Alexandra Kleeman: You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

The camera angle changed, and there was a pale swipe on the screen, some shape moving in the blur, painfully white but stained by shadow. The blur convulsed and suddenly its edges were there, cutting the shape of a creature out from its background. A haunch collapsed inward, dark in the hollow and skinny like a dog. Above it a section that reminded me of moonlight passed through the gaps of a venetian blind, carving strokes of bright out from a dark room. The mass came into view, then blurred back out, the focus continually changing as if the cameraperson couldn’t decide whether it should be on-screen or off-. I looked hard at it. It was the color of natural wax, pale and creamy. It had shadows in places, strewn through its smoothness. Then I saw. Those were ribs. That was the jut of a hip bone. It was a whole human body: female, naked, holding its arms out as though waiting for an embrace.

“That’s my body,” I said to myself, and then I realized that I was starving.

IN A DREAM YOU SAW A DOOR AND YOU REJOICED:

IT WAS THE SEEING, NOT THE DOOR,

THAT YOU CONSUMED

BLESSED IS THE MAN WHO WEARS A

FACE NOT HIS OWN TO SAVE HIS BODY

FROM TOUCHING THIS WORLD

AND CURSED IS THIS FACE, AND THE ONE BENEATH:

LIKE THE SOLE OF THE FOOT IT WILL BLACKEN

YOU ARE THE ONE WHO DID THIS TO YOU

TAKE YOUR OWN LIFE FOR EXAMPLE

IT MAY BE HELPFUL TO PICTURE THEM WATCHING

THEIR FAVORITE TELEVISION PROGRAMS

WHILE NOT THINKING ABOUT YOU

A PERSON IS JUST A BABY GHOST

CONSIDER THOSE WHO THINK OF YOU IN THIS WAY,

AND THE GHOST OF YOU THAT IS MADE

GET THERE FASTER:

BE YOUR OWN GHOST

“Chris,” I said, “I need to eat something right away.”

He looked at me sadly. He said nothing. I had to push him harder.

“Chris,” I said, “look at me. I look like people who are about to die.”

“You mean you’re going to get ghosted?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Or maybe,” I said, reconsidering. “I thought so. But this isn’t loosing my perfected ghost unto the world. It’s just ordinary dying.”

He looked like he was about to disappoint me. His face had a downward thrust.

“Our food’s all decoy,” Chris told me. “It’s all idea. It’s made to nourish the ghost. Nobody anticipated having a use for real food here. We’re a Wallybaffle.”

I looked over at a pair of plastic-wrapped pork chops. Something had pooled in the lower-right corner of the Styrofoam tray, and I poked it. It was replica meat runoff, stiff and made of plastic. I hadn’t noticed because all of it was wrapped in plastic already, and also I wasn’t really an expert on food either, anymore.

“Plus, all a ghost needs is the Food Idea, you know. And we have lots of that around,” he said, pointing at the aisles and aisles of fake plastic cookies, fake plastic chickens, fake plastic fruit.

“Do you have food breaks?” I asked. “With real food?”

“We have one at the compound once we get back,” he said hesitantly.

He paused.

“And we have one while we’re here,” he said, brightening slightly. He hadn’t figured out what I was driving at.

“And where does the food come from?” I asked.

He looked around, confused.

I looked toward the front of the store, where the checkout Wallys sprayed down and wiped their product conveyors with what I was now certain was fake water. I looked toward the back, where there were rows and rows of stock untouched, replete, not being messed about with by anyone. I headed back there. As I walked, the aisle closed in around me: my shoulders knocked against the shelves, the ceiling came down until I could reach up and touch it if I wanted to, but I didn’t want to. I came to a wall painted like a half-scale supermarket. This was why nobody was doing anything at the back of the store: there was no back of the store. Just smooth surface and a little scene that I, with my clumsy, heavy, long-boned body, would never fit into. I ran my fingertips all over the hard surface of the wall, looking for a nick or button.

Then a piece of the painted world slid open, and we walked through.

SOME ANIMALS TAKE THEMSELVES AWAYto a private place to die, into the forest or under a raised wooden deck constructed of weather-treated pine. Are there animals that seek out the most public place to die, the greatest number of eyes to watch them lie down, roll over, stiffen? Is it true that all living creatures feel the instinct to survive, or are there ones that don’t, only we know nothing about them because they die so swiftly, in utter silence, before they can be seen and recorded?

I was slumped, my back to the wall, looking out at the warehouse stacked floor to ceiling with large boxes of Kandy Kakes, which were themselves filled with smaller boxes of Kandy Kakes, which contained Kakes on Kakes on Kakes. In a cartoon these stacks would have teetered above us, but this was real and so they stood there, stretching upward like hard geometric trees. Now that I knew there was something wrong with me, and how wrong it was, each part of my body began its own respective panic. It felt as though all the bits of myself were fleeing to different corners of this gigantic room. In the empty space at the center, I waited for a better idea, but there was none. I couldn’t do anything without a good strong impulse to survive, and what there was of that desire belonged to the bit of ghost I felt rattling around in my chest: my ghost, which had nothing to do with me, which resembled me not at all, which wanted me to be gone, obliterated, so that it might be free to be its absolute nothingness with absolute abandon.

Chris was milling about, looking worried. He kept trying to talk to me.

“Don’t you want to go back to the store area?” he said. “I can find you some really nourishing decoy food,” he said, “to feed your ghost. Fake chicken soup?” he asked. “Fake instant mashed potatoes?”

I was like the Kandy Kakes commercial where Kandy Kat just sits on the floor, starving and wasting away and staring straight out into empty space as the dust settles in his open mouth, coating his tongue. I was like that neighbor lady that everyone thought was a hoarder but who turned out to have almost nothing, just a TV and an antique bedroom set, in the apartment where she died alone of pancreatitis.

“I’m really worried,” Chris said, looking really worried. “You don’t look like you’re thriving. Maybe you should eat one of these Kakes?”

“I dunno,” I said. “I’ve had so many and I’m still going to die. I thought I would be fat by now, I thought they’d accumulate. I don’t understand. I’ve been eating Kakes all day, every day. I should be fat.”

Chris squinted at the back of a case.

“It’s real,” he said. “A bunch of chemicals, plus some flour and aspartame,” he said.

“What about the sugar?” I asked. “The lard?”

He leaned close to read the fine lettering.

“The Choco Armor,” I said. “The Candy Shrapnel. The fudge crust. The caramel-orange syrup core.”

“No,” he said. “Just chemicals, flour, aspartame, and some food-grade plastic.”

I pushed myself to my feet. I read the label. Only sixty-five calories per serving, and a serving was two Kakes. I guessed it was a cost-saving strategy: real fat had to come from somewhere, and it took time and energy and money to squeeze the living oil from living things. Dead matter, on the other hand, was abundant and cheap. It was everywhere. Our world was made of it: life clung only weakly to its surface. How much energy was it taking me to squeeze those calories from these dead chunks of stuff? And if I ate enough of them as quickly as I could, more quickly than I could, might I maybe outrun this starvation, this steady ghosting of my body? Could I eat my way back into my own face?