The first time I went to the clinic it was dark out.
The first time I went to the clinic my sister thought I was crazy.
The first time I went to the clinic my mother was highly supportive. “Let me know how it goes, sweetie,” she told me. “I might try it myself.”
The first time I went to the clinic I was single, but if I had had a boyfriend I would’ve wanted him to be supportive but not too supportive. My boyfriend would shake his head and say something like, “I love how you look now, but it’s your body and I’m sure you’ll look great afterwards too. Just, please, don’t get rid of your boobs.” And I would kiss him and roll my eyes and say he wouldn’t care if I looked like a slug as long as I still had my boobs. And then he would fuck me doggy style and come on my back and then wipe it off tenderly with a Crate and Barrel hand towel and we would cuddle and watch something on Amazon Prime.
The first time I went to the clinic it was a Tuesday, at seven a.m., in early December, and the air was wet and overly warm like the inside of a mouth. I wore my puffer coat because of the calendar. On the bus ride over there I sweat and stewed in it.
The clinic was smooth and white. The doctor, too, was smooth and white, round glasses, a bald head. “Some women come in here and think the surgery is enough,” he told me. “But this is a two-part process.”
“Yes, I know,” I said. “The nurses told me all about the diet and stuff. I’ve read all about the procedure. It’s liposuction with a twist, basically.”
“Yes,” he said. “Exactly.”
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I had brunch with my sister a couple days after. We went to an expensive restaurant in midtown that was filled with dirty mirrors.
“Wow,” she said when I took off my coat. “I mean, you do look good.”
“Thanks,” I said. “And the recovery was nothing. I took the bus home afterward.”
“They sure have come a long way,” my sister said, wrinkling her nose slightly. She had always been the beautiful one.
When the waitress came, my sister ordered an oat latte and avocado toast. I hesitated.
“Can I get an egg white omelet and a side of sauteed spinach,” I said, “but can you cook it in this?” I pulled out one of the little tubs of approved cooking fat I had been given by the nurse at the clinic.
“Of course,” said the waitress. I hadn’t eaten at a restaurant since before the procedure and had been worried about it. But as I looked around the cavernous dining room I saw several other women with tubs that looked like mine.
My sister watched the transaction with open disgust.
“It tastes fine,” I said. “Kind of like bacon fat.”
“I can’t watch you eat that,” she said when the food came.
“Want a bite?” I waved a bit of floppy egg white at her. She shrieked.
“I think you’re being very closed-minded about this,” I said.
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In the mornings I did my exercises. Afterwards I showered and marveled at the beautiful absences of my body. There was nothing left that dimpled and rolled: there was only the flesh that was meant to be there, the flesh that was truest and most essentially me.
Then I cooked breakfast: egg whites, usually, or turkey bacon with vegetables on the side. Some people had toast and spread it with the fat but that was a bit much for me. I didn’t like to eat it cold. Besides, there was some controversy on the message boards about whether carbs ruined the whole process.
After breakfast I worked from home, moving my fingers over a keyboard and my eyes over a screen.
At night I went out with friends or with men I met on the apps. I wore clothes I ordered off the internet—I knew now that whatever I ordered would fit me. With my friends I drank elaborate sugar-free cocktails at rooftop bars. With the men I drank slightly less elaborate sugar-free cocktails at basement bars. I had taken photos of my new body and added them to my profile, and now the men I matched with were much better. They had jobs and gym memberships and new apartments with shiny gray floors. They wanted to sleep with me but I didn’t do it, not yet. I wasn’t sure my body remembered how.
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The second time I went to the clinic it was for a maintenance appointment.
“Excellent,” the doctor said when he saw me. “I can tell you’re keeping up with the process.”
This time when I woke up from the procedure I was woozier. I had more pain around my torso, and a few bruises.
The nurse handed me a bag with more cooking fat and a few ice packs. I paid at the front desk with my credit card.
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It didn’t really taste like bacon fat. Maybe lard, or suet. It got really hard in the fridge. You had to chip off pieces with a knife.
I thought it was weird, too, when I first heard about it. No one would talk about it directly, not at first, but the message boards buzzed about it with the powerful low-grade whine of a distant air raid siren. Something out of Korea, no, Miami, no, Rio. More effective than anything else on the market. All-natural. Low-risk. The procedure was called Cyclical Fat Sculpting. The logo was a snake eating its own tail.
