Dietland

by Sarai Walker

  He stood up and told me to put my arms down. He maneuvered me back slightly so my face was directly under the bright light above the mirror. “You’re probably too young for a facelift, but we’ll see how it goes with the surgery. Be prepared for the fact that you’ll look older when you’re thinner. Fat is like a natural collagen, so without it you’ll wrinkle more.” He turned my face to one side. “Your nose is a bit big. I could fix that.” Big compared to what? I wanted to ask. Not compared to a Volkswagen.

  Dr. Ahmad put the cap back on the marker and smiled at me. “That’s it,” he said. “You may need some lipo if you have small pockets of fat here and there, but we won’t know that until you’ve had the bypass. You look worried. Don’t worry. You’re in good hands. I do this all the time. Several times a week, in fact. In about a year from now, you could be a whole new person.”

  He left me to get dressed and I looked at myself in the mirror, full on. There was Plum’s body with black lines showing how Alicia would be carved out. I’d look like Frankenstein by the time it was over. I turned full circle, trying to take in all the black marks. No matter what I did, there was no escaping the body that trapped me. I could see that now.

  In the taxi on the way back to Calliope House, I didn’t say anything to Marlowe. She congratulated me on finishing the makeover and handed me a copy of Fuckability Theory, which she’d signed For Plum Alicia, love Marlowe xo. I noticed the book’s dedication: To the 3 Stus and Sharlene.

  “What’s wrong?” Verena asked when we walked into Calliope House.

  “Nothing, I’m just tired.”

  “Making yourself fuckable is a lot of work,” said Marlowe.

  “I’m not fuckable,” I said. I’m Frankenstein.

  Verena told me to go to her office at the top of the stairs, that there was a present for me. Hanging on the back of the door was a new version of the white poplin shirtdress with purple trim, along with a pair of purple tights. More than double the size of the original, this duplicate dress was like a cartoon. I set down my bag and Marlowe’s book and held the dress in my hands. For some reason, I wanted to put it on.

  I locked myself in the bathroom, where there was a pubic hair on the toilet seat, as black and spindly as a spider’s leg. I took off my clothes and replaced the black control-top tights with the purple ones. There was a brief flash in my mind of Leeta, she of the colorful tights. I stepped into the dress and then stood before the mirror. Seeing Plum wearing Alicia’s dress was like looking in a funhouse mirror. Alicia, blown up twice the size she should have been. The dress was sleeveless, so my upper arms were visible, with the pattern outlined by the doctor’s black marker. The pattern of Alicia.

  Thankfully I couldn’t see my whole body in the bathroom mirror, but what I saw reminded me of Janine, the outcast from the Baptist clinic, with her bright and colorful wardrobe. What if it were my fate to look like Janine forever? What if this is your real life? What if you’re already living it? Only a month earlier that had seemed impossible.

  “Plum, are you all right?” Verena called up the stairs.

  “Coming,” I said. I turned away from the Plum-Alicia hybrid in the mirror and returned to Verena’s office to collect my things. I didn’t bother to change into my regular clothes—I wanted to leave the red-walled house as quickly as possible. As I was about to walk out of Verena’s office, I saw the bottle of so-called Dabsitaf, the French diet pills, on her desk. I stuffed the bottle into my bra, in the space between my breasts. I was downstairs and out the door before Verena and Marlowe realized it, heading toward the subway in the dress, my legs bulbous and grapelike in the purple tights, which didn’t press in my stomach.

  In the subway station at Fourteenth Street, I waited on the platform for the train, conscious that people were staring at me in my costume. I concentrated on the blackness of the tunnel, but from the din of the station, a male voice cut through.

  “Can you imagine doing that?” the man said, loudly enough for everyone in the vicinity to hear. He was about thirty, wearing a polished gray suit, standing between two other young men in suits. The trio was unshaven-on-purpose, wearing white shirts and ties in different colors, the only way to tell them apart. They laughed at the woman in the white and purple dress, knowing she could hear them, but not caring.

  Not today, I thought. Please don’t do this today.

  I turned to face them. The shame and embarrassment I felt made me want to keep quiet, as always, but then I remembered:

  A Baptist isn’t afraid to take risks.

  I looked at the man who’d made the comment and said, “I’m too much woman for you. From the looks of you, you probably like to diddle little boys.” The two guys next to him, the friends, his white-guy posse, laughed.

  They shouldn’t have laughed.

  The fist of the man who’d made the comment came flying at me. I saw it coming—the white paw, the hairy knuckles, the ring finger wrapped in a thin gold band. I opened my mouth as if to yell but his fist hit me before I could, the gold band smashing my lip into my incisor. I stumbled backwards, past the white line, near the edge of the subway platform. Someone screamed, but it sounded far away. I turned my head and saw the train approaching, the silver bullet, its white light heading toward me. My arms moved propeller-like as I fought for balance. Blood filled my mouth. I didn’t want to die this way, not with these people watching, but the white light was moving closer. I braced for impact, but then I felt hands pulling at me.

  I fell to my knees on the platform as the train blew past. “He tried to push her onto the tracks. Did you see that? He tried to push her.”

