You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (30 page)

I looked at her, and then I walked back to my side of the room, where all the decoy girls were busy sitting around. When I walked up, a flicker of recognition took hold of their faces. Then it passed.

LITTLE BRUSHES EKE AWAY AT
my skin, leaving trails of color. They feel like insects on me, landing on me, dragging their light, stiff limbs across my face and lips and eyelashes. Insects of all different shapes, softnesses, teeming across my surface as though I were plant or soil. I felt everything but couldn’t move. I opened my eyes and my face was different, I closed them and it all went black again. Each time I raised my eyelids, my face was two steps removed from what it had been before. I was a series of photographs of different, unrelated people, a yearbook that didn’t even belong to me.

Someone put a palm on my forehead, the way a mother might check for fever, their hand cool and slippery. Then they pressed down hard, pushing my head back while another hand forced it forward. A scraping rim around the perimeter and a sound like crushing grass. I opened my eyes and another person’s hair sat on top of my own, slipping slightly atop my slicked-down head. Now there was blond hair all around my face, touching my cheek, touching my neck, clinging down across my forehead. The hair was stiff, almost pointy. It bounded me on all sides, like a tiny room.

The blond actress came up behind me and gave me a sort of hug. She stayed there, her face above my face, her hair mixing into the hair of my wig and merging with it, making us look for a moment like a single monster creature that could be happy and sad at the same time. “Looking good,” she said, beaming at me from the face that belonged to her. I felt for a second like she remembered me, but then she moved on and did it to another girl, and another girl after that.

From behind the dark blue curtain, we decoys slumped against whatever was around and listened to round one. If he didn’t pass round one, we wouldn’t be needed. Then we could take off our woman costumes and go back to our cots. We could close our eyes and dream of our faces as we remembered them, clearer in our imagination than in any mirror. If he did pass round one, then we would have to dance and spin in front of hundreds of strangers, and if we fell, we might lose even our assignment at the game show, where we labored in shadow but not in the real Dark. Through the curtain we heard the questions and the responses.

“Dark meat or light?” asked the host.

“Uh, dark,” said a man’s voice, without much hesitation.

“Good. A closet or a stove?” said the host.

“Stove,” he said with confidence.

“Correct again,” said the host. “Now: Africa or the military draft?”

I didn’t understand. Maybe I would have if I were still with C. These were questions for outside people, people in love, not people who had misplaced their lovers. I wasn’t the sort of person anymore who could watch this game show and make some sense of it. I couldn’t even make enough sense of it to hate it. I could only dance around within its bounds and try not to fall down. I looked around for the contestant, the girl who was putting her relationship on the line; I wondered if she was worried. But at this point we were a sea of blond actress, and the little portions of face that offered particulars were hard to search out and read.

The deep blue curtain rose like a wall in front of me, but the way it stirred showed that it was unmoored at the base. It matched the identical blue sequined dresses we had been packaged in, heavy dresses that dragged down our skinny bodies. It throbbed every time the audience burst into applause. I looked at the curtain and I tried to see it as the deep red curtain around the little space where Anna and I used to sleep, the space where she was probably sleeping right now, at this moment. It was terrible the way resemblances ran wild through the things of the world, the way one place or time mimicked another, making you feel that you were going in circles, going nowhere at all. I looked forward to fully becoming my own ghost, which I had been told would resemble nothing and would look uniquely like itself.

The happy music played. He’d won round one. We were going to have to dance.

THE CURTAIN SLID OPEN ON
our twirling mass, kicking in unison, waving in unison. We were a blur of blond and dark blue, we had a hundred arms. The sequins that swathed us bled together, a shitty ocean glittering with sharp points of light. I looked for the girl who had shouted about seeing her house and I couldn’t find her. I looked for the blond lady contestant and I found her everywhere, everywhere equally, there wasn’t even one girl who looked more like her than another. The production department had done a really great job.

Now we kicked in a line, grabbing shoulders for balance. Now we did the move where some of us stood still and others wove in between us, smiling and waving. Now we all moved forward and back alternatingly, like children on a swing set, but not children, and no swing set. We let go of shoulders and began the spin pattern, raising our faces to the bright studio lights overhead that beat down upon our open eyes and turned the world bright and white and then a bruising violet color. We gulped down lungfuls of the air-conditioned studio air, the same air for all of us. We were all spinning, we were all blurs of girl and color. The thought made me calm: at this moment we were all decoys together.

Then we formed a single line one person wide. This was the beginning of the finale. From the player’s point of view, we would look like one solitary girl moving toward him, but then the first girl would peel off and take her final position, and then the second girl would peel off, etc., until he had gotten a front view of each one of the decoys and also his partner. This was almost his last chance to point at someone and shout,
That’s my partner!
because then we would go into the spinning leaps for the final flourishes, and after the final flourishes it would all be over.

I got in thirty-first position in the line and took a breath. We lurched forward, step by step, as on an assembly line. It took so long before it was my turn. The other decoy girls were probably tired, too, and aching from our shoes — but we were Eaters and used to our shedding bodies crying out for one thing or another. Then there were only four people in front of me, then three, and I could begin to see past their shoulders as I leaned left and right. The player was tallish and cuteish, with brown hair.

Then I felt my stomach turn over. There was no blood left in my body.

Because it was C standing in front of me: C with precision, C and nobody else.

