There was a gut-wrenching sensation as I picked up the bottle of water awkwardly with my left hand, struggling to hunker up with that right wrist still cuffed onto the heavy-duty chain, about twelve to fifteen feet long, attached to a support pillar by identical cuffs. I glugged at the water, emptying half the bottle, and got to my feet. I pulled at the chain with both hands, like a tug-of-war competitor; it holds fast at every link of tempered steel. I worked my way down it toward the pillar, like a reverse abseiler, yanking as hard as I could, levering my entire weight on the chain. It was still absolutely futile.
Guess what. It’s like, called a restraint, dumbass, to stop you from getting to food and eating yourself to death. That’s why it’s strong. It has to
restrain.
I went to the window, again testing the meager limits of my freedom. The room is still bare, except for the home-gym apparatus, a treadmill, and an inflatable mattress, pillow, and comforter, two buckets of water, some rolls of toilet paper, and a blue-and-white plastic cooler. There’s also a child’s plastic pool with a really cute illustration of a coyly smiling bear, where I wash. They are all within my semicircle of freedom, which radiates from the point of this support pole, one of three that buttress the overhead steel beam. I can get to one window; it faces another high-rise opposite, which seems as deserted as this one.
I look out the window, at the block opposite. Then I look down, thinking of those stairs we climbed. There are no drops on the glass, yet a shining, deserted sidewalk tells me it’s been raining. Then I go to the cooler, and get a drink from a bottle of water. With being stuck in the dry air conditioning all day I have to continuously drink water to avoid dehydration. I force myself up in the night to drink and urinate. It’s drink and pee, drink and pee. My “bathroom” trips are awful: struggling to maintain an unsupported squat over a plastic bucket.
The washing in that pool is a cumbersome undertaking. I turn the strapless sports bra round to undo the hook (it can’t be good to have your breasts squashed so tightly to you) and remove my panties, climb in and squat down, relieved nobody is witness to this infantilizing humiliation. I wash myself as best I can with one free hand, then dry off and sit with the soothing comforter draped over my shoulder.
I think of myself as a prisoner in solitary confinement, but my new circumstances seem way beyond analogy. No clock bar a cerulean sky, which fades in a darkening sweep as the sun drops behind the neighboring towers, or the shifting volume of toylike cars going back and forward on the Interstate 95 below. The lamplight clicking on, for a few hours, before switching itself off and shrouding me back into night. I shout out regularly, but my voice, isolated in the air, sounds strange. Sometimes I’m beset with euphoria. Talking to myself. Laughing loudly. Wondering if I’m going mad.
There’s no “wondering” about it. Eating yourself to death? Yes, that’s going mad.
My first night here was the worst. A storm grew in potency, whistling and sizzling around the building. As the last of the planes flew over Miami, I imagined them being blown off course, and their irresistible and unstoppable collision with this tower, ready to crush or incinerate me. Me linked to the pillar and chain, dangling by my arm from the crumbling wreckage of the building. My mind played a grim and terrifying mix of the possible scenarios of my death on a loop, overwhelming me, making me cry and scream until I blacked out. But then the wind awakened me repeatedly throughout the night, smashing up against the building in enormous bursts, so hard I fancied I could feel the structure moving around me. I pulled the comforter over my head and sobbed.
The storm faded out a couple of hours before dawn. Then something else woke me: the implacable silence. The irrefutable evidence that I was a prisoner, alone in this high-rise. I sat up, and, for want of anything else to do, went to the treadmill.
— I’M HUNGRY! Sorenson shouts through. — Can I
please
have some breakfast?!
I blank out the fat sounds and continue to read.
And, through my sleepless exhaustion, I’ve done this every day, my feet scrunched into my sneakers, mangling my toes. They have started to blister and bleed. Yesterday I looked and saw black-red blood had caked into one white sock. It makes me glad of the kiddie pool. I tried the home gym; now the muscles of my upper back and shoulders are bound in tense, searing knots.
Today, I’ve already eaten my meager allowance of tasteless food, and have to wait till Lucy comes to replenish it. As the day wears on I’m lying on this feeble mattress in my sweat, delirious in a reverie both ecstatic and tortured, fantasizing about cheeseburgers, buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken, nachos, pizzas, chocolate-chip cookies, and, more than anything, about ice cream and Key lime pie. I drink the last of my water.
