BIG EXIT ~ Melissa Mann
You stand in front of the class knowing that this thing you will do will happen soon. If you had known it would come to this when you began teaching in the late nineties, you would have stopped while you still had the chance. But that was over twenty years ago and you are where you are; now it feels like your destiny.
You stand in front of them wearing a Bioderm bodysuit made from material that breathes like your skin. Your body is slight, toned muscle sculpted round slim bone. On your face is a smile, a smile sewn on your face with ugly stitches made of string. The smile is for the three rows of women in front of you, the twelve obese women standing in the studio like farm animals waiting out the rain in a field. You are small enough to roam around inside each one of them. You are insignificant, a minority figure in a new age where eighty percent of women are clinically obese.
You look up at the squares of blue silence in the ceiling and despite the subdued lighting and the Nutri-air Climate Control System, you want to be elsewhere. It has always been this way. The blue light and all that female flesh make you feel like everything that exists in the world is crammed in here with you in this studio. You want to be outside breathing in real skies, vast oceans lapping your insides.
You ask the class to go to the end of their mats for the roll-down and they obey. You watch as they gather up armfuls of themselves, hauling their bodies from where they are now to where you have asked them to go. You cannot see their bones move inside them as they do this and it disturbs you; you can’t help despising them for it. These women are lost inside their own meat but this thing you will do will help them find themselves. You realise this is why they have come to you, this is the reason you are here, not to teach them Pilates but to help them start themselves again.
You lead the women through the roll-down, walking your fingers down spines you imagine must exist somewhere in the spongy folds of their backs. The class is bent over itself now, pushing down on the sprung floor. You watch, appalled. How you hate the fat, the pictures you see in the fat – the ugly shapes, the grimacing faces, the buried worms. Most of all though you hate the fat because it is alive. You look away, the taste of lard in your mouth, your tongue caked with it then you give the instruction for them to roll up. Eventually they are upright, staring at you, their moon faces flushed from the inversion and you ask yourself how, how the simplest of movements can excite so much sweat from their glands. You wait for the Nutri-air System to take the smell away
A voice, firm, decisive. It is yours. You can hear yourself speaking to them, telling them that you don’t want to hurt them anymore than they have hurt you. And they have hurt you, over the years. They have hurt you by getting bigger and more immobile and less flexible despite your best efforts. You have made a life’s work of these weekly one hour classes and yet you realise now that it means nothing; you have wasted your time. These women have done nothing but feed off you for years; you can feel them breathing you in every time you exhale. You press a hand to your face and suddenly you feel like you are growing old in their puckered, stretch-marked skin. An anger that is bigger than you, takes you over. It presses on your temples, burns your throat, pushes at your eyes trying to get out. If these women had any respect for you, if they felt any loyalty towards you at all, they would do the decent thing and die.
Disgusted, you turn your back on them and confront the mirror. In your left hand, the vacant gun. On your face, a smile; you love this gun. How beautiful it feels in your hand, like a cool glove. And this is no ordinary gun. No, you have designed this gun yourself. It is a gun designed by you to kill with precision, to kill beautifully. Your hand will speak to these women now, your hand will tell these failed bodies what they need to hear; your hand will talk to them in bullets. You pull out the gun in your empty hand and point it at yourself in the mirror and in that moment you know, for the first time in your life you know exactly who you are. And you are not alone in this knowledge because the woman behind you in the first row, she knows who you are too. You can see it in her eyes, brown eyes that suddenly cannot meet yours. She looks at the floor, pulls her shapeless black t-shirt down over the rolls of her stomach, clutches the fleshy wings of her upper arms. Of all the women in the room this one has fed off you the most. Questions, always asking questions, asking for help, always wanting something from you; you could never give her enough. You turn to face the class, slowly, deliberately, casting your eyes around the room but really you have already decided; she will be the first.
The women stare back at you like theatre-goers, expectant, waiting to be entertained and you smile because you know you are about to give them the performance of a life-time. Adrenalin is coursing through your bloodstream like lust. Cut you now and you would bleed excitement, anticipation. The adrenalin is making you shake but it is a shaking that is somehow outside of you. When you raise your gun hand it is surprisingly steady. You are aiming straight at her, the woman you have decided will be first. She can feel the cold barrel scorching her forehead even from ten feet away; the fear you can see in her eyes tells you this.
The woman dies as beautifully as you imagined she would. The bullets burn kiss-shaped holes into her forehead, her chest, her belly. In fact there is beauty and precision in the way they all die. You see the bullets splintering hair follicles, splitting cells as you shoot them, one after another. And you enjoy it, seeing these women falling apart in front of you like this. You enjoy it because it feels like you have been a part of this falling since you began teaching them all those years ago. This is how it was meant to be. It was inevitable. So you keep on firing, on and on until every last one of them is lying on the floor. But still you don’t stop. You keep on shooting these women, shooting their fat onto the walls until eventually it feels like you are firing at ghosts. And so you lower the gun, letting out the breath you have been holding since you brought the gun to life.
The studio is deathly quiet now except for the gun whispering, kiss-shaped smoke rings floating in the beam from the glaucous spotlight above your head. Curiously the gun no longer feels like it is in your hand. It has become something other, a thing in its own right, a thing that needs no-one for it to exist, to fulfil its destiny. You can hear a slow rapturous handclapping but you are the only one in the room left alive and when you look at your hands they are wiping themselves down the thighs of your bodysuit.
“It’s all your fault,” you say and as you look round the studio at the bodies on the floor, you realise this is something you have known about yourself your whole life. Just as you know that you have spent your whole life preparing for this death. You grab your things and stride across the studio, struggling to open the door. Eventually it unseals itself and breathes you into the corridor outside. You walk away from the studio towards the fire exit, a security camera tracing your every step but you are unaware of this. You are looking at your hands. You are looking for the gun, for your beautiful gun.
“Did I just do that,” you ask yourself and you answer.
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