The Art of Starving

by Sam J. Miller

  “Maybe I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re in for a disappointment. I wasn’t sure if I was even going to go, until—”

  He stopped the sentence, but I think I knew where it was going.

  The sad, dirty, trash-strewn roads of my neighborhood were extra pathetic, looking down on them from the cab of that truck. The extra height gave me distance, perspective, but so did knowing how Tariq must have seen them. This is a place where hard-up people live: workers in the quarry and the zipper factory and the slaughterhouse. People easily taken advantage of. Girls I can hurt with no consequences.

  “Got a cigarette?” I asked, when he came to a stop along a strip of dark road beside a bunch of other cars. Music thumped in the distance. I turned my head in that direction so I could burrow down deeper into the noise of all those people, hear the interwoven strands of so many conversations.

  “Full of surprises tonight, Matt,” he said, pulling a pack from his back pants pocket. Then he reached past me to open the glove compartment. Out came a book of matches and the Hudson High School library’s copy of On the Road.

  “You?” I asked. “I was waiting for that book—you checked it out?”

  Tariq nodded, looked out his window. “Jack Kerouac. I saw you reading that book by him,” he said. “It looked interesting.”

  I read the first sentence of the book, then shivered. The whole thing was just too weird. I put the book back.

  He handed me a cigarette, stuck one in his own mouth, lit a match, then lit the cigarette, then held the lit match out to me. In a haze of mesmerized self-hate, I watched his hands fly gracefully through these motions. I lit the cigarette. Then we turned and walked toward the sound of screaming.

  “Tariq!” came a booming shout as we drew near a house with pale-blue vinyl siding and expensive landscaping. The whole soccer team was out front, and for a moment I panicked, convinced that Tariq had led me like a lamb to the slaughter. They were waiting to jump me, bash me, break my arms, kick my face to pulp. But one sniff and I knew they were harmless: drunk, jolly, their attention and energy scattered across a dozen things—getting more beer, banging some chick, a couple of them thinking about a beef they had with someone else that might blossom into violence if that jerk showed up tonight.

  Cigarette smoke scraped me raw, scorched my throat, and filled my lungs. This new pain distracted from the pain in my stomach. I grinned, slightly, to myself.

  Tariq shared bro-hugs and handshakes and hellos with his fellow teammates. “You all know Matt, yeah?” he said, and some nodded and some looked down and some raised their plastic beer cups in an intoxicated magnanimous show of welcome.

  I smelled them. And I listened. And I could go deeper now. Drunk people don’t guard their thinking. I focused on my senses, and then, I could hear scraps of words. Phrases that might have been their thoughts.

  This faggot. Why’s he here?

  Does he even go to our school?

  I need more beer, but I don’t want to go inside.

  Could this be real? Could I actually read people’s minds?

  If I could, I was going to put it to good use. I zeroed in on Bastien and Ott, but both looked away as soon as they saw me. Bastien at least had the sinister intelligence to blink away his discomfort and smile. “What’s good, Matt?”

  “Not much.”

  They disliked me, so they were guarded. Their thoughts impenetrable even if they were some combination of drunk and high.

  I glanced around.

  I had never been to a high school party before. People stopped inviting me around fifth grade. That was also the time people started calling me faggot. I don’t know how they knew. I didn’t know myself.

  At any rate—I’d been wrong to be so afraid of this. I’d always pictured these parties as frenzies of alcohol and weed and sex and violence. And while the first two were certainly in evidence, everyone seemed about as frenzied as an anaesthetized cow. Instead of the hate I always thought lurked beneath every handsome jock’s facade, there was mostly apathy. Instead of the violence I always associated with alcohol, there was mostly just a doofy happy lazy buzz. I stood there, smoking, almost belonging.

  “Come on inside,” Tariq said, “let’s get you some food.”

  In the house, I shut my eyes and smelled, and knew at once that the place belonged to a boy in my grade named Griff. That his parents were not home. Two stuffed moose heads and a taxidermied alligator watched Tariq and me stroll through.

