I listened. I listened to her words and the spaces between them. I tried to track the ups and downs of her voice. The more I listened, the more I thought I could hear something. A timbre to her words. The specific vibration of particular emotions. My ears felt thick and stupid but also like I was at the edge of a dizzying amount of information. The power to hear what someone was feeling, even when their words tried to hide it. My stomach groaned, and for a split-second I smiled. The hunger was real. Hunger was causing—all of this. My head spun with happiness, with fear, at this bizarre miraculous thing I could barely believe.
She plopped herself into a plastic lawn chair. Put one hand against her face. Then the other one. Seeing her so in pain magnified my own immeasurably.
“So what are we going to do?” I asked. It hurt even to whisper.
“Be here for her when she gets back.”
I didn’t want to worry her any worse than she already was. Asking the question I needed to ask might plant bad ideas in her brain. But if she knew something and she wasn’t telling me, I had to take a risk. “I’m worried someone hurt her,” I said. “That maybe that’s what drove her away—what’s keeping her away.”
Mom lowered her hands. She looked at me a good hard while before she said, “What makes you think that?” And her voice, when she said it, was raw and fragile. My mom wore almost no makeup. I could see the veins through her thin delicate skin, smell the slaughterhouse soap she used to wash up with.
Shame sucker-punched me. I’d let selfishness guide my actions, and now I’d upset my mom. How could I say, I think Tariq and Ott and maybe Bastien did something? Because Tariq was all interested in Maya, and since she disappeared he can’t look at me, and neither can his henchmen. “Nothing.”
She frowned at me. She took a long drag on her cigarette until there was nothing left of it, all the while holding eye contact. Now it was her turn to not believe me.
“Maya is hurting,” she said. “I know that much. I don’t know how to make it better. But we can’t fight someone else’s battles for them.”
That’s bullshit, I thought, but did not say. Power trembled in my hands, in my stomach.
I’ll fight Maya’s battles.
I’ll destroy Maya’s enemies.
I’ll do it all for her.
When Mom was asleep, I snuck into Maya’s room. I shut my eyes until the fear of Maya punching me repeatedly for invading her space evaporated. I breathed in the smell of it. Focused on all the normal notes, the smells of her lip balm and hair products, her dirty clothes and Trident gum. Once I had acclimated myself to the room’s smells, I could focus on the smell of her. After a while I could almost see her with my nose, trace her movements through the room the last time she was in here. I followed that lingering memory—Maya to the bookshelf, and ran my finger along every single book . . . I stopped at Pretty in Punk: Girls’ Gender Resistance in a Boys’ Subculture.
Was it possible? Could it be that I actually knew what my senses told me? Maya had paused here, before she left the room for the last time.
I picked the book up. Maya had held it in her hand, had opened it.
I opened it. And found, stuck between two pages at the back: the SIM card to Maya’s cell phone. She would have replaced it if she didn’t want to be tracked, but she wanted to still be able to use her smart phone.
And if I put it in my phone, I could send texts and make calls that people would think were coming from her.
My stomach gurgled triumphantly.
I pitied them, all the people I was up against, the ones who had hurt her and the ones who were keeping secrets. All those men and women and boys and girls had puny senses, and the skills of mere mortals.
They hadn’t unlocked the power that I had.
RULE #10
Human hearing is a complex mechanical process. Understanding how it works will allow the student of the Art of Starving to expand its power exponentially.
The ear detects vibrations. The outer part of the ear focuses sound waves into the ear canal, where they strike the eardrum and are passed on into the middle ear. There, they pass through a series of complicated pieces that transform mechanical stimuli into neural transduction, ultimately sending information through the auditory nerve and into the brain stem, where it’s combined with other signals and filtered through several parts of the brain that enable you to know the difference between a dog barking and a woman singing, and the language you speak from a language you don’t.
