Dancing in Dreamtime

by Scott Russell Sanders

  Journalists christened him Sir Tubby Roly-Poly. Video crews delighted in catching him in the company of his petite lady-friend, Lyla Bellard, whenever the two appeared together in public. On screen he loomed beside her, huge and pale, like a domesticated polar bear.

  One such video aired while Sir Toby was engaged in perusing his chicken-liver sunrise. He was informed of this new publicity by a MEGA vice-president, whose bony face materialized on the phone screen. “You just can’t stay away from the cameras, can you?” said the woman in an exasperated voice.

  “It’s not my fault the paparazzi hide in the shrubbery and ambush me every time I stir from my apartment,” replied Sir Toby.

  “Not only do we see you from all angles, with your tiny mistress standing next to you as if to represent the human scale, but the news anchors have fun estimating your weight and life-expectancy.” The vice-president forced a smile, like a doctor trying to cheer up a terminal patient. The taut skin of her cheeks reminded Sir Toby of trampolines. “We’re being flooded with complaints from stockholders,” she noted.

  “Are they requesting my head on a platter?”

  “They’d prefer the sacrifice of your paunch and half of each buttock. Enough to slim you down to respectable proportions.”

  Knowing, or at least hoping, that he was too valuable a property for MEGA to lose, he ventured: “So fire me. I’ll sign on with another weight-loss outfit tomorrow.”

  “Don’t be rash. I am simply appealing to your dignity.”

  Sir Toby half-lifted the mug from his stomach, and then, be-thinking himself, lowered it again. He was famished. The woman on the phone screen kept smiling grimly. All these marketing people had too many teeth. “My dignity?”

  “When people think of our brand, Sir Toby, we want them to think thin. We want them to imagine fashion models, not Sumo wrestlers.”

  “I rather fancy being compared to those agile giants,” he bluffed. “If I may say so, you bring to mind a praying mantis. What is there for your male friends to grasp?”

  The vice-president’s grin froze, an expanse of teeth floating on the screen like a crescent moon. “Listen, our competitors are displaying posters of you in their shops, identifying you as The Sleek of Araby mascot. As our symbol.”

  Sir Toby sighed. He was only too familiar with those competitors and their revolting names: Fat-Away Farms, Rub-a-Dub-Tubby’s, The Beauty and the Feast, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Ipso Fatso, Gorge Us George’s, each of them with outlets in malls around the world, vying with one another in the lucrative war against obesity. The mere thought of these shops, with their needles and vaporizers, made Sir Toby queasy. On several occasions he had gone so far as to deposit himself on the slenderizing couch in a Sleek of Araby parlor, only to flee in terror once he caught sight of the fat-extraction devices. The whole enterprise struck him as an unholy alliance between modern electronics and medieval torture.

  “I can’t help the way your competitors decorate their shops,” he said.

  “But you can. A series of operations . . .”

  “Out of the question.”

  “MEGA would raise your fee.”

  He lurched upright on the couch and glared into the screen. “Madam, I’m an artist, not a rack for displaying clothes. Nor a video star. It so happens I am content with my present shape. I have no desire to resemble a weasel or a lightning rod. If MEGA doesn’t approve of my physique, then I’ll get someone else to sponsor my skies.”

  The professional smile faltered. “I only meant to suggest a possibility.”

  “An impossibility.”

  “You won’t even consider it?”

  “I have considered, and the answer is no. I won’t have my body shriveled by machinery.”

  “Could you at least find a larger mistress? Miss Bellard makes you appear so—”

  Sir Toby flung the empty mug at the screen. Plastic bounced harmlessly against plastic. With the angry punch of a button he erased the grimacing face in mid-sentence.

  He longed to gather all these corporate image-makers, tie them in a sack, and dump them in the Wabash River—assuming one could still find the river, down in its concrete channel beneath the mall. They would never quit meddling. When they insisted on changing his name from Thurgood Moranski to Toby Moore, he had been annoyed, but he could see their point. Adding the “Sir” had struck him as comical, given that he had never set foot in England, let alone been knighted. But next they ordered him to shave his beard, give up wearing plaid, and take up wearing square-framed spectacles, at which point he rebelled. To spite them, he now wore plaid coats and trousers at every opportunity, allowed his blond beard to sprout defiantly, and banished his glasses. Once they offered to hire a stylishly thin actor to make his public appearances, but Sir Toby threatened to strangle the reedy wimp on sight.

