by Irvine Welsh
God, she disgusts me! Lying on that mattress, comforter swaddling her fat frame, like an obese refugee. Loo-zir! — The treadmill. I pat the machine.
— I can’t!
— Uh, uh, uh . . . what the fuck have I told you about the unpardonable rudeness of the “c” word?
She pulls the comforter closer to her, looking at me with those beseeching eyes. — No . . . please . . . let me go! Please, Lucy . . . this has gone beyond a joke! I’ll do what you want! I’ll follow the fucking program! The point has been made! Just let me go!
I walk toward her, sinking down on my knees in front of her. I point to the treadmill. — If you do as I ask, it means a fifteen hundred debit on your daily calories account. That’s half a pound of fat. There, I run my finger under her chin, — and here, I poke her gut, causing her to shrink away.
— I can’t . . . she moans in a small voice, — I never slept properly, I’m so tired.
— As I said, that’s just your body recalibrating. I spring up. — C’mon, I try to tug her to her feet, — let’s go!
— But I can’t!
— Losers find excuses, winners find ways, and I take a deep breath and haul the useless little sack of shit upright and push her onto the treadmill, her chain rattling behind her as she steps on. — Find a way! I stuff my phone into the iPod dock and set it on Joan Jett’s “Love Is Pain,” singing along as I set her controls to 4 mph.
— Okay . . . okay . . . Sorenson reluctantly hits her jogging stride.
I stand back to watch that fat little hamster work her ass to freedom. But you know what? That isn’t enough. I spring forward and push at the controls. 5 mph.
— Okay! Okay!
Bitch gotta sweat or bitch gotta bruise. Up to 6 mph, a mild run.
— AGGHHH! The loser sow shoots off the mill like a grotesque comic-strip character, chain yanking at her arm, her fat ass wedged in between the machine and the wall. Her petulant face twists up at me. — Oh my God . . . this is a nightmare . . .
— The nightmare is one of your own making. I point at her, the contempt and derision coming from deep within me, as Joan sings about love being pain and not being ashamed. — I’m trying to save your bloated ass! Now get back on that track, you fucking ungrateful, time-wasting bitch!
Sorenson fearfully complies, pulling herself to her feet and stepping on.
She gets the message. This time she’s running strongly. — Better! Put those fuckin dimes in the jukebox!
I make her shave off another four hundred cal, to hit the fifteen hundred goal, before letting her eat her food as a reward. — Slow the fuck down when you eat. Watch every spoonful. Focus on the food. Chew it!
The nervous eyes under those bangs; going from me to what’s on the end of her spoon. A passive fucking victim. No balls, no fight. To let somebody do this to them. That asshole guy she went out with; the way she just let that prick fuck with her. You gotta fight them. You gotta hurt them. You can’t just fucking well lie down and take it. — Okay, Lena, you’ve done well. If you keep this up, I’m going to bring you a book tomorrow. Then, at the end of the week, I’m suddenly thinking of my portable, — you might get a TV.
Sorenson’s face is still crunched in misery. — Please, Lucy. The point has been made. I’ll come here every day. Just don’t make me spend another night here. I need to sleep in my own bed. I really, really need to get on with my work, she begs, her eyes red-rimmed. — Don’t leave me here for another night!
Those urging eyes. Her work is so important . . . but the bitch is playing me. I’m not gonna be manipulated, this won’t work if I’m manipulated. — Toughen the fuck up, Lena, and do your Morning Pages, because if I come back here tomorrow and find none, there will no breakfast. Get that? No fucking breakfast without Morning Pages!
And I head outside, double-locking the door, as her cries belt out:
— LUUUCCCEEE!!!! NO!!!! HELP!!!!
But there’s still nobody around, and as I summon the elevator and hear it clicking up the floors, I’m thinking: yes, this building must be a spooky place to spend the night.
I key the ignition on the Caddy, as a call from Mona comes in on my cell.
— Have you seen the news?
— No.
— Oh. Don’t shoot the messenger, she says coyly, and I know it’s not good. As much as I loathe that bitch I have to concede that she has a real nose for scenting blood in the water.
