The 8-Year Itch
Watchmen → Dan
Dan falls into disuse.
A/N, originally posted on the KM, typo-full. Now edited and revised.
radishface
[#]
Charlie Kowal discovered the first of the outer solar system asteroids in 1977. He named it 2060 Chiron, after a Centaur. While the Centaur race as a whole was famed for its lust, abandon, gluttony, and wantonness, Chiron was probably best known for his intelligence, kindness, and civility.
In other news, Deng Xiaoping gets reinstated into the Chinese Communist Party, the Soviets delay the launch of their space station with the spectre of Doctor Manhattan still looming large, and the Lockheed's top-secret stealth aircraft project, designated Have Blue, not ironically, makes its first flight. Somewhere in between, an Act is passed that affects a handful of people and appeases thousands.
The first week, Dan skips one day of his normal workout routine. The second week, he's back on track, determined to keep it up but by the third, fourth weeks, he's only going to the gym once a week. It's six months before Dan begins feeling the bloat in his gut and another three before he really starts to miss the nightly jogs, the runner's high. But by then he's already gained twenty pounds and it's already started to ache when he does run and he doesn't want to think too much about it, so.
You can't say that the Dreibergs don't age well-- Dan's father had stated bloating by his late forties, and his mother boasted an ample figure, always generous in the hips, but they were never really out of shape, just on the placated and middle-class side of the scale. Dan's mother had always given him second servings even after he graduated Harvard and learned to protest, because he was still, always a growing boy and needed the nutrition.
He visits her for Friday night Shabbas dinner even though he hasn't in ages and she still treats him the same because she doesn't know how to act otherwise. This time, on the spur of the moment he treats himself to a second, third helping, and his mother smiles, eyes crinkling and unreadable, and Dan leaves the house with his belt unbuckled and the top button of his pants undone, breath circulating short through his lungs. He's still hungry, though, and fires up a box of leftover chicken tandoori from the Gunga and slurps on that while settling into his couch, heater turned up and television tuned to the rerun of that evening's news.
Dan attends the annual conference for the American Ornithologists' Union and while hovering over a server's h'or d'ouvres tray, bumps into Lenny there. Lenny was a fellow zoology major at Harvard who's been in Africa for the last five years studying egrets and bitterns. His neck cranes like a heron's when he sees Dan, surprise written all over his face. "Well gosh, Dan, you--" put on weight, Lenny's expression reads plain as day. "--look the same."
Lenny's body is tan and lean and sinewy from cavorting all over marsh terrain, and as Dan finishes munching on a sliver of bruschetta he thinks back to college when they used to train together, sweating up and down the bleachers and spotting each other in the weight room. He tries not to let the nostalgia show on his face.
"You look great, Lenny." Dan is anything if generous. "Field work is treating you well." He smiles self-deprecatingly and points at his gut. "Can't say the same here."
Lenny breaks out into a laugh. "That must mean that the missus at home is feeding you well, right?" A friendly jostle on the arm and Dan doesn't object, though he's not sure when he started being taken for a married man. They laugh anyway and with the ice broken, reminisce about the college days and catch up on what work they've been doing. Dan has to fudge things a bit, but he can say for a while he was reliving his high school days and doing nothing but reading King Arthur novels over and over again. Lenny chuckles like he believes him, and Dan isn't sure what to feel.
It's late when the final keynote ends, but Dan stops by the convenience store on the way home. He browses up and down the fluorescent, sick-lit isles and picks up a pint of coffee-flavored Haagen Daaz. Spoons away at it while flipping through stacks of ornithological journals as infomercials play in the background. The caffeine keeps him up until dawn, until his eyelids grow so heavy he has to close them, but even then his mind is running a million miles a second over rooftops and fire exits.
The next year, Charlie Chaplain's remains are stolen from Switzerland. The following year, McDonald's introduces its Happy Meal. John Lennon is shot the following December, and the December after that, the first test tube baby is born in Norfolk, Virginia. A recession slips by almost unnoticed in 1982.
Apple releases the Lisa personal computer the next year, and the year after that, a commercial featuring a young woman running through a crowd of empty-eyed drones. Watching it gives Dan shivers up his spine, a cheap thrill. Chicken wings pile high on his Dixie paper plate and when the Super Bowl game comes back on, Hollis asks him if he wants another beer. He says yes.
Only when Dan comes home to a long-lost figure crouched over his kitchen table slurping from a can of beans does he realizes his hunger pangs are gone.
[#]