Thigh of the Beholder:
Food for Thought

by Kevin Ahearn

By the middle of the 21st Century, obesity in adults and children had reached epidemic proportions. Is this the way the world would end... Neither with a bang nor a whimper, but with yet another jumbo cheeseburger, a large fries and a triple-thick shake? The burgeoned species teetering on tumbling into the heavy duty dustbin of history, a breakthrough discovery saved Man’s bacon.

What will they think of next? Now people would be able to regain their ideal body weight without dieting, without harmful or addictive drugs, without exercise and without... eating. Fasting was fast and painless, with no cravings and no health risks. Fully covered by worldwide HMOs, no one on earth would ever have to spend another waking moment overweight.

Like so many industries birthed by the space race of the 20th Century, Suspended Animation Fat Expiration (SAFE) took root with the Virtual Hibernation Process (VHP) perfected after Man had established a permanent colony on Mars and sought to send astronauts to the Outer Planets. For a voyage of billions of miles, putting the crew of a spacecraft into VHP and reviving them safely was the only practical solution.

After countless experiments with a wide range of mammals, perfected VHP allowed a subject to be put into suspended animation for an unlimited period and be fully revived with only one inescapable side effect: severe weight loss. In the state of artificially controlled homeostasis, the body was unable to efficiently digest intravenous nutrients. Deprived of sufficient calories, it literally began to eat itself. Humans would only lose a couple of ounces of accrued fat in the first week, but that soon accelerated to over a pound a day. To make the voyage to Jupiter, an astronaut candidate had to weigh more than 400 pounds.

Business has always been business; private enterprise saw massive weight losses generating enormous gains. Despite intense lobbying from diet gurus and health club chains, the International Food and Drug Administration approved the SAFE Method and the multi-billion dollar weight loss industry woke up and went out of business.

SAFE began small and grew exponentially. Most of its initial staff was former dietitians, health care workers, and cosmetic surgeons. All were strictly licensed in pursuit of SAFE perfection.

The neediest were not served first, rather those who only wanted to be rid of those last pesky pounds diet and exercise never seemed to erase. One week asleep did so. Next came the two-weekers with thirty pounds to lose. Three weeks lost sixty-five. A full month and a hundred pounds of unsightly body fat was seen no more.

There were social consequences. Young mothers, seeking to lose the weight gained during pregnancy, would return home after a week or so and their babies would not recognize them. Spouses asleep for three weeks would awaken to find their wives or husbands gone off with another; their marriages had weightier problems than they thought. Couples who hibernated jointly brought new meaning to the term “sleeping together.”

Only convicted felons and prison inmates were barred from SAFE. This led to an increased public bias against the few eligible overweight people who still had not taken advantage of the program. The effect was twofold: an almost unanimous participation in SAFE and those disallowed became determined to lose their excess weight the old fashioned way. Not as expensive as it used to be — unread diet books and unused exercise machines could now be purchased at a small fraction of their original costs.

All was well in the slim new society. The only fat people left were either astronauts bulking up on Mars preparing to journey to the far reaches of the solar system or were already on their way.

There remained, however, one very big exception.

Steven Marshall had come into the world weighing 25 pounds. Within three months that doubled. By age five, he tipped the scales at 200 and before he had learned to operate a computer, he had cleared 300. No diet or exercise could stop his growth. Becoming a teenager, Steven surrendered to his fate. No matter how intelligent or creative or honest or hardworking or well-rounded an individual he aspired to be, he’d only be thought of as fat. And that was that.

If I am going to be one thing and one thing only, vowed Steven with all his heart and soul and digestive tract, I’m going to be the fattest fat man in the whole wide world! Living off his late father’s inheritance in a one-bedroom apartment in the gut of the city, 700-pound Steven Marshall whiled away the hours preparing one gigantic meal after another in his fully automated kitchen and feasting in front of his lavish computer monitor, content to be his own unique self, the last fat man on earth.

His mother had other plans. Fresh from SAFE where she had slept for nearly six months and lost 250 pounds, she appeared at his door, a third of the woman she used to be.

“Let me in, Steven,” she shouted up at the security camera. “We are going to talk.”

At the sound of her inimitable voice, the reluctant son complied.

“Well, my boy!” she exclaimed, twirling around him as he sat stuffing himself. “Look at your brand new mother!”

“There was something wrong with my old one?” he asked between bites, savoring every morsel.

“Sleep to wake, my boy,” she said. “There’s so much more to you if there’s less.”

“I am who I am. I want to stay that way or...” said Steven between heavy swallows. “...get even bigger.”

“Oh, Steven,” she signed, bemoaning the sight of him. “This can’t go on.”

Steven wanted it to very much. Even more than eating, his grandest pleasure was in going to and from the supermarket. His massive form waddling among the politically correct slim, he felt like a rogue star orbited by regimented planets, completely conformed to the laws of their universe. Not him. He was the glaring, over-endowed exception and proud of it.

“No more free lunch,” announced Mom. “Your beloved father’s investments have taken a steep turn for the worse.”

“Oh, no!” gasped Steven. “You mean...?”

“You’re going to have to work to eat and nobody is going to hire a fatty,” she said. “Claiming any kind of disability will only compel you into SAFE. Either way, you’re going to have to lose weight.”

For a long moment, Steven stopped chewing and chewed this over. There is a time in a boy’s life when everything his mother says is right and later whatever she says is wrong. And then when neither mattered — a man made up his own mind. And body.

“Well?” she demanded.