I don’t know how long it is till I hear the dread sound of that key in the lock. Sure enough, Lucy appears, a surly set to her mouth, yet that unhinged gleam in her eye that scares the shit out of me.
Good! But everything fucking scares the shit out of you!
As I’ve done since this nightmare started, I try to reason with her. But she does that walking-across-the-room thing, like a college professor in a lecture hall full of students, then suddenly making spooky eye contact with me. “We’re going to flush that garbage out of your system,” she announces, that bewitching, austere, almost abstract rhythm of her movement, and the Mephistophelean gleam in her eyes silencing me. “Not only is Coca-Cola shit, it makes you want to consume more shit. People who drink diet carbonated drinks are still, on average, ten pounds heavier than those who don’t.”
And with that perfunctory sermon, she puts out my oatmeal and blueberry, and once again leaves me.
Jesus! Check that bitch! What a pretentious fucking asshole! What the fuck is a “Mephistophelean gleam”?
I devour my breakfast, then wash myself as best as I can in the tepid water of the kiddie pool. After a while I take a number two, struggling to crouch over the bucket, convinced I’m defecating on the floor, or will topple it, or even get my butt stuck in it, grotesquely tragicomic. When I’m done I wipe myself, and push the bucket as far to the outer limits of my chain as possible, but making sure I can still retrieve it. It’s not far away enough: it’s horrible being around my own foul, sour excrement, and I constantly gag.
I’m so tired, and I move back onto the cheap inflated mattress with its fitted sheet and abrasive white comforter. If only I could sleep on it. Every time I drift off and turn in the night, my wrist pulls on this chain, yanking me back into fractured consciousness. Instead, I watch the light decline in a trancy fug. There are no blinds on the windows, and the lights from the neighboring buildings cast a sickly orange glow into the room, throwing up all sorts of horrible shadows. In the reflection of the glass I study my face, remorselessly cataloging its defects. My imagination is running riot and I can’t even paint or sketch! Instead my only companion is constant fear, sometimes overwhelming. I’m so scared of this impoverishing silence, broken only by the odd roar of an airplane, or I imagine I hear the elevator outside, faintly sweeping upward on its ghostly journey. When I start to shout, it’s either nothing or only Lucy. The day is already measured by her visits. The anticipation, then the dread, as I worry what psycho stuff might be going through her sick mind, yet I fear her visit being over, and being plunged back into this terrifying solitude.
When I half shut my eyes, I can almost see Lucy still in this room. The way she moves, tidying everything up around her, like a smooth machine, attacking all the chaos, leveling it out into order. You can imagine her as a mother, weaving that intimate dance of habit and routine. Children’s crayoned drawings on the walls. Messages posted on the refrigerator. But after supervising my eating and exercise, scrupulously recording the results on her iPad, Lucy always leaves me alone. During the day. All of the night. Visiting only in the morning and early evening with tiny portions of unsatisfying food. What she calls real food, or good food.
I’m so hungry and tired and lonely! What I want now is bakery goods: cakes, scones, croissants, bread, but also eggs, bacon, hash browns, waffles, steak, burgers, tacos . . .
— I’M HUNGRY, LUCY! A high screech from the front room. Fat fucking asshole.
My bad eating habits probably began when I was around ten years old. Back in Potters Prairie, Otter County, Minnesota. The Midwest is an expanse of dreariness, punctuated by the odd sparkling jewel. We were at the beating heart of its blandness: too far from Minneapolis–St. Paul to be classed as a suburb, but close enough to preclude anything that might excite the imagination.
At ten years old my life started to go bad. It hadn’t been that way before. I was the miracle baby, the one who’d come along just when Mom and Dad had almost accepted that they would never conceive. Mom actually thought I was a cyst for the first seven months of her pregnancy. She was too scared to go to the doctor. She would repeat to anybody who listened, and, no doubt, to many who didn’t, “I just prayed, and those prayers were answered.” She never specified if she was praying for me to be a baby, or simply not to be a cyst.
Oh shit, we gone struck gold! Thank you, Michelle Parish! Thank you, Julia Cameron!
