I was invincible.
We drove south on a punk rock carpet of sound, intricate melodies overlapping inarticulate guitar distortion. He wore all black, strong and graceful as a ninja.
“We’re driving to Poughkeepsie, then taking the train into the city. Then we’ll take the subway to the club. Okay?”
“Sure,” I said.
The music made my heart beat faster. Where had it been all my life, this sound, these noises, all the profanity and bare unashamed feeling that they’d never in a million years play on the radio or in the supermarket or any of the other places people play music? How big it was, this ocean of music, and here I was standing in water that was up to my ankles. Maya was out there, knee-deep in the same sea.
“You don’t say much,” Tariq said. “I thought it was just you didn’t want to talk to all those assholes at school.”
“That’s certainly true,” I said, watching the world darken before my eyes. “You seem to find plenty to say to them.”
He nodded. “It’s complicated. I’ve known most of those guys since we were little kids, you know? They weren’t always such jerks.”
“But they’re jerks now.”
Again, Tariq nodded. “Some of them, anyway. Sometimes.” I took him in: his profile, the slope of his wide nose, the smell of the dinner his mother cooked, spices I couldn’t name, meat so rich I could feel it on my tongue.
“Like Bastien and Ott,” I said.
He laughed. “They’re not so bad. They have their moments. They can be assholes, but it’s mostly harmless stuff.”
Both my eyebrows skyrocketed. There were a dozen things I could have said, but I decided to be strategic—and neutral. “Just because you don’t feel the harm doesn’t mean it’s harmless.”
“That’s true.”
“And anyway, I wonder. People say sticks and stones, words will never hurt me, all that bullshit, but the first thing you find out in kindergarten is that words can hurt. And if someone’s capable of hurting someone else with words, aren’t they also capable of hurting someone physically?”
Tariq shrugged. I breathed deep, but his guard was up. He didn’t like talking about his best friends.
I gave it a second, and then pressed the point. “You don’t think so?”
“No. I think so.”
Already the streetlights were stuttering on. “And would they? Hurt someone?”
Silence. Stalemate—he wouldn’t say anything else on the subject, not for the moment anyway. I’d have to sneak up on it another way. The scotch would help.
Many miles passed before he said, “In a way I envy you, you know? You don’t need to be disconnected from all these people. You don’t feel this pressure, to be some person they expect you to be instead of yourself.” I smelled something on him, then: the rush of yearning, the hunger for release. Bingo. I reached into my bag and my hand closed on the neck of the scotch bottle—but then something stopped me from pulling it out.
That smell.
The smell of wanting to be drunk. Of desperation for booze.
I’d been smelling it all my life. A knowing settled in my stomach, half eerie suspicion and half gut certainty. My mother is an alcoholic. She had kept it in check for longer than I’d been alive. She went weeks sometimes without thinking about it. It was why she went to synagogue so often, when I was pretty sure she didn’t believe a word of it. But it was still there, below the surface. Just like this bottle, hidden away. Forgotten sometimes. But there. How had I missed it?
“This song is so good,” I said, cranking up the stereo.
He smiled and sang along, and so did I. By Poughkeepsie my whole body was singing. We stood on the platform and waited for a southbound train. We stood so close I could feel his heat against the cold of the night. Lights glimmered and flashed on a bridge. The river was a wide rush of wind and water, cold and alive, the weight of the night so heavy it could crack me open. My empty aching belly gurgled out a song, every cramp and spasm an affirmation, a lyric: I am alive, I am an adult, I control my life, I can do anything.
RULE #17
Pattern recognition is an innate ability of all animals. Birds and jellyfish and people all learn the same way: by finding familiar things in the chaos of reality. And the human mind’s capacity for pattern recognition is the most impressive on the planet. Properly attuned, it can find the signal in an ocean of static.
Only the strongest, purest mind can control the body. But some truths can only be taught by the body. The warrior schooling herself in the Art of Starving will learn to let the body take the reins.
DAY: 13, CONTINUED . . .
This was a terrible horrible no-good very bad idea. I knew it the second I stepped onto the platform at Grand Central Terminal. New York City was the wrong place for a novice in the art of controlling his senses. Overwhelming stinks, deafening sounds. The crushing pressure of a half-dozen million people choking on their own anger and sadness. Like that first day back in high school, before I learned what my powers were, except cranked up ten thousand times.
“Stay close,” he said, leading me through the bustling chaos of the terminal.
“You know the city pretty well,” I said, although he didn’t hear me. I could barely hear myself.
If his plan was to hurt me, this handsome monster, he wouldn’t need to lift a finger. He could slip away from me easily enough in the crowd and abandon me to my fate in this terrifying city. Five minutes on my own and I was sure I’d be knocked out and dragged into an alley and tortured to death, my organs subsequently sold off for spare parts. I glimpsed streetlights, taxicabs; smelled bus exhaust and tar—but Tariq took me in the opposite direction, down a sloping hallway, burrowing underground, boarding an escalator, descending to the subway.
“This is so complicated,” I said, staring at the tangled transit lines on a map.
