Thinner Than Thou

by Kit Reed

  After some thought, Theophane added, “I think you’d better start in Mexican Hat. My best contact is there. The Carmelites’ extern was a Jumbo Jiggler before she escaped,” he said. “She’s talked to a lot of fugitives on their way into or out of those hills.”

  “And you think she knows …”

  “She knows who and what they ask the Carmelites to pray for.”

  Dave murmured, “God this is weird.”

  “Everything’s weird,” Betz said.

  “It is; but it isn’t.” Theophane made the sign of the cross over them. “Her name is Sister Philomena. Tell her what you’re doing and I’m sure she’ll tell you what she knows.”

  Dodging as if to elude the blessing, Danny squinted as if he thought the old monk was trying to put something over on him. “What’s an extern?”

  “They aren’t going to just let you in and start talking to you,” Theophane said. “In fact, they aren’t going to talk to you at all, but this will get you near enough to interface. That’s what Philomena’s for.” He handed Betz a note for the extern, explaining that since Carmelites take a vow of silence, they communicate through Sister Philomena. “Give her this.”

  There was no writing on the piece of bark, just two Greek-looking characters burned over the outline of a fish. Betz looked up, confused. Dave took it from her and turned it over and over in his hands. When he spoke he was so profoundly thoughtful that it surprised her. “Tell us what to expect.”

  “I can’t. You’ll understand when it’s time,” Theophane said. By that time the old monk had been through the Trappists’ secret passage into the monolith and back. He brought them a few dollars in singles and a crumpled map, along with provisions from the monastery deep in the belly of the Deds’ establishment. They were standing at the old monastery gates in Snowmass—when? They’ve been through so much that Betz no longer knows how long ago.

  “Then at least tell us what to look for,” Dave said.

  “For your protection, I can’t. It isn’t safe here,” Theophane said, “and it isn’t safe for the Carmelite sisters, either, so be careful how you approach them. Go at night and not until you’re sure nobody is watching and there is no one following.”

  “I don’t get it,” Betz said. She didn’t. “How did things get so bad?”

  Theophane heard, but he did not answer. Instead he handed them a paper sack, food for the road: goat cheeses, two loaves of fresh bread and two jars of Trappist strawberry jam. “Just be good and be careful. And God bless you, whether or not that’s OK with you.”

  They found the Carmelites hiding out in a small motel outside Mexican Hat—praying furtively, Betz Abercrombie supposes, because now that fitness is the religion and the Reverend Earl is its prophet, they aren’t safe. Nobody is safe, not the Muslim community in the mountains outside Montrose and not people in the hidden shtetl or the Hasidim scattered in the foothills and especially not the Buddhists, who were last seen somewhere near Pueblo but have managed to vanish so completely that not even Theophane could locate them. Except for the Dedicated Sisters, who worship something completely different, these believers in something Other aren’t safe anyplace where they can be brought to earth by buff fanatics in workout clothes, intent on refocusing them on personal beauty or stamping them out.

  For imagining there’s anything out there beyond physical perfection, for believing there is something beyond the NOW, these groups will be hunted down and burned out of their quarters or harassed to extinction. It’s not a persecution, exactly, but it is. These holdouts who pursue a higher power, whether they call it God or Yahweh or Buddha or Allah or a name we don’t recognize, are a living reproach to right-thinking people who live for NOW. They are an insult in these days when body is everything, and appearance comes first.

  In a time when everybody believes in the power and perfectibility of the self, nobody wants to run into a contemplative who cares nothing for the things of the world. Not these days, when people can’t afford to think about the body deteriorating or, face it, ending. Or what lies beyond. In the gospel according to the Reverend Earl, Americans deal with things they believe they can fix. Important things, like hair color and fitness and body weight and those nasty wrinkles under the chin and around the eyes.

  “Oh shit,” Danny says after a long, long time. The shadows around the Crossed Triceps are spreading like ink spilled on the desert sand. “How long do we have to wait?”