We lived in a small, comfortable home with a large yard, which sat right on the shore of Lake Adley. The beautiful lake and the surrounding forest ensured my childhood memories had a decidedly idyllic flavor. I recall long, warm summers, where the heavy air crackled with the hum of crickets and grasshoppers. I’d ride my bike to the Kruz’s corner store with my friend Jenny. Buy a bottle of Coke or Sprite and some candy. Then I discovered the Couch Tomato Diner on Galvin, near my old elementary school, that place where could you buy over thirty kinds of ice cream. And wash it down with more Coke or Sprite.
The winters were vivid and white. The snow like a shroud of silence placed over the house; other than the big clock, the only sounds came from the kitchen, the odd muffled pot rattling or tray shunted into the oven, testifying to Mom’s cooking and baking labors. Even if he was at home on Sunday (he worked at least six days a week at the hardware store), Dad remained an almost silent presence. If I was playing or reading in the living room, I’d hear him breathing deeply or perhaps turning a page of his book or rustling a newspaper. But the main noises came from the kitchen and involved the preparation of food. There was always more food.
Yet, by the time I was sixteen, I was still stick-thin. 118 lbs. Then, at around my eighteenth birthday, as I was ready to go to Chicago to prepare for art school, I was 182 lbs.
What happened in those two years?
— LUCY! Sorenson shouts. I snatch the papers from the countertop and head through.
— WHAT?!
— Where’s breakfast?
— I’m trying to read your papers.
— But I’m starving!
— What do you want me to tell ya? Fight through that shit!
— No, I won’t, I need to eat something—
— You know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna go out to a local diner, have
my
breakfast, and relax and read those fucking pages.
— No, you have to—
— And before you start shouting again, it’s your own fault, I wave the papers in her face, — for writing fucking
War and Peace
.
— Please, Lucy! Sorenson is up on her feet, jumping on the spot, chain clanking, as I split, getting the fuck outta the apartment.
I head down in the elevator and get back in the Caddy. There’s a scarcity of any social facilities in Miami’s dead downtown, and that includes decent places to get breakfast. After passing a few shitholes, I find somewhere palatable in a mall, and have a green tea and a wholegrain bagel with salmon and low-fat cream cheese, getting another of the same for Fatty Sorenson. She can’t eat oatmeal and blueberries every morning. A TV in the corner distracts me from her journal, as it’s running a feature on the twins. I can’t make out what’s going on but it doesn’t look good as they’ve turned pointedly away from each other. Amy is crying, which makes her seem human, so different from the scowling, parasite self she normally presents to the world.
But back to Sorenson’s shit:
You saw things, felt things, as you grew up. The human hurt behind all that apparent tranquility. A town where public lives intersected and connected through sheer custom, as well as a denying, studied civility and convention, blinding us to the poverty, meth labs, and large swathes of shit-blanketed, corn-stuffed nothingness. The silences that buried so much pain within the walls of those old family homes.
Mom.
Oh, snap!
When I was around fifteen, our happy house became less jovial. Mom and Dad started to behave differently toward each other. And she was growing very, very big. I once saw her weigh in at 270 lbs. What I didn’t realize was that she wanted a partner in crime. In the crime of lovelessness, of becoming unlovable to justify that lovelessness. So we ordered ice cream from the Couch Tomato Diner and pizza from You Betcha Pie. “Uff da! You can eat anything at your age,” she would say. I liked that I could eat anything.
My father, Todd Sorenson, was a short guy, about half a head smaller than Mom, with a habitually ulcerated expression and an air of piety. He said little. If anything contentious ever arose in discussion, or from the news, he’d dismiss it as “something or nothing.” Dad did little else but work, and take Mom to the occasional dance. Every month he’d go hunting with some friends: dreary guys in the hardware business who were full of dull platitudes. Dad took me a few times, showed me how to load, shoot, and clean a rifle. I treasured the one he gave me, the same type he used, a Remington 870 Express Super Magnum. “Works just fine on everything from doves to deer,” he said. I liked shooting, at tin cans and bottles, but the thought of taking the life of a living thing for sport disgusted me. Then I saw them shoot a young deer. It just looked inquisitively and started moving toward us. I thought, surely they have to let it go. I saw them look at each other for a second, as if deciding, then my father shot it. The small animal jerked back about five feet, coming to rest, its legs kicking into stillness. “Right in the kill zone, Todd,” one of his friends yelped.