You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (21 page)

Through his Wallyhole he said: “Excuse me. Hello. At Wally’s we pride ourselves on creating a flexible shopping environment, insofar as products have no fixed place. Which we believe inspires creativity. At Wally’s, Consumers are Creators. We say that.”

He paused. He must have been waiting for me to stop moving products around, which I would not do until I was more certain of what was at the bottom of this bin.

“Nevertheless,” he continued, “there are boundaries that we do
not
allow the customer to flex, in this case the placement of products in both an area-specific and storewide sense.”

I compromised by moving the products more slowly from their old place to their new.

He began again.

“We can all agree,” he said, “that a man’s home is his castle. At Wally’s, we wish for your supermarket to be your castle as well. And, like a king in his castle, we wish you to do nothing, or as little as possible. We would rather you feel at home.”

“I don’t feel at home,” I said, finally putting down the chicken flesh and sodas and staring the Wally straight in his face.

“In my home,” I said, “nobody tries to divert me. If I wanted a crowbar, someone would tell me where to find it. Or maybe I would already know,” I added.

I was bluffing. I didn’t have a home where people treated me in this way, a home full of the things I needed. I hardly had something resembling a home at all.

The Wally just stared at me. It made it worse that he was staring at me with his real eyes, rather than the eyes of the Wallyhead, which were fake, shiny plastic with no actual holes for light to pass through. In the center of the forehead was a circular aperture smaller than a dime, through which a Wally’s employee could glimpse a portion of the customer he or she was aiding. But to get a full view of a person through a Hospitality Hat, you had to tilt the foam face up toward the ceiling while looking down hard, angling your head within so that your line of sight passed straight through the mesh netting of the mouth. I couldn’t see anything through the meshwork, but from the sharp twist of his head I knew he was examining me.

I was turning back to the refrigerator bin when he spoke again.

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

With my mind I was digging through what I knew about myself, trying to find a chunk of language that would tell me what I wanted and needed and was asking for.

“I just want something that makes me feel like myself again,” I said.

“Not myself as I feel right now,” I added. Right now I felt like a person learning that a surgeon had left a pair of scissors inside her during an operation.

“I had someone once,” I began, watching through his foam face for signs of recognition, sympathy. “We were fantastic together. He really understood what I was all about, what I was like inside. This was because, inside him, he was the same as me. Maybe not on the surface-most inner layers, but deep down, the deepest, tiniest part.” I scanned his mesh mouth for a reaction, but there was none. “Then something horrible happened to him, and I’m still trying to figure out what it was.”

The Wallyhead listened, pointed intently toward me.

“He lost himself,” I explained with a touch of defensiveness.

I added: “I’m trying to find him.”

“And what do you want from us?” he said, his voice a little gentler, a little wider somehow.

“I just want to get into my boyfriend’s house and see if he’s there, or not there. I don’t need anything to happen once I’ve found out, you understand, I just need to know whether we’re together or not, and if not, if it’s because of me or because something dark and mysterious has befallen him,” I said.

“If it’s dark and mysterious, that’s okay too,” I added.

I said: “Something came into me, or my life. I need it out of me, as soon as possible.”

I looked up at the Wallymouth. A single eye gleamed, not unkindly, through the dark netting. The head wobbled around slowly in what I chose to interpret as a gesture of sympathy.

“I can show you to a crowbar,” he said.

“I thought you weren’t allowed to do that,” I said. But I wanted it: I wanted it enough that I didn’t care if this Wally got punished for it.

“We aren’t,” he said slowly. “But I can show you to something better.”

“Kandy Kakes?” I asked.

He just stood there for a second. The large foam head looked as though it were looking at me, which I knew meant that he was looking someplace else. Then he started walking.

