(Foreword: While this story stands alone, readers may find "Valediction for a Different Boy" a useful preamble. The story is found in this author's index.)
If largesse were a 90s' masculine ideal, I was merely avoiding the highest common denominator. Besides, conventional health wisdom had not unilaterally institutionalized 105 pounds on five-eight a social crime. But my oldest stepbrother thought otherwise.
Allow me to put this tale in its proper context.
Only a week ago I was living in the grid locks of a bubble universe with morphine at its epicenter. Owing to my father's absence and the prescribed roles of rankings in my father's house, the responsibility fell upon my oldest half brother, Mishka, to help me make the transition back to Reality Central. By all counts, I was fortunate and grateful that he had taken work leave to minister to my needs until I was rehabilitated.
The combination of substance dependence and the internal turmoil and torment of losing family had damaged my eating pattern and eventually become, apparently, presented as an eating disorder. Of course, this was purely conjecture, from trying to interpret the language of my body's behavior. Truth or myth notwithstanding, in under a month, I had lost interest in food and, consequently, thirty-five pounds.
I first caught sight of my abnormal weight in the mirror when Mishka had undressed me for my bath. That was a week ago, but I had been on an endless popping orgy and failed to foresee that it would evolve as an internal conflict I would have with my own body, and an external one with my stepbrother concerning how best to arrest the disorder and restore me to health.
But Mish, having factored in my foray into moral turpitude as the reason for my weight loss, had put me on a weight-gain program. He had engaged the expertise of our cousin Johan, a doctor, and Johan's colleague, a clinical nutritionist whom I called, in the punctilious conventions of my country's nomenclature, 'Uncle' Arias.
Part of my health regimen included completing ten laps in the family pool every day. Which was not an unmanageable errand to reciprocate, for swimming was a favored sport. I was effecting my final lap in the pool when I heard Mishka's 'Lincoln Navigator' pull up the driveway.
My face surfaced to be met by Mishka's extended arm. Physically and psychologically, Mish had always been my non-departmental muscle, a metaphor now represented in Mishka's gym-enhanced dividends visibly straining against his pointelle sweater while he eased my featherweight out of the pool.
Indeed, I was a diminutive version of First Brother. I could never compete with his five-eleven and 165, and didn't intend to try. I had projected that when I turned 22 and had reached the peak of my development, I would, at best, be five-nine and 150.
"You're still losing weight," Mish said, making careful observation of my ribs, which I tried to hide under the towel.
"No, I'm not," I retorted. "I'm getting better."
But Mish was not wrong. My body was an anorectic's showground. However, it was not something I was consciously aware of, for I had stopped looking at myself in the mirror since the auto accident.
"I thought things were getting better for you," Mish scolded. "At least, that's what you keep saying."
"I'm doing the best I can, Mish," I mumbled unintelligibly.
Mish then surprised me with his arms wrapped over my shoulder. There was no affection in the hug as he disclosed his intent, thereafter, asking, "What's that in your mouth?"
"What?" I asked out of turn.
Mish's fingers reached my mouth to prise it open forcibly.
I shrieked. "Let me go," I howled, "you're hurting me."
Mish's fingers found the evidence that, contrary to what he had suspected, I really had been pursuing legitimate activity. He gaped at the evidence foolishly while I dispensed with the traditionally masculine impulse to check one's emotions and, instead, answered my primal urge to cry: "It's gum, Mish, it's only chewing gum."
Thoroughly appalled at my stepbrother, I pulled away from his arms and made hastily measured reconnaissance for a quick exit. I fled to my bedchamber, not for a moment looking back.
An hour later, Mish knocked on my door. Had he come to apologize or accuse me further?
"Did you think I was doing drugs again?" I asked him point blank.
Mish nodded, approaching me on my bed.
And then his arms enfolded my head, suddenly, burying it deeply under his chin. "I'm sorry, milksop," First Brother apologized. "I was out of line. I do so worry about you."
"I know, Mish," I replied, studying the shadow under his chin.
Though cliched, it was a verity of my relationship with Mishka: I could never stay angry or upset with my best-loved stepbrother for long.
