The Weight of Numbers

by Simon Ings

  ‘I need a part that really stretches me,’ says Stacey, lining up her knife. (Has she looked him in the eye once?)

  Stacey has her meal planned. She doesn’t need to look at her watch; she can count in her head. Every forty-five seconds she is going to eat a piece of muffin approximately the size of the first joint of her forefinger. She will not tear this off the body of the muffin with her fingers: this method might suffice at home, but here it is too approximate. She will use her knife. A few seconds before she reaches for her knife, she measures the muffin against her forefinger, planning her attack. The conceit of cutting perfect rectangles from a round muffin is appealingly nonsensical, almost Zen. She maps this muffin’s every crumb and bubble. Escape is impossible: this muffin is going down. Taking her hand away, she reaches for her knife, brings it over her plate and cuts exactly the shape she measured out. What I need, she thinks – because she is not beyond self-parody; like most anoretics, she knows what she is – is one of those vegetable slicers you find sometimes in Japanese kitchen stores. One stamp and hey presto! Every piece the same! Perfect bite-size muffiny chunks. She can even hear the exact note she’d hit, were she selling such a device, for such a purpose, on local TV, her first love.

  Like this:

  Per…fect (not too fast, build up slowly. Not too much of a smile; a note of suspense) bite-size (crisp and even here: nothing much else you can do. Just play up the consonants, the neatness of those two ‘eye’ sounds; careful not to drawl the ‘z’: this is no time to slacken the pace!) muffiny (a gift; would that every tag-line boasted such a word. You can really camp up kids’ words. Big, big grin: hell, you just can’t say ‘muffiny’ without breaking into a great big mischievous grin! Finally…) CHUNKS. (What a kicker! A real stamp-on-the-toes number. Heck, frighten them a little, even. Make them think about that sharp metal template hitting that dough. Not tearing it, not squashing it, not squeezing the life out of it ‘which, as we ALL KNOW, happens TIME AND TIME AGAIN with INFERIOR CUTTERS’. No, my friends, my ensofa-ed brethren, we are here today to talk about taking this muffin and CUTTING IT! Into CHUNKS!)

  ‘Of course, the final decision lies mainly with the producers,’ says Amiel, unable to keep up the pretence. He hasn’t wanted to hurt her feelings, and because of this he is messing up badly. He knows this is cowardly of him, placing responsibility for her eventual rejection at someone else’s door. He knows that she will surely hear, at the back of these words, the most mealy-mouthed of excuses.

  But she does not hear him. She cuts another bite of muffin free, places it on her tongue, presses her tongue to the roof of her mouth, and suppresses a groan of guilty pleasure as the morsel paps and melts, oozing between tongue and molars into the cavity below so that she must roll her tongue, gather the sweet bolus together once more, only to crush it, dizzy with pleasure, against her top incisors, then lick it off – another bite – and down!

  ‘And you must meet Sam and Judith,’ Amiel says. These are business acquaintances of his. A married couple with two kids and a dog. Or is it a kid and two dogs? Anyway it occurs to him that what she needs is some normal people around her. Ordinary dinner parties. Stuff. Because otherwise the sharks are going to have her. She’s been here – what? two weeks? – and already she has an assistant and a personal trainer. She’s been telling him, when she hasn’t been worrying at that bloody cake of hers, all about her important LA lifestyle, and what began as an audition has degenerated, by this point, into something resembling intervention.

  ‘You really must come,’ he says.

  Stacey isn’t listening. What would make this meal complete is mustard. Lashings of mustard. Stacey loves that hackneyed phrase, lashings, so irredeemably naughty. It sums up everything she feels about mustard, the sour tang, the granular fascination of wholegrain, Dijon’s fabulous range of shades, the melted-ice-cream texture of your everyday squeeze-bottle American blend.

  She grips her hands under the table and counts the bones in her palms as though they were a couple of Chinese calculators.

  This is an important meeting and the part is hers, she knows it, she can feel it. She is going to be a star. If she can just hold it together a little longer. She will not ask for mustard. She contents herself – when she thinks Amiel’s attention is elsewhere – with another quick sprinkle of salt.

