Alteraciones psicopatológicas de los pacientes con obesidad mórbida

i.

Daedalus had only now. Come along with me, he said, to the furthest limitations of our earth. To detest was to bear witness, de testari, and his eyes were the shade of protracted exile.

This was what we’d done and how we did it. Longing, without latitude.

We had not asked to visit,

for this was our native country to be done with as we will.

He said we might start again, but. His way was our way,

barred by the tide of our rising seas.

So-saying, he put his mind to the balance of the air. Techniques unexplored before.

Limiting the growth of our desires to two degrees,

and the complex feedback mechanisms of the point of no return.

We were altered parameters, shifting masses, creating space beyond ourselves.

We didn’t tend to speak of the disjunctive laws of nature. Indiscriminating pronouns.

61 ii.

Some gases.

The smallest to begin with.

The shorter positioned to the longer. You’d think they’d grown like that.

iii.

In the middle of the sky, adhering to the clouds, there were clumps of earwax.

At the bottom of this neatly compacted plumage the sheaf of the most recently negotiated protocol curved in a gentle camber to imitate birds’ wings.

The pigeons looked at us as if we had nothing better to do than hang around their square of sky and shit on statues.

We did not listen. It was fair game. Whose carbon dioxide was this anyway? The pigeons refused to ratify; they just spat stones at us.

iv.

Daedalus was moulding the weather.

But we must also mitigate our ways, he said, or we’ll have the sun falling on our heads like melting toffee.

His eyes sunk into his scalp as he thought of his young son Icarus.

What does your Daddy do?

Because my Daddy’s going to save the world. Daedalus’s shadow was of light bulbs, little awarenesses, the size of globes, the underlying threat of future tense.

To be himself was to be the way the world was touching on him.

He watched Icarus as he laughed and smiled, as he ran and caught at the springtime feathers fluttering in the breeze.

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Sometimes Icarus would sit with Daedalus and carelessly soften the yellow wax between the feathers with his thumb, enjoying his game, as he meddled and interfered with his father’s work.

I like toffee, he said. It’s like playdough. The colour of summer holidays.

vi.

As he’d said.

Everything was going to be ok.

This was perhaps the most surprising thing.

Next Daedalus instructed his son. It was strange, but he didn’t really feel as if he had a choice in all of this.

When his own wings beat the air there was but a momentary hesitation. What were we really found wanting?

They say that life goes on and on and

When Daedalus led the way into the sky it was in hope of a temporary silence. His, her, their, our, its. No more shouting

vii.

The sun grew larger than a peach, softening the fragrant ice like candle wax, fastening the accumulated heat to the surface of this earth.

The moment wore the clouds like decorative plumage:

carbon dioxide methane water vapour

Icarus balanced the melting ice wax on his fingertips. It was more than likely that the air had the texture of dissolved sugar. When the pigeons headed for home Icarus licked his lips, flapped his arms, and looked sassy.

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Part 1: The Fall

One thing was certain; the key to base-jumping the atmosphere was a sense of humour. Only Icarus didn’t jump, he was pushed. Afterwards Icarus would ponder the shape of the hands and the familiarity of the laughter that had tipped him off the flat edge of Planet Zeus. He would ask why Zeus had allocated him that particular job of fixing the perimeter fence on that particular August day when he could have been helping the cherubims sew feathers to wings, or reading stories to the goats. But on the verge of oblivion one has more pressing worries than playing whodunit with the Gods.

Icarus lay back against the air and looked out into the abyss. The upper atmosphere couldn’t have contrasted more with the Eden from which he had just been ejected. The blackness defied the brightness of the sun, and the passing gas particles which singed the hairs on the back of his hands passed by so infrequently that not even his stripey woollen jumper could keep him warm. Certainly, there was something to be said for the once-in-a-lifetime experience of floating, weightlessly on thin air, running the stars through your fingertips like sand.

‘Vorpal!’ Icarus might have exclaimed, if only there had been some choice in his situation. Instead his attempts to butterfly-kick like a dolphin down into the Earth’s gravitational pull resembled a dying fish, floundering about the exosphere while floating into outer space. He was a faller by trade, but try telling that to a lack of gravity.

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It was only a week since Icarus had declared it high time that his life had a happy ending for once during individual counsel with Zeus. ‘I’m fed up of being recalled to earth by any boojum to play the fool who flew too close to the sun. Isn’t it time I outgrew my fate? I’ve become prisoner to it, my story’s wearing out!’ Icarus had pushed his curly blonde fringe from his blue eyes and adjusted his growth spurt to the paisley pattern armchair as he counted the writers who had summoned him to earth, or the artists who had sculpted his wings. Recently he had been a pop song about the follies of youth, before serving as figurehead to a mental health charity. He had once been a design of custom bicycle, but most infamously of all he had lent his figure to Greece’s first national airline, which had combusted within months.

