Read More: A brief Q&A with Maureen O’Leary
Visualize your higher self and show up as her.
Tracy whispered the mantra and powered through twenty pull-ups in a row before dropping off the bar, palms stinging. Mark handed her a towel.
“I’ll train you for anything but this,” he said. “How about the Miss Bodybuilding Universe Open next year? Or Ironman? Even better.”
Tracy couldn’t tell Mark not to worry. She knew the dangers as well as he did. She wouldn’t want him to take another Astral Gateways job if the roles were reversed. But AG work was how she afforded a luxury apartment with the heated floors in the bathroom, her beautiful clothes, an exclusive gym membership, a Lexus.
“Why do you care so much?” she asked.
“It’s obvious why I care,” Mark said.
Tracy’s heart fluttered like a trapped bird. She never understood other people very well. She didn’t remember her parents or any siblings. She grew up in a series of foster homes after a policeman found her as a small child wandering the city in the middle of the night. Doctors thought she was probably around four years old but they weren’t sure and though her foster families were never cruel, when she officially turned eighteen she was on her own. She didn’t date often enough to know how relationships worked. All she knew was that Mark’s hands were steady when he spotted her and he knew how to push her to muscles’ limits without going too far. As her trainer, he protected her from injury. As her boyfriend, if it wasn’t too early to call him that, he was always kind and when he kissed her for the first time she forgot for just one second that life was hard.
Mark did know how big the Astral Gateways money was, despite his protests. He worked an Astral Gateways gig once and used the proceeds to buy his own gym. He offered her a job as a co-trainer but couldn’t pay in five years what she could make in just one six-month AG contract.
“I’m begging you not to go.” His skin reddened under his tan. He crossed his arms in front of his chest, biceps bulging.
She wavered for a second. Mark wasn’t wrong about the dangers. No one at AG ever glossed over the risk.
“I’ve always been fine,” she said.
“Because you’ve been lucky.” Mark reached out his hand as if to coax her from the edge of a cliff. “Can’t you back out? For me?”
She shook her head once, a tight no, her syrupy resolve hardening to amber. She wouldn’t back out just for him. A lifetime on her own taught her that she could only depend upon herself.
Still, Mark’s crestfallen face tugged at her heart. “I promise to quit after this,” she said. She didn’t say that she was hoping that this would be her last job anyway. “I’ll train my way out of this job alone. You won’t even have to talk to me.”
Mark sighed. “Please. Don’t train by yourself. Let’s just get the weight off as fast as we can. When it’s over, I’ll build you back up.” He walked her to the door with his hand lightly resting on her back, her skin thrilling at the pressure of his fingertips. She hurried away so that she could be alone where she was more comfortable.
The air conditioning in the Astral Gateways lobby blew Tracy’s hair from her face in a cool cloud of eucalyptus and mint. A photo of the CEO Ted sitting in a field of daisies covered an entire wall. Pan flute music floated through invisible speakers as an attendant dressed in white led Tracy to the suite where her body would be sleeping. Ted waited on his cushion, his mouth playing with a knowing smile. His cheekbones cut ledges over a short scruff of beard and her face warmed when she saw him. He was handsome in a way that was impossible to prepare for.
She lay on the white sheet and took a deep breath. If she kept her promise to Mark, she would never go under again. She would miss seeing Ted in person, even if they hardly spoke beyond their initial greetings. She wasn’t and couldn’t be special to him. Ted treated everyone the same, his meditations emanating vibrations that helped a practitioner achieve lift off. The selflessness of the practice was the important factor, yet she treasured her brief moment with him in the room as she went under. A man with that powerful a spirit was almost not a man, but a pure source of positive energy. In his presence she felt totally clear.
She loved that her own problems were suspended on a job. All of her questions were put on hold. Did she love Mark? Was she even capable of a normal relationship? None of that mattered now. On a job for AG, she gave herself to her client for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for months. There was a limited amount of time to get the work done in the client’s body; six months to be safest, ten months at the absolute limit of sanity. There was no time to wonder about love.
