The Gnome Stories, page 12
Or it might be just that his name contained his destiny. That was his theory. He’d always hated it, being one of the Pauls, but being in a relationship had protected him from it, himself, his doom, he’d said.
Name one successful Paul, he’d said, when they had been dating for a year.
McCartney, Sherilyn replied.
Second fiddle, but alive and married to a woman with just one leg, he said: so there’s that. But okay, name another.
She got distracted: there’s what? He was alive and married, a multimillionaire. She paused before responding. How about the apostle?
Is that successful?
He’s remembered, right?
Wasn’t he crucified or pulled apart by dogs or something awful?
He might have had a point, though, when she thought about it, and she spent a whole weekend trying to disprove his theory, and this was the conversation from the relationship that came back to her from time to time, and she’d never had a great answer, which was pretty strange, you had to admit, because how much could a name really determine? (Don’t ask a John.) Eventually the best she figured out was: Bunyan, some baseball player for Milwaukee famous for a string of hits in consecutive games, and probably some pope somewhere along the line (John Pauls do not count, he reminded her). Paul Simon?
Among the more transcendent of the natural Pauls, but we only remember his name in contrast to the dorkiest-named partner you could dream up.
Shit. How about J Paul Hurhston, the famous horror writer?
J, my dear, is for John.
Hmm, she said.
Compare the success of Pauls, he said, to Johns. I give up, she said, and did.
It had been a year.
Paul had contacted the Starvationist, though he had first referred to her as the Interventionist, mixing her up with one of those jokers who specialized in curbing any old kind of behavior unwanted by families on television shows. When he had called, his voice was unrecognizable—thick and thinky, like he had spent far too much time alone, in his head. Who knows how many loser Pauls he’d now collected? It’s like his vocal cords had gotten fat, too, if that was even possible. Luckily, maybe, he didn’t recognize Sherilyn either, until he had come in for the initial consultation, which was a little more than awkward, and the Starvationist could surely sense it. If he wasn’t sure when he’d walked in, the look on Sherilyn’s face—impossible to hide—was what clicked for him, he said, later: that was what now committed him to the Method, the full course of it.
She explained their history to the Starvationist.
Good, she said. Stakes are important.
Sherilyn was not so sure. Shouldn’t you be here on your own? she asked. People will do a lot of stupid things to try to get back someone who it turns out they cannot have.
He’d explained that his weight had increased ever since she left, it was all he could think about, eating, the slow roll down the inclined plane of their love (he was an engineer and worked hard for these kinds of metaphors). Was there a maximum blood pressure you could get to and still be alive?
Lord, he said, give some salt to Paul.
Now he—and via the magic of institutionality he became Subject, no longer Paul or he at all—looked like a sandwich, his brow inflated, his neck inflated, the totality of him mushrooming outward, and it was all Sherilyn could do not to let her horror out. She had heard, of course, what everyone had said, but she doesn’t believe in talking to one’s exes. And especially in this case, she had thought it better just to cut it off entirely—you don’t want to leave men with hope.
As part of the Contract Meeting, Paul was informed that it was a possibility—possible, though rare—that he might have to lose an extremity as part of the treatment, but that he got to pick which one, if it came to that, and he had to pick now, so there would be Actualization of Consequence.
Of course he had to pick the penis.
Almost no one picked the penis. Though one man picked his lover’s penis, and then became petulant when informed the extremity had to be his own. After that he—like most people—picked a toe, though it didn’t end up needing to be clipped off.
Toes were the easiest, the least obtrusive, amputations. Very few people had any love for the toe, aside from the array of sandal sniffers, stocking stuffers, and foot fetishists who inevitably found their way to the Starvationist, fetishists drawn inexorably to another, usually through the power of the internet. Occasionally you got the people who wanted amputations, who were that particular brand of fucked up, the Starvationist told Sherilyn. That’s why they did the psych screen up front, the MMPI, those weird Rorschach cards, and the rest of the battery of tests. That way you could control certain variables, keep the real wackos out, those who didn’t want to succeed, for whom the consequences were the endgame.
Runners never picked the toe, but runners never came to the Starvationist, having already found their system.
Afterward Sherilyn told the Starvationist that he probably wouldn’t do it, if it came to it, that he’d pick another body part. Who would really want it to be the penis? she said. You never know, the Starvationist told her in another one of those unguarded moments that became almost startling: her father had chemically castrated himself to reduce the incidence of one of his many compulsive urges.
But that’s different, Sherilyn said, he still had the body part, right?
That’s true, said the Starvationist.
Sherilyn asked, Is he still alive?
Yes, she said. Kind of, she said. I don’t want to talk anymore about it. Well, with this Subject we will see.
What kind of life would it be with the sex drive just stripped from you—or would it remain a learned compulsion? It must have been pretty bad, she thought. But then a lot of it was pretty bad, she found, working here.
And besides, Paul’s penis, like most penises, was never one of his better features, though perhaps now with his massive weight gain its position had improved, thought Sherilyn. Maybe it too would become weighty when engorged, would sway from side to side like a pendulum. This was not a thought she had ever thought before, she realized, with some alarm, and wondered where it came from.