All the decoys right behind me had piled into my backside, and the others were confused, craning their necks. I said his name once, and then again and again and again in different ways, wondering if he couldn’t hear me because he wasn’t really reacting, just staring, his mouth a little ajar. Then I remembered that I wasn’t looking like myself, I was looking like the blond actress, so I grabbed at my hair and tried to pull it off, but I had forgotten it was pinned in, so it came only halfway off while I was shouting. I had to stop shouting to start taking some of the pins out, but security was coming up from the wings and I didn’t have time. So I took both my hands and I tried to rub the weird makeup off. It was not like the makeup I used to wear, it didn’t look like me. It gummed up against my hands, making my hands feel like flippers, mittens, stumps. And I got some of it off, I think, but I smeared most of it, and I looked at him and his face was not showing signs of recognition, but showing instead that grossed-out-but-thrilled look he used to get when watching
Shark Week
on television or really weird porn.

The decoy girls were looking aimless, sometimes staring at me, sometimes at C, sometimes at nothing in particular. They didn’t know who I was or who I had been, and they weren’t really curious. My hair looked a mess and my face was unintelligible, but then I remembered that I had one part of me that wasn’t pinned down and marked up: it was only covered, temporarily, and it could be uncovered. I reached down and pulled the sequined dress up over my head and then I took off the sculpted bra that was supposed to make my top half like her top half, and the sculpted underwear that was supposed to make my bottom like her bottom, and then I waved my arms, and pointed to myself, and said: “See? It’s me!” I couldn’t think of anything any better.

C squinted at me as if he were trying to make me out through my body and my face and all the different stuff that had been caked onto me.

I felt like I might cry, only I couldn’t quite believe this was happening. Technicians spoke into small microphones that wrapped like slender stems around their faces. The studio audience just sat there.

“I looked for you,” I said. “I waited outside your apartment and I watched your door. I waited for you to come back. I was there all the hours of the day, every day. Except when I had to go to Wally’s,” I added.

“I was there,” I said. “And you were never there.”

Nobody said anything. Nobody did anything. C looked like he was trying to consider the possibility that I was someone he knew. His shoulders, usually slumped forward, had pulled themselves upward and back, as if they were trying to protect the rest of his body by moving it a few precious inches away from me.

Then one of the blondes took a couple of steps in my direction. She was looking deep into my face in a way that nobody had in months or maybe years. She was rifling through my face with her own, and it hurt. It almost hurt. It was like holding still for the dentist. Whatever she was searching for, her facial expression looked like she was having trouble finding it. She put her hand on my shoulder and I realized I was cold. I was shivering even under the hot lights. We were the same height in these standard-issue sequined shoes, and she had a pointy chin and big dark eyes the color of something I remembered having remembered some time ago. Her dry, bony hand on my arm reminded me inexplicably of autumn.

Then I felt it pushing on me, the knowing that this was probably B, must be B. B was the other contestant on the show, which meant that she was C’s partner, which meant they had loved each other, or something like it, for more than the qualifying number of months. How long had I been gone?

As I looked at B, her face pulled itself together, like in a time-lapse sequence in a nature documentary, a sun rushing from left to right across the TV screen or a deer carcass turning its insides out as it slumped into bone and soil. It was her, her features heavy with familiarity. This had been my friend. From her face, it was clear that she couldn’t quite place me.

“I looked for him all over,” I said. “Did you know?”

“You might have had the wrong condo,” she said gently.

“I’ve gotten lost there too,” she said. “All the buildings look the same and it can be pretty confusing.”

I stared at her. What she had suggested was possible.

“Is it you?” B asked, still sounding hesitant.

“We missed you?” she said tentatively.

It was possible. I hated her.

C HAD ONCE TOUCHED EVERY
part of my face with his hands, with his lips and tongue. He had tried to find out how much of it he could fit into his mouth, licking my nose and then clapping his whole mouth over it, grunting as he widened his hold on my face. We practiced breathing through each other, sealing our lips together and relaxing the nasal passages, taking turns inhaling, drawing air through the holes in the other person’s body, breathing circularly. We put our lips close and spoke down the other’s throat so that we could feel the words trembling in our tissue, as if we had said them ourselves. We licked each other’s ears, necks, teeth. He had tasted every part of me, even some of the parts inside, but it didn’t mean anything now.

I walked along the side of the highway, where people had strewn plastic wrappers, soft drink containers, broken pieces of car. Headlights came and went like hours. I wasn’t really dressed, but I could barely feel the weather on this body that still hung heavy on me no matter how I tried to shake it off. At the studio someone had thrown a black robe around me, one of those hair and makeup robes that hang dozens deep in the long dark closets of the soundstage. People had been arguing over what to do with me, standing there naked on the stage. I needed to leave right away: if the Eaters found me in this situation, where it was clear who I was and what I had done, they would make me a Tester or a Knowledge Leper and I’d never again be on the path to becoming my own ghost, which was the last thing I had left. I had to become something. I was nothing as I was.

If I stayed, I wouldn’t have a choice. But if I could get to another Eaters compound, one where they didn’t know me and wouldn’t recognize me from the episode of
That’s My Partner!
that fortunately had not aired yet, I could slip in and take a position similar to my last one, as a processor. I could slip in and hide myself in an inner room, wait there until things changed, until I had turned my body into its own disguise.