You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (14 page)

Maybe Kandy Kat survived like that, from images of eating and images of food. Light consuming light, the desire for sustenance a type of sustenance in itself. Even if he was always paused on the narrow edge of starvation, what he was doing in pursuit of Kandy Kakes sustained him. They made his life terrible, but at the same time they made him more himself.

I WAS SITTING ON THE
floor of Wally’s, in what they called Wally’s Food Foyer, a grand and open and frosty-cool space decorated with gold-framed photographs of food lit lovingly by a large chandelier decorated with bananas and pudding cups and racks of ribs, which hung from the ceiling in the middle of the hall. On this structure, examples of the sale items of the day dangled just out of their customers’ reach. I stood up and readjusted my dress. The ribs suspended in the air over me turned slowly. Artificial light glinted off the corners of the plastic casing, making the meat look shiny and hard. The ribs were like a toy model of ribs that children could play with and pretend to eat.

This DoubleWally’s was the largest grocery store within a thirty-mile radius, larger than the one by our house. Its scale was a matter of repetition. There was an aisle that was only for ketchups and mustards. It stretched red on one side and yellow on the other, two or three brands carving up the wall and reiterating their particular shape of plastic squeeze bottle for many feet. The sprawl of the aisle was a single tessellated surface dented where a few bottles had been removed, revealing a multiplicity of identical bottles behind them. I stood there in the ketchup aisle trying to remember how this place was laid out.

Every Wally’s had a similar feel inside, the interminable rows of smooth color that began to break apart as you got closer to them, dissolving into little squares of identical logos. But the stores had a special trick to them, an organizing concept based on years of statistical data about purchasing preferences, the drift habits of purposeless customers: they were designed to baffle. The most sought-after items — candy bars, sandwich meat, milk — were placed in the most inaccessible parts of the store, not next to one another, but in separate and distant locations that were rotated every one, two, or three weeks in accordance with an obscure schedule developed by top management. Because the things you wanted most were constantly on the move, you couldn’t trust muscle memory to guide you back to them. You moved slowly and cautiously, looking for signs of familiarity in your product surroundings. You followed false links and backtracked and still usually ended up in two or three wrong places before finding the right one. Sometimes you ended up at a different desirable object, peanut butter, for example, and bought it instead, but more often you bought both, and the things in between, following a chain of substitutions and transformed desires until your basket was full. Wally’s customers ultimately spent thirty-six percent more time wandering the aisles than customers of the leading supermarket competitor, which equated to an impressive twenty-two percent increase in unforeseen purchases along the way. You could recognize Wally’s customers by the confused, placid look on their faces as they came to a full stop in the middle of the aisle, gazing wistfully at nothing in particular.

Kandy Kakes used to be in the back right corner of the store, then they were in the far left near the sugar cereals, but that was weeks ago. By now they’d be in the place that Wally Incorporated’s team of programmers, statisticians, and behavioral psychologists had calculated to be the least thinkable location for the statistically average Kandy Kakes consumer. I closed my eyes and tried to think of the place I’d be least likely to think about. I made an empty space in my mind and tried to keep out of it. I let my hands flop open as if I were asleep or had been knocked unconscious. All I could hear inside was the hum of Muzak all around me, familiar sounds with all the words missing.

I opened my eyes to no new clues, no new insights. To my far left, a Wally squatted close to the ground, working at shelving some cartons of raisins. I gave him a long stare to let him know that if he was spying on me, I was spying on him right back. Then I saw that what this Wally was doing was not so much shelving as rearranging, moving the front-most boxes of raisins to the back and vice versa. Most likely B had guessed right: they were trailing me just to keep tabs, make sure I wasn’t going to steal anything. But that gave me an idea. The work that the Wallys seemed to be doing was purposeless, designed only to distract me and obstruct. If everything about Wally’s was designed to thwart me, I would operate as though I had no goal. Against my better instincts, I turned randomly into the maze of aisles and began wandering. It was possible that I would come around to the thing that I wanted most.

