He threw the remains of the second Whopper out the window and then looked at the mixed slime of juices and sauce on his hand with a desperate kind of horror. And then he did the only sane thing possible under the circumstances: he laughed. And promised himself: No more. The binge would end.

That night, as he sat in front of the fireplace reading The Wall Street Journal, Linda came in to bestow a good-night kiss on him, drew back a little, and said: 'You're starting to look like Sylvester Stallone, Daddy.'

'Oh, Christ,' Halleck said, rolling his eyes, and then they both laughed.

Billy Halleck discovered that a crude sort of ritual had attached itself to his procedure for weighing himself. When had it happened? He didn't know. As a kid he had simply jumped on once in a while, taken a cursory glance at his weight, and then jumped off again. But at some point during the period when he had drifted up from 190 to a weight that was, as impossible as it seemed, an eighth of a ton, that ritual had begun.

Ritual, hell, he told himself. Habit. That's all it is, just a habit.

Ritual, his deeper mind whispered inarguably back. He was an agnostic and he hadn't been through the doors of any church since age nineteen, but he recognized a ritual when he saw it, and this weigh-in procedure was almost a genuflection. See, God, I do it the same every time, so keep this here white, upwardly mobile lawyer safe from the heart attack or stroke that every actuarial table in the world says I can expect right around the age of forty-seven. In the name of cholesterol and saturated fats we pray. Amen.

The ritual begins in the bedroom. Take off the clothes. Put on the dark green velour robe. Chuck all the dirty clothes down the laundry chute. If this is the first or second wearing of the suit, and if there are no egregious stains on. it, hang it neatly in the closet.

Move down the hall to the bathroom. Enter with reverence, awe, reluctance. Here is the confessional where one must face one's wate, and, consequently, one's fate. Doff the robe. Hang it on the hook by the tub. Void the bladder. If a bowel movement seems a possibility – even a remote possibility – go for it. He had absolutely no idea how much the average bowel movement might weigh, but the principle was logical, unshakable: throw all the ballast overboard that you could.

Heidi had observed this ritual, and she had once sarcastically asked him if he wouldn't like an ostrich feather for his birthday. Then, she said, he could stick it down his throat and vomit once or twice before weighing himself. Billy told her not to be a wise-ass … and later that night had found himself musing that the idea actually had its attractions.

One Wednesday morning, Halleck threw this ritual overboard for the first time in years. On Wednesday morning Halleck became a heretic. He had perhaps become something even blacker, because, like a devil-worshiper who deliberately perverts a religious ceremony by hanging crosses upside down and reciting the Lord's Prayer backward, Halleck entirely reversed his field.

He dressed, filled his pockets with all the change he could find (plus his Swiss army knife, of course), put on his clunkiest, heaviest shoes, and then ate a gigantic breakfast, grimly ignoring his throbbing bladder. He downed two fried eggs, four s trips of bacon, toast, and hash browns. He drank orange juice and a cup of coffee (three sugars).

With all that sloshing around inside of him, Halleck grimly made his way up the stairs to the bathroom. He paused for a moment, looking at the scale. Looking at it had been no treat before, but it was even less pleasant now.

He steeled himself and got on.

221.

That can't be right! His heart, speeding up in his chest. Hell, no! Something's out of whack! Something

'Stop it,' Halleck whispered in a low, husky voice. He backed away from the scale as a man might back away from a dog he knew meant to bite. He put the back of his hand up to his mouth and rubbed it slowly back and forth.

'Billy?', Heidi called up the stairs.

Halleck looked to the left and saw his own white face staring back at him from the mirror. There were purple pouches under his eyes that had never been there before, and the ladder of lines in his forehead seemed deeper.

Cancer, he thought again, and mixing with the word, he heard the Gypsy whispering again.

'Billy? Are you upstairs?'

Cancer, sure, you bet, that's it. He cursed me somehow. The old woman was his wife … or maybe his sister … and he cursed me. Is that possible? Could such a thing be? Could cancer be eating into my guts right now, eating me inside, the way his nose … ?

A small, terrified sound escaped his throat. The face of the man in the mirror was sickly horrified, the hag-face of a long-term invalid. In that moment Halleck almost believed it: that he had cancer, that he was riddled with it.

'Bil-lee!'

'Yeah, I'm here.' His voice was steady. Almost.

'God, I've been Yelling forever!'

'Sorry.' Just don't come up here, Heidi, don't see me looking like this or you'll have me in the fucking Mayo Clinic before the noon whistle blows. Just stay down there where you belong. Please.

'You won't forget to make an appointment with Michael Houston, will you?'

'No,' he said. 'I'll make one.'

'Thank you, dear,' Heidi called up softly, and mercifully retreated.

Halleck urinated, then washed his hands and face. When he thought he had begun to look like himself again – more or less – he went downstairs, trying to whistle.

He had never been so afraid in his life.

'How much weight?' Dr Houston asked. Halleck, determined to be honest now that he was actually facing the man, told him he had lost about thirty pounds in three weeks. 'Wow!' Houston said.

'Heidi's a little worried. You know how wives can be.

'She's right to be worried,' Houston said.

Michael Houston was a Fairview archetype: the Handsome Doctor with White Hair and a Malibu Tan. When you glimpsed him sitting at one of the parasol-equipped tables which surrounded the country club's outdoor bar, he looked like a younger version of Marcus Welby, MD. The poolside bar, which was called the Watering Hole, was where he and Halleck were now. Houston was wearing red golfing pants held up with a shiny white belt. His feet were dressed in white golfing shoes. His shirt was Lacoste, his watch a Rolex. He was drinking a pina colada. One of his standard witticisms was referring to them as 'penis coladas.' He and his wife had two eerily beautiful children and lived in one of the larger houses on Lantern Drive they were in walking distance of the country club, a fact of which Jenny Houston boasted when she was drunk. It meant that their house had cost well over a hundred and fifty K. Houston drove a brown Mercedes four-door. She drove a Cadillac Cimarron that looked like a Rolls-Royce with hemorrhoids. Their kids went to a private school in Westport. Fairview gossip – which was true more often than not – suggested that Michael and Jenny Houston had reached a modus vivendi: he was an obsessive philanderer and she started in on the whiskey sours around three in the afternoon. Just a typical Fairview family, Halleck thought, and suddenly felt tired as well as scared. He either knew these people too well or thought he did, and either way it came to the same.

He looked down at his own shiny white shoes and thought: Who are you kidding? You wear the tribal feather.

'I want to see you in my office tomorrow,' Houston said.

'I've got a case'

'Never mind your case. This is more important. In the meantime, tell me this. Have you had any bleeding? Rectal? Mouth?'

'No.*

'Notice any bleeding from the scalp when you comb your hair?'