But I need your body

I still live in the very first body I was ever gifted.

 I only had it repaired once, aged thirteen, when I fell off a tree in our garden and landed onto my arm. It took a month to heal, a month I spent living in my emergency body.

It might as well have been a sack of potatoes. No features whatsoever. No hair of any kind, nails never grew on it. I had a mouth but no lips, two small orifices made up for my lack of nose and nostrils. The only features present were for functionality. Limbs you technically need, but all of those human extras such as a belly button, a certain amount of toes per foot, for your skin to bruise when appropriate and for it to feel a certain way instead of a slab of clay? Those are luxuries.

I spent my days at the repair facility, behind a window as my body was operated within a glass bubble. I stared at the mangled arm, twisted like a branch, at my hair, still golden with youth, braided to keep away from my blank face, after my incessant begging to prevent them from just shaving it off.

‘It’s just hair, it’ll grow back, you can wear another body in the meantime, or a wig.’

‘I don’t want to buy a wig or wear another body. I don’t even own another body.’

‘Well then this might be the perfect time to buy one! Can we interest you in any from our new collection? We are using this new fibre to make our skins look translucent, giving it that mermaid glistening scales look that’s very in right now-’

I don’t remember what else they said, only that my gaze never faltered, and asking them one more time to just fix my original body.

The way I see it, the way I was brought up, is that you can buy a multitude of clothes, dress up depending on your mood, but you shouldn’t do that with bodies.

A body equals an identity. How can you live with hundreds of different bodies? How can you recognise yourself in the mirror when your hair, eyes, skin tone, the amount of pupils each of your eyes has, changes?

And I tried to pass these values onto my daughter.

Which brings us present day

***

By all accounts, that day she drowned.

She sneaked out of our house, jumping from her bedroom window onto the oak tree, the same oak tree I had fallen off as a child, a little younger than her, and shimmied down, onto the overgrown grass. Ice skates held in her palm by bunched up laces.

I got the call a half hour later.

Fell through the ice while ice skating on a pond. She’s fine, but her body…

Brain dead essentially. Her white scarf had strangled her when she was submerged, her skates weighing her down.

‘She’s very lucky to have lost her body and not her life.’  The paramedic tells me as he zips up the body bag. ‘We’ll take it to a storage facility where you can meet with a disposal director and hear about all your options.’

I thank him, directing my attention to the medic attending my daughter. They have her bare in a hazmat suit, a glowing purple in the bright night, her muffled breaths barely audible. She sits on a stretcher; head down won’t even meet my eyes.

I place a hand on her shoulder, the hazmat’s shoulder, willing a word of comfort to leave my pursed lips. Instead I bear it down, to the point she should feel something. But she doesn’t say anything. Bodyless, numb.

Her friend is also there, waiting for her parents. And while I am grateful she was sensible enough to call an ambulance, despite the fact she would also get into trouble, I almost see red. How could they not have seen this coming? How could my daughter disobey me?  

Why does she get to walk away when my kid sits in the back of an ambulance, bodiless?

‘She’s fine.’ I hear someone say, and it brings me back. ‘Sustained quite a shock but her temperature is back up to normal, we are still going to take her into the hospital for some routine checks. I’d recommend bringing her back-up body, if you don’t have one we can lend you the suit but it’s going to be a fee of about-’

‘That’s alright.’ I say, ‘We have a backup body, I’ll make sure to bring it. Thank you doctor.’

She gets up, nodding at the other doctors to pack up.

‘I’ll meet you at the hospital, I need to go home and get your body.’ I tell my daughter before heading off.

But she grabs my arm, and calls after me. I expect an apology, a cry, a plea for me not to be angry at her, but nothing else comes. Just a feeble ‘mum.’ Out of her lips.

And I want to reassure her, tell her that while I’m livid I’m more relieved that she’s fine, that we’ll get her a new body and while it might hurt trying to fit into it at first and feel uncomfortable, we’ll get through it together. I want to tell her that she can talk to me and I’d rather we come up with safe alternatives for things she wants to do over her sneaking out and getting into trouble.

‘You’re grounded. Indefinitely.’ Is all that comes out

***

I make sure to coat the insides with aloe vera before strapping her in. A memory had hit me when I had first seen the body, tucked away into a box at the back of the entrance’s wardrobe, of that horrible month I spent living in it.