  Betz and Dave exchange looks. Agree. Dave says, “Fuck waiting. We’re going in.”

  Looking like angels who have fallen to earth here, naturally naturally gorgeous at fifteen, the twins wander into the enormous body shop behind Dave. The place has an oddly abandoned air, no trainers in sight, no official greeters. In little corrals all around them, men and women of uncertain ages are pumping iron and trudging up Stair Masters in pursuit of the Afterfat and beyond that, muscle tone that time has taken away from them. In the background, dozens of exerbikeles whir like so many prayer wheels. The feverish pursuit of the perfect body, the holy fervor of a good workout is nothing Betz ever had to think about before they took Annie, but it’s a big thing, she realizes now, especially to the population here.

  “Shit,” she murmurs, “these people are all old.” Sixty, she thinks, some of them look sixty.

  Annie’s boyfriend nods without explaining.

  “Why are they working so hard?”

  Dave turns to hush her; his face is pink with fresh sunburn and that sandy hair of his falls over eyes that are almost too bright; in this place the glow of youth is shocking, almost an obscenity. “They have to,” he says.

  Betz looks down at herself; whatever these old people are working for, she already has. “If you say so, but it’s sad.”

  Image is everything here, and from a distance, the people in the skintight exersuits do indeed look like the people you see in ads and on TV, as in, totally pulled together and glamorously right. The trouble is …

  The trouble is, they aren’t so wonderful when you see them up close. Wandering among the machines whose users are too driven to notice, Betz understands that much of what she sees has to do with implants and lipo and beautifully orchestrated tucks.

  “Dave,” she whispers, and he takes her hand so reflexively that she gasps. “These people are old.”

  “Senior division.”

  At his nudge, she turns. It’s right there on the sign. It doesn’t say SENIOR, but it does say GROUP V. In a glass booth above this sector she sees a flash of something else: a woman in white, a nurse? Nurse. In case, she supposes, because everybody has a duty to be perfect but it doesn’t always work out, even in the world according to the Reverend Earl.

  “Why did that nun—”

  “Danny, shhh!”

  “I said why did that, um, cowboy. Why did that cowboy send us here?”

  Betz shrugs.

  “Look,” Dave says.

  They have wandered through the maze of people laboring at machines, through avenues of bench-pressers and nonstop rowers and arrived at the door to the showers and the locker rooms, men’s to the left and to the right, the women’s. They could, she supposes, part company here and explore; hell, she can do this. She turns to the door marked WOMEN. Dave snags her elbow and pulls her up short. “What?” Then she sees where Dave is pointing. To the left of the shower rooms, to the left of the entrance to the tremendous, glassed-in fifty-meter pool where, there are other entrances. QUICK FIXES, one says above the door. They know not to blunder in. Instead they linger until the door swings open and a woman with her hair freshly moussed and dyed to a deep gold and all expression Botoxed into extinction, comes out. Dave catches the door before it swings shut and holds it just long enough for them to catch a glimpse of the options available inside. It’s all spelled out in euphemisms, but the trio has been around long enough for the options to be clear to them. There are people sitting on benches like patients who’ve been waiting too long at a clinic, which is what this is. There are signs made
festive by floral emblems and massed smileys, over a series of frosted-glass doors:

  SMOOTH CITY :)

  HAPPY HAIR :)

  NIPS ’N TUCKS :) :)

  BODY WORK :) :)

  BETTER STILL :) :) :)

  and over there, to the extreme left of the counter where freshly uniformed Barbies with Dynel hair and synthetic grins take the particulars:

  SOLUTIONS :) :) :) :)

  They are stalled in the doorway, staring at all this, when a spangled apparition with sequined eyelids and amazing hair rushes out and scoops them up and rushes them away from the clinic doors, hissing, “Idiots, not here!”

  23

  Journal

  I am so fucking full of drugs that I have no idea what day it is. They keep us so busy that Zoe and I crash into bed in a grave state of exhaustion. It’s hard to think and impossible to keep track of time.

