The Cronus Health Medical Complex was a moldering artifact of 1970 s architecture, a compound of dull cream stonework and tinted black glass, impenetrable enough to hide atrocities. Emmett gazed up from the passenger seat of Lizette’s SUV, dismayed. He’d expected something ultramodern like the Monstera building, not rust-stained and dilapidated, like a relic from a bygone era. They d eposited the SUV in the parking structure and checked in at the front desk. It was just as old-fashioned and sterile inside, the waiting room empty but for a couple of patients squeezed into too-small seats: a woman eating fried chicken straight from the bucket, a man staring at the wall, tongue circling his red chapped mouth. Cracked, mottled purple skin stretched like scales over the sacs of fluid hanging off their enormous legs. The pair reminded Emmett of My 600-Lb. Life, a show he loved, hated, and hated himself for loving. Worse than a guilty pleasure, it was a guilty pain, in which he routinely indulged to feel better about himself. Peering into the half- lives of the shows’ stars—trapped not only inside their bodies but their mobile homes, too big to bathe themselves and wipe their own asses—was strangely validating. Their bodies made his feel tiny in comparison. Their lived realities made his less empty and pathetic. They reaffirmed his humanity by allowing the cameras to strip them of theirs. Sitting beside Lizette, he watched his fellow patients like he watched those shows: feeling a greasy combination of sad, smug, guilty, and cruel. Afraid that if he didn’t change he’d end up just like them. Beginning to suspect that on some level, he and they were already the same. After a few minutes a nurse emerged. Youngish. Pretty. “Emmett Truesdale? We’re ready for you now.” He and Lizette rose. “I’ll be waiting right here.” She hugged him hard, her breasts like lead weights against his. “Everything will be fine—” “You have to leave,” said the nurse. “What? I can’t just sit here?” Lizette said. “I thought my emergency contact was allowed—” Emmett began. “The treatment is proprietary. We’ll call you when the patient is ready to be picked up.” The nurse’s stare was glassy and intense, her lips glossy and very slightly red. “Emmett Truesdale?” she r epeated. “We’re ready for you now.” “I’m right here.” “I don’t like this,” Lizette said. “It’s fine. Just go home, I’ll be fine.” “I’ll find somewhere nearby. I want to stay close until I know you’re okay.” She gave him another hug, one eye still trained on the nurse. “Love you.” “Love you.” As she finally es caped through the sliding doors, Emmett felt a sudden urge to run after her. His heartbeat quickened. All the nervousness he’d pushed off until this moment rolled back now like an ocean swell, submerging him in dark, rushing terror. The only way out was to submit to it, let it chew him up and spit him out.
He turned to the nurse. Her smile was fixed, anemic. “Emmett Truesdale? We’re ready for you now.” In the exam room, the pre-op pr eparations had the rushed, destabilizing feeling of being shunted through airport security. Brusque instructions. Grim expressions. Authority he dared not question. Take your clothes off. Put this on. Sit down. Give me your arm. No one paused to explain what was happening, no one cared if he understood. The nurse checked his blood pressure, his heart rate, the stethoscope biting cold against his chest. What’s going to happen? What’s that needle for? No answer. The Black, modelesque anesthesiologist—Emmett knew this only by the title listed on her name badge—took his arm and laid it flat. A jab—no warning, no apology. He cried out, clenching the edge of the hospital bed, then drifted. The drugs were already working through him, drip-dripping through the IV, coating his anxiety in sweet, syrupy fatigue. He blinked in and out of consciousness. Next thing he knew, someone was pushing his hospital bed out of the room. Where were they going? Was it already time? Emmett couldn’t speak, in capacitated but awake. Shouldn’t he be asle ep by now? They barreled down a hall of open doorways, a scene of horror through each one. A patient screaming and ripping an IV out of her arm (sharp turn). A man biting a nurse’s shoulder as she restrained him, drawing blood (sharp turn). Imagining it. He had to be. His perc eption addled by the drugs. An elevator swallowed them, then bore them up. The temperature rose, as if they weren’t rising but plummeting beyond the basement level, down toward the earth’s molten core. Sweat dribbled from Emmett’s temples, drenched his armpits. The word infernal flashed dully across his mind. The doors slid open. The room before them was dark, cave-like, windows blacked out. Silent. Slowly the nurse pushed forward, wheels stuttering out a high-pitched squeal. She delivered him to a spotlit operating table surrounded by a masked surgical team. His nightmare willed into stark, gut-churning reality. He tried to object as they transferred him to the table, but he couldn’t form words. “The patient’s still awake,” said the male surgeon to the anesthesiologist. “How many times have I told you, these big ones need more juice.” “I’ll take him back—” “Forget it. Gas and local are good enough. They never remember much anyway.” A plastic mask like on Emmett’s CPAP closed over his nose, pumping the sedative straight to his brain. The fog around him thickened. Hands rolled him onto his side. The prick of the needle was a dim, faraway concern. A warm throb bloomed across his hip. “Scalpel.” The instrument glinted in the surgical light as the surgeon took it. “Making incision above posterior iliac crest.” Emmett didn’t feel it or what their fingers were doing inside the opening, only heard it: the scream of the power drill, the gnashing of metal on bone. A large needle and syringe passed over him. “Beginning extraction.” This Emmett felt: a sharp sting of pressure penetrating de ep into his hip bone. A probing, scraping, sucking violation. He’d read about this.
