Imperfections

by Bradley Somer

  Donna threw her cigarette butt into the garden and then lit a fresh smoke.

  “These aren’t the only ones,” Leonard said quietly. “I have come across thousands of such deaths. Some are obvious, others aren’t. Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both on July 4th, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. I’ve barely scratched the surface.”

  A muffled doorbell rang from inside the house.

  “So, have you got any predictions?”

  “Prince Rainier of Monaco and Pope John Paul II could happen. Sometime soon after the year two thousand.”

  “What’s the connection?”

  “Both longest ruling monarchs of this century in the two smallest kingdoms in the world. I’m also banking on Paul Winchell and John Fiedler dying on the same day as each other. All four of them are going to buy it in the same year. The connections run deep.”

  “Who are Paul Winchell and John Fiedler?”

  “The voice actors for Tigger and Piglet.”

  “Shit,” I gasped.

  “I know,” Leonard agreed.

  Father slid the patio door open. “Food’s on,” he said.

  Donna waved her cigarette and said, “I’ll be a minute.”

  “You boys go in,” Father said. “I’ll keep my future daughter-in-law company. Tell everyone to start without us so the food doesn’t get cold.”

  “When am I going to die?” I asked Leonard.

  “I’ll work on it,” Leonard said as I followed him inside.

  We ate. Donna and Father were not seen again until we were almost done reading our fortune cookies. Abigail introduced us to the fortune “in bed” game where you read your fortune aloud and said “in bed” afterwards. It works with every fortune.

  “You’ll find fortune and glory this year… in bed,” Abigail read.

  “You’ll be filled with friendship and love… in bed.”

  “You are strong, willful and fun. People like to spend time with you… in bed.”

  “Oh my God, Richard, your Dad is amazing…”

  That was what Donna said when the two of them returned, exploding through the patio door in a storm of giggles and breathlessness. Donna was flushed. Father glistened. They didn’t even try to hide it and the funny thing was, I felt instantly lighter, happier and relieved.

  Donna and I started our engagement on such shaky ground, what with the orgy and all, that I was not surprised it ended the night she met my family. She wasn’t out of my life. I would see her at shows. I would see more of Father, too, as he would be in the audience, supporting Donna.

  I cracked my fortune cookie in half, pulled out the dry piece of paper and read one of the more disturbing fortunes I’ve ever seen.

  “Past troubles will pale in comparison to what is to come…”

  CHAPTER 12

  There Are No Fat Angels

  Light flashed so bright it was almost a sound. It burned every image seen before that moment right out of the mind, leaving the brain a soft, grey template ready for its first impression. A clean slate with no memory of past loves or previous traumas, happy moments or sad ones.

  The pure white light faded to a pale blue as flawless and familiar as a lover’s eyes. It was a colour that had its own soul. When I think about its beauty now, stumbling along with inadequate words and a broken recollection, I realize how insufficient language is to capture such perfection. I have to rely on the clunking tools of metaphor and simile to get close to an accurate description. Even still, it hits wide of the mark.

  The blue was broken by occasional drifting wisps of clouds. They started as baby hair skiffs and grew more substantial as the seconds passed. They were white, so very white. Once the clouds were dense enough to stand on, the first few tones of music filled the sky: slow, sustained, electronic notes.

  I stretched my feathered wings, light reflecting pearlescent from a fine film of lavender scented oils covering them. I stepped down onto clouds as firm as any ground I had ever touched. I took a tentative step and looked around, ready for the plunge back to Earth.

  There is a Heaven, I thought. I’m in Heaven.

  I looked around, uncertain.

  To become an angel, to be blessed to walk among the clouds, I had successfully shed fifteen pounds of flesh that had barely been clinging to my skeleton in the first place. I had donned pants made from zippers and vinyl, pants that clung as tightly to my skin as my skin clung to my bones. A pair of aviator sunglasses crowned my newly etched cheekbones and my chiselled jaw. I wore a white shirt with black block-letters spelling out Ozone Kills. There were holes cut in the back of the shirt so my wings would sprout through and I could stretch my full five-foot wingspan. There were slits cut in the fabric of my shirt, the gaps stitched with a golden fleecy mesh through which my ribs could be seen, my collarbones, my breastbone making ripples under my skin.

