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

of the act, then used that more acceptable fear to reason his way back to doing what he had wanted to do all along, which was to eat it.” In his blue sweater, in the faintly blue light, he looked far away and boyish.
    “I don’t know,” I said. “That’s so complicated. I thought he looked frightened. He looked sick. Did you see how he kept pulling his suit tight around him? It looked like he was thinking of the meat inside him.”
    “Well, he’s also nuts,” C said calmly.
    C said everybody was nuts.
    I twisted my body around inside C’s hold to get a better view of the TV, flickering with color and light and sound. What was it that made one person go nuts while the rest of the world remained intact around them? I’d ask C on the next commercial break.
What the cutlets want,
I thought to myself.
The flesh desires something different from its sum,
I tried to think, but I wasn’t sure, it didn’t sound right. C’s breathing was long and slow and peaceful next to me, and I felt comforted by the fact that what was going on in his head was the same as mine: the image of Michael’s panic-tightened face on the screen threaded its way from the eyes toward the center of the head, through branching neuronal trails to a sludgy affective core. Even if we felt differently about the image and its meaning, at least it was inside us both, acting on our inner parts. Michael’s image made something claw inside of me. Sitting in his ugly chair, he radiated a pitiful and trapped energy. He clutched at the air as he described lifting the allotments of flesh from their casings, peeling them from Styrofoam trays, and laying them onto the frying pan. He described the gentleness of the meat, how it trusted, and his eyes were as wide and gelatinous as a deer’s. When Michael looked down at the imaginary cutlet in his hand, he had the face of a saint.
    At that moment I wished that C would look at me like that, touch me like that, and I wondered if there were a way to trick him into doing what I wanted. A new product had just come out from Fluvia cosmetics, designed to soften your skin by tenderizing the subdermal layers that were sometimes stringy with things such as fat, muscle, and pores. The ad claimed that nobody would be able to resist falling in love with your new skin, then showed a beautiful woman holding still as her boyfriend, boss, best friend, and workplace nemesis gathered around, stroking her skin wonderingly with the tips of their fingers. But I didn’t think a product like that would have any influence over C. He was one of those rare people who seemed only to do things that were their own original idea. When he bought deodorizing underarm spray at the Wally’s Supermarket by his condo, it was as though the need had suddenly occurred to him and the correct product had simply presented itself — even though I knew that he had seen the commercials because I watched them with him, watched him laughing at them. He was a graceful consumer: he could consume without being consumed in turn.
    In C’s living room, the television talked on. It must have been early in the day: the show had the calm irrelevance of programming at hours when only the trapped and the old and the infirm are watching. Michael was still on-screen, explaining what had led him to attack a supermarket employee with the veal cutlets he had hidden away beneath his shirt.
He stopped me and asked what was under my clothing. He told me stealing had consequences in his store,
Michael said.
That’s when I realized I wasn’t just eating the cutlets. I was eating a whole machine, a machine much bigger than me, and a lot better organized. And when I thought of all the parts of that machine, the meadows and the grasses and the slicing machines and the plastic wrap machines and the factory farm gates and the steel manufacturers and the person who stuck the price sticker on the outside of the package, and the person who killed the calves, and the people they went