, and I knew it was only a matter of time before B found me. And when she did, what would I say? What would she do?