Thinner Than Thou

by Kit Reed

  There is something deep down lasciviously wonderful about having a secret, and now I have two. There are the food orgies with my lover and now there’s this:

  The fat man inside me is-dwindling along with the flesh on my increasingly lean flanks and wow, look what’s moving in as the fat guy leaves the room! Inside Jeremy Devlin, the inner lion is expanding. He’s on his hind legs with his jaws wide, fixing to roar.

  It’s time. Zoe and I have our orgies, but undeistand. I do what I have to, to maintain my position here.

  You might as well know that in my early days, I was disgusted by the Scarf-and-Barforama scene, but to keep the weight off, it’s a nightly necessity. My throat is sore and my mouth tastes of vomit all the time; I can feel the enamel leaching off my teeth because this kind of thing is not good for you, but the alternative is to disappoint Zoe, which I am not about to do. We are proceeding cautiously because we’re shy about our bodies, but we are proceeding nonetheless, sneaking out into the desert to feed our desires. Face it, we need each other, I need her soft touch and the sound of her sweet voice and her baskets of beautiful food.

  I suppose I could drop Zoe and concentrate on my ambitions, but when push comes to shove, I can’t. A few more perfumed nights in the sweat lodge and I’ll probably be in love. Meanwhile I scarf and barf and gargle afterward because it is commensurate with my plan. See, I am done with discipline and subservience. Jeremy Devlin is used to running things, and now it’s time. I’ve paid my dues, hell, I paid a fortune to come here, I’ve lost the weight and by God it’s time to hit the clubhouse. It isn’t about the bikinis and the lobster breakfasts, it isn’t about the white coveralls or the king-size beds with the coordinated plush spreads and it isn’t about my part in the heavenly infomercial, although I thought it was.

  Frankly, I think there is a place for me in the organization here. All I need to do is get to the clubhouse, so I can show him what I’ve got. Financial acumen. Organizational skills. I was a success in the world outside Sylphania before I ever bought a brick in the road to the Afterfat. After all, I am an asset in any setting and it’s time the Reverend Earl recognized me for the talent that I am. All I have to do is show him what I can do, e.g. that I can buy and sell all his two-bit showoffs like Nigel Peters, who isn’t worth the disposable napkins I use to wipe the chocolate off my mouth.

  It’s clear the Rev’s got a good thing going here. And me? The bottom line is … OK, I’m not in business for my health. With J. Devlin the bottom line is the bottom line.

  But success in any business demands concentration. The trouble is, how can a guy think when he’s hungry all the time?

  Even with double doses of the Special Herbal Formula, I’m too hungry to think. I guess the stuff is working, I’ve lost the fatal three pounds and a couple of quarts more and all within the week, but I am hungry as shit. I scarf the mess hall crap and lick the mess tray and then I suck up everything Zoe brings, sometimes I even eat toothpaste and I chew on leather in between, but I am fucking starving here. Dieting is supposed to shrink your stomach, so where is this coming from?

  Later

  We are still meeting regularly. Wonderful Zoe. Me. I have become a bulimic virtuoso, and she? Does my lover secretly do the same, and do we both gargle before and after these encounters to keep our secret sacrifices to ourselves? And where—where does my sweet Zoe get all this food? Maybe it’s the proximity and maybe it’s just a shipboard romance, but I’m definitely close to being in love with her. If we keep on meeting like this, one of these nights when we’ve finally had our fill of desserts and roasted meats with rich glazes, we will go the rest of the way and make love. But only after we’re comfortable inside our bodies, and only after we’ve disposed of the evidence. The evidence: this is important. We can eat all we want and love it, but we can’t leave a scrap or we’ll be caught. Every night when Zoe and I are finished we kiss and then we go out into the moonlight and bury the detritus in the sand, and distracted as we are, entranced by the rich mixture of love and deception, we are becoming, how to say this? Disturbed.

  Something weird is going on.

  This kind of knowledge doesn’t come all at once, it creeps up on you. Things intuited. Things peripherally observed. Disparate items that you file and forget until there are so many that you can’t pretend to ignore them any more. You see things and you think, that’s nothing. Until they start mounting up.