The sound of Ted’s breathing moved through her. “Welcome, sister.” Ted’s voice resonated everywhere at once. Tracy placed her right hand on her stomach, her left hand over her heart.
“Thank you, brother,” she said.
The nurse slid a needle into the back of her hand for the IV fluids that would sustain her life. Later they would insert catheters and tubes but she would not be in her body to feel those. Ted rang a pestle against a crystal bowl and drew the sound into a glistening oval. Tracy was good at this part, the best. Lifting away and leaving her body behind was never a difficulty.
This time though, she thought of Mark’s gentle eyes. She felt safe with him. Safe. The word tethered her to her own body until she visualized scissors cutting a thread strung between their hearts. She concentrated on Ted’s crystalline song pulling her up and away and she was gone.
Upon waking, Tracy stared at the ceiling in perfect stillness. The attendants trusted her process. They moved around the room in silence, pulling her free of the IV. Pouring her a glass of fresh water. Listening to her heart.
Tracy searched the brain for the host. Della was the name on the packet she’d read before signing the contract. Della, are you there? Silence. That was okay, at first. Communication was the client’s choice. Her last client was chatty and asked questions, interested in learning how to be fit, even if she didn’t want to do the work on her own.
Della, however, didn’t speak. Not even a whisper. Tracy made fists to get a feel for the hands. The clients were required to cut their nails and crop their hair. There should be nothing for Tracy to fuss with. Nothing to get caught in the exercise machinery.
Tracy regarded the body from a point of view of discovery, not judgment. Her method was simple. She treated the client’s body as she treated her own. She drank smoothies made of kale, collagen, and almond milk. She ate raw walnuts, monkfruit, and lychee. There was a spinach and fish dinner at three in the afternoon and then nothing until noon the next day. The afternoons were for yoga, mediation, and kundalini chanting after abdomen work. Dhan dhan ram das gur. The impossible becomes possible. She returned one client’s body in such a fit state that Tracy heard she stayed in her apartment walking around naked, bumping into furniture, talking to no one for weeks.
Tracy moved to stand. A razor edge of pain shot up the right shin. She cursed in shock. Basic mobility was a prerequisite of a contract. She couldn’t promise results in six months if she couldn’t move the body from the start. When she tried the right foot again, the bone screamed like split wood.
“Something wrong,” she said. The mouth felt full of cotton. A yoke of unaccustomed lethargy bore down across her shoulders. The body wasn’t any bigger than others she took over while the client slept or watched from within, giving in to Tracy’s will. Her clients counted on her to reach their goals. Yet here she was, inhabiting a stranger who paid handsomely for her help, unable to stand and begin.
Later, the company doctor listened to the heart and at Tracy’s urging, palpated the lower right leg. It wasn’t broken, he said. But perhaps pain was to be expected with a body this size.
Tracy swallowed the urge to remind him that this was not her body. But he was one of Astral Gateways’ regular doctors. Of course he knew. But though he didn’t say so, Tracy felt the force of his distaste as he pressed a cold stethoscope to the back.
Afterward she set on walking the hall. With every step, a blade of pain sliced into the right leg, starting at the ankle and ending at the tip of an invisible arrow digging deep into the knee. A shiver of fear twitched a scaly tail inside the stomach. Maybe Mark was right about the risk being too great.
Tracy signed reams of legal documents before every job that outlined in clear language the risk of heart attack, stroke, and death. She was liable for any burn, cut, broken bone, and strained ligament. AG never set her up for failure with an injured body.
Breathless, Tracy returned to her bedroom suite and rechecked Della’s packet. There wasn’t anything about a hurt leg, just the regular information about beauty preferences. Did Della allow tanning? Real sun or spray? Della checked the spray option.
