“But you don’t think I will.” He had a lifelong pattern of losing and regaining his weight and then some, up until the past five years or so when he’d wearied of the struggle and had given up altogether.
“I’m done trying to figure out what people are and aren’t capable of.” Tricia fetched her cigarettes and lighter from the window ledge and stepped outside, closing the back door with a sharp click.
A gray-blue ribbon unraveled across the window. Something about that thread of smoke and breath, both having come out of Tricia and now floating up and away, gave Billy a feeling in his throat like food caught. The morning they lost Michael, Billy brought a towel from the bathroom and he and Tricia sat on the side of their bed together, crying into the two ends of cloth. How did they go from that to this? He swallowed hard. Tricia was disappearing on him, too.
*
Inside Dr. Shaw’s office, Billy struggled up onto the exam table. Beneath him, the sheet of white paper made its scratchy sounds. His embarrassment grew as he wrestled out of his too-small jacket. Shaw moved toward him, his liver-spotted hands gripping the ends of the stethoscope hanging from his neck. The thought rang in Billy’s head. Hanging from his neck.
After checking Billy’s blood pressure, Shaw placed the stethoscope on Billy’s chest and then his back, pressing hard to hear the wheeze of lungs through the walls of fat. The skeleton in the corner was missing its left arm. Billy’s last visit, it was intact.
Billy gestured with a nod. “What happened to him?”
Shaw, pulling an impatient, confused face, removed the stethoscope’s right earpiece.
“Its arm?” Billy repeated.
Shaw gave a soft chuckle. “Would you believe the dog got in and ran off with it?”
Billy could believe almost anything now.
Shaw finished his check of Billy’s vitals and moved back to his desk. Billy tried to work up the courage to tell the doctor he wasn’t here for a second stress cert, to get more time off work. Shaw reached for his notepad.
“Actually, Doctor, I’m not here for that.”
“Oh, no?”
“I want to drop all this weight, and get fit and healthy.”
Shaw’s gray eyebrows arched and he pushed on the bridge of his glasses. Their family doctor, he had cautioned Billy on his weight many times over the years, and his lectures had largely gone ignored.
“I mean it,” Billy said.
“Glad to hear it,” Shaw said, moving back to Billy. “I’m sympathetic to your situation, you know that, but it is about time we had a serious talk, especially with everything you’re going through. Your blood pressure is high, worrisome in fact, as is your overall condition. There’s no easy way to put this, Billy, you’re morbidly obese and on a very slippery slope. Headed straight toward hypertension, diabetes, cardiopulmonary disease, and you put shock and grief on top of all that … well, I don’t have to spell it out.”
“No, don’t, thanks.”
“All right, then. Let’s get you up on the scales.”
Billy shuddered. This would be his first time on a weighing scale in years. The number would feel like a sentence.
He dragged himself across the room. A detailed, multicolored diagram of the human body filled much of the wall above the tall, metal scale. Billy stared at the map of veins, muscles, bones, and vital organs. A geography of ourselves. Next to the human map, he looked like an entire, ailing continent.
“Best to take off your clothes,” Shaw said.
“I’m all right like this.”
Shaw looked out over his smudged glasses and leveled Billy with a cool gaze. Billy sighed. He should have known the death of his firstborn would only allow him to get away with so much with a man of the Hippocratic oath. He stripped down to his briefs. The underwear, riding obscenely low, was stretched to its max. His hands twitched to cover himself, but it was pointless. He took a deep breath, as though going underwater, and made to step onto the scale.
“Not there, here,” Shaw said, pointing at a digital scale on the floor. Billy realized his weight must exceed the standing scale’s capacity.
He stepped onto the digital scale, his breath held. The red numbers did a horrible dance and then stopped at four hundred and one pounds. Billy’s heart thumped. He had topped four hundred pounds. Sweat bubbled from his every pore. He blinked, perspiration and the number on the scale stinging his eyes. The cloying smells of must, iodine, and nameless syrupy medicines worsened in the small, airless office. The beige walls moved ever closer. Shaw made a note of the terrible number. Billy did the math in his head, his stomach lurching. He weighed twenty-eight and a half stone. All these years, he’d sworn he’d never sink so high.