The direction I had chosen carried me toward gift items, flowers, and other inedibles. It seemed like an entirely separate store swallowed up and surviving within the belly of a larger beast. I stopped to look at the rack of frill-topped flowers: white, pink, red, and then, more disturbingly, green, blue, neon orange. They clustered to one another like a single growth, blossom crowding blossom so that they looked hard and burstable. I squeezed their puffy heads between my fingers to check if they felt real. The frill of petal looked like the thin red membrane hidden inside the gills of a fish. I would have ripped one apart to see if color went all the way through the bloom, but I heard a voice from behind me, a male voice, so near to me that I immediately thought it had to be C sneaking up on me again, sliding his warm hand up the nape of my neck.

“They’re died,” said the voice.

This seemed like a strange way to say something obvious. I turned around and looked for the source, which sounded familiar and new at the same time.

The speaker was about the same size as C, wide in the shoulders, hair more dark than light. I could tell that he wasn’t C, but when I looked at him I felt the tug of recognition. That feeling alone made him and C blur together in my mind.

“They’re dyed,” he said again. “It’s easy to do, you just need some warm water and food coloring. You put twenty or thirty drops in a glass of water and stir it up, then you chop the bottoms off in a slant. You put the carnations stem down in the water and they drink all the color up. They do it automatically. It’s easy.”

I asked: “Does it hurt?”

He looked confused.

I stared at the flowers. I worried about them, their deaths serving as decoration for birthdays and dinners. I looked at his face, then back at the dying flowers. Then I remembered, all at once, how I knew him. He had light brown hair cut short so that you could see his scalp beneath the little hairs. He had thin skin, smooth as paper, that looked like it would feel clean and easy to touch. He was less handsome than the drawing of him had been and more handsome than he had looked from the car, as we watched him move around inside his condo.

A week after B moved in, she asked me to go on a drive with her. It was the first thing she had asked me since she had shown up, brittle and small boned, hauling her gigantic suitcase up a staircase with three cramped turns in it. B was absentmindedly picking at the upholstery on the armchair where she was sitting, destroying an embroidered peony and staring at me as if she were trying to see all the way through the me of this moment to what the me of the future would say in response.

B drove an old maroon sports car that must once have been a nice object. I tucked my knees up inside the passenger’s-side cabin, where the floor was covered with scraps of paper, torn-out advertisements, photos of faces, and food mingling together, tamped down by the bottoms of shoes. Every time I moved I heard the sound of something squealing in protest, the leather seat or the Styrofoam cups wedged underneath. I couldn’t find a way to sit where I wouldn’t be treading on a picture of something special and saved. B got in next to me and turned the key in the ignition. Hot, itchy air started pouring from the vents, smelling like vintage clothes. She put the radio on and turned it down so low you couldn’t hear anything, only feel it twitching in the air, a slightly human presence. At home she had always seemed hesitant to touch things, use things: even buttering a piece of toast was a gesture that required careful planning, several pauses, and two hands clutching the knife — so it wouldn’t slip, she said. She was the same way in her car, hesitating over the temperature of the air-conditioning, adjusting and readjusting the mirrors, talking aloud through the possible obstacles she might encounter on the way to her destination. But that night B pulled out of the driveway before I could even put my seat belt on.

It was two in the morning and nothing was moving in any of the houses we drove past. I saw the Wally’s on our right, then B took a left into a street with no sign, past a couple of branching roads, toward a dark clod of condos pushed up against each other around an empty cul-de-sac. She parked in front of one of the condos and the headlights shut off, the trickle of radio stopped, and then there was only a thrumming sound taking place within me, the sound of space pressing down on the emptiness inside my head. She took out a cigarette and lit it. It was faint light, but in it I could see the shadows below her mouth where the wrinkles would begin. The photographs on the floor of her car all seemed to point their eyes and mouths in my direction.