‘It itches.’  I had told my mother. I ended up scratching myself raw until thin streams of blood emerged, swiping them away with my thumb, as if they were stains from day-old jam.

‘Let that be a lesson for you. Let this be your punishment for being so reckless and getting hurt.’ She had said. 

But wasn’t the  humiliation of the state of the hand-me-down emergency body punishment enough?

‘If it itches more let me know.’ I say, the last velcro strap put in place.

‘All done.’ I tell her.

Standing before her is like standing before my mirror twenty or so years ago.

The mitten hands, the mosaic patches of different toned skin. I have a box of belts to put around the indentations circling her waist, I want to offer them in case she needs them to make the body fit better.

But I also don’t want to draw attention to it.

She’s me from the past, and again I’m at a loss for words. I don’t let it show. At least I try not to. It’s the last thing she needs.

‘I…look like Frankenstein’s monster.’ She says

Don’t pity her.

Don’t pity her.

‘Please don’t look at me.’

I let her be alone for the rest of the day, and once again I’m lost. I don’t berate her, not like mum would have done, like she did to me, but I don’t say anything.

Maybe that’s worse

I see her hiding from the mirrors. If she’s anything like I was, I know she shut her eyes when she gets changed, to avoid looking at the purple fissures on each joint, from where her current body has been stitched together.

She hides herself under blankets and winter hats, despite not being able to feel temperature in her current state.

I want to tell her that I’ve been there, and to remind herself that this isn’t her.

The words never leave my mouth. I lay awake at night screaming at myself to do something for her for once.

***

I leave my daughter at home with her aunt while I go to the body clinic, a sad little building in the middle of nowhere, it looks more like a storage facility.

I wear thick winter clothes, my mittens still soaked from touching the car’s frozen door handle, and again, I think of my daughter, at home. I left her with my sister, half to have someone look after her, but also because I don’t trust her not to get into trouble.

I’m let in by an ethereal woman, a clear company representative. She’s beautiful for sure, with lips that look permanently glossed and perfect, luminous, soft hair that look like it has never been knotty a day in its life, each twirled lock sporting little gems on every strand of hair. She steps outside to invite me in, and as the rays from the rising sun submerge her body, and I think that she looks just like the snowflakes sinking around us.

She leads me down a narrow, twisted hallway, it’s a rollercoaster’s tracks, up in the air, nothing below us, I can tell from the shallow thud of my steps echoing through it. At the end of it, a single door, revealing a laser. It scans her hand, and after being gestured to do the same, it scans mine too.

The door opens with a swooshing air current, revealing a room. I’m invited in, and I can’t see her yet, there’s a doctor flanked by interns standing around the metal table.

They step back, it’s covered in a white cloth.

It just comes to me, the fact that haven’t seen her body since the night before the accident, when I had wished her a good night before heading off to sleep. I got to the lakeside after they had taken her out of the waters and out of her body, I didn’t see them haul it into the body bag.

A doctor pulls it back, and it’s her.

It’s my daughter, lying on a cold table, hooded eyes averted as if she were looking down, not completely closed. Her dark lashes lay on the eyebags she has developed, her hair long and let loose, it dangles off the table, all around her.

The doctor keeps on talking, moving her head as if she’s a doll, pointing to different parts of her little face. It’s my daughter.

It’s my daughter, I ask them to stop, or maybe I only think it.

It’s my daughter, and he lifts up an arm, she’s covered in bruises, why are there bruises on her skin? She drowned; she wasn’t beaten to a pulp.

It’s my daughter, and I should have been kinder to her, when it happened, the past couple of days. I want to be there for her, but I can’t, why can’t I?

It’s my daughter, what kind of mother am I?

‘I get it, just please, stop!’

You could hear a pin drop.

‘I understand it’s hard ma’am, if this was your daughter’s favourite body-’

‘It wasn’t her favourite body; it was her only body. This-’ I gesture to her- to it, ‘Is my daughter.’

‘I appreciate what you’re doing, but please treat her gently. Be good to her, to what you need to do, I- I can’t watch. Just do a standard funeral- disposal and mail me the cost whatever it is, I can’t be here.’

***

Body shopping is a pain.

