Deadweight

MuscleMania had been the only place to look for anybody.

MuscleMania had been the only place to look for anybody. I didn’t know if being fit was a prerequisite, even socially speaking, and so I stood in the humid basement in biker shorts and a loose T-shirt from a yoga studio I had visited, once, four years prior. Sweat beaded across my chest and forehead, and I spoke in a kind of breathlessness meant to imply it may have been because I might have jogged there and not because I ran hot and was experiencing, to my own horror and the diagnosis of strangers online, symptoms of perimenopause at thirty-two. I had to repeat myself twice: “I saw an ad for a receptionist on Facebook.”

“Ah!” Steve gasped, as though he was shocked by himself, his proneness to unpredictability understood by those closest to him. “I put that there? Are you sure it wasn’t Instagram?”

“Sometimes Instagram asks if you want to share posts to your Facebook profile.” I had learned this when I created a fake page to stalk my exes and panicked when I saw the two were linked to my email address. Steve found this very smart of me, like I knew things that would be helpful to him, and I think my knowledge greatly improved my desirability as a candidate. The rest of the interview – if you could call it that – went smoothly. He had made up his mind.

I didn’t expect such an assuredness from him. He was shorter than I was, which was really saying something, and was very lean. He had bright blonde, close-cropped hair and piercing blue eyes and a few errant mustache hairs that were there on purpose, he had worked so hard to grow them. His arms were littered with artistic tattoos that I later learned were done by Sam, the weekend receptionist and his best friend. Sam was there, too, nodding along, examining me with even less interest. One was of a guitar, another was of a milk carton, and the most irritating was of a ten-pound dumbbell. I found it to be too on the nose, and so I resisted looking at it, lest it upset me.

“I’m impressed, Martha. You worked at Barnes and Noble. That’s huge. Like, a lot of books, I can imagine. How didn’t you lose any of them? And you arrived on time, which makes you better than everyone else who applied!” Steve and Sam chortled together, but stopped prematurely when I didn’t join in. How weren’t they sweating? At that point, water had pooled in my socks and dripped down my biker shorts so that I looked like I peed myself and my shoes made a squelching noise when I walked. I had to take such short, quiet steps.

“I’m reliable!” I said with a tight, toothy smile. “I even wrote that on my cover letter.”

“You did! Amazing! Allow me to introduce you to the rest of the gang,” Steve said. He was the type of person who called an assembly of people gang and squad and crew, even when one of them, like me, stuck out like a sore thumb. He swung his short legs over the e-gate at the entryway and gestured for me to do the same. My sweaty vagina almost got caught on one of the doors. It was my first time getting a proper look around. I didn’t know anything about gyms, but MuscleMania seemed pretty well-equipped. They had all kinds of machines and cables and ropes and boxes and poles. It all reminded me of the FedEx near Barnes and Noble. The walls were mostly black and peppered with inspirational slogans, like IF YOU CAN DREAM IT, YOU CAN DO IT and OPPORTUNITIES DANCE WITH THOSE ALREADY ON THE DANCE FLOOR. Where there weren’t rhymes, there was asbestos. Chunks of the blackness were eaten away to expose the soft white underbelly of it all. “I had been meaning to get that fixed,” Steve said casually, “but the exterminator is, like, so hard to get ahold of. Really working on a tight schedule. That’s not how we do things around here, you know? And so, like, we haven’t really aligned. Yet.”

What was still in place was made of gypsum board, so thin that I couldn’t even rest my back against it. There would be an incident, later on, where a muscled, mustachioed man who resembled Hulk Hogan teetered on his feet after performing a heavy deadlift and collapsed into the gypsum board. He was covered in white residue, threatening to sue, until Steve called him “buddy” enough times that he calmed down.

