F.A.T.
Annie moved quickly down the street, dodging in and out of the shadows as best she could. Despite her evident haste, she tried to avoid close contact with passersby, tried to move unnoticed down the street, hunching her darkened figure in an effort to diminish her large frame. Her wide shoulders were rounded over her stomach, her thick fists jammed in the pockets of her denim jacket. She kept her head down, the soft folds of her face purposely obscured by the hood of the sweatshirt she wore under her coat. It began to rain harder, which suggested that her awkward hurry was an attempt to get out of the weather.
But really, Annie was nervous. Deep in her coat pocket, she fingered the precious package she carried, thumbing the protective Saran Wrap over and over, the slick plastic rebounding gently from the touch of her fingers. She couldn’t believe it. It was there, in her pocket. Soon she would be able to enjoy the fruit of her illicit labor, if she could make it to a secure place. Frankie had told her about a burned-out apartment building near the projects that was still waiting approval for demolition. Until it was knocked down, it was the best place to enjoy her black market jewel in peace. If she wasn’t caught first.
Carefully, Annie gripped the package, cradling her precious cargo from being too jostled as she hurried up the cobbled sidewalk. In her hand, she nestled the soft cake in the flesh of her palm in order to prevent any damage, any squashing imperfection, any loss of cream filling. Annie couldn’t believe it. There it was, the real thing. “It oughta be,” she said to herself. “Cost me a whole regimen’s worth of carbs.” An actual Hostess Cupcake. Totally illegal.
The man that sold it to her had sworn up and down that it was authentic. “Never mind the packaging,” he’d said when he noticed Annie’s hesitation at the plain plastic covering the treat. “Environmental laws make it hard to get the right kind of cellophane. But that there, that’s the gen-u-whine article.”
Annie flinched slightly as his pronunciation. He sounded exactly like a used car salesman, exactly like a fraud. She was vaguely certain that her money was not going to be well-spent. But it had been so long. So long since she had even smelled something as sweet and processed as a Hostess cupcake. Even if it were a fake, it would be nice to be reminded of what chocolate and sugar tasted like. It would beat the hell out of the cardboard NutriMeals she ate every day as part of her state-regulated diet.
“Yeah, it’s fine,” she said. “Just take care of the switch and lemme get outta here. I gotta be home for my marriage counselor’s appointment in a couple hours.”
The guy gave her a tight smile and took her debit card. “It’ll just be a moment, missy. Just have to exchange these carbs appropriately. Make everything seem nice and legit. Lessee… What’s your daily cal count?”
“Uh…1200 a day this week. But it changes. I’m on the Swartz-Keene plan, so…”
“Yeah, yeah I know. That’s the one that changes your cal count to rev your metabolism.” He narrowed his eyes at Annie and he slid his tongue over his teeth. “It’s for them subversive types.” Then he laughed and handed her the cupcake. “That prize is goin’ to cost ya…hope it’s worth it. It always kills me what you fatties will do for a taste a’ the good stuff. Just can’t seem to let it go, can ya!” He adjusted something on the computer screen in front of him and handed Annie back her card. “But hell, who am I to complain? Keeps my ass in business.”
“He’s right,” she thought, and part of her just wanted to run from the place, run from everything, run out of her huge hulking body and into some other life. But she just took the card and the cake and slipped them both into her pocket. She couldn’t just let it go. She couldn’t.
Now, as the rain started to pick up momentum, she recalled the whole exchange bitterly. He’d called her a fattie, for Christ’s sake. To her face! And she was giving him a week’s worth of carbs! She had moved beyond shame. They had taken even that away from her, so that when she did try to defy the system, it still managed to insult her. The cake hardly seemed worth it at this point; the whole idea of rebellion seemed worthless. What would Frankie say about her, if he knew? Some revolutionary. She couldn’t even defend herself from a pathetic cake pusher.
