“Shouldn’t be too difficult. Just give me notice. I’ll need notice,” she says. “To make arrangements.”
I nod and watch this woman pedaling in the dark. Was I like her? Surely not. Surely I was getting somewhere. Surely all my work was the work of progress toward attainable goals.
“Sad,” Char pipes up beside me. I see she’s looking at the woman too.
“Yes,” I agree. “Very sad.”
The cat’s grip on my arm relinquishes a little.
“If she would just do interval training. That’s her problem. No interval training.”
Smoke darts out of her mouth like little tongues.
“Your body needs to be surprised. Attacked. Always. You’ve got to shock your system constantly. Otherwise, you’re nowhere.”
“Yeah,” I say, looking at the woman. “Do you know if this lake goes out to the sea?”
“The sea? I don’t think so.”
I nod.
“Maybe eventually it does,” she says. “I think it goes into a river first. I’m not sure.”
I wonder where it all goes, Mel asked me once.
What?
Our fat. After we lose it. I know we sweat but that can’t be all it is. It can’t just turn into water and salt. It can’t just disappear. We don’t just melt, do we?
She looked at me, smiling, bouncing a little in her chair. She was in a good mood because she’d been on a diet for a while, was losing. Feeling philosophical in her slinky velvet dress, stirring a peppermint tea she’d doctored with a million Twins.
I think we do melt, actually, I told her. I read an article about it once in a science magazine. I can’t remember exactly what it said, though. I think it even comes out in our breath.
Mel wasn’t listening. She was looking at her reflection in the window, pleased.
Maybe it’s all around us, she said at last, waving a hand at the dusty café air, making her voice spooky, her eyes big and wide like we were teenagers and she was trying to scare me. Maybe we’re all around us. Maybe the universe is made up of it. Our old fat. She smiled. Wouldn’t that be so funny?
? ? ?
The red fire of the morning is ablaze over our faces and over the water. The glass towers of the city, which will return to a dismal gray the moment the sun is done rising, shimmer and flame in the distance. From here the lake looks beautiful, but I know for a fact, have seen with my own eyes during the walks I sometimes take to mix it up, that nothing lives under there but the junk of the world and eyeless, acid-ridden fish. I suppose I could switch to a different machine. Vary the incline level at two-minute intervals. Change the fitness course constantly so that I’m always going from Random to Fat Burning to Rolling Hills, so that it always feels like I’m getting somewhere. The sound of the sirens draws close, causing Char’s cat to tense in my arms. Even though I know that woman must hear the sirens through the glass enclosure of the Malibu Club, she keeps pedaling. As I watch her through the glass, breathing in Char’s smoke, I feel dangerously close to a knowledge that is probably already ours for the taking, a knowledge that I know could change everything.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my parents, Nina Milosevic and James Awad, for their love and faith in me.
Thank you to Alexandra Dimou, Ken Calhoun, Jessica Riley, Jennifer Long-Pratt, Erica Mena-Landry, Dawn Promislow, Mairead Case, and Emily Cullitone for their friendship, immense support, kindness, and thoughtful feedback during the writing of this book.
Thank you to Jessica Riley, an intelligent and beyond generous reader whose friendship and endless encouragement saved me more times than I can say, for my sanity.
Thank you to my inspiring teacher Brian Evenson for his perceptive and encouraging feedback, and for the invaluable guidance provided by Joanna Howard, Carole Maso, Thalia Field, Joanna Ruocco, and Kate Bernheimer as well as my fantastic cohort at Brown (2012–2014) who patiently read various incarnations of this book.
Thank you to the generous editors who read and supported my writing: Nick Mount, Jordan Bass, Derek Webster, Matthew Fox, Carmine Starnino, Jaime Clarke, and Mary Cotton at Newtonville Books, Libby Hodges, Mikhail Iossel, Mike Spry, Emma Komlos-Hrobsky, Emily M. Keeler, Lauren Spohrer, Quinn Emmett, and Elizabeth Blachman. Thank you to Christine Vines.
Thank you to my amazing, hardworking agent Julia Kenny, whose enthusiasm is a bright light in my moments of doubt and to my editor, Lindsey Schwoeri, for her always intelligent and insightful feedback and her tireless dedication to this book. Her commitment to authenticity and voice was yet more proof that I couldn’t have had a better editor. And many thanks too to my Canadian editor Nicole Winstanley, for her thoughtful notes, her deep commitment to this book, and for bringing it to my home and native land.
Thank you to Debka Colson and the Writers’ Room of Boston for providing space in which to work.