HGH

Then, further, they ask of what size these equal bodies shall be. For if all shall be as tall and
large as were the tallest and largest in this world, they ask us how it is that not only children
but many full-grown persons shall receive what they here did not possess, if each one is to
receive what he had here. And if the saying of the apostle, that we are all to come to the
“measure of the age of the fullness of Christ,” or that other saying, “Whom He predestinated
to be conformed to the image of His Son,” is to be understood to mean that the stature and
size of Christ’s body shall be the measure of the bodies of all those who shall be in His
kingdom, then, say they, the size and height of many must be diminished

Augustine, City of God

*

I dreamt that you had a bird, Claude said to his father. That you had it in your pocket and it was broken into five pieces, he said, and you showed them to me one by one, very proudly, but I couldn’t be sure that you really had two wings and two legs, because you showed them so quickly and not all at once, and I thought it might be a trick.

*

The chapel was a low-ceilinged thing, with – all the same – these great soaring walls at least three times taller than it was wide. It was, in intention, a chapel made miniature, imagined from the perspective of a child or a little camera on the ground. The effect, however, even to a child, could not quite be pulled off. It divulged something important: that the scale of churches and other religious buildings is in some sense absolute – you must be at least this tall to sit down with God. That sort of thing. Growing quickly, a child could panic, and think to themselves that after too long spent in the chapel they might not fit through the door to leave.

The ones who liked it best, then, were those who would not soon outgrow the chapel. The exceptionally small for their age, the slightly stunted, the ones with simply no concept that they might be getting bigger, quite happily sat inside and wondered at the other children’s reluctance, their unwillingness to enjoy this little space made just for them. Claude was not much smaller than the other children, nor was the way he moved particularly feeble, in the way of the children who really just wanted somewhere to sit. Claude had, however, as far as his classmates could recall, which at eight or so was not, admittedly, very far, but he had been more or less as big at four or five as he was at eight.

This had, of course, amazed and impressed parents, teachers, friends some years ago. In time, though, Claude’s calmness and his indifference to this amazement, and his refusal to throw his weight around or really collide with the other children at all had induced some great forgetting. He had been an unusually big child for his age at four, and there were others unusually big at eight, and in the end it would all more or less even out. The other children had not quite forgotten, nor had they ever quite known at the time. It was as if among all those eerie, slightly hyper-surveillant sensitivities children, and especially very normal children, tend to have, there was one that sniffed out that Claude was not growing.

His parents worried more deliberately, and worried about the time he spent inside the chapel when at school, and recognized in time that he hadn’t refrained from barrelling into his classmates out of some sense of fairness or restraint but that there was something fundamentally insubstantial about him.

In the year when younger boys started to complain to teachers – in their roundabout, oddly diplomatic way – about someone older and just slightly creepy and unmoving, always in the chapel, Claude’s parents began to lobby him to spend more time outside. They drew up lists of excuses to vary their angle of attack, and Claude’s mother – who was herself scared of the bigger boys, and was certain Claude was, too – asked a teacher for a list of the gentler children. Campaigned to bring them home for tea. On a Thursday evening of exasperation, following four days of lunches in the chapel, Claude’s father asked Claude what was so bad he had to keep praying about it, and laughed, and Claude’s mother did not speak to him for two and a half days.

Claude’s father had written down some of the complaints the teachers had relayed over the phone, and when he was feeling exhausted by his son he would read them aloud to his wife in a pompous voice, though he knew she did not like it. ‘Miss there is, I think, just something not right about it’, ‘If he is always sitting in there then when is it my turn to talk to God?’ Claude’s mother asked the chaplain whether Claude might want to be a priest, if this was the sort of thing that people who were going to be priests did when they were children, and the chaplain said it was not, and though he could not say Claude was creepy or socially leprous or definitely not there to be close to God, it was clear that this was more or less his feeling.