  The doors of the train opened and the passengers stampeded out, knocking me from side to side. When the crowd thinned and the train closed its doors, a woman knelt down next to me. “Are you all right?” She helped me to my feet. Another woman handed me a wad of tissue from her purse, which I held to my lip. The man and his two friends were gone.

  When the police came, they asked me to describe what had happened. “He said something rude to me,” I told them, but I couldn’t repeat what he’d said. “I confronted him and he punched me.”

  “He tried to push her,” said the woman who’d offered me the tissue. “I saw the whole thing.”

  The officer said they would review the closed-circuit television and then contact me. I wrote my name and address on the form, as requested, and so did the witnesses.

  The officer asked me, for the second time, if I needed the paramedics.

  “I just want to go home.”

  A 2-train pulled into the station and I settled into one of the orange plastic seats. The man sitting across from me was shrunken and old, and I could see myself reflected in the glass above his head. I stared at myself, Plum in Alicia’s dress, a bruise forming above her lip. The woman in the glass stared back.

  • • •

  Girls Will Be Girls

  The 7:30 a.m. Metrolink to Los Angeles Union Station was due. The girl weaved between the waiting commuters. The women and men, staring into their newspapers and phones, took no notice of her. She should have been getting ready for school, this lone girl on the platform, a shawl wrapped tightly around her slender body. Her feet were bare, but she didn’t feel anything; she couldn’t. Her body didn’t belong to her anymore, not after the attack, not after so many people had seen the photos online. Soon, she would leave her body behind.

  When the women and men on the station platform looked at her with their morning eyes, they saw a girl, but not that girl. Her identity was a secret, but they had all read about her, even if they didn’t know it. She’d been dissected before she was dead.

  As the train approached the station, the girl felt it in her feet before she could see it. “Stand behind the line,” the man on the speaker said, but the girl didn’t stand behind the line. She rushed forward, and leapt.

  La luz se fue.

  The girl liked to ride around in cars with boys, that’s what they’d said. Did you see how she dressed? S
lutty-ass bitch. She sure didn’t look twelve.

  Luz lived with her grandmother in a house on the outskirts of Santa Mariana, an hour north of Los Angeles. Her mother had been away from home for more than a year. If her mother had been around, Luz wouldn’t have been riding around in cars with boys—she would have had to stay at home and do her homework every night and forget about sneaking out—but it was her grandmother who was in charge, half blind and hobbled by arthritis.

  On television, a local resident said, “Where was this girl’s mother? This is her fault.”

  With her mother serving as an army medic in Afghanistan, Luz was largely unsupervised and went where she pleased. This didn’t go unnoticed around the neighborhood. She was a girl who had wandered away from the safety of the herd, a feral girl, easy prey. Did you see how that girl was dressed?

  It happened in an abandoned apartment, on a dirty mattress in a bedroom with no curtains on the windows. A classmate’s older brother, a man named Chris, had invited Luz to a party. Chris and his friend Lamar picked her up. They drove her to the apartment, but Luz could see there wasn’t a party, just a group of men standing around, waiting. Chris told Luz to take off her clothes. Come on, Lamar said, we know you’ve done it before. He said if she didn’t do it, he would cut her. He had a knife, so she undressed and lay down on the mattress in the middle of the room and that’s how it began. Chris went first, then Lamar, then the other men, taking their turns one after the other. Luz stared at the ceiling, not wanting to see their faces, and waited for the hours it took to be finished.

  On television, the mother of one of the accused men said, “That girl let them boys run a train on her.”

  When the men left, Luz was alone in the apartment. She crawled into the hallway and pulled herself up. She wasn’t going to tell anyone about what had happened; they said if she told anyone they would kill her.

  It was Chris’s little sister who told. She saw pictures on her brother’s phone of Luz naked on the mattress. There were photos of Chris on top of Luz, and photos of Lamar on top of her, and photos of other men she didn’t recognize. The girl posted some of the photos online and shared them with her friends. She told the principal, hoping Luz would get into trouble. Slutty-ass bitch. The photos of Luz and the men circulated throughout the school and on social media.

  The principal called the police. The faces of Chris Martinez and Lamar Wilson were the only recognizable ones in the photos, but the police counted at least four other men who’d been present. When questioned, Martinez, twenty-one, and Wilson, twenty-three, said the girl had consented to sex. They said she’d told them she was eighteen. She liked to ride around in cars with boys, they said. She wasn’t a virgin.

  In the newspaper, one of the mothers of the accused men said, “That little girl lured my son to the apartment.”

  After their arrest, Martinez and Wilson gave up the names of the four other men, who were also arrested. The local news media covered the case. A community leader said young men of color were being harassed by the police. Threats were made against Luz, the slutty-ass bitch who’d gotten the guys into trouble. Social Services was considering moving her to foster care in another part of the state until her mother returned home, but it never came to that. One morning, Luz made her way to the Santa Mariana train station, wrapped in a shawl.

  On television, after Luz had jumped in front of the train, a pastor from the local church said, “Why wasn’t this girl’s mother supervising her? That’s what I’d like to know.”

