Alexandra Kleeman - You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

Then I said, “No. No, I don’t think I would be that kind of person.”

WHAT I DID NEXT HAPPENEDat some distance from myself. I took two of the empty boxes and headed toward the front of the store. I was shouting that I needed some help, because I did. I needed someone to fill up those boxes. I was talking to a cashier and asking her what’s going on with these empty boxes, what have they done with the Kandy Kakes? Where did they go? Where are the rest of them? There have to be others. I was shouting a little, it’s true, but in my defense I was really very hungry.

“Ma’am, I’m sorry,” said the cashier. “Please lower your voice,” she said, “you’re disturbing the children.”

What children? I thought. Then I said: “I’m disturbed. You’re disturbing me. Where are your Kandy Kakes?”

“Please calm down, ma’am, and I will address your question,” said the clerk.

“I’m calm,” I said.

“You don’t understand what my day has been like,” I said.

“I’m already calmed down,” I said.

“Ma’am,” she said, “we’ve had some trouble keeping them on the shelves given the activity of that cult out in Randall. All the stores nearby have been hit.”

“What cult?” I asked.

“What cult?” she said back to me. “You’ve seen the murals? The strangers picketing Town Hall? The people dressed up like ghosts?”

In Wally’s Food Foyer I see the children dressed in private school uniforms, navy blue on the bottom with crisp white tops. They’re dancing beneath the food chandelier, lifting their arms toward the light. Their little faces darken when a banana or loaf of bread passes by overhead, casting a gray blotch in its own shape upon their open mouths and eyes. A little boy stands off slightly to the side, hopping up and down, reaching for a rack of ribs that twirls slowly above his head.

I HAD GRABBED ONE OFthe veal posters on my way out of Wally’s. I was holding the poster in front of me, arms outstretched, walking in what I hoped was the direction that I had come from. Now half of Michael’s head eyed me from the paper, its corners curling in the wind. I tried to place it where an actual person’s head might be, standing before me, ready to explain to me what exactly was going on and what that pressure was that I felt digging in against my organs, that pressure like a man’s hand pushing down on an oversize game show buzzer. Embedded in paper, his eyes were flat, his face was flat. Where a nostril was supposed to be, I looked harder and saw more flatness, the semblance of a hole more like a bruising of the paper than any kind of way in. Around the eyes and cheeks there was an inanimate smoothness, like a stone washed ashore after years of slow wear underwater. This smoothness crept in toward the crinkling eyes and nestled around them, clotting near the wrinkles on the outer corners, which looked overdefined and numbered fewer than seemed anatomically appropriate. The lips pulled at the skin-colored surface surrounding them, suggesting a grin and a grimace at the same time.

What I was searching him for was his level of satisfaction, which I thought might be lodged somewhere in the facial expression. Had Michael’s veal-related accomplishments left him with a sense of purpose fulfilled? Was this ad campaign somehow the next step in his commitment to saving veal from its enemies? Who exactly were veal’s enemies? Might veal secretly crave its own consumption, thus making its enemies its saviors? Was consumption a form of infiltration? I looked to his face for clarity, but whatever answers might once have been there had been smoothed over in retouching.

Help, I thought. But nothing happened.

I rolled Michael into a thin tube and stuck him in my backpack. I took out my phone and looked at it as I walked. I had been calling C every hour or so, hoping he’d pick up and let my voice join to his once more. I had left one message after another, many of them silent, filled only by the background noise of wherever I was walking. In some I asked the same questions over and over. Why won’t you pick up, where are you? Are you at home? Are you someplace else? Are you alive? I felt angry, sad, at peace, and then angry again. I told him things that I wasn’t sure I felt but wanted him to hear anyway. I’ve been napping in the house across the street during the day, I want you to come next time, you’d like it. There’s nothing there. Nothing to go wrong. Call me back. Call me back right away. I know who you’re with. I want to know who you’re with. Call me back. I may not want to be the person you want, but I love you, and maybe I could make myself try to want to be, if you’d call me back. Call me back. Emotions infiltrated me like toxins in the air supply, passing through my body and corroding the things inside, filling me entirely and then leaving me vacant.

I thought about C sitting there, picking up his phone each time it shook at him, looking at my name on the little screen, and choosing to put it back down, ignored. I imagined his face not changing when he saw my name, or maybe just changing a little bit, into some less pleased shape. It hurt to imagine that, so I imagined him differently, distraught every time he saw me call, distraught and missing me, but that didn’t make sense. What actually felt best was to imagine him missing entirely. On the arm of a couch I had never seen before, somewhere I had never been, his phone rang and rang and nothing happened. The lights on it blinked on and off, a sequence of green and blue and red, and nobody did anything to quiet it. When I imagined a stranger’s hand, the hand of a much older man or woman, reaching down and pushing the button on the side to silence it, I was comforted. Maybe I could be the one to cut the feeling that linked me to him, to cut the thing that had me worrying about his love and who he was saving it for, that had me wanting words from him and a constant stream of feelings. I felt empowered, briefly. If I could find him, I could disappear him. But even if I couldn’t find him, it was within my power to disappear myself, dispose of my own body. If I looked at it blurry, I might even be able to make it feel to myself as though the world were vanishing from me, rather than vice versa.

Then I took out the pamphlet that the Wally’s manager had offered me when I demanded to see a schedule of deliveries that would tell me when there would be Kandy Kakes again. “Ma’am,” he’d said, “we do not know when the next date will be that your product will be in stock. We are currently having difficulties getting in touch with both the distribution and supply ends of things, and furthermore those individuals visiting from the Conjoined Eaters Church have been removing product from the shelves and leaving these documents in their place, which we recognize is an inconvenience to our customers. Please feel free to take one of these reading materials home with you, with our apologies, and you will see that our problems are genuine. Their religious practices devote no thought to the complexities of supply and demand, or customer service.”

He had opened a drawer stuffed full of identical folded white papers. White filled the cracks between white, a harbor of inexhaustible paper. With a dull feeling in my skull, I took a pamphlet and left. Now I opened the pamphlet, which had the flimsy feel of paper from a home office printer. The shiny black of the type dissolved into tiny dots when you looked into it deeply. The pamphlet was blank on the outside, but on the inside it read:

HAVE YOU BEEN SAVED TWICE?