You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (22 page)

“Haven’t you been sensing this?” said the voice in front of me. “Don’t you want to be one with yourself? To have a double ownership. To know just once with surety that when you breathe, when you eat, that you are the only one inside you breathing and eating? That you are you, and no one else.”

In the gap newly created by the sliding shelves, where the plastic cups of jellied fruits trapped in firm syrup had once been, and behind the head of the Wally whose voice radiated from within me, pouring out from my skull as though I were the speaker rather than the listener, I saw the bodies of Wallys working away at something, heaving boxes of something dense that hit the ground with moist thuds.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You will,” it replied.

The bodies were loading the boxes into a truck. The bodies were shouldering them heavy, like cases full of flour or ground bone, cases of liquid-soaked rag. On the sides of the boxes I saw the KANDY KAKES logo and underneath it the words:

HAVEN’T YOU NOT HAD ENOUGH?

I saw the EXIT sign glowing over the dark hole they carried the boxes into. I knew that there probably wasn’t anything good inside that hole. Wherever my neighbors had gone that afternoon, silent and sheeted, it hadn’t been in pursuit of happiness. Otherwise they might have looked happier. But what I found hopeful about that hole was: It was a hole. I could put myself into it. I could avoid detection, and in its dark inners I could pretend to forget myself. Whatever I had once had with B or with C was gone; if I wanted it back, I’d have to dig my way back into them. It would be difficult, and there was no guarantee that they’d be willing to hold still to let me do it. I felt the thinness of the fiber binding me to myself: like a loose thread hanging from a hem, I could tear it off. I’d leave them waiting around in the heat for me, the ones I half loved, wondering what they had done to scare me off. Something rattled in my hollow. When the Wallys in their masks handed me the sheet, I took it. I let them help me unfold it, stretch it out to its full length. I let them drape it over me, shift it back and forth until the eyeholes fell over my eyes and I could see them all, their identical Wallyheads bobbing around me at slightly different heights. I let them blank me out.

I took one step forward, then another, then another another another.

WE SAT LIMP AND SILENT
inside the hold of a white cargo van that sped along the highway. The van was a common make, rectangular and white with two long, tinted windows so we could see out and nobody could see in. It was the most popular model of cargo van on the road these days: according to the ads, one was sold every five minutes. Dozens had been bought in the time that we’d been driving. A funny chemical smell hung in the air, polyurethane foam, the smell of Wallyflesh bodying out the masks that the cultists continued to wear even though we were no longer in a Wally’s, even though it was prohibited to wear the Wally’s uniform outside of the store, where it was considered an unauthorized use of a trademarked visage. It was still bright outside, but fading. Slices of the world, anonymized, shone from around the corners of drooping Wallyheads as we drove someplace that I couldn’t even imagine. I pictured a black, light-filled room. I thought of the house across the street, minus the house, minus the street.

For the first couple of minutes, the little slivers of outer world meant something. They were the stop sign on the way out of the Wally’s parking lot, the second stop sign after the bend in the road that plenty of cars ignored, the willow trees lurching over the fenced backyard of a woman recluse who only left the house wearing a pretty silk scarf draped over her head, the ends clutched together beneath her throat by a hand that could have been very old or fairly young. She went as far as the mailbox, never farther. B said she was probably a former movie star with an obliterated face. B was obsessed with obliterated faces, she thought they made for a great story. If B were here, she would whisper into my ear that each one of the Wallys had lost their faces in gruesome grocery store — related incidents. But that kind of thinking was why I was here in this van and she was wherever she was. B didn’t understand that the dangerous part of having a face was showing it off, not losing it. To see your face spread onto the faces around you, absorbed by others. The masks on these Wallys kept me safe the way the sheets over my neighbors had kept us all safe from seeing and then replicating their sadness, safe from taking them within. The masks were prophylactic, emotionally speaking. These masked men were going to bring me to a cleaner place, where things were more sharply distinguished from one another and where I would finally have the space to figure out who I was without other people nudging me all the time into the shapes they thought I should have.

After a minute or two in the van, we could have been anywhere. Tree-shaped trees blurred behind the shapes of the other people slumped in the van like captured things whose only experience had been to be captured again and again. Thinking of them in this way made me feel warmly collegial. Beneath their masks and uniforms, they could be people much like me, with anxieties about those closest to them and a weird misplaced hunger for something intangible that could be satisfied only by snack food. They might have someone they were running from, or someone they were running to, even though they didn’t have any idea where that person might have gone or why. Of course they wouldn’t be, beneath their foam shells, exactly the way I was. All of them were male, possessed of soft, foldy bellies that crested and troughed beneath their red Wally’s polo shirts. They looked ample, arms and torsos pressed together. I wanted to push myself in among them, sneak my bony elbows up into their surplus, and fall asleep there, warm and forgotten and surrounded by the lingering scent of cheese, cardboard, and laundry detergent.