They had to collect stem cells from his marrow to create the vector. The extracted material, bloody and thick, dribbled into a plastic bag. Fading in and out, Emmett couldn’t ke ep hold of time. It passed, maybe minutes or hours or days. Then someone was applying gauze, another hooking the bag on an IV pole. It swung, puckered and gelatinous, like a sack of raspberry jam. Two tubes trailed from it, one smaller, one thick. “Virus.” A fresh syringe passed over Emmett’s head, a little one filled with clear blue liquid. The surgeon fitted the tip into the end of the smaller tube and smashed the plunger. The blue liquid blackened as it infused the bloody soup of stem cells. Emmett panicked, moaned in fear, or tried to. For a second he believed they’d heard him. They were removing his mask to hear him better. The nurse squeezed his cheeks together like an adoring auntie, then shoved something roughly into his mouth. It was bendy, sterile tasting. A ribbed plastic tube. Emmett gagged as she thrust it de eper. It scraped down his throat. He retched, unable to breathe. His eyes streamed, his vision bleary and starred. Emmett always knew he’d die young, but not here. Not like this. “Administering nutritive formula.” The nurse turned the lever on a tank of brownish-green sludge. It began to gurgle and empty. The noxious smoothie chugged through the plastic tube, wending toward him like a headless snake. Then the snake was shoving itself down his throat. Its heaviness filled him like concrete: a sensation his body remembered with a spasm of inner violence, a reflexive response stifled by the deadening effect of the sedative. A voice cut through the mire of black gelatin surrounding his mind: Got room for a little more, sport? His body twitched inertly on the table. He couldn’t scream or even cry for help. A needle glinted thickly like a six-inch metal straw. The nurse inserted it into the bag’s larger tube, sucking the syringe full of tar-like vector. Still choking back formula, Emmett blinked up at the surgeon above. His head blocked the surgical light, reflecting Emmett’s pathetic face in his goggles. He held out a hand for the syringe. “Pr epare the injection site.” Hands rolled Emmett onto his back with a stab of pain in his wound. They cut a hole in his hospital gown and tore it open from the middle, exposing the downy, stretch-marked belly beneath. The surgeon laced his gloved hands around the syringe, his thumb poised on the plunger. Black fluid pooled at the beveled tip. A drop unlatched and splashed against Emmett’s skin. The surgeon’s fists jerked upward, then slammed the needle down, burying it up to the hub with a pinprick of excruciating pain. Emmett’s back arched, hands clawing the table, throat contracting into the shape of a scream. The vector spread through him, ravenous as lava, rewriting his DNA with a pen of fire. His old mantra returned to him unbidden: Feel the burn. Then the darkness opened its mouth and swallowed him whole.