None of this is to say that Claude’s father was an unkind man, or unloving, or wrapped in some perpetual bad-cop routine with his wife as his foil. He bred guppies and zebra fish as a kind of hobby-cum-side-hustle, and took extreme, gentle care of every parameter of their existence. He was often proud of his son when Claude finished a large meal, or read aloud in his ordinary speaking voice; he repeated Claude’s questions to his colleagues, who agreed that Claude was very clever. Claude asked a lot of questions about looking at planets from great distances and seeing backwards in time, and asked permission to pick up coins he found in the house to use in change-operated telescopes near landmarks. The rule they agreed, Claude and his parents, was that Claude could only keep coins he found in places where nobody else would have looked.

Claude’s father sold the guppies as pets, your first fish, that sort of thing. The zebra fish he mostly sold to laboratories, and in sentimental moments would worry what was done with them and look it up and get angry with the simplicity of stop-animal-testing people whose videos he found online and sell them anyway. In a paranoid moment, not long after Claude’s ninth birthday, Claude’s father blocked searches relating to animal testing on the family computer, fearing difficult questions and possible filial mutiny.

*

Claude’s mother started taking Claude to see doctors around the age of twelve. At around this time, Claude’s father had to stop breeding zebra fish because they all died from some sort of algae that grew in the tank, and even after he emptied everything and cleaned it really thoroughly and bought more fish the algae came back, and so he decided that the cost of a whole new tank and the fish to go in it would take a really long time to recoup and for a period of several months refined a speech on the sunk cost fallacy to recite every time someone asked about his fish-breeding hobby. He would sometimes recite it without explaining the whole situation with the tanks and have to furiously backtrack when he noticed his listener’s bafflement. He later composed a kind of follow-up speech that explained that he knew that it wasn’t a formal logical fallacy, in response to repeated responses along these lines.

The second or third doctor, each successive one being of a greater degree of specialization, prescribed Human Growth Hormone, which Claude’s mother tentatively accepted and then thought very hard about before administering. Most of the information she could find related to adult bodybuilders, and caused spells of spiralling worry culminating in an inevitable email to the doctor, who would say reassuring things about growth plates and dosage and research, and Claude’s mother would be subdued. She did not begin the injections, though, and her husband – inadvertently – fanned her fears that it was getting too late to start. Claude frequently heard these conversations, and often completely forgot about them.

Apparently if your growth plates are already fused it can make your organs too big for your body.
And that’s bad for you?
Yes, it’s extremely dangerous and it will make him look peculiar.
Is it dangerous or will it just make him look weird, not to be cruel but he already looks weird.
Both! But I know you wish he’d get bigger and bigger until he’s just a percent littler than you.
What are you talking about?
Until you die and then he can get as big as he wants, pump himself to the gills with hormones and Alpine food.
You’ve completely lost me
What can’t he do if he’s little?
All sorts of things, besides all the things people could do to him, that’s all wrapped up in the same deal you know
What has anyone ever tried to do to you? What’s this sudden paranoia, it’s like the time you tried to have those battering-ram-proof doors put in, nobody is trying to get us
It’s completely hardwired it’s just that I want my wife and my son safe, and I don’t think there’s anyone out to get us especially but obviously there are always some people out to get someone and I just don’t want to be that someone
I just think if Claude is going to start taking drugs that could make his own organs a threat it should be for a better reason than soothing your home-invader fear fantasy!
It isn’t a fantasy it just does happen and I’m not going to be too tough and macho to say that it scares me what people could do with my house or my wife or my son who’s going to need to look after himself after I’m gone
But it’s exactly the macho shit I’m fed up with, you’re not a cage fighter – and I’m glad of that, let me be very clear – and I don’t think your son is going to be either and at some stage it just isn’t worth the home-castle defenses or the steroids or the bat-with-the-nails
But before the point where it’s too far there’s a point that’s reasonable, and our son being at least within a normal range of size sounds reasonable to me, whatever you’re trying to make out I’m not paranoid and I’m not putting glass on the wall or trying to make him wear knuckle-dusters I just don’t want him to get picked on
Well what if him being smaller is actually more of a deterrent against him being picked on than being relatively normal, I mean he’s never going to be some giant is he, so maybe it’s better if he’s really different and then people – and I’m still not saying that there are all these people around baying for blood – but anyway maybe then even if there are people they’re more likely to leave him alone. It’s like I remember I met this girl who had a bearded dragon and she said the best way she ever found of keeping men away from her on the bus was having these crickets for her lizard on her lap, because people just thought it was sort of weird and disgusting-
Claude is not weird and-
No, I know of course, I love him, but I just mean maybe it’s not so bad for him if he’s a very unusual size