It was hard to think of the right thing to say when I had never said anything to these men and they had never said anything to me. I didn’t know whether to express sadness about my past or positivity about my future with them. I looked around me in the back of the van: eight men in foam heads, six cases of Kandy Kakes, five or six tarps spread beneath us, balled-up newspaper, and two units of twine, brittle and straw colored. I looked at everything outside the windows. They could have been driving me in big loops around my own town and I wouldn’t have known. It all went flashing by, increasingly green but still just visual slush, reminding me blandly of other places I’d been without causing me to remember them in detail. I figured that I’d better start feeling like this van was my home.

“I don’t know about you guys,” I said out loud, trying to sound upbeat, “but I for one am completely excited to eat a Kandy Kake whenever we get to where we’re going.”

Nobody replied. The only sounds then, as before, were the tires turning against the road, rubbing themselves out on it, and the low drone of the engine. Outside the window, the trees passed by — not faster, not slower, but the same.

Words spilled tinny from the overhead speakers, a deep and ballooning male voice undercut by the squeal of outdated equipment. In the cavernous room, our bodies turned toward the sound in different directions: we didn’t know what we were looking for or where we would find it. It was a conference hall, bounded by movable beige walls and wine-colored carpeting, the carpeting dotted by little shapes that had gone blurry, diamonds and triangles with no points. Through the vents in my sheet I saw a tacky chandelier shining weakly above us, faint in the enveloping daylight. I shifted the eyeholes to try for a more complete view, but it was all parts and pieces: a white sheet or some dark gap cut into it, the graying carpet, the steep emptiness above.

The voice came from all around, but I tried to turn away from it and look toward the light. Turning into my dizziness, I found the brightness of the outdoors, rectangled through large glass panels. A breeze swayed the long, faded burgundy curtains hanging in front of tall plate-glass windows, curtains that must once have looked expensive, important. Now they were nubby with lint and the glass behind them was dusty from the outside, which made the things you saw through it look fake. Birds looked like an echo of birds, fat white clouds looked as if they were there to sell you fabric softener or air travel or health insurance. And there at the middle of it all: a plain wooden podium with angled microphone, an averagely tall man covered in what looked like a standard-issue white sheet but was actually of a luxuriously high thread count. He shuffled in place — or maybe he was doing something more impressive, it was hard to tell beneath my covering. Besides a small patch of color below his eyeholes, an insignia that I had been told stood for his decision to renounce his mouth, he lacked obvious markers of authority. Even with his features and limbs hidden beneath loose white, he gave the impression of being overweight and soft, a body like a sofa.
Great, okay,
said the voice, which I understood originated in front of me but which seemed to come from all around, pushing from the outside in.
Let’s begin. Greetings to all of our new recruits, and Welcome. Or should I say Unwelcome. I’ll explain that later. I’ll be your Regional Manager, reporting to the General Manager and by extension to the Grand Manager himself.

A few scattered claps that faded on their own.

Here, the speaker paused and I gathered that something was supposed to happen. I looked around me at other swiveling heads. Behind me, someone whispered a question. “Do they mean there isn’t anything, or that there is something and it is nothing, with a capital N?” they asked, and fell silent again. From the silence there rose the sound of a cough and a couple of people clapping experimentally toward the back of the room. He nodded at us. The applause swelled. Our speaker raised his hands to indicate that we should be quiet.

I looked all around me, pressing my hands to the sides of my head to hold my eyeholes on straight. I had questions. There were still some things that remained unclear to me. But scanning the room, I saw only nodding bodies, white lumps bobbing at the top ends of people who all seemed to understand what was happening. I looked back at the podium and nodded my own head in turn.

“HE WHO SITS NEXT TO ME, MAY WE EAT AS ONE!” shouted a fragile young female voice at the far right end of the room. More applause, and louder, one person whooping tentatively. I joined in, even though I could not say that I knew what I was clapping for, only that it seemed hopeful. In the midst of this new and mysterious information, I felt a confusion that was unlike my everyday confusion. It was the confusion of a newborn thing learning how to live.