Alexandra Kleeman - You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

But Kandy Kakes were a pure food. Their wrappers could boast that they were Preservative Free! because they really were. In one Kandy Kakes commercial, Kandy Kat and a Kandy Kake are dropped into the right and left halves of a split screen. Time begins speeding up as they stand side by side: seasons change and the furniture starts looking more futuristic, hands on the clocks in the background spin around dizzily. Kandy Kat’s bony body grows longer and taller and wider as it ages, though never more fleshed. Then suddenly he buckles, beginning a serene crumple inward. His knees bend and begin shaking, his head hollows out and gets skully, sinking down toward the ground where the shedding hair collects in soft, fluffy clots that blow around like tumbleweeds. His shriveled tail looks like a chewed-up rope. Occasionally he raises a skeletal paw to the stark black line that divides him from the Kandy Kake one cell over and claws at it, but he’s clearly getting tired. On the other side of the split screen, the Kandy Kake is doing jumping jacks and calisthenics, practicing the cancan, hopping around, and looking bored. No matter how much time seems to pass, it remains the same: untouchable, impassive.

The voice-over explains the miracle of Kandy Kake imperishability as a product of several different highly advanced manufacturing processes. First, biologically derived ingredients are passed through an ultrapasteurization process that destroys not only harmful bacteria and molds, but other life-related elements within the substance: trace enzymes, proteins, vitamins. Next, these elements are filtered out through a subtractive chemical process sensitive to the structure of organic compounds, which eliminates most natural degradation. Finally, the nascent Kakes are reinvigorated with specially engineered weather-resistant forms of sugar inspired by plastics, which function doubly to repel vermin. As long as you leave the water-repellent fudge casing intact, your Kandy Kake is guaranteed to stay fresh for twenty to thirty years. By this time, Kandy Kat is mostly a pile of hunched bone and hide, his two round eyes blinking blearily at the audience. He holds up a sign that reads MY LAST WORDS, while the Kandy Kake, which has found its way over into his half of the screen, dances a perverse jig around his broken body.

I opened the refrigerator and saw nothing but a pile of stripped oranges, a pyramid of them, all the pale yellow color of rind. They would be so easy to eat — pre-peeled, unarmored. The little gouges in their rinds matched the diameter of B’s fingernails exactly. But for some reason oranges now filled me with dread. I had never noticed it before the pamphlet had pointed it out, but there was something dark about oranges, seeded through their sweet, watery flesh like a poison. With a product like Kandy Kakes, the ingredients are spelled out for you on the wrapper — every part accounted for, its caloric and nutritional content tabulated. But what sorts of ingredients went into a piece of fruit? An orange wasn’t a type of food so much as another entity, looking out for its own interests, secretive and sealed, hiding its insides from the outside world.

I looked around for the peels, but they were all gone, vanished down B’s throat.

It made sense to me that B would be a danger: she was too weak to be harmless. Though I didn’t know how to describe the threat posed by the oranges, it wouldn’t be hard to avoid eating them since I avoided eating almost everything else. But the threat posed by C’s absence, the regret I felt as C felt further away — these things felt more dangerous with each passing moment. The no-longer-myself feeling was growing; I worried it was here to stay. Things were better with him than they currently were without him, dizzy and bereft of snacks, not sure what was safe to eat. I would take a nap, reread the pamphlet, and maybe go to the grocery store again later.

When I opened the door to my bedroom, the last squeezings of daylight were leaking in around my curtains and the outlines of things were barely visible in the dark. My shelves and desk were normal, and my bed was normal except for a deformity in the center, a lump under the covers that was too small to be C but might be small enough to be me. I went over and looked. Her body was curled under with the covers tucked beneath the feet, under a curve that was probably a knee. A little bit of her black-rimmed eye poked out over the top of the blanket, shut in sleep and oblivious. She had a ponytail like mine, splayed out over the pillow like a quick swipe of ink from a large, stiff brush.

I felt light and airy. It was as if I weren’t there. For a moment it seemed possible that I might have been asleep the last few days, dreaming a long and extremely detailed dream where my roommate was turning into me and I was turning into nobody. But when I leaned in again toward the face, I saw small freckles on the earlobe that I knew from B’s ears, though I couldn’t remember what my own looked like, and mine could easily have been marked the same way, except there was nobody else there to look for me. I moved my face close to hers and breathed in and out, watching the fine hairs at her temples dance around her face. But I remembered what someone had told me once about breathing in dreams: If you’re feeling your lungs open and close, you can’t be dreaming.

Leaving my bedroom where B was sleeping, I saw a pamphlet on the living room couch. It looked like the one I had taken from Wally’s, distinctive insofar as there was nothing at all distinctive on the outside of it. But mine was still in the back pocket of my shorts, so this one had to be B’s. I opened it up and read:

DOES YOUR HOME OR LOVED ONE

GIVE OFF DARK CHEMICALS?

Many individuals operating in this day and age are familiar with the disheartening experience of becoming ill, anxious, or otherwise SICK IN THE SOUL despite having made good life choices. You may find yourself asking, “How have I placed myself in this position despite following the best information available? Could it be there is better information available?” The self-destructive impulse is to open oneself up to an influx of new advice, but in truth one should simply ELIMINATE DUPLICITY from your existing body. In other words LEARN TO CLOSE YOUR SECOND EYE.

An example: Monks living in the Middle Ages under the watchful care of our Lord were frequently given the task of copying out holy documents while reading them aloud or mouthing them beneath their breath. Working six hours a day six days a week, a monk or nun could copy out the whole Bible in a year. And yet these monks were never given an education in the discovery of the hidden pages within the pages of the Holy Book, and thus with face full of DECOY KNOWLEDGE they copied the Bible as it appeared without referencing the SHADOW STRUCTURE beneath. Thus was the book rendered rife with mistruths, namely the number of Jesuses. Similarly, Oedipus was in the right when he set about gouging his left eye out so as to eliminate from his sphere of knowledge the false truth that Jocasta was his mother. It is because he failed to stop at the better truth, that she was his wife, that he went mad. To this end, you might ask yourself: WHO IS MY SECOND EYE AND HOW AM I GOING TO GOUGE THEM OUT?

You are probably wondering: “What does this mean for my loved ones?” That depends upon their level of contamination. Does living near them make you sleepy? Do they increase or stifle your appetite? When you make a statement natural to your body of knowledge, do they contradict or compound it, forcing you to ingest new knowledge that has not been tested for safety? If your answer to any of these statements is “maybe” or “yes,” then your loved one may be SEVERELY BUT NOT IRREPARABLY DUPLICATE.