Soon Annie noticed the crowd of pedestrians was thinning. She was getting to the projects and by Frankie’s directions, she should be able to see the burned-out building at the end of the street. Sure enough, it was there. Annie looked quickly around her as she approached the building’s entrance. There was no one around. She ducked into the back alley and pried open one of the basement windows. Fortunately, the building had housed basement apartments and the windows had once served as emergency exits as well as sources of decorative light. Annie managed to squeeze herself through and drop to the floor below. The whole place still smelled of delectable burning, reminding her of her own place before Congress had passed the Tobacco Prohibition Act. “America will be healthy! Whether you like it or not!” She remembered the 30-second TV ads, featuring loud evangelical politicians ranting about obesity rates. But she had been just a kid then. She hadn’t really understood what was going on or how her life was going to change because of it.
Frankie remembered a lot of it far better than she did. He was older than Annie; he’d even voted in the national referendums that had led to the beginning of the changes. “Not that I voted for any of that shit,” he’d told her. He always got angry talking about it, as if he took the whole thing as a personal vendetta against him. “But you couldn’t stop it. All those self-righteous fitness freaks got everything they wanted passed, and they still do. All you gotta say is being fat is un-American and they’ll vote against you in droves.” Frankie was the one who filled in the blank spaces for her. He felt sorry for Annie and he told her so. She really didn’t remember a world where you could be who you wanted to be, where being fat was not a crime.
Back in the camps, where they’d first met, she had idolized him. He was old then, by the time she knew him. A gaunt and angular man, in his sixties, he was still an imposing figure—over six feet tall, a full head of dark hair flecked with grey, and a beard that Annie thought, rather foolishly, made him look wise. He reminded her of her father in some ways. The deliberate way he spoke, making every word ring with some kind of poignancy. “There is nothing wrong with us,” he would say to her as they huddled over a heat lamp in the middle of the night. The other internees slept around them, their hulking shadows wavering softly with the intake of breath. “It is wrong what they’re doing. Remember that. Don’t buy into it.” His eyes narrowed and he pointed his finger outward into the air to emphasize the significance of what he said. “Out there, if you buy into this shit, they gotcha. And they won’t ever stop.”
Her father had talked the same way, gesturing cryptically whenever he wanted to make a point. As a child, Annie had listened to him talk endlessly, even when he told her stories he’d repeated hundreds of times. It didn’t matter. She loved to hear him talk, loved the fact that, if even for a moment, he wanted to talk to her. When she was first detained, her case worker told her that her eating habits stemmed from this need for attention. “You were starved for it,” the case worker told her. “That’s why you began overeating. You wanted to fill up that hole.” Annie thought about the irony of using that word: “starved.” She had always had her father’s love.
Maybe that was why it had been so hard watching him die. He lay in his hospital bed, gasping for air, hardly able to speak at all. Her mother had taken her to see her father, even though she was barely a teenager and liable to get upset. Annie had just watched him intently, wondering how such a man could deteriorate so quickly. Surely, there had to be more to it: dying. You couldn’t just fade away. The day of the funeral, she had locked herself in her room with a plate of brownies one of the neighbors had brought over, and forced them into her mouth. She was not hungry. She did not even taste them. She just wanted to have something inside of her, filling her up, not for attention, but because she did not want to just disappear like her father had. Annie had not told the case worker this story. They had diagnosed her before she had even opened her mouth. Frankie was the only one close to her that knew.
She had risked the cupcake because of Frankie. She wanted to do something for him. And for herself. To prove that she didn’t have to sit back and take it like everyone else. She wanted to rebel, to let Frankie know that even if he was gone, at least she would remember what he’d taught her: that there was freedom before the Diet Wars had stripped people of their right to regulate their own lifestyles. Gently, Annie took the cupcake out of her pocket, and held it out in the open. Even though she was in the stale remnants of an old apartment, it felt strange and wonderful to feel its weight in her hand, to have it out in front of her as if it were the most natural thing in the world. For a long time she didn’t unwrap the cupcake. She just watched it, sitting in the palm of her hand, and she realized that, in that moment, it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. Slowly, Annie brought her free hand over to unwrap the packaging and paused, unable to move. It was as if touching the thing itself would make the moment unreal, and she didn’t want to break the spell.
