'My what?'
'The shit cards,' Houston said, and then laughed heartily. 'Something might show up there, but really, Billy, the lab ran twenty-three different tests on your blood, and they all look good. That's persuasive.'
Halleck let out a long, shaky sigh. 'I was scared,' he said.
'It's the people who aren't who die young,' Houston replied. He opened his desk drawer and took out a bottle with a small spoon dangling from the cap by a chain. The spoon's handle, Halleck saw, was in the shape of the Statue of Liberty. 'Tootsweet?'
Halleck shook his head. He was content, however, to sit where he was, with his hands faced together on his belly– on his diminished belly – and watch as Fairview's most successful family practitioner snorted coke first up one nostril and then up the other. He put the little bottle back in his desk and took out another bottle and package of Q-tips. He dipped a Q-tip in the bottle and then rammed it up hisnose.
'Distilled water,' he said. 'Got to protect the sinuses.'
And he tipped Halleck a wink.
He's probably treated babies for pneumonia with that shit running around in his head, Halleck thought, but the thought had no real power. Right now he couldn't help liking Houston a little, because Houston had given him good news. Right now all he wanted in the world was to sit here with his hands laced across his diminished belly and explore the depth of his shaky relief, to try it out like a new bicycle, or test-drive it like a new car. It occurred to him that when he walked out of Houston's office he was probably going to feel almost newborn. A director filming the scene might well want to put Thus Spake Zarathustra on the soundtrack. This thought made Halleck first grin, hen laugh aloud.
'Share the funny,' Houston said. 'In this sad world we need all the funnies we can get, Billy-boy.' He sniffed loudly and then lubricated his nostrils with a fresh Q-tip.
'Nothing,' Halleck said. 'It's just… I was scared, you know. I was already dealing with the big C. Trying to.'
'Well, you may have to, 'Houston said, 'but not this year. I don't need to see the lab results on the Hayman-Reichling cards to tell you that. Cancer's got a look. At least when it's already gobbled up thirty pounds, it does.'
'But I've been eating as much as ever. I told Heidi I'd been exercising more, and I have, a little, but she said you couldn't lose thirty pounds just by beefing up your exercise regimen. She said you'd just make hard fat.'
'That's not true at all. The most recent tests have showed exercise is much more important than diet. But for a guy who is -who was– as overweight as you were, she's got a point. You take a fatty who radically increases his level of exercise, and what the guy usually gets is the booby prize – a good solid class-two thrombosis. Not enough to kill you, just enough to make sure you're never going to walk around all eighteen holes again or ride the big roller coaster at Seven Flags Over Georgia.'
Billy thought the cocaine was making Houston talkative.
'You don't understand it,' he said. 'I don't understand it, either. But in this business I see a lot of things I don't understand. A friend of mine who's a neurosurgeon in the city called me in to look at some extraordinary cranial X rays about three years ago. A male student at George Washington University came in to see him because he was having blinding headaches. They sounded like typical migraines to my colleague– the kid fit the personality type to a tee – but you don't want to screw around with that sort of thing because headaches like that are symptomatic of cranial brain tumors even if the patient isn't having phantom olfactory referents -smells like shit, or rotten fruit, or old popcorn, or whatever. So my buddy took a full X-ray series, gave the kid an EEG, sent him to the hospital to have a cerebral axial tomography. Know what they found out?'
Halleck shook his head.
'They found out that the kid, who had stood third in his high-school class and who had been on the dean's list every semester at George Washington University, had almost no brain at all. There was a single twist of cortical tissue running up through the center of his skull– on the X rays my colleague showed me, it looked for all the world like a macrame drape-pull – and that was all. That drape-pull was probably running all of his involuntary functions, everything from breathing and heart rate to orgasm. Just that one rope of brain tissue. The rest of the kid's head was filled with nothing but cerebrospinal fluid. In some way we don't understand, that fluid was doing his thinking. Anyway, he's still excelling in school, still having migraines, and still fitting the migraine personality type. If he doesn't have a heart attack in his twenties or thirties that kills him, they'll start to taper off in his forties.'
