What Goes On In The Walls At Night: Thirteen tales of disgust and delight

by Andrew Schrader

  “In the morning,” he said, “we’ll call someone. A doctor—a good doctor. A physical therapist. I will start changing myself, by God. But, tonight, I have to eat. I can’t expect to change my life in a few hours, and you already bought all the things I needed—and, really, thank you soooo much—so could you continue being a good friend and bring the groceries in, so I could have a nosh? I couldn’t get myself up tonight, and had to call someone.”

  Then he smiled somewhat deviously, bringing his fingers together and touching the tubby tips. “I’m famished.”

  I agreed to cook for him, on the condition that he agree to see a doctor friend of mine that very night. The doctor was a nice man with a moustache, I told him, whom I’d flown several times before in a private plane, and who I was sure would do me a favor. In fact, he lived less than a half hour away.

  “Fine, fine!” Martin snapped, eyes hurt and brooding. He looked away, crossed what he could of his heavy arms, and pouted angrily. “Just get me the meat. Pig liver first!”

  I called my friend, who agreed to come at once. Doctors are like that. I was halfway through cooking Martin’s fifth course, three lamb shanks (after the pig liver, two packages of boiled hot dogs, a 32-ounce filet, and a whole roasted chicken), when Dr. Harris arrived to examine Martin.

  Later, the doctor took me into the living room, sat down, and shook his head as I passed him a cup of tea. Martin was in the kitchen, gorging himself on a rump roast, slurping greedily, and muttering and singing under his breath, clearly in some kind of edible ecstasy.

  “I’ll have to check the blood work to be sure,” the good doctor said, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if his LDL was north of 350. 400 maybe. That’s your cholesterol, your bad cholesterol. Very high numbers are 200. I’ve never seen anyone above 300 live very long.”

  The doctor sipped his tea. “His blood pressure is 260 over 140. That’s near death. Heart attack any second. How he’s lived this long is a miracle.”

  We sat in silence for a few minutes more, absorbed in our thoughts, listening to Martin defile himself in the next room.

  Finally, the doctor set his teacup down and slapped his knees. “I’ll be in touch about the blood when I get the results back. I’ll hurry up the lab in the morning, should have results soon.

  “My advice is to get him a trainer right away. But be careful—your friend’s blood pressure is so high while resting his heart could explode with too much movement. Go easy. I’ll be back in a week or so to check on him.”

  I thanked the doctor, walked him out, watched him drive off.

  It was 1:30 in the morning. I stood in the driveway and reviewed my options. I could leave, leave my friend alone in his overbright mansion with his mountain of meat, or I could stay and try to help him.

  The thought of planting myself in his house for any amount of time invoked cottonmouth, a distressed stomach, sweating, numbness, and a tingling scalp, but the anchor of responsibility, to do the right thing, prevented me from leaving. Never leave a fallen man behind, I heard the little voice inside of me say. With a sigh, I resigned myself to stay the night.

  The next day the doctor called. Lab results were in. Martin Nicholls’s LDL numbers, the bad cholesterol, were at 612. His blood sugar stood at a whopping 1,500. His TSH level (thyroid) was north of 400. A normal TSH level was in the 1 to 5 range.

  It looked like death was imminent. I heard the pity in the doctor’s voice and the disappointed tone he took when I told him that against all pleading Martin refused to be taken to a hospital or be ambulanced out of his home.

  There was little anyone could do but let him eat himself to death.

  And eat he did. That day he consumed over twenty-five pounds of beef, pork, and chicken. All day I found myself walking in and out of his giant meat freezer, in and out, to cook and return for more. The meat I’d stacked the night before, I carried out now by the armful.

  To his credit, Martin recognized the need for help, and in exchange for my assistance (plus, he couldn’t hoist himself off the floor alone) he agreed to see a man named Sebastian Fit, a dietician and exercise guru I found in the phone book.

  Sebastian rang the doorbell in bright green shorts and a skin-tight shirt, chipper and light, armed to the gills with pre-portioned food bowls and organic frozen berries.

  “Okay, gang!” the man cheerfully squealed upon entering the home. “It’s time to butter up those buns!”

