When the Student Is Ready
by Gabriel S. de Anda
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
In the last days of December, Antoine came to a decision. He needed to go on a serious diet. He had arrived at a juncture in his life where both his physical bulk and his thirsty quest for happiness did not fit in the same room. It was to be, it had to be.
Things might have been different if he could have inhabited his skin with that flair attendant to the role of debonair and famous fat man, deploying some measure of panache, like, say, the middle-aged Orson Welles with his regal beard, the Borgia-with-a-stiletto stare and the deep stage voice; or even a frog-faced Diego Rivera, the artist of the masses transforming his potbellied beastliness through a muralistic take on life and love, an international man of the world with outsized appetites and an unshakeable faith in his own talent, looks and prowess.
Money, art, genius, sainthood: there were ways in which society allowed you to be — no, expected you to be — a fat man. But there were no props for Antoine to hide behind. He had neither the talent nor any of the varieties of confidence that might allow him to pull off a Viking beard with an angled beret; no cinema auteur’s oeuvre under his size forty-six belt to mark him as an artiste. If you were a Julian Schnabel or a Helmut Esquivel, you were not a fat slob, you were a star.
Antoine was no artiste. When people looked at him, they were reminded of the image of the mother goddess Venus von Willendorf carving from the Upper Paleolithic age: spongy and vaguely featured, copiously adipose, motherly.
On December 31st, through the magic of his Wide View Virtual Cousin® he had watched the glittering, Waterford time ball drop to riotous cheering on Times Square, and he was there, even feeling the chill of a New York winter.
In real space he was, of course, sitting in his drab apartment living room, eating what he’d decided would be his “last supper,” a take-out order from his favorite restaurant, Osselay: tender breaded veal in a rich cream-and-mushroom sauce; side of savory rosemary polenta dish covered with a vegetable ragout sautéed in salted butter, parmesan, toasted flour and beef stock; fettuccine in a sauce of butter, mortared Roma tomatoes and basil and finely crushed pistachios; and hot garlic-and-parmesan dinner rolls.
Antoine rinsed his palette between mouthfuls with a vintage Cabernet Sauvignon, thinking: When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.
Antoine was ready.
The teacher was the fortuitous advertisement he had run across in the Kindled local newspaper calling for volunteers to a series of clinical trials conducting experiments in treating morbid obesity at the UCLA School of Medicine. Antoine had scheduled an appointment.
* * *
On January first, the tomorrow which never comes finally arrived.
It did not matter to Antoine what the treatment or medical procedure was to be, he had already made up his mind to be one of the program’s guinea pigs. An all-or-nothing effort on his behalf, he’d had the will to make this appointment, to be here, but for little else.
He had tried every weight loss program on the market, with little or no success. The Scarsdale Diet, Weight Watchers, New Life, Old Skin, Old Life, New Skin, the list went on. He had even tried fasting, once, losing nearly 40 pounds in 22 days, and he had been deliriously happy afterwards, buying size 34 jeans and prancing around like a member of the Joffrey Ballet.
But within six months he had regained all the weight plus, and now he was at least 120 pounds over what the charts called for him to be for his height and body type.
“What we’re doing here at the UCLA Manna Project,” said the registered nurse supervising Antoine’s intake interview, “is adapting military technology to civilian uses.” Her name was April Fuentes, and she was something of a tall and thin Plain Jane but, like many of her type, she was possessed of a lascivious simplicity, a bookish repression that spoke secret, prurient volumes.
“The Manna Procedure was originally developed as an off-world military solution to aid foot soldiers stranded in hostile territory, Mr. Harrison. We can provide our fighting boys and girls with the latest smart weapons and armor, but there’s no getting around it: they still need to eat.”
“Manna? Is that what it’s called?”
“That’s what Axis Command calls it.”
“How does it work?”
“The human cell structure is remediated through nanotechnology to bypass the digestive system and draw its sustenance directly from the air.” Illustrative video accompanied her spiel on a paper screen monitor behind her.
