You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (3 page)

That fall we moved to a new school district forty-five minutes from our old house, and our new neighborhood was greener and wetter than the last one, with more space between the houses. Everyone was a stranger, and in the afternoons I’d go out to the woods behind our house and upend rocks and logs to see what was underneath. Underneath there was a basement smell and the wood blackly wet had a softer texture, like damp velvet. I’d flip the log over and watch what was underneath scatter: black beetles with a permanent shellac to their hard casings, ants of different shades of brown and red, earthworms and shortened white worms with no eyes or faces. With a twig or long blade of stiff grass I prodded at them, rolling the worms in the rich dirt, herding a beetle over to a dark divot into which large black ants disappeared into the earth. I tried to feed the small insects to the larger ones. I wanted them all to mix, to struggle, to show me in real time what it meant to live and die.

I found an earthworm half-submerged in watery soil, where it was being eaten by a larval dragonfly. The worm was larger and stronger, its body a single muscle twisting out of the water and flopping back, failing. It struggled, pulling its long body into small arcs and spirals, and this meant nothing to the larva that worked calmly to chew a hole into one of its ends, releasing a thin, cloudy white trail hovering in puddle water.

I left my room and went into the kitchen, where B sat looking at the fridge.

“I don’t know what I feel like eating,” she said to me.

“Maybe you want a sandwich?” I suggested. “I can make you a sandwich.”

The sandwiches I made B were white bread, condiments, deli cheese, no meat. B claimed meat was hard to digest, but I think she just didn’t want the calories inside her. Instead of cutting off the crusts, I squished the sandwich down with my palm to make of it a sort of edible coaster. This was a way of tricking B into thinking there was less food in it. Then I slid it on a plate, cut it diagonally, and handed it over to her. I’d make my own sandwich while, out of the corner of my eye, I watched her pull it apart, remove the cheese, scrape out the fat white center of the bread, and throw it away, leaving only the mayonnaised crusts to chew on.

“No, too much,” she said. “I don’t want to overeat when it’s so hot out. What were you going to have?”

“A sandwich,” I said.

B stared straight forward, chewing on her lip as she thought it through. Finally she announced: “Let’s have Popsicles.”

Popsicles came in a fifty-pack and were bright with artificial coloring, though there were only three flavors: red, pink, and orange. B loved them, this stuff that was more like a color than a food, loved to eat them day or night as she drank the lemon-scented vodka from the freezer. Since she had moved in, I had been eating more Popsicles and less of everything else. Her habits were contagious. I could only guess at how many boxes she went through each week from the plastic cups full of Popsicle sticks, cigarette butts, and sunset-colored liquid that I found in the living room when I returned home. One time I asked her why she ate so many of these when she wouldn’t eat even a scoop of ice cream. She brought the box and explained that even though they tasted like juice, they were made of something better. Each Popsicle contained about fifteen calories, and you could burn almost that many just by eating them with vigor. “They erase themselves from your body,” she said as I pulled the box closer to my face to peer into the fine print.

B came from the kitchen and handed me a Popsicle, the waxy wrapper caked with frost, and we crawled out the window onto the roof the way we were used to and sat out there with the summer heat pressing down on our arms and legs from above. Sweat beaded on the surface of our skin and felt creaturely, like many legs ready to be set in motion.

Our Popsicles were identical orange, and each was a conjoined twin, bound in the center with sticks projecting from both halves. A navel orange is something similar, the navel another separate fruit attempting to grow within the base of the first, impacted on all sides, turning dry, infertile, and tasteless as a result. The fruits are seedless, and new plants grow only through cutting and grafting, which means that all are essentially clones of one another. I had just maneuvered myself over to the spot on the roof where I liked to sit, where I could see into my room and also into the kitchen next door and the living room across the street where they had the crazy dog, but B had already stripped hers down and was digging in, biting at it first and then holding its peak in her mouth to soften. Sucking sounds came from her mouth as the orange slick pooled around her teeth. She was working at it as though she hadn’t eaten for days. Except for the Popsicles, tea, cigarettes, and sloppy cocktails made out of the lemon-flavored vodka that someone had left in our freezer after a party, B didn’t really eat. Maybe she was saving her stomach for something that didn’t yet exist. I looked over at the house across the street and tried to spot the dog as I tore at my Popsicle wrapper, gummy on the inside from Popsicle juice, juice coloring my hands as I tried to pull the Popsicle from its skin.