I listened to the thrumming, my body idling.

Then I asked: “Is this where he lives?”

She nodded her head up and down. “I like to spend the night with him,” she said.

“I don’t think I’ll be of much help,” I said back.

I looked around, but I didn’t know which of the different identical windows I was supposed to be looking in. The condominium complex was dark and silent. Through the units that were still lit up, I saw bland slices of wall painted cream and ecru, occasionally decorated with objects both boring and useful, clocks and calendars and wall-mounted telephones.

B put her thin hand on mine. It felt like a moist leaf clinging to my skin.

“You already help,” she said to me. “Just by being here, you make it more.”

I had never been able to remember his name, something standardly male like Brendan, Brady, Brian, Bob, but this was definitely B’s ex, larger and more three-dimensional than I’d imagined from the scurrying black shape we used to glimpse behind the venetian blinds on rare occasions. The voice and height and full-on, detailed views of the face were new, but I recognized him by his profile, the haircut, and the anxious sense that I associated with looking at him, a feeling that I was about to get caught. I was closer to him now than I had ever been before, with the exception of the time when he spotted B’s car while we were staking out his grocery shopping one night. He was so furious running up to us that it seemed to me he was moving in slow motion. He had a liter of soda that he was using like a baseball bat, and he brought it down on the hood over and over, shouting in his language that I couldn’t understand, could only listen at the way I would to a recording of humpback whales singing their underwater songs.

“No, it doesn’t hurt them,” he said patiently. “They’re plants. You need a brain and a nervous system to register pain. Pain is a product of thinking.”

He took a can of protein shake from the shelf behind me and popped it open casually. The air filled with a scent like ice cream and laundry detergent. I looked around, expecting to see a Wally coming to discipline one or both of us, but the only one around was watching us from twenty feet away and looked down at his feet when our eyes met.

B’s ex assessed me.

“You must be one of those nutri-terrorists like that veal guy. You have feelings for all the wrong things,” he said conversationally, smiling and taking another sip from his protein drink. “When you’re at the top of the food chain, what it means is you don’t have to worry.”

Now he was sounding like C. Another person explaining the world to me, what things were and were not, and why I was being unreasonable when I failed to keep them distinct. At the same time, when I described the dangerous blurriness that I saw at work around me, they were always failing to notice, always finding a problem in me, in the way my mind ordered or disordered the things around me. “You live in the world you make for yourself,” C would tell me. “Why not make a less precarious world?”

“Who are those flowers for? Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said.

He looked at me strangely.

I didn’t know if I “had” C anymore, if he was still around to be had. I didn’t know if he’d care if he saw me with this guy or what it would take to make him care. B’s ex breathed down on me from above, the air from his mouth smelling of stale cake. It occurred to me that if B’s ex had been interested in B for any of the traits that we shared, he might be interested in me at this moment. Suddenly I found myself wondering if I could have him, too, if I tried. It might help me understand B a little better to put myself in her place, or as close to it as possible. If I tried to lean up on him, watch commercials with him, chew on his thin, sharp-looking mouth. I could ask him about his ex, whether she had been crazy before they dated, or only after, or also during. Maybe then I’d understand whether her encroachment on who I was amounted to intentional or unintentional aggression.

I could feel his body heat from where I was standing, and because he was still a stranger to me, someone seen only from a distance, his temperature was offensively intimate. I was violating some sort of order in being close enough to B’s ex to touch him, after having kept her at a distance from C for the entire time I’d known them. If it was easy for me to take her place, it’d be even easier for her to take mine. Anybody could sit next to C on the couch, watching episodes of terrible TV. Anybody could fit inside the curve of his arm, could cuddle against his front. And I realized the more I found out about this man in the grocery who was watching me back for the first time in my long history of watching him, the more my knowledge and memory converged upon B’s. Just being near him was a form of contamination.