Alexandra Kleeman - You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

The third level was the one that offered the largest cash prize, but also the greatest risk. Players were sent into a pitch-dark room in which a number of completely naked people waited in the blackness, one of whom was their loved one. The clock would start, and then they would have three minutes to grope everyone they could get their hands on. When they found the person whose body they thought was their partner’s, they had to hold on to the wrist and drag that person out of the room onto the studio soundstage, where the audience would clap and cheer pretty much no matter the outcome. For the players, it was often a different matter. They turned to the person they had grabbed and saw a blonde where there should have been a brunette, or a man where there should have been a woman. The unchosen other would usually trail out a few seconds later, looking some variant of miserable or angry. Because the twist of the level was this: Players signed contracts beforehand agreeing that “losing” the challenge would dissolve their relationship and institute a modified restraining order, one that was bidirectional. Under no circumstances would the losers be permitted contact through words or bodies — though, obviously, the law could not dictate that two people cease loving each other in an abstract sense, from a legal distance.

On the screen in front of me, a man was crouched with his head between his hands, not quite rocking back and forth, but definitely swaying a bit. He was pulling mechanically at his own hair. If he was saying something, it wasn’t audible over the sound of the crowd and the music playing him off the stage. I couldn’t tell if he was the person who hadn’t been recognized or the person who hadn’t recognized his partner. I felt bad for everyone on this show, coming on with smiles and hopes for winning big amounts of money. I was always wanting to tell them to turn back quick, be happy with what they had. Because they had so much. Or at least they had something. But to the people on TV I was nothing more than a ghost, watching them hour after hour, unable to speak to them or warn them of what was coming.

“Why are you making me watch this?” I asked. “You know I hate to see them lose.”

The man on-screen rubbed his slack face with a hand as three or four tears made their way down his cheeks. The rubbing pulled his mouth into an externally imposed smile, then an externally imposed frown.

“I know,” C said, “but I’m trying to cure you of it.”

“Why,” I asked, “are you trying to cure me of something I feel?”

For the first time, C looked a little bit hurt.

“I know you’ve been worrying about B, and I think it has to do with feeling like you’ll be less yourself if she starts seeming more like you,” C said. He looked thoughtful. “But I also know that she’s not going anywhere, and she’s only going to look more like you, if anything, not less. I think what would be healthy would be to just start dulling that fear, and the fears related to it. Think of yourself as a franchise, like a Coffee Hole or Wally’s. More outlets just mean greater reach.”

“So you do think she looks like me,” I said.

“Well, hmmm, you think she looks like you, right?” he responded.

“Would you be able to tell us apart?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “I know you.”

I just looked at him.

“Well, of course I think I could,” he went on. “But it’s hard. Everyone thinks they could. All those couples thought they could,” he said, pointing at the screen. “But in reality people are a lot alike. Any two people, on average, share 99.9 percent of their DNA sequences. The genetic difference between the two of us comes down to something like eye color and whether or not we like the taste of cilantro.”

I wished he would stop talking. When I looked at him now, I couldn’t help but see him as a casing stuffed full of thready strands of DNA, just a few miles of letters in a shell. I thought about the parts of my saliva that were merging with his in his mouth, the stray cells that probably had already mixed in. The three or four things that made me different from him were already lost in there and would never find their way back to me.

He was speaking facts to me that many other people knew, that many other people could have told me, and it made me feel like I was sitting with a stranger. I pulled my knees up to my chest and made myself smaller on the couch. I was looking at him now like I was trying to get his features down, so I’d recognize him in the future. The more steadily I looked at him, the more excited he got about the things he was saying. He must have thought I was listening. Sitting over there and gesturing with the remote control, he grew more and more animated and his hair flopped around on top of his head. He looked like someone I was just meeting for the first time, and didn’t like all that much.

“I don’t understand,” I said, “why you can’t just tell me that I am exactly who I am, and that I couldn’t ever be mistaken for anyone else.”

“I could tell you that,” he said. “But anyone could tell you that. And if they told you that, you’d know it wasn’t me, so you wouldn’t be satisfied with it, even if it was me telling you. It’s like if I said that to you, I’d disappear. I’d be someone you didn’t recognize.”

He leaned forward and rubbed my shoulder, suddenly tender.

“What I’m saying,” he continued, “is that you aren’t going to get what you want. Probably you don’t even want what you want. There’s no satisfaction here. So maybe you should think of something else you could want, and then just go get that instead. It’s called ‘transference.’”

I was sitting there and thinking that B could be in my room right now, touching all of my things, and my things wouldn’t even know the difference. Then I was wishing her out of my room, but that still left all the empty, threatened space, saturated with potential violation. It wouldn’t be enough: I wanted my room to be gone, the whole apartment gone, all the walls closing in on the space between until there was no space between. I wanted to eliminate all the space within which something worse could happen. That blank material was a threat. It could become anything. And then I wanted C gone, wanted him gone so that it would be impossible to want him, so that there would be nobody else that I wanted things from and nobody else to disappoint me. So that there would be nobody I needed to recognize me except myself and maybe B, if I didn’t decide to wish her away, too.

All this wanting created an appetite in me that was terrifyingly shapeless. I had no idea how to feed it. I didn’t know how to make anything vanish. The things I wanted were hazy, and the things one could have were small and solid, like an orange, and never seemed to add up. I pulled the remote out of C’s clutched hand. I was going through the television channels one by one, up and up, looking, and the channels were going up like they would never stop. They would go blindly on, climbing up until they were back at the bottom again, sketching a sort of Möbius strip. I was looking for something I recognized without knowing what I was looking for, something that would remind me that I had an appetite. I wanted the sort of company that could be given only by someone who didn’t know I was there.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

I passed an ad for used cars and one for kitchen hardware. Faces of women and sometimes men pointed away from me and at something off-screen, at faces I couldn’t see. Lids of jars and flaps of purses lifting up, revealing something dark inside that the gaze of the camera did not penetrate. The hands moving them were pale hands, the nails painted awful colors. And then there was a commercial for something medicinal, some modifier for the body, where the inside of a body showed up on-screen, flooded in light and glistening with a studio lacquer. The heart and lungs and liver and kidneys showed up throbbing and shiny like they did in real life, or the real life we imagined they had in the dark within us. They pulsed there, silently.