  He skidded to a halt just inside the kitchen, the expression stripped from his face, no doubt in shock at the sight of the hippo in the corner who was slick with grease, surrounded by old plastic wrappings, and drenched in meat sweat.

  Martin grinned at the trainer like a Mack truck, toothily, mouth-breathing as usual and wheezing more than normal. His shirt was pulled so tight his tummy rolls looked like smooth kielbasa sausages. His whole body—head, arms, chest, stomach, legs—shook with each inhale, so great was the amount of force needed to help him breathe. On the exhale the same body parts trembled in aftershock, ripples of fat reversing their course. I think his mind and body had transcended in many ways the foul or lovely nature of being human; he now exemplified a level of comfort and acceptance for himself normally reserved for enlightened mystics.

  “Meat!” Martin yelled through gritted teeth. “MEAT!”

  “I’m sorry,” I explained to the trainer. “I refused to feed him for the last two hours, since I knew you were coming. He must be starving. He eats every fifteen minutes, so you can imagine the hunger.”

  Sebastian the Trainer treated my old friend with respect. He smiled and explained his program while lovingly stacking his measly frozen food containers in the fridge, labeling each with the weekday and time of consumption, so even a three-year-old could survive on his own.

  Each meal had its own inspirational, halfway enlightening and fully mediocre statement, like “Don’t worry about the trek up the mountain. Think about the view from the top.” Then there was Wednesday’s factually inaccurate 6 p.m. dinner quote: “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll be among the stars.” Then there was my favorite: Thursday’s poignant lunchtime notification—“Once you choose positivity, anything is possible.”

  Sebastian presented Martin with his first meal on his new diet plan, removing the stainless steel dome top from the plate and waving a mashed sweet potato, a mousy, perfectly sterile piece of chicken parmesan, a quarter-cup of blueberries, and a fistful of spinach with raspberry vinaigrette under Martin’s supremely disappointed smell holes.

  Martin ate, but all the while stared intensely with bloodshot eyes at his new trainer, making Sebastian uncomfortable for sure, muttering under his breath while shoving a hand full of berries to his mouth and grinding his food to mush.

  After letting my friend digest and rise from his mid-day lethargy, Sebastian engaged Martin in a little exercise, which consisted of Martin flapping his arms under Sebastian’s commands, sitting up a little straighter, and wiggling his toes. After leaking nearly a gallon of saltwater sweat, Martin took a nap, shining the floor with his legs as he twitched.

  The next couple days went like that: Martin eating scraps, fluttering different body parts, sweating, sleeping, and over again. Sebastian had taken this on as a full-time assignment; a bedroom was made up on the second floor. I often heard him singing in the shower, in his room, on the stairs. Jolly guy. I moved up to the third floor for solitude; often I still heard him through the vents, the floor, the walls.

  Martin couldn’t stick to only the scraps Sebastian provided. He was afraid his body, too used to the influx of hot dogs, linguica, pork loin, ribs, ground beef, and duck pate, might revolt against him and shut down if he stopped the meat train. Nodding understandingly, Sebastian settled for two rounds of physical exercise each day, and a decrease in one pound of meat per week until Martin’s health improved.

  Here the narrative takes a slight detour. For it was here, with adequate time away from Martin, and buffered by Sebastian, that I had the space to b
egin forming my own theory about Martin’s physical changes.

  First of all, I didn’t believe that eating in and of itself could have transfigured his body, face, hands, feet so grotesquely. I have seen large people, fat people, obese people—insanely obese people—before. Every two or three flights I make brings in someone who needs two seats—sometimes all three in the row—to fit in the plane. Though everybody is different in body type, they all still look human.

  Not so, with Martin. The weight was one thing, but it was his body itself that simultaneously interested and disgusted me:

  The flattened face like a slab of steak with a receding hairline.

  His belly of a dozen sausage links.

  His hot dog fingers (which I realized were, in fact, getting thinner).

  His legs. They shone and dripped with sweat, sure, but they were also proportionately much skinnier than one would expect from an 800-pound man. At the top, around the thighs, they bulged thick and juicy, but they tapered down past the knees, until they were thin as broomsticks.

