Chapter 28

After just the first fifty flights of stairs, my breath won’t stay inside me long enough to do any good. My feet fly out behind me. My heart is jumping against the ribs it’s behind inside my chest. The insides of my mouth and tongue are thick and stuck together with dried-up spit. Where I’m at is one of those stair climbing machines the agent has installed. You climb and climb forever and never get off the ground. You’re trapped in your hotel room. It’s the mystical sweat lodge experience of our time, the only sort of Indian vision quest we can schedule into our daily planner.

Our StairMaster to Heaven. Around the sixtieth floor, sweat is stretching my shirt down to my knees. The lining of my lungs feels the way a ladder looks in nylon stockings, stretched, snagged, a tear. In my lungs. A rupture. The way a tire looks before a blowout, that’s how my lungs feel. The way it smells when your electric heater or hair dryer burns off a layer of dust, that’s how hot my ears feel. Why I’m doing this is because the agent says there’s thirty pounds too much of me for him to make famous. If your body is a temple, you can pile up too much deferred maintenance. If your body is a temple, mine was a real fixer-upper. Somehow, I should’ve seen this coming. The same way every generation reinvents Christ, the agent’s giving me the same makeover. The agent says nobody is going to worship anybody with my role of flab around his middle. These days, people aren’t going to fill stadiums to get preached at by somebody who isn’t beautiful. This is why I’m going nowhere at the rate of seven hundred calories an hour. Around the eightieth floor, my bladder feels nested between the top of my legs. When you pull plastic wrap off something in the microwave and the steam sunburns your fingers in an instant, my breath is that hot. You’re going up and up and up and not getting anywhere. It’s the illusion of progress. What you want to think is your salvation. What people forget is a journey to nowhere starts with a single step, too. It’s not as if the great coyote spirit comes to you, but around the eighty-first floor, these random thoughts from out of the ozone just catch in your head. Silly things the agent told you, now they add up. The way you feel when you’re scrubbing with pure ammonia fumes and right then while you’re scrubbing chicken skin off the barbecue grill, every stupid thing in the world, decaffeinated coffee, alcohol, free beer, StairMasters, makes perfect sense, not because you’re any smarter, but because the smart part of your brain’s on vacation. It’s that kind of faux wisdom. That kind of Chinese food enlightenment where you know that ten minutes after your head clears, you’ll forget it all. Those clear plastic bags you get a single serving of honey-roasted peanuts in on a plane instead of a real meal, that’s how small my lungs feel. After eighty-five floors, the air feels that thin. Your arms pumping, your feet jam down on every next step. At this point, your every thought is so profound. The way bubbles form in a pan of water before it comes to a boil, these new insights just appear. Around the ninetieth floor, every thought is an epiphany. Paradigms are dissolving right and left. Everything ordinary turns into a powerful metaphor. The deeper meaning of everything is right there in your face. And it’s all so significant. It’s all so deep. So real. Everything the agent’s been telling me makes perfect sense. For instance, if Jesus Christ had died in prison, with no one watching and with no one there to mourn or torture him, would we be saved? With all due respect. According to the agent, the biggest factor that makes you a saint is the amount of press coverage you get. Around the one hundredth floor, it all comes clear. The whole universe, and this isn’t just the endorphins talking. Any higher than the hundredth floor and you enter a mystical state. The same as if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, you realize, if no one had been there to witness the agony of Christ, would we be saved? The key to salvation is how much attention you get. How high a profile you get. Your audience share. Your exposure. Your name recognition. Your press following. The buzz. Around the one hundredth floor, the sweat is parting your hair all over. The boring mechanics of how your body works are all too clear, your lungs are sucking air to put in your blood, your heart pumps blood to your muscles, your hamstrings pull themselves short, cramping to pull your legs up behind you, your quadriceps cramp to put your knees out in front of you. The blood delivers air and food to burn inside the mito-whatever in the middle of your every muscle cell. The skeleton is just a way to keep your tissue off the floor. Your sweat is just a way to keep you cool. The revelations come at you from every direction. Around the one hundred and fifth floor, you can’t believe you’re the slave to this body, this big baby. You have to keep it fed and put it to bed and take it to the bathroom. You can’t believe we haven’t invented something better. Something not so needy. Not so time-consuming. You realize that people take drugs because it’s the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world. It’s only in drugs or death we’ll see anything new, and death is just too controlling. You realize that there’s no point in doing anything if nobody’s watching. You wonder, if there had been a low turnout at the crucifixion, would they have rescheduled? You realize the agent was right. You’ve never seen a crucifix with a Jesus who wasn’t almost naked. You’ve never seen a fat Jesus. Or a Jesus with body hair. Every crucifix you’ve ever seen, the Jesus could be shirtless and modeling designer jeans or men’s cologne. Life is every way the agent said. You realize that if no one’s watching, you might as well stay home. Play with yourself. Watch broadcast television. It’s around the one hundred and tenth floor you realize that if you’re not on videotape, or better yet, live on satellite hookup in front of the whole world watching, you don’t exist. You’re that tree falling in the forest that nobody gives a rat’s ass about. It doesn’t matter if you do anything. If nobody notices, your life will add up to a big zero. Nada. Cipher. Fake or not, it’s these kinds of big truths that swarm inside you. You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past. We can’t give up our concept of who we were. All those adults playing archaeologist at yard sales, looking for childhood artifacts, board games, CandyLand, Twister, they’re terrified. Trash becomes holy relics. Mystery Date. Hula Hoops. Our way of getting nostalgic for what we just threw in the trash, it’s all because we’re afraid to evolve. Grow, change, lose weight, reinvent ourselves. Adapt. That’s what the agent says to me on the StairMaster. He’s yelling at me, “Adapt!” Everything’s accelerated except me and my sweaty body with its bowel movements and body hair. My moles and yellow toenails. And I realize I’m stuck with my body, and already it’s falling apart. My backbone feels hammered out of hot iron. My arms swing thin and wet on each side of me. Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it’s the only way they can get anything really finished. The agent’s yelling that no matter how great you look, your body is just something you wear to accept your Academy Award. Your hand is just so you can hold your Nobel Prize. Your lips are only there for you to air-kiss a talk show host. And you might as well look great. It’s around the one hundred and twentieth floor you have to laugh. You’re going to lose it anyway. Your body. You’re already losing it. It’s time you bet everything. This is why when the agent comes to you with anabolic steroids, you say yes. You say yes to the back-to-back tanning sessions. Electrolysis? Yes. Teeth capping? Yes. Dermabrasion? Yes. Chemical peels? According to the agent, the secret to getting famous is you just keep saying yes.