Alexandra Kleeman - You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“You’re full of murk,” he said, speaking down to me from his full height.

I looked up toward his face, sought out the eye and mouth holes that swayed an inch or so in front of his actual face. At the edge of a hole I saw an eye I thought I had seen before, blue and watery.

“And you’re making a mess,” he added, swiping his arm around at the irregular blotches of beauty cream that marred the floor and stained my white sheet a thicker, heavier white. “Try being more like those around you,” he said as he walked away, “and less like yourself.” I looked around the room. Everyone else did seem to be doing a better job, a cleaner job. Then from across the room I thought I saw Anna sitting at a different spooning station; I recognized the frayed right corner of her standard-issue sheet and the smooth, lazy way she scooped, as if it were easy, as if she were only lying around in our room, staring up at the ceiling and practicing her emptiness. A Manager paused by her station and patted her back. She looked up at him as he looked down and they were both nodding at each other, nodding as though they had just made a decision together. I thought of B’s face pressed jealously against the window as she watched me walk away with C, my hand seeking around for his. Steering him away from her in the drugstore when I spotted her there, down on her hands and knees and reading the backs of boxes of hair dye. I thought of her face smiling out at me from under my haircut, and as I did I could feel my skin growing thicker, foggier, leathery tough. I couldn’t seem to stop it; the memories came uncontrollably. I stopped spooning, squeezed my eyes shut.

When I opened them, it was to the sight of a tall, heavy-looking Eater in a newcomer’s pristine white sheet. He was wandering back and forth on the warehouse floor, stopping other Churchgoers, grabbing their shoulders, and shaking them gently, asking again and again: “Have you seen my car? A green hatchback. Have you seen my car?” I looked at the spooners around me. We had all stopped spooning, all turned our faces toward this alarming man who, in his forgetting, seemed somehow also to be suffering a seizure of remembrance. I could see on all of their faces that it was uncomfortable to watch him suffer so from his own unsheddable Darkness, but I felt worse than the rest of them. I knew I was closer to becoming him than becoming the well-adjusted Eaters to the right and left of me. I knew I was only a few remembrances away from letting something Dark slip out again.

As I watched, the Managers surrounded the remembering man on all sides. “Have you seen my car?” he asked them as they closed in on his bulky body.

The Eater to the right of me must have seen my concern through my sight holes. She leaned toward me in a confidential way.

“The Dads usually burn out early,” she whispered. “Nobody knows why. Some people think it’s because they can’t shed their memories properly. They’re too tied to the things they were responsible for, the things they owned. Even though that’s what they came here to escape.”

I looked at her and nodded. The Managers were dragging the man off toward the warehouse’s outer door. The man had stopped asking about his car and was now just sobbing blurrily, a wet patch forming on his sheet near the face and shoulder.

“What happens to them?” I asked quietly.

“They are expelled,” she said matter-of-factly. “Banished to their former lives. Returned to the toxicity of the world outside. You cannot have those kinds of things going on around purer, Brighter people. Allowing them to stay, even in a separate area, even in a neighboring building, would hold us all back.”

I looked out at the outer door, glass paneled and sleek. In the squares that opened up onto the outside world, I saw thousands of small leaves twisting in the breeze, the worn gray asphalt and curb, empty plastic bottles and cans sitting in clods of browned-out grass. I saw at least twelve different things that I knew were killing me at varied rates, driving me insane, rendering me toxic and flawed. A shiver ran down my spine. Whatever it cost me, whatever it might take, I had to stay in the Church.

I WAS STANDING IN CONFERENCERoom F waiting for the day’s speech to begin, waiting for our Regional Manager to step up and give us the day’s new lessons on what to avoid, what to remember, what to forget. Anna had offered to stick close to me and explain the nuances of the speech so I wouldn’t make so many mistakes in the future. “Every slipup of yours causes me to slip too,” she said. “Remember that.” I knew now that I had to follow her instructions to the letter if I wanted to stay in here, where I was safe from the Darkness and the toxins and, most important, from myself.

It was late afternoon and we still hadn’t had lunch; people stirred a little less than normal as they stood. They moved drowsily, their sheeted forms tilting in the light like there was a person trying to keep awake somewhere beneath. From across the parking lots that darked like lakes through the middle of the business center, we saw other buildings like our own, mirrors to those on the outside, and we saw small people entering them and leaving them.

In the room, a scent like diet cola sweated from our bodies, sweated out through the skin and was absorbed by the white fabric. The sound of a generator weighed heavy in the air, filling the room though all the windows were closed. Light filtered in through the standard-issue sheet I had been done up in, through the very transparency of the cloth itself. We knew we were safe in here, or we thought we were, or we felt we were, or we wanted to feel we were. Through eyeholes I watched my fellow Eaters, the white of their coverings melding together to form a thing that looked like a mountain range in the snow, dozens and dozens of peaks rising sudden and urgent from out of the white, the points eerily rounded, as though they had been hammered down.

We were packed tight together and the air tasted moist and personal, like a kiss from the mouth of a stranger. Dozens and dozens of us, new and old, waited restless before the empty podium. We swarmed it like ants around a gob of jelly, trying to figure out how to wring from it the thing we wanted: a glimpse of the Regional Manager, the Manager’s favorable attentions, the words from his mouth that raised us from our situation and into a better one. These blank periods of time before the lesson began were difficult to fill. They were uncomfortable and boring. We wanted to watch one another, judge one another, determine whether we were better than each other and worthier for advancement. We wanted to feel lucky, feel hopeful, feel closer to our ghosts. But in this sea of white, it was hard to see any trace or trait on your outside that made you different from anybody else.

The white mounds in front of me begin shifting, turning their torsos laterally beneath their shrouds to look around, swaying before me like mountains in the wind. Then I see our Regional Manager making his way through the crowd, cutting his path from the catering entrance toward a thick swath of admirers who part just a little to let him through. They all want to feel the force of his body on its way, they think that some of his Brightness will rub off in the friction. The Manager, trailed by a couple of assistants, grasps his head with both hands to keep the eyeholes in place as he moves. He’s walking slowly, like he thinks he has a majestic air. But he’s not that tall, not especially graceful. All he is is Bright, Brighter than the rest of us. We know this because we’ve been told, we know even though it doesn’t really show up through his sheet, a sheet of higher quality than ours — hotel-quality luxury thread count, thick and creamy with satiny details at the hem that drags along behind him. He reaches the podium and his assistants scurry out from behind to sort out the train of his sheet so that he won’t trip as he turns to us to speak. The Manager gives us all what I assume is a look of appraisal, though through the eyeholes it can be hard to tell. At moments like this he looks so ordinary it is hard to believe that he, alone, has the knowledge necessary to midwife our future selves.