I’m being carried… haven’t been carried since I was a little boy… this doesn’t feel real, almost like a session of Realité Magique…
I’m with my wife. Emily and I just made love. She caresses my face with her fingertips, the way she used to. Before she died. I don’t want to think about the helmet or the migraine headache that will be coming soon. I don’t want to think about what I might be doing to my brain. Emily is here now, and she’s stroking my face.
I’m in my examination room at the West Hollywood clinic. My plastic surgery practice gone, I put in a few shifts a week here as a general practitioner to make my rent. This room stinks of mold. The wood paneling has warped and pulled away from the wall, a result of a ceiling leak that’s never been fixed. The intercom buzzes incessantly. I was supposed to see my first patient an hour ago. But I’ve got better things to do.
Emily and I have just finished breakfast. We’re on the veranda of the Monteverde Inn, enjoying the spectacular scenery of Costa Rica’s Central Valley, sipping the most delicious cups of coffee we’ve ever tasted. The mold scent is distracting, but a bit of extra concentration and it’s obliterated by the aroma of brewing coffee. The space between my eyes throbs. But this is worth it.
Her breasts are as full and lush as the fruits of the tropics, radiating health and wholesomeness. No disease could ever maim such radiant globes —
“Doc?”
The mold smell returns. I’m back in the examining room. Humiliation and fright clear my head like a bucket full of ice water. I yank the RM helmet from my skull, turning to see who’s come into the room.
It’s Mitch Reynolds, a sportsman who wrenched his knee. I’ve been giving him weekly shots of cortisone. “Doc? I’m sorry to, uh, disturb you. But I’ve got this business interview I can’t be late for, and those shots you give me are all that’ve been keeping me walking…”
He stares at the RM helmet, illegally reconfigured, hanging from my hand. He’s no babe in the woods; he knows what it is. His eyes are equally surprised and pitying. The pity makes the rush of nausea worse than it normally would be. “That’s one of them Realité Magique gizmos, huh?”
I nod, feeling the room begin to polka.
“Uh, Doc,” he says, slowly, “I don’t mean to tell you your business or anything, but that can fuck you up pretty bad —”
I stumble past him and vomit into the sink.
“Lou, you can do it. Knock ‘em dead, pal. You’re about to kick the Good Humor Man movement in California into high gear.”
Mitch follows me as I enter the State Capitol chambers and await my introduction. The confidence in Mitch’s voice helps dispel some of my stage fright. Some, not all.
“Honorable ladies and gentlemen of the legislature. My name is Dr. Louis Shmalzberg. I work as a doctor of general medicine in a low-income neighborhood of West Hollywood.” I grip the lectern tightly, trying to keep my legs from shaking — I feel thrilled, empowered, more whole than anytime since Emily died. “Every day, I treat dozens of patients hobbled by obesity and the maladies it causes: pulmonary heart disease, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, asthma, and spinal strain. Every day, the State of California, now running annual deficits in the tens of billions, spends millions of dollars it doesn’t have treating these diseases. Diseases caused by the endless rivers of processed sugars and hydrogenated fats we all consume.
“What can be done? Decades of public health education campaigns have failed. As a nation, we get fatter and sicker — and poorer — every year. Our bodies, trained by thousands of years of scarcity, are hooked on cheap, ubiquitous, empty calories. When citizens are unable to stop harming themselves, government has a moral duty to step in. Opium was once legal, readily available, and almost universally abused. Society made the choice that it not remain that way. We as a society can make the same choice regarding anti-nutritious, high-calorie foods.”
I have the attention of every lawmaker in earshot. GD2, the second Great Depression, has frightened and demoralized them, bled California’s business community and government white. They’re eating from the palm of my hand. “I’ve heard many political leaders state that California can’t afford another experiment in Prohibition. That police forces, already strapped by shrinking tax bases, don’t have the resources to enforce a ban on obesity-generating foods. This is not a burden that government needs to take on alone. Just as the Minutemen rose from the citizenry to secure American independence, so today a legion of volunteers stand ready to secure our independence from the slavery of obesity.”