Zeus adjusted his tunic, ran his fingers through his flowing golden beard, and raised his bushy white eyebrows while looking Icarus directly in the eye for a good few moments, as if to ask – who do you think you are young Icarus, to presume to ask such things of me? You mean you want to be a God? Zeus rose and opened up the door to signal the end of the meeting, before speaking down to Icarus. ‘True, your story was recycled more often last century than the previous nineteen combined. But there are worse fates than your semi-mortal assignation, Icarus. The grass isn’t always greener…’

‘But…!’

‘…BUT if you really wish to become a God, as you have intimated, then the only way would be by rewriting your story, not just inhabiting the one written for you.’

And that had been the end of that, Icarus had concluded, getting up to go, uffish as any adolescent. There was no point arguing with the God of the Gods over such matters, or in fact any kind of matters, once Zeus had decided that things were or weren’t to be. Because rewriting his fate would require the kind of extended application to the serious matters of life of which Icarus appeared incapable, as both Zeus and his father Daedalus well knew.

‘What’s going to become of you?’ Daedalus had recently asked, on the occasion of Icarus’s school report. Daedalus had a shock of curly hair to rival Einstein, which stood on end when he spoke to his recalcitrant son or smoked his pipe. ‘I could understand if you were lacking in intelligence or creativity or talent...’

Icarus had interrupted his father’s outburst in the only way he knew – whistling – an improvised variety of whistle at which he was undoubtedly virtuosic, but which on this occasion had been a tune too far.

‘If you left off dreaming, just think where you could be! Take Apollo, for example!’

Icarus managed to shrug off that comparison to his best-friend-cum-nemesis, but had stormed off when the argument had descended into the familiar debate over how, and even on this occasion whether, Icarus could be his son. Was it really Icarus’s fault that he was the product of his father’s sexual dalliance with the local village prostitute? Or rather, less offensively considered, his mother – Naucrate – may she rest in peace? He hadn’t spoken to his father since. But more immediately, what was going to become of him? A happy ending? Ha! His most immediate fate more likely involved painting a constellation on the night sky with his skeletal remains – as a permanent warning to humanity against overweening pride. And if it hadn’t been for a particle of carbon dioxide sidling by, right then, perhaps his end would have been just this.

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‘How do?’ said the CO₂. ‘Icarus, I presume? But what have you done with your wings?’

Icarus spread his arms wide, as if he had only just noticed that, indeed, there were no wings. ‘But I’m not travelling to the sun. I’m trying to fall back to earth – that’s the problem.’

‘Wings melted again, huh?’

‘Well, not exactly, but they may as well have. How did you end up here?’

‘Oh, the usual.’ The carbon dioxide hooked his thumbs in the handles of his oxygen and leant back on his infrared cowboy heels. ‘Us bad boys hang around greenhouse earth too long causing trouble and pow wow, before we know it, a cannon blasts my gang out of the atmosphere. Well, not right the way out – the human race couldn’t organise an atmosphere at a murder scene. But hey ho, if you’re travelling down not up, any chance of a ride? A few more carbon dioxides onboard and we’ll easily have enough density to begin sinking towards earth.’ The CO₂ held out his hand. ‘My name’s Billy.’

In the absence of any better ideas, Icarus couldn’t see why not. But by the time Billy woke several days later, exospheric gas particle fishing had proven as exciting as the time Icarus and Apollo had broken into Poseidon’s mansion to poach salmon from the chlorinated swimming pool.

‘Lucky us carbon dioxides live long enough to survive waiting around for each other, eh? Thirty to ninety years, give or take. Not that different, in fact, from human life expectancy. Not that that’s anything to brag about!’

Icarus’s task might have been slow, but at least when a particle did pass by it took very little effort on his part for the CO₂ to lodge in his jumper without invitation, equally eager for a ride. It could only be a matter of time before they acquired sufficient density to begin falling towards the next stage of the earth’s atmosphere. The blackness slipped before Icarus’s eyes, lightening with every mile, faster, further, until…

‘Passports!’ cried the helium customs officials in falsettos, puffing out their six packs, at the thermospheric border control.

‘Special high security delivery of carbon dioxide,’ Icarus answered officiously, mistaking the helium particles’ camp exclamations for a gesture of being waved straight through.

‘Are you crazy?’ Billy screamed once they were out of earshot. ‘We don’t get smuggled into the atmosphere. The jumper was a disguise! Any other guards than the heliums and we’d have been blasted straight back out!’

Certainly, the thermosphere was more atmospheric than the exosphere. It was even inhabited, although the presence of abandoned scientific space-stations, reputedly inhabited by renegade space-pirates, was scant consolation for Icarus’s dawning horror. No matter that he had bunked his science exam; no matter how much the moralistic overtones of climate change debate made his toes curl; he didn’t doubt climate change, and imagining its potential consequences made his tummy turn. Icarus was now accelerating towards Earth. ‘Get off!’ he screeched to his

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cheerful carbon dioxide friends, shaking his jumper to and fro. ‘Away! Back up out of the atmosphere, now, scram!’ Instead the particles scampered around the back where he couldn’t get to them and laughed.

