You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman Read Free Book Online

malls five towns over, malls that were not their own but resembled their own to an uncanny degree. They would return to familiar stores like the Gap and try to buy khakis with little scraps of paper that they had collected from obscure places. They sat on the mall benches and closed their eyes, waiting for someone to claim them. Often they wore clothes identical to the ones they had disappeared in, identical but fresh smelling, as if they had been laundered or even bought new in the same sizes and colors. They were confused and quiet, preferring to stare off into the distance or fiddle with a key chain instead of engaging with those around them, those who asked them gently:
Are you lost? Is your family looking for you? Do you have a number we can call?
When questioned about their disappearance, whether they left or had been taken, who had taken them, did they remember his face, height, manner of dress, was it someone they knew from work, from home, from the bowling league, from the auto repair shop, was it many people, an organization, a religious group, a band of criminals, a league of sexual predators, the missing dads reproduced, with slight variations in phrasing, a single sentence:
Sometimes you’ve just got to be content with things the way they are.
    The emptiness of C’s apartment reminded me of those missing fathers. The place was nice the way car dealerships are nice: clean, spacious, cold, and full of light. He owned two of the same self-assembled couches and three identical self-assembled end tables, the cheapest model they made. They were all arranged in his living room, the couches side by side gaplessly and facing forward to the television set, the end tables pushed together in front of them to form a single, long, low table from which you could eat food if you hunched over and lowered your jaw almost to your knees. From the door, you could see the living room, kitchen, and a chunk of bedroom splayed before you like a blueprint of someplace an engineer had once thought might be all right to live in. I took a few steps forward and the bedroom came into view, a full-sized mattress on the floor with navy-blue sheets and a wad of comforter. Next to it, a laptop blinked drowsily.
    “Did you just move in?” I asked, hoping that he had.
    C laughed. “People always ask that. I’ve been living here two years. Two and a half, really,” he added.
    “Where do you keep your things?” I asked, and he gestured all around us.
    C did graphic design for a small advertising agency, but this had almost nothing to do with his life. He left for work around eight thirty or nine in the morning and returned unchanged, with few memories of where he had been. If I asked about his work, he seemed surprised to be reminded of it, then annoyed. “If you want to talk about dead-end jobs,” he’d say sometimes, “why don’t you talk about your own?” and I would respond to this by saying nothing at all. I pictured him as a hot-air balloon, saggy and bright, tethered to the earth by three or four flimsy ropes. The person who lived in this bare, depressing, anonymously furnished apartment was about one taut rope from falling off the face of the earth, I decided.
    “Are you one of those people who acts normal, but is secretly about to chuck their lives and disappear?” I asked. If that were the case, I wasn’t going to waste my time getting to know him. I knew that we’d be dating for a while, at least, when he laughed several times, loudly, and kissed me for what was then the third or fourth time ever.
    “Yeah, right. No way. Neither are you,” he said. “I’ve seen that on TV, those dads, and it is nuts. No way. Everything’s worked out great for me since whenever, I don’t have any plans to make it complicated. Besides, I’m attached to my material goods.”
    What material goods?
I wondered. Then I followed the arc of his arm pointing to a location across the room. He had been referring to his collection of DVDs, heaps