Appendix F—Blog Post My St epdad and Other Monsters: Part 1 By: Emmett Truesdale Published: June 17, 2018 As a compulsive overeater, one of the questions I often find myself asking is: How did I get this way? Where did my food addiction really start? I guess the idea is that if I can figure out how it began, I can figure out how to end it, or at least not be so controlled by it. In my post last month I wrote about my mom and her “food is love” approach to parenting. I definitely think that’s part of the reason why I find myself reaching for snacks and sweets when I’m stressed or sad. But de ep down I know that’s not the whole story. Just the tip of the ice (cream) berg, you might even say! Okay, so I usually try to ke ep this blog pretty upbeat, because we’re all in this together and I want you to feel uplifted, not saddened—but I also feel like I need to be real with you. And the reality is that not everything in my life has been rainbows and butterflies. Some of it is hard to write about— one event in particular that I’m not ready to dredge up just yet—but in the spirit of being real, with you and myself, I think it’s time I introduce you to a few of the monsters from my past, starting with Hank. At first glance, Hank wasn’t your stereotypical evil st epdad. In fact, quite the opposite. Ninety-nine percent of the time, he was the nicest guy around. In the early days especially he was always smiling, complimenting my r eport card, buying gifts for my sister and me. Sure, they weren’t always things I wanted—soccer balls and orienteering kits and weird books about healthy habits—but fortunately Hank made up for his bad taste in presents by being exc eptionally funny. He joked a lot and could be quite silly, doing a spot-on impression of our neighbor, Mrs. Dasko, who was always smoking and shouting at her Yorkshire terrier, Romeo. He called her Mrs. Fatso, which was mean, but secretly I found it hilarious. I looked up to Hank. He was smart and successful and handsome, with a thick, macho, dark-blond mustache. He k ept fit, pumping iron in the garage every morning before work. Unlike my parents, who hadn’t gone to college, he had a Ph D and a fancy job helping find a cure for cancer (I mean seriously, how much more virtuous can you get than that?). He was active in the community and passionate about his dorky hobbies like gardening and coaching high school lacrosse. And most of all, he loved—seemed to love— his adopted family. He’d never had kids of his own, but even though I know he really, really wanted them, he said the three of us were all the family he needed. But as nice as he was most of the time, Hank had high expectations—for Abby, for me, and for his “temple,” which is what he called our house. The smallest thing could set him off, for example a glass of water left sitting on the counter for more than a few minutes, or the faintest sound from the Game Boy Advance attached semipermanently to my hand. I’d recently become obsessed with Pokémon after a friend introduced me to the show. “Gotta Catch ’Em All!” was the franchise’s famous tagline, and it was no joke—I’d been well and truly caught. Within
months, I’d amassed hundreds of holographic trading cards, arranged neatly in sheets of plastic inserts that filled a three-ring binder. Pokémon posters plastered my bedroom walls, and I woke with the sun each morning to watch the new episode of Pokémon: Advanced Challenge before school. The franchise quickly became everything to me. While my classmates moved on to the Black Eyed Peas and Call of Duty, I carved out a life for myself in the Hoenn Region, that colorful anime world where young people had control over their own destinies and lifelong friends who would fight for them no matter the threat (CUE FORESHADOWING!!! ). Hank seemed sk eptical. “Hey, sport”—that was his favorite nickname for me—“you’ve been playing with those cards an awful long time. Why don’t you go outside and get some fresh air?” He was always trying to get me to play with the neighborhood kids, but they were older and kind of mean, calling me Jigglypuff, the name of a tubby pink fairy-type Pokémon. Hank didn’t want me to have a Game Boy of my own—“He spends enough time in the house,” I heard him tell my mom—but my dad, maybe to piss him off, got me one for Christmas with my own copy of Pokémon Sapphire. I played for hours on end, so long that my eyes bugged out and I developed what my doctor called an ocular tic, compelling me to r epeatedly roll my eyes so far back in my head that it hurt. Mom was afraid I was going to have a seizure like “those kids in Japan”—whoever they were—but it was Hank who really hated my playing the game. Whenever he saw me at it, his voice would get low and sharp around the edges. He’d mutter little comments about me being lazy and idle, remind me that when he was a boy growing up on the island—he was born and raised on Maui—his Air Force veteran father would’ve bent him over his knee with a folded-up belt if he sat around the house like that. Although he was estranged from his family, Hank’s words dripped with disdain for my mother’s permissiveness and the limits it set on the correction of my body. Hank didn’t like my body. I could tell by the way he looked at me behind his smile, by the conversations we had when no one else was around. “Whatcha doin’, sport?” he once said as I grabbed a string cheese out of the fridge. His home office was just a few st eps off the kitchen; hearing the door open, he’d suddenly appear, like he’d been listening for it. “Didn’t you just have lunch? Are you even hungry?” “Yes—” “No, you’re not.” I felt anxious, like I’d been caught doing something bad. Confused too. Mom never minded if I had a snack—in fact, she was the one who was always asking if I was hungry, if I wanted something to eat. And I did want something to eat, so therefore I must be hungry. “I am hungry,” I said, and something hardened behind Hank’s smile. He didn’t like to be contradicted. “You know, sport, there’s a big difference between hungry and being a glutton. Do you know what a glutton is? That’s a person who never stops eating. Not because they’re hungry, but because they’re stupid and greedy like a pig. They just get fatter and fatter. And you—well, you’ve put on a few pounds yourself.” A boy like me, he said, shouldn’t care