  Eventually you hear the click.

  Things are happening out there in the night. I have seen phenomena I can’t explain. Movement in the distance when Zoe and I tiptoe out to bury our cupcake papers and cleanly licked chop bones. Trucks, for instance. At first I thought well sure, supplies. But, every night? I see 18-wheelers moving along the remote horizon line, coming and going at every hour of almost every night. At a certain point this goes from ordinary to creepy: those tremendous, dark shapes running without lights, and why are they running without lights? Last Friday night when we finished and Zoe left for her trailer in the women’s compound, I stayed back. Stay in the dark long enough and your pupils expand and turn it into day for you; my sight lines seemed to expand. For the first time I followed the outlines of the trucks as they moved along toward—yes!—there was a pale green glow coming off the sand way out there, in the west, but from what?

  That night my consciousness expanded too.

  Now, when my love and I touch sugary fingers and separate and I return to the solitude of my trailer, I see every spark moving in the middle distance, whether of torches or headlights I can’t yet say. Then there are the sounds, barely perceptible over the noises the men’s compound at Sylphania makes. Sometimes I think I hear humming, as if of a remote generator. Voices I can’t source.

  Distracting, sure, odd and a little disturbing, but given my ambitions, given what Zoe and I have together, I’m afraid to explore. Don’t rock the boat, Devlin, the businessman inside me tells the adventurer when the sand starts to vibrate and lights dance in the desert night and unframed questions simmer, begging to be raised. You want to survive and triumph here so whatever you do, stay within the parameters and whatever you do, don’t rock the boat.

  Later

  So I made it to the clubhouse, but not like you think. For our sins, the gravest of which I think was the three-tiered fruitcake, which we devoured right down to the brandy-soaked paper doilies the gradated tiers rested on, my sweet Zoe and I are indentured here. We scrub pots in the Reverend’s kitchen for our sins, and the level of exposure to temptation makes it clear that it doesn’t matter a rat’s ass to him if we topple and get so fat that if we wanted to, we could discredit him and the entire Sylphania plan.

  It won’t matter a ratfuck what we do because he has his ways and if we get in his face he will dispose of us. He’s also made it clear that us sinners are never going to make it out of here. You don’t get caught doing what Zoe and I did and get away with a slap on the wrist. You don’t resign and you don’t escape. You don’t sneak out and cross the desert between here and civilization without money or a car and you don’t land in some safe place where you can expose the Reverend on CNN.

  When it came down on us, it came down fast.

  “I think I love you,” Zoe said last night, in the last sweet moment before the skies split open and all hell came down on us.

  We were at the sweat lodge for what turned out to be the Last Good Time. You know, like in the movies where the settlers or explorers are at a party, maybe dancing, and they’re happy. For a time. They’re all freshly scrubbed and laughing in their party clothes, the women’s curls are flying and you in the audience can hear the drumbeats that let you know you that something awful is just about to happen. You know what the settlers don’t know, or what they know and refuse to accept because everybody has a right to be happy, at least some of the time. We’re talking about a generic narrative. unit here, a progression that is so certain and rock-bottom true that in every life the disaster that follows is inevitable: The Last Good Time.

/>   Zoe and I had polished off the last pie—blueberry, and it was gooey and glorious; even in our niche in the darkened sweat lodge, safe in our nest of blankets, I knew our teeth were turning blue. “This is wonderful. You’re wonderful.”

  “So are you.”

  “Oh, Zo!” Full for once, full and happy, we rolled toward each other and I murmured, “Now?”

  “Oh yes, I think.” She hesitated. “Perhaps. I hardly …”

  “Know me?”

  “I know you, Jerry, I just don’t know.”

  “The food is beautiful, but it isn’t the only thing in life.”

  She laughed. “I know.”

  “We can see what else is out there.”