DAYS: 6–7
AVERAGE DAILY CALORIES, APPROX.: 900
Magneto, supervillain par excellence, archenemy of the X-Men and leader of the evil Brotherhood of Mutants, was a Jew like me. He lost his whole family in a concentration camp, and only survived himself due to his mutant superpower, the ability to control metal. His whole life was about getting back at a world that had hurt him so badly. Professor Xavier, leader of the X-Men, just wanted mutants to be tolerated by an intolerant world, but Magneto wanted to burn that intolerant world to ash.
Darryl and I used to have the Magneto vs. Professor X conversation all the time. Aang vs. Zuko. Donatello vs. Raphael. Darryl was always siding with the pacifists. He even loved Superman, who bores me to tears, because what could be less interesting than someone who is mostly invincible?
The strongest people aren’t the ones who are born strong. They’re the ones who know what it’s like to be weak, and have a reason to get stronger. The ones who’ve been hurt. Who’ve had things they love taken from them. The ones with something to fight for.
The ones who want revenge.
I shut my eyes, sat down in the noisy hallway fifteen minutes before the morning bell rang, and listened. I embraced my hunger and tilted my head in one direction and then another. I had studied up, the night before, on the biology and the physics of hearing.
Sounds are like smells. They carry so much information that most people simply don’t know what to listen for.
High school hallways were actually a pretty good laboratory for finding the extra information hidden inside human speech. Teenagers are dramatic; they exaggerate; they try too hard. Turning my head slightly I could shift from someone lying about a fight she almost got into (“And she is so lucky he was there, because I had people with me, and she would not be breathing right now—”) to someone spreading false gossip (“His brother got arrested at college because he beat up a black guy—”) to someone spreading true gossip (“She told her mom she’s pregnant, and her mom agreed to send her to a different school. But she’s not really pregnant. Not even a little bit . . .”)
Careful listening will tell you precisely where a sound is coming from. Careful listening will let you hear sound waves passing through solid barriers. The sound waves of speech are shaped by the emotions of the speaker, and a listener with abilities can hear those emotions. He can know when someone is lying or sad or about to do something terrible.
Or rather, I can know.
The training montage is a cinematic staple in a whole bunch of film genres—an easy way to say, “A bunch of time passed, our hero did a lot of really boring stuff over and over again until he or she ceased to be useless.” Clips of the main character doing stuff repeatedly, usually getting hit over the head or punched in the face a bunch, usually to weird synthesizer music. You know what I’m talking about. The Bride and Pai Mei. Yoda and Luke in the swamp. Most of Kung Fu Panda. Every X-Men movie. Etc.
So just imagine a training montage here. Me, researching how hearing works, trying out different methods of auditory perception that are . . . above normal human margins, proceeding with stubborn thick-headed persistence, wrong and wrong and wrong . . .
And then, incredibly, right.
Me with my ear to a wall, listening until I could make out the words being said in the next room over and then two rooms away.
Me, moving through the school during the chaos of lunch period, listening for the songs playing in my locker far away and then quizzing myself after—sort of an audi
tory eye chart.
Me, putting my ear to the cold exposed pipes in the physics room, listening to how effortlessly the metal tubes transmitted sound waves from the other side of the building.
Me, shifting my focus to follow the architecture of the building to selectively listen in on any one of a dozen different rooms.
Me, clapping in the dark at home, trying—and failing—to use echolocation, listening to how the sound waves bounce off objects and thereby “see” in the total absence of light.
Me, on the internet, looking up the phone numbers for every single recording studio in or near Providence, Rhode Island. Calling every single one. None could confirm or deny whether a band named Destroy All Monsters! was currently recording there.
Me, experimenting with food. Going a whole day and only eating a sandwich, to see how much more clearly I could hear. Me, going a whole day eating only half a sandwich. Feeling the difference.
Movie montages end in success and enlightenment, or at least a grudging smile from the hard-ass master, a tiny acknowledgment that progress has been made. This is not a movie montage. It ends with me, sitting in the woods behind my house at dawn, freezing, scared shitless.
