The result was a cruelly neat, insoluble problem; he couldn’t push if he was full of Thorazine, and yet he simply didn’t have the will to refuse it (and, of course, if they caught him refusing it, that would open a whole new can of worms for them, wouldn’t it?-real night-crawlers). When they brought him the blue pill in the white dish after this was over, he would take it. And little by little, he would work his way back to the calmly apathetic steady state he had been in when the power went off: All of this was just a spooky little side-trip. He would be back to watching PTL Club and Clint Eastwood on Home Box Office soon enough, and snacking too much out of the always-well-stocked fridge. Back to putting on weight.
(charlie, charlie’s in danger, charlie’s in all sorts of trouble, she’s in a world of hurt)
If so, there was nothing he could do about it.
And even if there was, even if he could somehow conquer the monkey on his back and get them out of here-pigs will whistle and beggars will ride, why the hell not? any ultimate solution concerning Charlie’s future would be as far away as ever.
He lay back on his bed, spread-eagled. The small department of his mind that now dealt exclusively with Thorazine continued to clamor restlessly. There were no solutions in the present, and so he drifted into the past. He saw himself and Charlie fleeing up Third Avenue in a kind of slow-motion nightmare, a big man in a scuffed cord jacket and a little girl in red and green. He saw Charlie, her face strained and pale, tears running down her cheeks after she had got all the change from the pay phones at the airport… she got the change and set some serviceman’s shoes on fire.
His mind drifted back even further to the storefront in Port City, Pennsylvania, and Mrs. Gurney. Sad, fat Mrs. Gurney, who had come into the Weight-Off office in a green pantsuit, clutching at the carefully lettered slogan that had actually been Charlie’s idea. You Will Lose Weight or We Will Buy Your Groceries for the Next Six Months.
Mrs. Gurney, who had borne her truck-dispatcher husband four children between 1950 and 1957, and now the children were grown and they were disgusted with her, and her husband was disgusted with her, and he was seeing another woman, and she could understand that because Stan Gurney was still a good-looking, vital, virile man at fiftyfive, and she had slowly gained one hundred and sixty pounds over the years since the second-to-last child had left for college, going from the one-forty she had weighed at marriage to an even three hundred pounds. She had come in, smooth and monstrous and desperate in her green pantsuit, and her ass was nearly as wide as a bank president’s desk. When she looked down into her purse to find her checkbook, her three chins became six.
He had put her in a class with three other fat women. There were exercises and a mild diet, both of which Andy had researched at the Public Library; there were mild pep talks, which he billed as “counseling”-and every now and then there was a medium-hard push.
Mrs. Gurney had gone from three hundred to two-eighty to two-seventy, confessing with mixed fear and delight that she didn’t seem to want second helpings anymore. The second helping just didn’t seem to taste good. Before, she had always kept bowls and bowls of snacks in the refrigerator (and doughnuts in the breadbox, and two or three Sara Lee cheesecakes in the freezer) for watching TV at night, but now she somehow… well, it sounded almost crazy, but… she kept forgetting they were there. And she had always heard that when you were dieting, snacks were all you could think of. It certainly hadn’t been this way, she said, when she tried Weight Watchers.
The other three women in the group had responded eagerly in kind. Andy merely stood back and watched them, feeling absurdly paternal. All four of them were astounded and delighted by the commonality of their experience. The toning-up exercises, which had always seemed so boring and painful before, now seemed almost pleasant. And then there was this weird compulsion to walk. They all agreed that if they hadn’t walked a good bit by the end of the day, they felt somehow ill at ease and restless. Mrs. Gurney confessed that she had got into the habit of walking downtown and back every day, even though the round trip was more than two miles. Before, she had always taken the bus, which was surely the sensible thing to do, since the stop was right in front of her house.
But one day she had taken it-because her thigh muscles did ache that much-she had got to feeling so uneasy and restless that she had got off” at the second stop. The others agreed. And they all blessed Andy McGee for it, sore muscles and all.
Mrs. Gurney had dropped to two-fifty at her third weigh-in, and when her six-week course ended, she was down to two hundred and twentyfive pounds. She said her husband was stunned at what had happened, especially after her failure with countless dieting programs and fads. He wanted her to go see a doctor; he was afraid she might have cancer. He didn’t believe it was possible to lose seventy-five pounds in six weeks by natural means. She showed him her fingers, which were red and callused from taking in her clothes with needle and thread. And then she threw her arms around him (nearly breaking his back) and wept against his neck.
His alumni usually came back, just as his more successful college students usually came back at least once, some to say thanks, some merely to parade their success before him-to say, in effect, Look here, the student has outraced the teacher… something that was hardly as uncommon as they seemed to think, Andy sometimes thought.
But Mrs. Gurney had been one of the former. She had come back to say hello and thanks a lot only ten days or so before Andy had begun to feel nervous and watched in Port City. And before the end of that month, they had gone on to New York City.
Mrs. Gurney was still a big woman; you noticed the startling difference only if you had seen her before-like one of those before-and-after ads in the magazines. When she dropped in that last time, she was down to a hundred and ninety-five pounds. But it wasn’t her exact weight that mattered, of course. What mattered was that she was losing weight at the same measured rate of six pounds a week, plus or minus two pounds, and she would go on losing at a decreasing rate until she was down to one hundred and thirty pounds, plus or minus ten pounds. There would be no explosive decompression, and no lingering hangover of food horror, the sort of thing that sometimes led to anorexia nervosa. Andy wanted to make some money, but he didn’t want to kill anyone doing it.
“You ought to be declared a national resource for what you’re doing,” Mrs. Gurney had declared, after telling Andy that she had effected a rapprochement with her children and that her relations with her husband were improving. Andy had smiled and thanked her, but now, lying on his bed in the darkness, growing drowsy, he reflected that that was pretty close to what had happened to him and Charlie: they had been declared national resources.
Still, the talent was not all bad. Not when it could help a Mrs. Gurney.