Dr. Peterbilt first introduced me to his study, in collaboration with Dr. Pantur Surapranata, Ph.D, of a phenomenon among a group of young Indonesian high school students he and Surapranata termed “hyperanorexia”, or in his shortened appelation of the girls he surveyed “hyperanas.” These were a group of girls who’d bonded over their strong desire to become as thin as possible, who had explored the rounds of various Pro-Ana forums seeking out the most effective extreme dieting measures, committing to them with a tenacity as yet unseen in the myriad young women who go down this dark and ill-advised path.
Displaying an admirable degree of teamwork and solidarity, within weeks they got their calorie counts down to the hundreds, they edged closer and closer to the absolute minimum BMI that was “survivable” by present medical knowledge, and at that point, interestingly, they seem to have lost sight of their original intention to exude waifish attractiveness, lost interest in men, women, any sort of romantic partner in general, and most of them lost their sex drives. This, even more interestingly, did not dissuade them from continuing to diet. They explained to Surapranata and Peterbilt that they had, in their words “found something better, better than sex, better than boys or girls, better than simply looking pretty,” Dr. Peterbilt paused at this to tell me that, although he didn’t want to catch himself rating the attractiveness of teenagers, this was their own idea of “pretty.” The first time he saw them was in an attached JPEG in email correspondence with Surapranata. The thumbnail, appearing to show, as he expected, an otherwise normal- looking group of maybe uncomfortably skinny looking girls, belied the details in the full-size image. Cracked, damaged skin not of a teenager but almost of an old woman, faded and brittle hair only tousled to a degree of normalcy by excessive application of oily sheening hair product, nearly exposed bones and joints at the knees and shoulders, and finally: empty, hollow eyes. Eyes that stared through the camera lens and almost the computer screen, directly at Peterbilt, seeming to show both malintent and fear at the same time, eyes that looked less than human, almost reptilian.
One of the girls, after he’d come in contact with the cohort, privately asked for his email address to send him intimate details of the unrecorded conversations between the girls during fasting sessions. These provided a wealth of the more confidential admissions by the women when they thought no one was listening. Some of these confessions were unnerving to the fourty year-old scientist. One girl spoke in lurid detail of her recent masturbation fantasies, which by the time she was at BMI 9 had declined into, in one instance, masochistically fantasizing about dying alone, in an empty nursing home, an obese wreck picking at fungus growing underneath her armpits. Her favorite part, according to her, was imagining the one final melancholic and “heartbreakingly pathetic” groan she would let out before she slumped over into brain death, a groan that “no one could hear, no one at all.”
There was a girl who claimed to, at BMI 8, acquire a new kind of vision by which she could glean out past wear on objects from even so much as a fingertouch. According to her, she managed a rather successful blackmail operation by sussing out a few girls in school stealing test materials from their teachers. She explained, however, that she “had to quit it” because of the effect this visual ability had on her observations of people. “People’s eyes” she said, “...people’s eyes look different. Not good. There’s bad stuff you see in there. Most people are not good, deep down. They’re really not.”
Another girl who said she made it all the way to BMI 6 said with the most earnest conviction that she began to hear human translations of animal speech. The speech was generally simple and childlike, but according to her revealed unexpected inclinations of the psyche of familiar animals we generally consider benign. According to Dr. Supranata, from what this girl told him, dogs were “needy, manipulative, hateful and jealous.” Cats were “sarcastic and funny, but complained frequently.” Bugs like ants and cockroaches “chattered insecessantly about what seemed to be their local politics.” Birds were “graphically screaming obscene sexual fantasies whenever they called in the morning.” From viewing nature documentaries, she also learned that “monkeys are abusive and cultlike, obsessed with various forest gods.” The cries of whales were “forlorn and pessimistic, about highly complicated science and religious topics” and “sounded
like their world was coming to an end.” Dolphins, however, were “mischievious, prurient, seemed to know a lot but preferred to crack jokes at the expense of the divers interacting with them.”
There was a girl who disappeared after sending a direct message to the group, claiming she had lost interest in talking to them, and “human life in general”. She would be found, weeks later, in the crawlspace underneath the gymnasium of their junior high school, covered in soot and powdered concrete, insisting she was to become a “part of the architecture.”
He started getting messages from the girl who had initially requested his email address, which featured no subject line, no body text, and only an attachment of an MPEG video file which itself featured clicking record on her iPhone, sitting down at her parents’ kitchen table, and miming a conversation. The speech was at a low volume, but after turning up his speakers as much as he could, Peterbilt heard in disbelief an exact replica of dialogue from conversations he’d undertaken earlier in the day, which she couldn’t possibly have been present for or even known about. Not only that she pantomimed the body language of the interlocuters almost exactly, seemed to know who was a female speaker and who was a male, raising and lowering the pitch of her voice in accordance.
He then directed my attention to an email from her that he had received last week, which featured her in her backyard on a sunny day, the sunshine almost obscuring her face in the considerable low quality of the video. She was reading off a sheet of paper, some kind of speech that sounded vaguely syrupy and inspirational. He then said “look at this” and clicked to a YouTube video of the current president of Indonesia, speaking at the United Nations, a video released today, of a recording of a speech given the day before. To a tee, the speech was identical to what the girl said in the video.