Mishka pulled me up and put me on the weighing scale. I was humiliated, not just by the gesture, but also by the 104 that registered on the scale. My rapid loss of weight was alarming, even to me, considering that ideally I ought to be 140 or 145. To say I was in a state of panic was understating the way I felt.
Mishka was the more dismayed. His demeanor evinced the soreness he was also feeling that his concern, as well as the time and effort he had invested in helping me, was lost on me. It might as well be said he felt as if I was betraying his trust. I always hated it when First Brother was disappointed in me.
"I'm sorry, Mish," I said promptly, feeling guilty. "Don't worry, Mish, I'll eat. I promise. I'm not sick, really. Maybe I've just been negligent, you know, but I'll be more careful."
Mishka appeared sold on my word, yet again, saying with some indignation: "I hope you mean what you say, Han. Undereating and being underweight can kill as easily as overeating and being obese."
It didn't escape my notice the innuendo my half brother had made that I might be deliberately starving myself. But I deferred my feelings to his opinions.
In the coming days, Mishka's charismatic leadership camouflaging a chauvinistic desire to monitor my diet and spy on my eating habits, and the stress of making progress with my weight, turned the subject of my body into a touchy one. About a week into the dawn of my latest adversity, I had been so chagrined by First Brother's intrusiveness that I vented my spleen on him. I told him in unkind terms to back off me. He did. But we were both visibly hurt.
Our relationship strained and our shared borders anywhere at home were a battle rather than a comfort zone. I went out a lot to avoid him. One day I collapsed and passed out while at the shopping mall with friends.
That event was a blessing in disguise: I was forced to make up with my stepbrother. I had wanted Mishka to look after me, and, not finding him, played the violent patient to cadge an early release. For better effect, I had threatened to pull the IV drip from my arm.
First Brother had arrived when I was sleeping under heavy sedation (an evil nurse had dared bare my bottom to give me the shot there) and had climbed onto the bed to lie down beside me. But all that trafficking on my bed awoke me. I found myself in Mish's arms.
At once I was reminded of the time I was five years old. I had suffered congenital kidney failure the year before. To save my life, Mishka had sacrificed one of his to me. I remembered that, just before the transplant operation, I had left my bed to climb up to my stepbrother while he reposed meditatively on his side of the ward. I lay naked on top of him. Mishka, then 21 years old, had said, throwing his long and elegant arms around my frail waist, "You're going to get my big kidney, little man. You're going to live. I promise you."
"What's wrong with me, Mish?" I asked him now.
Mishka seemed to regard the innocence of my question with some vertigo. But it was the first time I admitted to being afraid for myself. It might also be the first time my stepbrother believed that I had not been taking an ethical position on Falstaffanism, or if I were, I would have chosen a subtler route than turning the trick for a permanent exile from the gene pool.
Mish's right arm shifted to my head, thrusting itself under my neck. He cradled my head on his chest; I surmised it was to provide protection and reassurance, but most of all, to force my tensed-up muscles to seek some level of relaxation.
"Don't worry, little man, you'll live. I promise," he said, his words redolent of that other long-ago promise. "I'll look after you."
That same evening, I returned home from hospital with renewed commitment to 'Uncle' Arias's diet program, and was even filled with positive expectancy about its success. Of course, neither Mish nor I had been aware that the program was harming me rather than healing me.
Every morning passed with milk, juice, toast, eggs or cereal. Lunch and supper featured plenty of meat – chicken, fish or veal, steamed vegetables, pasta, potatoes or rice. I was dizzy from the amount of food I ate. I was given vitamins that increased my metabolism and made me hungry all the time so that I became predatory about food.
Before long, my stomach launched an offensive. My lower abdomen retaliated with terrible aches as soon as I had had a meal. I thought it was an attack of wind or colic and took pills for that. The pains were recalcitrant. I told no one, certainly not Mish. Nor did I give up. I stuffed myself with food, silently coping with my pain with a manly resolve.