He led me out of the aisle and into the aisle adjacent. There were jellied fruits suspended in plastic containers, glowing orange, yellow, pink, as the light pushed through them. I thought he might look back to make sure I was still there, but he didn’t. I understood that it might not be a simple thing to look around in a Hospitality Hat, to change the orientation of one’s head so radically. The foam plastic would chafe against cheek and neck. It would press warm and humid to the scrub of his pinkening face, eventually it might rub the skin away, showing the deeper pinks, the bluish-lilac tint belonging to the subdermal layers of skin. If he moved too much, his face might erode entirely. I trailed behind, several docile steps behind, watching his body clench and loosen with the motion of walking.

“When does the food chandelier get changed?” I asked him.

His body twisted toward me slightly, but the bulk of it kept walking as before.

“Do you know when you’re going to get more Kandy Kakes?” I asked.

“Are these really the questions you long to have answered?” he replied.

I looked around us at all the veal.

The veal section had changed. In the weeks since it first appeared on TV, Michael’s face had propelled veal to new heights of desirability: Men identified with his confusion, with the somber melancholy of his paunchy stomach and cheeks. Women wanted to feed him. He reminded the elderly of past versions of themselves, still ravening for living matter. And children finally had something they could understand when they thought of veal, that meat whose name wasn’t a kind of animal or a substance that came nuggeted, pattied, or shoved onto a stick. Veal had a face now, where before it had nothing. And while Michael’s face had once been an artless and unexceptional slab according to the personal accounts of grocery store employees and other witnesses to his robberies, image-capturing technology had transformed it into an object of fascination, something to stare at, a face that yielded up more over time.

The veal section had tripled in size, and Michael was everywhere: on stickers and cardboard signs that hung from the ceiling, mugging zanily all over the promotional Veal Wheel. He was a grinning caricature pictured next to the logo for the Regional Council for the Protection of Veal and Veal Imagery. Below his face, the text read: THE MAN WHO STOLE VEAL. . AND GAVE IT TO THE WORLD. Veal’s new slogan was short and underexplained. Each package was stamped with a single repeated phrase:

THE LIGHT MEAT.

Ending up with the Michaels gave me that old feeling of having someone around, someone familiar and friendly who I wanted to talk to. I looked into each pair of his eyes and tried to feel for the one that was most familiar to me, most like the Michael from the poster I had swiped or, even better, the sad, slabby man from C’s television who I had watched cry through the rounded convexity of the glass screen. It depressed me to think of him living by the will of the Veal Society, kept in some room and taken out only when they wanted to extract more images from him. For his sake I hoped that he was okay, that these images were recent. I stared at the most Michael-like face of the bunch until I noticed suddenly that the Wally was stopped next to me, watching the same advertisement with an intensity that matched my own.

“Do you follow Michael?” he asked me, wiggling his large foam head on its axis a little.

“I’ve watched him,” I said. “I have a poster of him at home.”

“Customers love Michael,” said the Wally, nodding. “His face brings new ones each week, and more the week after. They come with their own shopping bags. Some bags have his photo on them. They come and they shove bundle after bundle of veal into their bag. They come to see his face and they buy because they hope to take away a piece of it. We don’t mind. We could stop it. Often when they leave with the veal, they take other items with them. This grows our veal proportion. We need the veal, but we can allow some to leave the store in the hands of customers.”

“But isn’t that what a store is for?” I asked. “To be emptied out by customers?

“And then restocked, of course,” I added. It was important to me that he could tell I was a good thinker.

“A store is about something greater than selling,” he said. “If you looked only at the surface of the word, you could say its primary purpose is storage. That surface is its core.”

“Why do you need the veal?” I asked.

He indicated with his arm the expanded veal section, as if that were an answer in itself. An unbroken aisle of meat, every gap filled, every crevice stuffed with packages of flesh shining wetly like rosy chunks of quartz. Coolers of veal shivered invisibly, releasing a sheen of cold mist into the air. A tremble of vulvar pink, the color of an innocent child’s gums. Freezers full of frosted flesh cast a low blue light.