  *

  Monday 7 August: three months later.

  Stacey Chavez has sacked her personal trainer. Instead, each weekday morning at 4 a.m., after a breakfast of celery juice and Fiberall, she drives to the beach and pulls up next door to a deep-bed Dodge with a Stars-and-Stripes on its roof and quarter of a million dollars’ worth of gym equipment packed into its guts. For $400 a month, and if she gets there before the others, Neal Krantz, ex-Navy Seal, fitness record-holder for an unprecedented four consecutive years, 1983 to 1987, lets her pull the handle, and the truck, wheezing, unpacks itself like a Transformers cartoon: 3000lbs of barbells, two dip bars, four 300lb pull-down stacks, T-bars, pull-up bars, bell-bars, and six inclined press-benches in weatherized aluminium. Add a missile launcher to this arsenal, it would not look more intimidating.

  Last week, during the most gruelling two minutes of her life, Stacey managed thirty sit-ups – less than half the number the Navy expects of its recruits. She drooled her way through fifteen push-ups, but Neal passed only three. She should have been able to do fifty-two. The demands of this new regime leave her exhausted and trembling. She dozes off in auditions. There’s a phone by her bed and yesterday afternoon she slept through its ring.

  Last week she flew around a two-mile course in just over twelve minutes, racking up her score; nevertheless, to be considered fit, she needs to dig inside herself for another fifty points. To begin with, the exhaustion worried her. She wondered how she would be able to juggle the competing physical and practical demands of her career. Now that the telephone calls have petered out, Stacey is beginning to leave these cheap anxieties behind. She has her mobile if her agent wants to talk. There’s little point Stacey phoning her, she’s always in a meeting.

  It is dark and the sand is cold through the soles of her sneakers as she lines up behind the eight others in her group. Neal hands her a 30lb pack – what he calls a ‘half-weight’. It is standard armed-services issue, drab, with no waist-belt.

  For ten years Stacey has been worrying her way up the career ladder. She has forgotten how to play, how to enjoy herself, even for a moment. She cannot stop. She does not know how.

  Whatever she achieves can’t, by her own impossible criteria, be worth anything, and so she snatches defeat from the jaws of every success. At twenty-six, faced with the first genuine stall of her career, Stacey feels old – as threadbare as a forty-something career woman grown grey and lined on a diet of Cosmopolitan.

  Neal blows his whistle and they jog towards the dunes.

  It seems to her that she has been dreaming her life: an anxious running-on-the-spot dream of unimaginable satisfactions forever delayed. The agent of this dream is her body, which will not let her be her best. It roots her in time and space, separating her from her goals.

  The pack bounces from hip to hip, bending her into what Neal assures her is a sprinter’s crouch.

  Shed the body, and you shed the dream. So she has begun to rid herself of her body, ounce by difficult ounce, and she feels more awake now than she has ever been. Another whistle and they sprint. Another whistle and they drop into the sand for push-ups. Another: they jog again. The sun rises, and the sky does not brighten so much as gain in intensity, as though veils of atmosphere were being driven away, revealing a purer blue. Under this light, through the pain of new muscle, the intense self-centredness of Stacey’s anorexia gives way to a spiritual sensation. It is time to shed the last scrap of her flesh. To distill herself down to the absolute.

  They reach the foot of the dunes and Neal throws them each an ice-cold water-bottle from his stash. Beside the water crate there are metal ammunition boxes filled with wet sand. They form a li
ne and pick up boxes, one in each hand. Another whistle and they trudge up the steep dune for a view of the ocean, then down again, no pausing, shoulders screaming, arms gorilla-stretched, around and up again.

  The air grows thin and bitter. There is a dirty tin-foilish taste in her mouth, a flavour made from dead cells and stale fluids and chocolate Ex-Lax. Pain quarters her body, revealing its component parts. The arms have no solid connection to the skeleton. The shoulder blades float in a crossply of muscle. The calf muscles bend the leg. The quadriceps kick.

