Alexandra Kleeman - You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

Then, suddenly, the smooth flesh parted like a ripple from the center, sprouting holes in all the organs. A mouth opened itself in the middle of the liver, a little Claymation mouth with thick cartoony lips. With its new mouth, the speaking liver complained of pain, dissatisfaction, longing for something more, better. A mouth opened up in the heart, the lungs, the small cute kidneys. All the organs clamored for more. In chorus, they demanded better treatment, more respect, more fun. My own heart felt strange to me, fluttery. I watched as a thick pink liquid slid down over the organs, a sheet drawn over the little holes that still flapped open and shut, open and shut. The gaps winked at me, thickly pink.

I felt a smothered hunger beating out from the unseen places inside my body. I felt corseted in skin. I wanted to turn myself violently inside out. I wanted to throw myself into the outside and begin tearing off chunks of it for food.

Somewhere to the right of my body, C continued to speak. His voice was a little bit sharper than I remembered it. I turned my head to the left, but it still found a way in.

C said: “I thought I should let you know that I put our names in as contestants on That’s My Partner! We’ve been together longer than their minimum relationship length, and I think it could be good for you, therapeutic.”

I looked in the direction I had been looking before.

“Just kidding,” C said. “Are you listening? I was just kidding. But I am going to enter us. If you don’t want to do it,” he continued, “I could always bring B. You could watch from home. That could be therapeutic too.”

He looked at me for a while, studying my face silently. It was like he was expecting me to do something, say something, but I couldn’t tell what.

“Just kidding,” he added.

I knew then that we were going to have a fight. I wanted to excuse myself before it happened, leave my body behind to field it while I did something else, something completely else. I wanted to return to myself hours later with no real memories, only a vague feeling of having floated. But what I wanted wasn’t something that I could have: my life, the process of living it out, was undelegatable, intransferable. This was an essentially contemporary problem, a problem of supply and demand. I had to solve it the way other problems of scarcity and desire were being solved: by finding something new to want and pursuing that wanting instead. Baby monkeys taken from their mothers will form attachments to fake mothers made of cloth or electrified wire, ducklings with no parents will imprint on a cardboard box with an alarm clock ticking inside of it. Wanting things was a substitute for wanting people, one of the best possible substitutes.

I had to leave and find a real Kandy Kake and eat it. I couldn’t stand to be myself around any of these people until it was all done.

I looked toward the door. It was the dead center of night.

I GREW UP IN Aplace just like this, where the leaves never fell from the trees but clung there crinkled like burnt paper, shriveled and brown in some places but sprouting tender green leaves somewhere else. Here, the flowers bloom all year, and once they bloom they are already close to dying, nicking the mulch beneath with blotches of collapsed red and white. They repeat themselves, blooming and falling and being swept away before they rot, restoring the perfect squares of green that grid this town and the towns beyond. They grow blindly, nursed by an unending stream of water and sunlight. They wither against a uniform background of palms and pines, which are the same every time you look at them.

I walked at the side of the road as cars passed me by in the sweltering heat, not knowing whether C was awake or whether he was still where I left him, smiling sweetly in his slumber even though we had just had a killer fight. Maybe he was entering us as contestants on that terrible game show right at that very moment. And if he succeeded, how would I ever know whether he had done it to help me, or hurt me, or something in between the two. Loving someone was no guarantee of how they would treat you. All it did was raise the stakes.

I called C two times in a row, then three, then I let it go to voice mail and just kept walking. I missed him. I wanted to hear him say something to me. I thought of him listening to my voice mail later that day, the sound of my breath pressing into his ear. I thought of my footsteps etching themselves onto a material far, far away. I was happy that some part of me would be touching some part of him, even if it was only the sound of my movement against the tissue of his eardrum.

This is a landscape made by human beings, but not for human beings. Walk it and you always step someplace identical to where you stepped before. You can’t get anywhere on foot. Cross it in a car and the surroundings slide by until you realize that you’ve seen them all before, like in the commercial where an impish young Kandy Kake lures Kandy Kat on a chase through frame after frame of a happy suburban neighborhood populated by cute yellow houses. Kandy Kat’s clubby feet kick up a wake of dust behind him, his body blurs with speed, the world scrolls maniacally by, breaknecking. He runs with claws out ahead of him, swiping at the little Kake that is always somehow a step or two away. Then a stray claw snags on a piece of sky, and the world starts to stretch and then slump in a startling way: Kandy Kat has literally torn through the scenery, caused a widening rip in the world. He stops to look, perplexed, at the fluttering material, blown by a breeze of unknown origin. On it you can see a piece of house, mostly window and some lilac-painted shutter. The shot widens, and we see that Kandy Kat is standing in a studio soundstage in front of a flat, painted background that slips past him while the little Kake turns a crank. One yellow house after another scrolls by before Kandy Kat looks down and realizes that he’s been running on a treadmill the whole time, a treadmill that yanks him suddenly backward and threatens to throw him off completely. Kandy Kat starts running for his life, running toward the giggling Kake, and he is still running with no sign that he will ever stop when we see the words projected over his body.

KANDY KAKES: HOPELESSLY DELICIOUS.

I had been walking for almost two hours when I came up on the crest that overlooked the DoubleWally’s, the newest and biggest grocery store in the area. B sometimes drove us up here when she wanted to be a food tourist, her term for the activity of coming to Wally’s with a digital camera and rigorously photographing all of the doughnuts. Each one was glazed or filled or sprinkled, sitting beneath colorless fluorescents that made it look inside as if it were always the same time of night no matter how bright it might be outdoors. I always thought her interest in food photography should be encouraged: how long could someone ogle doughnuts without giving in and eating one? So while she crouched on the floor to get her shots of the filled maple bars and glazed twists, shots taken up close and from below so that the doughnuts looked like sticky, oozy mountain ranges, I hovered around her and said encouraging things like That one looks really good . Late at night nobody bothered us, but if we came during the day, a line might form behind B as she took her photographs, a line of customers waiting quietly to choose their doughnuts from the bins, waiting without anger even though B took forever to line up her shots.

Sometimes she’d have me drive back so she could look through the photos right away. Her body curled around the camera slightly as she stared, as if she were trying to shield the photos from my gaze. They didn’t look like anything real from where I sat: they might have been blurry photos of abstract paintings. B passed these times silently, mostly, with an occasional squeak of satisfaction. Afterward she looked rosier, as though she had found something real, something meaty to feed on in the tiny images. Her satisfaction worked at me in weird, corrosive ways. Her soft mmm sounds, coming from next to me, sounded nearer to my ears than they actually were. They ate at me, at my resting feelings, and made me feel a sudden dissatisfaction of my own. What was there in my life to absorb me the way those photos absorbed her? Even C, a thing I had that B didn’t, created as much lack in me as he sated. Sometimes I would sneak a look at her doughnut photos, hoping for a bit of that satisfaction I’d seen her feel, but the most I noticed was that each frosted surface glistened in an anatomical sort of way. After looking at each one, I felt slightly nauseated.