Houston pulled the drawer open, took out the cocaine, and took some. He offered it to Halleck. Halleck shook his head.
'Then,' Houston resumed, 'about five years ago I had an old lady come into the office with a lot of pain in her gums. She's died since. If I mentioned the old bitch's name, you'd know it. I took a look in there and Christ Almighty, I couldn't believe it. She'd lost the last of her adult teeth almost ten years before– I mean, this babe was pushing ninety – and here was a bunch of new ones coming up … five of them in all. No wonder she was having gum pain, Billy! She was growing a third set of teeth. She was teething at eighty-eight years of age.'
'What did you do?' Halleck asked. He was hearing all of this with only a very limited part of his mind– it flowed over him, soothing, like white noise, like Muzak floating down from the ceiling in a discount department store. Most of his mind was still dealing with relief – surely Houston's cocaine must be a poor drug indeed compared to the relief he was feeling. Halleck thought briefly of the old Gypsy with the rotten nose, but the image had lost its darkish, oblique power.
'What did I do?' Houston was asking. 'Christ, what could I do? I wrote her a prescription for a drug that's really nothing more than a high-powered form of Num-Zit, that stuff you put on a baby's gums when it starts to teethe. Before she died, she got three more in– two molars and a canine.
'I've seen other stuff, too, a lot of it. Every doctor sees weird shit he can't explain. But enough of Ripley's Believe It Or Not. The fact is, we don't understand very goddamn much about the human metabolism. There are guys like Duncan Hopley… You know Dunc?'
Halleck nodded. Fairview's chief of police, rouster of Gypsies, who looked like a bush-league Clint Eastwood.
'He eats like every meal was his last one,' Houston said. 'Holy Moses, I never seen such a bear for chow. But his weight sticks right around one-seventy, and because he's six feet tall, that makes him just about right. He's got a souped-up metabolism; he's burning the calories off at twice the pace of, let's say, Yard Stevens.'
Halleck nodded. Yard Stevens owned and operated Heads Up, Fairview's only barber shop. He went maybe three hundred pounds. You looked at him and wondered if his wife tied his shoelaces.
'Yard is roughly the same height as Duncan Hopley,' Houston said, 'but the times I've seen him at lunch, he's just picking at his food. Maybe he's a big closet eater. Could be. But I'd guess not. He's got a hungry face, you know what I mean?'
Billy smiled a little and nodded. He knew. Yard Stevens looked, in his mother's phrase, 'like his food wasn't doing him any good.'
'I'll tell you something else, too– although I s'pose it's tales out of school. Both of those men smoke. Yard Stevens claims a pack of Marlboro Lights a day, which means he probably smokes a pack and a half, maybe two. Duncan claims he smokes two packs of Camels a day, which could mean he's doing three, three and a half. I mean, did you ever see Duncan Hopley without a cigarette in his mouth or in his hand?'
Billy thought about it and shook his head. Meanwhile; Houston had helped himself to another blast. 'Gah, that's enough of that,' he said, and slammed the drawer shut with authority.
'Anyway, there's Yard doing a pack and a half of low-tar cigarettes a day, and there's Duncan doing three packs of black lungers every day– maybe more. But the one who's really inviting lung cancer to come in and eat him up is Yard Stevens. Why? Because his metabolism sucks, and metabolic rate is somehow linked to cancer.
'You have doctors who claim that we can cure cancer when we crack the genetic code. Some kinds of cancer, maybe. But it's never going to be cured completely until we understand metabolism. Which brings us back to Billy Halleck, the Incredible Shrinking Man. Or maybe the Incredible Mass-Reducing Man would be better. Not Mass-Producing; Mass-Reducing.' Houston laughed a strange and rather stupid whinnying laugh, and Billy thought: If that's what coke does to you, maybe I'll stick to Ring-Dings.
'You don't know why I'm losing weight.'
