The Good Humor Man

by Andrew Fox

  The breeze from the ocean brings a whiff of ozone. “My food bill is breaking me,” Margo continues, her voice drained of its earlier emotion. “I’d go down south if I could, to the Latin countries. They don’t have Good Humor Men or Metaboloft, and normal people eat stuff like I get at Lansky’s all the time. But I wouldn’t want to leave the church for that long, and traveling outside the U.S.A. can be hard.”

  She stands, using my case to help hoist herself up. She runs her fingers along the edge of the bag, up its handle. Then she glides her fingertips lightly across my knuckles. The sudden contact, our first, makes me shiver. “I feel like I’m on an endless treadmill, but I don’t have a choice,” she says. “The Reductionist… he won’t do me yet. It’s been almost two years since my first and only sacrament. I’ve tried as hard as I can to gain the inches back, but he says I’m still not ready. I think he plays favorites. It could be —” Her voice breaks. Do I detect a note of calculated distress? “It could be years before I’m big enough to satisfy him.”

  “Margo. Don’t go back to him.”

  She stares into my eyes, removes my hand from the case, and squeezes it between both others. “Why shouldn’t I?”

  Behind us, the neon glow of Ocean Drive begins sputtering out. High above, the scattered lights of the few occupied Overtown towers blink and die. “What’s happening?” I ask, grateful for a chance to think of an answer.

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “It happens all the time.” She points to a floating power generation plant close to the horizon, barely visible in the moonlight. “It’s the old wave-energy generator. It’s cranky. The lights will come back on sometime before morning.”

  In the sudden absence of city light, the stars blaze with renewed radiance above the ocean’s darkness. Margo’s hair looks black in the distant celestial light. As black as Emily’s was. “Tell me where he is,” I say.

  I sense her nearness, the warmth of her skin. “How do you know the Reductionist has what you’re looking for?” she asks.

  Can she read minds? “I haven’t said a word about looking for something.”

  “You didn’t need to. I can just tell. Your being in Lansky’s the same time I was — that wasn’t an accident. And tracking down Julia Bonnabel. You wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble just to make some dinky sale.”

  How much do I tell her? How much is safe to tell her? When her parents selected her traits, they didn’t skimp on the cunning. While I’m debating how to regain the initiative, she takes my hand again and steals the initiative for herself. “I’ll tell you how to find him,” she says, her breath scented with chocolate, “if you’ll do a certain something for me first.”

  It doesn’t take the wisdom of Solomon for me to figure out what that might be.

  CHAPTER 12

  “Did you find everything you need?” Margo asks as I open the door.

  I feel like a reborn adolescent, horny and raw with anticipation, as I walk into my hotel room with a bag full of supplies. “Yes. We’re all set.” Scalpels, gloves, and topical anesthetics were easy to find. Hyaluronidase required a lot more looking, but I found that, too. I reach into my shopping bag and pull out a loose white robe, the closest surrogate for a hospital gown I could find. “Here. Put this on in the bathroom.”

  She frowns. “The Reductionist operated on me while I was naked, like Eve before the Fall.”

  “I’m not the Reductionist. Go change.”

  While she’s in the bathroom, I begin arranging what will be my operating room. I want to get started before my hands begin trembling, before I lose my nerve. I stare out the large windows that look out onto the bay and downtown Miami. Miami’s distant towers are partially blocked by the concrete profile of Christopher Columbus, on whose broad shoulder this corner of Overtown rests. That hooked, asymmetrical nose… I could perfect it, given enough time.

  Margo joins me at the windows. We stare at the colossus together. “Isn’t it ironic,” she says. “Thirty years ago, when Overtown was first being built, preservationists fought it like it was the end of the world. Now that it’s become a blight, a slum, those same preservationists say it’s as sacred as, I don’t know, the Great Wall of China.”

  She walks into the next room, then returns carrying a large mirror from atop the dresser. She leans it against the couch.

  “What’s that for?” I ask.

  “I want to see what you do, watch it all happen. So don’t even think about knocking me out.”