  “We can!” Snaps popped; the pink coverall was open. I could feel her warmth. “Oh, Jerry,” she said. “I’m just afraid we …”

  Did my Zoe hear the drumbeats I refused to hear? Did she foresee what I couldn’t or wouldn’t, or was she only trying to prolong the lovely moment of tension? Anticipation may not be everything, but when you think you’re in love, it is a very big deal. Sure Zoe and I were both foreseeing a moment more beautiful than anything we could possibly arrive at, but it was time. She was trying to warn me but I cut her off. “Don’t say it. Don’t say anything.” I buried my face in her lovely, soft neck.

  Zoe blushed; I felt the heat. “What if they catch us?”

  I pulled her close. “We won’t get caught, we can’t.”

  “Can’t afford to get caught or they can’t catch us?”

  “Both.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” she murmured. “Both.”

  I ripped my coverall open. Now, I thought, but the question prompted by her murmur slowed my hands. “About the food,” I said. “You never told me where you get the food.”

  “It’s not important.”

  “I need to know where it’s coming from.” I pictured the two of us loading up desserts and cheeses, filling our backpacks and escaping; I pictured the two of us surrounded by steak bones, making love in a cave.

  Her giggle was wonderful. “If I tell you I’ll have to kill you,” she said.

  Then I rolled her over and sat up. “If you love me, tell me. Otherwise I’ll have to …” I didn’t know what I would have to do. I did know that Zoe and I were bonded, even closer because, in spite of our orgies—was she bringing feasts and. then sneak-going all bulimic on me?—in spite of the desserts we consumed together at tremendous speeds, we were both losing weight. Others about us were losing theirs through terminal hardship whereas Zoe and I … Together, we were three inches from gorgeous. We had everything, and if we were about to risk it all by making love, I needed to know where she was coming from.

  A long silence fell. She removed my hand from her coverall. She was done kidding. “If I tell you they’ll kill me.”

  I disengaged her fingers and sat up. “You don’t love me.”

  She was silent for a long time. “That’s the trouble. I do!”

  “If you loved me, you’d let me in on it.”

  “I love you and I can’t, but … OK.” She rose. “Wait here. And promise not to follow me.”

  I waited, of course, but I couldn’t bear the solitude of the sweat lodge, the silence, as if before the thud of beginning drumbeats, like a tightly held breath. Shaking myself, I snapped the coverall shut and slipped out through the parted hides. With my back to the supporting board, I dropped to a squat in the shadows, looking out into the desert night.

  Funny, when you first come to a place you jump to conclusions. You think the place you’ve come to is all about you. You have paid top dollar and expect to get what you want. The first surprise comes when you realize you don’t know what you want, and the next? You try to scope the operation but you can’t for the life of you figure out exactly where you are. You know you’re in a desert, but what does your leader think of you?

  You were promised an oasis and instead you’re stranded in a trailer in the middle of the sandy waste. All that you paid for—the clubhouse, the green trees and splashing blue water of the Reverend Earl’s special preserve are present, but somewhere out of sight. Make a 360 spin and you see nothing but the little basin you are stuck in and just over ridge, the distant glow, a mysterious green light that you can’t source.

  You stare out in all directions and conclude for no reason that desert is all there is. The wasteland you see and the one thing you’ve been promised that they tell you you’re not fit to enter, the clubhouse, is somewhere you can’t see and are not allowed to go. Thrown back on yourself, you have no choice but to reflect. When Zoe and I came outside to bury our leftovers, we were focused on each other, what we had just eaten, what we might eventually do. Now I was alone. Like a spaceship hitting warp speed, my body responded with a little jolt. Everything I had seen without comprehending snapped into focus and I understood.

  I heard the generator and I saw the trucks. Off to the west where the sun dropped, I saw that layer of green vapor hanging just above the cooling sand and every hair on my body stood up. In a more romantic mood I’d have imagined, I don’t know, the glow or northern lights or the movement of ancient Indian spirits, but instead I knew. This was vapor hanging above some great building like an enormous toxic, exhaled breath. There was a building out there. There was a building out there and it was huge. Carefully, I moved out into full moonlight, advancing slowly because in a place like Sylphania, even when you think you’re alone, you’re probably not. For all I knew Nigel Peters was at this very moment creeping up on the far side of the sweat lodge, jonesing to pounce and collect Brownie points or brass medals for ratting me out. Was he out there, and did I hear him? Did I see shadows moving, did I hear the clink of metal or did I hear something stir?