Mona recounts the grim story, but no way can her voice remain as neutral as that botulinum-paralyzed face, and irrepressible glee sparkles her tone. I get home, and there’s nobody at the rear entrance to the building, and, thank God, a free parking space. In my apartment, the plastic cunt’s gloating is confirmed on a local TV channel. The missing ten-year-old, Carla Riaz, has been found dead, in the home of her neighbor, one Ryan Balbosa.
In the swarthy mug shot I’m gaping at, I see the second man I saved that night on the Julia Tuttle. I can’t take my eyes off the screen, even when Balbosa’s face is replaced by a carousel of other sex offenders. The blood in my veins is like ice; the monster I saved did that to a child. That would have been the scum to execute, that one.
Chef Dominic calls, but I don’t pick up. I listen to an extended voicemail about a party. I can’t do that.
Mona calls again; I don’t pick up. Another voicemail, offering another party. No way.
Instead, I look through the plates in Sorenson’s book, at those monster men and women, scrambling through the debris of ruined cities. Then I leave the apartment and get into the car. The gates open and I pull into the alley. Two paparazzi snap at me, one of them, the bastard with the wrecked camera, shouting, but I look ahead and edge slowly onto the street. When I get there, I floor the gas pedal. The Caddy burns rubber (or as much as it can) and tears toward Alton sounding like a broken hairdryer. I take a long route to Lena’s place, over the MacArthur, through downtown, midtown, and back over the Julia Tuttle, paranoid that those bastards are tailing me.
But the coast seems clear as I park in the Publix lot and walk around to Sorenson’s house. Picking up the mail, I dispose of those ubiquitous fucking fliers advertising club nights and food deliveries. There’s a package among all the junk. I deliberate on whether or not to open it. No, it’s Lena’s. That’s crossing the line. I also decide against having a closer look at Lena’s studio. I dump the rest of the shit in the trash and take the package home with me, again parking a couple of blocks from my building, then head over to Whole Paycheck.
As I come outside with my groceries, crossing the parking lot and passing the bus stop, a contaminated-looking guy shuffles obsequiously toward me. I’m relieved when I realize he’s not paparazzi, just a bum. — Excuse me, miss, I wonder if you could help me? I need to get to Mount Sinai hosp—
— Bored already. I wave an upturned palm at him, jumping across Alton as the pedestrian signal comes on. When I get back to my apartment the street outside is full of press. I can’t get into my own fucking home! I double-back to the Caddy and drive up to Lena’s place where I make some food, and try to watch her cable. But I can’t settle. I keep thinking about that kid, and that animal Balbosa. What the fuck have I done?
I go onto Lena’s computer. It isn’t even password- or security-protected, and opens up straight onto the page of her email account.
26
CONTACT 10
* * *
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Did You Get The Caramel Creams?
Lena,
Please get back to me. I know you have a busy-busy, chop-chop life in Miami, but we like to hear from our girl!
Lynsey Hall is rumored to be having a baby . . . I know.
The caramel creams are your favorites. Hope you enjoy! Let me know if they came, UPS have been kind of weird lately.
Dad sends his love.
Love
Mom xxxxx
Good golly Miss Molly Sorenson
. What a freakin loser! It puts me in mind to check my own emails on my iPad.
* * *
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Success!
I don’t know if I’d quite put it like that, but you need to be determined and not be swayed from your course of action! Tough love rules! And so do Morning Pages!
Best of luck with your difficult client.
M x
* * *
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Have I Been Too Forthright In My Sexuality?
Michelle,
You are so right about the media turning on people. I worry that I’ve been too candid about my bi (veering strongly toward chicks) sexuality, and you’re right, I should have taken the “it’s none of your fucking business” approach that you and Jillian Michaels both so successfully deploy. I mean, look how the bastards turned on poor Jackie Warner!
Yes, you’re correct to exercise discretion. In the public eye it’s difficult to come out and say what you mean, with a hostile media so ready to demonize a strong, independent gay woman. Nonetheless, I think it would be great if you gave it the “bi and proud” thing. I think a lot of women in America would be empowered by that.