It was better than other diets I’d tried. Results were immediate. I could eat until I was full. I was rarely hungry. And it tasted good, good enough. Better than eating fat-free. The only thing was you had to plan ahead if you wanted to go to restaurants because some places wouldn’t take it—said it was a health code violation, usually, although I think most chefs just thought it was gross.
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When I found my boyfriend I knew it was him the second he told me he wanted to be my boyfriend. He had been one of the men from the apps. At first I couldn’t hold his face or his name in my mind, but I liked him when I met him. He was hard and strong from the neck down but had a softness in his face that made him look gentle. The first time I took my clothes off in front of him his face became so soft and gentle it looked like it might melt away.
The sex was much better than it had been before the procedure. I was nervous the first time, but I couldn’t believe, afterwards, how easy it was—how completely I could dissolve into it now that there were no positions that made me ugly.
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Sometimes, still, I dreamed about olive oil. Dripping off of slick, crisp roasted vegetables. Drizzled over pasta. Luscious and liquid and bright green.
Or butter—the way it melted and bubbled and browned. Chunks of cold butter cut and eaten on crackers like cheese, like I used to do when I came home drunk. Cold fat that gave, that softened, that tasted of milk.
But these were just dreams. I hated what they contained. These were the things that had ruined me and alienated me from myself.
These were just dreams, and they could not hurt me.
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The third time I went to the clinic my mother went with me.
“You’ve been getting such great results, I want to tag along and see about a consultation,” she said.
She talked to the doctor while I had the procedure. Afterwards she was beaming.
“He said I was a very good candidate,” she said.
When I went to pay my card was declined. I paid with a different credit card.
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“You’re so tiny,” my boyfriend said when his penis was almost inside me. “You’re so tiny, and my dick is so big.”
“Yeah,” I said, “totally.” He pushed in. My eyes rolled back in my head.
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But sex was nothing compared to how I felt when I woke up: when the sun streamed in from my window and illuminated my cheekbones, my ribs, my clavicles, carving and shading all the parts of me that were concave. Or when I stood on my fire escape in a windy sunset and the lightness of my body felt as profound as the lightness of my clothes and hair. This was better than sex, better even than being envied. It was exhilaration. It was favor. It was grace.
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I was starting to crave the food they gave me. This, too, was part of the process. Gradually you weaned yourself off other food: gradually, they said, it would be all you needed, all you wanted. Liposuction, with a twist; keto, made more muscular.
I liked the taste. It tasted right. I ate it straight from the tubs, straight from the fridge, hard and crunchy until it melted on my tongue. Or left it out for a while, until it softened into something like yogurt, or pudding, or melting candle wax. I thought, I can do this forever. If this is what it is for the rest of my life, that’s okay.
A week later I lost my job on a company video call. Eight hundred and seventy-two of us were let go by the CEO at once.
“Think of this as an opportunity to work on yourselves,” she said. “Who knows? This could be the best thing that ever happened to you.”
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I missed my fourth appointment at the clinic, then canceled my fifth. I was behind on my credit card payments.
I ate only the fat until it ran out. For a few days I licked the tubs. For the next few days I ate nothing.
“You’ve got to eat, babe,” my boyfriend said. “Come on, live a little. Let’s get burgers. Let’s get pizza. Let’s fly to Italy and eat gelato by the beach.” He meant it, but he meant it like a dog means things.
“Just eat normally,” my sister said. “You know, don’t pig out, stop when you’re full, eat vegetables with every meal. Eat normal and you’ll be fine.” She, too, seemed to believe this.
The first thing I ate was a boiled egg. It was slimy but somehow sterile, more like the idea of food than food itself. I peeled the white off first and ate that in chunks: slippery, firm, tasteless. Then I ate the yolk: crumbly, creamy. I rolled it over and over with my tongue, crushing it in different directions, luscious against the roof of my mouth.
First I tried keto, then mail-order diets. But those were expensive too. I tried vegan, I tried CICO. I tried to eat normally. I tried to remember: was pasta normal? Was it normal to eat the bread, to have dessert? To weigh everything I ate, to track it all in my phone? Lean meat, red meat? Everyone says fat is fine now. Olive oil, liver, full-fat dairy. A sandwich with two slices of bread seemed normal but also suspect. Fish at a restaurant, $38, $20.99 at the cheaper places, $4.79 for the Filet O’Fish at McDonald’s but that hardly counts. Normal? Was it normal to eat a breakfast burrito and then nothing else that day? Rice was normal, rice had to be normal—but a quarter cup of rice, was that normal? Surely other people were eating more than that.