But she had to open it. After all, she’d paid for it in full. Deliberately, as if un-bandaging a wound, Annie lifted the plastic wrap, taking meticulous care not to remove the lacquer-like chocolate frosting from the rest of the cake. She touched the strangely slick surface, and longed to lick it. She felt as if she had no idea what sugar was. It had been so long since she’d tasted anything like it. She marveled at the idea of chocolate, real chocolate, here, in her hands.
It was all too much. Once the plastic wrap was fully removed, she attacked the morsel viciously, overwhelmed by the intense flavor, the blend of textures, the fact that something so unnatural could taste so damned good. “This is what I have been missing,” she thought. “This is what they want to keep away from us.” But now she knew. She would remember. And she wanted to tell others, because she understood that Frankie was right. This was not a way to live your life. This was not life at all.
****
The rain had not subsided. In fact, it was raining harder as she wedged her way through the open window and struggled out onto the street. It was getting very late. If she didn’t hurry, she was going to miss her appointment for marriage counseling. And then there would be questions that she couldn’t answer. Annie struggled for a moment, trying to figure out the best course of action. She would have to take the metro. It was the only way to get home in time.
Huddled in her denim jacket, Annie hurried towards the nearest metro station. As usual, she tried her best to diminish herself by walking hunched over, trying to keep the parts of her large body as close together as possible. If no one noticed her, everything would be okay. She could take the metro home, and she would be safe. Hopefully. She just prayed the rush hour crowds were passed, because lots of people meant trouble for her and her kind.
Her kind. What did that even mean? Why exactly was she different from everyone else just because she was a bit heavier than the rest of them? Just because she wanted to eat sugar and chocolate and bread and butter and deep fried food? What was so wrong with that? Annie wrapped her arms in front of her and looked down at her damp gray sleeves. She had sworn, when she’d fished the jacket out of a bundle of used clothes, that it had just the hint of blue. But of course it was gray, a bland, washed-out gray—the color of the hulking beast she was made to think she was. “Never wear battleship gray,” she thought, the words taken from some long forgotten comedy show, where a thin comedian had made fun of fat women exercising in gray leotards. And why shouldn’t he make fun? And why shouldn’t people laugh? It was easy. It was true.
Except that lately, it wasn’t funny. Since President Swartz’s third re-election, things had been getting more difficult. Violence against Fat-Americans was becoming almost commonplace, and worse, the new laws essentially condoned it. Often passersby, sometimes young school children but not necessarily, would hurl epithets at her, calling attention to her largeness, making her feel more grotesque that she really was. But then again, that was the whole point. At the start of the last presidential election, Swartz’s Committee on Homeland Fitness had instituted the Derision for Revision campaign, a whole advertising concept designed to ridicule the portly and obese. It felt like someone had unleashed a whole flood of schoolyard bullies to wreak havoc at will.
Arnold Swartz was descended from a long line of fit-obsessed politicians. Annie knew, from Frankie mostly, that his grandfather had once served as a presidential advisor on physical fitness, sometime at the end of the last millennium. That’s when it all started, when people began to measure their lives in carbs and cals instead of experiences, or objects, or even cash. Annie had been forced many times, as part of her rehabilitation, to watch documentaries on the rise of the Healthy American party. At one of the key party conventions, the one that preceded the historic third party victory of the presidency, Swartz had given his famous speech that had launched him into the political arena. She remembered watching his face redden with passion as he talked about America’s position in the global health community.
“America is the fat kid on the playground,” he said, his unnaturally white teeth glinting in the spotlight. “We’re getting bullied in the global schoolyard and I for one am sick of it!” Everyone in the convention hall had exploded with cheers and applause. “We, of the Healthy American party, are here to help that fat kid. We’re going to get him healthy and get back his self-esteem!” That was the beginning.