'Nope.' Houston seemed pleased by the fact. 'But my guess is that you may actually be thinking yourself thin. It can be done, you know. We see it fairly often. Someone comes in who really wants to lose weight. Usually they've had some kind of scare -heart palpitations, a fainting spell while playing tennis or badminton or volleyball, something like that. So I give them a nice, soothing diet that should enable them to lose two to five pounds a week for a couple of months. You can lose sixteen to forty pounds with no pain or strain that way. Fine. Except most people lose a lot more than that. They follow the diet, but they lose more weight than the diet alone can explain. It's as if some mental sentry who's been fast asleep for years wakes up and starts hollering the equivalent of“Fire!” The metabolism itself speeds up … because the sentry told it to evacuate a few pounds before the whole house burned down.'
'Okay,' Halleck said. He was willing to be convinced. He had taken the day off from work, and suddenly what he wanted to do more than anything else was go home and tell Heidi he was okay and take her upstairs and make love to her while the afternoon sunlight shafted in through the windows of their bedroom, 'I'll buy that.'
Houston got up to see him out: Halleck noticed with quiet amusement that there was a dusting of white powder under Houston's nose.
'If you continue to lose weight, we'll run an entire metabolic series on you,' Houston said. 'I may have given you the idea that tests like that aren't very good, but sometimes they can show us a lot. Anyway, I doubt if we'll have to go to that. My guess is your weight loss will start to taper off– five pounds this week, three next week, one the week after that. Then you're going to get on the scales and see that you've put on a pound of two.'
'You've eased my mind a lot,' Halleck said, and gripped Houston's hand hard.
Houston smiled complacently, although he had really done no more than present Halleck with negatives– no, he didn't know what was wrong with Halleck, but no, it wasn't cancer. Whew. 'That's what we're here for, Billyboy.'
Billy-boy went home to his wife.
'He said you're okay?'
Halleck nodded.
She put her arms around him and hugged him hard. He could feel the tempting swell of her breasts against his chest.
'Want to go upstairs?'
She looked at him, her eyes dancing. 'My, you are okay, aren't you?'
'You bet.'
They went upstairs and had magnificent sex. For one of the last times.
Afterward, Halleck fell asleep. And dreamed.
The Gypsy had turned into a huge bird. A vulture with a rotting beak. It was cruising over Fairview and casting down a gritty, cindery dust like chimney soot that seemed to come fro beneath its dusky pinions… its wingpits?
Chapter Seven. Bird Dream
'Thinner.' The Gypsy-vulture croaked, passing over the common, over the Village Pub, the Waldenbooks on the corner of Main and Devon, over Esta-Esta, Fairview's moderately good Italian restaurant, over the post office, over the Amoco station, the modern glass-walled Fairview Public Library, and finally over the salt marshes and out into the bay.
Thinner, just that one word, but it was a malediction enough, Halleck saw, because everyone in this affluent upper-class-commute-to-the-city-and-have-a-few-drinks-in-the-club-car-on-the-way-home suburb, everyone in this pretty little New England town set squarely in the heart of John Cheever country, everyone in Fairview was starving to death.
He walked faster and faster up Main Street, apparently invisible– the logic of dreams, after all, is only whatever the dream demands – and horrified by the results of the Gypsy's curse. Fairview had become a town filled with concentration-camp survivors. Big-headed babies with wasted bodies screamed from expensive prams. Two women in expensive designer dresses staggered and lurched out of Cherry on Top, Fairview's version of the old ice-cream shoppe. Their faces were all cheekbones and bulging brows stretching parchment-shiny skin; the necklines of their dresses slipped from jutting skin-wrapped collarbones and deep shoulder hollows in a hideous parody of seduction.
Here came Michael Houston, staggering along on scarecrow-thin legs, his Savile Row suit flapping around his unbelievably gaunt frame, holding out a vial of cocaine in one skeletal hand. 'Toot-sweet?' he screamed at Halleck– it was the voice of a rat caught in a trap and squealing out the last of its miserable life. 'Toot-sweet? It helps speed up your metabolism, Billy-boy! Toot-sweet? Toot -'
With deepening horror Halleck realised the hand holding the vial was not a hand at all but only clattering bones. The man was a walking, talking skeleton.