Icarus pulled his fingers through his hair. He’d outdone himself. In other circumstances collecting carbon dioxide particles in the weave of a woollen jumper might have been a novel invention for reducing the atmospheric concentration of greenhouses gases – an invention worthy of Daedalus no less! Icarus’s father had spent the last few decades applying his technological genius to atmospheric science, and had recently become Zeus’s climate change advisor. And never mind their run-ins over the last few years, Icarus didn’t disvalue Daedalus’s efforts. Rather, Daedalus’s technological approach continued to make as much sense to him as a snark in a teapot! Where Daedalus was application, Icarus was abstraction. Where his Dad was sense, he was nonsense. Where Daedalus was design Icarus was digression, some might say disaster. He had broken his arm on the way to his science exam by climbing up a tree to catch a passing cloud. (What was life but a dream?) Whistling had failed to slow his collision with the ground. The science of climate change was one of those things that – yes, certainly – filled Icarus’s head with ideas, if only he knew what these ideas were! As a case in point, Icarus hadn’t just sequestered CO₂. Contrariwise, he’d smuggled it back into the atmosphere to further warm Planet Earth!

There was nothing for it. Political correctness aside, the fate of the planet had to come before his favourite jumper. However, when Icarus raised his arms above his head, his hands were met by another pair of hands – rough, weathered – which far from helping him off with it, instead hauled him onto the balcony of a passing space-station.

‘Now what do we have here?’ the space-pirate asked in a Cornish accent. He resembled an ageing fisherman with his bushy beard, ruddy cheeks and navy mackintosh – and Icarus his catch. Icarus recoiled from the pirate’s cannibalistic breath before biting hard into his right hand. The pirate swore and propelled Icarus from the toe of his yellow wellingtons in an arc, up, up, down towards the mesosphere – carbon dioxide jumper and all.

At minus one hundred degrees mesospheric lightning travels at the speed of elves and sprites, firing bolts at you like pyromaniacal garden gnomes. The burning on entry was so cold that meteors combusted. Icarus spun at the speed of light, his arms and legs flailing like a Catherine- wheel. He would have truly been a firework had it not been for the inflammable protection of his carbon dioxide vest. ‘Thanks be to carbon dioxide,’ he said when he finally came to a stop in the stratosphere; paused; looked around.

Usually when things combusted, Icarus’s story was escorted back to Planet Zeus by cherubims, to await Zeus’s judgement and Icarus’s subsequent reincarnation in time for his next quest and inevitable fall, but here he still was. ‘You might be the first things to truly save my life,’ he said to the CO₂. ‘I don’t know how to thank you enough.’

‘But we save your life every day!’ Billy scoffed. ‘You wouldn’t even remember to breathe without us. But I guess credit where credit’s due. Makes a change from being the black gas in

67 the family.’

Icarus blushed. Had he really once thought to cast the carbon dioxide off his jumper to be done with as any passing space-pirate might choose? Of course not all CO₂ was bad. Not only was it required for human breathing, but where would photosynthesis be without it? As Daedalus had once taught, it was only certain concentrations that were problematic – carbon dioxide’s tendency, as Icarus had understood, to hang around in gangs and drink, multiply and collect anti-social behaviour orders as trophies for their skies!

‘However, if you really want to thank us, then you could best leave us here where we can cause most climate havoc,’ Billy added, winking.

Icarus leant back against the air to weigh things up, but by the time he’d decided that he really ought to offer the particles up to the authorities on Earth, thus salving both his conscience and his loneliness, his jumper sagged lifelessly from his shoulders. Every particle had dissolved into thin air, further stoppering the planet to see whether humanity could take the heat. ‘You could at least have said goodbye!’

Icarus’s resultant mood fitted into the ultra-violet stratosphere well. He traced his index finger mimsily over centuries of human environmental misdemeanour, etched in the sky like an Ikarian tragedy. If you fly too low, the water will clog your wings; if you fly too high, they’ll be scorched by fire…fly the middle path? There were certainly echoes between the story of his own life and the tale of humanity with climate change, and Daedalus’s warnings had never rung so true, but…! He followed the upward trajectory of human progress upon the sky – up, up, and…where it would come to a stop was the million-environment question. Icarus knelt upon the increasingly dense atmosphere to pray for forgiveness and no less than a happy ending to the climate change narrative in which he had become unwittingly implicated. ‘Let me fall, not humanity, not earth.’

It was a big ask, but Icarus had barely spoken before his wish was granted. He had soon gathered enough pace that the atmosphere became blurred. It wasn’t long before his disorientation was complete and he lost all sensation in his dislocated limbs. He heard the almighty crash before feeling the impact. Yet in those final instants before losing consciousness,