Neither of us speak on the train ride there, she hides under her beanie and hikes her scarf up further. I lift my hand up, to hug her, to caress her, I don’t know. I end up letting it go.

We don’t speak throughout the film presentation at the Bodyhub either, nor when we are guided down halls and halls of bodies. The cheapest ones, such as emergency bodies, are hung up like rugs, their zips wide open over their bellies, you can see every indentation where each bone, vein, and organ goes.

But since that’s not what we’re looking for, we are guided up a level, a lift consisting of only a glass platform.

They’re kept in glass tubes, swaddled up in an azure liquid.

‘Every body in this section is compatible with each of our specific requirements, such as height, weight, IQ, blood type, anything else falling under your genetic make-up.’ The assistant tells us. ‘Just point to one and we can get you to try it on in no time.’

And she tries on hundreds. She steers towards ones that look like her old body, with similar skin tones and hair colours, ignoring the assistant’s efforts to get her to  “spice things up!” dismissing whenever they come back with a body with pink hair and horns, or one with gills “they actually work!”

The day ends without a new body being picked.

I call after her in the fitting rooms. She draws the curtain back, body and layers and layers of clothes back on.

‘Mum, I don’t want to hear it. I know you’re angry, because I disobeyed you, because I’m so indecisive, but please, please can you lecture me later? Not right now, not here?’

‘I wasn’t going to lecture you.’

‘Okay.’

‘But- look, I know I haven’t handled things well, and while I’m not happy that you sneaked up I am so thankful that you’re okay. But you need to choose a body, if not here somewhere else. You can’t keep on living in your emergency one, it’s not built for continuous use, what will you do when you need to go back to school?’

‘I know mum.’ She cries. ‘But I felt so claustrophobic in each of those bodies. You are right, you should only wear one body, and now I’ve that I’ve wrecked mine-’

‘I never meant to teach you that so you could use these values to punish yourself when you need a new body. I wanted you to appreciate your body and everything it does for you, overuse it as a toy, like many do, but if you need a new one, that’s alright. You took good care of it for years, and ultimately it served its purpose: it saved you that night.’

‘Every time I looked in a mirror I felt like screaming, those aren’t me. It doesn’t matter if they bring out one that has 99% of the same characteristics that I shared with my old one, it isn’t my body.’

‘I know, believe me, I know. But we need to find a solution, we can’t keep going like this.’

‘But mum, what am I supposed to do?’

And truth is, I don’t know. Before I can open my mouth and spout some nonsense such as “we’ll figure something out together” we are interrupted.

The assistant, pushing a little cart. ‘I came to collect that final body if you’re done with it?’

I nod, and go to retrieve it, when I hear them speak again. ‘I didn’t mean to eavesdrop but I heard your predicament and wanted to let you know about a procedure Bodyhub has just come up with. It would mean you would get a pretty much identical version of your previous body.’

I ask them how that would be possible and they continue. ‘Did you carry and birth your daughter with this body?’

‘I did, what’s that got to do with anything?’

‘The procedure would mean we would be able to retrieve some of those “leftover cells” from your pregnancy and turn them into a whole new body! Think of it as birth, minus the essence of a person. You wouldn’t have to do anything of course, just hand your body to us and we will take care of everything.’

‘How long would this take?’

‘If the first round of care is successful, then around ten months? It would also come with a good paycheque due to the procedure being high risk and for being one of our first clinical subjects.’

‘I’ll do it.’

‘Mum, no, I can’t ask you to do that, to live without your body for ten whole months.’

I turn to my daughter. ‘It’s fine, if it means you get your body back then I’ll do it.’

‘Brilliant! I’ll email everything you need to know and what your next steps are.’

The assistant thanks me and walks out, after retrieving the body from my daughter’s fitting room, the closest one we were able to find to her original one. And I see it, how the eyes are slightly more curved up than hers, the shape of her cupid’s bow. It’s so similar, but it’s not the same, it isn’t her.

‘Mum, you don’t have to go through all of this for me. I’ll pick another body, no problem.’

‘No, I want to do this for you. This is the right thing to do.’

‘What if it doesn’t work out? What if I don’t get a new body and they ruin yours?’

‘Then we’ll get matching new ones. I’ll be fine, and you’ll be fine, okay?’

‘Okay.’