  Now this really was too much, when they began dictating the size of his mistress. He adored Lyla, every cubic centimeter of her. The less of her there was the more affection he could invest per gram. She was the only woman who had ever succeeded in making him feel graceful. “It’s not a matter of bulk,” she told him early in their friendship. “It’s how the soul moves.” The way she said it made him feel that his soul was as tangible as his fleecy beard. When their friendship had matured sufficiently to afford him an opportunity of examining her naked body, he searched her belly for the telltale puncture scars from slenderizing operations. He had seen the scars on so many others, on men in saunas and shower rooms, on women in swimming pools and more intimate settings—tiny puckerings of skin like pursed lips marking where the needles had done their work. But the skin on Lyla’s midriff was as smooth and unblemished as a freshly laundered sheet. “However do you manage to stay dainty—and, may I add, sexy—without subjecting yourself to those barbarous operations?” he asked her. “I only eat when I’m hungry,” she told him. “So do I,” he said. To which she replied, “Ah, yes, but you’re hungry all the time.”

  This was unfortunately true. Hunger gnawed at him relentlessly, like a rat in his guts. Even while recollecting that marvelous first perusal of Lyla’s body, he was munching pretzels. He could only stop thinking about food when he was sleeping or, strangely enough, when he was at Lyla’s apartment. She refused to live in the mall, or even to visit him there, complaining that its hives of bedrooms and clanging shops made her ill. Instead she lived in the wilds of southern Indiana, on a military base devoted to psychological warfare. “Why don’t you come live with me?” she kept urging him. But he always refused. Since childhood, he had dreamed of growing rich enough to live in the Wabash River Mall, where every conceivable need, from cradle to grave, could be satisfied. That childhood vision still gripped him so firmly that nothing less than Lyla’s potent allure could persuade him to move outside.

  After the irksome phone call, Sir Toby was too stirred up to resume painting. So he left his unfinished sky shimmering on the roof of his studio and trundled into the mall. Some piece of romantic trash was playing overhead on the dome, featuring a hero with chiseled chin and a heroine with heaving bosom. A close-up of the damsel’s moist lips showed them parting to admit a soda straw, giving way seamlessly to an ad for Giga Gulp, “The Juice Full of Joy.” He knew all the slogans by heart.

  Dodging a pack of kids who were hurtling toward him in a zip cart, Sir Toby clutched a plastic tree for support and uprooted it, setting off an alarm. One of the hazards of being fat in a world of skinny people was that you could never count on railings or chairs or other props to bear your weight. Presently a guard appeared to find out who was assaulting the vegetation. Before Sir Toby could explain, a look of recognition wiped the scowl from the guard’s face. “Hey, you that painter?”

  “Certainly not,” Sir Toby insisted, stepping onto a pedbelt and gliding away.

  A blast of music announced a change of program, and he made the mistake of looking up. An ad showed before-and-after photos of a young man, in the first of which he appeared grotesquely bloated, his eyes mere sli
ts, his jowls bulging over his collar, while in the second portrait, taken after the slenderizing operation, he looked as lithe as an otter. “LET THE SLEEK OF ARABY REVEAL YOUR TRUE SELF,” the announcer boomed. The ad agency had taken pains to make the slenderized young man appear handsome, but in Sir Toby’s eyes he looked sadly withered, like a helium balloon, abandoned at night in robust plumpness near the ceiling, discovered next morning in a shriveled heap on the floor.

  As he rode the crowded belts through the mall, he noticed other riders drawing away from him, their scrawny bodies encircling him like a stockade about a blockhouse. He was painfully accustomed to this isolation. The space they left around him bore less resemblance to the aura of respect surrounding a king than to the buffer zone surrounding a plague victim, as if obesity might be contagious.