“And this is Lindsay, my leading lady. The beauty to my brains,” Steve smiled widely, gesturing at the most stunning woman I had ever seen leaving the ladies bathroom. I was too aware of how differently we filled out our respective biker shorts. She had no hip dips, no awkward pads of fat where there should only be smoothness. Her legs were as hairless as a newborn baby. Not even a hint of stubble. Her hair was luscious and long and was artfully kept out of her face with a claw clip. I could never get mine to stay like that. The clips always moved out of place; my baby hairs always had a mind of their own.

“You look like a brunette Bridget Bardot,” I told her, my voice wistful.

“She so does! I’ve never even thought of it! How brilliant, Martha!” Steve spoke as though he should have thought of it himself. “Baby, you so do!”

*

Everyone at the gym, I realized, resembled someone else. There was a Kash Patel doppelganger who trained with a Dwayne Johnson doppelganger. The former often wore a wifebeater that said I TRIED TO GO TO VALHALLA, BUT I WON EVERY FIGHT.

There was a bleach-blonde man who looked exactly like a character from Apocalypse Now. I had only ever watched it for a class at college. To complete my English degree that would land me part-time jobs at Barnes and Noble and MuscleMania. I loved Heart of Darkness, the chilling beauty of it, and yet as a film it was so grotesque; I sobbed, nearly vomiting, at those images of the frail women fleeing from the howling soldiers in Apache helicopters, gripping their children. My professor, sensing my upset, thought it was better for me to leave early.

“Hey,” I said, stupefied, tapping Steve on his small shoulder. “Do you see that blonde guy?”

“Patrick?” MuscleMania had over one hundred members and Steve knew them all by name. “Yeah, what about him?”

“He looks just like a character from a movie.”

Steve squinted at Patrick as he rocked back and forth on his heels in an exaggerated shoulder press. “Really? Which movie?”

I recanted the plot of Apocalypse Now, how old it was, Martin Sheen’s role, Steve not knowing there was a relative of Charlie Sheen’s named Martin, least of all his father, how it takes place during the Vietnam War instead of in Congo, since Francis Coppola took some liberties with the story.

“There’s this famous surfer who gets drafted into their brigade. He’s always so chill and confused, just oblivious to all the killing. But, like, you can tell that he kind of gets some sick pleasure from it over time, that he becomes just as deranged as the rest of the men. It’s a metaphor for the herd mentality, I’m sure. Human depravity. His name is Lance.” I pulled up a grainy photo on my phone, stills from so long ago. “Patrick looks just like him. And look at his shirt. It says “Vietnam.” What are the odds? And he wears it every single day. Does he have multiple of them?”

“That’s so wacky. Life can be strange, dude. Why don’t you ask him about it? In, like, a fun way, of course. Maybe no mention of the killing and blood and stuff. You know, MuscleManiacs love connecting with the staff. It’s what makes us feel like a real squad. I don’t know if you noticed, Martha, but Sam always checks in with the regulars. They love him.”

Steve was polite enough not to say the quiet part out loud: no one really loved me. It had taken me months to open up to Steve and Sam and Lindsay. Painstaking months where my polite questions were unheard and ignored over their own laughter, the warmth of their inside jokes. I overthought every interaction. It took me fifteen minutes of self-bolstering to build up the courage to talk to Steve about Patrick.

I knew Steve meant well, and still, I felt the nerves of my heart pinch, and I tried my best to keep blinking, to still the threat of the tears pooling in my ducts. What was I so sad about? Memories of the film? The gentle phrasing of his words? It was impossible to tell. Everything bled into everything else.

“Yeah,” I nodded quickly enough that he wouldn’t notice anything was amiss. “I should ask.”

*

Two weeks went by before I would. I settled into my role at MuscleMania. Mostly because it was mindless and uncomplicated. Collect the dirty towels, chuck them in the laundry bin, set up a forty minute spin cycle. Fold the towels. Put them back. Smile when someone complained about the smells or missing toilet paper or invasive nudity in the sauna. Text Steve: need toilet paper. Man was groped. Man was groped again. He responded to everything within seconds: Ah, man! Thanks for letting me know, Martha!