  Luz’s mother returned home from Afghanistan to bury her daughter. Martinez and Wilson were released on bail, but the other men had been on probation and remained locked up, luckily for them. Soon after Martinez and Wilson returned home, they disappeared. No one had seen them in more than a month.

  Every day for twelve days, the editors at the Los Angeles Times received a video via email. The videos, each titled “Death Porn,” were shot in grainy black-and-white and featured a different man sitting in front of a concrete wall. There was a tiny shard of light to illuminate the scene, just enough to differentiate the man from the shadows. The men were unshaven, naked, and sweaty, their hands and feet bound with rope.

  Twelve men, twelve videos.

  The men in the first two videos were immediately recognizable to the newspaper’s editors as Chris Martinez and Lamar Wilson. They both pleaded to be released, writhing and moaning against the concrete and restraints. A female voice, off camera, sexy, said, “Do you like pain?” Then the screen went black.

  Each of the videos played out in a similar way. The men had been kidnapped over a period of a month, taken from their homes, offices, or hotel rooms, their disappearances reported by wives, mothers, coworkers. There was no trace of them, until the videos began to arrive.

  The third video featured the star player for a Super Bowl championship team. He’d been accused of raping two women in two separate incidents, one in Miami, the other in Seattle. In both of the investigations, the police officers had asked for autographs and posed for photographs with the star athlete, who said the sex with the women had been consensual. No charges were ever brought, but he was suspended for three games by the NFL. On Super Bowl Sunday, millions of Americans ate potato chips and drank beer while watching the man throw a ball around a field. They clapped and cheered for him. On a visit to L.A., he went missing.

  The next two videos featured two European soccer stars who’d been accused of paying an underage teenage girl for sex—a prostitute, the media had labeled her. The players denied the accusations, but the claims against them and media interviews with the girl had engulfed two of Europe’s leading soccer clubs. Prosecutors eventually declined to press charges, but the scandal only grew wider in Europe, involving other athletes and even more underage girls. While in Los Angeles to play an off-season charity match, the two soccer stars went missing.

  The star of the sixth video was a film director of Eastern European origin who was accused of raping a thirteen-year-old extra during the filming of a remake of Lolita a decade earlier. It was consensual sex, the film director had said; in his culture, standards were different. “The girl was a Lolita,” the producer of Lolita had told the police, in defense of his director friend. Over the years, the acclaimed film director was dogged by protests and controversy, but no charges were ever brought, and he went on to win two Academy Awards. After a business lunch at the Chateau Marmont, he vanished.

  Six other men with similar profiles were also targeted by the kidnappers, including a county attorney from Texas who’d refused to press charges against a teenage boy who’d molested a little girl because, as he told the girl’s mother, “boys will be boys.” Another target was Hal Jizz, the creator of the pornographic websites RevengeHer, where men retaliated by sharing intimate photos and videos of ex-wives and girlfriends, and VietCunt, which enabled Internet users in North America to access women and girls in Vietnam, who performed whatever actions the user requested via webcam. Someone in Ohio could pay to see a fourteen-year-old girl molested by an old man.

  The media dubbed the twelve kidnapped men the “Dirty Dozen.” The director of the FBI appeared on television to plead for their release: “We urge members of the public to come forward with any information that might lead to the rescue of these twelve men,” he said, sounding official, but it was clear his heart wasn’t in it.

  The friends and family of the Dirty Dozen stayed mostly clear of the media. The mother of Hal Jizz, when confronted outside Saturday-night bingo at her local American Legion, said she had “no comment” on her son’s kidnapping. When asked if she was proud of her son, the old woman, her hair wiry and gray like a scouring pad, took a drag on her cigarette and turned to the reporter, her black eyes penetrating the camera, “What do you think?” she said. In the parking lot of the Van Nuys accounting firm where he worked by day, employees ran from their cars to the building with file folders held over their faces, trying to outrun reporters.

  The FBI director appeared
on television again. “These twelve men have not been convicted of anything,” he said, but many commentators thought that was the point. “Kidnapping is a serious crime. If you have any information, please come forward. It’s not easy to transport and hide twelve grown men. Someone out there must know something.”

  But no one did, apparently. A week later a skydiving plane went missing from an airfield in Nevada. The twelve men were dropped from the plane into the desert. The coroner estimated that the men, alive and without parachutes, fell from an altitude of at least 10,000 feet. By the time anyone noticed the plane had been stolen, it had crashed into the Sierra Nevada and animals were feasting on the men’s remains. There were no bodies in the plane. Investigators surmised that the kidnappers had parachuted out of it before the crash.

  On her cable news show, Cheryl Crane-Murphy said, “As a committed Christian, it pains me to admit that I feel nothing but glee at the death of these pigs. God forgive me.”

  • • •

  The New Baptist Plan, Task Four:

  Blind Dates

  Nearly a week had passed since the makeover. The bruise on my lip had faded, but the black lines on my body hadn’t. I wasn’t bathing or dressing or eating. I reclined on the sofa, wrapped in a sheet, tortured by shocks and by nausea. The television news was filled with reports of the Dirty Dozen. I watched the scene unfold in the Nevada desert, where the police had erected tents around the bodies to keep the wild animals away.