  Most of his fellow passengers were nibbling snacks and guzzling drinks. As the belt slithered past food shops, the non-eaters stepped off to replenish their supplies, and new riders hopped aboard with jaws grinding and lips slurping. Sir Toby was feeling virtuous amid all this gobbling until he realized he was holding a half-empty bag of salties in his hand. He stopped in mid-chew. Where had they come from? Probably his pocket. Food seemed to hide in his garments, even though he rarely remembered stashing it away. After hesitating briefly, he shook the remaining salties into his mouth. Then he stuffed the bag into a pocket of his plaid sport coat, where he discovered lumps of hard candy, stored there like a squirrel’s acorns. With an effort of will he forced himself to leave the candies in place.

  Suddenly he was jolted by such an intense craving for sugar that he lost his balance and staggered a few steps along the pedbelt. The other riders cleared away, lest he should fall and crush them. He felt panicky with hunger. The sound of chomping reverberated in his ears. He had to escape from these stares, go somewhere to eat in secret. Glancing up, he saw the neon lights of a Rub-a-Dub-Tubby’s. Beyond that shone the marquees of Fat-Away Farms and Gorge Us George’s. Sir Toby teetered on the edge of the belt, unwilling to let the skinny riders think he was going into one of those shops for an operation. But someone jostled him with an elbow—or perhaps a sausage or baguette, he imagined in his hunger—and he stumbled onto the pavement, nearly bumping into an emaciated woman who was emerging from the door of Fat-Away Farms.

  “Sir Roly-Poly!” the woman exclaimed.

  “Moore,” he answered stiffly.

  She grinned up at him with her newly shrunken face. A series of fresh scars along her throat and jaw stood out like scarlet stitches. “I just saw your picture,” she breathed.

  “Picture?”

  “That poster they’ve got hanging inside,” she said, brushing past him to hop on the belt.

  And it was true; there on the rear wall of the slenderizing parlor hung a life-size portrait of him, in corpulent profile and lurid color. He stood transfixed in the doorway. His unflattering likeness dominated the shop like some evil totem designed to frighten passersby into the clutches of the fat-removal machines. The caption below read: REPRESENTING THE SLEEK OF ARABY. One of the operators glanced at him, then at the poster, then back again at Sir Toby, eyes widening, needle poised above the beefy thigh of a carefully draped customer.

  “You’re all a pack of leeches and ghouls!” Sir Toby bellowed through the open door. “Fat-suckers and walking cadavers!” A dozen operators glared at him now and a dozen customers twitched beneath their draperies. As an after-thought, backing away, he shouted, “May every needle strike a nerve!”

  Fuming, he avoided the pedbelt, with its cargo of chomping scarecrows, and ambled down the walkway past Gorge Us George’s and Ipso Fatso’s. He stole a glance through the window of each shop, and in each he saw his unbecoming portrait.

  He walked hurriedly on, feeling morose and hungry. Within moments he was puffing. At least, in his unhappiness, he was burning calories. Lyla would be proud of him for exercising like this. She despised pedbelts and elevators, insisted on using her own legs. And such legs! Too shapely to be described as thin, they were delightfully proportioned, like the rest of her, as if she had been designed for a world more elegant than the one other mortals inhabited.

  Outside the window of a Cravin’ Haven his exercise came to a halt, and he stared in like a tramp at the diners seated along the counter. His mouth opened and shut in sympathy with theirs. At about the third bite he tasted chocolate, having unconsciously stuffed his mouth with a joybar, which he had fished from some hiding place in his voluminous suit. The taste of chocolate always dissolved his last vestiges of self-restraint. Watching the diners, he pulled from his pockets and devoured in rapid succession the hard candies (butterscotch), a box of raisins, a stale pastry, and a packet of crushed soy-chips. After the last hiding place had been ransacked he went on thrusting hands into pockets, opening and closing his coat, slapping his thigh and rump, in search of more food. He gave up searching only when he noticed that the diners inside Cravin’ Haven were watching his pantomime with great amusement, pointing at him with drinking straws and half-eaten burgers. Several of them appeared to be mouthing his name, or some slanderous variation on his name.