A bright heat trembled all around us as we ate them, our faces sheening with sweat. Sounds of lawn mowers and birds hung like chains in the quiet air. I favored one side of the Popsicle over the other so that I could finish it first and have a normal, single-stick Popsicle to work on. Sweat ran down my forehead and into my eye. Then there was the sound of an engine growing louder, harsh in the heavy afternoon, and we saw the neighbor’s car coming slowly up the street. The man was driving, and his wife and daughter were in the car, too. B stopped licking to watch the car pull into the driveway across the street, and when she looked down again and noticed her Popsicle dripping, she crawled all over the roof looking for ants to drown in the sticky bright syrup. She hunched over them, dangling the last nub of it above, turning the stick in her fingers to make it drip more evenly. The ants struggled for a bit, and when they had stopped, others came to feed minusculely on the orange slick.

I shuffled over on my knees to see them more closely, the dying ones and the ones not yet dying, many trying to eat up the stuff that had killed the others. The live ants looked like they might be distressed, or maybe just excited: I wanted to know which. I hung close above one group, casting my shadow over their swarming, and I waited to see some sign that would tell me whether they were caring for one another or just eating. B had lost interest in the ants, but she was looking at me now with intensity.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“The ants,” I said. “They’re dying. Then I thought some of them were coming to help, but actually I think they’re trying to eat the syrup.”

“That’s kind of morbid,” said B.

“I don’t understand why you try to kill them,” I said. “They never come into the house. And when you kill them this way, it leaves sticky spots all over the roof. We’ll have to clean it someday.”

“They die in sugar,” she replied matter-of-factly. “It’s the best possible death for an ant.”

A strange noise came from nearby, and we both stood up to see better. From the house across the street with the expensive-looking hydrangeas and the novelty mailbox shaped like a barn, the house where they had the crazy dog and the daughter who took ballet lessons on Tuesday and Thursday and Friday, three figures were filing out through the front door. Each one wore a large plain white sheet over its body, with holes cut out where the eyes would be. The largest figure helped the second-largest down the front steps, while the smallest struggled out on its own, stepping all over the dragging corners of its oversize veil.

B and I watched our neighbors shuffle in sheets toward the family sedan. The husband opened the passenger’s-side door for the wife, then walked all the way around the car to open the driver’s-side rear for the little girl, tiny under her white covering. Then he walked back up the front steps and into the house. We watched the door for what must have been a long time. Birds fought in the dark interior of the juniper bushes over things that we did not comprehend. The smaller body fidgeted in the backseat of the sedan. The father returned, carrying an aerosol can that turned out to be spray paint, cherry red. He stood in front of the garage door and in large sagging block letters he spelled out:

HE WHO SITS NEXT TO ME,

MAY WE EAT AS ONE

The ghost man looked down at his can of spray paint like someone wondering what he had just done and whether he had done it all correctly. Then he set it down on the driveway and got into the car. There was the sound of the engine starting up, the tires grinding against stray rocks, and then they were gone. They had left the front door open.

B and I stared at the emptied house for a while, then she turned and climbed back inside, stepping over the puddles of Popsicle juice and dead ants. I squinted at their house, a drop of sweat settling onto my eyelashes and making me blink. Through the front windows I could see corners of their furniture, covered over in still more swaths of white fabric. It looked like a room about to be professionally fumigated or painted, some mundane sort of transformation. I sat there for maybe a half hour watching the empty house for whatever might happen next. But nothing happened next. When the ants started crawling over me, I brushed my body off and went back in through the window. I was still hungry when I got back to my room. I stared at the knot of hair for a while before I turned on the smaller TV in my bedroom, the one I watched when I didn’t want to watch near B.