Time to close the sale. “Deputize the men and women of the Good Humor Man movement, just as the lawmakers of Massachusetts and New York did three months ago. Let us make California strong again, both physically and fiscally. Let us make our home once more the Golden State, not the state of the Golden Arches.”
Mitch is beaming. The bill will pass. We’re in.
I wake up on a familiar-feeling sofa. It’s the sofa in my study. I’m home.
I feel a hand on my shoulder. Am I still inside a dream?
“You look like crap,” Mitch says. “How do you feel?”
“Like… crap.”
“You’ve got visitors.”
“Who…?”
“Group of school kids from Jerry Brown Elementary. They’re here for their nutrition history lesson.”
My appointment for this semester. I’d completely forgotten. “Damn… I’d hate to disappoint… Karen Dissel.”
Mitch smiles. “Yeah, I’ll bet you would. She’s been carrying a torch for you the size of the Statue of Liberty’s, and everybody in town knows it. She’s a little young for you, but that’s all right, you old dog. Long past time you got saddled back up again. Don’t worry — that busted nose gives you character.”
I close my eyes and see Karen Dissel’s face, cheekbones protruding like the womanly breasts she never developed. Once upon a time, when I was still a plastic surgeon, her appearance was a look I gladly accepted tens of thousands of dollars to sculpt on a patient’s face. But now her gauntness makes me shiver. Karen looks like a tribeswoman from an old news show about an Ethiopian famine, only she’s the victim of a famine we’ve willingly brought on ourselves. A thirty-six-year-old woman dwelling inside a prepubescent body… I wonder if she’s ever menstruated. I wonder if she suffers at all from the thought she’ll never bear a child.
“Mitch… I’m in no shape to go in front of those kids. Could you… do it for me, this one time? Do you know how to work the vid-9 unit?”
“That old contraption? Yeah, I guess I can figure it out. Sure, Lou. I’ll fill in for you, don’t you worry none. Get some more rest. You’ve earned it.”
I listen in as Mitch introduces himself to the class in the meeting room next to my study, answers a few questions about being a Good Humor Man, and then starts the vid-9 program. It’s sponsored by the MannaSantos Corporation, and it’s meant to be a sort of “Scared Thin” for the under-ten set. I’m rather fond of the ludicrous title: Beware the Fat Monster!
“In the days before your parents were born, the people of the rest of the world looked at America and laughed at ‘The Land of the Fat’…”
MannaSantos’s image-archaeologists did one hell of a job. Somehow they got their hands on a print of a nearly fifty-year-old German porno film which was marketed to European fat fetishists. Essentially a home movie of suburban American life, circa 1990, it features three-hundred-pound women wearing tank-tops and bright pink polyester shorts, exiting a neon-lit Krispy Kreme Doughnuts shop, their arms filled with bags of fried, sugar-coated dough. The filmmakers always shot them from behind, framing the view so that the screen overflows with jiggling buttock flesh.
“America, land of the free and home of the brave, was suffocating beneath a sea of ugly, unhealthy fat. Something had to be done. Just as they had so many times before in the history of our country, hopeful Americans turned to science for an answer —”
Here comes the bullshit. MannaSantos and the other chemical companies didn’t create genetically modified foods in response to some obesity crisis. They created them to more effectively market their own proprietary brands of herbicides and pesticides. They created them because they thought shoppers would pay more for bananas that could sit on supermarket shelves for months without rotting.
Bread basket of the world… we thought we’d always keep that title, that it was our birthright. But we somehow forgot that the customer gets a vote, too. People around the world revolted against being forced to consume what they called “Frankenfoods.” Punishing tariffs spiraled into trade wars, which spiraled into the Second Great Depression, the worst years of my life. If it hadn’t been for the treasure my father gave me, his vacuum-packed legacy, I’d have lost this house, this clinic. And these children wouldn’t be sitting here today, absorbing these half-truths under my roof.
I want to tell them the truth, my truth. I want to tell them that they are the first generation in American history who will be shorter than their mothers and fathers. I want to feed them the whole milk and whole cheese and natural fats their growing brains and bodies need.