*

On a fretful windy day in April of his fifteenth year, some other boys his age stopped him at the chapel door

It’s just that that the littler kids get creeped out
It’s only because they’re so easily scared
It’s irrational really and we’ve tried to tell them but it’s easier to have like a grown-up talk with you
It’s probably just easier because all the teachers are so protective with the younger years

There had been little run-ins before, and the teachers had always calmly let Claude in, and sent off the blockade with some sympathy. These, however, had always been cruel interventions, the voices of the stoppers had always been the same as the voices of accusation. This second- hand intervention, couched in terms of concern and pragmatism, was at once heartening and intolerably insubordinate. It was made clear to the older boys in question that any overheard complaints from younger students should be passed on to teachers. The head of school repeatedly made clear that he was ‘disgusted’ with the way they had spoken to Claude. As if they were not even his classmates, as if they were parents who had sympathy for him and had seen all this play out before.

No more than three weeks after this incident, and the aftershocks of parent-teacher phone calls, Claude began to inject HGH. Quite privately, he began to write down his observations as the hormone took effect. This was at first mostly a litany of measurements, a string of circumferences taken at just about every place Claude could think of a way to repeatably measure.

Do you want to be bigger? His mother asked him every time she gave him the syringe to inject himself, do you think being bigger and taller will make you happy? Your dad thinks it’ll keep you safe. Often Claude would say that he just didn’t mind, that he didn’t really think about it much, and at other times he’d say I like the idea that I could do more of the things I can imagine doing; like picking things up or looking over walls; it seems that if I could do all the things I imagine myself doing then everything would be all quiet and right, which satisfied Claude’s mother, and after a while she was sure that the injections were for the best. Though she hated to see the needle and the way its sides dragged against the skin and made a little dimple in her son, the way Claude didn’t hurry any of it or wince much and the way his eyes were somehow milky and very awake all at once.

Relatives and family friends began to say you’re so much bigger than last time we saw you, as if congratulating Claude on some great work, and Claude responded it’s just HGH as if modestly deferring responsibility for the great work. Claude’s father told frequent jokes about being tempted to inject some of his son’s HGH, with the dose of attendant sleaziness carefully matched to the setting, until people started to notice he was telling the jokes almost compulsively. Being a fairly socially astute man, and disliking the idea of being pegged as neurotic or insecure, Claude’s father tried to make his repetitive-HGH-joke-telling into a kind of joke of its own, by exaggeratedly ham-fisting the HGH-temptation jokes into conversation, and basically got away with it.

And anyway, Claude got bigger. Big enough that the only trace of his ever being so far outside the ordinary range for his age were old acquaintances’ occasional boggling exclamations, and their mismatch to his basically average or slightly sub-average stature. He got bigger slightly awkwardly, his measurements showing that his organs clearly had got disproportionately big for his torso. He ended up a deep man, with a blocky look that was after all not so different from the blocky look of some men, and the HGH had no particularly noticeable or exciting side-effects; Claude was never euphoric after an injection, nor particularly sick. He remained Claude, but bigger and with a greater alignment between what he felt the urge to do and what he could do, but his father went completely mad. Mad as a snake, Claude’s mother said when it was long enough afterwards that such phrases could be dusted off and put to work.

Claude’s father was found with the HGH first time about eighteen months after Claude started taking the stuff, taking all three doses Claude had been given for the week all at once. He was all contorted in the en suite just off the bedroom where he and Claude’s mother slept, with his wide, shiny haunch perched up on the sink side, doing his best impression of Claude’s workmanlike injection expression. His look, however, went scampering out ahead of his excuse, which was – besides – incoherent and he was undone. Which parts of yourself did you want to make bigger? Claude’s mother asked him every day for eight days afterwards, and he would get back his glimmering childish look of guilt (more childlike, Claude’s mother noted, than Claude’s face had ever looked as long as she could remember) and start making a semi- verbal keening sound that only occasionally landed on words like curiosity and general feeling.

