Dead-Weight Over Russia

    I sit in a British Airways plane, 36,000 feet above Russia, heading for London. I am in a block of three seats. On my right is a demure, diminutive young Chinese woman. On my left is a morbidly obese Glaswegian man, about thirty-years old. He wears the most enormous shirt I've ever seen (although its voluminous tract of gingham material is, even so, straining to contain so much bloated, saturated, adipose tissue beneath it). I can almost hear the seams creak and groan at the mass trying to burst asunder. He also wears shorts.
    I have been wedged between these two since Hong Kong. The man's belly is monstrous. I can sense the enormous weight of it as it pools around his torso, filling up all the space between him and the fold-down table and the video screen; it also flows over the arm rest and into my personal space, causing shudders of revulsion in me whenever I acknowledge its encroachment, as it wobbles silkily against my chest, or tenderly grazes my arm. 
    The man's legs, naked from the knee down, are each the size of a dolphin. They are pink and hairless and they gleam wetly as he sweats away in his seat. His buttocks, which have long since forgotten that they were once two separate orbs, now strain against the fabric of his navy blue shorts like a bungalow wrapped in serge by Christo. The man has been tossing in fitful sleep for the past four hours, like an expiring whale cast up on a beach. His most favoured position is to lean forward, resting his massive forehead and face against the video screen, and his wobbling chins upon the folds of his chest, which now rises up to meet and caress them. His right forearm, which is the size of a leg of lamb, has been regularly dropped onto my lap during his fitful dreaming and his well-padded elbow thuds continuously into my ribs, making any attempt at sleep of my own impossible. He huffs and snorts like a wounded warthog. Every fifteen minute he will sneeze or cough loudly, never raising his bloated hand to block the explosion of bacteria. 
    As he wrestles with sleep his body jerks regularly into spasms, during which a leg or an arm is shaken about rapidly. When the meals came around (a choice of horrible, under-cooked pasta or terrible beef and rice) he asked for one of each, which he wolfed down at record speed; and then he gobbled down two of the hideous, spongy desserts, licking the plastic containers clean afterwards like a cat who'd found the cream. 
    Glancing down at the point between his legs I wonder how such a behemoth manages to have sex, if at all. I try to imagine his genitals, which, in comparison to the rest of his bulk, must resemble a glob of chewed gum stuck in the fork of a tree. 
    Now he has just woken up and he is occupying himself jogging his legs furiously up and down and wringing his squelchy hands together. The thin, overhead, directed light flares across his video screen - on the glass I can make out a clear impression of his face, which has been imprinted there in human grease, like an oily Turin shroud.

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