Page 17 of Takedown

And for one week, the two walls of that room merged into one.

Because the scale doesn't take checks. Pemberton's family could buy the building, and Pemberton still had to spit into a bottle in his Tuesday seminar like the rest of us. Miles — Miles, whose people own a plane — sat in the locker room Wednesday staring at a single almond like it had wronged him personally.

"I want you to know," he announced to the room, "that I dreamed about a sandwich last night. Not a woman. Not glory. A sandwich. It had a name. I'm not telling you the name."

"Was it Deborah," said Sam, not looking up from his chemistry.

"It was Deborah," Miles whispered, broken, and even Aleks laughed, once, like a door clicking, which for Aleks is hysterics.

Aleks. I should tell you about Aleks and cut week, because I noticed it that Wednesday and didn't know yet what I was looking at.

Everybody suffers on a cut. Aleks didn't. That was the thing. The rest of us wore it — the gallows jokes, the sandwich dreams, the collective theater of misery that gets a room through — and Aleks moved through the week like it was any other week, precise, silent, hitting his marks, and it took me until Wednesday to figure out what was off about it: he wasn't rationing. He'd been living at the ration all along. The cut didn't cost him anything, because he'd never let himself have the thing the cut takes away.

Sam watched him that whole week the way you watch a gauge. I caught him at it — the chemistry book open, his eyes over the top of it, tracking Aleks across the room, quiet math running behind his face. Thursday, Aleks did extra sprints after Halloran called it, alone, and Sam packed his bag very slowly until Aleks finished, and they walked out together, not talking.

I filed the whole thing under not my business, because I was nineteen and had my own furnace to feed. You file things. Later you find the drawer again. That's a different book too. I'm telling you now so you'll recognize the sound of it — a door clicking, once, in a room full of laughing men.

That's the thing about cut week that no one who hasn't done it will ever understand. It's miserable, and it's the closest thing to church I know. Everybody hungry together. Everybody's body telling the truth at the same time. All the money in New Hampshire, and by Thursday every man in that room was down to the same currency — water, salt, and will.

For the first time since the covered bridge, I had home-field advantage. Hunger I knew. Hunger and me went way back.

* * *

What I didn't know was cutting next to him.

Same weight means same schedule. Five a.m. in the sauna, just us, because we were the two closest to the number — me down six with four to go, him down five with four to go, both of us right at the line where cutting stops being math and starts being character.

You want to know what a man actually looks like? Not the singlet version. The Thursday-of-cut-week version. The sauna had one working light and cedar walls gone black with forty years of this exact suffering, and Grayson Whitfield sat across from me on the top bench with a towel around his neck and his ribs showing.

Ribs. On the architecture. The cut had stripped the polish off him and what was underneath was — I'm going to say it plainly, it's the only way I know — carved. Every breath moved countable bone under the skin. The long muscles down his stomach stood up like something drawn on with a thumbnail. He sat with his forearms on his knees and his head down and sweat running off the ends of his hair, one drop at a time, patient as a leak, and none of it — none of it — was for anybody. No mirror in a sauna. No gaze to dress for. Just a body being spent for a number, beautiful the way work is beautiful, and completely unaware of itself.

I looked. Sue me. The agreement says there's nothing to look at, and the agreement is a liar.

"Stop it," he said, head still down.

My heart did a full extra beat. "Stop what."

"Thinking about food. I can hear it."

"...I was thinking about pierogi."

"I don't know what that is and I'd kill a man for it." He lifted his head, and even his face was cut — cheekbones like the '62 photograph gone sharper, eyes a little too bright the way everyone's get on day four. "Describe it. Slowly."

"That's sick."

"Kovac. We're in a wooden box losing our body weight on purpose. Sick left on Tuesday. Describe the pierogi."

So I did. Potato and cheese, the way my mother made them before she got sick, fried in butter after boiling — he made an actual sound at fried in butter after boiling — onions gone brown and sweet, sour cream cold on the hot dough. I built it slow, cruel, detail by detail, and he sat there with his eyes shut taking it like a man at mass, and when I finished he exhaled through his nose and said, "Okay. New rule. We do that every morning. Food radio."

"You're gonna owe me one."

"Friday night, after weigh-ins, I'll describe my grandmother's cook's roast potatoes and you'll weep like a child."

"Your grandmother has a cook."

"My grandmother has two cooks who hate each other. It's the only entertainment in that house." A beat. The drop of sweat fell off his hair. "You'd rather hear about the feud, wouldn't you."

"So much more than the potatoes."