Claude’s mother, who was by inclination meticulously kind and empathetic in a slightly suspicious but discernibly basically sincere way, went through several weeks after this of almost apologizing to her husband. She said to him that she had had no idea he was insecure about his size in general or particular, and that she was sorry that she had never thought to ask him about this, and that she was especially sorry if she had in some way inadvertently caused or contributed to the relevant insecurity. Her presumption, of course, was that the insecurity behind the HGH experiment concerned either her husband’s height or his dick, neither of which to her knowledge were really remarkable in any direction, and so in roughly the same period of time she began to lavish praise on him, and initiate sex more frequently. She sometimes made competently subtle speeches relating her total lack of interest in other men ever since they had met, and indeed total lack of comparative thought regarding her husband and his physical attributes in general. None of this appeared to have any substantial effect on Claude’s father, who continued to respond mostly with keening and occasionally with annoyance to any question of comment directly concerning the HGH incident.

Two months later, around the beginning of autumn – which is technically later or earlier than you expect, though Claude’s mother could never remember which one Claude said it was – Claude’s mother found that her husband had ordered, at great expense, three grams of HGH to be delivered to their home.

*

After Claude’s mother found the package, and found out from the receipt in the box just how much it had cost her husband, they began to argue. Claude’s father’s defense relied heavily on the fact that by ordering his own HGH he in no way interfered with his son’s growth or happiness. Claude’s mother’s attack returned to the triple-incrimination of her husband’s premeditation in ordering it, the irresponsible risk to his health incurred by taking drugs bought online, and the damage to their finances done by the HGH’s inordinate cost.

In a brief détente, following three days of near-continuous argument and two more of taut quiet, Claude’s father gave the first thing that looked like some kind of an explanation. He had read, he explained, when he was an undergrad and enfolded in all the very long and explicit chains of undergraduate social hierarchy, one of Sylvia Plath’s diaries. Claude’s mother almost laughed at this, most of all from the relief of being surprised. If the explanation started off surprising, then there could perhaps be some end to the explanation so far from anything she had considered and played through in conversations with friends that she could let it all slide off, and tell those friends that the answer was something she had never even thought of, but made perfect exculpatory sense.

She did not laugh, however, and urged her husband to go on, and tell her about Plath’s diary. The particular diary, or at least the particular bit that had stuck with her husband, was where Plath described meeting Hughes for the first time, at a party. The sort of headline bit of the story of her meeting Hughes was that she bit his nose at the party, or maybe after it, but Claude’s father – who was anyway reading the diary in a state close to shame, feeling it to be a decidedly effeminate sort of reading – remembered the description that came before, or again maybe after, the nose-biting. Plath describes Hughes as, simply, the only one there huge enough for me. And Claude’s father had never forgotten this, and something about this very straightforward and, at the same time very vague, pure-size-metric for desire had made it cling to Claude’s father, and whisper itself out to him in moments of humiliation or subordination.

He had worried so much amount Claude’s size because it seemed like a constant sort of mockery, it made his movements seem affected, his achievements compensatory. Claude’s father slipped off into a side-alley tangent about how some men are so desperate to be taller than they get leg-extending surgery even though it leaves them unable to walk normally. And all the same Claude’s mother came winding back to the phrase, asking her husband to explain how Ted Hughes, of all people, was relevant to him spending hundreds of pounds on black- market steroids. She didn’t even know he liked Ted Hughes.

And so, he explained. Explained in a very careful way as if carrying a full pail and the water has already picked up some momentum from your steps. Caveats and qualifications appended each sentence. He told how the phrase came back to him, and without really thinking about it he came to recognise hugeness as a kind of masculinity that was really very simple and universal and didn’t need you to do anything. How it made Hughes sound noble in a way that no particular behaviour or style of behaviour could undermine. Huge and gregarious made sense, of course, because the largeness earned the loudness, and you certainly weren’t compensating for anything. Huge and silent worked, too, even if it was the timid kind of silence rather than the menacing kind. Even a certain childishness could be charming in a big enough body, because the contrast made it seem like the childishness was a choice, something returned to rather than never left.