Things had changed quickly after that. Most of the documentaries glossed over that part of history, but Annie remembered what she’d heard from Frankie. About the registration lists, the home raids, the blackballing. She knew Frankie as a thin old man, mostly held together by his contempt for where the country was going, but in his day, he too had been a Fat American. And Swartz’s regime had not been kind to him. Frank had already spent years in the camp, listening to the same motivational drivel and deliberately trying to ignore it. But finally, a spare diet of nutritive gruel seemed to take effect and he had dropped the weight. He was allowed to go home, an example to all of them. But he didn’t have much to go home to. And the camp controllers had never said that his weight loss stemmed from the cancer eating away his body. Annie had looked him up when she was released herself. Unlike Frank, she was not a success case. She was returned for further evaluation, because the diet measures at the camp weren’t working. She found him in a state-run nursing home. His cancer had been diagnosed much too late and there wasn’t anything left for anyone to do. In the end, she watched him die too, the only person left she cared about, the only person she knew that had given a damn about her.
“Hey Pidgy,” someone yelled, and snapped Annie back into the moment. “You, yeah you. You walk like a pigeon.” She quickly ambled past, trying to ignore the comments. She did indeed walk like a pigeon, shoulders hunched over her pouchy stomach. She walked this way in a vain effort to hide herself, only to realize too late that she was calling attention to it, giving them ammo. Her feet bent awkwardly out at strange angles, like a duck’s, and she shuffled along slowly, winded from walking up the stairs to the metro platform. She walked as quickly as possible to the far end of the platform and stood well away from the tracks.
There had been several incidents in the news lately about fat people being flung in front of subway trains. The perpetrators claimed to be working as part of the Fit America faction, an overzealous sect that viewed fat people as evil and immoral. They believed that obesity was a sign of gluttony, one of the seven deadly sins, and they were going about punishing sinners to cleanse the country of such an immoral plague. Most people denounced them publicly as a lunatic fringe, but that didn’t help the fact that five people had been murdered in the subways in the past two weeks. The police, too, weren’t doing much to hunt down the members of the group. Most of them probably bought into the rhetoric.
Annie stood in the corner waiting for the next train. She needed to get home soon, before Terri, her counselor, showed up at her apartment and found her missing. Not only would she have to squirm to answer questions, but she’d probably have to watch more inspirational videos as a punishment for not keeping to her regimen. She couldn’t bear to watch more brainwashed heavy-set faces, eyes vacant and weepy, chanting the mantras of the new, health-obsessed country: “Free And Thin, Free And Thin, Free And Thin.”
“Pidgy, Pidgy!” the voice came again. Annie could see that it belonged to a tall, stalky guy standing at the other end of the platform. He had a friend with him who was laughing and pointing at her in response. They seemed like they had been drinking. She was worried that the young men had followed her. Forcing herself to quell the shake that began to course steadily through her, Annie stood still and looked ahead at the tracks. Behind her hood, she flicked her eyes to the side every few moments to see if they were moving towards her.
The tall man broke into a gait and Annie sucked in her breath. But he stopped after a few feet, only to yell, “Hey fat girl, you gotta lay off them sticks a’ butter! If you so hungry, I got plenty a’ somethin’ for you to eat.” He gestured to his crotch and made a motion to unzip his fly, when the metro train finally roared in and Annie escaped into the mercy of the last car.
****
When the train arrived at Annie’s stop, she hurried out of the station quickly. Her apartment was a few blocks away and she only had fifteen minutes before her appointment. Before Terri showed up. Terri. She was thirty-five, slim and slight, petite in her stature, and her massively ringletted brown hair looked like it weighed altogether more than she did. As Annie’s counselor, she was in charge of routine visits to make sure Annie stayed within her cal counts. She was also the one who designed inventive dietary and exercise regimes at Annie’s expense, all in an effort to make her marriageable. That was, after all, the bottom line. At least in Annie’s case.
“Remember, hon,” Terri had said during one of their first sessions. “No one wants to marry a fat girl. Y’all are just disgusting.” She had said it so sweetly too, as if she delighted in sugar-coating the painful words that came out of her mouth. How dare you call me hon, Annie had thought. Her whole life seemed to have boiled down to a series of insults. One tremendous fat joke. The marriage deal made it worse, too. Even Annie understood the bitter irony of calling Terri a marriage counselor. A marriage broker was more appropriate. Her job was to slim Annie down so that she could be matched with a suitable partner—an equally thin and healthy partner—so that they could, in turn, produce thin, health-obsessed children. “Good Habits Start at Home,” the latest public service ads announced. Annie was part of the newest trend of reintegrating fat people into being productive members of society. Her productivity, of course, being literal.