I felt the three of them warm up to me, albeit gradually. Sam started smiling at me when we would switch shifts in the afternoons. Lindsay started talking to me about blushes at Sephora and pimple creams and self-tanner, thinly veiled advice. Steve’s friendliness was amplified. I was asked about my weekend, college, my apartment, whether or not I had any pets. Even Patrick would nod in my general direction whenever he entered the gym.

It was a more welcoming environment than Barnes and Noble had been. Everyone there had been pseudo-intellectual, bitter English majors whose dreams of writing the great American novel never took off. The customers were older and curt. Retired men who called me “a big lady” when the book they wanted wasn’t appearing on the barcode scanner. I would cry in the breakroom and then get an email from my manager that I was not permitted, under any circumstances, to cry in the breakroom, which made me cry harder. And perhaps the worst part of it all was that I had no one to whine to about this. Every event that took place served to punctuate my loneliness.

I thought things were going well at MuscleMania. Truly. I was even told by Steve what a good job I was doing. But he had left his phone at the reception desk to investigate why a member’s key wasn’t working, and I saw his screen light up with a message from a group chat. It was called MuscleSquad. I saw the grinning display picture of Sam, who asked if they were still down to get dinner once they closed, and the addictive smoulder of Lindsay, who confirmed that they “so were.”

Was it wrong of me to be disappointed at my exclusion? I couldn’t say. They had known one another far longer than they had known me. What I could say was that it hurt. That just as I was beginning to feel like I belonged, I was pulled so forcefully back out of frame. That I existed only on the edges of something I couldn’t voice my longing for, but that I longed for all the same.

I remembered the words of Steve. Sam always checks in with the regulars. They love him.

I looked over my shoulder to see Patrick squatting at the bar rack, his thick thighs straining in the same black sweatshorts he wore every day. My feet moved me to him, and I loitered in his vicinity until it seemed like he was in between sets.

“Can I ask you a question?” I began plainly. As an afterthought, I smiled.

“Is something wrong?” Patrick’s gaze was inquisitive. Like I was a decorative cactus in the reception area and he had never thought me capable of speech.

“No, no. It’s about your shirt.”

“What about it?”

“It reminds me of a film I saw once.”

“I just have a few more sets, doll. Do you want to talk about it after?”

*

Patrick suggested we talk at a cafe around the corner from MuscleMania. He had never seen Apocalypse Now.

“But what a coincidence, right?” He had ordered a non-fat, decaf latte, and, in a daze, I said I’d get the same thing. I didn’t drink coffee. I let the paper cup warm my hands until the liquid went cold.

“Why Vietnam? Have you been there?”

“Never. A friend of mine did, though, on a humanitarian mission. Part of being a Jesuit or something. He brought me back this shirt. Who would have thought it would be so great for the gym, huh? Perfect amount of airiness.”

“Yeah. I mean, you wear it, like, every day.”

“So,” Patrick lifted the lid of his coffee and produced a dropper of stevia from somewhere in his gym bag, stirring it aggressively as he spoke, “Martha. I want to know more about you.”

I was very uncomfortable with attention of any kind. I was the observer, not the observed. “What do you want to know?”

“Why MuscleMania? I see Sam and Steve and Lindsay working out all the time. Sam and Steve are my bros, actually. But I don’t think I’ve seen you on the gym floor.”

My cheeks pinked. “I don’t work out, really. I used to do yoga, I guess. But I’m just the receptionist.”

“Don’t say you’re just the receptionist.” Patrick wriggled his eyebrows over the steam of his latte. His teeth were large and square and marred by distracting white lesions. Up close, all his features seemed television-ready. He had a wide set forehead and nose, a light splatter of freckles on his cheeks. His hair looked bright yellow instead of blonde, brittle and straw-like. Cartoonish. I wanted to ask if he suffered from body-wide demineralization but knew that would be invasive. He did a wonderful job of concealing these flaws in appearance so that you would only really notice if you were observing him as closely as I was. He painted over himself with wide enough strokes that you could easily forget what was underneath.

