You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (20 page)

But waiting was hard work. I was sleepy all the time, I ate nothing but oranges. If I wasn’t eating something while I watched for C, I’d find myself hard asleep, numb to the moment when he’d return and open his house back up to me to tell me where he had been, why I had done the things I’d done, and what I’d do next. I had to be peeling an orange, separating out its segments, pulping them within my mouth, or I’d end up still, deadlike, gulped into dreams. An endless sequence of oranges passed into my hands to be disassembled.

My eyes ached in the heat and my left lid had started fluttering uncontrollably. It was a little like watching a silent film, the way it made the world twitch jauntily in and out of darkness. I walked up to C’s front door, feeling my knees wheeze as I moved. When I got there, I didn’t know what to do: I had already rung the bell, had already knocked so many times that the side of my fist felt cold and tingly all day long. I dug around in my pockets. I found a tube of lip gloss, tinted raspberry with little sparkles in it. Extracting the wand with a wet popping sound, I stared at the blank slab of door. Then I wrote. I wrote:

THE PROBLEM WITH YOUR LIFE IS YOU.

It felt right, but looking at it, I wasn’t sure what I meant by it. Then below it I wrote:

CALL ME.

I put the gloss back in my pocket and legged my way back toward home, my new home, the house across the street from my old home. When I looked back behind me, C’s condo was unchanged. You couldn’t even see the writing on the door at this distance. If you looked hard, you might notice that something over there looked slightly wet.

I thought of the orange pulp in my stomach, cuddled against a nest of B’s hair, and shuddered. I tried to retch quietly, but my stomach only rubbed up against itself inside me, scratchily like two pieces of wool felt. I knew that I looked like somebody in need of desperate, anonymous help from strangers. But there was no one around to look at me, no one around to see.

MY NEW LIFE HAD THE
benefit of simplicity. If I wasn’t over at the condominium complex staking out C’s apartment, I was in the house across the street sleeping. Or I was at Wally’s buying supplies for the next day. By supplies I just mean oranges, the oranges I tore through one after another until my lips and cheeks and fingertips were numb with stinging.

Night after night, I was zeroing in on the daily moment at which Wally’s ceased resembling itself, the few short minutes where the shelves shifted into their new, perplexing positions. For the last week I had been overshooting and undershooting, discovering new slices of time that were just like any other: the same lights fluorescing a soured white, same tinny music seeping from the speakers, pop songs with all the words gouged out. The food chandelier hung heavy in the front of the store and swung slowly, deliberately, as though someone had come by and pushed it once, a very long time ago. As many times as I had come to Wally’s, I had never seen someone swap out the food in the food chandelier, and yet it was different every time I saw it. New things had appeared in it when I left the store, things that hadn’t been there when I came in. But this was a minor mystery compared with that of C’s location, which had yielded no answers: nothing but waiting, and more waiting, and time.

The new plan was to find a way into C’s apartment and wait for him to come in, to interrogate his objects, to do the things we used to do together as though there were still somebody to do them with. Generally: to be no longer on the outside wishing a way in, but at the end point already, wishing for others to trap themselves in with me. I came to Wally’s in order to find the thing I’d need, whatever it was, to wreck the lock and pry open his door.

I saw a Wally’s employee wearing the Wally’s Hospitality Hat, the oversize foam mask made in the shape of a young boy’s grinning, freckled face. A Hospitality Hat was like an ordinary hat in that it fit over the top of the head but also featured an extensive frontal flap with contoured nose, eye, and cheeks that was designed to be pulled down and over the openings of the face. Hospitality Hats were implemented so that customers would always be able to count on seeing a familiar face when they went in to shop at a Wally’s, no matter how far from their home branch they might be. The system wasn’t perfect: some Wallys were fat, others thin, some had jarring voices, some had breasts. But by removing a few of the variables from customer-employee interaction, they freed both parties to treat each other with the pretense of recognition, with amnesiac familiarity. GOT A PROBLEM ASK A WALLY read the sign overhead.

I had many problems. I looked down the aisle, toward the Wally that was standing at the other end, taking down notes on a clipboard. The fake face he was wearing hung down over his clipboard, freckled and permanently grinning. I wanted to ask him for help, but the Wally’s corporate policy stated that employees were not allowed to offer help to customers, only a generalized form of aid. A sign near the store entrance read:

WEAKNESS THRIVES ON HELP

An ideal buying journey took at least an hour to complete. This Wally wouldn’t be able to shorten my path, but he might be able to hint at what sorts of products might be near the product that I wanted to buy. Though it was possible that he wouldn’t know himself, he could at least give me more to look for.

“Hi,” I said to the side of the oversize foam face.

It swiveled toward me. The crest of each upended cheek was the size of one of my shoulder blades. Shadows sank into its fleshlike form. Each dimple could have swallowed up one of my thumbs.

“Welcome to Wally’s,” it replied.

“I was hoping you could provide me with product aid,” I said.

“Tell me about your product circumstances,” he said back.

“I’m looking for a large thing about the size of a crowbar, and also of about the same weight, shape, and material,” I said, making a levering motion with my hands. Sometimes it was best to be vague. By being vague, you could occasionally give a Wally room to help you.

“I can recommend Salad Smotherin’s,” he said, “a new line of salad dressings from Rexall, the nation’s leading manufacturer of paper products. Or a frozen dinner from Stewwart’s.”

I made a dissatisfied customer face.

“Aisle fifteen and aisle four,” the Wally continued. “Both are delicious,” he said, turning back to his clipboard.