  There is something electrical about the sky now, the cyan of a dead video screen, except that it is infinitely deep, a space of absolutes. They are running again. She is running into the wind. The front of her is chilled, the back half hot and clammy.

  One mile.

  A fever-line separates the two halves of her, a seam that shivers with every footfall, every arm swing, as though the halves of her are coming free of each other.

  Two miles.

  The halves of her lurch in opposite directions. Her prune-like heart misses a beat. Her joints tremble: she imagines the cartilage shrinking in every joint, rattling about in its sinovial bag so that her whole body becomes a baby’s plaything: a tambourine of stretched skin.

  Three miles.

  She feels a shift inside her, nudging aside her dormant ovaries. Her shrivelled heart misses another beat.

  Four miles.

  This is it. The moment of departure. The sky is an electric blue. Goodbye, she thinks, expecting no answer from the dumb world of material things.

  Goodbye.

  Not her voice; someone else’s.

  Not her thought: Goodbye.

  Five miles. Six miles. Ten miles.

  It occurs to her that she is not going anywhere. She is still tangled in her body like a lobster in a trap. She is not leaving.

  She sucks in air against panic and the air ripples around her, sending a shiver around her which seems this time to be no mere hint of anything, but an actual unzipping. Stuff spills out of her like ectoplasm. Weightless, bound to no material law of motion, it ascends in absolute terms through the gridded blue that hangs above her in place of a sky.

  ‘Come back,’ she gasps, or thinks she does, but so much of herself has poured out, sound will not carry through her. In her terror she thinks this is what it is to be flesh. In this moment, she understands what has left her.

  It is her spirit.

  ‘Chavez!’

  She had imagined she was a spirit, trapped in mortal meat.

  ‘Drink this. Come on. Sit up. Chavez?’

  But no. The soul is something else. Her soul is free, gone. But she is still here, tied to flesh. The irony is so fine – finer even than the cruelty – that she wants to laugh.

  ‘Stacey. Chavez.’

  She laughs, or thinks she laughs.

  MODERN MEDICINE

  1

  Saturday, 11 March 2000. A rainy Chicago night. I am pressing my hands into the rucks and wrinkles of the bedsheet, searching for some piece of Stacey Chavez.

  The room is in darkness and the curtains are open. Vehicles send ripples of light through the room’s shifting blue interior. It feels as though we are coupling in an aquarium. She has pulled the sheet over her and around her like a shroud. There is a flash, a peal of thunder. What if the bedsheet is actually holding her together? I imagine unwrapping it, spilling her across the bed like a child emptying a parcel of presents. Disembodied laughter from a disembodied head.

  Over the course of our meal at Lovell’s I had expected to get to know her a little. The more we talked, the less of her I saw, the more I was confronted with Stacey Chavez, actress. Stacey Chavez, the fallen star, the recovering anoretic. If her recovery was so far advanced, how come she had turned up at the restaurant with a muffin in her handbag?

  It had been my impression, returning from our meal, that we had not liked each other very much. Outside her Michigan Avenue hotel, I leaned forward to give her a perfunctory goodnight peck. She turned her head slightly so her lips met mine. Fold after fold of her coat concertinaed under my palm before I found her tiny waist. My fingers, indifferently splayed, ready for the wall of her back, cupped instead the secrets of her pelvic girdle, rising sharp against her skin. The bone whip of her spine.

  After a minute of this she said, ‘You can come in if you want.’

  Stacey pulls the sheet aside, revealing herself, and bends forward to unbuckle me as I shed my shirt. I can hear her panting with the effort of it, the pain, the mattress stiff against her bones. Her legs are splayed, the knees bent, the feet brought together, making a curious ‘O’. When she leans forward to fellate me, her back arcs and her spine stands proud of the skin, a line under tension, and her ribs fan either side, the armature of an umbrella. It is impossible to describe Stacey’s body without some resort to metaphor. Its radical thinness has robbed it of all familiarity. It does not look like a body at all. It looks like a hand: a delicate, alien hand with its unexpected points of articulation, its difficult, eloquent gestures.

  When I woke up it was already light, and breakfast had been delivered to the room.