“Nothing to it,” he said, stabbing the map with two fine fingers. “Don’t think about the big picture. Focus on where you are and where you need to go.” He paused. “That’s good life advice, actually. Free of charge, brother. Anyway. This is where we are. See?”
I saw: Grand Central Terminal. A green line crossed a purple and a gray one.
“And this is where we’re going.”
He stabbed a different spot: Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn.
“Okay,” I said, stepping closer to the map. “So . . .”
“How do we get there?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
“The green line,” he said, tracing it with his finger.
“To the L train!” I said, seeing where the lines crossed at Union Square.
“Good!” he said, and clapped me on the shoulder and held on. “We transfer there. You’re practically a New Yorker already.”
He let me lead us. I got us to the right platform; I got us on the right train. Saturday night and the car was packed, dressed up men and women, drunk kids, and people on drugs. Someone played an accordion. I felt inches away from drowning. Happiness oozed out of him, and I clung to it, wrapped myself up in it. Let it anchor me.
“Here,” I said, discreetly inserting the bottle under his arm.
“Matt!” he said, laughing. “You’re my new favorite.” He drank from it shamelessly, openly.
“Be careful with that!” I hissed.
“Don’t be a narc, Matt.”
Someone sitting down laughed. We stood together, alone among millions. He handed me back the bottle and I put it to my mouth, lips pressed tightly shut as I tilted it back so I didn’t swallow a drop.
By Bedford Avenue the booze had begun to kick in for him. We had a ways to walk, and I could see Tariq wobbling a little already. I sniffed. Three people had puked on the sidewalk in the past hour, just within a four-block radius of where we stood. Three stories up, in a squalid weed-stinking apartment, I heard two men grappling and punching in a firestorm of hate and anger.
This city would destroy me.
“This place is the best to see sh
ows,” he said. “But they just lost their lease. It’s the last night. Gonna be a great show. All the good spots in the city are gone, seems like.”
“My sister had a crush on you,” I said, more out of desperation than Evil Genius Expert Timing.
Tariq stopped walking. “Your sister is awesome,” he said after weighing his words for a while. “I was so sorry when I heard about what had happened to her.”
We kept walking. The booze was making him less careful, less skilled at hiding his thoughts and feelings. Precisely as I had planned. “What did you hear?” I asked.
He shrugged. “You know. Stuff. I heard she ran away.”
“But you said I heard about what happened to her. That’s not the same thing as running away.”
“People run away for a reason, don’t they?”
I decided not to press the point. I had to be patient. Let him do the work for me.
I felt him start and stop a dozen times, trying to say something. “I wanted to ask how she was doing, but I figured you wouldn’t want to talk about it.”
“Why would you assume that?”
“If it was me, I wouldn’t want to talk about it. But you’re not me. I shouldn’t assume other people think like me.”
“No,” I said, my voice icy. “You shouldn’t.”
“Sorry I brought it up,” he said.
“You didn’t. I did.”
He laughed. “Then I’m sorry you brought it up.”
I stopped walking. I couldn’t risk driving him off, losing all the work I’d put into bonding with him. So I started to laugh.
“I’m messing with you, man,” I said, just like that. Man, like I was one of the guys, like this language came naturally to me.
“Consider me messed.”
That’s how I made it to the club. Faking it. Focusing on my mission. On Tariq. Being what he wanted me to be. Being the smart friend he was so hungry for.
Tariq tried to pay our ten-dollar door fee, but I pulled out my poker winnings and paid for both of us myself. We were whisked down a flight of stairs to a low-ceilinged, basement-smelling, overcrowded room, walls covered in decades of densely layered graffiti, where angry guitars galloped alongside frantic drums, and a wandering bassline struggled to keep up.
“What do you think?” he said, his eyes shining in the dim light, alcohol glee already making him grin like a tiger.
“This is amazing,” I said.
It was amazing. It was also terrifying. It was anarchy; it was liberation. Dancing in a frenzy, all fists and elbows, screaming out songs of rage. Every few minutes a subway rumbled through an underground tunnel beside our basement, and we felt it in our bones.
They are angry at the same world I am angry at, I thought. They accept me. I am one of them. All I have to do is step forward and claim it—
Five or six times I tried to enter the mosh pit. Fear got the better of me, the first two times—made me stop, made me turn back. After that it was simple clumsiness, the inept stumblings of a boy bad at gym class and afraid of all physical activity. Again and again I got pummeled, and barely made it out.
The basement helped; the thick stone walls and the echo of all that music shielded me somewhat from the city. But I still felt raw, naked, open to the suffering of the world. I still felt sick, alone, lost.
And suddenly, hungry. So hungry. What was wrong with me? Right then, I could feel there was something wrong with me. I shut my eyes and tried to focus on something safe, and all I could think about was my mother.
“Mommy,” I whispered without wanting to. It was the helpless cry of a child having nightmares. And somehow, as it had when I was tiny, just saying it made me feel better.
My cell phone said 11:04 p.m. How much longer would this thrashing go on?
“Come on, Matt!” Tariq called, periodically, whenever the surge and ebb of the pit brought him close to me.
“In a minute!” I said.
I really was content to sit back and watch. I was one of them, even from the sidelines. I watched them punch the air, pound the floor, smash into each other in a haze of testosterone. Sweaty limbs wrapped around sweaty torsos.