“Directly from the air?” parroted Antoine. “Living off the fat of the land?”
April smiled and nodded, adjusting her glasses. “Exactly. The superficial cells of the body — that is, the skin — are genetically re-engineered to cull the elements the body needs to survive from the ambient air itself. Carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen: the basic building blocks of human existence. Normally, plants gather these elements, turn them into a form usable as nutrition by the human body, which we then eat.
“With our process, the recalibrated and newly outfitted skin cells can gather what the body needs, converting it into useable energy — glucose — and feeding the body’s cellular structure directly, bypassing the stomach and the normal digestive process.”
“What happens if you do eat?” asked Antoine.
“Oh, you can eat and have fun doing it, too. But you no longer need to eat food to survive. And nothing you do eat is used by the body.”
“Okay. So, nothing eaten can cause weight gain.”
“Exactly.”
With this procedure, explained April, the mechanism by which the stomach ingests, breaks down, and metabolizes nutrients, is thus isolated. The stomach continued to function, but the nutrition it normally extracted from food and delivered it to the rest of the body is simply excreted along with all the unusable bulk like roughage through the urine and the feces.
“The cell’s cytoskeleton is modified not only to organize and maintain the cells’ shape, but to facilitate a process called endocytosis, which is the uptake of external materials by a cell. Superficial microfilaments cull what they need from the environment and microtubules move it though cytoplasmic conduits as a new form of nutrition.”
“Is this for real?” said Antoine, excited.
“It is. The Axis Armed Forces employed the procedure in the field, the first time in the Ares desert campaigns as well as the take-over of Saint Catherine’s. It helped break the back of the Red Star Coalition and cost them Mars, the rebel Dysons, and control of the Twin Worlds.”
Antoine pictured an army of marching golden warriors undulating over the landscape like amber waves of grain.
Freed from the historical military Achilles’ Heel of either having to live off the fat of the land and alienating the locals or of importing and carrying provisions in bulky, costly and burdensome convoys and backpacks, the troops could focus on the mission of winning hearts and minds and conquering cities and the infrastructured machineries of politics. Enemies lost their incumbent advantage, their will to fight, and were decisively trounced. Shock-and-awed not by superior firearms, but by superior soldiers.
“So now you’re fighting a war on fat,” quipped Antoine.
“Well, yes. We’ve had to tweak the process for a modified goal,” said April. “We’ve adapted the Manna procedure likewise to bypass the digestive tract. When the nannite-altered cells feed the body, the digestive system becomes superfluous, that much is the same. But while the Axis troops maintained their optimal weights without having to eat anything at all, our calculations are designed not to maintain weight, but to slowly produce weight loss.”
“So,” drawled Antoine, “I’m gonna be placed on a starvation diet, right?”
April chuckled amiably. “Well, yes. But you won’t starve. We continue blocking the digestive system so that food ingested is harmlessly excreted. But for our purposes, the nanotech that normally morphs the cellular structure to glean nourishment from the air is dialed down a bit, modified. After all, there’s no need for sustenance when the body can meet its energy requirements from its own fat reserves.
“The cellular engine will continue revving, gleaning nutrition from your surroundings but at a much slower, lowered level. We’re more interested in setting the cells so that they take in water from the air, and that way the cells get bathed, the system maintaining its toxin-flushing capacity without having to actually drink water, and the body remains healthy while losing weight.
“And here’s the kicker, the bonus that makes the system we’re testing so deliciously workable: the more you eat, the more energy the body has to expend to clear out the useless roughage, and the more weight you lose.”
Antoine’s smile grew slowly and hesitantly as he wrangled the math.
“How sweet is that?”
“So,” drawled Antoine, “what’s the downside? Why clinical trials?”
“Well, like anything that needs government approval, it has to be examined from all the angles, tested, vetted. Unraveled, put back together and given the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.
“Downside?” April shook her head. “We don’t see any downside.”