  His feet. You could hardly grip half of one with both hands. If you can imagine an hourglass with a longer middle section, that was generally the look of his legs and feet as a whole.

  I was most drawn to his feet. Something beneath those pressure socks called to me, told me to look there.

  While he was sleeping that night, I snuck downstairs and unrolled one clammy, sticky sock from around his left ankle, stripped it off in one motion, and shined my small pen light at his foot.

  Though webbed toes wouldn’t be the right description, it was close. His toes weren’t toes anymore, just fused bumps of flesh set like a leg of chicken or turkey. Raw chicken. Little bumps of pink flesh dotted them all the way around. They felt almost scaly. And the toenails were completely disintegrated.

  A freakish and unthinkable suspicion began to fester in my mind. It had been there, under the surface of conscious thought, for days, but until now I hadn’t given it the courtesy of real contemplation. The thought went from a hunch to near certainty.

  Given the amount of meat consumed by Martin Nicholls, given the changes in his body, the receding hairline, the flat, meaty face, the sausage stomach, the chicken legs—no matter how ludicrous, insane, or farcical it seemed—the evidence was clear that Martin Nicholls was slowly turning into a giant piece of meat.

  “Interesting.” Martin gurgled and stared past me, his blubbery tummy rising and falling gently. He narrowed his eyebrows and nodded slightly as I told him my theory. He was calm that day, sober and focused like I’d never seen him before.

  It was a full minute before he spoke again. “Makes sense.” He thought some more, nodded again, and repeated, “Yeah, it makes sense.”

  That it made no logical sense didn’t bother him. “Who the hell’s eaten twenty-five pounds of anything a day,” he said, throwing his hands up. “What government’s tested that? Who’d even think of it?” His eyes lit up. “Maybe I’m the first.”

  “The question is,” I asked, “can you stop eating? You heard the doctor. If you go on like this, you’ll die, maybe next week, or even tomorrow. You’ve got to quit.”

  He rubbed his flat, greasy chin. “It’s the hunger, the obsessing. When I don’t eat, even for an hour, the voice inside me yells. It screams, Glover. What can I do? I can’t fight it.” He thought, shook his head, and threw his hand in the air. “It didn’t start out this way. But it got worse. Much worse. First, I just liked to eat the stuff. Ham, beef, whatever. Steaks with dinner, packages of ham or turkey at lunch. I had the money to buy the best meat—so, why not? Then, at some point . . . I couldn’t stop.”

  He looked at the ceiling. “When I needed pâté for breakfast, that’s when I knew I had a problem. I’d put it on toast, then I ate it out of the can. For lunch, more beef, more sausages, more bacon . . . I haven’t had a vegetable in months,” he admitted, his voice cracking, his head drooping.

  Then, as if struck by a revelation, he whipped his head around at me in terror. “What if, what if I did stop eating so much? What if I only ate fruit or salads or smoothies but never turned back into myself. I’m almost 800 pounds of pure meat. What if I stay like this forever?”

  I tried to console him. “You got this way from eating too much. If you ate something else it would steer you away and into a . . . different figure, perhaps.”

  “What, like a giant piece of lettuce? And how much do I eat? Twenty-five pounds a day?”

  “You could try eating less. If you ate normal again, you might be normal again.”

  “And starve?” He rested his chin on his sternum. “Face it. There’s no solution. If I stop eating, the voices start. If I eat something else, I risk turning into something else. If I keep eating like I am, well . . .” He sighed. “It’s hopeless.”

  Inwardly I agreed with him, but said nothing. He slouched there for the rest of the night. In the morning I made sure the trainer and my friend the doctor had everything they would need for the future, then I drove home. I think Martin was glad to see me go. I don’t think he wanted his old friend to see him suffering.

  About three months later I was staying in a hotel at Central Wisconsin Airport, just fifteen miles south of Wausau. My flight to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport got delayed on account of my copilot coming down with pneumonia, so I was given a rental car and put up for the night. The next morning I would receive a new copilot and be on my way.