How did I get sucked in? Why did I let myself be seduced?
As if it can read my mind, the vid-9 program offers an answer. It’s reached the part about Hud Walterson. The very first Good Humor Man. The founder of my guild.
I’ve seen this program often enough to have memorized every frame. At the beginning of the public part of his story, Hud was the reluctant owner of nearly a thousand pounds of flesh, trapped in his own bed by immobilizing weight. He’d been an overweight child, his widowed mother’s only happiness, and by the time he’d turned thirty, his mother and aunts had fed him to the point where he weighed an estimated nine hundred pounds.
Hud’s rescuers were a wealthy Beverly Hills dietician, whom my father knew socially, and the dietician’s partner, a washed-up Hollywood starlet who had gained new fame following her own dramatic weight loss under the dietician’s care. Emily and I saw Hud’s extrication from his bedroom (paramedics used a forklift), televised live on The Geraldo Rivera Show. Video simulcasts over the internet documented his stomach-stapling surgery, his various lipectomies, and the experimental drug treatments.
As a TV stunt, his Beverly Hills handlers arranged for Hud to burn the small mountain of junk food his relatives had stockpiled during his years trapped in his former home. Hud insisted that the producers let him carry out the burning with a military flamethrower. I see him again, still mountainously impressive at just over five hundred pounds, his face flushed with passion, holding the nozzle of his flamethrower in both hands like a priest preparing to drive out the Devil. America witnessed the birth of a new hero when Hud waded into the pile of snack cakes, corn chips, candy bars, and chocolate bunnies, his eyes flashing with an almost-palpable hatred as he incinerated his former treats.
Hud Walterson was the right man with the right gimmick at exactly the right time. The country was desperate for a new craze, anything to divert attention from the international economic meltdown. The national mood was ripe for a big, fat scapegoat. And Hud Walterson, making as many as five or six paid appearances a week to burn up heaps of junk food, pointed his accusing finger at a juicy one — the notoriously gluttonous eating habits of the average American, bankrupting the American health system with a plague of cardiovascular disease, joint degeneration, and cancer.
Emily and I saw Hud in person, at an event sponsored by a Los Angeles chain of body toning spas. She had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer; I hoped that taking her to this presumably goofy event would help lift her spirits. Hud was down to three hundred pounds then, a third of his peak weight. The hundreds of dollars’ worth of snack foods he was to burn had been donated by local grocery stores; I remember thinking how bizarre that was. Hud Walterson attacked that food, incinerated it with the frightening, total conviction of a Crusader leading the charge to recapture the Holy Land from the infidels.
Emily remarked that if she could manage to fight her disease with just half of Hud’s emotional dedication, the cancer would shrivel inside her like a box of MoonPies bathed in napalm.
Things began going downhill for Hud not long after we saw him, however. His body betrayed him; it fought to regain the pounds he’d shed, lowering its metabolism and increasing its production of insulin. With every pound he regained, he lost another paid endorsement, another donation of snack foods to burn. But having captured the national spotlight, he refused to let it go. Following in the hallowed footsteps of Bonnie and Clyde and Billy the Kid, Hud Walterson became an outlaw.
Snack food warehouses in California and Nevada burned to the ground. An ice cream factory in Seattle lit the night. Neighbors of the destroyed building swore that just as the fire started they’d heard a tinny calliope playing children’s songs. Urban legends quickly sprang up — Hud Walterson had hijacked an ice cream truck in Las Vegas to use as his getaway car; Hud was being secretly financed by Jane Fonda and the Turner media empire; he’d bought a whole fleet of secondhand ice cream trucks to use on missions; Hud and his gang would not rest until all of America had been purged of junk food.