After all, Mish was so patient and encouraging that I couldn't disappoint or let him down. But when my meals continued to leave my lower abdomen revolting with severe cramps, the sight of food made me surrender to the urge to give up. By the end of the second week, I had rejected food altogether and the week retrogressed into a repeat spiral of suspicions and frustrations.
Mish's desire to take care of me became an obsession. If Mish was unable to recognize me for my skeletal state, I was watching him transform into a brute. For instance, I would weep and he would not be moved. Under duress, I made revelations about the stomach pains that I was getting, but Mish dismissed them as mere complaints or else products of my imagination, as if I had made them up. He saw my pleas as the whining of a child playing up to be spanked.
"It's all in your head," Mish had said to me, "don't think I'm ignorant of your talent at manipulating circumstances and people for your own good. You just love being helpless, don't you? You just want to continue being a little boy and looking like a little boy, to be taken over some man's knees. Admit it: you don't want to grow up. That's why you're starving yourself – to retard your development.
"It's too sad. I can just picture you thirty years from now: behaving like a recycled teenager living in prime time!"
To force a whiteout experience as a self-defense mechanism, the kind that mountain climbers were known to have, I cupped my ears and closed my eyes to Mish's insult. He could sometimes be so cruel.
"I am trying to grow up," I screeched, racing to the safety of my bedchamber while tears rolled down my cheeks, "but you're not letting me!"
"Go ahead, Han, run from me," Mishka yelled after me. "That's all you're good at doing, every time there's a problem. Run from everything."
Feeding time was supposed to be as enjoyable as _s_e_x_, but with Mish, it was an epic struggle of clashing egos. Feeding time was a tearful time, which tended to reduce me to a crybaby, for my stomach was raging against too much food too suddenly.
About a week before I began my college sojourn in America, I was sitting at my usual place at the dining table. I stared at the platter before me, overcome with nausea. Mishka gently persuaded me to start with a small morsel. I couldn't. Mish punished me by emptying my plate into the incinerator bin. I broke down at the sheer anger permanently stenciled on his handsome face. For the hundredth time, I fled from the stepbrother I loved.
The next evening would see a repeat of the wastefulness of the previous evening, so that Mish and I felt like we were watching the rerun of a very bad film. Mishka must have been tired of the film, for he got up from the table and disappeared, without a word, into the kitchen, only to return soon after with a rope and a cane in his hand.
My instincts prompted me to reconnoiter an escape passage yet again, but this time, I was too slow. My other siblings, terror-stricken, abandoned the dining table.
Mishka ordered me up. I obeyed, feeling my knees shake.
As a pattern he had set for matters of discipline and correction, Mishka removed all my clothes for me. Leaving alone my jeans for the time being, he roughly stripped me first of my sweatshirt and undershirt. Afterward he forcefully pulled my faded blue jeans to my ankles before lastly rolling my briefs down my hips. He abandoned my white briefs twisted up into a tiny strip of cloth around my knees.
Mish then restored me, bare-chested and bare-bottomed, to my chair, turning me over the arm. And while I howled in defiance, he removed my sandals and completely yanked away my jeans. Next, he savaged my mobility, binding me to the chair with the rope.
Mishka proceeded to force-feed me, squatting at my head. I swallowed the first morsel he pushed into my mouth and my stomach reviled. I almost threw up, but didn't. Awarding me a hug that was a beneficent counterpoint to his mission, Mish lovingly scooped up another spoonful of pasta, holding the spoon to my lips.
But this second forced morsel ended up on the floor. Mish rose and disappeared behind me. Without too much time being wasted, the crunch of the penalty came in the form of the cane that Mish sent crashing down on my buttocks, naked and exposed to all my siblings as an example. I whimpered as my buttocks smarted. But Mish devoutly rewarded my childish inability to refrain from whining by ripping off my briefs from my knees.
"Spread your legs," Mish commanded me, "wide. Wide, I said." Mish then repositioned my body, pointing my feet toward each other and raising my backside higher up. My private parts, dangling southward between my spread thighs, were shriveled up and pitiful-looking silhouettes.
