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Go to Jess's shop Monday evening for the first arm sleeve session. Push all of my workouts and eating even harder next week. Branch out my film watching to other sports with tall, fat, muscular men, specifically boxing, mma, wrestling and sumo. Incorporate their techniques into my work as well

Monday evening Lena drives to Jess's shop on Tenth Street after work. The sign in the window reads JESS'S INK in hand-painted letters and the door chimes when she pushes it open. Jess is behind the counter cleaning tubes. She looks up at Lena and her eyes do the same thing Walt's do — the quick measuring sweep, the assessment of what's in front of her — and then she smiles and says, "East-side girl. Get in the chair."

Lena sits down and Jess takes her left arm and studies the marker lines she drew Wednesday. She turns the arm, flexes it, extends it, watching how the muscle moves underneath the fat.

"The lines are going to shift when you flex. That's good. The tattoo should move with you, not sit on you like a sticker." She adjusts the stencil and Lena watches the pattern tighten — the thick black lines curving from the deltoid down the bicep, spiraling toward the forearm. Jess starts the machine and the sound fills the shop and the first line goes in and Lena doesn't flinch.

Three hours. The shoulder and upper arm are done by the time Jess wipes the ink away and Lena looks down and sees the lines — thick, black, tribal, curving across the deltoid and down the bicep, following the architecture of the muscle exactly. The skin is red and raised and the lines are sharp. Lena flexes and the tattoo shifts with the muscle, the curves bending, the pattern alive on her arm.

"Second session in two weeks," Jess says. "Let it heal. Don't scratch it."

Lena drives home and eats dinner and presses two-twenty on the balcony and the arm is sore but the press holds. Tuesday she adds another block — two-forty on the pipe now — and the first rep is a war. Her jaw locks. Her back arches. Her belly drives forward and the pipe goes up and the shake at lockout is violent. She does three sets of two and drops to two-twenty for two more sets. Wednesday she manages five sets of three at two-forty. Thursday she does four. The arms are adapting but the pace of adaptation has changed — slower, harder, the muscle fighting for every rep. She eats seven thousand calories a day. Eight thousand some days. Whole chickens and pots of rice and quarts of milk and bags of donuts and chocolate milk and ground beef and eggs. She belches after every meal — the sound deeper now, the volume louder, the kitchen window rattling. She farts on the balcony between sets and the sound is long and low and she laughs.

Thursday night she opens her laptop and branches the film study. She's been watching offensive line tape for weeks — stance, leverage, the geometry of mass. Now she types in new searches. Boxing first — heavyweights, the big men. She watches George Foreman, leaning on opponents, using his mass like a wall. She watches Lennox Lewis, six-five, two-fifty, using the jab to control distance. She takes notes. Then MMA — she finds heavyweight fighters, the ones who carry real mass, and she studies how they use weight in the clinch, how they press opponents against the cage and let gravity and mass do the work. Wrestling — she watches collegiate heavyweights and the technique is pure leverage, the body as a fulcrum, positioning over force. Then sumo. She watches for two hours and the principles are the same across every sport — low center of gravity, use the belly, drive with the legs, let the mass lead. She takes notes on all of it.

Friday she runs thirteen miles and the body grinds through the last mile the same way it did last week — no new gear, just will and mass. But the two-forty presses have built something in her shoulders and core that changes the mechanics of the run. Her arms are heavier and the pump is different and she can feel the new density in her upper back stabilizing her torso when the core wants to collapse. She finishes and walks home and eats everything and masturbates on the balcony floor and the orgasm is long and she lies there in the dark and thinks about the lines Jess drew on her arm and the sumo stance and the way Foreman leaned on people and the way the body carries all of it — the weight and the muscle and the ink and the grime and the miles — and she is comfortable.