Chapter 3
The promoted story was posted under the account weightlossinnovations, the sympathetic face of the company that was running the clinical trial. Upon being directed to their website, Emmett understood why such a veneer was necessary.
“En route to Monstera BioSciences,” said the navigation system of Lizette’s SUV as she backed it out of the cramped assigned space.
“Monstera?” she erupted, shifting into drive. “Could it be any more fucking sinister?”
“So dramatic. Monstera is a plant. Your aunt Paola has like ten of them.”
“Paola is borderline psychotic, so what’s your point?”
“Okay.”
“I’m just saying, the vibes are bad. When this all goes south, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
The Monstera BioSciences headquarters were a feat of modern architecture perched on the canyon side of the Torrey Preserve, a fortress of plate glass and pristine geometry reflecting the clarity of the California sky.
After explaining their purpose to the gate attendant, they parked in the underground lot and took the elevator up to the lobby level.
2,500 lbs max capacity, read a plaque below the button panel.
Emmett automatically added his and Lizette’s weights in his head to be sure they wouldn’t send the carriage crashing down.
The doors whooshed open onto a lofty expanse of white walls and high-gloss concrete floors, a Frankenstein’s monster of modern art museum, office building, and Mormon temple.
The lobby’s sole concession to color seemed to be the reception desk’s emerald backdrop, a living wall of monstera boughs, fanning and supine, embellished with a tasteful profusion of palm fronds, ferns, and birds-of- paradise.
They were so lush and eye-catching it took Emmett a moment to realize they were all fake.
“Good morning,” sang the smiling receptionist as he and Lizette approached, her eyes rising instantly to Emmett’s hair. “Love the neon.”
He absently scrunched a lock of blazing orange. “Did it last night.”
“It looks great!”
A hidden pocket of confidence burst warmly in Emmett’s chest. He’d never been brave enough to get inked, fearing how a tattoo might distort if he gained more weight, but he never tired of experimenting with his hair.
A mane of poison green or electric blue, he found, conferred a feeling of armor-like protection; the wilder the color, the quicker the eye glanced off his body.
“Are you here for the Obexity session?”
“Obexity?” Lizette glanced at Emmett, skeptical.
“Sorry, is that the clinical trial?” he said.
“It is, yes. Just take the elevator up three more floors. Room 405.”
They returned to the elevator. “Still time to run,” Lizette said.
This time they were joined by a couple of men in lab coats.
Their presence prevented Emmett from replying that if he were inclined to run, he wouldn’t have needed the trial in the first place.
He guessed the strangers’ weights and mentally summed them.
On the fourth floor they found a meeting space prepared with chairs facing a projection screen. It hardly registered in comparison to the view. Even as they signed in, their eyes strayed to the floor-to-ceiling windows.
A moment later they approached and stood before the large windows, gazing down into a vast canyon blanketed with sage scrub, wild and thorny and teeming with wildlife. “Look at that.” Lizette pointed out a coyote scavenging a carcass. “Cool.”
“Ew,” said Emmett queasily.
Nevertheless, the view demanded a selfie.
“Say self-loathing!” Lizette said.
When the seats began to fill, they peeled themselves away and squeezed into the second-to-last row. Despite the session’s target audience, the chairs were tiny and plastic with legs like toothpicks. “If I break this shit, that’s on them,” Lizette announced to the room. A couple of people laughed.
She sat, spilling over onto the chairs on each side. Emmett sat beside her, crossing his arms over his chest with his thighs pressed together.
He surveyed the room. The other attendees were diverse in age and ethnicity, most fat but not all; it was a rare weight loss program that wasn’t overrepresented with average-weight White women who hated themselves.
At least he wasn’t the biggest person there.
One man in the front row had to be pushing 450.
Emmett broke his gaze with a guilty reflux. Why did he always default to bitchiness and self-comparison? He had been that man. In most rooms he was that man. Cut the guy a break.
At half past nine, a nerdy-cute twentysomething appeared at the front of the room before the title slide of a PowerPoint: Obexity?—The Future of Weight Loss.
“Morning, everyone,” he said, winning no awards for enthusiasm. “I’m Blake, I’m an intern here at Monstera. Before we begin, we’ve got water, coffee, and fruit in the back—feel free to get up and help yourselves.”
“Fruit and water?” Lizette muttered. “That’s a hate crime.”
Emmett smirked as she squeezed out to make herself a plate.
“Restrooms are down the hall to your left,” continued Blake. “If there are no questions before we begin, I’m going to hand it over to our presenter, Dr. Saito.”
The crowd sent up a smattering of applause as a petite Asian woman approached the front of the room.
She was in her mid-thirties, pretty, cheating her five-foot frame with thick wedges.
Her black dress flattered her professionalism and shapely figure.
She smiled at the carpet as she walked, a natural darkness showing at the roots of her tousled blond lob.
“Good morning, everyone,” she said, turning her smile upon the crowd with a double-handed wave.
“Thank you so much for being here bright and early this morning. We couldn’t be more excited to tell you about our new weight loss miracle and how you can help make it available for millions of Americans—and make some money doing it. We like that, right?”
Emmett joined in the polite laughter, so instantly enamored with the presenter he hardly registered that Lizette had returned to his side.
Dr. Saito clasped her hands, crossing her ankles as she continued.
“First of all, allow me to introduce myself.” The slide flicked over to a brief bio.
