I lost sixty pounds dieting for my bodybuilding contest. Dropping this much weight, I was prone to fainting spells, always at the most inopportune of times. I would stand at the conclusion of work meetings, assuring my boss I was fine—I know what I’m doing—and immediately collapse. Or the apartment complex elevator door would slide open, and my retired neighbors would step carefully around me, perplexed that a fine, muscular man would struggle so with two grocery bags.
Bodybuilding is first about bulking, spending inordinate amounts of time at the gym lifting progressively heavier weights, and then eating plates of chicken and beef and sweet potatoes and swallowing pills. As the muscles engorge and swell, they form a kind of protective layer over the inner being, shielding the bodybuilder from the cold and from casual chit-chat at the grocery line. For those prone to chills and social anxiety, as I am, this is excellent.
Oftentimes, these muscle gains are accompanied by an equally formidable gain in fat. Thus, the bodybuilder’s pleasure when marvelling at the enormous size of his flexed bicep in the bathroom mirror is dismantled somewhat when he grabs the expanding layers of subcutaneous fat blanketing his musculature, in some parts beginning to resemble drapes. This phenomenon of rapidly attaining both muscle and fat is commonly addressed by wearing loose-fitting, concealing clothes. I enjoy this form of attire year-round. I do not want to be looked at by passersby if I’m not in near-perfect physical condition.
When the bodybuilder is finally ready to reverse the weight gain, most always coinciding with his decision to enter a contest, he dramatically shifts his diet and training style to lose fat. Dropping weight too quickly wreaks havoc on the body’s ability to sustain healthy blood pressure levels, however. And it is this unstable blood pressure that causes these musclemen to drop like rag dolls, only to come to moments later, feeling foolish for having looked vulnerable.
I think often of how terrified I am of death. The eternity I’d wager on is one in which the consciousness, once drained, never returns. This drives me nearly mad. The sheaths of muscle, this armored layer that makes sex-flyer distributors on street corners think twice, cannot save me from the torment of knowing I march, day by day, closer to my eternity.
But in the moments between realizing that I am about to faint and actually fainting, in these seconds of faded consciousness where cognition fails and I must allocate what resources that remain to falling gracefully, a kind of awareness spreads over my unresponsive body, a realization that the permanence of death, like being judged, or my need to build impenetrable walls, or my compulsion to wear Eskimo parkas or Speedos and nothing in between, never mattered. There is just this fleeting deliverance from my anxiety, so overwhelming as to approach rapture, almost enough to have me believe.
Ernie Wang holds an MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His other work appears in McSweeney’s Quarterly and PEN America Best Debut Short Stories.
