Alexander Jablokov - Doing The Circuit

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DOING THE CIRCUIT

Alexander Jablokov

"So tell me, Fiona, what do you want this exercise program to achieve?"

"I'm sorry?"

"What's your goal? I'm your trainer. I have to know what you're after."

"I want, you know, a flatter stomach?"

I make a note on my sheet. "Okay."

"And, like, a tighter butt?"

"Fine."

"And I want to be able to brachiate."

"Brachiate? Swing through the trees like a gibbon?"

"A siamang, actually. Yeah. And I want to climb. It's in this year: radar antennas, buildings under

construction, power plant cooling towers...."

"Good, great."

"But it's not just fitness for me. You see, I've got this girlfriend?"

I don't want to hear it. "We'll work biceps, lats, all that. Some surgical modification of the rotator cuff

may prove necessary...do you understand that?"

"Yes."

"It can be done as an outpatient procedure. And your arms need to be lengthened. That's a little more

complicated. We'll insert lengths of titanium alloy into your humerus, ulna, and radius. We've found that

gives us the best balance of flexibility versus strength."

"Great! My girlfriend will love that."

I'm not really in any mood to discuss girlfriends. "Those fashion 'ceps of yours...very impressive, Fiona.

Climbing a long-time ambition for you?"

Her biceps are massive, craggy massifs, and loom from holes cut in her denim sleeves.

"You know what's funny? I didn't have any idea when I had these installed. I just liked that tectonic look,

you know? These are my two favorites. The right one's the Eiger, the left is K2."

The Eiger's infamous North Face, just a trace of snow clinging in the cracks, is particularly striking, a

death waiting to happen.

"But if you want the hylobatidae mods...." I begin.

"I know, I know. I'll have to give up on geographical features. I'm ready."

Fiona, like many of my clients, is desperate to adhere to society's arbitrary standards of beauty. And she

is gorgeous, I must admit. There are times when the arbitrary is universal, eternal. I'm glad this is the time

I live in.

She's completely covered with matted reddish hair, so that her green eyes look like jade earrings lost on

a shag carpet. Her fingers and toes are webbed, nothing excessive, nice and subtle. She's scrimshawed

her surgically implanted walrus tusks with faux-na‹f images representing the passage of a bill through

Congress. I can smell the bitter musk of her anal glands.

I would be head over heels, except I'm in love with someone else. Someone I can no longer reach.

"Can I...touch your skull?" I say to Fiona.

"Oh, go right ahead. Lots of people like to."

Her cranial bones flex under my fingers. Through hormonal regression she's regained the open sutures

and the fontanel of a newborn infant. She wears a slant board strapped tight to her forehead. In a few

months it will give her that popular Mayan deformation of the skull, with the sloping forehead and the

egg- shaped head.

"Mayan mothers used to dangle a bead in front of their child's eyes," I say. "It crossed their eyes. That

was considered extremely fashionable."

"Oh, really?" I can tell she thinks I'm really lame, out of it.

I recover by getting businesslike. "All right. We'll start right off with preacher-bench curls, nothing heavy

--"

"Did I tell you how I met her?"

"Who?"

"My girlfriend."

It doesn't look like there's any way to avoid it.

"No, you didn't."

"She hit me with a long-distance Taser shot while I was hanging out with some friends in an abandoned

swimming pool. Isn't that silly? Nothing was in it but some rotting lime Jello from some old party. When I

recovered from my convulsions I looked up and fell in love. You might have heard of her? Janine

Pingree?"

"Janine Pingree? Glasstooth Pingree?"

She smirks. "That's right. That's her."

Glass is a terrible substance for teeth. That's what my nine-fingered dentist told me, anyway. Pingree has

the shattered pieces of a rose window from the west front of some defunct medieval cathedral in her

mouth. I understand she's getting slow lead poisoning from it: peripheral neuropathy, saturnine gout, renal

failure, the works. Her fans imitate her pained gouty shuffle, her dropped wrists, her inane, slurred

speech. But when she clicks on that halogen bulb that has replaced her uvula, all is forgiven. Her mouth

glows like the Age of Faith.

"Wonderful," I say, not meaning it.

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Alexander Jablokov - Doing The Circuit

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