In any case, it was a safe floor of desire. Hugeness implied an ignorance of the rules, which Claude’s father had come to feel was, and had perhaps always been, the proper domain of Man. It had something strictly first-order about it; it was pure action. Claude’s father had always, he felt, been aware of the rules in a way that could never be anything but effeminate.

Being huge was a kind of baseline, it proved you were a man without performing anything, was the belief Claude’s father had come to tacitly hold. If there was no particular performance, there was nothing to slip, he thought, and therefore no plastic-taste humiliation when you were revealed as having tried to be a man. The explanation came interspersed with anticipations of disgust, of Claude’s mother being unable to ever go back to thinking of him as at all automatic of natural or manly at all. In his heaving way Claude’s father said that this was what he had come to so envy about men who could be called huge, that it was something that could not be taken away or ripped off, and that it set off other qualities so nicely, made everything else a pleasant surprise: a virtuous contrast with some basic threat. Claude’s father had come to feel he said, from books and surreptitiously-read women’s magazines, and conversations with friends when he was younger, that hugeness, and its threat, and all the contrasts with – and confirmations of – some men’s hugeness that appeared in their characters, was the only really erotic quality a man could have. Claude’s father felt that everything that could be attractive about him, or anyone else smaller than Hughes, was really just an impersonation – or a woman’s fantasy – of that underlying erotic hugeness, and would always be trumped by it.

Claude’s father said he’d read about a correlation between the mass of CEOs and their income, and even between mass and being a CEO or some other high-ranking role in the first place, he was pretty sure. Claude’s mother asked do you really want to be a CEO? and Why didn’t you say you were unhappy with your body we could have done some exercise together? And Claude’s father repeated no no no until she stopped asking and urged him to go on. She congratulated herself inwardly for taking this so well and for ably switching between advising and just listening, which she had read was important, and necessary in marriage, especially when the two partners had different communicational styles, which she felt they had.

Claude’s father, however, had basically given up on the whole conversation. Between him and his wife there existed, if only in this moment, a catastrophic gap, and between his wife’s searching, slightly bored eyes and his own look there was, could only be, a total humiliation. Claude’s father felt as if he’d tried to talk about a secret code or game or set of objectives and nobody had joined him, and that though his wife knew exactly what he was talking about she thought that bringing it up was pathetic, an admission of defeat in the game itself, and she was punishing by refusing to admit that of course she wanted him huge, like Plath, and that she just wished he’d kept the HGH a better secret. He was, he felt, trying to get at the absolutely fundamental ideals that make desire work, and being utterly transparent about them to the point of humiliation, and his wife was thinking about communicational styles, which were so many layers further up in the murk from where desire comes from that it felt like the risk he was taking was unreciprocated.

That night after their bath, somewhere in the interstices of their early evening, he asked her to tell him something that would help him get to sleep. Both of them seemed, however briefly, to hang in the nervous wash of it as a request. Had she mocked him for asking, or he retracted or ironized his request, the evening could have gone on bright and hard with some permanent shift. She pictured him as a little pig, or as a dog with worms, anything with a plump and upturned stomach. She reflected that it was a dull and easy image to match with vulnerability, but it suited her. He was taut and pink, with breathless beady eyes, and a noontime sheen across his full skin. He was not a Grosz sort of a pig, but an expectant sort, the sort that crop up some way down the tiers of a Ponzi scheme, forever waiting for something big to trickle down.

To help his sleep she conjured a scene that was half going to sea in a sieve, and half their university town. She told him to picture the two of them in a two-berth scallop shell, all lined with rugs and furs, and that at dawn, having been awake all night through untellable parties and complications, the two of them were drifting in this scallop shell down the river they had swum in, the river where Plath’s plaster head still was, at least as far as anybody knew.

And down the river, taking little notice of the nauseous neon tint of the dawn, which spoke of headache fumes, swept miles inland over the fens. And down, shrinking perfectly sized to cut under each little bridge, or suddenly grown to skip oblivious over little squalls in the water. Down with an insistence that meant to bundle him unceremoniously into sleep, beating on past buildings pasted and looped to keep the tableau running for as long as it took. Past three or four-times repeated towers and libraries, to where the river widens and they give way to grasses and high canals and confluences of river ooze. Here at the boundary of the town he grew agitated, and worried that the fantasy would run out just before he could get to sleep, and he knew that the water here was deep, running back over itself in all directions at once like muscle. Their scallop shell spun with the steady cadence of a nonsense poem, and the river was wider still and messy with reeds, which dragged the shell’s bottom.

