Alexandra Kleeman - You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“What?” I said in a flat tone.

“Where were you? Where have you been?” B asked plaintively.

“I was staying with C. Because you were angry with me,” I said.

“I wasn’t angry,” said B.

The silence hung around us, heavy and dark.

“Most people would be angry,” I said.

“We’re not most people,” she said. “We’re closer than that.”

“Closer to what?” I asked.

“Closer to each other,” B said. “Closer to being the same person. Like, if you destroy my things, you’re destroying your own. Our lives are twined together.”

“Twined, twined, twined,” I said. What a strange word, I thought. It reminded me of the pamphlets.

“Are you making fun of me?” B asked, her face confused but also irritated.

The things we said slid past each other without making contact, failed to land or fit together. It was like C’s porn videos, where soft, listless actors carried out their roles while thinking of something entirely unrelated somewhere beneath their faces. You watched them fucking and all you learned was that they were fucking. One body stuffed the head of another deep into a pillow and began its pounding: It was what it was. These bodies were universally compatible, each to each, so the minds would be, too. There was nothing any of these naked bodies could do to truly surprise each other.

I fantasized sometimes about an inverse pornography in which all that mattered was what was going on within what appeared to be a successful fucking. Everything would look the same, flat and happy, but as a viewer I would know that one of them felt an uncomfortable friction that they were concerned would turn into a rash, the other was worried about their unbalanced relationship, not sure what to think about or focus on, wishing they were fucking someone more energetic and distracting even if it was all staged. These innards would be exposed in a voice-over recorded by the actors directly after filming and spliced into the video during postproduction. You would know all the things that the body, in its busy activity, kept hidden.

But since C had disappeared, the fantasies that obsessed me were all the worst things I could imagine at any given time. In one fantasy I look over at the TV in the middle of having sex with C and I think I see our reflections — but then I see that it’s a video of the two of us. But as I watch longer, I see that it’s actually a video of C and someone else wearing a wig that looks just like my own hair, which starts to come off the head, revealing real hair beneath that also happens to be similar to mine, only blunter, darker. The hair on the wig is so familiar. This hair is soft and tangly, silky like a little girl’s. It even has the same cowlicks as my own, a small one at the front above the forehead and a deeper one on the back of the head. That’s when it hits me that it’s no wig, it’s my own actual hair. And then I wonder what’s happened to the me that used to be inside it.

B was still crouched down, staring at me and waiting for me to agree with her. I felt a pressure in my muscles that might have been an urge toward flight or just the effort of holding a body perfectly in place. I felt waves of heat sweep my body from the head down, heard something sizzling behind my ears.

“I mean,” she said, “how would you put it?

“Is something wrong?” she asked. “Is something wrong with us?”

She couldn’t even understand why we might have a problem, and in this way she proved that she was the more innocent person.

“We can talk about it?” B asked.

For a second, I thought we could. It was a long second.

Then I lurched to a sitting position and pushed past her to my bedroom. The room had all my things in it, but when I looked out at it, I didn’t feel like I was in the right place. My shoulder pulsed where I had muscled her aside. In my mind, I heard a shadow of the sound she had made when I pushed her over. A bird call, thin as a twig. It was the sound of injury uncolored by anger or fear: she still couldn’t imagine that I was struggling against her.

I stood in front of the mantel. I knew that everything in this room belonged to me, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone had moved it around or swapped it for identical objects, slightly off. To my right, the TV spooled out colors and light and sound that I couldn’t bring into focus. I saw Kandy Kat’s hollow cheeks and drowned eyes. I saw what seemed to be a darkened face, one eye black and one eye white, spinning dizzily on-screen. But that made no sense. It must have been a Kandy Kake, from the longest of the Kandy Kakes commercials, the one where Kandy Kat clones himself to sneak into the Kandy Kakes factory, sacrificing one of himself so that the other can sneak past the security Klowns and into the glorious troves of sugary-sweet treats that lie beyond. I tried to remember what happened next: did it end in a Kandy Kat embrace, their weak and wobble-thin arms wrapped around each other like a coil of wire? Or was it something worse, the two tearing and scratching at each other’s identical bodies, trying to destroy each other for the sake of a single Kandy Kake smuggled from the factory grounds and ready at last to be devoured? I felt strongly that I had once known the correct answer — it was in me somewhere, even if it couldn’t find its way out. I looked to the TV screen for help, but the cartoon was already over. All there was now was a pile of fur and the parting slogan, displayed on-screen in bright, bobbing words:

IT’S NOT YOU, IT’S THE FOOD.

EAT BRIGHT.

The light in the room shifted almost imperceptibly, and I knew that B had entered, clogging the doorway with her thin frame. Her face was wide open and excited, as if she thought I were about to give her a present. I kept my head where it was, pointed forward and staring. I held still. Any movement I made would be proof that time was passing. Any movement would suggest that something would be happening soon. I had an image of myself walking toward an unsheathed knife, its tip pointed straight at me: I didn’t want to, and yet this image of myself understood that it was the only place to go.

Outside my bedroom window the streetlights came on, spilling yellow light into the darkening blue. Breath quaked my body. I couldn’t do anything without driving the situation between me and B forward by notches, one step and then another. I heard the floorboards creak as she took another step toward me, contaminating my presence with her own. Everything she did seemed calculated to push me into the future.

Said the voice to my far right, almost out of the range of peripheral vision: “Are you okay? Is something wrong? Do you want to eat Popsicles?”

I reached out and touched the bundle of hair on the mantel, the lopped braid that B had brought to me and left in my hands. I squeezed it in my hand and drew it toward me. It had a yielding shape to it, like a stuffed animal with no limbs, head, or face. I pinched a bit of its smug torso and pulled. Hair like black taffy in the palm of my hand, with a blunt scissored edge to its ends. I wished that someone would catch me with it, to see me and shame me and stop me from doing this to myself. But there was nobody else: it was just me and B, her eyes large and confused and searching me for what I was about to do with her gift. Between my fingers the hair felt slippery, motile. As I tried to wad it, it unspooled. I knew I had to move faster.

Forming the hair into a cohesive mass was a losing task: single hairs drifted from the bundle, falling in slow motion to the carpet. Twisting the bundle made the sound of flesh opening up onto barren sand. I wrapped the stuff around my finger until the wad was the size of a walnut, but when I pulled it off it swelled up in my hand and I understood that this was going to be difficult no matter what. I looked to B’s face, saw her eyes dark and frightened like little gaping mouths. Then I stuffed it in. Tongue clinging to the dry fiber, gums wettening but still sticky, struggling to stay slick. There were bits hanging out, but I couldn’t open my mouth or I’d risk losing the whole thing. I tilted my throat back and tried to choke it down. I put my thumb and fingers on opposite sides of the neck and stroked down, the way I used to get my dog to swallow a pill hidden in a lump of peanut butter. At the back of my throat it stuck like a wet rag at the threshold and I had to cough it up a bit, gasping around it, needing much more saliva to get it down.