When the Student Is Ready

by Gabriel S. de Anda

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
parts: 1, 2, 3

conclusion

High above the world on the one hundred and sixteenth floor of the Los Angeles Slim/Deatherage skyscraper, Antoine waited for his attorney.

He sat in a chair of darkly-hued distressed leather designed for profound comfort, a quite conscious effort to soothe the mentally distressed people who had appointments regarding subjects that required lawyers. Classical ambient music quietly volatized in the background, like a soporific perfume.

Antoine had dragged his chair over to the conference room window to peer down at the distant world below. It was late September, three months after his release from the weight loss clinical trial program. Despite the comfortable chair and the piped-in Plateau of Mirrors, he felt uneasy.

“I’m sorry,” said his lawyer as the door closed behind her and she took a seat at the head of the large slab of black marble that served as deposition table. She began removing documents from a lambskin briefcase she had carried slung over her shoulder, noting with astute eyes the posture of Antoine’s unmoving back as he watched the vanity fair below. “Something to drink?”

A pick-me up was ushered in by staff, espresso in a white china demitasse with a tiny Madeline and an ornamental bonsai strawberry edged on the saucer.

“Why are the depositions being rescheduled?”

The attorney sat to Antoine’s right, strawberry-blonde hair cut short and spiky. She wore an impeccably white and chic silk shirt with a thin yellow man’s tie with red and blue sigils, the blouse tucked into a black, long-hemmed gaucho skirt. Her prescription glasses — an affectation that brought April to mind — reflected the muted fluorescents in a blinking morse of clarity and flash. A perfect prop, thought Antoine, squinting, for an attorney. Now you see them, now you don’t.

“This is a class action suit, Mr. Harrison,” she said, not unkindly. “There are over five hundred parties, multiplied by the number of their attorneys. Add to that all the expert witnesses and Axis bureaucrats and their attorneys with their convoluted schedules, this case is like a huge ocean liner that takes more than a moment to turn right or left.”

“Are we on a collision course with an iceberg, Ms. Fuire?”

“Call me Susan, please.” She smiled at the allusion and shook her head. “We might crash, Mr. Harrison, but my job is to make sure you get a lifeboat. This is going to take a little bit of time.”

“I don’t think I have too much of that.”

The lawyer removed her glasses and set them down on the table, deciding on deep eye contact with Antoine. There was something coquettish about her movements, the purse of her lips, the tilt of her head, but her kohled eyes fumed with dry-ice seriousness.

Antoine had of late acquired a frail beauty, the noirish glow of a junkie still on bliss’s upward trajectory but close to cresting, cheeks hollowing and lips rendered fuller by the contrast. On the road to it, he had thought 170 to be his ideal weight, and although he was five pounds under that now, he considered that the concept of “ideal” was a relative thing. Ideal for what? To be a family man? To be a wandering Rubirosa? To be a poster boy on the marvels of modern science and healthy living?

He felt good, and he knew he looked good, for the mirror of women’s attentions reflected him well, but he noticed that most of the women he attracted were in their ways needy or lost. Nothing attracts a woman more to a man than the belief that, in some fundamental way, she can save him.

The nanotech that the UCLA doctors had been unable to purge from his system was burnishing him with a saintly, slightly malevolent ethereality. This was still all so new to him, the headiness of this new life, that his resultant affectations — a slightly patrician locution, the artist’s considered, studied physical movements, the mildly jaded satyr’s Mona Lisa smile — still seemed natural to him, emblems of who he thought he had always been, but only recently discovered, as if being told that he carried the unsuspected exotic heritage of Italian, French or Chinese blood. He was dressed in Armani black, and he had about two days’ worth of stubble on his face, the edges carefully razored.

“I weighed 170 this morning. The plateau I’ve been at for over two weeks just ended.”

His lawyer nodded, her eyebrows knitted darkly as she sucked at her lower lip, fully aware of what he was saying. “You look okay,” she said with an affirmative measure of sympathy, a bit of encouragement to add to the distressed leather and the ambient music. “The trial date’s set for July.”

His eyes widened. “That’s ten months away. If this doesn’t end soon, I’ll be under a hundred.” More like six feet under, he thought with dark comedy, smiling sardonically.

The attorney judiciously refrained from saying that in cases like these, the trial date — if this thing even went to trial — would most certainly be rescheduled when it came up. It was in the nature of class action filings.

Antoine shrugged. “Do we know anything new?”

“The vast bulk of discovery is still outstanding,” said the lawyer, casually placing a hand over his, “but we’re beginning to get a clearer picture of things.” One of her fingers stroked his middle finger.

“At the original intake interview,” he said, “they told me that this was ACE technology. Can’t we just talk directly to the military?”

“Well, that’s part of what I mean. They’re only one of numerous defendants.” The lawyer grasped Antoine’s hand in hers and their thumbs embraced. He felt the familiar warmth in his chest and groin, an instinctual triggering of appetite as hardwired as the need to eat. “But one thing we have uncovered through ongoing discovery is that this wasn’t Axis technology to begin with. It was something that the Red Star Coalition had developed, not us.”

