She’s the scarred man on the table with his twice-cleaved chest and gouged belly. When they open him, they’ll find things missing. She’s the woman without a name, another body from the river. He knows her. She rises, floating in the dirty water.
Dr. Juste says, “Shove her up there on the slab any way you can.”
This one’s fat. That’s the first thing Sid notices. Later there will be other things: the downy hair on her cheeks, the long black hairs sprouting from her blotched legs, the unbelievable white expanse of her breasts. And she’s dead, of course, like the others.
But she’s not exactly like them, not dead so long, not so cold or stiff. He’d thought he could no longer be surprised, but she surprises him, Gloria Luby, the fattest dead person he has ever seen.
She weighs three hundred and twenty-six pounds. That gives her eighty-three on Sid and the gravity of death.
Dr. Juste turns at the door. He’s lean and hard, not too tall, bald; he has a white beard, the impatience of a thin man. He says, “You’ll have to roll this one.” He says, “She won’t mind.”
Now they’re alone, Gloria and Sid. She was a person a few hours ago, until the intern blasted her eyes with light and the pupils stayed frozen. Sid can’t grasp it, the transformation. If she was a person in the room upstairs, she’s a person still. He imagines her upstairs, alive in her bed, a mountain of a woman in white, her frizz of red hair matted and wild, no one to comb it. Blind, unblinking as a queen, she sat while the interns clustered around her and the head resident told them about her body and its defeats, the ravages of alcohol and the side effects of untreated diabetes: her engorged cirrhotic liver, the extreme edema of her abdomen, fluid accumulating from her liver disease, which accounted for her pain — were they listening to her moan? — which put pressure on her lungs till she could barely breathe — did they see her writhing under the sheets? It was the gastrointestinal bleeding that couldn’t be stopped, even after the fluid was drained from the belly.
She pissed people off, getting fatter every day, filling with fluids and gases, seventeen days in all. If she’d lived two more, they would have taken her legs, which Dr. Juste says would have been a waste because it wouldn’t have saved her but might have prolonged this. Sid wanted to ask what he meant, exactly, when he said this.
She’s valuable now, at last: she’s given herself up, her body in exchange for care. In an hour, Dr. Juste will begin his demonstration and Gloria Luby will be exposed, her massive mistakes revealed.
Sid thinks they owe her something, a lift instead of a shove, some trace of respect. He won’t prod. He isn’t going to call another orderly for help, isn’t going to subject Gloria Luby to one more joke. How many men does it take to change a light bulb for a fat lady?
Later, he may think it isn’t so important. Later, he may realize no one was watching, not even Gloria Luby. But just now this is his only duty: clear, specific. It presented itself.
None, she has to turn herself on. He knew what Juste would say when the interns gathered: Shall we cut or blast?
A first-timer might be sick behind his mask when they opened her abdomen and the pools of toxins began to drain into the grooves of the metal table, when the whole room filled with the smell of Gloria Luby’s failures. But everyone would keep laughing, making cracks about women big enough for a man to live inside. He knew how scared they’d be, really, looking at her, the vastness of her opened body, because she was big enough for a man to crawl inside, like a cow, like a cave. Hollowed out, she could hide him forever. Some of them might think of this later, might dream themselves into the soft swamp of her body, might feel themselves waking in the warm, sweet, rotten smell of it, in the dark, in the slick, glistening fat with the loose bowels tangled around them. They might hear the jokes and wish to speak. Why didn’t anyone notice? There’s a man inside this woman, and he’s alive. But he can’t speak — she can’t speak — the face is peeled back, the skull empty, and now the cap of bone is being plastered back in place, and now the skin is being stitched shut. The autopsy is over — she’s closed, she’s done — and he’s still in there, with her, in another country, with the smell of shit and blood that’s never going to go away, and he’s not himself at all, he’s her, he’s Gloria Luby — bloated, full of gas, fat and white and dead forever.
It could happen to anyone. Anytime. Sid thinks, The body you hate might be your own; your worst fear might close around you, might be stitched tight by quick, clever hands. You might find yourself on this table. You might find yourself sprawled on a road or submerged in a swamp; you might find yourself in a bed upstairs, your red hair blazing, your useless legs swelling. Shadows come and go and speak, describing the deterioration of your retinas, the inefficiency of your kidneys, the necessity of amputation due to decreasing circulation in the lower extremities. Extremities. Your legs. They mean your legs. You might find yourself face down in your own sweet back yard, the hose still in your hand.
He doesn’t think about God or ask himself what he believes — he knows: he believes in her, in Gloria Luby, in the three-hundred-and-twenty-six-pound fact of her body. He is the last person alive who will touch her with tenderness.
The others will have rubber gloves, and masks, and knives.
So he is going to lift her, gently, her whole body, not her shoulders, then her torso, then her terrible bruised thighs. She’s not in pieces, not yet — she’s a woman, and he is going to lift her as a woman. He is going to move her from the gurney to the table with the strength of his love.
He knows how to use his whole body, to lift from the thighs, to use the power of the back without depending on it. He crouches. It’s a short lift, but he’s made it harder for himself, standing between the gurney and the table. If he pressed them together, they’d almost touch — a man alone could roll her.
He squats. He works his arms under her, surprised by the coolness of her flesh, surprised, already, by her unbelievable weight.
For half a second, his faith is unwavering, and he is turning with her in his arms; they’re almost there, and then something shifts — her immense left breast slaps against his chest, and something else follows; her right arm slips from his grasp — and he knows, close as they are, they’ll never make it: an inch, a centimeter, a whole lifetime, lost. He feels the right knee give and twist, his own knee; he feels something deep inside tear, muscle wrenching, his knee springing out from under him, from under them. And still he holds her, trying to take the weight on the left leg, but there’s no way. They hit the gurney going down, send it spinning across the room. The pain in his knee is an explosion, a booby trap, a wire across a path and hot metal ripping cartilage from bone, blasting his kneecap out his pants leg.