about eating or even want to eat. He should play outside, do sports, get into mischief. A misbehaved boy was better than a fat one. When I was younger, my brother Chris used to tease me relentlessly. One of his favorite taunts was to call me a girl, to insist I wasn’t a boy because I had boobs. In a way, it felt like Hank was saying the same thing. I started to feel uncomfortable eating in front of him, even at mealtimes. He’d laugh and joke with my mom and sister, but I could feel him watching me across the table, clocking how fast one bite followed another, how thoroughly I chewed my food. His eyes narrowing with disgust when I didn’t reject the second helpings Mom was already heaping onto my plate. In a house where food was love but eating was shameful, family meals were both a relief and a curse, a volatile push-and-pull of comfort and fear. And so eventually I turned to eating in secret. I’d wait until Hank was out of the house or busy upstairs and take a seat in the open-plan family room connected to the kitchen. Once I was sure the coast was clear, I’d pad silently over to the walk-in kitchen pantry and close myself inside without making a sound. If it was night and the light would be too noticeable, I might not flip the switch at all. Feeling my way around in the dark, I’d eat whatever I could get my hands on—Doritos, Triscuits, Goldfish, slices of plain bread—always open bags and boxes. A bit from each, finishing none of them, making sure no one noticed that I’d gorged. I’d shovel them down as fast as I could, as quietly as I could. The faster I ate, the better it hurt. The system usually k ept me out of trouble, but sometimes I slipped up. One day I was curled up on a leather loveseat in the formal living room, my favorite place to doze on a Sunday afternoon, when Hank’s words from the kitchen pantry snapped me awake: “Where are my cupcakes?” My body went cold with panic and fear. He could only be referring to the orange-flavored Hostess Cupcakes Mom and I had picked out for him at the bakery outlet. Not my favorite flavor, but when I needed to binge, anything fatty and sweet enough would do. He barreled into the living room, sending me scrambling upright and snatching my book off the coffee table, as if I’d been reading the whole time. Hank hated when I napped. “Hey, sport,” he seethed, a muscle spasming in his neck, “I noticed my special cupcakes are missing.” “I didn’t eat them,” I said quickly. “Oh yeah, sounds like you’ve got a guilty conscience there.” “No—” “Bull crap. I guess you think I’m stupid, that I can’t tell when you’re lying. You think you’re smart. Well, let me tell you something: You might get A’s at school, but you get F’s with me. You won’t even look me in the eye.” My eyes, searching around in hopes my mom or sister would come and rescue me, flicked instantly to his. “Don’t eat my food again. Or there will be consequences.” Hank turned to leave, muttering just loud enough for me to hear: “Fat pig.”
When I was able to get Mom alone that evening, I told her what Hank had called me. I didn’t mention the cupcakes, because she would probably suspect I’d eaten them and I didn’t want to give her any reason to side with Hank. She went ballistic. Her face a twist of white, horrible rage, she stormed downstairs to his office. I followed cautiously, crouching on the stairs to listen, scared of what he’d say and how it might turn her against me. The office door flew open, Mom screaming at the top of her voice, “What the fuck is wrong with you, how DARE you, you fucking piece of shit! Don’t you ever, DON’T YOU EVER talk to my son that way or I’ll break your fucking skull!” I was a jumble of emotions: terrified that Hank was going to retaliate against me for tattling, thrilled that his meanness was finally being called out, empowered by the knowledge that whatever happened, Mom had my back; I wasn’t alone. The fight between her and Hank lasted more than an hour, insults and curse words flying back and forth. Condemnations of Mom’s parenting and jabs at Hank’s fucked-up childhood. “If you think I’m gonna have a baby with you when this is how you treat my kid—” Mom said. Abby tried to pull me away upstairs. “You shouldn’t be listening to this.” But I needed to hear it for myself. I needed to know that Mom loved me exactly as I was, that Hank’s cruelty said only bad things about him. At last the fight had run its course, the voices too quiet to follow. Footst eps approached. I turned and scrambled back up the stairs, but I’d been caught. “Emmett, s-sport?” To my surprise the voice wasn’t angry, but thick, syrupy. I turned to find Hank gazing up at me. His eyes were wet, his hands clasped and supplicating. “Come down and let me talk to you, okay?” My eyes flicked to Mom, who stood behind him. She nodded. Reluctantly I trudged downstairs, nerves chewing a hole in my belly. Hank dropped to his knees, grasping my hands. “Sport, I—I don’t know what got into me. I’m sorry, I— You’re not a pig, okay? Y-you’re a great kid. I just worry about your eating sometimes, your health. But what I said— I’ll never speak to you like that again, all right? Just please—say you’ll forgive me.” I was overwhelmed. I’d seen him like this only once before, years ago, the day Mom found out he hadn’t fed me while I was home sick from school. She was watching me, waiting. I could tell she wanted me to acc ept his apology, to make this all go away. So I did. He let out a breath of relief and held me as he w ept. I didn’t like it. Even at his nicest, Hank wasn’t a touchy-feely kind of st epdad, and his hands felt different on my body now that he’d called it fat. But I didn’t want to be mean. With my arms around his shoulders, I patted his back, and trusted that everything was about to get better.