He stared at the figure, feeling a coldly fluttering swirl of moths in his gut. Five pounds, he thought. Five pounds in one single day! Christ!

He had skipped no more meals since then.

Now he indicated his empty plate – the clean corn cobs, the remains of the burgers, salad, french fries, dessert.

'Does that look like anorexia nervosa to you, Heidi?' he asked. 'Does it?'

'No,' she said unwillingly. 'No, but

'I've been eating like this for the last month,' Halleck said, 'and in the last month I've lost just about sixty pounds. Now, would you like to explain how my subconscious managed that trick? Losing two pounds a day on an intake of roughly six thousand calories per twenty-four hours?'

'I … I don't know … but Mike … Mike says-'

'You don't know and I don't know,' Billy said, tossing his napkin into his plate angrily – his stomach was groaning and rolling under the weight of food he had dumped into it. 'And Michael Houston doesn't know either.'

'Well, if it's a curse, why isn't anything happening to me?' she shrieked at him suddenly, and although her eyes blazed with anger, he could see the tears that were starting up in them.

Stung, scared, and temporarily unable to control himself, Halleck shouted back: 'Because he didn't know, that's why! That's the only reason! Because he didn't know!'

Sobbing, she pushed her chair back, almost fell over, and then fled from the table. Her hand was pressed to the side of her face as if she had just come down with a monstrous headache.

'Heidi!' he yelled, getting up so fast he knocked his chair over. 'Heidi, come back!'

Her footsteps didn't pause on the stairs. He heard a door slam shut – not their bedroom door. Too far down the upstairs hall. Linda's room, or the guestroom.

Halleck was betting on the guestroom. He was right. She didn't sleep with him again during the week before he left home.

That week – the last week – had the consistency of a confused nightmare in Billy's mind when he tried to think about it later. The weather turned hot and oppressive and surly, as if dog days had come early this year. Even crisp, cool, double-knit Lantern Drive seemed to wilt a bit. Billy Halleck ate and sweated, sweated and ate … and his weight settled slowly but surely through it all. At the end of the week, when he rented a car and left, heading up Interstate 95 toward New Hampshire and Maine, he was down another eleven pounds, to 156.

During that week the doctors from the Glassman Clinic called again and again. Michael Houston called again and again. Heidi looked at Billy from her white-ringed eyes, smoked, and said nothing. When he spoke of calling Linda, she only said in a dead, brittle voice: 'I'd prefer you didn't do that.'

On Friday, the day before he left, Houston called again.

'Michael,' Billy said, closing his eyes. 'I've already stopped taking calls from the Glassman doctors. I'm going to stop taking them from you, if you don't cut the shit.'

'I wouldn't do that, just yet,' Houston said. 'I want you to listen to me very carefully, Billy. This is important.'

Billy listened to Houston's new rap with no real surprise and only the deepest, dullest stirrings of anger and betrayal. Hadn't he seen it coming, after all?

Heidi had been in again. She and Houston had had a long consultation that had ended with more tears. Houston had then held a long consultation with the Three Stooges at the Glassman Clinic ('Not to worry, Billy, it's all covered by professional privilege'). Houston had seen Heidi again. They all thought that Billy would perhaps profit from a battery of psychiatric tests.

'I want to urge you most strongly to take these of your own free will,' Houston finished.

'I bet. And I also bet I know where you'd like me to take the tests. At the Glassman Clinic, right? Do I win a Kewpie doll?'

'Well, we thought that was the logical

'Oh, uh-huh, I see. And while they're testing my brains, I assume the barium enemas will continue?'

Houston was eloquently silent.

'If I say no?'

'Heidi has legal recourse,' Houston said carefully. 'You understand?'

'I understand,' Billy said. 'You're talking about you and Heidi and the Three Stooges there at the Glassman Clinic getting together and committing me to Sunnyvale Acres, Basket-Weaving Our Speciality.'

'That's pretty melodramatic, Billy. She's worried about Linda as well as about you.'

'We're both worried about Linda,' Billy said. 'And I'm worried about Heidi, as well. I mean, I have my moments when I'm so angry with her that I feel sick to my stomach, but I mostly still love her. And so I worry. You see, she's misled you to a degree, Mike.'

'I don't know what you're talking about.'

'I know you don't. And I'm not going to tell you. She might, but my guess is that she won't – all she wants to do is forget that the whole thing ever happened, and filling you in about certain details she may have overlooked the first time around would get in the way of that. Let's just say that Heidi's got her own guilt trip to work out. Her cigarette consumption is up from a pack a day to two and a half.'

A long pause … and then Mike Houston returned to his original chorus: 'However that may be, Billy, you must see that these tests are in the best interests of everyone con -'

'Good-bye, Mike,' Halleck said, and hung up softly.

Chapter Fifteen. Two Phone Conversations

Billy spent the rest of the afternoon stewing his way back and forth through the air-conditioned house, catching glimpses of his new self in mirrors and polished surfaces.

How we see ourselves depends a lot more on our conception of our physical bulk than we usually think.

He found nothing comforting in this idea at all.

My sense of what I'm worth depends on how much of the world I displace as I walk around? Christ, that's a demeaning thought. That guy Mr T. could pick up an Einstein and lug him around all day under one arm like a … a schoolbook or something. So does that make Mr T. somehow better, more important?

A haunting echo of T. S. Eliot chimed in his head like a faraway bell on Sunday morning: That is not what I meant, that is not what I meant at all. And it wasn't. The idea of size as a function of grace, or intelligence, or as a proof of God's love, had gone out around the time that the obesely waddling William Howard Taft had turned the presidency over to the epicene – almost gaunt – Woodrow Wilson.

How we see reality depends a lot more on our conception of our physical bulk than we usually think.

Yes – reality. That was a lot closer to the heart of the matter. When you saw yourself being erased pound by pound, like a complicated equation being erased from a blackboard line by line and computation by computation, it did something to your sense of reality. Your own personal reality, reality in general.

He had been fat – not bulky, not a few pounds over weight, but downright pig-fat. Then he had been stout, then just about normal (if there really was such a thing the Three Stooges from the Glassman Clinic seemed to think there was, anyway), then thin. But now thinness was beginning to slip into a new state: scrawniness. What came after that? Emaciation, he supposed. And after that, something that still lingered just beyond the bounds of his imagination.

He was not seriously worried about being hauled away to the funny farm; such procedures took time. But the final conversation with Houston showed him clearly just how far things had gone, and how impossible it was that anyone was going to believe him – then or ever. He wanted to call Kirk Penschley – the urge was nearly insurmountable, even though he knew Kirk would call him when and if any of the three investigative agencies the firm employed had turned up something.