  “Total anesthesia isn’t necessary.” I smooth out the sheet I’ve spread over the dining room table. “Climb aboard. Lie down on your stomach and pull your robe up around your waist.”

  She does as I instructed, raising her rear end immodestly — provocatively? — as she wiggles her robe into a bunch around her midsection. I concentrate on my tools. I’ve decided against an IV drip; I’ll be removing only a small volume of tissues, between half and three-quarters of a pound. There’s simply not that much there to remove.

  The components of my cannula, suction unit, and power supply screw together smoothly, almost organically. I ask myself one last time: Should I have tried harder to bargain with her? Offered her money (or pastries) in place of this operation? But then I look at the places she has exposed for me, young white flesh where Trotmann has left his mark, and all objections and recriminations die unvoiced in my throat.

  It’s not as bad as it could be. Nowhere near the magnitude of damage he inflicted on Julia Bonnabel. Trotmann only operated on Margo once; maybe he was just breaking her in, waiting until her methodical gluttony could overcome her genetic predisposition toward gauntness. Bad enough. Staring at his obscenely amateurish incision, the way he cavalierly, cruelly left her two cheeks uneven in size and shape… I want to hurt him. I want to plunge my cannula into his chest like an ice-pick, then suck out his atrophied heart.

  This is no frame of mind to be in before picking up a scalpel. “Margo,” I say, struggling to keep my voice even. “These… irregularities on your left buttock cheek. I can correct them. I can inject lipids I’ll be extracting from another part of your body into the damaged areas.”

  “The marks on my rear end?” she says, turning her head so she can see me better. “They don’t matter. Just remove the fat, okay? Once you’ve sucked it out, I don’t want you injecting any back into me.”

  A thought races through my head: I didn’t request your permission. I do it right, or I don’t do it at all. I rub an antiseptic solution on my hands and forearms, then pull on a pair of sterile gloves. I begin applying the pre-operative ointments to the areas I’ll be working on, her buttocks and upper thighs.

  In the mirror, I see her eyes following my hands. “What are you doing, Doctor?”

  “I’ve applied an antiseptic to the areas where I’ll be making the incisions. They’ll be very small, just wide enough for me to insert the cannula through. I’ll hide the incisions in the folds between your buttocks and thighs.”

  “What is all that other stuff you’re slathering on me? It’s cold.”

  “It’s an anesthesia cream. The numbness lasts several hours.”

  Her face in the mirror grows hard. “Wipe it off. I told you you could give me a little shot where you’d be doing the cutting, not baste me with numbing cream like some Thanksgiving turkey. I need to feel what you’re doing. Those are my sins you’re sucking out of me. How can I achieve real expiation if I can’t feel the pain? Hurry! Go get a towel and wipe me off!”

  “I will not inflict needless pain. I don’t know what kind of sadism you’ve become accustomed to. But if you refuse local anesthesia, I refuse to perform the operation.”

  “Even if it means never finding what you’re looking for?”

  I walk to the windows and stare out at Columbus’s nose. Behind me, Margo sighs heavily. “All right,” she says. “Do it. The way you want to.”

  I finish applying the anesthetic, then inject a solution of hyaluronidase and sterile salt water into her right buttock ch
eek.

  “What is that, Doctor?” Her voice is softer now, almost apologetic.

  “It’s a solution that lowers the viscosity of hyaluronic acid, the cement that holds your internal tissues together. It allows the suction to be more effective. It’ll be a few minutes before the solution takes effect. If you’d like, I could leave the room until then.”

  “Why? What for?”

  “I thought you might need privacy, for… well, whatever.”

  “Are you asking if I want to pray?”

  “Something like that.” I check my watch. Ten minutes should do it.

  I see her smile in the mirror. “No, I’d much rather you stay. It’s a little weird, not being able to feel my thighs or my behind. About what I said before… not wanting the anesthesia? I’m glad you didn’t let me bully you. I’m glad you insisted.” She squeezes my hand, then lets the contact linger before pulling her arm back to a more comfortable position. “It was kind.”