  This year, 1998, the same year I wound up in Heaven, was the year most developed countries finished their phase-out of ozone-depleting halocarbons in aerosol sprays and industrial chemicals. In Australia, under the magnifying glass of the biggest ozone hole ever recorded, people’s tans had never been so deep and bronze. Only my skin, sparkling golden in the brilliant light, was more beautiful than theirs.

  It took my mind a few seconds to overcome the vertigo and it took my feet a few more to trust standing on the clouds like they had once trusted the ground. When I was sure I wasn’t going to tumble to the Earth below, I walked with a little more surety. A few more steps and it struck me that, if I were to fall, my wings could save me. The thought gave me confidence. A few more steps and I was getting up to speed. This was easy. A few more steps. A nod to old St. Peter. I rounded a corner, my feet pumping and my mind growling through clenched teeth.

  I am the most desired slip of angel flesh that ever walked.

  I am a firecracker exploding in your face. I’m taking an eye with me. It’s mine, now. I own it.

  I fucked your wife on the hood of your Porsche.

  I am a screaming baboon shaking a tree.

  When Chester had called a week ago to tell me he could get me into Ozone’s Heavenly Show, he phrased it something like this. “Okay, don’t shit yourself but I can get you into the Heavenly Show.”

  “No shit? Paris Fashion Week? Ozone?”

  “I’m not shitting you, Richard. There’s a catch though. Before I call them back to confirm, I need to know you’re in, that you’re committed.”

  “Shit, yeah. What do I have to do?”

  “Lose fifteen pounds. I need you in fifty/eighty-six pants and an eighty-seven shirt.”

  Twenty-inch waist. Thirty-four-inch inseam. Maximum thirty-four-inch chest. Minimum thirty-two.

  “Holy shit,” I gasped.

  “Yeah,” Chester agreed. “But they don’t make $80,000 pants for just anyone, Richard.”

  Were those proportions even possible?

  Yes.

  I could do it. I was twenty-two years old, my body was still malleable. I was close. Chester was right, fifteen pounds or so should do it. So I said, “Book it.”

  Chester hung up. A rush washed over me. I was in. This was the biggest thing that could happen to me. Ozone. Paris. This was the peak. Most people had to look back at their career to find the high point. I was fortunate to see mine coming, to be able to take full advantage of it. My career could not get higher. My head swam with the lack of oxygen at that altitude.

  I was skinny and I had no idea how to shed fifteen pounds of flesh that I didn’t have, let alone in a week, not without dying. But this was Paris. This was Ozone. This was worth dying for. I needed help. Luckily, I knew an expert. I grabbed my cellphone and speed-dialled 6.

  Father answered.

  Small talk. I was too distracted to remember what was said. I needed to get to Donna. Each moment that passed was an ounce of unlost weight.

  “Put Donna on.”

  My thoughts raced. How had my weight become an issue? There i
s no more consistent a stigmatization than that of being overweight. The results of being obese are clear. Judgments about people, their morals, their worth are made first by physical appearance. It only takes seconds. In magazines, movies, advertisements, it is implanted in us. There are no fat superstars. There are no fat models. There are no fat angels. The world is rougher on obese people than anyone else…

  “…and the fatties do it to themselves. They’re lazy and dirty and smelly and self-decapitating, in the purest sense of the word, because they just don’t care,” Donna said.

  I couldn’t remember when my thoughts ended and she began talking.

  Also, I think she meant “self-deprecating.”

  “They don’t care about their appearances so they don’t care about their lives or what they accomplish. They don’t care about others. They’re totally unmotivated and don’t contribute and that’s it. It’s a sickness, in a nutsack, a sickness in the brain,” Donna said. “Though I hear the fatties are jolly. If I ever get to know one, I’ll have to see.”

  “I see.” I needed to stay positive.