“Tell me about you,” I said, deflecting.

Patrick shrugged. “Not much to say. I’m a normal guy. I work in car insurance, lift whenever I can, watch Sunday night football at bars around town. I have two brothers who live out in California.”

“You’re not at work today.” It was more of an observation than anything else. Perhaps it had been the wrong one to make.

“I’ve been going through some stuff. I decided to take some time off.”

I nodded as if this all made perfect sense. “Because I’ve been seeing you in the mornings every day since I started working at MuscleMania.”

His smile tightened. “I’ve been going through some stuff.”

When I smiled back, he leaned back in his chair, releasing the tension from his muscles. For someone who worked out as often as he did and was rigid with muscle, I had a nagging feeling he didn’t look anything like how he wanted to.

“I don’t usually go for chubby girls, Martha. But I feel like you’re different.”

I didn’t know how to tell him that he wouldn’t need to go for me, that we were only here because he reminded me of someone else. “Okay.”

Patrick offered that we go back to his apartment. It was a request I could have rejected, but something about it still being light out and him living so close by made me accept. I felt oddly guilty that this whole excursion was my doing, although he was the one who suggested we get coffee. As we walked there, I thought of Sam and Steve and Lindsay. I wondered how their meal was going, if they were laughing, if they mentioned me at all.

“This is me,” Patrick eventually said in front of an aging brownstone.

“I can see that,” I snapped without meaning to.

We ascended a single, short flight of stairs and he jimmied with the lock and keys until we were confronted by a cracked leather couch, a yellowing refrigerator, rows of DVDs and old books on shelves. The walls were bare save for a few posters of wrestlers I couldn’t name and a photo of Patrick at some graduation. It could have been high school or college. He looked exactly the same, as though it were taken that morning.

He didn’t gesture for me to sit anywhere, so I lingered next to the aging couch. The apartment was alive with the hum of the refrigerator, and he kicked it open with his left foot and a grunt to produce two beers.

“I don’t drink,” I said blankly.

“Suit yourself.” Patrick cracked open one can and took a long sip. He leaned back on the couch and swung his big legs onto a console table, sighing deeply and closing his eyes, as though he were carrying the weight of the world.

“Was this your parents’ apartment?”

He opened a single eye. “No. Why do you ask?”

“The furniture. It’s a bit old. I don’t know.”

This displeased him. “I picked it out myself.”

Things were awkward and tense and silent. My eyes fluttered to the ceiling, where the paint was cracking. It reminded me a bit of the gym. I wondered if he also had asbestos.

“Tell me something about you,” I said. “Something you don’t usually tell people when you first meet them.”

This amused him. “Why should I?”

“Why not? We’re getting to know one another, aren’t we? Do you have anything else we could talk about?”

Patrick’s eyes rested on me. He had just the thing. “I was in a very bad accident when I was a teenager.”

“Oh, no,” I said sympathetically, although deep down I had been pining for something juicier.

“Yeah. I was sprinting during gym class at school, and I accidentally ran into the wall. I broke one of my arms, my forehead and my clavicle. I ended up needing three surgeries. The forehead one was so serious that I was in a full body brace for months. I couldn’t walk or even sit upright. My friends would come into the room with empty water bottles every few hours just so I could pee. And my muscles completely deflated. Like empty balloons. Just sacks of skin.” Patrick flexed a bicep. “That’s why I’m so into the gym, Martha. PTSD.”

Suddenly I imagined his weak, watery bones, his strong form withering away. Lifting his arm from the hospital bed and seeing it jiggle like slime, the soft, mottled flesh of a rotten animal. I wished I could unsee it. I wish he hadn’t said it. My mind was struck with the picture of him flailing during a deadlift, collapsing comically back onto the gypsum board walls at MuscleMania, his chest crushed by the barbell, his skin and bones nothing but a thick, dark soup garnished by his blonde hair.