Hud returned to the big time just three weeks before Emily died. I was with her in her hospital room when accounts of his latest provocation exploded onto all the national news channels. A man with a video camera had caught Hud in the act at a McDonald’s in Salinas. Hud was back up over the five-hundred-pound mark; his jowly face was tired and strained as he ordered employees and patrons out of the restaurant. In true Robin Hood fashion, he tossed a five dollar bill to every patron he’d deprived of a meal. He no longer had his famous flamethrower; instead, he dragged two huge gasoline cans around the restaurant, splashing the liquid on grills, deep fryers, cash registers, and rows of cheeseburgers pre-assembled for the lunch hour. Emily and I saw the videotaped fire replayed on dozens of newscasts during the next two days, endlessly repeated on CNN and Fox News. The hypnotic images temporarily distracted us from what lay ahead for us.
That incident was the spark that ignited dozens of copycat arsons around the nation. By that time I wasn’t paying attention. Emily was going very quickly. Her double mastectomy had failed to halt the advance of the cancer. Chemotherapy and radiation treatments provided only temporary roadblocks. I was a physician. But I was unable to do a thing to save my own wife. Three months later, the future we’d planned for and everything I’d loved about my life were buried along with her.
Five months after she died, the law finally caught up with Hud Walterson. And I was there in person, just as I had been at his start. It was around seven in the evening. I was walking back to the garage where I’d parked my car, following a shift at the McHardy Clinic in West Hollywood. I remember very little about that time. I sleepwalked through most of my shifts, writing basic prescriptions for the flu, diabetes, and hypertension, hazily witnessing how chronic neglect and poor habits led to crippling chronic disease.
I was walking through a shabby, garbage-strewn neighborhood when I saw that the street had been blocked off by police cruisers. A large crowd of neighborhood residents, pushed back from orange barricades by police, had surrounded a candied popcorn factory. Media vehicles were just beginning to pull up, large vans topped with telescoping satellite antennae, magic wands pointed at the collective subconscious of an audience of billions.
I asked a young black woman what was going on. “They got him trapped inside,” she said. “The Good Humor Man.”
“Who?”
She sighed impatiently. “You know. The guy who burns up junk food. Hud Walterson.”
It was the first time I’d ever heard him called that. I joined the crowd and waited for things to happen. Negotiations were not going well. Every few minutes a police captain with a bullhorn repeated his demands that Hud come out; the captain promised Hud would not be harmed. The crowd eagerly scanned the factory’s windows, hoping for just a glimpse of the gargantuan outlaw. The entire cordoned-off area took on a carnival air.
The SWAT team fired tear-gas canisters through the factory’s windows at nine o’clock. The crowd tensed as we heard the soft chuffs of the canisters being fired, the tinkling crashes of the windows breaking. Something would happen now — Hud and his followers would appear on the roof; they would rain flaming candied popcorn down on the heads of the police before escaping in a helicopter playing calliope music…
Black smoke billowed through the broken windows. The smoke had a strangely sweet, nauseating odor, like burning motor oil mixed with caramelizing maple syrup. The SWAT team used battering rams to break down the doors, but the fire quickly grew too intense for them. Fire trucks arrived quickly. Soon dozens of hoses were spraying the building down, but the inferno refused to be quenched. We waited for Hud to appear. Surely he would find a way to escape. All around me, people gulped their cheap wine and chewed their greasy, fried snacks while they watched the doors.
Suddenly, all eyes (and video cameras) darted to a large window on the third floor. He was there, flames backlighting his mountainous silhouette. Would he try to climb out? Would he jump? He didn’t move, even as the fire came closer. It was inhuman, that he could stand so stock-still. He stared down at us, a weird look of triumph on his face, as if he’d transcended all failures, all pain. Then there was a sound of beams breaking. He looked up at the roof that was poised to collapse. When he looked down at us again, the triumph in his face was gone, replaced by a despair that chilled me.
The roof fell. A collective gasp went up from the crowd. Hud wouldn’t be coming out. This time, he was burning with the hated snack foods. We looked at the flames, and then we looked at each other. I had the eerie sense of the crowd seeing itself, truly seeing itself for the first time. More than half of them held bags of potato chips or fried pork cracklings in their crumb-coated hands. Next to me, the young woman I’d spoken to earlier shriveled under accusatory gazes — her mouth was stuffed full of candied popcorn, the same brand that had been packaged at the burning factory.