Focus and patience were still where I needed to work. I had to learn to let go of my desires, my needs and wants. I needed to simply be. Listen. Hear. Wait. Learn. Absorb as much information as I could from my senses, while turning off the information from my brain.
Hearing meant pulling meaning from chaos. Tuning out the static and taking what I needed. To truly hear the innumerable sounds of the universe, I needed to quiet my mind.
So I decided to meditate. Focus on erasing my sense of self. Become a vessel for the sounds of the universe. Listen. Hear. I went out back and sat down on the ground and shut my eyes.
I’d been to some pages on the internet about it. Buddhist sites and Hindu texts, all about mindful meditation. How to quiet the mind. Except quieting the mind was really really hard. “Mastering the mind is as difficult as controlling the winds,” said Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita, and he had a really good point. Sages and monks spent a lifetime learning to meditate.
So I started with simply breathing. And listening.
I heard my stomach. I heard wind. I heard it shush through the grass, whistle over the roof of my house, sing in the branches of the trees. I followed the sound of the wind into the scattered trailer parks and ramshackle cottages nearby, heard screen doors bang and televisions squawk. I heard dishonest men making promises from a thousand television sets, babies crying, liquor sloshing over ice, and dogs dreaming. . . .
But the wind was moving too fast, speeding through space and taking me with it, spreading me out, turning me into a massive net, sucking up sounds, miles and miles of laughter and tears and plates smashing and doors slamming. It felt like this time when I was a little kid, swimming in the sea, suddenly realizing I had waded too far, couldn’t touch the bottom, and knowing how much deep dark water was waiting to swallow me up.
I gasped, gulped, tried, and flailed.
I heard Ott. I heard his father, his voice thick and hairy and terrifying, the sound of a man made miserable and determined to take it out on the people he had power over—
They’re not your friends, you stupid fuck. You’ll see—you’ll see how they abandon you when you get out in the real world. Live it up now because come graduation you won’t have nothing except a shit job, if you’re lucky.
Ott only whimpered. I pulled away, desperate not to feel pity for him.
I heard Bastien’s dad, my mother’s boss, tell her she wasn’t making quota for the week, wouldn’t qualify for overtime. I heard the soulless calm to his voice, the rational These are the rules, my hands are tied tone with which he explained why she might not be able to pay this month’s rent, and it made me want to rip the skin from his bones like they did with so many pigs.
Furious, I tore myself away again, losing what little bit of control I still had—
And I heard the cries of the animals at the slaughterhouse. And hearing their cries I instantly, profoundly, felt a fraction of their pain.
I screamed until my throat hurt.
I tried to pull back. Shut my ears. Come back to my body. My mind was a bubble, and in a moment I would pop—
My belly twisted. The pain restored clarity. I was stronger than my body. My hunger was proof.
I breathed. I listened. I let the sounds pass through me. I stopped worrying about what might happen. Let go of the pigs and their pain, their cries, dropped it like a hot coal I’d been clenching in my fist. I focused on erasing—like the books said—my sense of self. I marveled, at how big the universe was. How full of sounds. How cold and solid the earth was. How much power I could tap into. And how easy it would be to let go of the earthly tether that connected me to my body, my troubles, my whole miserable existence. And just cease to be.
It made me shiver. It would be so much easier than actually killing myself. Less pain, less mess to clean up. With practice I could just . . . float away.
I decided to stick with this meditation thing.
RULE #11
No superhero, no Chosen One, no budding witch or demigod or changeling gets better by playing it safe. Sooner or later, you will have to put yourself in a dangerous situation. You will have to test yourself. You will have to risk losing everything, before you can gain anything.
DAY: 8
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 1000
Two hours before Tariq came to pick me up, while Mom napped, I stole her cell phone from her purse and took it to my room. A simple thing, old and clunky, but that was better, because a smartphone might complicate the kind of shenanigans I needed to pull off.