  “Hungry?” Tariq said when we got to the kitchen. I almost laughed. Food covered every surface of the place, great unhealthy heaps of it, oily chips and creamy dips, baked frozen fried breaded appetizer monstrosities, store-bought cookies stacked like coins, sugary sodas, all of it sending broken-glass shivers of agony through my midsection. I smothered the pain with one last long pull on the cigarette and stubbed it out sadly.

  “Nah,” I said.

  He smiled. A lonely smile. Open and trusting. And yet, I couldn’t read his mind, either. No doubt, he was an expert at hiding things from the people around him.

  But then again, so was I. “Let’s go get us some beer,” he said.

  I followed him outside, down a long, dead, sloping lawn, through flocks and gaggles of boys and girls. I tensed, every muscle anticipating some sort of attack.

  I thought of those scenes in The Birds when for no reason at all the birds cease to be evil and violent and just stand around harmlessly, apathetic to human beings instead of bent on their destruction. Maybe I was safe . . . for a little while.

  Once I no longer feared my own death, I heard everything. Scraps of conversation, words that said almost nothing—while my sense of hearing detected so much more.

  “So I went out for the team—”

  “All I know is there were rumors—”

  “I just stood there, I was so shocked, I couldn’t believe she said that—”

  Underneath I heard happiness, fear, insecurity. I looked from person to person in a state of tingly shock. I inhaled. I knew that Tammy Ladonnia was pregnant, and that Pete Shumsky was the father, and I knew that she knew it, and he did not.

  I detected things others did not. I saw, heard, and smelled things others could not.

  Somehow, I had become Peter fucking Parker.

  Somehow, I had—could I even say it? I had powers.

  I followed Tariq down to a bonfire, blazing tall and bright against the dark. I walked a little bit behind him. His shoulders were so broad, backlit by the fire in front of him. His arms filled out his sweater so nicely. Sad, jangly pop music blasted from a parked Jeep. I let him pour me a beer, but resolved not to drink it. He poured one for himself, and took a sip, and then looked up—

  “Pass that bottle,” he said, too loudly, seeing glass glint in the firelight, and joy and relief crackled in the air around him. Someone laughed, came closer, dumped tequila into his beer.

  “More . . . ” he said, laughing, “more . . .” even when it overflowed and soaked his fingers. He took a long, long sip.

  I stepped closer and breathed him in. Really breathed. Looked past all the surface smells, the stink of the world he walked through . . . and then past the smells of him, of the outer shell of his body: sweat and hair and saliva, and found:

  Loneliness.

  Tariq gave off a crushing, overpowering loneliness. A smell of McDonald’s breakfasts eaten alone in parking lots, and long hours standing on the edge of a circle of friends, and the bitter odor of knowing none of his buddies truly knew him. Girlfriends who dated him to piss off their parents but who didn’t care about who he was as a person. Random strangers responding with hate and suspicion to his Middle Eastern name or looks.

  Loneliness.

  The smell was so strong, I wobbled on my feet. For a split second, I faltered. The rage and hate cooled into pity.

  He’s miserable, I thought.

  Then I thought better. So what, I told myself. That doesn’t gi
ve him the right to hurt people. That doesn’t diminish or excuse the hurt he’s caused.

  I stepped closer, tapping into some ancestral genetic carnivore. Some feral creature who knew loneliness for what it was: a weakness. Tariq was desperate for a friend. His body had snitched on him.

  I could be that friend. I could get close enough to make him feel safe confiding his loneliness. His pain. And something else—

  A secret. Something so big and so dark it blotted out the space between us, turning Tariq into a swirl of night beside me.

  Except I already know your secret. Or—almost. And when I learn it, when I know exactly what you did, nothing will save you.

  He stood beside Bastien and Ott, both of whom were still trying hard not to look in my direction, and I realized—

  Tariq is the weakest link. Whatever happened, he’s the one I can get the truth out of. The one who will help me destroy all three of them.