Love, respect, and sisterhood,
Luce xxx
PS I’m going round to see my artist bitch who better have written her Morning Pages! Cause I’m off to read those suckers RIGHT NOW!
27
LENA’S MORNING PAGES 3
A BRIGHT MORNING, with red skies fusing into azure. I arrive at the penthouse hutch to find Sorenson scribbling into the notepad on her lap. She rips out a sheaf of papers and thrusts them at me. — Thank you, I tell her. Her eyes are darkened and she looks like shit. And the bucket is full of it. Better.
— I need some breakfast, she grumbles. — Didn’t you bring any food?
I ignore her, take the papers, and head into the narrow galley kitchen. I place them on the countertop, sit at the stool, and start to read:
I awoke lying prone in a perfect, stifling darkness, not aware of where I was. I struggled for air; there was a sort of cover over me. Raising myself onto my knees, I crawled forward, bumping my head on something, then my stomach lurched, and I felt like I was going to be sick. I tried to push the smothering weight from my shoulders and back, but then my hand snagged, a wrenching grip on my wrist being followed by a clanking sound. My awareness of where I was flooded back in a sick torrent, like it’s done the last two mornings. As I struggled more, I felt the sharp cutting edge of metal dig into my wrist. I’m shackled. But my other hand is free. I pushed the harsh, scratchy comforter from my face and blinked into a room faintly illuminated by distant lights spilling in through big windows. I tried my morning yell, “Hello,” but my throat was raw and sore. I felt like I’d swallowed a tennis ball.
There was a gut-wrenching sensation as I picked up the bottle of water awkwardly with my left hand, struggling to hunker up with that right wrist still cuffed onto the heavy-duty chain, about twelve to fifteen feet long, attached to a support pillar by identical cuffs. I glugged at the water, emptying half the bottle, and got to my feet. I pulled at the chain with both hands, like a tug-of-war competitor; it holds fast at every link of tempered steel. I worked my way down it toward the pillar, like a reverse abseiler, yanking as hard as I could, levering my entire weight on the chain. It was still absolutely futile.
Guess what. It’s like, called a restraint, dumbass, to stop you from getting to food and eating yourself to death. That’s why it’s strong. It has to restrain.
I went to the window, again testing the meager limits of my freedom. The room is still bare, except for the home-gym apparatus, a treadmill, and an inflatable mattress, pillow, and comforter, two buckets of water, some rolls of toilet paper, and a blue-and-white plastic cooler. There’s also a child’s plastic pool with a really cute illustration of a coyly smiling bear, where I wash. They are all within my semicircle of freedom, which radiates from the point of this support pole, one of three that buttress the overhead steel beam. I can get to one window; it faces another high-rise opposite, which seems as deserted as this one.
I look out the window, at the block opposite. Then I look down, thinking of those stairs we climbed. There are no drops on the glass, yet a shining, deserted sidewalk tells me it’s been raining. Then I go to the cooler, and get a drink from a bottle of water. With being stuck in the dry air conditioning all day I have to continuously drink water to avoid dehydration. I force myself up in the night to drink and urinate. It’s drink and pee, drink and pee. My “bathroom” trips are awful: struggling to maintain an unsupported squat over a plastic bucket.
The washing in that pool is a cumbersome undertaking. I turn the strapless sports bra round to undo the hook (it can’t be good to have your breasts squashed so tightly to you) and remove my panties, climb in and squat down, relieved nobody is witness to this infantilizing humiliation. I wash myself as best I can with one free hand, then dry off and sit with the soothing comforter draped over my shoulder.
I think of myself as a prisoner in solitary confinement, but my new circumstances seem way beyond analogy. No clock bar a cerulean sky, which fades in a darkening sweep as the sun drops behind the neighboring towers, or the shifting volume of toylike cars going back and forward on the Interstate 95 below. The lamplight clicking on, for a few hours, before switching itself off and shrouding me back into night. I shout out regularly, but my voice, isolated in the air, sounds strange. Sometimes I’m beset with euphoria. Talking to myself. Laughing loudly. Wondering if I’m going mad.
There’s no “wondering” about it. Eating yourself to death? Yes, that’s going mad.
