The Art of Starving

by Sam J. Miller

  The truth burns

  Like black coffee

  Bitter strong and cheap

  “God damn,” I said to the empty room. “My sister’s gonna be a rock star.”

  It wasn’t much. But it was something. Her anger fed me, filled me up. Gave weight and heft to my own.

  My doorbell rang on my fiftieth listen. Mom was at work already.

  Jehovah’s Witnesses, I thought, since they’re pretty much the only folks who ever knock on our door outside of election season, and I leaped down the hall excited about the possibilities for Messing With Them.

  Do you guys like Jews?

  What is your church’s stance on homosexuality?

  Would it be a good place for me to meet a man?

  You may have noticed by now that I was getting a little cocky.

  Alas, no earnest shepherds waited on my doorstep to usher me into their flock. Just Tariq, looking a little nervous.

  “Hey,” I said, opening the door.

  The day was cold. I wanted to invite him in. The friendly thing to do would have been to invite him in. But then he would see the place, its tiny size and its clutter, smell its scorched-dinner stink.

  “Hey, Matt.”

  “Why aren’t you in school?” I asked. “I’m suspended, but what’s your excuse?”

  “Decided to play hooky today,” he said. “Can you believe I’ve never done that before?”

  “I don’t believe it, actually,” I said. “Aren’t you the senior class bad boy?”

  “People only say that because I’m not white,” he said.

  “And the nose piercing. And the general attitude of Screw your rules, society!”

  He chuckled. “All of the above. So what do you want to do with this day of hard-earned freedom?” Tariq asked. “Whatever you want, we’ll do it. When’s your birthday?”

  “February,” I said.

  “Then consider this a belated birthday present from me,” he said.

  “Coffee,” I said. “I want to start with coffee.”

  Dunkin’ Donuts; Tariq ordered us two large black coffees, each with two shots of espresso added.

  Espresso, it turns out, should be strictly regulated by the government, because that shit is the very definition of a mind-altering substance.

  “Now where to?” Tariq said, leaning back in the driver’s seat. He needed a shave. Stubble caught the sunlight, made him radiant. “We could break windows in the old zipper factory, go to Albany and get some records from Last Vestige . . .”

  I stared down the road in both directions, imagined all the adventures that awaited us either way. It had been so long since I’d had someone to go and do things with. And it felt good. And it made me angry that it felt good, because my friend was also my enemy. All that road, all the people who lived and worked and suffered and played and died just past my field of vision. All the paths we could take. I felt like a sieve, a funnel that all the joy and suffering in the world passed through. I wanted to cry.

  In the long silence of my distraction, Tariq reached across and took something out of the glove compartment.

  “Check this out,” he said, and read to me, “‘All I wanted to do was sneak out into the night and disappear somewhere, and go and find out what everybody was doing all over the country.’ Do you ever feel like that?”

  He held up the cover of On the Road, and I thought of my dad, who snuck out into the night, and disappeared somewhere, and found out what everybody was doing all over the country. . . .

  “I’m not Kerouac. I don’t want to see any people. I want to go to your Christmas tree farm,” I said. “I want to disappear in a forest of Jesus trees.”

  “The Jew and the Muslim in Christmas Land,” he said.

  I nodded, so we drove.

  “So you like Jack Kerouac?” I asked.

  “Love him. Like, how he writes is how I feel. How he sees the world. How much beauty there is, and sadness, and how much other people hold us back from experiencing what life really has to offer. You know?”

  I did know. But I didn’t say anything.

  Tariq’s Serious-Driver face broke into a brief smile at something remembered or imagined. I shut my eyes and breathed deep, trying to smell or hear his thoughts, but got almost nothing. He had so many walls up. A secret stood between us, something that scared him so bad that it overpowered everything else.

  I came close to killing him in New York City. I didn’t, though, and now I know the reason why. I needed him to confess what he did. I needed the details, no matter how ugly they turned out to be, no matter how much it hurt, so I could help Maya heal.

  Staying silent was tough, with two espressos hiding inside a large coffee inside my belly, but I managed. I could feel his discomfort, his confusion. We pulled off the road, down a dirt drive, came to a stop in an empty parking lot. “Jesus Tree Land,” he said.

  We got out of the truck.

  Below us a hill sloped down into a wide shallow valley, where pine trees grew in straight lines like marching soldiers. Before my eyes they grew from tiny saplings to mighty trees. Like a flipbook of the tree-maturation process. I stood there, in awe, my hunger-addled brain forgetting everything other than this simple moment. I shut my eyes, and I was a deer, a wolf, a bear standing in a forest, feeling winter come, feeling the earth beneath my feet, knowing I was part of everything that lives and dies.

  “For every one we cut down in winter, we plant another in spring,” Tariq said. “Those tiny ones, we just planted them this year. Those down there—they’re older than us. Some of them are older than my dad. It’s kinda beautiful.”

  “It is,” I said.

  “Cigarette?”

  “Yes, please.”

  He lit mine for me after I fumbled several attempts with his Zippo.

