Thinner - Stephen King [49]
Halleck ran out into the night and stood there breathing great lungfuls of clean air, his head bowed, his thighs trembling.
Chapter Thirteen
172
He thought restlessly for the rest of the week of calling Ginelli at Three Brothers - Ginelli seemed like an answer of some kind -just what kind, he didn't know. But in the end he went ahead and checked into the Glassman Clinic and began the metabolic series. If he had been single and alone, as Hopley was (Hopley had made several guest appearances in Billy's dreams the night before), he would have canceled the whole business. But there was Heidi to think about and there was Linda - Linda, who truly was an innocent bystander and who understood none of this. So he checked into the clinic, hiding his crazy knowledge like a man hiding a drug habit.
It was, after all, a place to be, and while he was there, Kirk Penschley and the Barton Detective Services would be taking care of his business. He hoped.
So he was poked and prodded. He drank a horrid chalky-tasting barium solution. He was given X rays, a CAT-scan, an EEG, an EKG, and a total metabolic survey. Visiting doctors were brought around to look at him as if he were a rare zoo exhibit. A giant panda, or maybe the last of the dodo birds, Billy thought, sitting in the solarium and holding an unread National Geographic in his hands. There were Band-Aids on the backs of both hands. They had stuck a lot of needles in him.
On his second morning at Glassman, as he submitted to yet another round of poking and prying and tapping, he noticed that he could see the double stack of his ribs for the first time since since high school? No, since forever. His bones were making themselves known, casting shadows against his skin, coming triumphantly out. Not only were the love handles above his hips gone, the blades of his pelvic bones were clearly visible. Touching one of them, he thought that it felt knobby, like the gearshift of the first car he had ever owned, a 1957 Pontiac. He laughed a little, and then felt the sting of tears. All of his days were like that now. Upsy-downsy, weather unsettled, chance of showers.
I'd kill him very slowly, he heard Hopley saying. I will spare you the details.
Why? Billy thought, lying sleepless in his clinic bed with the raised invalid sides. You didn't spare me anything else.
During his three-day stay at Glassman, Halleck lost seven pounds. Not much, he thought with his own brand of gallows joviality. Not much, less than the weight of a medium-sized bag of sugar. At this rate I won't fade away to nothing until gee! Almost October!
172, his mind chanted. 172 now, if you were a boxer you'd be out of the heavyweight class and into the middleweight would you care to try for welterweight, Billy? Lightweight? Bantamweight? How about flyweight?
Flowers came: from Heidi, from the firm. A small nosegay came from Linda - written on the card in her flat, sprawling hand was Please get well soon, Daddy - Love you, Lin. Billy Halleck cried over that.
On the third day, dressed again, he met with the three doctors in charge of his case. He felt much less vulnerable in jeans and a MEET ME IN FAIRVIEW T-shirt; it was really amazing how much it meant to be out of one of the goddamn hospital johnnies. He listened to them, thought of Leda Rossington, and suppressed a grim smile.
They knew exactly what was wrong with him; they were not mystified at all. Au contraire, they were so excited they were damned near making weewee in their pants. Well maybe a note of caution was in order. Maybe they didn't know exactly what was wrong with him yet, but it was surely one of two things (or possibly three). One of them was a rare wasting disease that had never been seen outside of Micronesia. One was a rare metabolic disease that had never been completely described. The third - just a possibility, mind you! - was a psychological form of anorexia nervosa, this last so rare that it had long been suspected but never actually proven.