“I need something heavy,” I said, “and strong enough to break a lock.”

“This week,” he replied in a smooth and well-rehearsed tone, “we are also promoting the new Peapple by Nutrisco Foods. Passionate about fresh produce? Or are you a food explorer, looking to sink your teeth into a piece of the unknown? Peapple is a revolutionary new fruit combining the crisp texture of the apple with the velvety mouthfeel of the peach. Flavorwise, it’s the pineapple’s second cousin. Funwise, it’s second to none. Brought to you by the manufacturers of Nutrisco Sea Nuggets.”

“I need a crowbar,” I said, “or something exactly like a crowbar.”

He looked at me.

“Miss,” he said, “I think you’d better continue along your buying journey.”

It felt like a personal slight. Wasn’t there a human being inside that Wallyhead, someone who knew the pain of losing the one they loved or, more precisely, being unable to find them again? A human person who knew the desire to hack through something hard and unyielding to get to the one you loved, hack through the one you loved, even, to get at whatever they kept inside? He must have a lover of his own, some man or woman or animal whose absence hurt like a presence, some person that he poured himself into like a mold to remind himself of what he was.

I wanted to tell this Wally what I was feeling. I wanted to tell him about an idea for a commercial that I’d been having, over and over, during the afternoons when I waited for hours, sweating, staring, seated in front of C’s apartment. In this commercial I’m wandering around inside a wet and glistening space that I come to recognize is a body, though I don’t know where I am in it. I’m still missing C and I know he’s not around here to be found. I know that, but for some reason I can’t stop looking for him. And I’m trying to claw my way out physically, pulling at nodules and hanging bits with my hands, but nothing will move for me until I find some tubes that I can wrap my miniatured hand around, they must be for blood. They’re a meaty color, liver bruised blue, their texture springy like mattress foam. I’m tugging on one as though it were a handle on a locked door and suddenly it separates, crumbling like dampened cake in my grip. The ground heaves beneath me. Then I hear a growl of pain all around in what I suddenly recognize is C’s voice. There’s no way to tell him I’m in here and no way of getting out that won’t hurt him, tear him open and apart.

I wanted to tell this Wally what I always see at the end of the commercial, a slogan materializing over my head, hovering there weightlessly, the letters illegible from below, the phrase too large to see. I wanted to tell him about this feeling, this feeling that everything is already ruined and I’m selling something I can’t even comprehend. But when I looked up, searching for him, he had already disappeared.

In the next aisle over there was window cleaner, peanut oil, fruit snacks shaped like carnivores. The blue-raspberry color of the window cleaner sat against the peanut oil, bright as new brass. They didn’t belong together, they had been stranded there, separated from their kind. Yet these items shared purpose. It was overwhelming: all the colors and shades of colors in between, asking you to fall in love with them, hold them in your hands, and take them home.

At the end of the aisle, a Wally was down on his knees, filing cans into the shelf. He had a young body, skinny, tall, wider at the shoulders than at the hips. It could have been C in there, and suddenly I felt like it really was: C hiding in plain sight, C watching over me in the grocery store aisles, C in disguise learning things about me in secret the way I always had wished to learn things about him. I wanted to walk up to that Wally, separated for the moment from all of its kind, and say to it all the things that I had been wanting to say to C:
Show me what you are when you’re not around me. Let me see how you look when I’m not looking at you. Tell me everything I’m not supposed to know, and don’t leave out any of the things you don’t know yourself.
I wanted to extract one secret from him, it didn’t matter which. I would put my hands all over that fake face and squeeze it to feel the bones underneath, bear down on the micromesh that veiled the real, living eyeball beneath and press until it blackened. On the next day, I would search this town for someone wearing on his naked face the bruised eye that I had designed for him. From a swarm of identical heads, this inner head would become distinct to me, singular, a head with a personal connection.

I moved toward the man, arms out to my sides, but he retracted, his body positioned for escape. He didn’t know if I was about to hug him or hurt him, and to be honest I didn’t know either. I heard his breath, heavy already, rasping through the mesh mouth of the Wallyhead. He stood up and hefted his box of product up in his arms, tilted sharply to one side as the product slid over; it must have been something heavy, like cans. Then he shuffled backward away from me toward the back of the aisle, turning at last and ducking one or more aisles over before I even had a chance to ask my question. Why had he left so quickly? Maybe he remembered me.

WHAT DO YOU CALL THE
things in the supermarket that are refrigerated, that you look down into like an open casket, and are full of light? I was standing near one of them, feeling the cold rise up from within its bright, clean white. Inside there were chicken breasts and wings and assorted soda tucked into crevices of the body pile, half buried beneath shrink-wrapped Styrofoam trays. I picked up a soda and a package of raw chicken in each hand and moved them to the other end of the cooled box. I did it over and over again, like a punishment. I was making a path to the bottom of the cooling unit, where there might be something like a crowbar. I was following my product instincts. They told me to dig right here.

When I saw there was nothing underneath the chicken and soda except more soda and then a smooth white epoxy, hard as tooth, I started moving my pile from this end of the unit to the opposite end. I had patience within me. A hand on a pack of chicken breasts reminded me of C, the squish of him, the way he differentiated himself from this cooling unit or that shelf. There was a Wally standing near me, watching, but I kept on redistributing the chicken, fixing my gaze on the cold meat, suspecting that what I was doing wasn’t allowed but hoping to do it for as long as possible. Finally, he spoke.