The Gnome Stories, page 11
Maybe because of this instead of leaving, she waited another hour in the waiting room, and Lucia asked the nurse if the boy’s parents had been contacted, and if someone was coming. Maybe she should have stayed with him in the room; she could have hummed or held his hand or told him dirty jokes. But then what had her parenting been worth, she wondered, and she knew that everyone else must suspect this failing in her, too, so she sat, fingers locked, out in the emergency room waiting room and watched a television show where police agents found The Lost (cue creepy humming sound). She had seen it before. It was all right—not that well written, but dark enough, because they didn’t always find the missing one. About half the time they’d be alive. Some of the missing showed up dead. And a few were never found at all. Those numbers were way above the actual: no one would tune in to see one out of every eight (at best) found at all, in any way, alive or dead. No one wanted to see the ones who were gone completely, who had disappeared without a note or trail of leaking gasoline or fingerbone to signify their disappearance. And no one would tune in for the episodes where disappearances went completely unremarked, just a smoke sign left in the air, evaporating, like in cartoons.
Lucia watched the door open and close until a woman came in with the look: sufficiently desperate, sweaty, and uninjured. This would be Luis’s mother, unaccompanied, her face pale, storming up to the reception desk to announce herself.
As she rose from the stained chair, Lucia realized the two of them had met. The mother might not remember her from that block party. It would have been before Luis was born and they were both someone other than who they had become. Lucia’s husband was still alive then, if flagging and in no shape to attend the party, which meant both the kids were part of the equation. Since there were four of them still in the house they went to parties, though the kids didn’t come to the block party for some reason, something stupid, probably, like they wouldn’t have mini corn dogs there, only regular corn dogs, and it might have been when Cherelle was vegan. Where had they gone instead? They wouldn’t have stayed at home. Oh, the artificial lake: they must have been there with their friends. Who knew what they did out there?
So Lucia had gone herself.
It was an unusually chaotic party, it being another Independence Day with everyone trying to prove their patriotism, this being only a year after those terrorist attacks down in Phoenix, you know the ones, the ones that started all the fires, and for some reason now we kept blowing things up to show our resilience to our stuff getting blown up as if to say we, not you, are the ones who blow stuff up: we do it for fun and all the time.
Was fire fun then? There seemed to have been a lot of fires then.
And there had been two fires at the party, too, the first one due to male-assisted lighter fluid overuse, and when it was put out all the surrounding kids had cheered, then got bored, and muttered off, and the dads held their heads low for a while but didn’t apologize, or at least not in public. Always awkward at parties, Lucia had rapidly gotten very drunk and thought of her husband at home, above the street and looking out, expecting her back any minute with a bratwurst for his consumption.
She did not, right then, want to go—not back to him, or anywhere else.
There was a second fire, too, wasn’t there? Lucia had been talking to Luis’s mother about something trivial when the stop sign had erupted in flames ten feet behind the two of them, and Lucia could only remember a little bit of this: first the eyeshadow of Luis’s mother, something bright, an echo of the fire, and then a whoosh of air behind her, the illuminated sign reflected in her glasses as she turned, elbowing someone else in the back, and as she turned, the ghostly shriek of a child as if a poltergeist had just caught fire and was surprised to find that it could burn.
The two women had ducked for cover, spilling their drinks onto the street. They watched the colored alcohol trickle down toward the sign and touch the burn but not, thankfully, catch flame. Luis’s mother crossed herself, and everyone else stood a little more alertly. The men appeared immediately, clamoring to do something to demonstrate their worth, all yells and whooping, putting out the sign with tablecloths from the front yard. This was now and would be henceforth remembered as the Party of the Fires. Also the Last Party for a Couple of Years.
She remembered the mother from that party. How many years ago was that? Turning, the mother scanned the waiting room, looking for something or just bored, waiting to be ushered in to deliver love and reprobation to Luis. She was filled with purpose; she held it like a glow. Lucia could almost see it coming off of her, like holy flame.
Lucia stood. She should go to her, she thought, and did.
She was pleased with herself for taking this small action. She passed an adult covered in what looked like eighty staples in his arm.
As Lucia approached the mother, a nurse called another name, and the mother turned.
Lucia realized she had forgotten the woman’s name, if she had ever known it. Had the world become so closed to her that it had become inaccessible?
The mother was just a foot away, preoccupied. Just beyond her the door led back into the real world.
Lucia reached out tentatively to touch the mother’s shoulder. The mother turned again just before and the two bumped. Oh, I’m sorry, Lucia said.
It’s okay, the mother said, her eyes already swimming away. They may have scanned Lucia’s face, or maybe that was just Lucia wondering if she would be remembered. She wanted to say, Do you remember, you know, the fire? The party? That afternoon? How it felt to be who you were then? Can you still access it now? What would you give up for that knowledge?
Lucia’s mouth stayed open for a beat. She could feel it gape. That pause went on just long enough to have contained some additional energy, but where it went was another question. Lucia couldn’t say what, if anything, passed between the two of them.
