Body Worlds
Sasha found Martin’s apartment on a Craigslist classified ad. The ad said: Lots of space, easy roommate. It was listed in Bushwick where rent was ideal for Sasha, who liked to talk about how she needed a cheap apartment but would never rent one in any worse a neighborhood than Bushwick, for example.
I am also easy, she wrote back in an email, and she was often told Martin replied that he would like to have an interview first. His email address was manager@twinstheband.com. They arranged to meet at The Blue Stove in Williamsburg, which had Sasha’s, and also Mary Louise Parker’s favorite pie. Sasha said in her email reply that to miss the apricot-nectarine would “be a sin.” She had never tried any other flavor so she couldn’t speak for them.
Martin looked too young to be holding interviews. He had a big head, a baby’s head, and a pink, hairless face, one that probably never needed to be shaved. His pupils were very big and black but she didn’t know what it was, what drug.
Over pie, although the apricot-nectarine was out and so they had strawberry rhubarb instead which was still good, Martin discussed logistics.
“Are you OK with late night things, drinking smoking, people, cats,” he said, throwing his hands around a lot. Sasha said that she was OK with all these things, and what cigarette brand did he smoke? They should buy in bulk. Martin said that he smoked American Spirits because other cigarettes kill.
“Me too,” Sasha lied. “I love the yellow packs,” even though she didn’t smoke enough to qualify as “a smoker,” and when she did she cadged them without discretion for brand, drunk and highly aware of her exhales. In fact maybe she did have a problem with living with a smoker but she didn’t give herself enough time to decide.
“No because then I will probably end up owing you money,” Martin said. “You don’t want to do that.”
“No?”
Often Sasha did things that caused her to be owed the kind of money that is never really paid back: funding a case of beer for a party, stopping at the store for limes or chasers, over-tipping the cab driver on nights when her friends bounced drunk in the backseat with their thighs touching. The totals were never so big alone. Sometimes she put them on her parents’ credit card, waiving contributions with a flip of her hand, forgetting about the expense soon after. Her parents had a joint account.
Martin was wearing a t-shirt that said TWINS and had a girl stick figure on it.
“Are you a twin?” Sasha asked.
“This?” Martin said, pulling on his shirt to get a better look. “No this is a band. You’ll come to realize I basically am obsessed with this band.”
Sasha tried to think of things she was obsessed with to match Martin’s obsession. She couldn’t which made her feel a little inadequate, and instead replied that she would like to hear Twins, even though she was relatively sure, based on Martin’s rosacea and badly-parted hair (middle), and other things like how he had to print out a Google map to find Graham Avenue, that she wouldn’t like his music. He ate his pie exactly the way she reserved for eating a pie, or anything else, in solitude: savagely.
“Don’t worry, you will,” he said, his words blocked by perpetual mouthfuls. Sasha took this to mean that the interview was over, and he finished his pie (She couldn’t finish hers even though she always could. What was it with appetites and strangers?), while she thought about whether she would offer to pay for his or not, and then they paid separately and Sasha thought about what a big mistake she was probably making moving in with someone like Martin. She also wished she was a little high like him.
“That was delicious pie,” Martin said as they left and the door jangled behind them and the sun crashed down on them.
“Isn’t it?” Sasha said. “It’s the best pie.”
“It’s really good,” Martin said.
“Right?” Sasha said. “It is seriously the greatest. Everyone should always eat there.”
“I’ll have to remember it,” Martin said.
“I can write it down for you,” said Sasha, searching for a pen she knew didn’t exist.
“Cool.”
“Yeah it’s so good.” She always made things less good by talking about how good they were and she knew this but she also knew that colloquial space often needed crowding. Like big tips, relief from silence was one of Sasha’s major contributions to the world.
“Yeah.”
“I need to get my things,” Sasha said, as they descended into the subway station, which was full of hot hair. Then she asked if he had a job.
“Yes and no,” Martin said. “I manage Twins, but I’m not paid, not yet.”
“That sucks,” said Sasha.
“It’s okay. We’re going to get big. And I watch cats and I get paid to do that.”
They walked from the subway (more warm wind as the train sped off) to Sasha’s now ex-apartment in Harlem and looked up at it from the hot black street. Her sublet was up, and mean neighbors anyway.
“Do you want help?” Martin asked.
“That’s OK,” Sasha lied.