  Inside, a small circle of boys and girls played poker. I sat down beside them and watched their faces. Watched the emotions they were feeling, and how they tried to hide them. How they failed.

  “Deal me in?” I asked, unsure if that sentence was even a real thing people said.

  Here is a helpful hint: even if you’ve never played poker in your life, even if you don’t know the rules, you can be really really good at poker if you can practically read minds. Which is how I earned a hundred dollars in small bills and the respect and semi-frightened awe of a slowly growing circle of soccer players and kids I’d never seen before.

  Including Bastien, who clapped me on the back and said, “Damn, son!” at several points, and Ott, who grunted after I won a particularly impressive hand, which was the nicest noise he’d ever made at me.

  “Hungry?” Tariq asked, evidently forgetting what I’d said when he asked me that same question an hour or so ago. Already his eyes were strange and feral, his expression distant and distorted. Alcohol was turning him into something else. Something that made mistakes; something I could manipulate. He stooped to pick up a pan someone was using to cook meat over the fire. The alcohol and the firelight made him look brutal, monstrous.

  “Um, sure,” I said. If I wanted to gain his confidence, yes was most assuredly better than no. I reached my hand out and grabbed a sausage. Molten-hot hog fat scalded my fingertips, dripped down to pool in my palm. When Tariq wasn’t looking I let the sausage fall to the earth, and whispered a tiny prayer of apology to that pig who died for nothing.

  RULE #12

  Your body is unique. A snowflake. No body is precisely like yours. Over thousands of years, the little differences between bodies add up to genetic drift, the differentiation of species. Evolution. So remember this the next time you curse some knob of fat or funny-shaped thumb, or sexual predilection for something society says you shouldn’t predilect: your differences might make you miserable, but they might also make you better.

  DAY: 9

  TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 1000

  My sense of triumph was gone when I woke up. Only sadness was left, and hunger. Sadness over what had happened to my sister and sadness over Tariq’s open, desperate smile. Sadness over what I would eventually do to him. Revenge was necessary. He was a monster. But then, he was also a person.

  When I came down the hall to find the massive breakfast Mom had made me, I was almost happy. Bacon, crisp and heaped on a plate, oatmeal bubbling on the stove, a pile of pancakes stacked high, a brand-new box of cereal.

  Food was love.

  Then I thought, food is failure.

  I stood in the doorway for a good long minute.

  “Can I have some coffee?” I asked, walking in. This made maybe ten years I’d been asking that question, so I was more than shocked when she said, “Sure, I made enough for both of us.”

  It meant something, something big, as much as if she’d bought me a dirty magazine or box of cigarettes, but not even with my new abilities could I see clear to what exactly it meant.

  I sat down. Mom gave me a mug, a spoon, milk, and sugar. I skipped them both. These vile substances are nothing but calories.

  “You’ve had coffee before,” she said, when I took a long sip and smiled.

  “Of course, Mom. Shouldn’t I have?”

  Mom shrugged. Then she sighed, sat down across from me. Perhaps she finally saw, that morning, in that moment, that I was a person in the world and could do all sorts of things she told me not to do.

  “Eat,” she said, pushing plates in my direction. And stared at me, eyes boring into mine.

  All of a sudden, my chest hurt.

  The bacon, probably made from the sister of the sausage I dropped into the dirt the night before, was pure salty fat, and therefore out of the question. So I slid several pancakes onto my plate, not intending to eat any of them, and added syrup sparingly.

  “How is that?” she asked, tapping the well-worn copy of The Dharma Bums I took with me everywhere.

  “It’s good,” I said, aware that this, too, meant something. Perhaps as close to a conversation about my father as my mother was capable of having. So I pushed it, just a little. “These dudes just wandering around, seeing the country, no attachments, focusing on living life, you know. Getting down to what’s important.”

  Mom snorted, made a face, looked into the distance.

  I sliced off a large strip of pancake, then cut it into smaller ones. “You don’t think that sounds good?”