Steven weighed his options. Conformity would be unbearable; he wasn’t going to take the same shape all humanity had become. From the frying pan into the fire? There had to be a way out.

“I’ve hired a truck to take you to a SAFE site,” urged Mom. “Or you can stew here. But not for long. The police will carry you out if they have to.”

Steven smiled, his bulbous face rippling. He had learned to obey his mother to get what he wanted. SAFE would not be his hemlock, but his resurrection. Let them plug their tubes into his and put him in their scientific chamber. He would dream the dream of heavenly eating, gouging himself on mountainous meals of meat and potatoes smothered in greasy gravy followed by rich ice cream sundaes piled high and topped with heavy whipped cream and chocolate cherries. And when his slumbering fantasy ended with a wake up call. He would arise thin as he had never been and proceed to get fat all over again. Oh, the joy that had been the first time around!

“Very well, mother dear,” said Steven. “I take it you’ve already made arrangements for the storage of my stuff while I’m hibernating.”

“Haven’t I always thought of everything?” replied Mom, extending her hand.

With great effort, Steven pushed himself to his feet. Outside a crowd cheered as he lumbered to the truck and into the cargo compartment. The SAFE site was just ten minutes away.

“Welcome, Steven Marshall,” said the Medical Chief. “We’ve prepared a special chamber exclusively for you.”

Two extra-large chambers had been seamlessly joined together to accommodate Steven’s massive body. Three staff members had to help him in. And when he lay comfortably on the formfitting pad and the tubes and the wires had been painlessly plugged and attached, he began to imagine all of his favorite foods as if he were already dreaming.

The lid was closed over him as if he were a stew in a pot covered to cool. Then he went under.

“There will be no compromises or half-measures,” his mother threatened the SAFE staff. “My son is the last patient you will ever have. Make him your proudest achievement... or I’ll sue till you’re bone broke.”

In VHP, Steven willed himself into a magical dining room: a never-ending table laden with exotic foods so real he could smell them. From the head to the foot, he set about fantasy feasting.

Time passed. A year was supposed to be long enough, but it wasn’t.

“Amazing!” declared the Med Chief. “He’s only lost fifty pounds. His body fat is so congealed. It’s like rock and eroding just as slowly.”

“We should never have VHPed him on earth,” said the Head Nurse. “This tubby could have voyaged beyond Pluto and back and still have love handles.”

Thirty years later, Steven’s mother lay on her deathbed.

“How much does my son weigh now?” she asked.

“Steven is down to three hundred and twenty-six pounds,” came the reply. “Should we awaken him to be with you?”

“No,” she insisted. “One way or the other, the next time I see my boy he’ll be fit and trim.”

She died smiling.

Time went on. The world changed as it always had in ways no one had expected. The Martian colony expanded to a nation of millions. Permanent settlements were established on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Lasting peace was achieved in the Middle East. The common cold was cured. Alas, in 88 years, the Red Sox never got back to the World Series.

Finally, after 103 years, 550 stubborn pounds had melted away; the process of reawakening began.

“Arcane system as out of style as the Internet,” said the newest Med Chief at the SAFE console. On the other side of a one-way plexiglass window, Steven lay in state, a state that was about to change.

The fantasy table was barren. Every last crumb had been gleefully devoured and all the scraps as well. Steven was hungry, hungrier than he had ever been in his life and he had no idea how long it had been between meals or even snacks.

“Allow the patient to wake up alone at first,” says the Medical Chief. “I don’t want too many shocks to his system. We haven’t kept him alive this long to lose him now.”

“From an age long gone,” said one of the nurses. “As though we were bringing back who we used to be.”

Steven opened his eyes to find himself in blackness. Moments later, the seals of his chamber broke with a flatulent hiss. The lid lifted to reveal a dimly lit room.

Steven shook his head and marveled how easily it moved. He looked down at what was left of his body and discovered that he had muscles he never remembered laying eyes on. He flexed his fingers and wiggled his toes. The bigness of his everything was gone. Above all else, he felt a gigantic pang in his stomach, demanding that it be immediately filled.

“Mister Marshall,” said the Med Chief gently. “Welcome back. You’ve been away for too long.”

“Not too late for breakfast, I hope,” said Steven, his eyes still adjusting. “I am starved!”

Two more doctors and then three nurses filed in, filling the room.

Steven squinted and couldn’t believe his eyes. Everyone around him was fat. Not as big as he used to be, of course, but each had to weigh 500 pounds at least.

“While you were in VHP, humanity made great strides in food preparation and health issues. Our esthetic values adjusted to them. Now we can eat all we want and live full lives in the sight of our own beautiful bodies.”

“Is everybody so... beautiful?’”

“We try to be,” said a blond nurse, her face and body as round as a snowman’s. “Humanity is on the verge of stellar exploration. Our heroes and role models are the cosmic pioneers who brave the dangers of the unknown. And we all want to look just like them.”

“Don’t worry, Mister Marshall,” the Med Chief comforted him. “As the only skinny human being on earth, you’ll feel inadequate, even ashamed for a while... until you can build yourself up to the heroic image.”

“We envy you, Mister Marshall,” said a younger doctor. “You can begin again to re-experience the bliss of self-expansion. You’ll find our food delicious beyond your wildest fantasies. “

“You’re the luckiest man in the solar system!” exclaimed a young nurse, her blubbery body quaking as she spoke. “You can be as big as all of us all over again.”

Steven smiled thinly. “Never,” he said. And that was that.

Copyright © 2005 by Kevin Ahearn