Alexandra Kleeman - You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

I indicated to the girl that I was busy doing other things to her, important and necessary tasks, required tasks. I waved my hands around in an imitation of washing and then held a quieting finger up to my lips, up to the spot on the sheet where my lips would be if it were a face. I readjusted my sheet and tried again to push the sleevelike regions of my covering up past my elbows. I leaned forward toward the tub and scrubbed with fine pale sand at her back and arms, her shoulders like bone handles to grip as I cleansed her of her past. But she kept looking at me with that needy look, sucking her lips in again and again. Her tongue emerged and pushed at the grainy stuff around it. She tried to eject from her mouth a globe of spittle that split her lips and came out dark with damped sand. She gagged into the air near my hands as I worked to hold her neck still for the cleaning. She struggled and twisted, retching aimlessly. I was having trouble holding her in place: my sheet was sliding off, I risked showing my face to the entire room.

“Please,” she said in a soft voice that crumbled, “I have to be at soccer practice.”

Recruits came in like this all the time, people of all ages with only the haziest idea of what they were doing here.

“There is no such thing as soccer practice,” I said. She looked confused. I added: “It’ll be better for you if you forget there ever was.”

“But my mom said. Ask my mom,” she insisted, her voice louder, pointier.

I shook my head and let go of her for just a second to tug my sheet back on center. Then I grabbed her by the shoulders and maneuvered her from the sand into the white bath. The white bath used to be a dairy bath, mostly milk, some yogurt, but researchers at the Church had discovered a toxic quality to milk. If milk was said to nourish the flesh of a human baby, it was bound to be suffocating to the infant ghost. Milk had been outlawed. Now the white bath was flour diluted in water, a passably milky liquid that had to be stirred constantly to keep it from separating into thin, cloudy liquid and a sticky, bottom-dwelling paste.

I hoisted her from under her arms and staggered her over to the white bath, slid her in one leg at a time while she looked up, saying to me over and over again, “Find my mom, ask her, please. Tell her I need my cleats. Don’t forget my cleats. I don’t want to wear my tennies and have Amanda Marcos do an impression of me falling on my butt during the kickoff. Where’s my mom? Is this a doctor’s? What are you doing to me?” Her talk was drawing stares from the other recruits and, worse, from the other processors. I felt their eyes on me like a fever. I had to quiet her before someone else decided that I was a bad worker, a bad worker because I had a bad recruit.

Her naked body projected through the white like pink islands rising out of a thick, blank sea. The flesh quivered, sent slow ripples through the thick. I leaned down, brought my face close to hers, lined up the holes in my sheet with the hole through her ear, and tried to speak as kindly and sweetly as possible. I told her that maybe someone she had once considered her mother had brought her here or maybe not. The idea of her mother was obsolete, it belonged to a doomed world headed cheerily toward total Darkness poisoning. She was lucky to be here with us, lucky to have found a way out of her doomed self. I rubbed her back in small, comforting circles. When I looked into her face for signs of peace and understanding, I saw the small black pupils shrinking in the center of her eye.

“My mother is where?” she asked.

I tried to think of a new way to phrase how alone she was.

“Do I know you from someplace?” she asked even more uncertainly. Her body lurched forth from out of the bath as she tried to see through the sheet holes to find my face. One glistening wet white hand shot under my sheet, grabbed at my bare wrist, and sought around on it, as if she were trying to find my pulse.

“I know I know you,” she said. “Please — from Forest Hills. The condos by the big Wally’s, the one with the bank in it and the ice cream sandwich bar. The condo complex where they just planted all the trees, those little trees that need to be held up with slings and rope. You have to remember me. I saw you there. Getting into your car. Going up to that door. You looked sad. You have to tell my mom to come get me.”

She was full of Dark. The only thing that could come of listening to her was misinformation. What I thought I had lived had been a bad dream originating in a sick body, like the sorts of nightmares you have when you sleep with a high fever. I had always lived here in the Church. Was the name Forest Hills familiar? Was it more familiar than any other name? Was it someplace that I had been, someplace I had slept, someplace I had lived in? Could that have been where C lived, where he used to live, maybe where he still lived today? Sometimes I had the feeling that he was here in the Church, only the building was so large that we had never been in the same place at the same time. A Manager watching me from across the room shook his head slowly, and I knew that I had messed up, stalled the processing, dredged the past up within myself, and Darkened up where everybody could see me.

I looked down at my work as though nothing had happened. I picked up the pitcher for cleansing her internal passage. Darkness sloughed fairly easily from the body’s outer covering, it was sloughing the inside that would take months and months of laborious and intensive Uneating. In a few minutes I would be finished processing her, but she’d still be far from Bright, far from an adequate shell. For that she’d need to reverse her commitment to herself. She’d need to become like Anna, who I could sense as she worked at the other end of the room, executing her cleanings with a quick and rough touch, turning out the new recruits one after another, each one of them bringing her closer to her promised end. I sank my pitcher into the deep, bland white and filled it with white water, warm thick flour water, and I held it up over her head for the pour. I held her chin with my left hand as the white ran down, and I said to her gently: “You were born to Nothing, you were mothered by Nothing, you were fathered by Nothing, you are child to Nothing.” Beneath the thick liquid I could see her blinking, the eyelids fluttering shut and shut again as they tried to keep out the white that would not stop coming.

“Your safety was Nothing, your hopes were Nothing, you made no mark, and any gap you left behind closed up a few hours ago,” I said, feeling inexplicably sad, inexplicably because I had said these words hundreds of times and knew it to be the truth. “You knew nobody, and nobody knew you,” I said, and as I said it I was seeing C’s face horizontal next to mine, in the morning before we had gotten up, his eyes fixing on a freckle, a spot, a stray hair at the corner of my mouth.

“But now we have you. We see through you to the person you always were,” I continued. I squeezed my eyes shut. “The better person. And we will find that person for you, and get them out.”

THAT NIGHT I LAY INthe cot next to Anna as we waited for our checkups. On the other side of the red curtain I could hear the Inspectors wheeling their carts into the curtained spaces to inspect our bodies for ghostliness, pulling aside covers, rearranging the sheetless limbs on their squeaky platforms. Anna was lying down, manufacturing memories unlinked to her past. Her exposed face was waxy and still, her eyes closed, hands folded over her belly. Her mouth tightened and loosened very slightly, sometimes pulling into a short smile, which gave her the look of a child playing at being a funeral corpse.

I was lying on my side, pretending also to manufacture present memories, but what I was really doing was thinking about the girl I had handled earlier that afternoon. I hadn’t felt well ever since I had heard her mouthfuls of fake recognition, her description of that half-fleshed place that was beginning to feel more and more as though it could be C’s apartment complex. C’s neighborhood had always been a bland place — doors, sidewalk, maybe trees or maybe not. The sun went up there, after a while it went down, and the whole time there were cars coming and going and staying still. But as I tried to remember if I had ever been in a place specifically like the one she described, seen that specific girl’s face watching me from the periphery, it all began to feel more possible. Even if I hadn’t been there, I had been someplace so similar that nobody would be able to tell the difference.