Alexandra Kleeman - You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

Then he raises his hands grandly and addresses us all:

HE WHO SITS NEXT TO ME, MAY WE EAT AS ONE!

I look at Anna, standing next to me, already shouting the words back to him, already joining her voice to the total volume of the crowd, shouting and shouting in perfect unison like one great white sprawling person with a single monstrous voice. Anna looks so happy through her sight holes, her eyes bugging out enthusiastically, her mouth pressing feverishly against the inside of her sheet as she cries out again and again. She looks so happy and so Bright.

I reach down and I take her hand in my own. I clasp it. I work my fingers in between hers and twine us. And then I lift my head up to shout.

INSIDE A BODY THERE ISno Light. Blood piles through with no sense of where it goes, sliding past inner parts, parts that feel something but know nothing about what they feel. What they sense they send up through nerve channels to the brain, a cavefish-pale organ with no nerves of its own. Inside a body, thoughts that never touch air, never reach Light, thoughts that end in a suffocating Dark. The damp basement in a horror movie into which a teenage girl sinks slowly, the stairs groaning beneath her weight, her voice thready and red as she says the name of her boyfriend out loud, over and over again.

Inside a body there is no Light, so the Eaters teach that you must shine your own through Righteous Eating. The diagrams illustrate it beautifully: a female torso in cross section, set on its side like a fish on a cutting board. Small cubes of black and white fall down its throat in the direction indicated by an arrow, the paths of the body marked out in bold white lines, highway lines. These black cubes represent food, the bad kind that starves the ghost within you so that when it is its moment to emerge from your soft shell, to come from you into the world and carry out your project more perfectly than you had ever dreamed, it will die trapped and weakened in your body that has been a prison to it forever. White cubes are the good kind of food, the kind that can save you — if not in this body, then for the next.

Inside the schematic woman, food cubes are destroyed. They release their own benevolent and malevolent ghosts. Dark food travels down to the protective organs in which the ghost gestates vulnerable and sleepy; it clusters to their outsides and strangles what sleeps within. The good food, by contrast, breaks into shafts of differently colored light, bright like fireworks, and this light illuminates the body and nourishes the ghost within. Imagine this, they say, how radiant you become when you eat Bright. How beautiful, how durable and long-lasting. The colors that can’t be seen, working brilliance inside you, preparing you for your ghosting. Colors more beautiful than any of the colors you know.

I used to lie in bed at night with my hands on my belly, feeling the blood crowd through, wondering what was taking place within me. Now that I had been illuminated, I lay in my cot, sideways like a baby in the womb, and when I rested my hand over my central organs I knew precisely what lay beneath. I knew that the flawed and sad feelings, daily dissatisfactions and pangs of despair, were just my ghost’s way of kicking within me, kicking to test its independence, kicking to tell me it wants to be let out.

I fell asleep dreaming that it would split me open someday soon, like a green shoot piercing the husk of a soiled bulb.

FOR THIS LESSON, TURN YOUR attention to the borders of your own body. If you are Stage Four in a state of peri- or proxi-ghosting, this session may not have much to offer you. For those operating at Stage Five or higher, or if you are already experiencing the feeling that your skin-barrier is penetrable or not really there, engaging with this lesson’s material could reverse you five to twelve decastages, and result in harmful physical symptoms such as retching, increased heart rate, elation, suggestibility, joint and liver inflammation, and epidermal crusting. If you or anyone you know fits this risk profile, please inform an attendant immediately.

Now, to those of you remaining with us today, welcome. I’d like you to close your eyes and concentrate on your edges, how they feel, how steady or firm. Where does your profile end, and is the ending blurry or rubbery? Trembly? Vibrating sharply? You’ll notice that your husk stiffens up, turns turgid, when your body channels memories of your Darker past. You feel queasy, don’t you? This is because thinking of your past instantly activates all things the you of your past came into contact with, from the innocuous to the severely toxic — especially the severely toxic. Your past life was like water in a stagnant lake: slow, cloudy, full of silt and particulate. Light could not push its way in through the murk. This is not to say that your past was one of total Darkness, just that the mud mixed with it so thoroughly that you cannot draw one single cup of water from that poisonous lake that is fit to drink. In each sip there will be a mouthful of dirt to choke you. That’s why we’re here today: to help you to filter from your bodies that Dark matter that interferes with your progress toward an ideal ghost state, that stalls the eventual discard of your body husk. We can sanitize your past in the present, if you are willing. Results contingent. Who has questions? If you have questions, raise your hand. An assistant will be over to deal with you.

I lay on my back in the center of the gymnasium and tried to breathe. I tried not to do anything that could look like I was raising my hand. I intended to know what I was doing and to do it perfectly. I pictured a perfect student and tried to resemble her physically. I tried not to look at the ceiling or toward the voice of the instructor. I tried not to look like anything, tried to feel like I had lost myself among the other supine bodies lying limp on the floor. I tried to concentrate only on the idea of Light and the ghost within me, not on my memories, which were as mottled as ever and seemed to be with me all of the time. The Managers moved between us, checking up on our progress, their sheets brushing across our faces and mouths by accident. I could feel Anna in the room, somewhere in the room, executing the exercise rather than worrying about its execution. Today the air had a frictive quality that ground against my skin, and I was glad again for the protection of the sheet.

I’d like to start by asking you all to focus your ghost pointers on the object at the center of the room. Keep your eyes closed. Focus with your inner eye, with your ghost’s eye. As I’m sure you all know by now, the object at the center of the room is an orange, an ordinary, everyday piece of fruit. Oranges, in and of themselves, are neither Dark nor Bright. If you had to put them in one category, they’d be Bright — but barely. Eating an orange is about as beneficial for your future ghosted self as brushing the lint from a sweater. It basically doesn’t matter. Oranges, however, are a popular American fruit. They show up in our grocery stores, in our Little League games, in our sack lunches, in the moments at which we are the weakest and lowest. They are a major player in the collective Darkness of our former world, and as such they are one of the most dangerous objects you could encounter or think about: the very notion of an orange is guaranteed to bring up dangerous memories thick with harmful people, places, and objects.

Gaze upon your inner thoughts, the ideas and memories evoked by this fruit, and you will see how they tend to bring into this clean, sanctified space remembrances of a corrupted time, in which Dark objects mingled indiscriminately with the Bright and your ghost was in a state close to atrophy. Recall, BUT DO NOT THINK OF the Dark feelings of that time, which are now gone: feelings of loving them too much or not enough, never loving them the right amount, of wanting them to give you space and then feeling unloved, of saying you understood what they were saying when what they were saying only made you feel more confused and more alone. Remember: DO NOT REMEMBER your past. PERCEIVE your past as you would perceive a dark stone or flower resting at some distance from you. THEN CAST IT FROM YOU WITH FORCE.