Here, and seeing his breath was not yet sleeping, she doubled back, redescribing the scallop shell, and their impossible warmness in it from the beginning. He peeled off, however, and the little magic of the story for his sleep peeled away with him, and in the bottom of the shell, no longer pressed secure against its side, he slid nacreous to-and-fro. And after a little while, she trailed off, and lay beside him unsleeping.

*

Claude’s father got a call from his doctor the week after, which was better than a lawyer because he always hated the way that lawyers had of speaking as if they’re your only hope, which he felt doctors had more of a right to anyway, but didn’t use. The doctor, however, was a bad surprise and – Claude’s father felt – maybe breaking some code of ethics. Claude’s mother had told the doctor about the HGH, and the doctor was calling with a list of all the side-effects of taking steroids to dissuade Claude’s father.

Despite his objections to the possible confidentiality-adjacent transgressions of the doctor, which he could not yet articulate but felt to be maybe career-ending, should he kick up a fuss, Claude’s father found himself looking at the fleshy spectre of the steroid-taking man, as conjured by the man on the phone. The steroid-taking man had small balls, this much was certain. The doctor led with it, and so the homunculus before Claude’s father had balls that were somehow massively small in a way that, contra all Claude’s father’s theories about size and its flattering contrasts, seemed undermining in a way that made him even angrier with the doctor. The steroid-taking man was in other ways overlarge, with big, unwieldy organs that kept clipping in and out of the frame of the homunculus, overspilling and then rolling back. He was bald, or balding, in a wispy desiccated way that announced its prematurity. The steroid-taking man’s remaining hair was always a brittle straw color, regardless of its original shade.

All this was testosterone, Claude’s father had no interest in testosterone, only in size. It was never the bulging muscles that made giants giant in folklore, and if it was sometimes their height it was most of all something else that was elusive and that made – he was quite sure – Ted Hughes huge. The doctor went on, Claude’s father kept telling him that these side effects were irrelevant to what he had wanted to take. The steroid-taking man was now in the bath, and though the bath was a good temperature he was sweating and felt queasy from the heat. The steroid-taking man worried that it was a waste of all that water if he didn’t stay in for a while, and it lapped about him as he straightened his legs to get his torso out of the heat. The steroid-taking man’s face had been permanently reduced in its expressive scope; he tried to make a prayerful face but instead looked vacantly confused. This man, the doctor said into the phone, had been permanently severed from the divine. The doctor explained that when a person looks prayerful it is because he throws out a sort of thread at the angel, and the angel catches it and pulls it in towards itself so that there’s tension in the thread, and that because you throw it out through your face the tension pulls your face taut, and that it’s the tautness that makes the face prayerful. Without it, when you can’t throw the thread far enough for the angel to notice it or its somehow withered like it is in the case of the steroid-taking man, there’s no tension in the thread and prayerful minus the tautness leaves you with that vacant, stupid sort of look with which the steroid-taking man is cursed.

There are only three kinds of men, the doctor told Claude’s father on the phone. He had discovered this, he claimed, when he was seeing a play by Dürrenmatt. There were rich men who were husbands and could always be interchanged with one another, and who were proud but weak. There were brutes, who were not proud but strong and stupid, who were bigger than all the rest but at the end of the day only good for carrying things about and carrying things out. And there were eunuchs, who were prophetic but could only speak and move in unison. The play’s great joke, the doctor said, was to make it sound like all these men were at the end of the day the same, but this was a lie, and nothing could be more important than which kind you were.

The doctor said that Claude’s father had made the mistake of wanting to be a brute, because people laughed at the husbands for their cluelessness and pride, and because eunuchs were eunuchs, but that he had missed what was wrong with the brute, which was that brutes would soon be rendered surplus by the machine age. What you wanted to be, the doctor said, on balance, he said, was a husband. Claude’s father told the doctor he would read the play, hoping it would get him off the phone.