  I decided to check on Martin. I called but got no answer. I tried two more times, with no success. A little worried, I hopped in my rental car and drove to his mansion, hoping to find him sleeping but otherwise safe.

  The gate was again open but this time did not close behind me. There were three cars in the driveway now: Martin’s (still covered in bird shit), Sebastian’s, and my friend the doctor’s. What were they all doing here on a Tuesday night at 11 p.m.? Martin and Sebastian, of course, both lived there, but the doctor?

  I went inside. Martin’s normal spot against the wall was deserted. And the kitchen was spotless. The grease skids on the floor were gone. No more dishes scattered on the counters. No more meat wrappers anywhere. The place sparkled.

  I yelled for Martin. No answer. I was about to leave the kitchen and start up the stairs in the entryway, when an icy draft blew against my back. I circled the refrigerator and entered the 10-foot by 10-foot stand-in meat locker.

  Sebastian’s frozen body hung from a meat hook. His upper half was mostly intact, his eyes and mouth wide in permanent terror. His legs, however, were missing. Cut cleanly off at the knee.

  I whipped around. To my right, hanging too from the ceiling, was part of a woman’s body. The maid’s. I could tell it was her from the apron hanging on her lower half. The head had been lopped off. So had both her arms. Dangling from the meat hook was only a torso and legs.

  There was a third body, back and to the left. I didn’t need to look hard to know it was my friend, the doctor.

  “Glover!” Martin’s mountainous voice boomed in the tiny freezer, as he stepped into the light, a pistol in hand.

  His flattened face had regained its shape, though the cheekbones were higher, like a woman’s. His hairline had returned, his hair thicker and fuller, long and silky. His eyes were different colors now: one brown, one blue—the shade of blue consistent with the maid’s eyes.

  My eyes traced down his body; his torso had shrunk. His chest was more muscular, while the lower half of his stomach still puffed out like an inner tube.

  One arm was longer than the other. His right hand had longer nails—a woman’s nails—than the left.

  Though he was still obese, 600 pounds or so, the overall meat-body look had largely disappeared. His skin glowed warm and creamy instead of red and inflamed. The white muscle bands in his face were gone.

  Martin grinned and stepped fully into the freezer, his gun trained on me. “Your theory was right. Well, almost. I was turning into something else. So you figured that if I ate something else, perhaps I c
ould become something else.

  “But there’s more to it than just eating.” He motioned around the room. “I haven’t eaten much of them. Maybe sixty pounds total. The trick isn’t in the quantity I eat, but the amount of thought I put into eating. The concentration, the visualization. If I ate a pork loin while thinking positively about pork loins”—he slapped his free hand across his belly—“that’s what I became.”

  He motioned to the decapitated maid. “Likewise, if I imagine the arm while I eat it, or, say, the eyes”—he leaned in close so I could see his bright blue eyeball—“if I really feel it, if I’m positive enough, suddenly it’s easier to become the thing.”

  He pointed across the freezer wall, where he’d displayed a huge banner with sloppy words drawn in crayon. “It’s all right there,” he said. “Sebastian was right.”

  The banner read: “Once you choose positivity, anything is possible.”

  He turned back, looked at me like I was dead wood.

  “What about me?” I asked.

  “I’m missing a good lower stomach. And I like yours.” He cocked the gun and pointed it at me.

  “Adios,” he said. He stepped forward and pulled the trigger.

  A funny thing about half-meat people: the combination of weight, sweat, and grease makes them a bit slippery.

  When Martin Nicholls cocked his gun and stepped forward, his clubbed cut of prime hoof twisted on his weight, rolling his ankle. Down he went, the barrel of his gun pointing up at his face, the jolt of hitting the floor causing him to pull the trigger.

  Meaty chunks exploded on the walls and ceiling.

  After some time, I left the freezer, letting the door shut behind me. I sat in the kitchen for what felt like hours, just thinking. I picked up the phone several times and contemplated calling the police, but each time couldn’t bring myself to punch in the numbers. Instead I held the phone next to my head, listening to the dial tone until it became just another background noise.