I switched out Mom’s SIM card for Maya’s. And sent a text message to Tariq, which would look to him like it came from her:
I’m going to tell.
Almost immediately, Mom’s phone vibrated in my hand. TARIQ, it said. I pressed the red button to reject the call.
A text came in.
Please don’t.
There were so many things I wanted to say. But I bit my lip and rode out the silence.
A second text from him: It would destroy my life.
At this I smiled, and thought: Like you destroyed hers?
A second call. Again I rejected it. And then, five minutes later, he texted: Why would you do that to me? After what we shared?
So. There was something. I didn’t know what, and I needed to be very very careful about what I said, because one wrong word would trigger his suspicions that something was up.
People need to know, I wrote.
I know you’re mad, came his response. But that doesn’t give you the right to hurt me. What’s going on? Can we talk? I’ve been trying to call you at—
Rage made me rip the SIM card from Mom’s cell phone. That doesn’t give you the right to hurt me. He believed he could harm her with no consequences, but if she tried to fight back she was—what? Violating the Rules?
I stuck the SIM card back in, and looked up Maya’s bandmates, and scribbled down their numbers. Then I took it out again, hid it where I kept my porn flash drives, brought the phone back to Mom’s purse, went outside.
Hunger and rage tore and screamed inside me, a whirl of blades that shredded the walls of my stomach. The generator in my gut had been cranked up too far by my anger, and the electricity threatened to split me open.
I had to calm down. My ride would be here in a second or two.
Of course it was a pickup truck. Of course it was brand-new, red, too big for Tariq, detailed with fiery half-circles around the tires. Of course he drove it with a face of grim tight worry, like it was a test of his manhood or a bull that at any moment might buck him. But when he pulled up to a stop and put it in park, his smile was epic.
“Hey, Matt,” he said when I climbed up and opened the door. I’d asked him to meet me down the block. Told him it was because I didn’t want my mom to know I was leaving, but really it was because I
didn’t want him to see my house. Its ramshackle frame, its unmowed lawn with fallen leaves piled three inches deep.
When he picked up Maya, it would have been nighttime. He wouldn’t have seen, then.
“Hi,” I said, trying several unsuccessful times to shut the door once I was in.
“You really gotta slam it,” he said, reaching past me to grab the handle and wrench it shut with a manly yank.
The senses kicked in hard. It smelled like him in here. Like a well-used pair of soccer shorts had spent several weeks under one of the seats. The intimacy of it was electrifying.
“You got a curfew?” he asked, looking distracted.
He kept glancing at his phone. The texts had shaken him up, no doubt about it.
“Not when no one knows I’m out,” I said.
He laughed. Did he ask her the same question when she got in? Did she have a hard time shutting the passenger-side door? I looked down at my feet. Punk rock flyers and pamphlets littered the floor. SMASH THE SYSTEM, one of them urged, and another said GOD IS A LIE THEY TELL YOU TO MAKE YOU BEHAVE.
“I didn’t know you were into punk,” I said, thinking of Maya.
“Only pretty recently. I just love it. There’s so much . . . anger.”
“What do you have to be angry about?” I asked. “Everybody loves you.”
Tariq laughed, but it wasn’t a funny laugh. “That doesn’t mean I have nothing to be pissed about.”
It occurred to me to be afraid. If he had hurt Maya, he wouldn’t think twice about hurting me. And the texts I sent had made him uneasy, anxious. People, like animals, are at their most dangerous when they’re afraid.
So I stepped back from what I’d been about to say—Kids whose dads can afford to buy them fancy new pickup trucks don’t have a right to be pissed.—and said nothing at all. He started the car, and we were on our way, the radio filling in the silence.
A few blocks later, he said, “You’ve never been interested in this kind of party before, so what made you want to come to this one?” He smiled when he said it. A cautious smile.
The Art of Starving Page 5