  My psychologist, the one I started weekly sessions with after Donna ran off with Father, said positive feelings are a coping mechanism to help us live through the bad times. She said they make us look to a more viable, happy future that helps us endure the ever-difficult present. Negative feelings are also important because they validate the authenticity of positive feelings. One has less meaning without the other. She said that the perfect ratio for happiness is 2:9, positive to negative feelings that is. She had read it somewhere in a textbook.

  “What did you want, Richard?”

  “I need to lose fifteen pounds in under a week.”

  “Easy,” she said. “Stop eating.”

  I knew I had come to the right person. Donna had stopped eating once. She watched a documentary about obesity in children and thought she needed a cause. She wanted to be a role model, so she boycotted obesity as if it were some seal hunt. She got down to sixty-five pounds. She stopped menstruating and her skin became translucent, so she stopped buying tampons and started putting on more foundation. She had chronic indigestion and got a persistent urinary tract infection, so she chewed antacids like candy and popped three antibiotics a day. Her doctor told her she had to eat or she would die. She laughed. Her fee had gone up by $20,000 a shoot. And then she collapsed.

  “I have to eat,” I said. “I can’t stop.”

  “It sounds like you have a problem, Richard. How long have you been a chronic overeater?” Donna asked and then said, “Go see Dr. Bella. She’ll make you better.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “It worked for my friend, Mila.”

  Mila’s story was a legend told to scare new models as they snuggled down under 600-thread count Lauren bedsheets at night. Mila wasn’t fat but she had her stomach stapled anyway, had it turned into the size of a thumb. She lost thirty pounds and her career took off. Top-ten model. She complained she was always starving. She had to eat every thirty minutes. She developed gallstones, osteoporosis and anaemia within a year.

  She died during revisional surgery. Plastic surgeons never called it corrective surgery because it implied a mistake had been made.

  The Cause: She starved slowly and painfully. She ate every half-hour but her body couldn’t absorb anything.

  The Moral: I wasn’t really sure. I thought long and hard about what was worse, to be beautiful and dead or to be dead with friends and family knowing it was due to vanity. I still didn’t know. The moral didn’t matter. Mila was dead.

  “It didn’t really work for Mila though,” I said.

  “Well,” Donna countered, “it did for a while.”

  “I don’t want a doctor,” I said. The feeling that calling Donna was the right thing to do was waning.

  “Really? Because you’re sick, Richard. Being fat makes you sad, you being sad made you reach out to me. A doctor can fix your body and then you’ll be happy again. A beautiful body causes a happy mind.”

  I hadn’t realized I was fat and sad until I called Donna.

  Maybe I should go back to my psychologist.

  Maybe I needed to get my 2:9 happy ratio realigned.

  Maybe I should just hang up.

  Donna was onto something though. I recalled my psychologist blathering on about physiognomy, something about how there is a close relationship between the body and the soul, how the two can’t be separated, how one was a manifestation of the other. I just couldn’t remember which manifested which.

  “A good plastic surgeon is better than a good psychologist any day,” Donna continued, seemingly reading my mind. “The reason shrinks never work is because they go at the problem from the wrong end. The problem is not inside your brains or wherever, it’s on the outside. Once you fix the extremities, the intremities follow. Trust me, it works. You’re talking to living proof.”

  I heard Father’s voice in the background.

  “In a minute, Jack,” Donna said through muffling fingers. “I’m helping Richard. He’s fat. Okay, I’ll hurry.” There was a staticky sound and Donna’s voice became louder. “So, no liposuction then?” Donna asked.

  Lipo, Donna’s fountain of youth. Twenty-five years ago, doctors were just excising wedges of fat and stitching the body back together. The flesh left behind became a minefield of infection, gangrene and puckered scars. It wasn’t until the seventies that a clever doctor figured out how to remove fat deposits without massive scarring and prolonged bleeding. The machine in that surgeon’s hands had since evolved into the modern liposuction vacuum from its humble beginnings in abortionists’ hands as the gynaecological cannula. From suction abortions to liposuction, progress is directional.