  ‘I hope you like eggs,’ Stacey said. ‘You look to me like somebody who likes eggs.’

  I like eggs.

  Stacey had ordered a continental breakfast for herself. I watched her eat. She did not pick or slice or arrange or juggle. She did not guzzle everything in sight then run for the toilet. She ate: steadily, sparingly. I wondered how to reconcile her perfectly ordinary breakfast with last night’s muffin dinner; was she fighting free of her old anoretic behaviours or re-learning them?

  I was waiting on a call from the clinic, wanting to know the outcome of Felix’s operation. Stacey, taking my edginess as interest, got talking about herself again. Her work.

  SCTV: ‘SC’ for Stacey Chavez; ‘TV’ not for television, as I had assumed, but for ‘tableau vivant’. She was a long way from Grange Hill.

  She had managed to place her work beyond casual notice, in a zone where her private obsessions were indistinguishable from the background: the migranous white-noise of the subsidized arts. She regarded this change in career, her successful dismantling of her celebrity status, as her real artistic achievement. The individual happenings – SCTVs one to four, her performances, tableaux vivants, whatever you want to call them – were more or less incidental to the central statement.

  Stacey considered herself a conceptual artist who took celebrity as her subject. It was apparent that she had private means, aside from her earnings as an actress, and this was just as well, as her work was expensive to make. Her publicist had demanded two years’ salary up-front, for fear of what Stacey’s manoeuvrings might do to her professional reputation.

  ‘I was doing everything wrong,’ she laughed. ‘Protesting outside the Turner Prize. Performances in church crypts in Oval and Hackney. The papers lapped it up.’ One notorious performance of hers – it had a short run at the ICA in London – had her shoving fifteen Mars Bars down her throat then vomiting them into a bucket.

  The business of erasure was more complicated than she had expected: ‘That’s why I had to pay through the nose for Vera.’ Vera was her publicist; her anti-publicist now, sending carefully crafted details of Stacey’s work to the usual diarists and media friends, ensuring that the tabloids became not so much frustrated with Stacey as bored and confused.

  In spite of myself, I was intrigued. I too knew something about the business of erasure.

  ‘So what do you do, Saul?’ Stacey asked, throwing me a bone.

  I saw no harm in spending another half-hour in Stacey’s company, and, in order to answer her question safely, I did not have to depart very much from the truth. I had merely to talk as if my US business interests were as healthy as once they had been. I told Stacey that I ran an employment agency and from then on it was easy. Automatic, even.

  Throughout the nineties it was expected of foreign aid workers settling in Maputo and Beira that they would
fill their houses to the gills with domestic staff. It was the local custom, a useful source of employment and, in a city without labour-saving devices, the only practical solution to life’s domestic demands. Anyone uncomfortable or embarrassed about employing servants was told, in no uncertain terms, and usually by the Mozambicans themselves, to get over themselves.

  Often, once they were rotated back to desks in Washington, these same staffers found themselves hankering after their old retinue, and this is where I came in. My operation, which was entirely above-board, exploited a legal loophole exempting foreign nationals from US labour law. By this means I was able to supply the apparatchiks of the UN, the World Bank and the IMF with cheap domestic labour. Better than that, I was pretty much able to guarantee the servants a goodish standard of living and a range of prospects far exceeding anything they’d find at home.

  My eager young sub-Saharan jobseekers had all the right papers, and it amused me that the aid industry itself was the inadvertent conduit for their arrival in America.

  It was the summer of 1996 before I let Noah Hayden catch up with me.

  Nearly thirty years had passed since my lacklustre translations of Guy Debord’s La Societe du Spectacle had graced the discussions of his New Left Reading Group, but Hayden was effusive. ‘Do you remember those marches?’ he exclaimed. This was one of the first things he said to me when we met again. We were both hitting fifty by then, and where I had shrunk and hardened, Hayden had acquired some considerable padding.

  We were sitting in the garden of the Mount Soche Hotel in Blantyre, the commercial capital of Malawi, Mozambique’s small, landlocked neighbour. I was here arranging domestic servants for the wealthier delegates at the Southern Africa Development Conference.