I was still paying attention to my messy pubic hair and genitals when Mish laid the cane against the meaty parts of my bottom and thighs a few times. The impact of Mish's correcting my attitude was swift, for I was hollering and sobbing from the third lash.
And so, for fifteen minutes, I endured the embarrassment of being force-fed in the nude and caned pari passu by my best-loved stepbrother. I would feel my anus pucker under the stress of being watched by my other siblings. I would hear the whisper of the cane as it whittled the air and then feel its pointed end land on my bottom, never ever truly tormenting me with brutal force, more a subliminally sharp licking of my pliant flesh.
But throughout the time of my correction, Mishka never cut back on bestowing his verbal and physical assurances on me, particularly hugging and kissing me when I managed to keep the food in. I suppose Mishka might have thought that to do this would mean the difference between preserving intimacy and engendering estrangement between the spanker and the spanked.
And then, as a matter course, I was to hear the last whisper of the cane whisk the air but not feel its indignation against my buttocks. One of my siblings had persuaded Second Brother, Kishern, to put a stop to my punishment.
"Enough, Mishka, for God's sake," Kishern yelled. "You've spanked Han enough."
Ignoring rank and rights, and risking possible punishment being meted upon himself, Kishern overrode our oldest brother's ordinance in favor of showing sympathy for his second youngest half brother. Strident remarks changed lips when my brothers came to blows. Later, I thought I saw someone impose his ethological credos on someone else with a sideswipe. At the same time, I was being released from the chair.
"You're a brute," I screeched at both my brothers, at Mish for forcing me to eat, and at Kish for daring to hurt Mish, and then took flight, collapsing in the hallway before I could reach safer territory. I lost consciousness as soon as I felt my stomach implode with an acute pain.
When I awoken again, it was to the bidding of the sun's rays. I would hear Mish tell me that I had been sleeping for two days.
"It was a ruptured appendix," he explained, his fingers gently stroking my cheek. "That was the reason for the pains you were having. The doctors performed an appendectomy the same night you were admitted."
So it wasn't really an eating disorder I had. I wasn't sure to laugh or cry: I felt as though we had all acted like citizens of the Australopethicus genus because we had neglected to check for what had seemed the most obvious cause of my pain.
"You don't have a disorder," Mish continued. "There was never anything wrong with your head. I'm sorry I doubted you, baby.
"I'm also sorry I didn't listen to what you were saying to me. I didn't even try. I wanted to take care of you my way. I thought I was doing a good job all this time looking after you, but all I succeeded in doing was run your life.
"It's just that I had always thought that I'd be around to look after you. I would be, but I didn't count on the fact that you're not going to be around for me to look after. You're growing up so fast. You're going to be a man soon, but you'll be leaving us and I won't be around to see you grow up. I have trouble dealing with this. If you've been afraid of losing Papa and me, I've been loath to let you go.
"I'm sorry, but I have to tell you the truth. I had been doing nothing these past two days, while you were lying here as helpless and little as you always are to me, except think about why I had done those monstrous things to you. And I realized that it was because I was unable and unwilling to let you become a man. The reality is that it scares me that you're going to live in a foreign land.
"I guess I should do some growing up myself, too, huh, milksop? Will you forgive your sometimes very foolish big brother?"
I nodded, my head spinning from Mishka's heartwarming confessions. For whatever else he might have been trying to say to me, I only cared about one thing – First Brother loved me.
As they always say, some things are best forgotten. Since that confession, Mishka and I, and Kishern, for this matter, had not spoken any more about the episode that had taken place just prior to my last collapse.
Mish had, since, also tried his best to let me be a man, even helping me along with good advice. Nevertheless, there would be lapses of memory or judgment when he doted on and spoilt me, even volunteering to accompany me to California and ensuring I settled in comfortably in our Uncle Uen's Berkeley house.
I think, to this day, that the reason Mish doted on me so much was the result of some penance he felt he had to pay because of what he'd done to me. But I had always been just happy my stepbrother had found an excuse to dote on me.
Any boy would.
THE END
(Copyright, JRK, 1997. This revised version is copyright, August, 2000.)