Alexandra Kleeman - You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

It was two in the morning and nothing was moving in any of the houses we drove past. I saw the Wally’s on our right, then B took a left into a street with no sign, past a couple of branching roads, toward a dark clod of condos pushed up against each other around an empty cul-de-sac. She parked in front of one of the condos and the headlights shut off, the trickle of radio stopped, and then there was only a thrumming sound taking place within me, the sound of space pressing down on the emptiness inside my head. She took out a cigarette and lit it. It was faint light, but in it I could see the shadows below her mouth where the wrinkles would begin. The photographs on the floor of her car all seemed to point their eyes and mouths in my direction.

I listened to the thrumming, my body idling.

Then I asked: “Is this where he lives?”

She nodded her head up and down. “I like to spend the night with him,” she said.

“I don’t think I’ll be of much help,” I said back.

I looked around, but I didn’t know which of the different identical windows I was supposed to be looking in. The condominium complex was dark and silent. Through the units that were still lit up, I saw bland slices of wall painted cream and ecru, occasionally decorated with objects both boring and useful, clocks and calendars and wall-mounted telephones.

B put her thin hand on mine. It felt like a moist leaf clinging to my skin.

“You already help,” she said to me. “Just by being here, you make it more.”

I had never been able to remember his name, something standardly male like Brendan, Brady, Brian, Bob, but this was definitely B’s ex, larger and more three-dimensional than I’d imagined from the scurrying black shape we used to glimpse behind the venetian blinds on rare occasions. The voice and height and full-on, detailed views of the face were new, but I recognized him by his profile, the haircut, and the anxious sense that I associated with looking at him, a feeling that I was about to get caught. I was closer to him now than I had ever been before, with the exception of the time when he spotted B’s car while we were staking out his grocery shopping one night. He was so furious running up to us that it seemed to me he was moving in slow motion. He had a liter of soda that he was using like a baseball bat, and he brought it down on the hood over and over, shouting in his language that I couldn’t understand, could only listen at the way I would to a recording of humpback whales singing their underwater songs.

“No, it doesn’t hurt them,” he said patiently. “They’re plants. You need a brain and a nervous system to register pain. Pain is a product of thinking.”

He took a can of protein shake from the shelf behind me and popped it open casually. The air filled with a scent like ice cream and laundry detergent. I looked around, expecting to see a Wally coming to discipline one or both of us, but the only one around was watching us from twenty feet away and looked down at his feet when our eyes met.

B’s ex assessed me.

“You must be one of those nutri-terrorists like that veal guy. You have feelings for all the wrong things,” he said conversationally, smiling and taking another sip from his protein drink. “When you’re at the top of the food chain, what it means is you don’t have to worry.”

Now he was sounding like C. Another person explaining the world to me, what things were and were not, and why I was being unreasonable when I failed to keep them distinct. At the same time, when I described the dangerous blurriness that I saw at work around me, they were always failing to notice, always finding a problem in me, in the way my mind ordered or disordered the things around me. “You live in the world you make for yourself,” C would tell me. “Why not make a less precarious world?”

“Who are those flowers for? Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said.

He looked at me strangely.

I didn’t know if I “had” C anymore, if he was still around to be had. I didn’t know if he’d care if he saw me with this guy or what it would take to make him care. B’s ex breathed down on me from above, the air from his mouth smelling of stale cake. It occurred to me that if B’s ex had been interested in B for any of the traits that we shared, he might be interested in me at this moment. Suddenly I found myself wondering if I could have him, too, if I tried. It might help me understand B a little better to put myself in her place, or as close to it as possible. If I tried to lean up on him, watch commercials with him, chew on his thin, sharp-looking mouth. I could ask him about his ex, whether she had been crazy before they dated, or only after, or also during. Maybe then I’d understand whether her encroachment on who I was amounted to intentional or unintentional aggression.

I could feel his body heat from where I was standing, and because he was still a stranger to me, someone seen only from a distance, his temperature was offensively intimate. I was violating some sort of order in being close enough to B’s ex to touch him, after having kept her at a distance from C for the entire time I’d known them. If it was easy for me to take her place, it’d be even easier for her to take mine. Anybody could sit next to C on the couch, watching episodes of terrible TV. Anybody could fit inside the curve of his arm, could cuddle against his front. And I realized the more I found out about this man in the grocery who was watching me back for the first time in my long history of watching him, the more my knowledge and memory converged upon B’s. Just being near him was a form of contamination.

“I really need to go,” I said. “I came here for Kandy Kakes.”

“Kandy Kakes?” he asked. “They’re barely edible. I hear they have plastic in them.”

“They’re edible enough,” I replied.

I was backing away from him, flowers in hand.

“Good luck, I guess,” he said, watching me.

“Maybe I’ll see you again,” he added. “I live right by here.”

“I know,” I said.

“How do you know?” he asked. But I could tell he was asking to keep me talking and not because he cared.

I felt his eyes aimed at me as I walked away. I had already put a good amount of distance between my body and his, which was threatening to turn me into B. Then it occurred to me that if he was interested in fucking me, he might allow me to use his phone. I had an interest in using someone else’s phone, using it to call C from an unfamiliar number that he might not be actively avoiding, tricking him into picking up the phone to find out what this strange number wanted and then yelling at him. I turned around and walked back toward Tom, or Tim, or whoever. When I reached him, I tried to look friendly.

“Hey,” I said, “could I actually borrow your phone?”

His hand moved toward his pocket but stalled just before reaching in.

“I need to call my roommate,” I told him.

“She’s diabetic,” I added.

He pulled it from his pocket cautiously.

“Thank you,” I said, taking it from his hand.

“Diabetes,” I said again. I had his cell phone in my two hands, the thumbs positioned for pressing numbers into the keypad, and I started pressing them in. I had done only the area code when I realized that I no longer had any idea what came next. I knew there were some sixes, a four, a three. I had no feeling about what order they might come in. I tried to draw upon my muscle memory, to start again, faster this time, and let my hands find their way to it on their own, but then I was just standing there again, stuck. I felt him looking at me. His look was not flirtatious. Reluctantly, I put his phone back in his pocket.

“You remind me of someone,” he began.