Alexandra Kleeman - You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

I rested the wad at the wet front of my mouth, behind the teeth, and I thought over and over about taking the first bite out of a Kandy Kake, cracking that fudge shell with my teeth and feeling the orange-scented syrup ooze out from under the thick skin. Digging my tongue through the oily stuff to the inner Kandy Kore, hard and dry as a bone, turning slowly to mush as my saliva soaks in. Sinking my teeth through layers of acidic sweetness to the woody pulp beneath, the crack of it in my mouth like a bone snapping in half. I looked up at the ceiling, opened my mouth, and pushed it in with two fingers, until I felt the furry ball lodged so far down my throat that it would be more work for it to find its way back up than to go, gently, in the peristaltic direction. My feeling of it disappeared completely when it reached my stomach, except for a heaviness, a sort of burden or weight I carried now that may only have been psychological. The fullness felt like it would never leave my body.

I grabbed another handful and shoved it in, using the left hand to round up stray bits. The hair was rodenty in shape and flavor. It was becoming darker and darker outside all the time, bit by bit. I couldn’t make out the sheen of the hair anymore, just an anonymous blob, two shapes twisted into each other darkly. I turned around. There was a pale oval in front of me, swathed in dark shag, stuck through by two dots symmetrically placed and a thin patch of darkness at the bottom center. It was B’s face showing fear, a shape I’d never seen it take.

THAT NIGHT I SLEPT, FORthe second time, in the house across the street. And the night after I did the same thing, ditto the night after that, and all the other nights until the night I became a Conjoined Eater. I felt better there, more like myself. During the days I walked two hours to C’s condominium, where I waited for him. His absence made my heart grow fonder: with each day that I waited, he seemed like a greater and greater guy. I thought to myself that I didn’t need to talk to him, not about B or anyone else, I didn’t need to talk to him at all. I just needed to see him once, even from a distance, and I’d be able to imagine him again. If I could imagine him, I could imagine talking to him, telling him about the fight and the pamphlets and all the makeup I crushed, without actually having to explain the things I knew he’d have questions about.

In many ways, having this imaginary C back would be better than the real thing. The genuine, unimagined C would want to know why I was keeping the Eater pamphlets, storing them in bed with me, when I had always hated strange and unprovable claims. He would want to ask how I could possibly think damaging B’s property would return our relationship to normal. He was always able to take the few simple things in my life and make them sound like trouble. It was his ability to trouble me that made me prize his comfort. I could imagine him hearing me out, tightening his jaw, nodding his head as he rubbed a hand up my back, saying, I know you did the only thing that seemed reasonable . I wanted it so badly that I almost thought it could save me from all the other things I wanted.

I wanted C. I was alive with wanting. I wanted to find him and hug him until his bones bent in on themselves like cheap patio furniture. When he pulled up in front of his house in his battered white vehicle, I would finally open the car door and step out into the bright, sun-ridden air. I’d walk up after him as he went to his front door, and when he slid the key into the lock I’d wrap my arms around him from behind. I’d press him up against the door with my whole small body, the sharp handles of my hips jutting into him, rubbing against his jeans. I’d shove my front against the contours of his back, force his chest tight up on the door. I wouldn’t let him turn around to face me. I hoped he’d recognize me just from the shape of my body, the bony snag of my pelvis, the lumpiness of my nose and chin prodding at his spine.

Then I’d speak to him, directly into him, into his back. I’d tell him that after a long time not knowing what to want or how to want him properly, I had figured it out. We were fine: it was the rest of the situation, the other characters, B in particular, that was darking us all up. B was encroaching on my very structure, confusing my body with the presence of her own, sending her ex to muddle up my sense of the one I loved. The only way back into our lives was to ghost ourselves like they had in the house across the street, ghost ourselves immediately and get our bodies to a Conjoined Toxicology Center, where they’d tell us which bad feelings were our own and which had been planted by those who wanted us duped. All we had to do was give ourselves up and we could begin our second life together, a life in which nobody else would be around to keep us apart.

But waiting was hard work. I was sleepy all the time, I ate nothing but oranges. If I wasn’t eating something while I watched for C, I’d find myself hard asleep, numb to the moment when he’d return and open his house back up to me to tell me where he had been, why I had done the things I’d done, and what I’d do next. I had to be peeling an orange, separating out its segments, pulping them within my mouth, or I’d end up still, deadlike, gulped into dreams. An endless sequence of oranges passed into my hands to be disassembled.

My eyes ached in the heat and my left lid had started fluttering uncontrollably. It was a little like watching a silent film, the way it made the world twitch jauntily in and out of darkness. I walked up to C’s front door, feeling my knees wheeze as I moved. When I got there, I didn’t know what to do: I had already rung the bell, had already knocked so many times that the side of my fist felt cold and tingly all day long. I dug around in my pockets. I found a tube of lip gloss, tinted raspberry with little sparkles in it. Extracting the wand with a wet popping sound, I stared at the blank slab of door. Then I wrote. I wrote:

THE PROBLEM WITH YOUR LIFE IS YOU.

It felt right, but looking at it, I wasn’t sure what I meant by it. Then below it I wrote:

CALL ME.

I put the gloss back in my pocket and legged my way back toward home, my new home, the house across the street from my old home. When I looked back behind me, C’s condo was unchanged. You couldn’t even see the writing on the door at this distance. If you looked hard, you might notice that something over there looked slightly wet.

I thought of the orange pulp in my stomach, cuddled against a nest of B’s hair, and shuddered. I tried to retch quietly, but my stomach only rubbed up against itself inside me, scratchily like two pieces of wool felt. I knew that I looked like somebody in need of desperate, anonymous help from strangers. But there was no one around to look at me, no one around to see.

MY NEW LIFE HAD THEbenefit of simplicity. If I wasn’t over at the condominium complex staking out C’s apartment, I was in the house across the street sleeping. Or I was at Wally’s buying supplies for the next day. By supplies I just mean oranges, the oranges I tore through one after another until my lips and cheeks and fingertips were numb with stinging.

Night after night, I was zeroing in on the daily moment at which Wally’s ceased resembling itself, the few short minutes where the shelves shifted into their new, perplexing positions. For the last week I had been overshooting and undershooting, discovering new slices of time that were just like any other: the same lights fluorescing a soured white, same tinny music seeping from the speakers, pop songs with all the words gouged out. The food chandelier hung heavy in the front of the store and swung slowly, deliberately, as though someone had come by and pushed it once, a very long time ago. As many times as I had come to Wally’s, I had never seen someone swap out the food in the food chandelier, and yet it was different every time I saw it. New things had appeared in it when I left the store, things that hadn’t been there when I came in. But this was a minor mystery compared with that of C’s location, which had yielded no answers: nothing but waiting, and more waiting, and time.