“But they said the Manna project helped defeat the Red Star.”

“Well, that part’s correct,” said the lawyer, drawing a little closer to Antoine, sighing. She had strange eyes, black eyes, pupil, and iris merging, giving her stare added intensity. “It was theirs to begin with, but it just backfired on them. The incidence of cancer and emaciation was disabling, defeating. They lost not just the war, but thousands of lives.”

“Thousands?” said Antoine, pulling his hand away from hers. “Did they all die?”

“No,” she said, placing the abandoned hand on his shoulder. “Thousands of others survived, were returned to a physiological ground zero without lasting ill-effects. But even with the positive, recent tech modifications by the Manna Project here on Earth, there seems to be a relatively small group of participants unresponsive to the restorative cellular recalibration.”

Antoine stood up and walked over to the windows facing out toward the ocean, westward, putting his hands in his pants pockets. “What identifies this unresponsive group?”

“We don’t know that yet,” said the lawyer. “Off the record, we are expecting the download of volumes of RSC medical records. We’re engaging outside help on this.”

“Not UCLA.”

“No, an Arab consortium think tank.” They were the genetics specialists.

“I’m doomed,” said Antoine with a sad smile the lawyer found irresistible. His sigh was a slow intake, a deep and lengthy exhale, a sonorous note that pinged on the lawyer’s hardened heart.

“No, you’re not. We will not let anything happen to you.” She put her arms around Antoine, his hands lightly resting on the flare of her silk-covered hips.

The Axis military, she explained later — much later — had been intrigued and delighted to both win the war and discredit the rebels in one fell swoop. A technological embargo was established toward the extrasolarian colonies and habitats, and their cellular remediation project co-opted. It was a good idea — a great idea — that needed serious refinement. Further testing. Enter the UCLA clinical trials.

“How could they keep something like this secret?” asked Antoine, the warm naked heft of her flesh a pleasing weight against his stretched-out form. She had a loft in the same building as the law office, on a much lower floor.

“This is Earth. The Internet is all about transparency and allowing information to be free. But it’s a different story when you get off-world. Information, like heat, rises, moves up and out. We had no idea. This is becoming quite a scandal.”

All in all, Antoine felt good, looked good, and did not feel terribly concerned, especially in the wake of good sex and good food. The same optimism he had felt when enrolling in the Manna project was the same optimism that buoyed him now, like an article of faith. His attorneys were angling to partition the case between a global settlement that would include general damages for pain and suffering; and focused, round-the-clock medical research with the goal of unraveling this dilemma, and racing against the clock to save the lives affected.

Everything would be okay. It had to be.

On his way out early the next morning, having descended the thirty-five floors of his attorney’s office building, Antoine exited the glass sliding doors and was about to cross the street when he saw a very obese woman in the crosswalk with a baby in a stroller and two other small children on foot. She was texting furiously on her PDA, seemingly oblivious to the snarl of traffic braking for her and her children.

Damned self-absorbed fat-ass, thought Antoine as he was rounding the corner, shaking his head in disgust. But the fat mom was quickly displaced in his thoughts by considerations of where he might pick up a café au lait and a brioche. His stomach was beginning to rumble with a seductive hunger, pleading for breakfast.

* * *

Eight months later, Antoine lay on his futon alone, watching as the early afternoon light lanced the dancing motes of dust slowly revolving through the air. Mesmerized by the ethereal ballet, he held out a hand to see if he could catch any of the floating specks. Tiny, alternate worlds, he fantasized, small Dr. Seuss worlds. He then focused on his own outstretched arm, wrist, his hand, and for a moment — just a moment — he imagined that it belonged to someone else, not him. He rotated it, looking at it from various angles, as if admiring a quirky work of art. Pale, bony, the skin drawn tight like parchment over the phalanges of each finger’s knuckles, the protruding ulna casting a shadow of its own, a sundial announcing the lengthening hour. He turned the palm towards him, and wondered sadly where the hand he was familiar with had gone to.

And which hand is that? he thought. The chubby, pink-fingered hand of so long ago? Or the beautiful, sculpted conductor’s hand of a mere nine months’ back?

He heard a melodic chime from his home communication center and turned slowly but expectantly. Was she calling back? He had left several messages for April, but she was not returning his calls. No? No. He looked out through the window, saw the sky closing up and the early May showers begin lightly washing the trembling leaves of the neighborhood trees, and suddenly the silvery skies made him feel irrationally expansive, transported, hopeful.

He felt the rumblings of hunger tickling his stomach and with a pang of horror tried to suppress it, his frail hand pressing weakly against his lower abdomen. The doctors had been clear on his need to diet, to slow down the rate of his weight loss. He’d read the online Time magazine article which detailed the medical community’s imminent breakthrough; it was merely a matter of time before a solution to Antoine’s problem was puzzled out, but time would not abet him if he lost any more weight. The nannites coursing his bloodstream had begun exhibiting new tics of misbehavior, no longer devotedly flushing his system free of toxins. Quite often he felt drugged, submerged, slightly hallucinatory.

