Robert Silverberg - Chip Runner

He was fifteen, and looked about ninety, and a frail ninety at that. I knew his mother and his father, separatelythey were Silicon Valley people, divorced, very important in their respective companiesand separately they had asked me to try to work with him. His skin was blue-gray and tight, drawn cruelly close over the jutting bones of his face. His eyes were gray too, and huge, and they lay deep within their sockets. His arms were like sticks. His thin lips were set in an angry grimace.

The chart before me on my desk told me that he was five feet eight inches tall and weighed 71 pounds. He was in his third year at one of the best private schools in the Palo Alto district. His I.Q. was 161. He crackled with intelligence and intensity. That was a novelty for me right at the outset. Most of my patients are depressed, withdrawn, uncertain of themselves, elusive, shy: virtual zombies. He wasnt anything like that. There would be other surprises ahead.

So youre planning to go into the hardware end of the computer industry, your parents tell me, I began. The usual lets-build-a-relationship procedure.

He blew it away instantly with a single sour glare. Is that your standard opening? Tell me all about your favorite hobby, my boy? If you dont mind Id rather skip all the bullshit, doctor, and then we can both get out of here faster. Youre supposed to ask me about my eating habits.

It amazed me to see him taking control of the session this way within the first thirty seconds. I marveled at how different he was from most of the others, the poor sad wispy creatures who force me to fish for every word.

Actually I do enjoy talking about the latest developments in the world of computers, too, I said, still working hard at being genial.

But my guess is you dont talk about them very often, or you wouldnt call it the hardware end. Or the computer industry. We dont use mondo phrases like those any more. His high thin voice sizzled with barely suppressed rage. Come on, doctor. Lets get right down to it. You think Im anorexic, dont you?

Well

I know about anorexia. Its a mental disease of girls, a vanity thing. They starve themselves because they want to look beautiful and they cant bring themselves to realize that theyre not too fat. Vanity isnt the issue for me. And Im not a girl, doctor. Even you ought to be able to see that right away.

Timothy

I want to let you know right out front that I dont have an eating disorder and I dont belong in a shrinks office. I know exactly what Im doing all the time. The only reason I came today is to get my mother off my back, because shes taken it into her head that Im trying to starve myself to death. She said I had to come here and see you. So Im here. All right?

All right, I said, and stood up. I am a tall man, deepchested, very broad through the shoulders. I can loom when necessary. A flicker of fear crossed Timothys face, which was the effect I wanted to produce. When its appropriate for the therapist to assert authority, simpleminded methods are often the most effective. Lets talk about eating, Timothy. What did you have for lunch today?

He shrugged. A piece of bread. Some lettuce.

Thats all?

A glass of water.

And for breakfast?

I dont eat breakfast.

But youll have a substantial dinner, wont you?

Maybe some fish. Maybe not. I think food is pretty gross.

I nodded. Could you operate your computer with the power turned off, Timothy?

Isnt that a pretty condescending sort of question, doctor?

I suppose it is. Okay, Ill be more direct. Do you think you can run your body without giving it any fuel?

My body runs just fine, he said, with a defiant edge.

Does it? What sports do you play?

Sports? It might have been a Martian word.

You know, the normal weight for someone of your age and height ought to be

Theres nothing normal about me, doctor. Why should my weight be any more normal than the rest of me?

It was until last year, apparently. Then you stopped eating. Your family is worried about you, you know.

Ill be okay, he said sullenly.

You want to stay healthy, dont you?

He stared at me for a long chilly moment. There was something close to hatred in his eyes, or so I imagined.

What I want is to disappear, he said.

That night I dreamed I was disappearing. I stood naked and alone on a slab of gray metal in the middle of a vast empty plain under a sinister coppery sky and I began steadily to shrink. There is often some carryover from the office to a therapists own unconscious life: we call it counter-transference. I grew smaller and smaller. Pores appeared on the surface of the metal slab and widened into jagged craters, and then into great crevices and gullies. A cloud of luminous dust shimmered about my head. Grains of sand, specks, mere motes, now took on the aspect of immense boulders. Down I drifted, gliding into the darkness of a fathomless chasm. Creatures I had not noticed before hovered about me, astonishing monsters, hairy, many-legged. They made menacing gestures, but I slipped away, downward, downward, and they were gone. The air was alive now with vibrating particles, inanimate, furious, that danced in frantic zigzag patterns, veering wildly past me, now and again crashing into me, knocking my breath from me, sending me ricocheting for what seemed like miles. I was floating, spinning, tumbling with no control. Pulsating waves of blinding light pounded me. I was falling into the infinitely small, and there was no halting my descent. I would shrink and shrink and shrink until I slipped through the realm of matter entirely and was lost. A mob of contemptuous glowing thingselectrons and protons, maybe, but how could I tell?crowded close around me, emitting fizzy sparks that seemed to me like jeers and laughter. They told me to keep moving along, to get myself out of their kingdom, or I would meet a terrible death. To see a world in a grain of sand, Blake wrote. Yes. And Eliot wrote, I will show you fear in a handful of dust. I went on downward, and downward still. And then I awoke gasping, drenched in sweat, terrified, alone.

Normally the patient is uncommunicative. You interview parents, siblings, teachers, friends, anyone who might provide a clue or an opening wedge. Anorexia is a life-threatening matter. The patientsgirls, almost always, or young women in their twentieshave lost all sense of normal body-image and feel none of the food-deprivation prompts that a normal body gives its owner. Food is the enemy. Food must be resisted. They eat only when forced to, and then as little as possible. They are unaware that they are frighteningly gaunt. Strip them and put them in front of a mirror and they will pinch their sagging empty skin to show you imaginary fatty bulges. Sometimes the process of self-skeletonization is impossible to halt, even by therapy. When it reaches a certain point the degree of organic damage becomes irreversible and the death-spiral begins.

He was always tremendously bright, Timothys mother said. She was fifty, a striking woman, trim, elegant, almost radiant, vice president for finance at one of the biggest Valley companies. I knew her in that familiarly involuted California way: her present husband used to be married to my first wife. A genius, his teachers all said. But strange, you know? Moody. Dreamy. I used to think he was on drugs, though of course none of the kids do that any more. Timothy was her only child by her first marriage. It scares me to death to watch him wasting away like that. When I see him I want to take him and shake him and force ice cream down his throat, pasta, milkshakes, anything. And then I want to hold him, and I want to cry.

Youd think hed be starting to shave by now, his father said. Technical man, working on nanoengineering projects at the Stanford AI lab. We often played racquetball together. I was. You too, probably. I got a look at him in the shower, three or four months ago. Hasnt even reached puberty yet. Fifteen and not a hair on him. Its the starvation, isnt it? Its retarding his physical development, right?