You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

by Alexandra Kleeman

The image of a skeleton key flashed in my mind, heavy and long, made of antique brass with a wide, flat end for the thumb to push against when turning the key in the lock. The key was normal except at the functional end, where it had no teeth, nothing with which to turn the small gears of an inner lock. This was a key that could fit into any lock, a key that could never unlock anything.

The same thing happened when he talked about things he would do to a particular part of my body: the body that emerged from his description seemed to have only three or four parts, linked hazily by what I would assume was more body. Talking about my body in any way took me apart. Afterward I would lie still and try to put myself back together, naming the parts one by one silently, in order, beginning with the small bones of the foot.

A woman’s body never really belongs to herself. As an infant, my body was my mother’s, a detachable extension of her own, a digestive passage clamped and unclamped from her body. My parents would watch over it, watch over what went in and out of it, and as I grew up I would be expected to carry on their watching by myself. Then there was sex, and a succession of years in which I trawled my body along behind me like a drift net, hoping that I wouldn’t catch anything in it by accident, like a baby or a disease. I had kept myself free of these things only through clumsy accident and luck. At rare and specific moments when my body was truly my own, I never knew what to do with it.

If I could look into my insides and poke at them, see them day after day, have control over their color and texture, maybe then I’d feel close to the pounds and pounds of matter that lived within me, in my blind spot.

to want to be a better person. Better people had a surplus of themselves that they were willing to give away, something they could separate out and detach. In me the portions only separated, pulling apart and waiting there for something to happen.

All around me, people were giving feelings and help to one another all the time, as if it were the only thing to do. And I watched these exchanges like a dead thing, a thing sealed off perfectly, a room with no holes in or out.

I wanted to excuse myself before it happened, leave my body behind to field it while I did something else, something completely else. I wanted to return to myself hours later with no real memories, only a vague feeling of having floated. But what I wanted wasn’t something that I could have: my life, the process of living it out, was undelegatable, intransferable. This was an essentially contemporary problem, a problem of supply and demand. I had to solve it the way other problems of scarcity and desire were being solved: by finding something new to want and pursuing that wanting instead. Baby monkeys taken from their mothers will form attachments to fake mothers made of cloth or electrified wire, ducklings with no parents will imprint on a cardboard box with an alarm clock ticking inside of it. Wanting things was a substitute for wanting people, one of the best possible substitutes. I had to leave and find a real Kandy Kake and eat it. I couldn’t stand to be myself around any of these people until it was all done. I looked toward the door. It was the dead center of night.

red became orange, orange turned pink. The colors bled sweetly, like a thing dying softly in the forest alone.

“Don’t you want to be one with yourself? To have a double ownership. To know just once with surety that when you breathe, when you eat, that you are the only one inside you breathing and eating? That you are you, and no one else.”

And most of all it means unremembering yourself: waking like an amnesiac to a world beauteous in its unassociations with pain, worry, strife.

INSIDE A BODY THERE IS no 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.

Recall the parable of the knife: There were two brothers, identical in temperament but divided in spirit, each bearing much enmity toward the other. With their father’s death, they made to split his property equally in half. They were fortunate, for their father possessed two of each thing, every object set next to its twin in his ample abode. They commenced to halve his estate, and the portions were made exact—but for a single carving knife that had no partner. The two argued bitterly over this knife, whether to share it in increments of time or split blade from hilt and go their separate ways. Finally, proffering the knife’s edge to the throat of his sibling, the eldest suggested that he would take possession of the knife in its physical manifestation, while the younger might count himself the owner of the knife’s intangibles: its sharpness, form, and afterlife. They quickly parted ways, the eldest mounting his horse and pointing himself toward the village, while the younger lay supine, bleeding his life out at the side of the road. But the bargain was in the younger man’s favor after all: while the eldest prodded dully at supper with his lump of inherited matter, the younger lived far better in heaven with his knife at his side, singing knife-songs to the heavenly gathering and putting holes in the angels, one by one.

What occurred to me then as I crouched on the warehouse floor, my mouth full, was that living wasn’t a matter of right or wrong or ethics or self-expression. There was no better way to live, or worse. It was all terrible, and you had to do it constantly.

You needed a vision of the future in order to get anywhere; you couldn’t live life thinking you were always about to fall off a cliff.

Where are we going?” “Someplace nice,” I said. “Normal. We can live in a house with a roof and a kitchen, surrounded by neighborhood. We’ll both get jobs. We’ll never talk about them. We’ll watch TV together, things like that.