bluffed. Powerful people like her didn't have to.
Doris stared at her mother for a long moment, not knowing what to say, and then finally: 'I'll have Martha get your sandwich.'
But her mother was already watching the screen again, lost in the perfect memories of her perfect little boy.
CHAPTER 26
After leaving the Loop via the Dan Ryan Expressway, Cini took an exit different from her own and pulled up to a 7-Eleven store whose lights she had seen from a distance.
She knew there was only one way she could cope with what she'd seen just a while ago in Eric Brooks' office. Some people would have picked up a glass of whisky; others would have engaged in sex. For Cini there was only one salvation. Junk food.
She surprised the Pakistani clerk by picking up one of the red plastic hand carriers. Virtually nobody ever used the hand carriers in here.
She wanted something from every basic food grouppastry, candy, potato chips, ice cream.
She didn't even try to stop herself, didn't even try to say, You're going on a binge again, Cini, and you're going to destroy that beautiful thin body of yours.
God, Cini, stop before it's too late.
But she was in the throes of a desire that she could no longer control. Did not want to control.
She started at the pastry section, picking up a box of Hostess powder donuts then a box of Little Debbie filled oatmeal cookies then grabbing a half dozen Colonial bear claws in cellophane wrappers that were gorgeously sticky inside from all the gooey sugar frosting.
The candy section came next. Cini specialized in chocolate. She selected a quarter pound Hershey bar with almonds, a King Size Baby Ruth, a bag of mini-Mounds, a bag of mini-Almond Joys, a Milky-Way King Size, two boxes of Boston baked beans, three boxes of Good n' Plentys and two long dealies of Switzer's red licorice.
At the ice-cream counter, she filled up her entire red plastic hand carrier with six quarts of Haagen Dazs of different flavors and then a vast box of Drumsticks. She really liked the nuts they sprinkled on the top.
There was a black customer at the counter when Cini got up there. She was nervous; she couldn't help it. Black people who weren't dressed in suits and ties (male) or nice dresses (female) scared her. She'd seen a black hatemonger on TV a year ago and he'd convinced her that in every black heart was a yearning to kill white people. Cini knew that this wasn't true, that most black people were decent citizens and not really all that much different from herself, but the trouble was, how did you tell the occasional hater from your good ordinary person? They didn't wear little tags that said HATER. Only too late did you find that they had guns or knives and were in the process of killing anything that moved and was white. You saw it on TV all the time.
The black customer, who was probably fifty, shook his head when he took his lottery ticket from the Pakistani clerk and checked the number. He smiled at Cini. He had a great smilewry, intelligent and friendly. 'And here I was gettin' ready to retire, too,' he said, nodded goodnight to Cini and the clerk and left.
Cini put the hand carrier on the counter.
The Pakistani laughed. 'Such a slim girl. Such a big appetite.'
'I'm having a little party tonight,' she lied. 'Some friends are coming over.'
Yeah, she thought. They don't like beer or bourbon or marijuana. They're Switzer's licorice junkies. Life in the fast lane.
She was already back to her Whale days. Always lying to clerks about why she was buying so much junk food. Ashamed of herself but unable to stop.
The clerk started ringing everything up.
He needed one of the big bags to get everything in.
The total came to $44.39.
My God!
That was another thing about being a Whale. You were always broke from buying junk food. No joke. Linda, another one of the Whales, once spent more than $200 in a single weekend on pastries alone. She estimated she had consumed more than 50,000 calories that weekend. She forced herself to vomit, as usual, but she began vomiting so violently that she actually puked up blood. She called Cini in absolute terror. Cini met her at the Emergency Room. She had done no permanent damage but the young female intern did convince Linda to try the Eating Disorder Clinic. Linda lasted seven weeks there and then started bingeing again. Last time Cini saw her, Linda weighed more than 220 pounds and was doping herself up constantly on tranquilizers. Being obese was a great big joke to people who didn't suffer from it. But for those who did…
Cini wrote out her check and handed it over. The clerk rubber-stamped the back of it and then began filling in the information he took from Cini's driver's license.
Cini hefted her bags and started out to the car.
Behind her, the clerk said, 'You be careful with all that junk food, missy. Don't want to ruin that figure of yours.'
Cini smiled and walked out the door. The night smelled of cigarette smoke and gasoline. She set the bags on the passenger seat and then walked around and got behind the wheel.
The tears came instantlyhard, hot, harsh tears that made her grab the steering wheel with such force that it bowed beneath the sudden pressure.
She was going to do it again.
Start the eating again.
The gorging that would take her back to obesity.
For the first time since the urge had seized her, she thought: I don't want to do this. I really don't.
But then she started the car and backed out of the 7-Eleven and headed in the direction of her apartment.
Before she had gone three blocks, she had ripped open the King Size Baby Ruth bar and was cramming it into her mouth.
CHAPTER 27
The scalpel is made of stainless steel and feels cold as death to the naked hand.
The same can be said of the other instrument the surgeon chooses on this overcast morning in Berlin, a knife of ten inches in length and two ounces in weight.
The surgeon likes the heft of the knife in his hand. Not many mortals are allowed to cut up a human being in this fashion and get paid for it. And paid so well.
He begins.
CHAPTER 28
I cut her up real good and the bathtub runs maybe an inch-and-a-half deep with her blood and that's when I get the idea of taking her out and then just sitting in there.
So I take her out and set up her bled body on the closed toilet, like maybe she's having a tinkle or something, and then I get in the tub and sit in her blood and light myself a Pall Mall and stare out the window at the dusk.
The dusk always makes me melancholy as hell but it's a dangerous melancholy, one I've never been able to explain to anybody. Things are just so fucking sad and nobody seems to understand that.
And I'm drunk, which doesn't help.