One night my boyfriend and I went to a restaurant. I’d eaten fruit and yogurt for breakfast, tuna salad for lunch. We waited for our drinks. The waitress put down a basket of bread and a dish of butter. We chatted about my job hunt. I picked out a slice of bread with the lurching precision of a carnival claw, buttered the slice, ate it in small, careful bites. Richness on the tongue. Teeth marks in the butter. I ordered Caesar salad, tomato soup. Spread butter on another piece of bread, ate it slowly. To go with the soup. My boyfriend ordered lamb chops, a baked potato. He loved to eat blood and fat and plain, drab starch. He tore the gristle with his teeth, sucked the bones, smacked his lips. I watched him. I ate another slice of bread. A tablespoon of butter. I’d had bread and soup, bread and salad. The waitress refilled the basket. It would be rude to leave it untouched. It was normal to eat my fill. I took another slice of bread.
As I ate myself back, I knew something was ending.
It was subtle at first. But soon I could feel I was so much more than I wanted to be. My mother told me so. My boyfriend pretended not to notice but I could see that his interest was less keen, that he could tell I was less beautiful now even if he didn’t admit it. He said he was happy. But he reached for me less. He stopped talking about bringing me to meet his parents.
I felt it before I saw it. I felt it in how I walked and fit into clothes and in how many eyes followed me down the street. I ordered clothes and had to return them. I smiled at men and they returned it less frequently. I tried to be happy. I tried to enjoy what people around me kept calling my newfound freedom. Then I tried to lose the weight. Thought about food more than I thought about finding a job. Spent money I didn’t have on steamed salmon and a gym membership. Teased and disciplined myself. Ate, cried, tried and failed to throw up. Became defiant, ate more, ate fattier, ate myself into armor, into massiveness, into nothingness.
Here’s the truth: I had never really felt like I looked good after the procedures. I was just filled with horror, a smug, survivor’s horror, at how bad I must have looked before.
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When my boyfriend dumped me I knew that he himself was not such a great loss. He was a nice ordinary man who knew what he wanted, what he deserved, and what he deserved was a wife who wore bikinis and jogged braless. I knew all along, I think, that we had shared no love that could not be easily recreated.
And when my clothes wouldn’t fit, when I had to gather myself up carefully to sit on the bus, when strangers passing on the street looked at me with pity or anger or disgust, when I looked at myself in the mirror and saw softness and weakness—I knew what I had, and I knew what I was giving up.
In college I’d read about a great sculptor from the Renaissance who carved angels and beautiful men. He carved them from marble, or travertine, or sometimes obsidian. He once said, or was said to have said, that all he did was see the form in the stone and then set it free.
I’d read a joke once about the same thing in a children’s magazine. “How do you carve a statue of David from a block of marble?” asks the child. “Easy,” says the sculptor. “You just get rid of anything that doesn’t look like David.”
Cyclical fat sculpting: it had caught on. It was all the rage now with celebrities and influencers. Everyone knew it worked. It got results. It made you beautiful and, in a way, entirely independent. Inflation was up. Supply chains were fucked. Wheat fields were burning. Why not save on groceries?
I saw the ouroboros everywhere. Winking at me in advertisements. Popping up in suggested accounts, suggested videos.
The first time I cut a soft roll of flesh from my side I was careful. Cauterized the wound with a blowtorch I had once used to make a crème brulee. Saw the white fat and red blood fall to the kitchen floor. I cooked the chop in its own fat and ate it and it was where it belonged. This was how it worked: you took away the fat and ate it back, in pieces, until there was less of you.
There was nothing greater, I knew, than to live off and of and for myself.
I cut a little bit more every week. Shaved the sides down. Hip dips, gone. Arm jiggle, banished. Thighs: incapable of touching! I wrap my torso in bandages and then in bandage dresses. You can get them for cheap right now, but I’ve read they’re coming back next season.
“Oh, you’re looking skinny again,” says my mother, approvingly. My ex wants me back but it’s never been about that. I’m doing this for me. The girls at the temp agency ask me what my secret is. I tell them the truth: it’s all about initiative, self-control, commitment, a true desire to sculpt.
When I cook dinner my only restriction is that I never finish the whole thing. I can cut as big a piece of meat as I want, as long as I don’t finish the whole thing. That’s the principle: the snake can never eat the whole of itself. I eat when I am hungry, so the fat redeems itself. Of myself, renewed; on myself, reliant.
My life is going to change. I can feel it.