The TV was showing another commercial for Kandy Kakes. This commercial was one of the newer series of ads that mixed animated and live-action components. In this new series, Kandy Kat would often successfully chase down or otherwise achieve contact with the snack cakes, but the cakes were pictured as live-action, three-dimensional objects while the cat was always a flat cartoon. The gag each time was that no matter how hard he tried, Kandy Kat could never put a Kandy Kake down his throat: the two types of matter were fundamentally incompatible. This went along with an advertising campaign centered around the point that Kandy Kakes were made of Real Stuff. Maybe not natural stuff, but definitely genuine three-dimensional material from our physical universe that was similar to us in ways that it might not be to bodies from a cartoon world.

In this commercial, Kandy Kat walks wobbily through a cartoon landscape full of dancing trees. The trees are shaking their middles and singing the Kandy Kakes jingle, as little birds play bells and maracas in their branches. You can see every rib on Kandy Kat’s brownish body as he wobble-skips through the woods, having what appears to be a pleasant day. He looks fairly carefree, oblivious to his hunger and to the words being chanted all around him by the living trees — when suddenly he happens upon a plate of Kandy Kakes sitting in a clearing in the middle of the forest, three-dimensional and super-real among the painted foliage, glowing with a sparkly light that is not real, not cartoon, but something in between. In rapid sequence, he spasms through shock, surprise, delight, disbelief, delight again, and then crippling hunger. His ribs throb. And when he reaches out for the platter, you actually see his emaciation in motion: the skin sags a little off the forearm, the bones and tendons of the arm show starkly with a little drop shadow under them to heighten the effect. His eyes grow larger and whiter in their huge cartoon sockets. At this moment, I want so badly for him to just take one of those revolting Kakes and shove it all the way into his belly, anything, anything to anchor his body a little bit.

But when his hand finally reaches the plate and grabs for a Kandy Kake, none of the Kakes will budge. It’s hard to describe. It looks like Kandy Kat’s hand is touching them through the glow, but they aren’t affected at all. It’s not like they’re a photo, but more like they’re impossibly heavy so he’ll need something else to move them. So Kandy Kat runs out of the frame and gets a comically large fork and he aims it at the plate and stabs down, but the fork seems to just pass through them as though they’re made of nothing, and Kandy Kat stabs more slowly and then picks the fork up and looks at it, confused. Then he runs back out of the frame and returns with an ax, which just does the same thing — nothing — no matter how many times he hacks away at the plate. Meanwhile the forest is getting pretty torn up. And when he runs back out of the frame and comes back he’s got tons of dynamite, which he sets up all around the Kakes and detonates in a huge explosion that turns all the trees and birds black, with little white eyes blinking in stunned disbelief. The platter of Kakes glows more handsomely than ever against this scorched background, and finally Kandy Kat just yanks his mouth open with his two hands, painfully wide with a cracking sound, and jumps mouth-first onto the plate and the Kakes, trapping their glow inside his mouth as he lies on the forest floor.

His mouth is kind of suctioned to the ground now, and he struggles, very carefully, to close it, drawing the lips together, biting into the soil to prevent any precious morsel from being left behind, and he closes slowly on a mouthful of dirt and plate and Kakes. He stands up, shaking, his mouth full. There are big bite marks in the cartoon soil where his teeth have gouged away at the earth. And — tentatively — he bites down.

It doesn’t even make a sound.

Confusion shows on his face, and he bites again, and again, more rapidly: nothing. Then, stretching his throat out to the appropriate width, he tries to swallow the plate whole, again and again, nothing. Finally, disheartened, he spits out the plate, the Kakes perfect and intact, still with that weird magical glow on everything, though now the glow has something smug about it. Kandy Kat looks toward the screen and his eyes have a new wetness to them. KANDY KAKES, the screen reads. REAL STUFF. REAL GOOD.

I looked down at my body as if for the first time. I felt fear wadding up the swallowing part of my throat. I reached down and put my hand on my stomach. I thought about the little swaddled girl in the back of the four-door sedan, so limp and still that she could have been a heap of dirty laundry. I wondered what happened to their dog. There was a bruise on my left thigh that I’d never seen before, and I was hungrier than I’d ever been. On the television screen, the evening news returned from commercial. There had been breakthroughs in the preliminary testing of a new anticancer drug designed to heighten the immune system’s sensitivity to familiar somatic cells growing at abnormal rates. Half of the animals used in testing showed greatly reduced growth for tumors and other unusual structures, as well as a reduction in the number of new abnormalities. The other half died.