HELIOTROPISM

by Kevin White  Dec. 2, 1995

            In a small bedroom late at night, Brooklyn is chewing on Cecile’s shoulder, trying to put her in the mood. She feigns only a slight interest.

            “Did you take a shower?”

            When she asks this he stops and looks at her, somewhat hurt.

            “What do you mean? Of course I took a shower, I took a shower an hour ago. Do I smell or something?”

            His tone sounds defensive and just a little bit paranoid.

            “Well, actually...”

            She adds, now a complete stranger to him, not even looking him in the eyes

            “I don’t know what it is, I don’t usually smell foul, its strange...”.

            At that point Brooklyn's mind seized up with anxiety, the nightmare was beginning. She was starting to pull away from him.    

            The next day Brooklyn goes out for a run, and ends up walking most of the time because he feels incredibly heavy and weak. He realizes that he has felt this way for years, but hadn't really paid it much notice. To him it always felt as if he was carrying some extra baggage, It was a constant state of his psychical being that was so familiar to him as to be almost non-existent. Cecile's comments, although indicative to Brooklyn of a much greater change in Cecile's perception of him, forced him into a violent confrontation with the issue of his own obesity.

            He decides to go to the doctor, convinced that he is suffering from something other than weight gain. Cecile thinks he is crazy for thinking this, and grows increasingly disgusted with him, openly avoiding him.

            Brooklyn goes to the doctor and tells him what he thinks is wrong with him. The doctor is reluctant to do anything at all for Brooklyn, but Brooklyn convinces the doctor to give him a physical, analyzes his blood, and take some x-rays. The doctor does these tasks, barely able to conceal his annoyance for Brooklyn, whom he regards as yet another over weight hypochondriac.

            A couple of days later Brooklyn returns to the doctors office for the results of the tests. There are six other men in the office besides the doctor, and Brooklyn quickly realizes that there is something really wrong. Everyone in the room is looking at Brooklyn with an expression of disbelief. Without saying anything the doctor turns out the lights and turns on the x-ray viewer.

            The x-ray image looks like a poster for some modern dance company. An emaciated naked figure is holding a spastic pose that looks something like a diver springing out of a fetal position an instant before he strikes the water. This nebulous figure is superimposed over the figure of a man standing, with his arms down to his sides. The transparency  is a brownish-yellow color.    

            Brooklyn steps towards the light table, looking closely at the face of the man in the strange pose. His father's corpse is wedged inside of his own body. None of the doctors know who it is that Brooklyn has inside of him, this thought makes him feel a little better, a little less self-conscious.

            The doctors seem to be concerned for Brooklyn’s health, they talk about operating to remove the corpse, they completely skip over the how and why of his condition. When they find out that Brooklyn does not have health insurance they decide to postpone operating indefinitely.

                        Brooklyn goes through an intense rush of emotional pain every time he lets himself think about his present condition. This cripples him somewhat. He barely makes it back to his work, where he feigns sickness and leaves early. He shuffles slowly back to the apartment, getting there just as Cecile does. She manages a small smile for him, briefly, and then lets her self in, leaving the door open as she enters the apartment like some unwanted garment she is throwing behind her, to the ground.

            When Brooklyn tells Cecile about his medical problem, she gets angry with him. She thinks that he is making up a stupid sick story and it pisses her off, she won't even look him in the face. He insists it is true.    

            “Call the doctors and ask them, they will show you the x-rays!”

            He is pleading with her, as she readies to leave.

            “What is wrong with you?! Huh? Why do you say stupid shit like this?! Your overweight and you smell! Deal with it!”

            She says, finally is allowing herself to show real contempt, and disgust for him.

            After she angrily packs a bag and leaves him alone in the apartment, he sits in the living room and stares out the window, in shock. He tries to recall when, and how, he managed to get his father’s corpse inside of his body. After a long while he concludes that it must have happened sometime shortly after his fathers death six years earlier.

            In his mind he travels back to that time. He sees his fathers funeral, and all of the relatives. He bends over to look into his father's casket, but he cannot fix on the image of his face, somehow he just cannot see it, it is almost as if his face were being purposely blurred, like they do on television. He looks for a long time at the fully clothed body inside the coffin.

            He remembers being very thirsty later after the funeral. Back at the house, he drinks more than a gallon of water and falls asleep, feeling very bloated and heavy.

            Brooklyn wakes up the next day and goes over to stay at his mom's house. He tells his whole family the new development in is life, and they prove to be very understanding. His grandmother offers to pay for the operation, to remove his father, pointing out that she had always hated his father, and she didn't see why Brooklyn should have to carry his corpse around inside of him.

            His mom seems to be disgusted by the whole thing and his stepfather doesn’t seem to care one way or the other.

            The three operations take over a week, and he spends another three weeks in the hospital recovering. When he wakes up after the last operation he asks the doctor what they have done with his fathers corpse. The doctor tells him that they have “disposed” of it.

            “Who gave you permission to throw away my father’s body?”

            Brooklyn tries to sound upset, but finds himself to be too sedated.

            “Your mother signed the release form for the disposal of your father’s corpse three days ago, I am sorry, I assumed you knew.”

            The doctor tells Brooklyn that they had to cut up his father’s body into twelve sections to get it out of his. He describes, with as much emotion as one would use to describe the carving of a Thanksgiving turkey, the methodical dismemberment of his father.

            The action of tearing apart his father's corpse has left Brooklyn in a lot of pain, for which he is prescribed copious pharmaceuticals, all of which make Brooklyn feel sick and unfocused.

            All together it takes about two months for Brooklyn to completely recover. He is left with seven large scars. The longest scar, an eleven inch scar about an inch thick, stretches across his stomach just below his belly button. The pain, except for a little bit of lingering stomach pain, is all but gone by the time he leaves home to return to the city.          

             Brooklyn moves back to the city by himself, finding his own small place and getting work as a lifeguard at a public pool. He doesn’t feel any lighter after the operations, and he still cannot manage to run very far, or for very long.

            After a while he gives up on the idea of running and switches to playing golf, which seems to require a lot less psychical strain.

            Brooklyn grows into a comfortable existence as a slightly overweight golfer, alone except for the occasional night out with his golfing buddies, and trips home to see the family. He stops thinking so much about his father, and the operation and begins to concentrates more on his own isolation.

            A year after the operation Brooklyn runs into Cecile at the supermarket. She seems shocked to see him so self-confident and content. All of the self-conscious bitterness (about life), that she remembers in him, seeming to have disappeared. She finds herself very attracted to his aloofness and he responds to her flirting automatically, as if it was some learned behaviorism he had learned and forgotten. They spend the whole weekend in his apartment getting re-acquainted, and talk constantly on the phone during the week. By the next week-end she has all but moved into his apartment.

            They are back together, as if nothing had ever happened.

            There is a certain lightness to their relationship this time however, something that was not there before. It is as if any reason they might have had for disliking each other (before) had completely disappeared. She simply no longer found it necessary to ridicule him because of his weight, and he no longer pretended to be his father.