  “No doctors,” I said. “No surgery.”

  “Fine.” I could almost hear her pout.

  “You have just one option really. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone but I want to help you get better and you leave us no choice.”

  “What is it?”

  “Dulcolax diet.” Without a pause, Donna described it to me and all I thought was how Heaven better be worth it. Looking back at my life though, I had never really wanted anything until that moment. I was dizzy with the idea of having a goal. I would do anything.

  I hung up, put on my shoes and coat and headed for the nearest pharmacy.

  The Dulcolax diet is basically an extended version of what patients do for three days before their lower gastrointestinal series, better known as a barium enema.

  I was lucky on two counts. I had six days, not three, and I didn’t have colorectal cancer.

  The diet is clear fluids only, no solid food, not even a hearty soup. Additionally, take two Dulcolax every four hours and stay close to the bathroom. The day before the flight to Paris, I completed the final stage, inserting a bullet-shaped Dulcolax suppository.

  Voila, seventeen pounds in six days. I felt so light I could have flown to Paris under my own power; that, and I was also half-delirious due to starvation and dehydration. I couldn’t drink though, not that day, not any more than was necessary to keep my kidneys from shutting down. My urine may have been like a desert rat’s syrupy dribbles but there were $80,000 pants waiting for me in Heaven.

  On the flight, I watched a nature documentary. A narrator with a haughty British accent talked about avifauna. “In the bird world, the onset of sexual maturity is marked by the development of gaudy plumage and huge bulbous body ornamentation which is disadvantageous for survival, as it draws the attention of predators, but is evolutionarily necessary as it attracts the attention of a mate.” Several images of birds humping flashed on the tiny, in-seat screen. I must have zoned out because when I looked again, the narrator was talking about plants reproducing. “This variety of orchid produces scents and grows dangly, bright baubles, which mimic the form of a female wasp.” Flash to a wasp humping a flower. “This confuses the male into mating with the flower which leads to pollination.”

  The flight touched dow
n at Charles de Gaulle in the early evening, the day before the Heavenly Show. I spied Donna and Father ahead of me in the Customs line and wondered why I hadn’t seen them on the flight. Donna was wearing sunglasses and a scarf. Father was wearing sunglasses and a scarf. Donna carried a Fendi Baguette. Father carried four suitcases.

  “Oh, first class sucked hard.”

  My gut clenched, either from the familiar pang of Donna’s voice or remnants of the laxative suppository. She was talking to another model whose photo hung near Stella Supernova’s on the Agency wall. I had seen her at a few shows but couldn’t remember her name. Sienna or Savannah or something.

  “The champagne was barely chilled and they didn’t start service until we were in the air… Oh my God, are those new?”

  “What, these?” Sierra glowed. “Yes. Do my nipples look off-centre though?”

  Donna took a step back for better perspective.

  Sahara thrust her chest out, “I feel like one is looking at the wall and the other at the ceiling.”

  “No, they’re great,” Donna said. “Okay, check this out.” Donna hung her coat over Father and lifted her shirt to expose her midriff. “Jack got me an outie.”

  “I love it,” Samhain squealed. “I gotta get me one. Innies are so 1986.”

  “My surgeon just started doing umbilicoplasty. She’s amazing, an artist. I swear, every time I go to her my paycheque grows.” Donna pulled her coat off Father, slung it over her shoulders and planted her hands on her hips.

  The Customs officer said something to her.

  Father prompted Donna to step up to the desk. She scolded him and then shrugged to Salmonella. “I can never understand what these Customs fuckers are saying, you know?”

  Charles de Gaulle aerodrome is what Paul Andreu thought the future would look like from the year 1966. At that time, the future was a world of smooth, Plexiglas tubes covering moving sidewalks, all intertwined over a central courtyard cylinder. At that time, people still thought the future would only get better. There were so few angles in the building, I too couldn’t help but feel fooled by the hope for a smooth, clean, soft future with no edges to bump into. It was a future of jetpacks and flying cars, a fantasy of robot slaves and laser ray guns that I dreamed about as a kid.