“Let’s stop talking about this,” I said. “Forget that I asked.” My ears were hot and clogged with a thickness I couldn’t remember detecting. My pulse strummed sporadically in my veins, my guts went into overdrive, gurgling menacingly, protesting the very place I was in. Demanding to be free of his apartment. What bothered me so much about his pain? My anxiety that something like that could befall me? But I never went to the gym or ran. I stayed where I was safest: the couch, mainly. The sale section at Ulta. Or was it pity? Anger at the cosmos? Anger at myself for failing to protect people from their fates? I thought that might make me a far more empathetic person than I ever took myself for. Perhaps I didn’t know myself as well as I thought I did. Perhaps I was destined for something more, then, something greater than this apartment, a job at MuscleMania, being left out of the employee group chat. I was meant for a spectacular kind of life few could understand. That was why I wept so easily, why I felt so much. The epiphany both pleased and frightened me. My stomach churned once more.

“I’m not feeling well, Patrick. Maybe it was the coffee.”

His cheeks flushed with relief at being free of me. “Oh, no. I guess you should get going then.”

I moved to stand up and then remembered I had never sat down. I stared at his face once more, beige and big and confident. His stained smile. Was he wearing concealer? I couldn’t tell. I had been about to turn around when I noticed something behind him that gave me pause.

“What is that?”

“What’s what?”

“I thought you said you had never seen it.”

Those wheatened cheeks blanched. “What are you talking about?”

“The film, Patrick. Apocalypse Now. You said you’d never seen it but you have the DVD.”

“Do I?” The laugh he expelled was forceful and impatient. “Maybe a friend left it here.”

“Are you sure you haven’t seen it, Patrick?”

“I’m fucking sure, okay, Martha?” He bared his teeth, the lips around them ruddy and moist. He was sweating. “I really would like for you to go now.”

*

“I think you misunderstood, Martha, which is just, like, super unfortunate. Because that’s not how we do things at MuscleMania.”

I was sitting alone with Steve in a room of MuscleMania I hadn’t even known existed. Something else they kept from me. It looked like a makeshift coat closet on the outside but housed a desk and a fake plant and a second MacBook and the worst fluorescent lighting I’d ever seen.

“It was Patrick who suggested we go out, Steve. I just wanted to ask him about his shirt. It was also Patrick who invited me back to his apartment. I can guarantee you that I didn’t harass him. I was there for all of five minutes.”

“That’s not how he described it.” It was the first time I had ever seen Steve anything close to unhappy. He looked like a small labradoodle who didn’t get a treat. Furrowed brows, a performative frown. “He said you asked some strange questions.”

“I didn’t, Steve. Really.” My defense was half-hearted. I saw the pensive looks on Sam and Lindsay’s faces when I arrived for my shift. The fact that Sam was there at all was strange, considering he worked afternoons.

“Like I said, it’s super unfortunate. But we want MuscleMania to feel safe for all our members, Martha. I’m sure you get it. We can’t have anyone feeling violated, even if you meant well. It would really disrupt the squad vibes we have going on.”

“Yeah,” I replied, my voice hollow.

“I’m sorry that it’s come to this. We loved having you here. I’m not sure if you have any belongings here, but I’d appreciate it if you could clear them before you go. I wouldn’t want you making any unnecessary trips back here.” Steve stood up, and I followed suit. “I wish you the best with whatever the universe has planned for you.”

I didn’t really have any belongings there. Just an extra pair of biker shorts and a water bottle. I held them close to my chest as my legs carried me out. I hadn’t seen Patrick that morning although he always got there right as we opened, so I assumed he may not be coming back to MuscleMania, either. But as the automatic doors slid open for me, there he was. He was wearing a new shirt. Plain white. He parted his lips as though he was about to say something. He struggled with himself, just as I did. I saw it. The hint of life flickering beyond his lids. Whatever came out was indiscernible and mumbled. I couldn’t understand because I was too far.