Orientation Read Online Free PDF Page A

Filipina on the second floor took them to the laundromat. She and her two daughters would need most of a day to transport and launder these vast garments.
    It was late afternoon and he was watching TV. He was flipping distractedly through the channels with the remote. He got free cable. (We believe, the cable people had said, that no American should be deprived of TV-viewing options.) He lived alone. He was forty-two years old. He had been honorably discharged two decades ago, returning from Southeast Asia with a medal of valor, an addiction to alcohol, and an inability to answer the question: What now? When he’d stopped drinking, he could not stop eating. He had found a kind of answer within his insatiable appetite. At the age of twenty-five he weighed 380 pounds, and he reached the 500 mark—joining the quarter-ton club—by his thirtieth birthday. He currently weighed just over 600 pounds. And he was at this moment very, very hungry.
    He looked at the clock in the kitchenette. That bastard had left with his money over two hours ago. He had asked a neighbor, a fellow vet who lived two doors down, to go to the market for him, to buy as many packages of hot dogs—cheap, filling, and quick to eat raw—as he could with a ten-dollar bill. He knew he should not have trusted this man, a chronic boozer who’d lost his legs just below the knee and who, several times a year, would lose his prostheses as well, and could on these occasions be heard returning predawn from an all-night bender—filthy and bruised and penniless—scuttling and grunting in the stairwell, violently refusing any assistance as he made his lone and legless way five flights up.
    The apartment window was open, and the curtains eddied with the onset of a breeze. He pulled up his caftan to expose himself to it, wadding yards of cloth and gathering the rolled wad onto his forearms to pinion it against his neck and shoulders. This took some work, and he was breathing hard when he was done. It was a hot one today. Days like this made him keenly aware of how badly it smelled in his apartment, much of the stink wafting from the bathroom, which the volunteers cleaned for him three times a week. Years ago, when he had finally gotten too big to leave his apartment, the members of a local church banded together and made him their special project. They deposited his monthly VA checks, shopped for his groceries, cooked him an occasional hot meal. Toward the end of the month, when he frequently ran out of food, they urged him to call. “Just give us a jingle,” they chided, amused at his reluctance to summon them. They were reliable and earnest and devoutly generous, completely committed to their good works, and he could not stand having them around. They said “Howdy!” upon arrival and punctuated everything they said thereafter with either “Okey-dokey!” or “Alrighty!” When they gave him his sponge bath, or when they applied the ointments and powders prescribed for his lesions and fungal infections, they undertook these tasks with the glee of schoolchildren working a charity car wash. And they proselytized incessantly, paraphrasing biblical passages that warned against gluttony and submitting too readily to the appetites; they spoke of hunger and desire as one would speak of disreputable kin. They had given him a Bible, and reading through it—reading the whole damn book—he had found only a handful of references that warned against eating too much, but hundreds that celebrated eating and appetite. God rewarded his children with bountiful harvests, and the tribes of Israel, when not slaughtering each other, were always breaking bread. Jesus was the metaphysical short-order cook, serving up fishes and loaves and wine to multitudes wherever they gathered. And what about the Last Supper? Nobody was counting calories in the Bible. Everybody had their fill. But he did not engage this issue with them. He did not want to antagonize the people he hated needing to