My bottle of Y—— was on the nightstand. I’d been taking the half tablets for a month; there was only one left and I worried about what would happen when I ran out completely. Maybe Y—— was the glue holding my life together—not a life so much as pieces of cracked china that had been fit together haphazardly. I took the last half tablet and then opened my nightstand drawer to find the bottle of Dabsitaf. I swallowed one, then another, then a few more.
I wanted to hear another person’s voice, a kind voice. I considered calling my mother, but she would have been able to tell something was wrong. She was alert to even the slightest shift in my tone of voice, the length of silence between words. I didn’t want to worry her, so I called my father. It was eight o’clock in New York, but it was only six where my father lived, in a place where life was slower and everything lagged.
His wife answered the phone. She told me he was mowing the lawn and set the phone down to get him. I thought of my father as I always thought of him, in the chair on the deck where he liked to sit after work, listening to birdsong. Through the phone I heard the lawnmower stop and imagined the smell of fresh grass clippings, a whiff of the heartland.
When my father picked up the phone, out of breath, I didn’t tell him about the dates or Verena or the other women at Calliope House. He didn’t know much about my daily life, so we talked about what he was doing in the yard, that after he cut the grass he would read the newspaper. On his end of the phone, unlike mine, it was quiet. In the suburbs there was an absence of noise.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Maybe I’m not having such a good day.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
He said nothing else, giving me time, allowing the silence. My mother would have asked questions and demanded to know what was wrong. I liked that my father was quiet on the other end of the phone, simply breathing, letting his yard work wait until I no longer needed him.
I listened to his breathing and wished that I could touch him. I wished that he could see the bruise on my lip, but he couldn’t.
“Are you there?” Dad said.
“Plum, are you there?”
? ? ?
Verena called to explain about a series of blind dates. She said there would be four men: Preston, Jack, Alexander, Aidan. These names sounded familiar. Hadn’t we done this before?
After six months on Dabsitaf, perhaps I was ready to date. Dr. Ahmad had been wrong about my body. After such rapid weight loss there was no sagging skin, no need to cut and stitch. I had simply shrunk, my flesh vacuumed in, with no evidence of a void left by my fat. I was Alicia. That’s who people saw when they looked at me.
On Dabsitaf I wasn’t hungry. I didn’t starve and binge. I simply had no appetite. Many people skipped breakfast, but I skipped lunch and dinner, too. Eating a slice of bread would have made as much sense as eating a book or a shoe. I didn’t want food. I didn’t want water. I didn’t want to get out of bed or go outside. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I didn’t want to think. I didn’t want to buy anything, not even clothes or shoes. I didn’t want love or friendship or sex. I didn’t want to listen to music or read or watch TV.
I didn’t want.
Without food, I didn’t have energy or mental focus. I didn’t want to work, but I needed the money. Kitty had forgiven me for deleting her messages, and when she saw how I’d been transformed she invited me to work in the Austen Tower in the office next to her. Reading and forming sentences was beyond my ability, given the lack of nutrients, so I sat at my computer and typed gibberish words that looked vaguely Norwegian—lsjfslkf jslkfjsl kfjalkjfla kjdflsk jflasjflsakjf—until it was time to go home. No one seemed to notice.
In my natural state, after my factory settings had been restored thanks to Dabsitaf, I was lovely. On the way home from work, men whistled at me. I couldn’t walk by a construction site without causing a commotion. On the subway men pinched my ass, they followed me, they asked for my phone number and gyrated their pelvises as if they were pronging me. I was supposed to find this charming, so I acted flattered. I was supposed to want this kind of attention, but I didn’t want anything. Not anymore. Thank you, I said when they gave me flowers, but I didn’t feel thankful. The inside of my head was blank.
Before long I weighed one hundred pounds. I hadn’t weighed that little since elementary school. One day when I came home from work there was a note taped to my back that said, FEED ME! Women came up to me in the street and asked me what my secret was. “I don’t eat anything, ever,” I said, but this wasn’t entirely true. I swallowed my Dabsitaf tablet once a day. I could see the oblong pill descend through my body, down my neck, between my breasts, heading toward my bellybutton. It looked like a bug inching along beneath my skin.