At first, she seemed embarrassed and afraid. But then her eyes acquired a new determination, a fiery conviction that I’d seen before, in Hud Walterson’s eyes. She spat out her mouthful of candied popcorn, then threw the box on the ground and trampled it. She stomped on the box, each leap more furious than the last.
Her gesture spread like wildfire through the crowd. Soon dozens of people were throwing down their bags of fattening snacks, spilling high-calorie beers into the gutters, stomping on chips and pies and pork cracklings until the crumbs were ground into the filthy asphalt. Even though I had no junk food of my own to destroy, I joined in the destruction, caught up in the communal electricity, feeling my blood run through my veins for the first time since Emily had died.
And a hundred TV cameras captured our savage celebration of Hud’s mission, our annihilation of our artery-clogging enemy. Captured it and broadcast it to a nation of people hungry for an easy victory, for a foe they could smear into the dirt. Hungry for something to set fire to.
I hear the children clapping in my meeting room. According to the story they’ve just seen, poor Hud Walterson won a posthumous victory far larger than any he’d ever achieved in life. A happy ending for us all. The makers of this little fat-umentary, as if abruptly realizing that they’ve spent too much time obsessing on Hud Walterson’s martyrdom, manage to squeeze the following quarter-century into less than four minutes. The establishment of hundreds of local Good Humor Men chapters, officially sanctioned by state governments eager to rein in health care spending; the chaotic mass layoffs that followed the breakup of most multinational corporations during the trade wars… All of this races across the screen as quickly as a commercial for Leanie-Lean meats.
Now the lumbering fatties from the first segment return, only this time they’re greeted by smiling cartoon MannaSantos scientists carrying platters of fresh fruits and vegetables. Eating this bounty, the fatties magically morph into glowing, toothpick-thin demigods. As the music swells, all the children applaud again, even louder than before.
“So never forget — you ARE what you EAT! The Fat Monster can’t hurt you unless you INVITE him into your mouth. And avoiding the Fat Monster has never been easier, thanks to the MannaSantos family of fine food products — Lep-Tone fruits and vegetables, Leanie-Lean meat products, and the NEW Metaboloft line of fresh corn, corn sweeteners, corn starch, and other corn derivatives.”
The program’s over. Normally, this would be the time for my grand finale, my unveiling of my “show-and-tell,” a preserved example of the program’s archaic societal nemesis, my method of permanently imprinting the children’s impressionable minds with an enduring horror of the Fat Monster.
But I’ve been the monster. How could I have done that thing, so many, many times? Make children scream at the sight of what is more precious to me than anything else left in this world?
I won’t do it. Not ever again. I’d rather rip out my own bowels and eat them in front of those kids, if traumatizing them is so imperative. How could I have blinded myself so completely? How could I have let myself become something I should have despised, some foul-smelling bit of excrement I’d scrape off the bottom of my shoe?
“Lou? I need to finish up the class. Where’s the jars of fat?”
It’s Mitch. His request ignites a blush that burns my whole body. I shake my head with all the force I can muster.
“C’mon, Lou, the jars of human fat. I want to knock those kids dead, just like you always do. Where are they?”
I force myself into a sitting position. The room swims around me. “No,” I say. “You can’t… I won’t let you touch them…”
“What’s the matter with you? All I wanna do is the same thing you’ve always done —”
“No! It’s — it’s obscene! A desecration of her memory!”
“What are you talking about? Are you out of your head, Lou? Pipe down, the kids’ll hear you —”
“The whole, the whole world should hear me! Should hear me damn myself!”
Mitch grabs my shoulders and forces me back into a prone position on the couch. “Yeah, you’re out of your head, all right,” he says. “Damn. I knew I shouldn’t have let them discharge you so fast. They patch you up and shove you out the front door, bad as it was in the Army —”
“Get them out of here!” I scream. “The children! Karen Dissel! I won’t have them absorbing any more poison in my house!”
“Okay, okay, I’ll clear ‘em all out. Then you and I are going back to the hospital, pal —”
“I don’t need to be in a hospital! I need to be in the innermost circle of Hell! Just — just let me be, Mitch!”