The Method is rough, what with the collars and the tourniquets, the tubes, and the restricted diet, but the worst part for Subjects was the lack of sleep. There were no drugs. The Starvationist did not believe in drugs, believed instead in the power of the will, and of suggestion, and of threat and consequence. Her father’s chemical castration didn’t take, she said, later, in another unguarded moment. He had done some things, and it was ordered by a judge; this was another era, when that still happened, but it didn’t help. They had found out later that he’d taken reverse hormone therapy to bring back his sex drive: he said he just couldn’t live without it. And he had committed another crime, and had to be removed to an experimental camp, and he had returned completely changed.
Changed how?
Just changed. He wasn’t the same. Less there, really, which honestly was better. He could be a terror before. Now he was just a shell of one.
Her Assistant wondered: Was that where it began for her?
The Subjects were nearly all able to make their goal weights. They lost tens of thousands of pounds in the aggregate. There was Danny, a four-hundred-pounder who lost, with their help, half of his body size in just under a year, though he died shortly afterward from an unrelated condition that no one was aware of. His testimonial still appeared on the brochure, with the before-and-after photos, accompanied by an asterisk and type so small it was illegible except with a magnifying glass. It had to be specially printed on a super-high-resolution printer: There Are Health Reasons Not to Suddenly Lose All Your Body Weight. And Sherilyn was impressed and a little bit surprised when each of them finally made their weight, in spite of what she knew about the Method, which worked whether or not you wanted it to. That was its genius. That was why the Starvationist could charge such fees, why she could afford to pay an assistant as extravagantly as she did. When everything else has failed, you should call the Starvationist. That was the little jingle the ad agency had created, which Sherilyn found herself humming. Sherilyn didn’t know why they’d bothered with advertising, since almost all their business aside from the internet wackos came from word of mouth. There is no shortage of those hoping to lose (or even occasionally gain: the Starvationist did this too) weight in this world, and they all come eventually to the Starvationist. Working here Sherilyn had started to notice how omnipresent weight was, how advertisements gestured toward its loss everywhere and in every medium: television, newspapers, internet, magazines, even stapled up on telephone poles all throughout the city or plastered on the crowded, aging bulletin boards at the public library and the coffee shop. Besides sex, this was now the great draw. There is money to be made, people to be saved from themselves, from the imminent world.
At the end of the world there will be cockroaches, a few stalwart lovers reaching out toward each other, some battlements, a shitload of Styrofoam, weirdo constantly mutating viruses attacking each other or the few remaining human hosts, and the Starvationist. That’s what Sherilyn told her friends who wanted to know why she stayed on. They asked: Wasn’t it just awful being around so much want? Wasn’t it like a cult? And could you tell us more about its dictates? About how it operates?
No. She stayed, she thought, because the Method worked every time, unlike love, family, or autoerotic asphyxiation. Sherilyn saw it work: she helped it work. She affixed the tubes, held the Subjects down, administered pulses of electroshock to the points circled into constellations on their sometimes-willing skin. She drew the cutting lines and helped guide the Starvationist’s hands in the cases where it came to that. This was the one task for which the Starvationist truly needed an assistant: her hands got shaky when touching skin, when cutting. She had tried med school before washing out of surgery. She just had a mental block, and could not get past it. This was her secret. And when Sherilyn started paying attention, she realized that the Starvationist never actually touched a Subject flesh to flesh. Not once. Hence the gloves and the getups and the masks. Here was what she was really needed for: the cutting and the touching. So Sherilyn would cup her hands on the Starvationist’s until they stopped their little shaking, and—like Ouija!—would guide them sort of semimystically to do what they had to do. Once when the Starvationist couldn’t do it, Sherilyn had to make the cuts herself unguided, which was far harder than she would have guessed: flesh unzipped so easily under the Starvationist’s hands on her hands, and even though it seemed that Sherilyn did all of the work, alone, suddenly she was in her head with all those Pauls, and she nearly botched the cuts. The incision along the socket where the ring finger would have gone into was jagged, and needed another round of trimming or it might go septic. This particular Subject wanted the ring finger gone if something had to go. She had been deserted by her husband, who, after upending her from her friends and life in Minnesota, moved her to Tucson, Arizona, where after just six months, he confessed that he was gay and wanted a divorce. She asked: Why did he even want to move us here? Not us but me: he moved me here—and not even to Tucson proper, I don’t know if you know it (it’s a dusty little town) but even worse, to Rita Ranch, a shitty commuter suburb for those who worked down at the avionics corporation where they designed missiles or software for them or parts to help them fly straight and long and kill, and then he left me there. All the restaurants they went to there were chains. It burned her skin to go outside. Every plant had hooks or barbs, and sometimes you wouldn’t even notice you got a spine in you until you went to bed. Some spines got so deep in you they wouldn’t ever come out, not ever, she explained. And then with his boyfriend he moved right back to Minnesota and I was there alone in all that desert suburban fucking air.