  Amazing, the effect a single word can have. I feel those parts of me that were guarded and wary untightening, melting under the warmth generated by that one word. Kind. I uncap a body marker and begin outlining those contours of her body I plan to modestly reshape. As I draw ovals on smooth white skin, I sense small, hidden clumps of fatty tissues far beneath the nub of the marker, mysterious islands floating deep beneath her dermis, nourished by a sea of blood. I wish I had a fiber-optic camera to attach to my cannula so I could see those islands, visit them before suctioning them into a liquefied, undifferentiated mass. But I am a surgeon of the old school. I will know the islands by touch, by touch alone. The bright yellow ink shimmers on the skin of her right buttock like a golden tattoo, a constellation. A promise of blessedness?

  “Doctor?” Her voice is completely relaxed now. I’m pleased. “Won’t you tell me what it is you’re looking for? I could be a lot more help to you if I knew.”

  The marker freezes in my hand. How much does she need to know? If her loyalty still lies with Trotmann, telling her about the Elvis could ruin everything. But if she can show me where he keeps it, my job becomes a hundred percent simpler. And telling her might magnify her trust in me.

  “Margo, if I tell you what I’m looking for, and why, will you swear to keep it between us?”

  “You’re my Reductionist now,” she says. “I’d have to be an incredibly evil person to do anything bad to you.”

  She sounds completely sincere. But a small, shrill voice in my mind reminds me: Trotmann was her Reductionist until now. If she’d turn on him, why not you?

  Because I’m better than he is.

  “What I’m looking for,” I say, closely watching her face in the mirror, “is the preserved adipose fat of Elvis Presley, extracted by my father a few weeks before Elvis died.”

  Her eyes widen. “Your father was the evil doctor? Your last name is Shmalzberg?”

  I expected her to be surprised. But not this way. “‘Evil doctor’? What kind of nonsense has Trotmann been feeding you?”

  She pulls words from memory, a kid reciting catechism. “Elvis was the first of us to ever seek expiation of sin in our special way. But he was tricked into choosing the wrong Reductionist, and he died soon thereafter because of that Reductionist’s evil nature. Dr. Trotmann said that Elvis’s spirit went to Heaven anyway, because of his saintly intentions. And ever since, his spirit has watched over his earthly fat, keeping it unspoiled, to provide us a holy example to follow.”

  Wonderful, According to Margo’s theology, my father is Satan. Which makes me son of Satan.

  I tell her the whole story. My father’s story, and the story of my most recent ten days — the inquiries and threats from Muthukrishnan and the Ottoman that first made me want to reclaim the Elvis; and my desire to present it once more to my father before he dies.

  “Trotmann isn’t worthy of having it,” I say, my throat raw. “The Elvis — I may not agree that it’s holy, but it is something precious. It’s… practically a member of my family. For Trotmann to have it, for him to use it to slander my father’s name — it’s an abomination”.

  Is she with me? I can’t tell yet. “My father’s behavior wasn’t beyond reproach,” I admit. “His puncturing Elvis’s stomach cavity was a bad mistake. But he fixed it. If Elvis had laid off the amphetamines and tranquilizers like my father instructed, he wouldn’t have suffered the internal bleeding that killed him. Compare that to what Trotmann did to your friend Julia Bonnabel. He’s maimed dozens of women, without a qualm. The man is a serial disfigurer”.

  What is she thinking — The words of the devil are sly and insidious, like honey-laden venom? “Margo? Whom do you believe?”

  She rolls onto her side. Her gaze is even and cool. “I told you before, you’re my Reductionist now. In for a penny, in for a pound. Although in our case, it’s going to be pound after pound.”

  “What about that business with my father? The ‘evil doctor’?”

  She purses her full lips. “That was never a part of the religion that made much sense to me. I mean, if your father was the first Reductionist, and what he did allowed Elvis to go to Heaven, what’s so ‘evil’ about that? If Elvis died, that must’ve meant he was finished with his work here on earth. Maybe it was more important that his spirit be up in Heaven.”

  Good girl. Let the Reformation of the liposuction cult begin today here in this room. We’ll nail our ninety-five theses to the church wall together, using my cannula for a hammer.