“Lou -!”
He tries grabbing me again, but I pull away. “Just, just leave me alone, Mitch. Just go. I’m all right. I… I need some time. By myself.” I stare into his worried face. “Really, I’m okay, Mitch. But I need to think. Everything that’s happened recently… I have to sort things through. As my best friend, can’t you give me that? Just a few hours to think?”
He chews his lower lip, then nods his head. “All right, Lou. I’ll leave you alone awhile. But I’m coming back later to check up on you. Whether you like it or not. Get me?”
I nod. “Thanks, Mitch.”
I hear him usher the school group out, then he closes my front door behind him. I want to look at them again… the jars of human fat I’d refused to let Mitch touch. I need to beg Emily’s forgiveness.
I sit up again, more slowly this time. There’s a bandage on my nose. I touch it, lightly. Owww… no need to try that again anytime soon. My nose isn’t the only thing that smarts. I discover two large bruises, one on my right hip and the other on my lower rib cage. There’s a dull throbbing at the back of my skull. The room goes out of focus.
I wait for the colors behind my eyes to clear, then try to stand. I fall back onto the couch. I’m a doctor; I should give myself hell for trying to stand so quickly.
I’m a doctor. Right. I’m a healer, and I killed a man today. Not by plunging a pen into his neck. No, that was just the proximate cause. I killed that man twenty-five years ago, the day I convinced the California Legislature to deputize the Good Humor Men.
I see the Mexican’s face again, his eyes rolling up in his head, his broad, tanned face turning red as a ripe tomato. I see Emily’s face, impatient for the local anesthetic to kick in, eager for the touch of my cannula, my magic wand. And then, suddenly, I understand.
That night in Los Angeles, the night Hud Walterson burned to death… maybe it wasn’t junk food I was stomping into the asphalt. Maybe it was cancer. Maybe it was cancer I was trampling, and guilt.
My God. I’ve never let myself make this connection before. Of course. Everywhere, in the journals, in the newspapers, there were stories about the correlation between significant weight gain and various types of cancer.
Our private game. Emily’s serial weight-gain, followed by tender, erotic sessions of liposuction. It was a game that evolved over time, that we groped toward and embraced in a mostly wordless fashion. It wasn’t something I made her do. But she helped invent the game and eagerly surrendered her body to it primarily for my pleasure.
I wasn’t willing to smash myself into the concrete. So I took out my vengeance on the implements some part of me believed I’d used to kill my wife. And I’ve continued on my path of vengeance for the last twenty-five years. Trying again and again to slay the dragon, but never getting it right. Because the dragon I was really trying to slay was me.
Me.
My front doorbell buzzes. It’s probably Brad or one of the other squad members, not realizing I’ve just pleaded with Mitch for some privacy.
It buzzes a second time. I wait for them to go away. They don’t. Another buzzing, followed by a prolonged knocking. I hear footsteps retreating down my driveway, but just as I’m on the verge of relaxing, the knocking begins anew, this time at my kitchen door outback.
Crap. I’ll need to tell them to go away myself. I make another attempt to stand. This time, I stay up. The nausea’s still there, but not as bad. I slowly walk to the kitchen, steadying myself against the walls, irritation building with every difficult step.
I peer through my back door’s spy glass, stealing myself to give Brad or whomever a radioactive piece of my mind. My persistent visitor is a dark-skinned man, and a stranger to me. I’m surprised, and that surprise reminds me how much America and Southern California have changed since I was young. He’s dressed in a conservative dark gray suit, wearing some kind of government ID badge, which he holds up to the spy glass. Turning away from the door now would be too rude, even given my condition.
I open the door partway. “Yes? May I help you?”
His intelligent, intense blue eyes immediately connect with mine. His half-smile is neither kindly nor antagonistic, but somehow detached, and a bit superior. First impression: I don’t care for this young man.
“I am seeking Dr. Louis Shmalzberg. Would you be he?”