  Ironic, isn’t it? Pay for what you want and you get what you wanted, but when you do, it’s never what you think. It’s about the small print. The Sylphania contract sets it out in a clause they make you initial, in case you complain. Comply and you get what you paid for. Results guaranteed. Defy and you forfeit your rights. When the rawhide roof came off and the trusties swooped down on us in the sweat lodge, I heard my sweet Zoe scream. It was the last thing I heard. I felt her fingers gripping my wrist like a life preserver. Then I felt the sting of the hypodermic that put me out.

  We woke up in a bunkroom off the clubhouse kitchen, too weak to sit up. We lay there for a long time without talking and when we were strong enough, I crawled out of bed and helped Zoe up. We hugged, that’s all. We were too weak even to sob. Then together we crept to the door. In the kitchen outside, workers in white coveralls and hairnets—other Sytphania failures? Wetbacks? Local hirees?—prepared the clubhouse meals—breakfast in this case. Still groggy from last night’s tranquilizer darts, we stumbled into the kitchen, floating along on delirious cooking smells. There were laden trays on the table. headed for the food. The chief kitchen worker, a scowling ex-pug in a hairnet, grabbed my biceps and turned me bodily. He aimed me at the sixty-cup coffee machine.

  Groaning, I nodded. We were only kitchen workers and this was our kickstart.

  Now, about the clubhouse breakfast. Lobster enchiladas today, with orange juice and hash brown potatoes for the buff and perfect chosen, maybe. For us, it was skim milk on shredded wheat. Two small bowls on a table by the back door. Forget orange juice, we each had a ten-ounce glass filled with the Reverend Earl’s Special Formula. three minutes to eat and don’t imagine that before they take it away and put you to work, you won’t have to scrub your bowl. Zoe and I are no longer paying customers with hope for a happy life in the Afterfat. We are disenfranchised citizens here. This place has its own weird, sick economy. Waste not, want not. The Reverend Earl uses his failures to do the job.

  Which is, face it. What Zoe and I are.

  Sylphania is famous for its successes because the Reverend Earl has a system for dealing with people like us. Only his successes, like Nigel and the Earlettes, make it into the public eye to win converts who are the fresh blood that makes this economy run. And for the failures? The Reverend Earl calls this heavenly retribution, but there’s more. What we have here is not us making restitution and it isn’t about repentance and it has nothing to do with redemption in the form of forced weight loss.

  It’s expedience.

  The Reverend Earl’s angels tell Zoe and me this is all for our own good, but it’s clear from the get-go that it’s for the sake of the enterprise. This system needs failed converts to grease the wheels that make it go. In the absence of hired help and fully functional and competent robots, every industry needs some form of slave labor. In the matter of the clubhouse kitchen, it turns out to be us.

  As for kitchen duty. Where we are concerned, it isn’t about food. The dietitian has us scraping plates and scrubbing pots. Except for our daily short rations plus Special Formula, we’re not allowed to touch the food. If’s been awful. At the end of that first day in the kitchen exhaustion rolled right over the hunger and when we were done and the staff went home Zoe and I fell down and slept like stones.

  Later

  The drugs are wearing off. In the middle of last night we both woke up. Never mind which one of us said to the other, “There’s nobody in the other bunks. We could make love.”

  The other said, “What if you hate the way I look when I’m naked?”

  “I’m beginning to think that’s not so important.”

  “That’s funny. So am I.”

  Morning

  Today I sneaked out of the kitchen behind the breakfast cart. I followed the trainee in the starched white outfit who pushed it along, down plushy corridors lined by closed doors which I guess must lead to private rooms. Whether they belong to angels-in-training like Nigel or angels or the TV crews here to shoot the infomercial, I do not know. I could hear music coming from behind one door and behind another I heard somebody laughing and in another room, there were sounds that I couldn’t exactly identify. I followed the angel-in-training out of that corridor and into the main clubhouse, where doors were wide open as if to showcase the opulent public rooms with plush carpets and velvet curtains, and, get this, candy dishes everywhere. The trainee with the food cart rounded a last corner and stopped at a pair of double doors with a brass plaque lettered in steamboat Gothic. MEETING ROOM. If they came to the door and saw me, I was screwed. I flattened myself in the corner, in case, but nobody came. Instead the cart guy knocked once, parked the food cart and left. This is how far my self-control has brought me. I didn’t steal one sausage or Danish. Wait a minute. Danish, they’re serving Danish at midmorning, Danish in a diet spa!

