Page 86 of Slashed Bonds

She always asks. She’s asked every day for three years. I have never once had a good answer.

“Working on it.”

“Mori.”

“There’s a plate. There’s a whole plate. There’s fig.”

A pause.

Then, softer, the way she goes when she’s decided to let something slide:

“Text me a picture of the fig.”

Jeez…

I texted her a picture of the fig.

So. Food.

I’m looking at it, and I can’t tell whether I’m hungry.

That’s not a figure of speech. There’s a wire in most people that runs from the stomach to the brain and reports in, and mine got cut somewhere in year two and never fully grew back.

I eat when I remember. I remember maybe once a day.

Most days I get to nine at night and realize the last thing I put in my mouth was coffee.

Not on purpose. Not the way the clinic means when they ask. I’ve stopped noticing, is all, and noticing is a muscle, and mine atrophied along with everything else.

At Bellwether they weighed you on Mondays.

A scale in the hallway outside the nurses’ station, and a clipboard, and a woman who wrote the number down without reading it out, which was a kindness. If the number went the wrong way two Mondays running you got a tray brought to your room and a chair in the doorway until it was empty.

I got the chair twice. Okafor sat in it. She didn’t watch me eat. She read a magazine and turned the pages loud, so I’d know she was there, and when the tray was empty she took it, left, and never once mentioned it.

That’s the only way anyone’s ever gotten food into me. Not by asking. By sitting in the door.

Nikolai isn’t sitting in the door. He’s across the room with his back half turned, hanging a black shirt at the front of the rack.

But the plate’s in front of me, and the door’s closed, and he hasn’t left.

Same principle. Different furniture.

“You haven’t eaten all day.”

Nikolai. From across the room.

He’s at the clothes rack, and he’s been at the clothes rack for eleven minutes, choosing what he’s going to wear this week and hanging the choices at the front in order.

Tomorrow’s off.

The rest of the week we’ll be in gear from nine to nine, and I can’t work out what a man needs seven outfits for when six of the days involve a chest protector.

He’s not choosing. He’s arranging. It settles something in him. I recognize it.

I like watching him.

That’s new too.