Antoine did not need to be talked into signing the waiver form all trial participants were required to execute. He had a good feeling about this. Procrastination itself had several side effects, and one of them was that when action was finally committed to, the mere act of acting was seen and felt as a positive thing, simply for no better reason than that action was being taken. It did not matter what one was committing to, other than making the commitment to no longer avoid choices that mattered. A move away from inertia.
In the days that followed, Antoine was prodded and poked by medical technicians, needles inserted and bodily fluids withdrawn and labeled, fMRI scans and X-rays ordered, skin scrapings and nail clippings and mouth swabs taken, dot-sensors attached to his body, genetic testing conducted, laser telemetric readings of his eyes, brain, cortex and spine recorded.
And finally, after nearly a week of medical reconnaissance and biological show-and-tell, one evening Antoine was given a luscious fruit smoothie, made with vanilla ice cream, fruit juice, strawberries, banana, honey, and crushed ice, the first bit of hospital nutrition he enjoyed. He delighted in its heft, crunchiness, and sweetness while marveling that in the one week he had been staying at the UCLA facilities, he had already lost nearly ten pounds, despite actually eating quite a bit.
Antoine knew culinary quality. However, while he considered himself a gourmet, he was basically an omnivorous glutton who would eat, in the absence of some culinary delight, whatever it took to fill the emptiness of a yawning hunger. When they gave him the second of three prescribed smoothies, he weighed in at 305 pounds. But he had been at 315 for so long that 305 felt like a gargantuan accomplishment, a dislodging that was as much psychological as it was physical. This gave him a rush, a sense of possibility, a feeling that a world long denied to him was on the cusp of revealing its secrets.
The fruit smoothies were the way the nanites specially tailored for Antoine’s fat body were administered. After being fed the third one, he was observed for two more days before being released, which was just fine, because the two weeks’ vacation time from work was just about tapped out.
In those remaining days, his eliminatory system amped itself up, since everything he was now eating was not being assimilated but simply excreted. His skin flaked and peeled like the aftermath of a nasty sunburn, and he itched crazily. Then, after a day and a half of nausea and some vertigo, the nanites had assumed complete control of his body, and everything, except for his voracious appetite, hit a watermark. He had lost six more pounds, but this was primarily from dehydration. His body balanced itself out, and rehydration made him gain five of those pounds back.
He was told that he would henceforth and for the duration lose anywhere between two to three pounds a week, depending, of course, on how much he ate. More food, more weight loss. Less food, a slower loss rate. If he ate nothing whatsoever, the pace of loss would slow down even more, but he would nonetheless lose a maximum of a pound a week, his modified cells shooting for a new equilibrium.
Any rate quicker than three pounds a week, they warned him, could endanger his health. He had to take it easy and find his “middle ground.” One pound loss a week was good; two pounds a week was fine, but no more than that. They calibrated the cells with a failsafe so that even if he stuffed his face every day, he would still not exceed a three-pound-a-week loss.
On the morning of his discharge, he was fed a hospital omelet with overcooked hash browns, little packets of ketchup and a wheat toast that was cool and, although still flexible, neither easily bitten through nor easily chewed. Even gluttons can tire of hospital cuisine, and Antoine was already planning his meals on the outside.
“Good luck,” said April, whom he had not seen since the intake interview. She adjusted her black-framed prescription glasses, her one concession to fashion, and handed him a packet with live-word literature and a brief telephone directory downloaded into his cell. He was being required to come in once a week for the first two months, and once a month thereafter until “goal.”
“Thanks, April,” he said, shaking her hand and feeling shy. He had fantasized a little about her. He could feel a slight blush and an increased ocular pressure when their hands touched, but managed to say, “Maybe we can have some coffee when I come back. To check in, I mean.”
“That would be nice,” she said with a smile and a muted but seemingly genuine enthusiasm that Antoine found hard to read but gave him hope.
He stopped at the front desk for some more procedural data work and went on his way.
* * *
Copyright © 2023 by Gabriel S. de Anda