Tracy stood in front of the mirrored wall, every step a separate agony. In the mirrors on opposite walls, the body reached into infinity. The arms and shoulders were strong. Della could have been a power lifter, or a woman from a painting of sturdy peasant women hefting bales of hay with their bare hands. She felt a pang of envy. For Della’s wealth, yes. What wonderful things that money could have been used for besides this. But she was envious also of the strength and heavy grace of the body. This was a body with gravity. This was a body that would stand her ground.
You are what you do, not what you say you do. She said the mantra aloud and found the voice sweet. She wondered if the throat could sing. There was so much yet to learn but right now everything from the skin inward hurt. She muttered mantras to keep the body upright.
Master the day. And then just keep doing that. Day after day.
Great things never come from comfort zones.
She called the name aloud. “Hello? Della?”
Sometimes saying the client’s name caused a response inside the head. Sometimes the client asserted ownership with a brief hello.
From Della, no hello. Instead, an answering gusher of grief exploded from deep within the body with geologic force. Tracy stumbled back onto the bed and stayed there, at the mercy of a wave of crippling and inexplicable sadness for a loss she couldn’t name.
The first morning in Della’s body, Tracy pressed snooze on her phone’s alarm despite her daily mantra upon waking: Snoozers are losers. Yet even after the third snooze, the body wouldn’t move. Sleep pulled on the body like quicksand.
The morning ticked away. She had a timeline on which every second was accounted for, yet she hit snooze again and again until the urge to use the bathroom forced her out of bed. Tracy searched for Della’s consciousness but this client was silent as fog. After the overwhelming sadness from the night before, she thought she should probably have been grateful, but instead she felt strangely lonely.
The exhaustion from the bathroom trip drove Tracy back under the covers until the body had to pee again. She took drinks from the faucet after. The stomach growled but she did not eat. For four days she urinated, drank water, slept.
On the fifth morning she called Mark, tucking the phone under her ear to talk lying down.
“You don’t sound like you,” he said.
“You know I’m not me.” The voice was weak.
“You haven’t come in to train. I thought you were mad at me.”
“I need help,” she said. “Something is wrong here.”
Mark agreed to look into Della and learn what he could from a friend who worked in Astral Gateways security. He called in the afternoon, waking her from the depths of an afternoon nap that felt like a crashing through brambles.
“Della requested you by name,” Mark said. “She insisted on you and no one else.”
“How could she know me?” AG promised energy practitioners perfect anonymity from potential clients.
“I don’t know, “ Mark said, “But you need to lift out.”
“I can’t.” Her eyes felt filled with sand. “I mean I literally could. But this is a challenge, not an excuse.”
“Please come home,” Mark said.
She fell asleep instead.
The days passed and Tracy would not eat or drink except water from the bathroom faucet. The stomach ached for food and the head hurt, but she leaned in to the fatigue and slept through the pain. After eight days of nothing but water, fat cells released into the bloodstream and the nightmares began.
She is dragged down a hall by an older girl. Run, the older child says, run. A door slams and she is alone in the freezing night. Icy concrete from the sidewalk slices into the bottoms of her feet. Her pajamas are slick with blood and the fabric chills against her skin. Pain shoots down her legs starting from her private tender parts as she runs down the sidewalk, turns a corner, runs and runs.
From the moment of waking, the stomach begged to be fed. Tracy refused. No exercise, no food. The hearbeat slowed to a flip turn. This body resisted like none other. By the second week in Tracy’s normal routine, she would have easily bent the client’s body to her will. Muscle fibers would be torn and rewoven. Insulin levels regulated. Fat cells depleted and secreted through sweat, breath, and smoky urine. By week two, the waistbands of clients’ clothes loosened.
This body clung to fat stores as if each cell were a child the body refused to abandon. Tracy walked out of the bathroom and hallucinated a strange man sitting on the bed, his shirt on but no pants, an erection sprung. She blinked and there was no one there. Her room was empty. She slept.
The doctor visited on the tenth day.
“Who is Della?” Tracy asked. […]
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Read More: A brief Q&A with Maureen O’Leary