Nobody
My name is Nadié and I am nineteen years old but my agency tells clients I’m sixteen—that I, in fact, just turned sixteen—so it is as if I’m sixteen every day because people keep smiling and wishing me a “happy birthday” whenever they meet me.
Everything in this country, it seems, gets lost in translation. When I arrived, people called me Natalie, Nadia, Nadine, Nena. The agents at Fusion had so much trouble pronouncing my name that they stopped saying it altogether and now they call me something else entirely. It costs less to print comp cards without accent marks—something about special codes for symbols—so now I’m Nadie, which, where I come from, means Nobody.
I walk in through the sunlit morning.
The wall-length windows bathe the wooden floor in shadows and I see half a dozen people slipping in between racks of clothes; a steamer; a long, black, conference table; an ornate mattress; a row of mirrors. I am slipping too, moving like a ballerina because I used to be a dancer and the most that came from it is my body—Fusion calls it elastic, lithe, supple, but sometimes I feel like I am barely-there.
No one has congratulated me on reaching sixteen so I say hello, drop my saddlebag and ask where the restroom is. I see two stylists standing hips out and turning a man’s head like it is on a swivel, deciding on the hair’s part, I think, or maybe the amount of glue to apply. I had seen him before—was it on television, or a bus stop? Or maybe a magazine?—but we had never met in person. In New York City, it seems natural that everyone eventually sees everyone else—whether or not we ever meet.
A Work of Art
The act of creation comes when I arch my back and turn my head in profile, and catch Julie’s furrowed brow, her scrutinizing gaze, the way her eyes look through me like I’m dust, like I’m dust on a piece of pasteboard. A mannequin with hazel eyes. Dust.
Before that look, I was minding my own business, acting polite and even a little interested—I’m a good actor and I made some money moving from one ABC soap to another a few years back—simultaneously engaged and nonchalant, and aware of my surroundings: the smell of steamed polyester and dark coffee, the way the sun cast a shadow over everyone, the clipboards, the pencils in each hand, five of them jotting down notes, everyone seated at a conference table, the chalkboard at the head of the room with the list—
SUPERHEROES
CELEBRITIES
CLASSIC UNDERWEAR ADS
WARDROBE MALFUNCTIONS
CROSS-DRESSING/OPPOSITES
HALLOWEEN IN JULY
DEVILS/ANGELS
MARDI GRAS/CARNIVAL
DECADES* HISTORY OF UNDERWEAR
—remnants from a marketing meeting fifteen minutes earlier, I thought, and started to shape my lips into a smile. I know what people want, and I was playing to the field. “Now that is something I’d wear to a family barbecue . . .” “. . . What’s this fabric called? . . .” “. . . I think the jock would sell quite nice . . .” “Was Jack Rogers your first choice for a brand name? . . .” I don’t even register what I’m saying; as soon as the words leave my lips they’re gone, dispersed into the stale air or out the open window, flung breathless toward the wind tunnel on Broadway, but I hear my tone, how I underscore certain words, the hint of a laugh curling under my tongue after each line.
I was in the moment. Or at least pretending to be. But now I’m out of it, thinking about that gaze while Julie cocks her head and purses her lips and jots something else down, and Donna makes a noise in between a hiccup and a wheeze and I think of something clever to say, something that would betray any sense of extrasensory perception, something that would make me seem totally involved in this fitting when Michael, the president of the company, says: “Look at that torso! My goodness. A torso like a salamander . . .” and nods at his own assessment. I am at the office of Whipped Skivvies on the fifth floor of 610 Broadway, in a room with five strangers; two of them buyers, one of them a designer, trying on samples while everyone gapes and take notes. Some only gape.
“Yeah, salamander torso,” I say, creasing my lips into a smile and rubbing my abdomen, which is now twisted and jutted forward, upon Julie’s instructions. “That’s actually why I can eat so much. Lots of room for food to go to.”
Everyone laughs except me. Someone asks about my Web site and I give him the URL while my mind drifts to another scene completely and I think that nobody ever knows where anything goes, much less what they consume.
Chris Campanioni is a first-generation American, the son of immigrants from Cuba and Poland, and the author of the Internet is for real (C&R Press) and Drift (King Shot Press). His “Billboards” poem was awarded an Academy of American Poets College Prize in 2013, his novel Going Down was selected as Best First Book at the 2014 International Latino Book Awards, and his hybrid piece This body’s long (& I’m still loading) was adapted as an official selection of the Canadian International Film Festival in 2017. He is a Provost Fellow and MAGNET Mentor at The Graduate Center/CUNY, where he is conducting his doctoral studies in English and redrafting narratives of exile. He edits PANK, At Large Magazine, and Tupelo Quarterly, and teaches Latino literature and creative writing at Pace University and Baruch College.
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