The doctor said there was also a fourth kind of man in the play, that he was the protagonist, but that he did not really exist, except in jealous fantasies, and so had to die at the end. He was the lover who came before the husbands, and who was desirable not because he was rich but because he knew the woods and barns, which nobody could take from him. This was the sort of man to be jealous of, the doctor said, and not huge men. Claude’s father felt that the doctor’s logic was off, it was precisely because nobody could take or acquire hugeness that he had wanted it so much, and that anyway the old lover could always be humiliated for his parochial limitations or naivety. Naivety, too, Claude’s father felt, was considered a virtue in the very large, uniquely among men, because it seemed that they were so intuitively powerful and capable that they did not need worldliness or tricks. This, he felt, was what had to disgusted his wife about his mentioning Hughes, that he – Claude’s father – was trying to game the system, which is worse than losing if anyone notices.

The doctor told him that nobody was trying to stop him from taking HGH if he wanted to, but that he should really be informed and come in for blood-tests and a chat, and Claude’s father kept telling the doctor that he could make decisions about his own body if he wanted to. The doctor told him that nobody was stopping him or controlling him, but that he needed to really think about what he was doing and what it might do to his family if he was ill, and Claude’s father told the doctor that he hated the steroid-taking man, that he was disgusted by him and as far from his desires as it was possible to be.

The doctor told Claude’s father that his son’s stature, now effectively remedied, was in no way a reflection of a lack of paternal virility. The doctor kept telling him to think of Claude, to think about how – and he wouldn’t ordinarily put it in these terms – but about how a man should think of his son first. Claude’s father acknowledged he had forgotten about Claude, and what his longevity might mean to his son. He had forgotten about Claude altogether really, since he had grown. And now he thought of Claude full force, projecting out a thread towards his son, the Claude of a few years prior who had spent all that time in the school chapel. Claude’s father felt that Claude had been praying for all eventualities, for all the wishes he might want to make for the rest of his life but couldn’t now, and he pictured himself above the chapel projecting down towards his son a thread to pull him up tauter and taller. A great chameleon-tongue of wishes to keep Claude going for the rest of his life. He thanked the doctor on the phone, and energetically told him that he would be a husband, always and foremost a husband, that a husband was the only properly desirable thing a man could be.

*

The steroid-taking man shone his bright, balding head into the chapel almost every day before work. It was vastly tall in such a way that the name chapel seemed almost to have been chosen for comic effect. He went there with questions, and often asked why he could not look after anything so that it stayed alive. He wanted to know whether it was because he had made himself infertile, because he had forgotten how things grow naturally, that when he kept plants or fish, they stayed the same size and then, steadily, died. He had made his way down from the things he really wanted to cacti and bottom-feeders, but invariantly, in shrivelled roots and upturned bellies, even they refused nurture.

He recalled the profound sadness of infertile crossbreeds, when they had been explained to him in school. Crossing a tiger and a lion was the domain of myth, or ill-conceived pleasuredome grandiosity, or sick childhood zoo-managerial fantasies, and yet it had happened and created something that could not even be called a species. In the interstices of its comedy and monstrosity there were flashes of a creature that was lonely, lonelier than he – the steroid- taking man – had ever been. It was a creature that was not merely rare or freakshow-ish but utterly at its own end. No matter how many were made, or how many were in one place at one time, each stood fully at its beginning and extinction. The steroid-taking man decided it was the worst fate in the world to be genealogically lonely, barren and conceived by strangers. He imagined having a child of his own that he fed with anabolic steroids, and teaching the child to do the same in turn to their own child, and he imagined that such a child would keep him company perfectly.

He and his liger son would sit opposite each other, full of organs overflowing their bounds, and throw back and forth to each other threads. In tens of generations their swollen looks and parted mouths would be carved as faces in prayer, in gargoyles and on doorways at the beginning and the end, not of themselves, but of a line. The steroid-taking man would be both bookends of all his chemical giants, the only one facing outwards into its before and after. He would take upon himself all the loneliness of inviting all this line inside his outsized ribcage, and inside his bounds everyone would understand one another, even if he was not there. He would wind himself tightly in threads, kept taut by nothing but the gaps between each huge part of himself.