One of them caught me staring. And stared back. And smiled. A handsome mess of floppy black hair and pale acne’d skin, his smile said, We are the same. His smile started a tingly feeling, so warm and good I knew not to trust it. He took a step in my direction, and I panicked, leaped back into the fray.
Panic made my mind back off, and my body took the reins. I moved with the crowd, a leaf in the wind, effortlessly swinging in a profane, sacred circle. Like a pagan ritual, breathing in and breathing out, feeling life energy course through me, rolling with the crowd of flailing arms and kicking legs.
A hard, ugly truth: Sometimes you have to let the body take the lead.
After the show, walking back toward the subway, I knew that nothing would overwhelm me now. The body was the key: making peace with it, letting it find its way. Letting it separate the avalanche of useless information from what I truly needed.
We passed a huge tenement building. Hundreds of apartments. A couple argued out front—her rage singed my nostrils—two floors down an old woman was pouring hot water over a tea bag she’d already used three times—
And I breathed in. Focused on my breathing. Turned my metaphorical back on all those stimuli. Focused on the one I needed. The one I was here for.
“Hold up a second,” I said.
Tariq stopped.
“Cigarette?” I asked.
He lit one for me. And one for himself.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Never been better. Just wanted to take a minute to appreciate what a nice night it is.”
Tariq smiled. I could have walked all the way home, that’s how clear and calm the map of the world was, now that I could control the tornado of sense impressions that had threatened to destroy me.
Even the memory of the boy who’d smiled in my direction made me feel strong, powerful, a member of a secret tribe instead of a lonely freak. My people are out there. Someday, I will be ready to join them.
“Give me some more of that,” Tariq said, drunkenly pawing me in search of the bottle, while we waited at Bedford Avenue for the L train. He had been sweating a lot, down in that basement. He was drinking the scotch like it was water. He couldn’t see my smile when I handed it over.
It would be so easy to end him, I realized. The slightest of motions, and I could pivot his body onto the tracks as the train pulled in.
But I still needed answers. I needed to know what happened. What he did, or they did. Then I’d be able to take the vengeance that was rightfully mine.
And I was still so intoxicated by the moment, by my discovery—I wanted to savor that moment. And I wanted to be clear of distractions when the time came to savor his destruction. . . .
RULE #18
Your body doesn’t know the difference between its hungers. It responds the same way to hate as to love. This is why Lex can’t get enough of Superman. Why Batman just won’t quit The Joker.
This is why every great revenge story is indistinguishable from a love story.
DAY: 13, CONCLUDED
. . . and maybe I wouldn’t have to wait too long before his destruction came along.
“Why’s it so coooooold,” Tariq said—or something like that—back in Poughkeepsie. He was trying and failing to unlock his truck, and I saw for the first time how drunk he was, and how long a drive we had, an hour of winding roads and twisted turns, and Tariq too drunk to say words let alone get us home alive.
Once he had the car unlocked, I didn’t get in right away. The smart thing to do was to snatch his keys, make him sleep it off in a hotel room or the bed of his pickup, because to get in the car with him was way too likely to result in both our deaths.
But so what if I did die? Taking Tariq out would give my sister healing, maybe bring her home. My own death was just icing on the cake, sparing my mother the shame I’d bring he
r one way or the other.
Suicidal ideation, the words flitted through my brain. It is a persistent little sonofabitch. And quite the opportunist.
“Matt, you’re a good guy,” he said, hands and forehead resting on the wheel. “I wish everyone wasn’t so mean to you all the time.”
“They won’t be,” I said, and he chuckled, either missing the malevolence in my voice or amused by it. “Not anymore.”
“No more scotch?” he asked, starting the truck.
“Couple drops,” I said, handing the bottle over.
He sucked it dry, then threw it out the window. “Tariq, you shouldn’t litter,” he said in a deep accented voice—his father’s voice—and then burst out laughing.
He picked our way through Poughkeepsie’s silent streets with an excessive, paranoid caution. Once he made it to Route 9, however, he floored it. The truck groaned and lurched as it hurried us north. Hunger had me gnawing at the inside of my cheek, and pretty soon I tasted blood.
“I’m drunk,” he said. “I shouldn’t be driving.”
“You’ll be fine,” I said. “You’re an excellent driver.”
He saluted. “Thank you, sir. You are an excellent passenger.”
He rolled down his window, maybe hoping that the cold might sober him up.
His father was in the car with us, summoned by Tariq’s lighthearted impression. I could hear him, echoing in the air, in Tariq’s mind. His presence was dark and terrible. Maybe I could use it.
“Tell me about your father,” I said, my voice a howl above the roar of cold wind from the open window. “What does he do for a living?”
“Runs a Christmas tree farm,” he said. “Jutkowski’s, out on Spook Rock Road?”
“I’ve gone by there a million times!” I said. “But your name isn’t Jutkowski.”
“No, he was the one who founded the farm. My father worked for him, for years. When old man Jutkowski retired, he sold the place to my dad. Figured changing the name to Murat’s might weird people out.”
The Art of Starving Page 8