His accent lets me place him. He’s Indian, or from one of the nations of the Indian subcontinent. I haven’t had the opportunity to speak with many Indians these last twenty-five years. We haven’t been a land of immigrants, or a land friendly to visitors, since before GD2.
“I’m Dr. Shmalzberg,” I answer cautiously. “What can I do for you? I’m afraid this isn’t a good time —”
“I am Ravi Varuna Muthukrishnan, from the United States Department of Agriculture. My office is the Agricultural Research Section of the Food and Nutrition Service.” He stiffly sticks out his hand. Just as mechanically, I shake it. “I have traveled all the way from Alexandria, Virginia, to see you, Dr. Shmalzberg. I believe you have an artifact in your possession which my office would be most interested in examining, and perhaps acquiring.”
“An artifact?” My heart jumps — my initial, absurdly paranoid thought is that he’s referring to those Nestle chocolate bars I pilfered during the first of yesterday’s raids, the ones I lost in Mex-Town. “I’m sorry, I have no idea what you’re referring to —”
He smiles a cool smile. “Of course.” He glances into my kitchen. “Is there somewhere private where we may talk? I waited until after your visitors had left.”
“Look, Mr. Muthnoo -”
“Muthukrishnan.”
“I’m not well. I, uh, I was in a car accident yesterday. Got pretty badly banged up. Can’t you come back another day?”
His smile loses some of its forced wattage. “I am afraid that I am not at liberty to wait very long. My staff and I are working on multiple projects during our stay in California. The project which concerns you, it is of a highly speculative nature, but it also has potential national security implications of the greatest magnitude. If you would telephone me as soon as you are feeling somewhat better —”
“I could do that.”
“We are staying at the Hotel Nixon, in San Clemente.” He removes a business card from his breast pocket and writes a telephone number and room number on the back. “Can I expect a call from you later this evening?”
I don’t like being pressured, not even for “potential national security implications of the greatest magnitude” — he’s from the goddamn Department of Agriculture, so how vital can this be? “I truly doubt that. Look, I can hardly stay on my feet right now. I’ll get back to you when I can —”
“Please do so as soon as possible.” He hands me the card. “This is a matter of great importance, Dr. Shmalzberg. Both to your government, and to you, personally. You see, I am not the only party who is seeking this artifact. And I believe you will find the others to be much less polite than I am.”
“If you would just tell me what it is you’re looking for, I might be more helpful.”
He glances over his shoulder, taking in the hedges and trees which surround my patio and garden. “I’m not at liberty to discuss specifics in an unsecured area such as this. We must follow proper protocols. I will leave you to your rest. But I trust I will be hearing from you soon, Dr. Shmalzberg?”
Dizziness assaults me like a swarm of gnats. I manage a weak nod, then close the door.
I sink into one of the chairs at my kitchen table. What on earth could the Department of Agriculture want with me? And who’s to say this Muthukrishnan fellow is even from the Department of Agriculture? Phony business cards are easy to come by. Judging from his accent, he’s not native-born, and America’s had a strict anti-immigration policy since the time this snot-nose was in diapers.
What could he be after? An artifact… What do I own that could be called an artifact? My Sony CD player, circa 2002? I suppose I could qualify as an artifact, being an ex-practitioner of an extinct medical art.
I don’t want to think about it, but the thought refuses to go away. There’s only one “artifact” I ever owned that was really worth the title. My father’s bequest to me. The Elvis (or, as I named it when I was little, “Elvis-in-a-Jar”). And if that’s what Muthukrishnan’s after, he’s shit-out-of-luck; I haven’t had the Elvis in my possession in twenty-seven years. I sold it back to its place of origin. In return for a truck-load of cash, most used to finance Emily’s cancer treatments, I promised never to reveal that it had ever existed. They didn’t tell me what they planned to do with it. In all likelihood it’s been locked away in a bomb-proof vault, more secure than the Dead Sea Scrolls. Hidden away from America’s memory forever.