My first night here was the worst. A storm grew in potency, whistling and sizzling around the building. As the last of the planes flew over Miami, I imagined them being blown off course, and their irresistible and unstoppable collision with this tower, ready to crush or incinerate me. Me linked to the pillar and chain, dangling by my arm from the crumbling wreckage of the building. My mind played a grim and terrifying mix of the possible scenarios of my death on a loop, overwhelming me, making me cry and scream until I blacked out. But then the wind awakened me repeatedly throughout the night, smashing up against the building in enormous bursts, so hard I fancied I could feel the structure moving around me. I pulled the comforter over my head and sobbed.
The storm faded out a couple of hours before dawn. Then something else woke me: the implacable silence. The irrefutable evidence that I was a prisoner, alone in this high-rise. I sat up, and, for want of anything else to do, went to the treadmill.
— I’M HUNGRY! Sorenson shouts through. — Can I please have some breakfast?!
I blank out the fat sounds and continue to read.
And, through my sleepless exhaustion, I’ve done this every day, my feet scrunched into my sneakers, mangling my toes. They have started to blister and bleed. Yesterday I looked and saw black-red blood had caked into one white sock. It makes me glad of the kiddie pool. I tried the home gym; now the muscles of my upper back and shoulders are bound in tense, searing knots.
Today, I’ve already eaten my meager allowance of tasteless food, and have to wait till Lucy comes to replenish it. As the day wears on I’m lying on this feeble mattress in my sweat, delirious in a reverie both ecstatic and tortured, fantasizing about cheeseburgers, buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken, nachos, pizzas, chocolate-chip cookies, and, more than anything, about ice cream and Key lime pie. I drink the last of my water.
I don’t know how long it is till I hear the dread sound of that key in the lock. Sure enough, Lucy appears, a surly set to her mouth, yet that unhinged gleam in her eye that scares the shit out of me.
Good! But everything fucking scares the shit out of you!
As I’ve done since this nightmare started, I try to reason with her. But she does that wa
lking-across-the-room thing, like a college professor in a lecture hall full of students, then suddenly making spooky eye contact with me. “We’re going to flush that garbage out of your system,” she announces, that bewitching, austere, almost abstract rhythm of her movement, and the Mephistophelean gleam in her eyes silencing me. “Not only is Coca-Cola shit, it makes you want to consume more shit. People who drink diet carbonated drinks are still, on average, ten pounds heavier than those who don’t.”
And with that perfunctory sermon, she puts out my oatmeal and blueberry, and once again leaves me.
Jesus! Check that bitch! What a pretentious fucking asshole! What the fuck is a “Mephistophelean gleam”?
I devour my breakfast, then wash myself as best as I can in the tepid water of the kiddie pool. After a while I take a number two, struggling to crouch over the bucket, convinced I’m defecating on the floor, or will topple it, or even get my butt stuck in it, grotesquely tragicomic. When I’m done I wipe myself, and push the bucket as far to the outer limits of my chain as possible, but making sure I can still retrieve it. It’s not far away enough: it’s horrible being around my own foul, sour excrement, and I constantly gag.
I’m so tired, and I move back onto the cheap inflated mattress with its fitted sheet and abrasive white comforter. If only I could sleep on it. Every time I drift off and turn in the night, my wrist pulls on this chain, yanking me back into fractured consciousness. Instead, I watch the light decline in a trancy fug. There are no blinds on the windows, and the lights from the neighboring buildings cast a sickly orange glow into the room, throwing up all sorts of horrible shadows. In the reflection of the glass I study my face, remorselessly cataloging its defects. My imagination is running riot and I can’t even paint or sketch! Instead my only companion is constant fear, sometimes overwhelming. I’m so scared of this impoverishing silence, broken only by the odd roar of an airplane, or I imagine I hear the elevator outside, faintly sweeping upward on its ghostly journey. When I start to shout, it’s either nothing or only Lucy. The day is already measured by her visits. The anticipation, then the dread, as I worry what psycho stuff might be going through her sick mind, yet I fear her visit being over, and being plunged back into this terrifying solitude.