Lucia closed her mouth. The mother’s name was called, and she turned away and walked right through the gate into the hallway toward her son.
As for Lucia, she backed away. She went through the open door and disappeared.
It Is Hard Not to Love the Starvationist’s Assistant
The job description was accurate: Assistant Needed for Commercial Body Modification Project. Sherilyn was excellent at assisting, having done it most of her life. She was certified to assist the nurses who would visit her grandparents in their home, where they would eventually die—together, in flames, probably though not conclusively one last act of rebellion against the world that had always, in their view, conspired against them. She had assisted dozens of her friends with their writing in college—plagiarism, really, though no one called it that then. Had driven getaway for her high school boyfriend’s second vandalism spree (two hundred plus broken windows, flares shot up over the water like fireworks trailing into glitter, all the parking meters downtown winched up from the concrete then left there like used toothpicks for giants), and admittedly it was sort of under duress, if that’s what you’d term their love, though she would have rolled on him in a minute if she had somehow been caught. Still, she could be counted on to show up on time, appropriately attired, prepared for almost anything, at any time, and to see whatever through. If she were a boy she would have been a Boy Scout, peppered with pins and multicolored badges, having mastered Webelos and on her way for sure to Eagle. Which is why she kept getting hired for these jobs. Her references: impeccable. Her work record: spotless. This was a kind of genius, she told herself, to be the supporting cast, even if you never got to call yourself a protagonist.
She had little respect for the body with its interlocking systems of fluids, its hormonal bursts and spurts. Where had it ever got her, she thought, and she was happy to help tame it when she could, she said at the interview. Her job was to be professional, to maintain lists, to watch the Subject’s food intake, to monitor the Subject’s weight as it slowly—then increasingly quickly, accelerating as the body began to burn its fat reserves—dropped, approaching the contractual goal. She would also be responsible for administering small electric shocks to curb undesired behavior, and occasionally for doing other things as needed. The need for discretion went without saying.
The Starvationist was a behaviorist at heart, with a bit of the dietitian’s training and a strong streak of the dominatrix. Her fashion reflected this—chokers, leather strips, keychain handcuffs that her Assistant assumed must be a joke, and a complicated strappy mask she wore in all official Encounters with the Subjects. The look was a put-on mostly. She called it her game face, and it always struck Sherilyn as odd. When she asked, the Starvationist told her that it reassured the supplicants, I mean the Subjects. That’s half of it, she said. They wanted to be reassured, to feel that by someone’s holding them they could assert control. This is exactly what they lacked, and she gave it to them. So you had to look the part. You can detach, submerge into the role, and act. Sherilyn was asked to wear only red and black, something professional with a touch of sexy. She would be the carrot; the Starvationist was the stick. This was how it was explained to her. Nearly any human behavior could be curbed like this. Every other Friday she’d get to be the stick too.
Take this Subject, for instance: he could benefit from the stick. At forty-six, not an age past salvage but an age when the outlines of your life have long become clear: whatever the glass was, half-empty or half-full, the line was calcified on the side of the container. Sherilyn could tell he was a sort of sad guy, just out from what he’d termed an open marriage, the sort of open marriage that you sensed was more open on his side than on his wife’s, that that was the story he’d been telling himself, that it was what she deserved for no longer wanting sex with him. He’d looked defeated, coming in, and was, no doubt. But he had one killer feature: a full head of hair, glossy and almost false looking, which he’d grown out to the point that it was hard to read it as anything but a performance. He had contracted the Starvationist to help him reach his weight-loss goal, which was to drop no fewer than sixty pounds. He wanted to get his old self back, he said, find his mojo. The usual. He wanted to impress girls. One in particular, he said: his ex. He wanted her back. He’d done something to lose her, though what that was he wouldn’t say. Now he’d do anything. Become anyone. He’d tried a lot of things, he said, but none of them had worked. What did she want anyway, he asked Sherilyn, and she couldn’t say of course (except for the obvious).
It could almost make you blind, encountering this kind of sadness on the daily. You could see from the cabinets and garbage in his house that this was a last chance for him. She saw it all on the walk-through now, just Sherilyn and him, gathering data for the Starvationist.
He had all the products seen on television. A box of brochures and glossy folders from weight-loss seminars. Hypnotism only works, Sherilyn told him, for one of three people, those who are predisposed to those sorts of states, and you are not. It’s not your fault. Don’t worry, she had said. We’ll get you there. You’ll get to see the inside of that meditative state. People often find that once they get beyond the first two stages of the Process they begin to lose sight of their lives. They come out beautiful; they come out changed.