  He resumed his trek through the mall, sunk in gloom, wondering how far he would have to trudge in order to burn up all the calories he had just consumed. It was hopeless. His exertions would never catch up with his eating. He could sympathize with people who sank ever deeper into debt by adding a bit more on the charge card each month. Still he felt ravenous. It was absurd, it was humiliating, to be so thoroughly a creature of one’s gut.

  “What provokes this ferocious appetite?” he had asked Lyla early in their acquaintance, imagining that as a neuroscientist she might know the answer.

  “It comes from living in the mall, where you’re surrounded by food and bombarded by ads,” she said. “That’s all the more reason to move in with me.”

  She had something there, he conceded, as he shuffled past eateries, taverns, snack shops, and sandwich carts. Even the eros parlors, feelie booths, and game arcades sold food and drink. The incessant dome shows beamed down mouth-watering ads, alternating with weight-loss promos.

  Thinking of dome shows, he glanced up, and was startled to see one of his own vintage sky-paintings. Thunderheads that actually looked like surly clouds instead of mashed potatoes and gravy; dragon kites playing against a lavender haze; a flight of Canada geese beating their way across the face of a late-afternoon sun; around the horizon a rim of hills topped by trees. He had painted that sky at least a dozen years earlier, while still a teenager, before moving into the mall. It already showed his characteristic strokes with the lightbrush. Yet by comparison with his recent work, overstuffed with allusions to food, this early painting seemed to him fresh and powerful. Every detail in it was authentic, something he had seen rather than vaguely hungered for. It was a creation of the eye, not the belly.

  Had he lost so much power? he wondered, standing outside a Never Say Diet store (“Open for Eating 25 Hours a Day”), a pudgy silhouette so familiar that shoppers paused to gape at him. He was surprised by tears slithering through his beard and over his multiple chins.

  For such misery there was only one antidote—Lyla. He barged straight for her, like a draft horse headed for the barn, riding the shuttle through its translucent tube out to the military base in the Hoosier National Forest. She would scold him for bothering her at work, something he had never done before. But this was an emergency. Most likely she would be dousing rats with exotic rays, turning them into spies or torpedoes, and how important was that by comparison with restoring her lover’s self-esteem?

  He did not fully grasp Lyla’s research, and was not certain he wanted to. It involved poking about in the brain with vibrations, or perhaps devising ways of preventing enemies from poking about in the brain, or some such business. Her scientific jargon might as well have been the language of dolphins, for all the sense he could make of it. Never having progressed beyond arithmetic and Bunsen burners in school, Sir Toby drew a blank when
confronted with equations or graphs. He was grateful that he did not need to understand electronics in order to use a lightbrush or understand holograms in order to have his skies broadcast in malls.

  The shuttle quivered to a halt. He glanced at the signboard: Old Bloomington. Two more stops to go. Ads beckoned from walls and ceilings, sales patter oozed from speakers. During the lull at the station, the sounds of chewing filled the air like subdued applause, reminding him that he had emptied his pockets in the mall. There were vending machines two cars down, but he could not bring himself to squeeze through the aisle past all those staring faces. Lyla would have nothing to eat in her lab. She seemed to subsist on air, like the wispy plant she had given him to brighten his bathroom. He would have to endure the hunger. Only two more stops. Surely there would be a snack bar at the base. Or perhaps he could persuade a guard to sell the contents of his lunch-bucket.

  First the guard must be persuaded not to arrest or shoot him. In his haste, Sir Toby had not sufficiently pondered how to gain admission to this ominous facility. Perhaps he could introduce himself, note that he paid substantial taxes, and declare that he wished to evaluate Ms. Bellard’s research. But what if they required a security clearance? And wouldn’t he be doubly suspect as an artist? Allow him inside, and he might discover military secrets and paint them into his next sky, which would be broadcast in malls around the world. Spies would stop in the midst of shopping, gaze up at his revelations, and snap photos to smuggle back to hostile governments.