He turned to run, but in the way of nightmares, he could seem to pick up no speed. Although he was on the Main Street sidewalk, he felt as if he was running in thick, sticky mud. At any moment the skeleton that had been Michael Houston would reach out and he– it – would touch his shoulder. Or perhaps that bony hand would begin to scrabble at his throat.
'Toot-sweet, toot-sweet, toot-sweet!' Houston's squalling, ratlike voice screamed. The voice was drawing closer and closer; Halleck knew that if he turned his head, the apparition would be close to him, so very close– sparkling eyes bulging from sockets of naked bone, the uncovered jawbone jerking and snapping.
He saw Yard Stevens shamble out of Heads Up, his beige barber's smock flapping over a chest and a belly that were now nonexistent. Yard was screeching in a horrid, crowlike voice, and when he turned toward Halleck, he saw it was not Yard at all, but Ronald Reagan. 'Where's the rest of me?' he screamed. 'Where's the rest of me? WHERE'S THE REST OF ME?'
'Thinner,' Michael Houston was now whispering into Halleck's ear, and now what Halleck had feared happened: those finger bones touched him, twiddling and twitching at his sleeve, and Halleck thought he would go mad at the feeling. 'Thinner, so much thinner, toot-de-sweet, and thin– de-thin, it was his wife, Billy-boy, his wife, and you're in trouble. oh-baby, sooo much trouble. . .'
Chapter Eight. Billy's Pants
Billy jerked awake, breathing hard, his hand clapped across his mouth. Heidi slept peacefully beside him, deeply buried in a quilt. A mid-spring wind was running around the eaves outside.
Halleck took one quick, fearful look around the bedroom, assuring himself that Michael Houston– or a scarecrow version of him – was not in attendance. It was just his bedroom, every corner of it known. The nightmare began to drain away … but there was still enough of it left so that he scooted over next to Heidi. He did not touch her – she woke easily – but he got into the zone ofher warmth and stole part of her quilt.
Just a dream.
Thinner, a voice in his mind answered implacably.
Sleep came again. Eventually.
The morning following the nightmare, the bathroom scales showed him at 215, and Halleck felt hopeful. Only two pounds. Houston had been right, coke or not. The process was slowing down. He went downstairs whistling and ate three fried eggs and half a dozen link sausages.
On his ride to the train station, the nightmare recurred to him in vague fashion, more as a feeling of deja vu than actual memory. He looked out the window as he passed Heads Up (which was flanked by Frank's Fine Meats and Toys Are Joys) and for just a moment he expected to see a half-score of lurching, shambling skeletons, as if comfortable, plushy Fairview had somehow been changed into Biafra. But the people on the streets looked okay; better than okay. Yard Stevens, as physically substantial as ever, waved. Halleck waved back and thought: Your metabolism is warning you to quit smoking, Yard. The thought made him smile a little, and by the time his train pulled into Grand Central, the last vestiges of the dream were forgotten.
His mind at rest on the matter of his weight loss, Halleck neither weighed himself nor thought much about the matter for another four days . . . and then an embarrassing thing very nearly happened to him, in court and in front of Judge Hilmer Boynton, who had no more sense of humor than your average land turtle. It was stupid; the kind of thing you have bad dreams about when you're a grade-school kid.
Halleck stood to make an objection and his pants started to fall down.
He got halfway up, felt them sliding relentlessly down his hips and buttocks, bagging at the knees, and he sat down very quickly. In one of those moments of almost total objectivity– the ones which come unbidden and which you would often just as soon have forgotten Halleck realized that his movement must have looked like some sort of bizarre hop. William Halleck, attorney-at-law, does his Peter Rabbit riff. He felt a blush mount into his cheeks.
'Is it an objection, Mr Halleck, or a gas attack?'
The spectators– mercifully few of them – tittered.
'Nothing, your Honor,' Halleck muttered. 'I… I changed my mind.'
Boynton grunted. The proceedings droned on and Halleck sat sweating, wondering just how he was going to get up.
