You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

by Alexandra Kleeman

Inside a body there is no light. A massed wetness pressing in on itself, shapes thrust against each other with no sense of where they are. They break in the crowding, come unmade. You put your hand to your stomach and press into the softness, trying to listen with your fingers for what’s gone wrong. Anything could be inside. It’s no surprise, then, that we care most for our surfaces: they alone distinguish us from one another and are so fragile, the thickness of paper.

I liked letting noise from the neighborhood leak into my sleep and begin turning things real. I liked it, except when I hated it, hated how close the houses were to each another, hated that the first outdoor thing I sighted each morning was my landlady’s swollen face as she poked her head out the door to grab the newspaper. She lived below us, but from certain angles she could see straight up into our unit.

I wished that C could be here to tell me as he often did that people were nuts, even the people who you loved, and that therefore it was fair to keep them at a distance, even fairer the more you felt for them.

There’s a kind of pressure that your own life muscles onto you, to do something just like you would do, to behave just like yourself. We had both gotten so used to me being stronger, reasonable, and having the resources to yield that I yielded by default, the idea of my own strength making me the weaker one.

He was a graceful consumer: he could consume without being consumed in turn.

We were behaving exactly like people behaved, there was nothing wrong that I could name, but for some reason I wasn’t feeling that unalone feeling you were supposed to have when you were with someone else.

For C, it was possible to get along with me even if I, for my part, was not getting along with him. It was lonely being the only one who knew how I was feeling, to not be stored in the mind of someone else who could remind you who you were.

went to the bathroom to see if there was anything going on with my face. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and registered the discrepancy between how I had looked last afternoon and how I looked now. In this way I measured the amount of life that had been extracted from me by loving someone, in person, face-to-face. I gauged the minus value by the dullness of my skin, the streaky, patchy black around my left eye, the miscellaneous redness that came from rubbing my face against C’s stubble as it increased in length and bristliness hour after hour.

Sometimes a face could be so simple: even a couple of dark spots on a lighter surface or a dark oval in the distance might be a face. An electrical socket could be a face, a mailbox or a couple of punctuation marks could congeal suddenly into something with an expression. Our faces, on the other hand, were made of hundreds of different parts, each part separate and tenuous and capable of being ugly, each part waiting for a product designed to isolate and act upon it. Every time I looked at my face, I seemed to find another new piece to it, floating there next to or underneath or inside the others, all the parts together but impossible to connect.

They didn’t want the gift-curse of recognition by those they loved and who loved them back, one consequence of that love’s durability being that they would be recognized and loved aggressively even on days when they couldn’t stand to recognize themselves in the mirror, even on days when merely remembering themselves made them sad and want to sleep. Love that made every day a day that they had to live in a handcrafted, artisanal fashion, rather than being outsourced to someone who could do it happily and efficiently for a third of the price.

Besides which, it was a challenge for me to compose erotic messages. I always got lost in the parts of speech: if I wanted something involving one particular part of his body, I had trouble not using the preposition “with,” telling him to do something “with” it, or else I would be telling him to “put” it someplace. Both structures made the part eerily passive, something he could pick up and set down and use or not use, like a hammer or a telephone.

If you were a person, you were supposed 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. I could see what it was that I could give B, but I couldn’t really give it. In fact, I wanted to keep it for myself, to take it and run.

decided that it had to do with the thinness of the present. At any given present moment a person was doing one thing, maybe three things. They were lying down, and they were reading a sentence, and possibly they were thinking about what they were doing. Or they were reaching for someone’s shoulder, and noticing a mole on someone’s back, and feeling their own breath leave their chest. Any piece of time is lonely and pale in isolation, and moments resemble other moments, so that sometimes you feel that you are a memory being called to mind by someone else.

I saw him look to the TV screen as soon as we had spent too long doing the same thing, and I thought I recognized something in him that I had seen in myself. He was thickening the moment by laying fantasy upon reality upon fantasy. Any two people stuck to each other in the present made for a wasteland. He was repopulating the act so that we would not be so alone in it together.

Wanting things was a substitute for wanting people, one of the best possible substitutes.

Loving someone was no guarantee of how they would treat you. All it did was raise the stakes.

It all smelled like beauty products, that anonymous female scent that we rub onto ourselves to blend into a wet, aggregate femininity, to smell like a person but not like any person in particular.

I fantasized sometimes about an inverse pornography in which all that mattered was what was going on within what appeared to be a successful fucking. Everything would look the same, flat and happy, but as a viewer I would know that one of them felt an uncomfortable friction that they were concerned would turn into a rash, the other was worried about their unbalanced relationship, not sure what to think about or focus on, wishing they were fucking someone more energetic and distracting even if it was all staged. These innards would be exposed in a voice-over recorded by the actors directly after filming and spliced into the video during postproduction. You would know all the things that the body, in its busy activity, kept hidden.

For as long as I could remember, there had been something going wrong in me: I did what I didn’t want to do, I wanted to do things that I knew I didn’t really want at all. Something in me did wrong when I needed to do right: the man who had fled was just the first person to see this in a tangible, physical way.

“The Dads usually burn out early,” she whispered. “Nobody knows why. Some people think it’s because they can’t shed their memories properly. They’re too tied to the things they were responsible for, the things they owned. Even though that’s what they came here to escape.”

With my butt sliding around on the leather-print plastic of the seats, I feel just like a child again, safe in the understanding that anything bad that were to happen to me would be someone else’s responsibility. Maybe that was the secret to happiness, I thought, being free of the responsibility of yourself.