Another Subject was this actor who needed to lose forty-one pounds for what he clearly thought would be an Oscar-winning role. He was supposed to be an ascetic, a sexy historical priest, and while the studio told him they could digitally reduce him onscreen if they had to, he was a method kind of guy, and needed to get there for real, to get inside the body of a 110-pound man, for it to feel yes, the click, so right. He had got down to 132 by himself through diet and exercise, deprivation. He’d tried the Zone, low carb, all pineapple, et cetera, but he plateaued at 132; 132 was skinny, but it was not 110. He was spinning his wheels, he’d said when Sherilyn was doing the initial interview, and his people couldn’t get him down any further, and if he didn’t he would lose the role, and he would lose momentum, he’d said, whatever that meant, and when Sherilyn had asked he’d said you know, the story, the one where you are the next; when you lose that moment you’re the previous, the last; the roles stop coming. He said he had heard the Starvationist was the breast. He actually said breast, and then corrected himself, laughing, and then Sherilyn laughed with him. She had liked his last movie, though she didn’t (would never—she didn’t want to be one of the masses who deify those whose lives occur onscreen) tell him this.
The job was mostly good. She got to talk to the famous, the semi-famous, and the very very depressed because they were not more famous, and that was a perk. It kept things in perspective. Here was what you wanted, and here was what you had to do to get it. It was a simple story that they told. Everyone seemed to feel the same: they wanted and they wanted. Even those who’d appeared to be themselves, to be happy: inside they wanted worse than anything. They just wouldn’t—or couldn’t—say.
The Starvationist held her at arm’s length for a few months before she relaxed. She’d make a joke while prepping a Subject for anesthesia. And then she’d reveal some hidden section of herself in that beautiful moment when the Subject went under, like her interests in erotic asphyxiation or her now-decades-long fandom for the band Hanson (this was how Sherilyn learned that Hanson superfans called themselves fansons). Sherilyn had never watched someone die, but she wondered how much like death anesthesia was. It was breathtaking, like watching someone walk off a cliff. They made a joke, and then the self was gone. It would come back after the procedure, but where did it go when it wasn’t here? Witnessing this did call for some kind of revelation, so Sherilyn began to tell stories too. And with every moment like this the two of them were stitched a little more closely together. The Starvationist said that she was glad she could rely on Sherilyn. She’d had trouble finding the right person. She gesticulated with the scalpel. Assistants wouldn’t stay past the first three months. Why was what? she wondered. I’ve never quite understood. Then she addressed the unconscious Subject: Do you know? And when he did not answer back, she recollected herself and gestured back to Sherilyn: How about you? Why are you still here? I don’t mean to seem ungrateful, but I’d resigned myself to replacing you like all the rest.
I couldn’t say, Sherilyn said: I mean I don’t know. I like the job. You help people.
We help people, Sherilyn.
I know, she said.
We change people, Sherilyn.
Yes, she said. It’s hard to change, to really change.
Yes.
Sherilyn saw the bodies melt away, the sags and flaps develop, because that was what happened when you lost a lot of weight in a very short time. Sometimes that spare footage rubbed together and you had to grease the rubbing parts if you run, which almost no one ever did. It wasn’t always pretty, this kind of care. Keep your clothes on, Subjects were told, until you see the cosmetic surgeon, if that matters to you.
The system works in part on fear and bargaining. The testimonials on the brochure explained that one former Subject was able to leach the last twenty pounds into the middle toe of his right foot, and then they lopped it off. He lost the toe but he did make his weight. The guy was really, truly happy to be down to what he weighed when he graduated from high school and got the first of his four lifetime Camaros. The middle toe doesn’t do jack for you, he said—who thinks about that toe? It doesn’t help with balance, doesn’t make you faster, more beautiful, cooler, or otherwise better equipped for life. He was thin now and life could not be better, he said. He beamed. The camera loved him and always would. Sherilyn had her doubts. He went on too long, especially for a testimonial. They couldn’t identify him by name, but they mentioned a couple of movies he had been in before the treatment and the blockbuster that came after. Still. Sherilyn wondered: What would have really happened if he hadn’t made the weight?
Almost no one doesn’t make the weight, the Starvationist said.
But what if?
He would have lost something bigger, the Starvationist said.
For instance: the whole amputation thing was real and written into the contract. She didn’t doubt whether it happened—she had seen the toe stump, had helped pull it off and preserve it in ice, so she knew it did—but it seemed awfully grisly. The Starvationist had a cat named Spragmos, which was something unattractive from some ancient Greek myth. The cat was ugly, bloated, angry, fat, not sleek and clean like other cats. He had a big hump along its back. Was missing a tooth in the front so he often appeared to snarl even when he was apparently pacified. He bit you in the head while you were sleeping, she explained. Sherilyn wondered why you’d even have a cat like that. Love, the Starvationist had said. He hadn’t always been this way. When you have a pet, you commit.
So commit her Assistant did. The job became all-encompassing. It was all she thought about, even at home or walking through the city, waiting for something to happen to her. When she began to dream about amputation Sherilyn knew she had become part of something true. So when Paul, an ex-boyfriend, walked in for an afternoon appointment, she felt almost—what—violated, she thought, later, once she’d recovered from the shock. And god, what had become of him? She’d heard from mutual friends that Paul had changed in the wake of their breakup. He had grown quite large indeed (the gossip suggested it was grief and desolation over losing hold of her heart, her heat, her gleaming, perfect teeth—that her spurning broke a boundary inside him, and he just inflated).