Antoine was trying to control himself and had not eaten anything since a small, late breakfast nearly six hours earlier. He knew well what he looked like. With the onset of natural hunger pangs he autonomically put caution out of mind, stomach grumbles conjuring the knee-jerk imagery of appetite, the pornography of desire helplessly assembling a tasty daydreamt smorgasbord. He would eat something bad, he knew, temptation battling with resistance in a war only emotion and instinct could ever win.

The habits of a lifetime subliminally told him that what he wanted would make him fat, even though this was no longer objectively true. This cognitive dissonance made him subconsciously inclined towards the act of eating, an act that millions of years of biology and instinct, not to mention the empty feeling in the pit of his belly, had hardwired itself into all living things. He wanted something spicy, rich and filling, pedestrian. Something he knew would make him lose more weight. His stomach gurgled and growled.

I’ll start tomorrow, he thought. I’ll be good and diet. Tomorrow. Today, right now, he wanted something rich, greasy, filling, something to dislodge the emptiness of a carpet-burning funk.

Less than an hour later, he was back from a quick jaunt to Taco Bell, and sitting in his kitchen, shaking salt from a tiny paper packet onto the last bite of his Mexican Pizza: oh, Lord, so savory, his mouth watering, the food crunchy and salty and exuding a cheesy swirly scent of south-of-the-border umami, the taste hitting every culinary note that that he’d ever wanted hit. He contentedly chewed the last bite, intentionally large, orally satisfying.

But his stomach was full, and the voice of reason was beginning to whisper, then nag, chastising him for his slothful lack of willpower, berating him for his lapse, and what he had done was beginning to sink in. For just a little while it would not matter, for his appetite had been assuaged, he was satisfied. Dying, yes, but weren’t we all?

He stood up to throw away the wrappers and the paper bag and the torn, spent hot sauce packets and crumpled, dirty napkins, and then to wash his greasy hands in the kitchen sink. He looked up and met his own gaze in the mirror above the faucets. His satisfied feeling was leaking like a saggy balloon, and it occurred to him how he looked like that deflating orb. He looked like a concentration camp inmate, boney, haunted, barely hanging on, waiting, waiting, waiting for the Allies to rescue him, his eyes deep set and circled by shadows, his cheeks concave, his face long and angular and frightening. His lips were kissed with red salsa, a few strings of bright orange, melted cheese lacing his unshaved chin. A very real sense of fear filled him, and he began to cry.

His body was consuming itself.

He bowed his head and cried for a while, hot tears streaming his face, and something about their warmth made him feel alive though self-pitying, and his breath grew normal again, although his heart was heavy.

And then his tears were gone, his eyes bloodshot and dry, and his amped and altered metabolism made his stomach growl again, and, despite having just eaten, he was already — in the back of his mind, to be sure, just beneath the radar of conscious cognition — contemplating what he would be eating for his late dinner, what rich, satisfying meal he would be trying to resist. Already his mind was setting the horror to one side, attending to more primal matters.

“Ready for dessert?”

Startled at the tap on his shoulder, Antoine turned abruptly and, incredibly, she was there. His eyes did a frenetic, scouring orbit, as if to find the open door or the inward flapping curtain or the ash and soot floating down onto the fireplace, trying to catch a quickly-shrinking window in the torn cobalt fabric of time and space by which she might have arrived, a fairy tale djinn.

“You came,” he said, surprised.

She kissed him lightly on the lips, tasting of butterscotch syrup.

“I brought you this.”

The pale gold of French vanilla ice cream, butterscotch and chocolate syrup, raspberries, cinnamon and raw sugar crystals, a sprig of fresh mint.

“Oh no, April,” he protested. “No. I can’t.” He looked down at the palms of his spread, upturned hands. “I’m dying.”

“All the more reason why you shouldn’t deny yourself.”

“Why didn’t you return my calls?”

“I thought it would be better if I came.”

She soothed his brow with her right hand, his head in her lap like Michelangelo’s La Pietà.

“But I’m here now.”

“I knew you would come.”

“Miga: listen carefully.” She leaned in toward his cradled head, fondly tracing an ear’s curves with a hot finger. She whispered beautiful nonsense syllables that brought out goosebumps of pleasure.

He turned towards her, eyes sparkling with fever, grinning with amused incomprehension.

“Win the prudent eddy, the tea-jewel’s peer.”

“I don’t understand,” he croaked, brow furrowed, a little angry. “Is this a test?”

“Just a reminder of what you’ve always known. You cannot outrun your destiny, Antoine.”

“And what is my destiny?”

“To be the coolest Dead Man ever.”

He felt a coldness seep through his veins and smiled sadly, comprehension suddenly dawning. Everything was interconnected, of one piece. Every action had its reaction, every movement a purpose.

“Everything is on its way to somewhere else,” he whispered.

“That’s right, Miga. It’s time to say ‘when’. Enough is enough.”

“But I want more,” he said.

“When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

“I guess the truth is,” he said dreamily, sadly, raising a spoonful of chilled, creamy, sugary delight to his mouth, “I’m just not that ready.”