Martin waited outside in the bright heat for about a half hour while she jammed her things into suitcases and trash-bags. She made four trips and panted sweat-soaked on the curb while Martin sat on her front steps wearing headphones. Once outside for good, Sasha shaded her eyes with her hand and tried to look as annoyed as a polite person could, but it just looked like squinting, which was required anyway given their position relative to the sun. She hailed a cab and threw the bags into the trunk, and Martin stooped in the backseat after her, music blaring into his ears only — what sounded from the outside suspiciously like stadium rock — and she watched her apartment and her Harlem diminish in the sunlight at a rate of 35 miles per hour.
The new building, Martin’s building, was big and grey, with intricate tiling on the floor and otherwise no decoration. Sasha paid the cab driver extra to split the load up the stairs.
“Sorry about the walkup,” Martin said, jogging ahead without any bags.
Sasha kept asking the cab driver if he was OK even though he was much stronger, and then she paid him almost double what she promised.
“Thank you and have a great day,” he said.
“OK,” said Sasha.
A cat stood expecting them at the door, number 20, black and white and the whole apartment filled with its hairy smell, which went nowhere in the blanketing heat. Some cat food sweated on a plate by the refrigerator. The kitchen was entirely white and cluttered with caked-over dishes (Cat food?). Martin didn’t apologize for the mess, but pointed at the cat. “He’ll be here for the next three weeks,” he said.
“It’s not yours?” Sasha asked, stooping down to pet the cat, though she liked cats about as much as she liked rugs or tables. (You ruled dogs, cats ruled you, she thought, etcetera.) The cat scraped its skinny head against her knee. Martin explained that to make his job and/or life easier, he brought any pets he was looking after to his apartment instead of keeping them at their own.
“Are people OK with that?”
“They have no idea,” he said, blasting on the air conditioner and taking an ice cube to his pink forehead, and she felt annoyed enough by all these things that she said she was going to take a nap and she shut herself in her new room. She didn’t like unfairness unless it was directly in her favor and then she didn’t mind. Like everyone else. Nothing furnished the room and she sat for a while on the sheetless twin bed and looked at her blank walls and wondered what she was going to do about things, in general.
A week into the arrangement, on a Friday after work, Sasha called her friend Ani on the phone.
“He is so disgusting,” she said to Ani, her ear sweating against the hot phone.
“What does he do?”
“Nothing.”
“Oh, God.”
“I get up and he’s sleeping! I go to bed and he’s out!”
“Oh, God.”
“He gets paid to do nothing! I feed the cats sometimes! And I think he gets paid more than I do!”
Ani was in Los Angeles visiting her boyfriend and had to go, so Sasha hung up the phone, unsatisfied. She sat on the couch with Martin and he offered her methadone in tablet form. Twins was blasting in all its usual arena-rock glory. It was the kind of music Sasha despised because of its grave inoffensiveness, and predictability, and general fan following.
“OK,” she said, feeling weird in her work clothes.
“Where do you work?” Martin asked, watching her untuck her shirt. His scalp sweated at the roots.
“You don’t know where I work?” Sasha said.
“No.”
“Really?”
“No.”
“I work in the Meatpacking District,” she said.
“That’s not what I meant,” Martin said. “But I also didn’t know that.”
“You don’t know what I do?” Sasha said.
“No.”
“I work for Diane von Furstenburg.”
“Is that just your boss?”
“Well, yes.”
“Oh. Just a firm or something?” Martin said casually. He offered her a bite of his sandwich.
“I’m a vegetarian,” Sasha said, though she often ate meat when alone.
“Me too,” Martin said, handing her the sandwich. He ate a lot for a vegetarian, and he was fat for one too.
“No thanks,” Sasha said, but it looked good. She guessed he ate meat secretly too.
Weekends Sasha resigned to sitting with Martin in their clammy living room, watching cartoons with the sound off. They’d watch on Sasha’s Macbook. Martin would blare Twins in the background of the cartoon, which worked especially well over Scooby Doo, the slapstick and ghost chases strangely synchronized with the cheap hooks, easy choruses, etcetera. It was arena rock. Sometimes Francesca who played guitar for Twins would come over, and the three of them would hold onto a high through the whole weekend, watching the cartoons, the same four or five over and over, with different songs playing in the background, losing their appetites together. At first Sasha felt weirdly star-struck around Francesca but then she looked at their Myspace page and there were 540 listens total. Francesca liked to put on Li’l Wayne as the soundtrack to all those cartoons. They seemed to move faster that way. She was one of those white girls who liked Li’l Wayne.
