Alexandra Kleeman - You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

I moved toward the man, arms out to my sides, but he retracted, his body positioned for escape. He didn’t know if I was about to hug him or hurt him, and to be honest I didn’t know either. I heard his breath, heavy already, rasping through the mesh mouth of the Wallyhead. He stood up and hefted his box of product up in his arms, tilted sharply to one side as the product slid over; it must have been something heavy, like cans. Then he shuffled backward away from me toward the back of the aisle, turning at last and ducking one or more aisles over before I even had a chance to ask my question. Why had he left so quickly? Maybe he remembered me.

WHAT DO YOU CALL THEthings in the supermarket that are refrigerated, that you look down into like an open casket, and are full of light? I was standing near one of them, feeling the cold rise up from within its bright, clean white. Inside there were chicken breasts and wings and assorted soda tucked into crevices of the body pile, half buried beneath shrink-wrapped Styrofoam trays. I picked up a soda and a package of raw chicken in each hand and moved them to the other end of the cooled box. I did it over and over again, like a punishment. I was making a path to the bottom of the cooling unit, where there might be something like a crowbar. I was following my product instincts. They told me to dig right here.

When I saw there was nothing underneath the chicken and soda except more soda and then a smooth white epoxy, hard as tooth, I started moving my pile from this end of the unit to the opposite end. I had patience within me. A hand on a pack of chicken breasts reminded me of C, the squish of him, the way he differentiated himself from this cooling unit or that shelf. There was a Wally standing near me, watching, but I kept on redistributing the chicken, fixing my gaze on the cold meat, suspecting that what I was doing wasn’t allowed but hoping to do it for as long as possible. Finally, he spoke.

Through his Wallyhole he said: “Excuse me. Hello. At Wally’s we pride ourselves on creating a flexible shopping environment, insofar as products have no fixed place. Which we believe inspires creativity. At Wally’s, Consumers are Creators. We say that.”

He paused. He must have been waiting for me to stop moving products around, which I would not do until I was more certain of what was at the bottom of this bin.

“Nevertheless,” he continued, “there are boundaries that we do not allow the customer to flex, in this case the placement of products in both an area-specific and storewide sense.”

I compromised by moving the products more slowly from their old place to their new.

He began again.

“We can all agree,” he said, “that a man’s home is his castle. At Wally’s, we wish for your supermarket to be your castle as well. And, like a king in his castle, we wish you to do nothing, or as little as possible. We would rather you feel at home.”

“I don’t feel at home,” I said, finally putting down the chicken flesh and sodas and staring the Wally straight in his face.

“In my home,” I said, “nobody tries to divert me. If I wanted a crowbar, someone would tell me where to find it. Or maybe I would already know,” I added.

I was bluffing. I didn’t have a home where people treated me in this way, a home full of the things I needed. I hardly had something resembling a home at all.

The Wally just stared at me. It made it worse that he was staring at me with his real eyes, rather than the eyes of the Wallyhead, which were fake, shiny plastic with no actual holes for light to pass through. In the center of the forehead was a circular aperture smaller than a dime, through which a Wally’s employee could glimpse a portion of the customer he or she was aiding. But to get a full view of a person through a Hospitality Hat, you had to tilt the foam face up toward the ceiling while looking down hard, angling your head within so that your line of sight passed straight through the mesh netting of the mouth. I couldn’t see anything through the meshwork, but from the sharp twist of his head I knew he was examining me.

I was turning back to the refrigerator bin when he spoke again.

“Tell me about your product circumstances,” he said.

With my mind I was digging through what I knew about myself, trying to find a chunk of language that would tell me what I wanted and needed and was asking for.

“I just want something that makes me feel like myself again,” I said.

“Not myself as I feel right now,” I added. Right now I felt like a person learning that a surgeon had left a pair of scissors inside her during an operation.

“I had someone once,” I began, watching through his foam face for signs of recognition, sympathy. “We were fantastic together. He really understood what I was all about, what I was like inside. This was because, inside him, he was the same as me. Maybe not on the surface-most inner layers, but deep down, the deepest, tiniest part.” I scanned his mesh mouth for a reaction, but there was none. “Then something horrible happened to him, and I’m still trying to figure out what it was.”

The Wallyhead listened, pointed intently toward me.

“He lost himself,” I explained with a touch of defensiveness.

I added: “I’m trying to find him.”

“And what do you want from us?” he said, his voice a little gentler, a little wider somehow.

“I just want to get into my boyfriend’s house and see if he’s there, or not there. I don’t need anything to happen once I’ve found out, you understand, I just need to know whether we’re together or not, and if not, if it’s because of me or because something dark and mysterious has befallen him,” I said.

“If it’s dark and mysterious, that’s okay too,” I added.

I said: “Something came into me, or my life. I need it out of me, as soon as possible.”

I looked up at the Wallymouth. A single eye gleamed, not unkindly, through the dark netting. The head wobbled around slowly in what I chose to interpret as a gesture of sympathy.

“I can show you to a crowbar,” he said.

“I thought you weren’t allowed to do that,” I said. But I wanted it: I wanted it enough that I didn’t care if this Wally got punished for it.

“We aren’t,” he said slowly. “But I can show you to something better.”

“Kandy Kakes?” I asked.

He just stood there for a second. The large foam head looked as though it were looking at me, which I knew meant that he was looking someplace else. Then he started walking.

He led me out of the aisle and into the aisle adjacent. There were jellied fruits suspended in plastic containers, glowing orange, yellow, pink, as the light pushed through them. I thought he might look back to make sure I was still there, but he didn’t. I understood that it might not be a simple thing to look around in a Hospitality Hat, to change the orientation of one’s head so radically. The foam plastic would chafe against cheek and neck. It would press warm and humid to the scrub of his pinkening face, eventually it might rub the skin away, showing the deeper pinks, the bluish-lilac tint belonging to the subdermal layers of skin. If he moved too much, his face might erode entirely. I trailed behind, several docile steps behind, watching his body clench and loosen with the motion of walking.

“When does the food chandelier get changed?” I asked him.

His body twisted toward me slightly, but the bulk of it kept walking as before.

“Do you know when you’re going to get more Kandy Kakes?” I asked.

“Are these really the questions you long to have answered?” he replied.

I looked around us at all the veal.

The veal section had changed. In the weeks since it first appeared on TV, Michael’s face had propelled veal to new heights of desirability: Men identified with his confusion, with the somber melancholy of his paunchy stomach and cheeks. Women wanted to feed him. He reminded the elderly of past versions of themselves, still ravening for living matter. And children finally had something they could understand when they thought of veal, that meat whose name wasn’t a kind of animal or a substance that came nuggeted, pattied, or shoved onto a stick. Veal had a face now, where before it had nothing. And while Michael’s face had once been an artless and unexceptional slab according to the personal accounts of grocery store employees and other witnesses to his robberies, image-capturing technology had transformed it into an object of fascination, something to stare at, a face that yielded up more over time.