“Come on, now,” Terri had encouraged her. “Don’t you want to get married? Don’t you want a handsome young man to love you and take care of you?” No, Annie wanted to say. But she knew that was dangerous. It meant going back to the camps for sure, or worse, deportation. There had already been purges of homosexuals. Their citizenship cards were revoked and they were shipped off to whatever countries would have them. Some of them, she’d heard, had managed to settle into nice quiet lives in the more civil areas of Europe, but most of them had a hard time of it. Without money or even possessions, it was hard to settle down in a new country; it was even harder when you didn’t know the language or the customs.
The florescent lights flared on in Annie’s apartment as she swiped the slide key in its lock and entered the foyer. The effect of the brightness was worsened by the mirrors. The walls of her dwelling were entirely covered with mirrors, except for her two Vis-a-Screens linked to the Fat Rehabilitation Center. They reflected her size and shape from all angles. The florescence served to cast her in the most unflattering light, so that there was no way for her to study herself in any one of the myriad reflections and find anything redeeming. That was all part of the plan. “You’ve fooled yourself long enough,” Terri would say. “Now’s the time to see the truth. You need to see what the rest of us see and do something about it.”
As Annie sauntered through her home, the mirror screens flickered their motivational slogans as she walked by them. Aside from looking pale and bloated, her mirrored image also had phrases like “Fat: Not Where it’s At!” and “Nothing Tastes as Good as Being Thin Feels” flicker across her face. She was numb to this by now. She had simply learned not to look, so that occasionally, when she saw her image reflected, uninterrupted, in a store window or even in a puddle, she almost did not know who was looking back at her. Instinctively, Annie knew that she was looking at herself, but sometimes she wasn’t sure. What does it mean, she thought, to not even recognize your own face? Is this what Frankie meant by “buying into” everything? Had she let him down after all?
Annie glanced at her watch. Terri would be there within minutes. Her stomach started to cramp a little. She wasn’t sure if this was a reaction to the cupcake or if it was just nervousness. She always felt a little panicked during these consultations. She didn’t know why. Perhaps it was the way Terri tried to make her feel at ease while insulting and interrogating her. Annie never knew whether to feel angry, hurt, or simply resigned. She was a little worried that somehow Terri would find out about the cupcake too, but it wasn’t a huge issue. After all, she’d cheated before and she knew she would again, even if only on principle. The last time, when Annie had managed to convince the ration handlers in the bread line to give her a double portion of white slices, Terri had put her on water diet for a week. For seven days, she took in nothing but water, and did it gladly because she felt a small sense of victory in the whole affair. But she always hated confronting Terri after her escapades: the cold vacancy of her eyes, the deadly sweetness of her smile.
“Miss Annie? Are you ready?” Terri’s voice came from the hallway. She did not knock. She did not need to. The element of surprise was part of her job. But Terri never knocked, whereas some of the other counselors did with their clients. It was a courtesy, a sign of trust. Terri evidently did not trust Annie in any respect.
“Yeah,” Annie said disinterestedly. She rolled up her sleeve to have her blood pressure taken.
“How are you today?” Terri asked, scribbling some preliminary figures into her notebook.
“Fine.” Annie stuck out her bare arm nonchalantly.
“Oh, I’m not going to do that first.” Annie blinked a little in alarm. This was unusual. Terri was strict about the details of her job.
“We’re going to do a sugar test first. Surprise!” She said it like she was having a birthday party for Annie. She was joyful. Terri had never done a surprise sugar test on Annie before, and Annie had never before given Terri a reason to do one. Most of Annie’s rebellions took the form of sneaking extra food rations or bailing on her exercise regimen. Once she had even managed to avoid her cardio workouts for an entire day. But she had never done business on the black market. Her sugar spike was sure to give that away and she was afraid of what Terri would do.