  “Jerry.”

  I jumped like a singed cat.

  “It’s only me.” Zoe touched my cheek. “Lover, it isn’t safe out here.”

  “I know.”

  “Come. Please. Hide yourself.” She pulled me toward the entrance. “Jerry, what’s the matter?”

  I couldn’t tell her what I knew because at the moment I couldn’t be sure I knew anything. We are four thousand feet too high, the air is too clear. These desert nights bring on a kind of delirium. Unless it was starvation I felt. Instead of answering I slipped into her soft shadow and we blended with the hides. “Oh, Zoe.”

  My new love had come back with the three-tiered fruitcake. Frosted! Eggnog. Sugared roasted pecans and a platter of rum balls. A box of, what were they? The label on the box said PARTY FOURS. Her voice was sweet. “Now do you believe I love you?”

  “I do.” I pulled her down into our nest of blankets. The food! I told her what she wanted to hear. “And I love you too.” I think I meant it. “I love you, but it isn’t safe.”

  “I don’t care.” Sweet Zoe, so anxious to prove her love.

  “You’re shaking.”

  “Just kiss me.”

  “We can’t do this here.”

  “We can’t get away.” Her hair brushed my face.

  I wanted everything. I wanted nothing. As long as we had nothing, the world would let this keep going on. “You’re sure.”

  “There’s no way out.” She stirred in my arms. “I’ve been here longer than you have, Jerry, and I know.”

  I understood that there were things she wasn’t telling me but by that time I was in love. “There’s a place for us,” I said. Fucking song.

  “Just here,” she said. “Just love me here.”

  “And tomorrow we’ll get out. Just the two of us.”

  “Of course we will,” she said, lovingly. Falsely. “Now kiss me.”

  “And we’ll get out tomorrow.”

  She gave me what I wanted. “We’ll try.”

  “I’ll find a way.” I buried my face in her. “I will!”

  So we were entangled, surrounded by pie tins and the rubble of the fruitcake when the roof came off. Hides fell away from the sweat lodge frame, exposing us to the night and t
he glare of a dozen flashlights. Trusties swarmed in and seized us. Blinded, I heard Nigel: “See!”

  “That’s it.” A vibrant voice—the Reverend Earl?—cut through all the others. “Bring them in!”

  19

  “I.”

  When he gets like this the Reverend Earl’s face gleams like a lamp carved out of abalone shell, skin paler than life but so taut and finely drawn that you can see the blood running pink underneath. At these moments his teeth glitter and his pale eyes focus so tightly that his pupils seem to revolve. His shoulders lift; without stirring the man who leads the flock and runs this financial empire is changing. Staring into nothing, the Reverend Earl expands until physically, he enters a zone somewhere far north of monumental. This is the ability that has made him great: the evangelical transformation.

  He repeats. “L”

  It is the only sound in the room. The only things in the room are the desk, the marble candle stand and Gavin, who is not breathing.

  “I.”

  There is no movement here in the inner office, where only the chosen come. The hush is profound. The Reverend Earl’s hair shines like white gold in the glow from the dome skylight.

  “In the end it all comes down to I.”

  Riveted, Gavin Patenaude waits, the prisoner of his expectations. He has served three years here in Sylphania, he rose through the ranks to trusty and then to angel-in-training and then angel and now … Now … He isn’t sure, exactly, but it is just about to happen. His shoulders clench and his belly twitches but he can’t breathe yet because the Reverend Earl is rising on his toes like a diver on the high board and any sound may distract him and interrupt the plunge. One more minute like this and Gavin will die of holding his breath. Starved for oxygen and dizzy with suspense, he is still confident. He’s made it this far by enduring worse: humiliation, months of hard labor, the glory of privation.

  “If,” the Reverend says, and the pause that follows is terrifying. “If you don’t believe in me yet, you will.”