“He’s hilarious,” Francesca would say. She made up one third of Twins. The other two, a boy named Berkley who drummed and another boy named Carl who did something else, would come over less often, and usually so late that Sasha had already fallen asleep. They stayed up late drinking beers but never Sasha’s so she felt she had no good reason to be all edgy about things.
“You should come to a show sometime,” Francesca would say.
“Yeah,” Sasha would say, having no intention of going to a show sometime.
“Do it before we get huge and you get left in the dust,” Martin said seriously. He always included himself in the band; he talked about Twins like both parts of married couple talk about themselves: “We are free this afternoon,” “We will bring beer,” “We are doing well.” Sasha would watch him air-drum in the living room from her bedroom to all these Twins songs like he was waiting for Carl to age fast and die and then he’d be the hero to take over percussion.
Martin was always waiting around for Twins. He was waiting to be a big part of a band that was trying to be a big part of music that was trying to be a big part of the people’s worlds and feelings. Arena rock was the biggest way to be. And they weren’t showing any signs of waiting for him back.
Once, Francesca crept out of Martin’s room around the time Sasha was coming out of the shower with steam falling off her, before work. Sasha made a mental note to ask Martin later if Francesca was his girlfriend, because it seemed like something she should have known ahead of time. She emailed Ani from work, before asking him that evening, to make sure it was reasonable to ask and feel annoyed about, which Ani agreed it was.
“Not really,” Martin replied. “Neither of us is really in the place for a relationship right now.” Besides never having understood what it means to not be in a place for something like a relationship, Sasha felt fiercely angry that there was nothing to be fiercely angry about.
“Do you want to go to Body Worlds with me?” Martin asked.
“I don’t know,” Sasha said, and she went into her room, and ordered Thai food, and after she was done she let Martin and Francesca eat the leftovers. From behind her bedroom door, she heard Francesca talk about how she was “interested in people,” not just men or just women.
It was a Thursday when Martin convinced Sasha to skip work and come to Body Worlds on methadone and Francesca couldn’t come. Sasha put both tickets on her parents’ card because she hadn’t yet paid for any of the drugs and had a nagging feeling about it. Martin agreed this was fair. After a short, glazed-over woman ripped his ticket in half, he let the other half float into a nearby garbage can. Sasha eyed him severely.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing,” she said, remembering that she only recycled when it was convenient. Bodies, whole and not, jutted from glass cases and corners of walls. A lot of them were playing sports with their brains out. These were the opposite of mannequins, an insides-only exhibit that made her feel both very embarrassed about her body and very happy for her skin. She pictured the basketball-playing corpse in a mohair suit.
“Isn’t it insane?” Martin said. He pointed to a body — a woman’s body with circles of white fat for breasts — and said: “That’s all we are.”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“That’s what’s inside.” He stood outstretched like the Vitruvian Man. The thought of any sameness between them caused Sasha to fold into herself, slightly, to scan the exhibit confines for some stray sweater she might put on. She comforted herself by thinking of the differences in their bodies. There were a lot. “There are also neurons, DNA, etcetera etcetera,” she said and then looked at Martin for confirmation of the fact. He beamed. “What is your favorite part,” he said.
“What? I don’t know.”
“Come on.” He pointed at a tangle of muscles hula-hooping, ass out, and said, “I like the large intestine and also the penis.”
“Gross,” said Sasha, who also liked the penis.
These bodies were sexless though, literally stripped of any former sensual appeal, glabrous pink muscles and eyeballs without lids. She thought of how disgusting the human body was, after all.
A Hasid, the only other person in the room at that exact time, stood looking at the red-dyed insides of a piglet for a long time.
“You think we’re the same?” Sasha said to him.
“We are all staring at God,” the Hasid said.
Because someone was needlessly cleaning the women’s bathroom, Sasha followed Martin into the men’s where there were floor-to-ceiling ceramic urinals and a dozen stalls. They were the only people and she couldn’t piss with him there.
“You’re not peeing,” he said, peeing loudly into the bowl.
“Yes I am,” she said, outraged and not peeing.
They left the bathroom and she felt too angry and mortified to speak.
When they got home, all three Twins were there sitting on their gross couch with their hands sweating on their thighs.
“You tell him,” Carl said to the air conditioner. Carl was a shrimpy boy-man with little shoulders and an already-graying, overgrown beard. He was always shrugging and looking victimized, his clothes too big, everything else also too big.
“No I don’t want to,” Berkley said. “Someone else.”