“I’m Jennifer Saito—you can call me Jenni—director of product development here at Monstera.
I’ve been with the company for about eight years, in PD for five.
I oversee the development and manufacture of an exciting portfolio of pharma and therapeutic solutions and sometimes products that incorporate both—we’ll get to that shortly. ”
The slide changed again. “Just a little bit about the company. Quick show of hands, how many of you have heard of Monstera BioSciences before today?”
A pair of hands inched up.
“Couple of you? I always like to ask that. Although you might not’ve heard of us, Monstera has been quietly revolutionizing the biopharmaceutical industry for over a decade.
We’re a publicly traded company founded in 2011 focused on innovating solutions to overweight and obesity.
If any of you have heard of the appetite suppressant ConsuMin—looks like a few of you know it—that was a Monstera product.
We’re small compared to the Pfizers and AstraZenecas of the world, but for our size we’re in the top two percent by market cap.
We’re a SoCal operation through and through, and we take our inspiration from the split-leaf philodendron Monstera deliciosa—a special favorite of our founder.
It’s named for being abnormal, even ‘monstrous,’ but with a little TLC is capable of producing such sweet fruit. ”
“This bitch did not,” Lizette said.
Don’t, Emmett mouthed.
The slide changed again, revealing a trademarked Obexity logo: simple, bright, colorful, with the telltale blandness of having been market tested to within an inch of its life.
“And now, the reason you’re all here. We’re excited to be seeking willing participants to trial our cutting-edge, multimodal weight loss product, Obexity, a first-of-its-kind gene therapy treatment paired with a new, specially formulated pharmaceutical known generically as ephaloma-copiramate, or EmaC-8 for short. ”
“I’m sorry, your weight loss drug is called emaciate?” Lizette called out.
Emmett wanted to slide down his chair into a puddle of goo.
“EmaC-8,” Dr. Saito repeated without breaking her smile. She raised a French-tipped finger toward the screen, sounding out each syllable as she pointed. “E. Mack. Eight. Hope that helps.”
Emmett could feel Lizette’s anger radiating off her. “Bitch,” she muttered. “I know how to read. It fucking says emaciate…”
“Representing the marriage of these two groundbreaking treatments,” Dr. Saito continued, “Obexity is unlike any product currently available on the market. Rather than suppressing appetite, it’s designed to alter your genetic composition, to actually rewrite the segment of your DNA related to energy conversion.
Our patented gene therapy procedure, when combined with the activating agent delivered through regular doses of EmaC-8, vastly accelerates metabolism, enabling you to lose weight rapidly without altering your diet or your exercise routine. ”
Disbelief rippled through the room. “No diet or exercise?” Lizette said to Emmett. Not even she could hate the idea.
Dr. Saito glowed. “Incredible, isn’t it? Obexity is the future of weight loss, the end of obesity for every American who’s ready to become the very best version of themselves.”
“If you can afford it, right?” snarked a man at the front.
“Well, yes.” Dr. Saito laughed.
“How much will it cost?” a woman asked. “Ballpark.”
“We’re still running the numbers. The procedure itself we think will fall in the region of two to three hundred thousand.
” She pretended not to notice the room’s collective inbreath.
“Then for your prescription of EmaC-8, anywhere between one and three thousand dollars a vial. Ballpark, between fifty and a hundred fifty thousand a year.”
Dr. Saito’s smile buckled under the weight of the shocked silence that followed. The incredulity, the anger, the crumpling of hope into all-too-familiar despair.
“That’s why,” she pressed on, “we’re so excited to be offering these trials—not only to ensure that the treatment is safe and effective, but to allow a few lucky participants to experience the benefits of Obexity at no cost.”
“Great, we get to be your guinea pigs,” the same joker wisecracked, to scattered laughter.
“Not at all,” Dr. Saito said. The slide changed. “We’ve already completed the first phase of clinical trials, virtually all of them extremely successful.”
“Virtually?” Lizette’s eyes slanted toward Emmett; he rolled his own.
“We’re now looking for a larger group of participants for the Phase Two trial. It’s expected to start in May, will last fourteen months, and here’s the fun part: each participant will receive a stipend of fifteen hundred dollars for each month they remain in the trial.”
Emmett wasn’t the only person to pull out his phone and calculate the total potential earnings. “That’s twenty-one grand,” he said to Lizette.
“Before you get too excited,” Dr. Saito went on, “I will say that for the second phase we’re targeting a fairly narrow participant profile, and some of you unfortunately won’t qualify. Anyone with a body mass index under thirty-five, for example.”
A moderately proportioned blonde snatched up her purse, forced her way out of her row, and stormed from the room, cursing under her breath. “Freaking waste of time…”
Dr. Saito continued as if no such disturbance had occurred.
“If you’re interested in moving forward in the process, you’ll be asked to complete an online application describing your medical history, weight loss goals, and availability.
You’ll receive an email with the link in the next twenty-four hours.
From there, we’ll narrow down a smaller group to be medically assessed to ensure you’re healthy enough to participate. ”
“But not too healthy, right?” said the jokester.
Dr. Saito paused, a glint of steel in her smile now.
“Of course we want you healthy. That’s the whole reason Obexity was created.” She cast her gaze across the group, her eyes falling on Emmett, as if by coincidence.
“For the greatest health and happiness of the country.”