So with this intervention from the Starvationist, she said, she would finally be done with all of it. Had she even tried to lose the weight? Who cares? she said. It would be a fitting reminder of what was there and would never return, even as she could now fit back into a size ten, something the husband had said she would never do again, and he didn’t know what she could or couldn’t do anymore, not now. And of course he came crawling back to her for support when his boyfriend left him in frozen Minnesota. You’re my best friend, he’d said. You’re the only one who really knows me. Back in a size ten, with her finger gone, she lost his name and switched her hair and returned to Minnesota. Her life would be hers again. Never again would she answer or return his call. You had to admire a woman like that for doing what she did, for recovering from that kind of wreck.
Was that the kind of wreck Paul was? He sure seemed wrecked, but Sherilyn could not see how it was her problem or her fault. He did genuinely seem to want change. It was uncomfortable being so close to him as he fell apart, even now that she was part of the solution.
The second time Paul saw Sherilyn in the office she could see him stiffen up, and not in the way she briefly used to love. He stammered for a minute, then got control, found civility, said hello. It’s not like he didn’t know she was here, that she was the hands around the Starvationist’s hands, that she was part of what was happening to him now. So today, as usual, even when he wasn’t late, Sherilyn told him he was early so he’d have to wait. That it could be some time. Expectation was part of the Method. Plus the Starvationist was with another Subject, an actor better known for his many nonacting passions that seemed like they must amount to either a mania or a joke. Normally she wouldn’t say anything this specific, but she was put off by Paul and the beach ball of his engorged body, then the thought of possibly bearing some responsibility for it, and for his eventual future depenising if the Method didn’t work, so she was off guard and stumbling. They both were. It was like their first date, which also went badly, involving diarrhea, a word he was completely unable to spell in the apology note he sent her, attempting to overcome her food poisoning and his botched attempt at cooking Thai. Back then Paul was beautiful, and his big skill, the thing he had mastered, was the ability to listen to Sherilyn as she told him about herself. He was all ear, all hammer and anvil and Eustachian tube and drum, and she had loved that immediately about him, this self-effacingness. He looked sort of dumb, too, and that was a plus.
The downside of this was that their relationship quickly became all about her, him hanging on her, always listening. She revealed herself to him, and got little back, until the great Pauling happened. It wasn’t domination, nothing like that, but there was nothing to it finally—he could not emerge from this stance and tell her anything she needed—and so she soured even as he took more of her inside himself. In retrospect their vectors were diverging even after their first night together, and she assumed he was too dumb or proud to tell.
The actor, whom they both recognized, came out of the closed door and walked down the hallway, beaming in the way that actors do when they know they are recognized, when they do their public masking thing. Sherilyn and Paul locked eyes—he knew she would not dignify the actor with her praise, and he was right. The actor passed between the two of them without comment. She wondered if the actor would feel let down, what that would feel like for him. He was looking thinner already, she thought, but didn’t say.
Weeks passed.
Then more weeks.
And then just one more.
As the Method worked on the expanded version of Paul, the Starvationist’s Assistant watched him whittle himself away. His behaviors normalized, then simplified, then some of them disappeared altogether. He took on this habit at times of seeming not to breathe, and Sherilyn wondered if it was real or illusion, if it was a literary allusion to some story by Kafka, Hurhston, or King, or Borges (his favorite authors, none of them, of course, an unadorned Paul), if he had some store of oxygen inside his sloppy body or if it was all a trick. He did it constantly, annoyingly, as Sherilyn charted his progress, the pounds slipping away, though the Starvationist was not concerned: she said this was not what was important. What was, Sherilyn wondered, and neither Paul nor Sherilyn asked themselves why she had given up on him and the Love That Was (grandiosely, he had referred to this in most of the dozen emails they had traded around the end of their relationship, recapping it in hopes of finding an alternate ending to their narrative), which she was thankful for. She did not want to talk about it here or elsewhere either, and because the Method depended on Excising the Personal (and possibly the penis), she had to quash it the one time he had tried to bring it up. He had to wear the Choker Apparatus for a day when the Starvationist noted this. It was a spike on his otherwise unremarkable chart, and after that his behavior curve improved, smoothed out. He was in the groove, right on trend, approaching norm. And as he was Reduced, he said less and less, and that was more as Sherilyn remembered him.
Then he plateaued for a week, and his chart went horizontal, requiring the Starvationist and her Assistant’s intervention. She asked him: What was wrong? What had changed? Sherilyn was not supposed to do this; Subjects were tracked and redirected but not interrogated, but she couldn’t help herself. She knew this was where the Possibility of Amputation was turned into an Actual Scenario. They had to bring it out to be Examined, Photographed, and Considered, and if it was a humiliation, so much the better. The Subject gave in to tears, not for the first time, though this did not sway the Starvationist. It was either the last ten pounds—just ten pounds after all that work!—or he would lose the thing. Predictably Paul tried to back out, said he was happy the way he was, having lost a lot of weight already, nearly ninety pounds: that was a lot, he said, don’t you think?
