You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (32 page)

“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 AWAY
to 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?

I tore open the cardboard casing. Hundreds of them looking up at me like dull black eyes. My stomach leapt up as if it were trying to escape through my mouth.

It’s no different from eating a piece of fruit or a chicken nugget,
I told myself. But it was. Now that I knew, the Kakes all tasted of petroleum and soil, vitamin and dirt. I knew that I was eating the food of the dead — mineral, chemical, synthetic. I was no longer a member of the food chain. I was part of something else.

Chris popped up in front of me.

“This is great!” he said. “You’ve really made a full recovery. I think there’s a color in your cheek. You’ll be back to normal in no time! And I’ll take you back to the compound, and we’ll see each other again, every day.”

I felt my stomach buckling already, telling me it was full.
You weakling,
I told it.
You will take this,
I said to my body,
and you will take whatever comes next, and when you’re brimming over you will pack it down to make more room for more. You will pull the food from these objects and build it into me, remake me in edible plastic, turn me fake, too.
It was hard to swallow, and I couldn’t breathe through my mouth anymore: the bitter orange seepage had formed a slick like flypaper at the back of my throat, a sticky cling that grabbed at the things I tried to push past. I closed my eyes and thought about the Kake. I felt for it with my body. I tried to seek out and zoom in on the living portion of it, the caloried portion. The part that had once been hacked off from a plant, then ground, powdered, processed, refined, enriched, and mixed in with all the other crap.

I concentrated on the biting and chewing. My body didn’t want to: it felt like the food was filling me over, pushing against the backs of my eyeballs. 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. I bore down, I tore in. I held my fingers over my mouth to steady the lips and keep the food from reversing. I held the image of the shark in my mind, tearing tearing tearing at the body of a seal.

Chris was talking at me still, spinning out optimistic Eater fantasies of what life would be like for us back in the cult. I stuffed another Kake into my mouth from the case. I was chewing less and less each time, trying to channel the shark. Between chewings I could hear him saying:
You’ll come home with us in the white van, maybe we’ll sit next to each other so I can make sure nobody messes with you. Then the next day we’ll see each other in the corridor, and maybe you’ll speak to me. Or not, if you don’t feel like it, no pressure. But we’ll still have this, this stuff we had today. We can be people together, in secret, pretending that we’re not. We can be people, secretly, until we become ghosts.

He reminded me of someone. As I thought on it, I realized that someone was me — the past me, telling C all about how great our lives would be if we moved in together or took a trip to Puerto Rico. I didn’t want to ruin Chris’s vision of the future. 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. I didn’t want to tell him that I would never go back with him to the Church: I would be going forward, forward by way of getting back to the kind of life I used to have, only this time I’d live it better. I didn’t want to take his imagined situation away just so that he could know something more accurate about his actual situation. Because what I was thinking now, what had come to me like an entirely new thought, was that I could use him. I could make use of him, as normal people made use of other normal people — for love, for sex, for someone to care about your thoughts. He wasn’t the person I had dreamed of being with, but maybe that person could be built from the raw material he contained. I had already tried to escape, to avoid, to negate myself. Now I was ready to try living.

I put a half-eaten Kake down on the concrete beside me.

“Hey, Chris,” I said. “Come here.”

Chris trotted over, helpful as ever. A good employee.

“Do you need help?” he asked, his pink face making a friendly shape.

“No,” I said. “I just need to talk to you.”

I stood up. I put my hand on his shoulder and looked up into his eyes.

“Listen, Chris,” I said. “Do you love me?”

He looked hopeful and confused.

“Or,” I said, “do you think you could?”

“Well,” Chris said thoughtfully, “I think definitely. If you wanted me to.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s good. Do you want to come with me?”

“Sure,” he said, “can do. 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. Okay?”

He looked puzzled again. “Okay,” he replied.

“I’ll call you C,” I said. “For short.”

“Okay,” he said, rubbing his face slowly with the palm of his hand.

I knew he didn’t understand what would be happening to him, but he’d come along anyhow.

“It’ll be wonderful,” I assured him. “You’ll like it.”

This seemed to put him at ease. He smiled at me, a pure and friendly smile, and walked off to continue his pacing.

I picked up my half-eaten Kake, and to my surprise, my mouth watered. I stuffed the half Kake into my slavering center. Over by the door, Chris walked around, wiggling his arms in optimistic motions and talking on about what our life would be like once we got back to the Eaters. He was so far away now, or maybe he just looked distant because we were imagining different things for our future. Standing small there among the boxes of Kandy Kakes that rose like brownish cartoon cliffs around him, he resembled the videos I’d seen of sea lions floating angelically among the kelp, black bodies filmed from below, their shapes cut out in bright sunlight, bodies mistakable for those of a human being. I felt the memory of a shadowy arm around me, a watcher again, sitting there on the couch with my boyfriend, watching the animals become prey. Somewhere there were giant whales feeding on creatures too small to see, pressing them against fronds of baleen with a tongue the size of a sedan. There were polar bears killing seals, tearing ovoid chunks from out of their smooth, round bellies. In the surrounding vastness of the warehouse, I heard something scratching against the concrete floor and knew there were rats here, scraping a thin film of nutrient from the dry packaged matter that surrounded them. Life was everywhere, inescapable, imperative.

ALL MY THANKS TO
Claudia Ballard, Barry Harbaugh, and Cal Morgan for their insight and faith, and to everyone at William Morris and HarperCollins who helped to make this book a reality. I am grateful to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Santa Fe Art Institute, ArtFarm Nebraska, and the hardworking staff of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for giving me community, support, and the gift of time.