  “So let’s get on with it,” she says, rolling back onto her stomach.

  I give the faded green button atop my cannula’s hand-grip a test press with my thumb. The suction unit purrs and vibrates like a satisfied cat. “We’re ready to begin now,” I say. “When I make the first incision, you won’t feel any pain; only a slight pressure.”

  I’ve read that before a Plains Indian would kill a buffalo, he would first beg its forgiveness. He approached his work with great seriousness and awe. This is how I approach this buttock, this lovely globe. To deface its perfect white smoothness with an incision seems a crime beyond measure. But what I remove from the one can be used to restore the other. I stretch Margo’s skin between my gloved fingers and make a tiny, neat slice, just wide enough for my cannula. Forgive me.

  With my cannula’s familiar weight in my hand, my arm feels complete, magically made whole. I insert its blunt-tipped aperture into the incision, beginning my probe of the mysterious spaces beneath the dermis, as alien as the dust clouds between stars. I must be careful to shield the fatty layer just below the outer skin; removing that would be like knocking the colossi from beneath the corners of Overtown.

  From the corner of my eye I see Margo twisting her neck in a desperate attempt to view my every movement. “Is it in? Is it in?”

  “Yes. You must remain absolutely still. The cannula can hurt you unless I control it perfectly.”

  “I believe in you, Doctor Shmalzberg.”

  With that strange emphasis on my surname, I can hear her building new mythologies from this encounter. I push the cannula deeper, feeling for the deep substrata of fatty tissues that underlie her right buttock. It’s hard, physical work. For the muscles of my right hand, it’s the redreaming of an old, recurrent dream.

  God, how I’ve missed this! I hadn’t realized how much.

  At last I sense the subterranean island I’ve been seeking. I push the green button on the cannula’s handle, and the machine hums to life. A viscid flow of red, yellow, and white races through plastic tubing toward the storage canister. Margo’s green eyes follow the spiraling flow, hypnotized by its ever-mutating beauty.

  Her lips form soundless words. I can’t tell what she’s saying. But her earlier words repeat themselves in my mind:

  I believe in you, Doctor Shmalzberg. I believe in you.

  Ten minutes later, the procedure is nearly done. I’ve positioned myself so that Margo can’t see the repair work I’m doing on her left buttock. I re-inj ect slightly more than half the lipids I’v
e removed from her other cheek; about 250 cubic centimeters, or half a pound. Already, I can see the furrows beginning to disappear. I sutured the right-hand incision quite elegantly, and now I do the same on the left. In telling contrast with Trotmann’s work, my incisions will leave no visible scars.

  I unfasten the storage canister from my suction machine. My net subtraction was 190 cc’s of subdermal fat, little more than a third of a pound. As I heft the diminutive weight in my hands (the weight of a small bag of chocolates, or a child’s heart), I am overcome by a piquant sense of tenderness. My fingers embrace a small but significant portion of Margo.

  How long did it take her to grow this third of a pound? How many furtive, lonely meals at Lansky’s? My heart skips a beat — haven’t I just suctioned away part of her fortification against the Metaboloft effect? But then I remember my trunkload of illegal desserts. For now, I can protect her. Metaboloft will reach the foreign fields where those ingredients were harvested, too, eventually. But in the meantime, Margo and I will wax fat as the world shrinks around us.

  I hold the storage canister up to the light. The Margo tissues swim in their warm salt sea, glowing like luminescent jellyfish.

  “Doctor? May I… may I see it?”

  She sounds weak. “In just a minute.” I pour her a large glass of orange juice to replace the fluids she’s lost. “Here. Drink this, then I’ll pour you another glass.”

  Only after she’s downed the second helping do I place the canister in her hands. “It’s… really kind of beautiful,” she says. “So long as I don’t think about the sins that pollute it.” She rotates the glass container in her hands. “It’s so strange, to look at this and think that, just ten minutes ago, this was a part of me. Not just something foreign inside me, like an undigested piece of steak, but actually a part of me, something my blood flowed through.”