Alexandra Kleeman - You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

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It is worth mentioning that in these confusing times other pamphlets may front themselves as being accurate renditions of the knowledge possessed by the New Christian Church of Conjoined Eaters. These pamphlets, once discovered, should be discarded swiftly and their memory dumped.

BRING YOUR LOVED ONE IN

FOR A FREE CONSULTATION.

IF THEY LOVE YOU THEY WILL COME.

At the end of the passage was that same phone number, same address, same logo with CONJOINED EATERS CHURCH printed above it. Was the error in the Church’s name intentional? I had never noticed how much the logo looked like a Kandy Kake: thick black border surrounding two squiggles of light, two chalices made of white frosting, twinned. I stared at it and felt like it was trying to tell me something, something I couldn’t hear over the sound of my hunger, which was like two people with two megaphones shouting at each other through the center of my head. Was this the correct pamphlet? Was the one I had read earlier a decoy? Could there be a more correct pamphlet than either of these somewhere else, waiting to be found?

THE FIRST EYE EVOLVED BYaccident in the single cell of an organism that had been born sensitive to individual particles of light, according to an article I had read in Marine Hobbyist . Deep underwater, it felt their soft touch on its surface as a blow and registered that shock by wincing slightly, changing its shape. In this way, the cell learned to say there is something blocking the light above me or there is not . Either something was there or there was nothing. This ancient eye was primitive in comparison with our modern eyes, which now operate as whole colonies of individual photosensitive cells yoked together into a single blob, cringing together at the sun. What the first eye saw, though, it saw with certainty.

I put my hand on B’s bedroom door, which was just like mine but with a little paper sign taped to it that read VISITOR PLEASE ANNOUNCE YOURSELVES. She had stolen it from someplace on campus, I guessed. I didn’t think it was grammatically correct. I was filled with a feeling like purpose, like those moments where you remember what you came into the room to do. What sort of purpose? I’d find out once I got inside. I pushed open the door onto an inside so dark, it startled me. B had gotten the better room, it was bigger and had an extra closet, but the windows looked out onto trees and told you nothing about the house across the street. While she watched the trees, I learned things about the world around us. I learned that our neighbors had sensed a threat in their surroundings, that they had ghosted themselves as some form of preemptive defense. I had learned that they were never coming back. I had learned, as they had, that just because a thing is in your home, just because you allowed it in or even put it there yourself, is no guarantee that it won’t begin changing itself while you’re not looking, unbecoming what it was and transforming slowly into something you’d never, ever let into your life. These sorts of things needed to be rooted out or abandoned as toxic.

It wasn’t that I wholly bought into the message of Conjoined Eating. There were some good ideas there, but I was still waiting to see how it all played out. What worried me was B’s malleability: if she had read that pamphlet, it could be assumed that she would fail to realize that she was the contaminated one in this relationship. Given her temperament, it was almost certain that she’d attack, if she wasn’t already somehow attacking me by invading my bed, infringing on my face. The safest thing was to retaliate in advance. Once, at least, maybe twice.

I saw dozens of shiny little tubes and jars arranged across her dresser, the mirror image of my own room, and I went to them and opened the little lids of the flower-reeking creams and dug my fingers into their mellow white. I glopped them out on top of the dresser and spread them around with my fingertips. They were all the same things that I used in my room, but they had been bought new, pristine, some with the crisp factory surface still on them. Then I clutched at the makeup, squeezed the pencils in my fist like a child trying to cause harm, pressed them point down until they snapped, and I banged the pressed squares of powdered pigment against the cream-covered surface until they fell out as chalky crumbs. The lipsticks I extruded from their canisters and rubbed between my gummed-up fingers, working them until they were warm and melty and slid over my hands like thick water. Outside, the dark trees swayed. The pinks and violets and greens were a clown-colored smear across the furniture in her room. I looked happy, though I didn’t feel it. My neck and face were covered in daubs of color, bright like petals on my skin. In my mouth, accidental chunks of lipstick tasted like Barbie doll.

I pressed my gluey hands to my face.

When I was done I lay down on B’s bed. It all smelled like beauty products, that anonymous female scent that we rub onto ourselves to blend into a wet, aggregate femininity, to smell like a person but not like any person in particular. I recognized this specific scent on her sheets, a body lotion sponsored by the actress who peels her face off in those commercials. It was a body lotion I used and was used to smelling of, and this bed smelled just like my own bed, drowsy and thick with nights of repeated sleep. It occurred to me that I shouldn’t have destroyed all the products in the room because I’d have nothing left the next day to make me look like myself. But it was too late to do anything about any of that.

It seemed early to go to sleep, but in a country like this, sprawling all over a yellowing span of land, there must be hundreds of thousands of people secretly sleeping at inappropriate times, times when they should be working or eating or otherwise fueling the total human enterprise. I thought of all those individual unconscious bodies sinking into themselves, slumbering away in the broad daylight of their drawn curtains. I thought of all the hidden spaces: the sewers, the closets, the lightless stomachs and wombs. Warehouses where stock sits silent, the dark interior of a Mickey Mouse costume, the caves of hibernating bears. I imagined the great diffuse blandness of these spaces, soft and dark like a concussion, and I closed my eyes and rolled myself over into the dim center of sleep.

WHEN I WOKE UP ITwas to the thought of a dark eye, singular and large enough to sink my whole body into, the tail end of some dream I couldn’t recall. The eye was so close that I could touch it just by tilting my upper torso a few inches forward, but instead I was trying to lean my body away from the blackness, inside of which I saw a scatter of dim shapes, squiggles, and lines that looked whitish through the dark liquid murk. I didn’t understand why I was pulling back, twisting around before it, then all at once I knew. I was looking for my own reflection in its glassy curve — but there was nothing of me in its surface, nothing underneath. I strained to see, and in straining my eyes slipped open onto a place I didn’t recognize: the light too bright, the smell of plastics. I rubbed my face with the palms of my hands, and when I pulled them away I saw them smeared with red, pink, purple, blue. Then I remembered, and I knew it was only a matter of time before B found me. And when she did, what would I say? What would she do?