“Wally’s is collecting veal,” I said, trying to extract words from his gesture.

“
We
are collecting veal,” said the Wally. He leaned on the word
we
as he stared down at me through his open mouth.

“That doesn’t make sense to me,” I said.

“It’s one of the only things that make sense,” he said soberly. “What qualities unite and divide all the products in this store? Either they are good for you, or they work ceaselessly to destroy you from within. The categories of fruit and vegetable and grain are meaningless in the face of this single superior distinction. It does not matter whether a tomato is a vegetable with seeds or a fouled-up fruit, it matters whether that tomato will hasten your ruin. This is what they should print on the nutritional labels, the ingredients list. This is the only category that is truly important to know, and knowing it is power.”

He continued: “We know what happens to the man who swallows arsenic, to the child or dog that keels over with a plastic bag shoved down the esophagus as far as it can go. The cause and effect are blatant. Most substances machinate more subtly. They suffocate the tinier parts of us, parts you can’t see. Strychnine has an effect life of minutes. Alcohol has an effect life of hours. What is the life of a half pound of potatoes inside you, how long will it work away at you, sabotaging you in ways too small to perceive? Minuscule objects are breaking in you at this moment. You can feel them, even if they can’t be seen or heard. The things that have gone wrong inside of you are whispering to each other beyond your hearing, too softly to stir the surface of your eardrum. They are whispering in the other room like your parents used to when you were just a child. A single moment of clarity could cure you. A single taste of some pure and holy food could return you to your originary nature, your ability to discern good from evil as simply as one looks up into the sky and sees that it is blue. But there is nothing pure and holy in this world.” I heard my breath loud in my own ears, so fast that it sounded to me as if I were running from something.

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” I said in a hopeful way.

“No, of course there isn’t,” he said comfortingly, peering down through the black mesh mouth. “You’re like everyone else. A ghost trapped in a body, loving what kills it. Wouldn’t you rather love what is right for you instead? Wouldn’t you like to find out what that is?”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” I said. “You’re talking about C?”

The little transparent pipes in my mind were breaking one by one, spilling forth a caustic blue fluid.

“I’m talking about you,” he said. “I’m talking about who’s running you. Is it you, yourself, or someone adjacent, so similar that even you can’t tell yourselves apart? Tell me, do you ever look in the mirror and mistake that face for your own? I see you and I perceive that the very edges of your body are a blur. You don’t know where you end. You are nibbled at by a vagueness. By saying this, I in no way am referring to anything like an aura. This is a sign of the disintegration of your organism under pressure. Tell me, is there someone in your life who’s been sharing your life too closely? A friend or a loved one? Is there someone who’s been taking up your time and not giving any of it back? Have you made certain they’re not stealing light from you? That the darkness from their body has not permeated your own by way of your common air, proximate water, shared furniture, et cetera?”

I knew he was talking about B.

“I did have a friend,” I said.

“And your friend trespassed upon you,” the Wally replied.

I nodded. His looming foam face seemed bigger now, closer.

He continued: “I sense another attachment, too. Someone who made you feel like a ghost within your own living body, someone who you are haunting. You see their separation from you as an act of harm, but you should examine the harm within you. Trace it. Source your sadness. Doesn’t it begin in this person, absent though they may be? Their oozings in you, their memory turning to rot. The ghost of this person haunts you, and you cannot flee in body.”

He reached forward his fleshy pink hand and placed two pink fingers against my temple. His skin was incredibly soft, like it had just been unwrapped, like I was the first thing it had ever touched.

He continued: “But you can flee your mind.”

I didn’t understand anything. Behind the Hospitality Hat, red became orange, orange turned pink. The colors bled sweetly, like a thing dying softly in the forest alone. By the time I understood it was the product shelves sliding on their tracks, shifting into their new positions, it didn’t even matter. It didn’t make a difference what different things were; just having them move across my visual field, casting their shadows on my retina, was enough for me to feel like I had known them deeply.