Ruthlessly, Terri jabbed Annie’s finger with a needle. She carefully fed the blood into her machine and the two of them awaited the results. Annie suddenly felt the warmth of the room and began wishing for an open window. The machine beeped treacherously.
“Hmmm…” Terri hummed. It was not a curious sound and it was not reassuring. It was cold. She looked deeply at Annie. All of the heat was sucked out of the room.
For the first time since Annie had known her, Terri did not smile. Her smiles were never warm anyway, but even that facade would have been more welcome than the present look on her face. “I don’t know why we bother to help you people,” she said contemptuously. “You are like dirty animals that can’t be trained. What was it? A cookie? A candy bar? What?”
And Annie found herself transfixed. She heard herself saying, “Hostess” and watched as if removed from the situation, as Terri scratched the words down in her notebook, took down the address of the dealer, and even the scene of the crime itself—the project building that Frank had told her about. “Oh Frankie,” she thought dimly, feeling the sick desire to cry well up within her. What would he have thought of her now? Some revolutionary. She had sold out after all. And for what? For a life of rationing and insults and the supposed promise of an empty marriage.
“I know you want us to give up on you,” murmured Terri at last, once she had stopped writing. “I know that’s what you want. But I’m not that easy. I’m not about to roll over on you. We’ve tried working with you. You’ve been on every nutrition plan we have. You’ve been to the camps. You’ve been on probation. None of the ordinary measures seem to be working.” Here, Terri paused and her eyes seemed to twinkle, just slightly. “Which means, it must be time for extraordinary measures.” Annie thought she could just detect the corners of Terri’s mouth curl upwards in a wicked grin. “Must be a trick of the light,” she thought. “Must be.”
Terri walked over to the Vis-a-Screen and began punching in codes. Annie wondered what she was doing, who she was calling. She wondered what her punishment would be.
“Terri, what do you mean? What do you mean by ‘extraordinary measures’?” But Terri did not answer; she was slowly typing Annie’s address into a VisSite. Slowly, Annie understood what was happening, what was going to happen. She understood now the extremity of the state she was in. Grafting. She means grafting. Oh God.
“There,” Terri said, the smile returning to her face. “They should be sending a transport around presently. I’ll be riding with you for company.” How can she talk like she’s sending me on vacation? How can she think nothing of this?
“T-Terri,” Annie began. “I don’t deserve this. Grafting….grafting isn’t right…It isn’t. And anyway, it’s only for the really subversive types. The ‘incorrigibles.’” Annie thought of the 800-pound shut-ins they dragged away on the news. They were being saved. They were the sorriest cases; the people who had decided to kill themselves with food. New medical procedures allowed doctors to attach their heads to entirely new bodies. Mere regimens didn’t help this sort. The fattest people were given new lives. They were virtually reborn with slim athletic torsos, muscular legs, perfect health. Annie thought the whole thing was terrible, but it was something that had seemed so far removed. She was not morbidly obese. She was not a shut-in. Surely, she did not deserve to be grafted, her head removed and surgically planted on an unfamiliar body. Annie had never met anyone that had been grafted before, but she had watched them give interviews on television. They said emphatically that their lives had changed for the better, that they welcomed being rescued, but Annie could never shake the feeling that they all seemed to want to leap out of their new skin. The idea of being one of them horrified her.
“Terri, please,” she begged. “Call them back. Tell them there’s been a mistake. Terri!”
Terri just looked back at her smiling, with her hollow empty eyes. “This is the best thing, you know. You will thank me for this.”
In that moment, Annie wanted so, so badly to wriggle through one of the small apartment windows and run. Anywhere. Just run.
“If you could do that, hon, I wouldn’t be here.” It was like she was inside Annie’s head. How the hell did she know…. Her breath came in deep gasps. She heard Terri trying to soothe her, telling her how happy she’d be, about all the success stories that had come out of the latest procedures, but Annie hardly heard any of it. All she could see was her face in the mirror, floating, disembodied. Her mouth was open, like she was screaming, but she couldn’t make any noise. Over and over again she saw her own face at every turn, flickering the words of the new world order: Free And Thin.