  “‘No attachments’ does not sound good,” she said, and I knew she was choosing her words carefully. “Some attachments are beautiful.”

  Here, she patted my hand. So this was about my dad, and his lobster boat—which, from my heightened perspective, I realized was either a lie or a euphemism.

  “What’s life, if not attachments?” she asked.

  I didn’t say anything at first. My pancake had been reduced to pieces practically too small to see with the naked eye.

  She was watching me.

  So far she hadn’t said anything. But I had to eat something, as much as it pained me to do so. “I don’t know, Mom.”

  Life was revenge. Life was making bad people hurt. Life was Maya.

  “They restricted the runs again,” Mom said, rubbing the back of her neck, her voice aching the way it always did when she talked about work. “Another three pickups canceled. That’s two more guys laid off.”

  Here is something you need to know about my mother. She loves her town. She loves the people in it. The ones she works with, the ones she grew up alongside. She loves the rusted wheelless vehicles along its roads and the falling-down houses with the roofs gone. I don’t know why. She’s a smart lady. She’s not small and hateful like so many of them are. And yet she loves the twisted pothole highways and the happy blanket of ignorance everyone wraps themselves up in, the deluded crazy stupid belief that This is all we need.

  And I realized something, somehow. For myself! Not with my supersenses, but with my mind.

  Had I not been born gay, I might have loved it, too. I would have been welcomed into the fold. One of us, they would have chanted, like the Freaks in that movie, and I would have lived happily for my whole life in Hudson. I would never have seen the fear and anger and hatred my neighbors and classmates carried around inside them, aimed at everyone and everything that’s different, because I would have shared those fears and hatreds with them. I wouldn’t have known how bad it was, kind of like how you can’t smell the smell of your own house because it’s so familiar.

  A ludicrous sentence shivered up my spine and into my brain, shocking me, terrifying me, delighting me, and almost escaping my lips:

  Thank God I am gay.

  “How is school?” she asked, and didn’t look up from her mug.

  “Fine,” I said, because coffee or no coffee, we hadn’t reached the place where I could tell her about how Ott slammed the locker door on my hand last week or Nate Smith threatened to rape me.

  “That’s good,” she said, and got up to pretend to busy h
erself with something in a drawer. Gracefully, in swift flicks timed to the rhythm of the conversation, I scraped small forkfuls of pancake into the napkin spread in my lap. Then I crushed it in both fists and slipped it into my backpack and went to school with syrup-stinking hands I never once let myself lick.

  My mother was worried. I didn’t need Starvation Superpowers to see it, smell it, hear it hiding between her words. And I probably wasn’t half as slick as I thought I was, disposing of all those uneaten pancake atoms.

  But I escaped without having to ingest a crumb. I’d fight my next battle when I came to it.

  School passed swiftly, effortlessly. And by evening the worry was still there, but bigger, or maybe by then I was hungry enough to see it for what it really was. Her worry was a knotted swirl, a tapestry woven of a thousand threads. Her fear of the factory shutting down or of losing more friends to layoffs; her fear of getting laid off herself. Her love of the town and her fear of the future. Her worry about me, what I was going through. Her fears about Maya.

  Mom and me barely spoke at dinner—and whenever she wasn’t looking I tossed food pieces into the Ziploc bag I’d left open in my lap—but I could hear so much even when she wasn’t speaking.

  For the first time since my powers emerged, I wished I couldn’t.

  RULE #13

  Breath is the tool for uniting the body and the mind.

  Chinese traditional medicine calls the energy that circulates in your body chi—which means breath. When you breathe, you’re literally sucking in life force, the flow of which sustains all living things. Sophisticated sages can draw great strength and nourishment from the air. And air has no calories. Master martial artists are said to be able to control the flow of chi through their bodies, and even project it out of their bodies to heal or to harm.

  DAY: 10

  TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 1000

  Hunger stretched out time, made me move faster without realizing it, made me seem manic and mad while, inside, I sat patiently in a bubble of calm. Words came out jangly and overflowing; sentences doubled up and intertwined.