The judge called a recess ten minutes later. Halleck sat at the defense table pretending to pore over a sheaf of papers. When the hearing room was mostly empty, he rose, hands stuffed into his suit coat pockets in a gesture he hoped looked casual. He was actually holding his trousers up through his pockets.
He took off the suit coat in the privacy of a men's room stall, hung it up, looked at his pants, and then took off his belt. His pants, still buttoned and zipped, slithered down to his ankles; his change made a muffled jingle as his pockets struck the tile. He sat down on the toilet, held the belt up like a scroll, and looked at it. He could read a story there which was more than unsettling. The belt had been a Father's Day present two years ago from Linda. He held the belt up, reading it, and felt his heart speeding up to a frightened run.
The deepest indentation in the Niques belt was just beyond the first hole. His daughter had bought it a little small, and Halleck remembered thinking at the time ruefully– that it was perhaps forgivable optimism on her part. It had, nevertheless, been quite comfortable for a long while. It was only since he'd quit smoking that it got to be a bit hard to buckle the belt, even using the first hole.
After he'd quit smoking… but before he'd hit the Gypsy woman.
Now there were other indents in the belt: beyond the second hole… and the fourth … and the fifth … finally the sixth and last.
Halleck saw with growing horror that each of the indents was lighter than the last. His belt told a truer, briefer story than Michael Houston had done. The weight loss was still going on, and it wasn't slowing down; it was speeding up. He had gotten to the last hole in the Niques belt he'd believed only two months ago he would have to quietly retire as too small. Now he needed a seventh hole, which he didn't have.
He looked at his watch and saw he'd have to get back soon. But some things were more important than whether or not Judge Boynton decided to enter a will into probate.
Halleck listened. The men's room was quiet. He held up his pants with one hand and stepped out of the stall. He let his pants drop again and looked at himself in one of the mirrors over the row of sinks. He raised the tails of his shirt in order to get a better look at the belly which until just lately had been his bane.
A small sound escaped his throat. That was all, but that was enough. The selective perception couldn't hold up; it shattered all at once. He saw that the modest potbelly which had replaced his bay window was now gone. Although his pants were down and his shirt was pulled up over his unbuttoned vest, the facts were clear enough in spite of the ludicrous pose. Actual facts, as always, were negotiable– you learned that quickly in the lawyer business – but the metaphor which came was more than persuasive; it was undeniable. He looked like a kid dressed up in his father's clothes. Halleck stood in disarray before the short row of sinks, thinking hysterically: Who's got the Shinola? I've got to daub on a fake mustache!
A gagging, rancid laughter rose in his throat at the sight of his pants bundled around his shoes and his black nylon socks climbing three-quarters of the way up his hairy calves. In that moment he suddenly, simply, believed… everything. The Gypsy had cursed him, yes, but it wasn't cancer; cancer would have been too kind and too quick. It was something else, and the unfolding had only begun.
A conductor's voice shouted in his mind, Next stop, Anorexia Nervosa! All out for Anorexia Nervosa!
The sounds rose in his throat, laughter that sounded like screams, or perhaps screams that sounded like laughter, and what did it really matter?
Who can I tell! Can I tell Heidi? She'll think I'm crazy.
But Halleck had never felt saner in his life.
The outer door of the men's room banged open.
Halleck retreated quickly into the stall and latched it, frightened.
'Billy?' John Parker, his assistant.
'In here.'
'Boynton's coming back soon. You okay?'
'Fine,' he said. His eyes were shut.
'Do you have gas? Is it your stomach?'
Yeah, it's my stomach, all right.
'I just got to mail a package. I'll be out in a minute or so.'
'Okay.'
Parker left. Halleck's mind fixed on his belt. He couldn't go back into Judge Boynton's court holding up his pants through the pockets of his suit coat. What the hell was he going to do?
He suddenly remembered his Swiss army knife– good old army knife, which he had always taken out of his pocket before weighing himself. Back in the old days, before the Gypsies had come to Fairview.
No one asked you assholes to come– why couldn't you have gone to Westport or Stratford instead?
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