Alexandra Kleeman - You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

We did better in the next room, windowless and dim and where the walls were just walls, not twinnings of our single selves. We learned to stand in a line without looking back and forth at one another and to do the simple kick pattern and then a more complicated kick pattern, right leg left, left leg right, right leg right left right. These musical numbers were supposed to require a lot of spinning and place swaps so that it would be more difficult for the player to spot his partner amid our shifting forms, but we weren’t very good at spinning or swapping. We got dizzy. They modified the routine so that it included more arm gestures, especially gestures that would obscure our faces while emphasizing the mood of the song, but we still had to spin some and the dizziness was like a long, billowy fabric that fluttered out beautifully at first, filling the air with motion and color, until suddenly it caught up to itself, snagged, and drew tight around us like a noose.

I looked out across at twenty-four other decoy girls practicing their routine, putting their arms out like airplanes for the first turn, holding on to themselves for balance or comfort as they entered the series of tricky steps that would weave them in and out of the line, around and behind one another, shuffling like cups in a magician’s trick. They clutched at their own shoulders, trying to hoist their bodies upright, but still they swayed. We can’t help it. We are all, apparently, so weak. The choreographers told us that we were going to have to improve: they couldn’t have one contestant dancing like a normal adult woman and forty-nine decoys flopping around like invalid children in a beginner’s dance class. I tried to bring my chin up in a way that I thought could possibly look elegant, like an expensive lamp covered in gold and painted flowers and slender, breakable parts that extended off from the side.

The spinning girls spun before me, their bodies rigid, their arms out like little white spokes. I was spinning, too, spinning and weaving, and I heard the sound of their spinning and of my breath loud in the center of the skull. I heard them fall and pick themselves back up, the sounds softer than you’d expect, their bodies light like dolls. I heard little cries escaping their mouths when they thudded onto the floor and I saw them straighten their backs and begin spinning again and again. I craned my neck up toward the ceiling overhead and saw the fluorescents bearing down on us all, brighter than us and cleaner, too, like the floor of a hospital smelling of bleach and lemon grove. And then I fell, too, my eyes brimming over with light.

THE REAL JESUS ONCE SAID: “If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.” His first argument is that WE BEGIN DIVIDED . His second argument is that WHAT IS DIVIDED CANNOT BE RECOMBINED . What he did not say, whether it was for lack of adequate time or preparation, was that a person, self-divided, partitioned and full of doubt, will fall unless they are able to force that rebel element from its foreign home.

What has the human body, in its infinite wisdom, done with the appendix, a dark organ, a wormlike sac fixed parasitically to the intestine? It has choked it gradually over thousands of years. Most scientists agree that the appendix used to be a sort of internal sibling nestled in the bodies of our predecessors — a sightless, speechless homunculus capable of counteracting the better thoughts of its host. In Jesus’ time every citizen would have sheltered one in their guts.

FEED YOUR LIGHT. DWINDLE YOUR DARKNESS.

KEEP EATING THE KAKES!

I lay in my cot listening to tonight’s Church lesson over the loudspeaker, thinking about the lesson, trying to understand why this lesson and why today, what is it trying to tell us about our current situation? If we decoys were unable to stand, if we happened to fall continually, did it mean we were divided houses? If we were, as the choreographers told us, the worst dancers they had ever seen, did it mean that other people, people on the outside, were more whole than us? That they had done a better job of dwindling their Darkness and that they had done it all on their own, without needing the Church, because they were simply better at being people?

The guest host was the actress from those commercials I used to hate, where they reveal her hiding like a skull beneath the skin of that nice lady who just wants a smoother, more radiant face. She showed up with two bodyguards and learned the musical routine in twenty minutes flat. She had wide cheekbones like a human cat. She was blond and about as pretty as she had looked on-screen, pretty in a pushy way: all of her features seemed to tell you she was attractive before you had a chance to gauge it yourself. I could tell she was curious about us, wondering why we weren’t more curious about her. My body didn’t hold curiosity for very long now: questions took hold briefly, tensed my muscles as they passed through, and relaxed them as they leaked away. But I looked at her stretching on the warm-up mat, drinking from a plastic water bottle. She looked like someone about to go for a jog, not someone about to smear her face all over other people on a TV game show. I walked to the other side of the room, where she lay on her back, holding her stiff, straight leg and pulling it across her body.

I looked down at her for a few seconds.

“Are you nervous?” I asked.

The beautiful actress from all those movies sat up and smiled at me.

“It’s a piece of cake,” she said. “All I have to do is dance around a little and look like myself.”

I wanted to ask her why it was so easy for her to do this, how it could be so simple to try to be like yourself. I asked: “Aren’t you worried about what could happen to you in a crowd of decoys? You could get lost.”

“No,” she said, laughing. “It’s just a game of ‘who wore it best.’ Almost every time, I’m the one who wins. The only thing that’s weird here is you’re the only person paying any attention to me. Where are all you guys from? Did you grow up under rocks? In a third-world country? Were you homeschooled?”

I looked at her, and then I walked back to my side of the room, where all the decoy girls were busy sitting around. When I walked up, a flicker of recognition took hold of their faces. Then it passed.

LITTLE BRUSHES EKE AWAY ATmy skin, leaving trails of color. They feel like insects on me, landing on me, dragging their light, stiff limbs across my face and lips and eyelashes. Insects of all different shapes, softnesses, teeming across my surface as though I were plant or soil. I felt everything but couldn’t move. I opened my eyes and my face was different, I closed them and it all went black again. Each time I raised my eyelids, my face was two steps removed from what it had been before. I was a series of photographs of different, unrelated people, a yearbook that didn’t even belong to me.

Someone put a palm on my forehead, the way a mother might check for fever, their hand cool and slippery. Then they pressed down hard, pushing my head back while another hand forced it forward. A scraping rim around the perimeter and a sound like crushing grass. I opened my eyes and another person’s hair sat on top of my own, slipping slightly atop my slicked-down head. Now there was blond hair all around my face, touching my cheek, touching my neck, clinging down across my forehead. The hair was stiff, almost pointy. It bounded me on all sides, like a tiny room.

The blond actress came up behind me and gave me a sort of hug. She stayed there, her face above my face, her hair mixing into the hair of my wig and merging with it, making us look for a moment like a single monster creature that could be happy and sad at the same time. “Looking good,” she said, beaming at me from the face that belonged to her. I felt for a second like she remembered me, but then she moved on and did it to another girl, and another girl after that.