Alexandra Kleeman - You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

The veal section had tripled in size, and Michael was everywhere: on stickers and cardboard signs that hung from the ceiling, mugging zanily all over the promotional Veal Wheel. He was a grinning caricature pictured next to the logo for the Regional Council for the Protection of Veal and Veal Imagery. Below his face, the text read: THE MAN WHO STOLE VEAL. . AND GAVE IT TO THE WORLD. Veal’s new slogan was short and underexplained. Each package was stamped with a single repeated phrase:

THE LIGHT MEAT.

Ending up with the Michaels gave me that old feeling of having someone around, someone familiar and friendly who I wanted to talk to. I looked into each pair of his eyes and tried to feel for the one that was most familiar to me, most like the Michael from the poster I had swiped or, even better, the sad, slabby man from C’s television who I had watched cry through the rounded convexity of the glass screen. It depressed me to think of him living by the will of the Veal Society, kept in some room and taken out only when they wanted to extract more images from him. For his sake I hoped that he was okay, that these images were recent. I stared at the most Michael-like face of the bunch until I noticed suddenly that the Wally was stopped next to me, watching the same advertisement with an intensity that matched my own.

“Do you follow Michael?” he asked me, wiggling his large foam head on its axis a little.

“I’ve watched him,” I said. “I have a poster of him at home.”

“Customers love Michael,” said the Wally, nodding. “His face brings new ones each week, and more the week after. They come with their own shopping bags. Some bags have his photo on them. They come and they shove bundle after bundle of veal into their bag. They come to see his face and they buy because they hope to take away a piece of it. We don’t mind. We could stop it. Often when they leave with the veal, they take other items with them. This grows our veal proportion. We need the veal, but we can allow some to leave the store in the hands of customers.”

“But isn’t that what a store is for?” I asked. “To be emptied out by customers?

“And then restocked, of course,” I added. It was important to me that he could tell I was a good thinker.

“A store is about something greater than selling,” he said. “If you looked only at the surface of the word, you could say its primary purpose is storage. That surface is its core.”

“Why do you need the veal?” I asked.

He indicated with his arm the expanded veal section, as if that were an answer in itself. An unbroken aisle of meat, every gap filled, every crevice stuffed with packages of flesh shining wetly like rosy chunks of quartz. Coolers of veal shivered invisibly, releasing a sheen of cold mist into the air. A tremble of vulvar pink, the color of an innocent child’s gums. Freezers full of frosted flesh cast a low blue light.

“Wally’s is collecting veal,” I said, trying to extract words from his gesture.

“ We are collecting veal,” said the Wally. He leaned on the word we as he stared down at me through his open mouth.

“That doesn’t make sense to me,” I said.

“It’s one of the only things that make sense,” he said soberly. “What qualities unite and divide all the products in this store? Either they are good for you, or they work ceaselessly to destroy you from within. The categories of fruit and vegetable and grain are meaningless in the face of this single superior distinction. It does not matter whether a tomato is a vegetable with seeds or a fouled-up fruit, it matters whether that tomato will hasten your ruin. This is what they should print on the nutritional labels, the ingredients list. This is the only category that is truly important to know, and knowing it is power.”

He continued: “We know what happens to the man who swallows arsenic, to the child or dog that keels over with a plastic bag shoved down the esophagus as far as it can go. The cause and effect are blatant. Most substances machinate more subtly. They suffocate the tinier parts of us, parts you can’t see. Strychnine has an effect life of minutes. Alcohol has an effect life of hours. What is the life of a half pound of potatoes inside you, how long will it work away at you, sabotaging you in ways too small to perceive? Minuscule objects are breaking in you at this moment. You can feel them, even if they can’t be seen or heard. The things that have gone wrong inside of you are whispering to each other beyond your hearing, too softly to stir the surface of your eardrum. They are whispering in the other room like your parents used to when you were just a child. A single moment of clarity could cure you. A single taste of some pure and holy food could return you to your originary nature, your ability to discern good from evil as simply as one looks up into the sky and sees that it is blue. But there is nothing pure and holy in this world.” I heard my breath loud in my own ears, so fast that it sounded to me as if I were running from something.

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” I said in a hopeful way.

“No, of course there isn’t,” he said comfortingly, peering down through the black mesh mouth. “You’re like everyone else. A ghost trapped in a body, loving what kills it. Wouldn’t you rather love what is right for you instead? Wouldn’t you like to find out what that is?”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” I said. “You’re talking about C?”

The little transparent pipes in my mind were breaking one by one, spilling forth a caustic blue fluid.

“I’m talking about you,” he said. “I’m talking about who’s running you. Is it you, yourself, or someone adjacent, so similar that even you can’t tell yourselves apart? Tell me, do you ever look in the mirror and mistake that face for your own? I see you and I perceive that the very edges of your body are a blur. You don’t know where you end. You are nibbled at by a vagueness. By saying this, I in no way am referring to anything like an aura. This is a sign of the disintegration of your organism under pressure. Tell me, is there someone in your life who’s been sharing your life too closely? A friend or a loved one? Is there someone who’s been taking up your time and not giving any of it back? Have you made certain they’re not stealing light from you? That the darkness from their body has not permeated your own by way of your common air, proximate water, shared furniture, et cetera?”

I knew he was talking about B.

“I did have a friend,” I said.

“And your friend trespassed upon you,” the Wally replied.

I nodded. His looming foam face seemed bigger now, closer.

He continued: “I sense another attachment, too. Someone who made you feel like a ghost within your own living body, someone who you are haunting. You see their separation from you as an act of harm, but you should examine the harm within you. Trace it. Source your sadness. Doesn’t it begin in this person, absent though they may be? Their oozings in you, their memory turning to rot. The ghost of this person haunts you, and you cannot flee in body.”

He reached forward his fleshy pink hand and placed two pink fingers against my temple. His skin was incredibly soft, like it had just been unwrapped, like I was the first thing it had ever touched.

He continued: “But you can flee your mind.”

I didn’t understand anything. Behind the Hospitality Hat, red became orange, orange turned pink. The colors bled sweetly, like a thing dying softly in the forest alone. By the time I understood it was the product shelves sliding on their tracks, shifting into their new positions, it didn’t even matter. It didn’t make a difference what different things were; just having them move across my visual field, casting their shadows on my retina, was enough for me to feel like I had known them deeply.