I stumble into my study, managing to make it to my desk. I pull my keys from my pocket and open the credenza cabinet. And there they are, the two glass cylinders, each filled with between four and six pounds of human fat, stabilized by xenon gas. Mottled, yellow, oily lipid tissues; to an unfamiliar observer, they’d look somewhat like tubfuls of margarine, partially melted in the sun. In some spots, the yellow fat is stained pink by the blood that was unavoidably extracted along with the lipid tissues. Fat and blood, all of it protected from the corrupting air, preserved forever, so long as I keep it free of ultraviolet rays and heat.
Those two cylinders are why the school board relies on me for health education. No one else can show the children what I can. I wasn’t always a humble General Practitioner. I’m a rare bird. My specialty, like my father’s before me, was liposculpture, also known as body sculpting, or liposuction: the surgical extraction of excess fatty tissues.
I place the two cylinders on my desk, handling them as gently as I would the golden eggs of a phoenix. And when I look at them, my heart soars higher than any fantastical bird of legend. The precious tissues preserved inside are all I have left of my Emily.
I spread my trembling arms around them and lay my bruised cheek on my desk, then pull the cylinders tightly against my skull.
Emily. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.
I’m so terribly, terribly sorry…
I’m awakened by a rustling outside my window, in the bushes.
I remain very still, listening. There isn’t any wind. Maybe I didn’t hear it; maybe it was a product of this bump on my head?
No. There it is again. The rustling lasts longer this time. Something is poking into my hedge, crawling beneath my window. Something large.
I feel my palms begin to sweat. It’s a Mexican in my bushes, one of the cheese hoarders from Mex-Town, come to avenge the man I killed. Or maybe Muthukrishnan, come to steal the Elvis-in-a-Jar?
Rustling again. I can’t take it anymore.
“Is anyone out there?”
I open the window a crack. “Is there anyone out there?”
The only way I’ll know is to turn on the back floodlights and look out the clinic’s back door. At least, sneaking into the kitchen, I’m much steadier than I was a few hours ago. Opening the door, I smell something musky and frightened.
It’s a deer. A terribly thin deer, haggard and weak as the two I passed on the road yesterday. It’s eating berries off my hedges.
I wait for it to jump away from me and run off. It doesn’t. As soon as it sees I don’t have any food to offer, it returns to its meal of bush berries.
I sit down on my back steps and watch it eat. While I’m trying to think what I might have in my pantry to feed it, my phone rings.
The machine can answer it. It might be Brad or Mitch. They’re the last people on Earth I want to speak with right now. But the voice that leaves a message isn’t any voice I was expecting. It’s hesitant, befuddled by the series of beeps. My father’s voice.
Oh, hell. I’m not together enough to deal with him right now. But a nagging sense of filial responsibility makes me pick up the phone.
“— Louie? Louie, are you there? It’s late. You should be home. So pick up the phone, Louie, okay? Okay?”
I click off the answering machine. “It’s okay, Dad. I’m here.”
“Hello? Who is this?”
“It’s me, Dad.”
“Did I wake you? It’s late, right? It’s late where you are?”
“It’s the same time for me as it is for you.” I check my watch. “It’s one-thirty in the morning. What are you doing up? Are you all right?”
“I’m not all right, Louie. You have to come get me. They’re not doing right by me here.”
He almost never complains about the home anymore. Why now? Has his dementia taken a turn for the worse?
“What’s the matter, Dad? What’s going on?”
“Come get me. Can you come get me, right now?”
“No. Not right now, Dad. You have to tell me what’s the matter first.”
“What’s the matter? What’s the matter? They’re starving me here, that’s what’s the matter.”
“What?” I hear the deer outside. I feel the weight of hooves walking on my grave.
“I said, they’re starving me here. Weren’t you listening?”
The food. He’s complaining about the food. The most common, natural thing in the world is for rest home patients to complain about their food.
“You don’t like the food there? They aren’t feeding you enough?”
“No!”
“I could talk to your doctor, get them to put more spices in your food —”
“No! You aren’t listening! They feed me plenty. Three, four times a day. Soon as I finish one tray, they got another one waiting for me. But I’m always hungry, Louie. I never used to be hungry all the time like this.”
My palms begin sweating again.
“Louie, son, I can see my ribs.”