That left it up to Francesca to tell Martin that Twins was breaking up for good. The reasons were: “We are too big,” (Physically? Sasha thought, standing in the threshold) but also “Things are tense between all of us” (“undeniably,” agreed Carl), and also Francesca was moving to “somewhere” in “The South” because “there are good opportunities for musicians there.” The cat cried in accord and then swatted at its empty dish.
First Martin tried to convince the three of them that he could take Francesca’s spot and then he said he’d go to The South with her (Was he in love with her? Sasha mused) and then she thought he was ready to throw himself out the window. Francesca lit a cigarette.
“Not in front of the cat!” Martin cried, snatching it from between her fingers, which made everyone feel very weird. He kicked the refrigerator and they all sulked home and were not invited back, not ever again, unless they changed their minds.
“Gutted,” he said to Sasha later. He was drinking cold medicine right from the bottle, but Sasha couldn’t go that far. For one, she had work the next morning. “I feel like a gutted human.” She wondered about his insides, what they looked like.
At work the next day Sasha ate lunch just like every other day with the other intern, Molly. She liked talking to Molly because it was the easiest thing in the whole world. She could be talking to Molly and thinking about something else. Molly had painted-on eyebrows and three stock responses to any given piece of information: “That’s so random,” “That’s hilarious,” and “That’s so funny.” Mostly there was no real discretion in terms of which one Molly picked, or any distinction between what provoked the latter two.
“My roommate’s band broke up,” Sasha said, thinking of how happy Martin would be to know that she referred to Twins as his band. There was some loyalty, however begrudgingly she admitted it. In fact there was a lot. Once when she tumbled home drunk and high and wet from a spewing fire hydrant, Martin had wrapped her in his beach towel and set her on the couch and turned on Invasion of the Body Snatchers which was exactly how she fell asleep and woke up with the DVD menu spinning over and over again and Martin gone to watch Twins rehearse. He never brought it up later. “Isn’t that weird?” she had said to Ani, who agreed it was weird, but really Sasha thought it was very nice.
“That’s hilarious,” Molly said, cutting into a Caesar salad with chicken on top of it.
“Yeah,” Sasha said, thinking about how unhilarious it was. It was maybe the least hilarious thing that happened to Martin. “The main girl,” Sasha said, “the lead guitar, is moving to The South.” She wondered why she was talking. Sometimes she would start a conversation with Molly and then get bored and abandon it midway through.
“What?” Molly said. “That’s so random.”
“Yeah.”
“She’s just moving to The South? Just like, moving there?”
“Apparently.”
“So she’s going to just pack up and move there. That’s so funny.” Molly tied the laces on a mannequin’s boat shoes and tucked a handkerchief into his pocket. He looked fantastic. He looked ridiculous. He had no orifices, nose, mouth, penis and here was this handkerchief covering his heart. Molly didn’t know Francesca, so how could she know what was so funny?
They, Martin and Sasha, were spinning on methadone when Martin crept into Sasha’s bedroom. The light outside was summer light meaning it never got as dark as it should and though it was eight o’clock the blue outside was like a chlorinated pool, the most shocking color that existed in that moment in Brooklyn. He was wearing plaid boxers and no shirt. “Look,” he said, and she did. He was just another body. He wasn’t even fat enough to be the fat example of a human at Body Worlds. He didn’t even have that. He seemed to be waiting for her to say he should take his boxers off next, but then what in the world would he have?
He didn’t. He stood there just needing something and he didn’t know what. Sasha reached over to her computer and they sat on her bed and watched Scooby Doo with Li’l Wayne playing in the background. It wasn’t as good as Twins.
“What have you been up to?” she said, thinking about what she had been up to, which is what she did when she felt uncomfortable. Martin turned to her. “You shouldn’t ask that.”
“What?”
“Are we all just all supposed to have something stored up for every time someone asks?”
“Is that so bad?”
“It’s individualistic. It’s just daily accomplishments pitted against each other. Doesn’t that make you nervous?”
“I’m nervous,” Sasha said, though she couldn’t say why.
In the morning she took the train to Langone Medical Center on First Avenue and donated her body to science. There were a lot of forms.
“For when I die,” she clarified.
“It’s free,” a man said who was in charge of the forms. He handed her a thick plastic card with her name on it. His voice was so soft she had to lean in and he used a lot of eye contact and Sasha got the feeling he thought she was about to jump in front of a train. This procedure was for old people, people who were ready to die or already pretty much dead. Behind all that glass, with her ligaments and organs tucked into shapes, she didn’t know how else she could be.