  I waited a long time and then crept closer. I put my ear to the door. Nothing inside was moving. Nobody spoke. I listened a little longer. Then I opened the door and went in. So that was me, Jerry Devlin, crouched behind the overgrown ficus when the Reverend’s special chosen filed in for the big meeting. I may have porked up a bit since Zoe but the new me is still trim enough to fit behind a tree. Amazing, watching them assemble. Walking templates, every one of them. There were no women in this crew. It was all guys in white bike shorts and gold Lycra singlets, with a couple of variations that suggested that there are higher and lower levels of being in the world according to the Reverend Earl. For instance, there was the one with the silver Lycra bike shorts, who held a Lucite clipboard, he took the head of the table while the Reverend sat in the middle in a glittering jumpsuit. Next a guy in a red angel robe took his place on the Reverend Earl’s left and a guy in a white angel robe came in, he was somebody special but he looked down and brushed off his seat before he sat in the chair on the Reverend Earl’s right.

  Hard to explain the bad feeling I got, watching the Afterfat chosen sitting there. Gritting my teeth for reasons I didn’t necessarily understand, I scoped the singlet-and-bike-shorts group, the blatant ab-and-pec display and thought with, OK, admiration and envy and bitter resentment, I’ll never make it in this crowd. The thing is, what I saw in that room was obvious only because I was sitting in that room. When you’re watching the pitch on TV, you think anything’s possible, but I am here to tell you it’s not. The men the Reverend Earl chooses to surround him are physically perfect, the Rev is perfect and his anointed are perfect and, shit. Nigel! Fucking Nigel has lost the white coverall of the angel-in-training. Fucking Nigel is an angel now. Revolting in a white brocade bikini and a silver fishnet shirt, he brought up the rear with an entitled strut that made me want to leap out from behind the ficus and smash him.

  Like, I get stuck in a back room off the clubhouse kitchen in durance vile and fucking Nigel Peters is sitting here at the big table, which means that the Reverend Earl thinks Nigel is perfect too. Now I am the outcast and Nigel is tight inside the inner circle of the Afterfat. That, my friends, is inequity.

  The bastard, he could have sat down anywhere, but no. He had to pick the chair down at my en
d of the oval table, i.e. he became the only person sitting between my hiding place and the door. His outfit was brand-new, as he sat down I saw the forgotten 28 WAIST sticker clinging to his white Lycra butt.

  Now, about the meeting. First. The Reverend Earl is nothing like he is on TV, but I knew that. For one thing, he is perfectly formed, as per the sermons, but he’s a lot shorter than you think. And tense. You think he’s God but surprise, the man is very tense. Every muscle in that perfect body is humming like a wire about to short out.

  Second. There are more orders of being here than the Infomercial says, but this, I kind of knew. The only surprise was the two guys in angel robes. So, trusties, trainees, angels, and. These guys in the robes, the red one and the white?

  What I didn’t know was that in spite of what he preaches, the Reverend Earl gobbles meats and pastries no problem, and the special chosen follow suit and they sit there with grease on their faces finishing the mixed grill down to the last chop and they are still perfect. How? Through the ficus branches I saw these paragons pop lamb kidneys and bacon into their mouths like bonbons and throw in two red pills on top and I watched them send for more food and when the full cart came and they plowed into second helpings the first thing I thought was, How can I score some of those groovy red pills?

  Then as they emptied their second round of plates I thought bitterly, Is this what you mean by sacrifice? Shit yes I felt betrayed. Then it came to me whole and I was thunderstruck. Either they’re naturally fit or it’s in those pills.