You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine Read Online Free PDF

a history as something larger. Such beauty in the lack of ducts or orifices, unitary and complete, impossible to feed it or cause it pain. A pasture full of veal cutlets sitting under the sun, looking eyelessly up.
    I couldn’t do anything for the calves,
he said.
I’m just one man. But I thought to myself: I can do something for these cutlets.
     
    I looked over at C sitting next to me on the couch, his arm slung around my shoulders. He sucked the residue of beer from the top of the can, then ran his tongue along the crevice. C was great at watching TV. He could go for hours and never get that dead look in the face, the one B and I sometimes wore after we’d spent too long in its shifting, hypervivid light. With the remote in his hand and my head in the crook of his arm, he could pull me toward him for a kiss as easily as he could change the channel. From time to time he did this, mouthed me drily without turning his head, and his lips felt gentle on my face, like swabbing the skin with a cotton ball. C was suited to his life and to the historical period within which his life unfolded. He didn’t long to return to a simpler time, or to destroy the current time, or to build a better future. He was a happy camper. This was one of the things that made our relationship work so well: he always assumed I was happy, too, even when I wasn’t. With C, I could sit there and cycle through hurt, anger, sadness, ambivalence, acceptance, all without disturbing the comfortable rapport between us. As a result, he called me easygoing. And at times when the inner corners of my eyes burned and I knew I was about to spill, I had only to look over at him and his utterly normal grin to feel like I had grossly misread my own situation. Then whatever feeling I was feeling would hollow itself out, so that all I felt was that I no longer knew what I felt. “What you’re describing is called ‘satori,’” C would tell me with confidence. “It’s the Buddhist term for happiness, specifically for becoming unburdened. It’s like what we’d call peace. You should learn to embrace it, not think it to death,” he added.
    This is happiness,
I thought as the air-conditioning droned behind me like a single monstrous insect. My face tingled or was falling asleep on one side. I had hoped happiness would be warmer, cozier, more enveloping. More exciting, like one of the things that happen on TV to TV people instead of the calming numb of watching it happen. C’s limp palm was damp with sweat. Beneath it my body hairs trembled in the cold. C liked the temperature the same during the summer as it was in the winter so that he could keep wearing his favorite sweater year-round, a nubbly blue wool that was starting to give out at the elbows. I thought I saw my own breath in the frigid air, but it was probably just dust. I wriggled my shoulders around beneath his arm, trying to generate warmth, and in response he tightened his grip on me, making it harder to stir. I moved my head around, I made small sounds in my throat indicating that I had something to say. I felt sad, then unsad again. Birds settled on the old oak outside the window, settled there and waited and then left. Where had they gone, and were they better there? From indoors, watching the trees outside sag in the heat was like watching television, a little hole in the world that opened onto something entirely unrelated, trapped behind glass.
    “Hey,” I said.
    “Are you there?” I asked.
    “Hmm,” said C.
    I looked back at the TV screen. A large piece of calf was getting chopped and chopped and chopped into smaller, more numerous pieces. It resembled a thing growing out, melting, spreading across the screen.
    “It’s so weird,” I said. “He wanted to keep people from eating veal, and then he ate more of it than anyone.”
    C turned his head to look at me for the first time in a while.
    “Or,” he said, “he wanted to eat it, and that scared him. He interpreted that fear as fear