  “I never knew my dad,” I said, breathing in that first sweet bitter mouthful of death and ash.

  He looked away sharply. I wondered if Maya had told him about our dad. About the lobster boat. I wondered what they had talked about, when they were together, while he was biding his time, before he hurt her or brought her to Ott and Bastien to be hurt.

  “Maybe that’s not the worst thing in the world,” he said.

  “No?”

  “No,” he said. “At least there’s nobody trying to make you into someone you’re not.”

  Nobody but me, I thought.

  “Does he ever hit you?” I asked. Tariq frowned. Opened his mouth. Shut it.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and I was. “That’s a terrible question to ask. It’s none of my business.”

  Tariq laughed. “You know what, though? That much, I don’t mind. And anyway, he mostly stopped, around about the time I got to be taller than him. When I started spending so much time in the weight room that I look like whatever stupid soldier man he was, back in Syria, when he was my age. But that’s the worst part—it’s like he’s already won. He’s already made me into what he wants me to be. He’s in my head. I don’t even know how much of me is me and how much of me is him.”

  “I wonder what fucks you up more,” I said. “Having no dad or having an asshole dad?”

  He laughed. “If only there was some test you could take to see how fucked up you are. Then we could both take it and decide who’s more fucked up. Then that’d answer your question.”

  I cut my laughter short. Back to business. The business of breaking him. “It’s my sister who really got the raw deal here. They say when girls grow up without a father figure, it messes up their whole love life from there. They never learn how to tell the difference between a guy you can trust and a guy you can’t. That’s what all the talk show assholes say, anyway.”

  “Maybe that’s true for some people,” Tariq said, “but not for everyone.”

  “But I think in her case, it is,” I said.

  Tariq’s eyes widened just the slightest bit.

  “She . . . told you?”

  I shrugged. Looked at the ground, at my feet. Shuffled thro
ugh the deck in my head, wondering if there was another card I could play. “Sort of.”

  He nodded. “Follow me.”

  We walked into the trees, which grew taller around us as we went, like something in a fairy tale. We walked for a while, talking, smoking, breathing, being alive. Soon the orderly rows of planted trees broke down, and we were in real forest, primeval growth that stretched probably all the way up to Canada, and through Canada, to the line no trees grow north of. I ached to take off my shoes, dig my toes into the dirt, feel the roots and bedrock and staggering raw scope of the earth we walked on.

  I picked up a couple pine needles. I shut my eyes and breathed. Felt life energy swirling densely around me, knotted and looping around the pine trees—here was life, here was power, here was the essential energy that the entire universe was built from, and it was mine to see, control, ignite—

  I flicked my fingers, like snapping them, pinching them with precisely enough pressure and speed to create just enough friction—

  The pine needles sparked and crackled and burst into flame as they fell away, and burned themselves out before they hit the ground.

  “What was that?” Tariq asked.

  I stamped out the embers with my feet.

  “Just snapping my fingers,” I said.

  “I hung out with your sister a couple of times,” he said, sitting down on a stump.

  This was it. The confession. He couldn’t have heard how my heart and breath both stopped, so he kept going. “She and I had never been friends, but she came up to me after school and asked if I’d sell her a cigarette.”

  That was the line she always used to start conversations with people she was interested in. She used to teach me all her tricks. Someday you’ll be in a place where you can actually be who you really are, and you need to know how courtship rituals work, she told me.

  “I gave her one for free, of course. And you know, we just started talking now and then after that. She was the one who got me into punk rock.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “The nostril piercing.”

  He laughed. “Her idea. In a weird, Jedi-mind-trick sort of way.”

  “My sister can be very manipulative,” I said. “In a good way.”

  So can I, I didn’t add. In a bad way.

  I took a long time thinking about what to say, weighing options, trying to be cool, finding I couldn’t. “What did you guys talk about?”

  “About you, actually. She’d do anything for you.”

  “I know,” I whispered, hideously embarrassed at how swiftly tears sprang to my eyes and overflowed. “At least, I thought I knew.”

  Tariq reached out, a spontaneous, unplanned action. We are primates, after all, hardwired to respond to the emotions of others, and the sight of my crying triggered some buried mammalian empathy instinct in Tariq. “Matt . . . ”

  And there it was, clawing its way up from his gut, squirming out his throat, the Secret, the thing he could never share with anyone, the shame and guilt that made his whole life a living hell, the need to confess, just like so many criminals in cop shows and mystery novels. . . .

  I could see it emerging.

  “Hey!” someone called. A big, dumb someone, stomping through the trees like an elephant, but with an arrogance no elephant could ever match.

  “Hey, Ott,” I said, when he blundered into the clearing where we stood. Last time I saw him, he had been sitting on the ground with his face six shades of red from a dodgeball strike to the testicles. I turned my head and wiped the tears from my eyes as sneakily as I could.

  “Matt,” he said, looking at me as little as possible. Surprised and unhappy to find me there. I stared at him, the broad rough cheekbones and flabby wide neck, and dared him to make eye contact. I couldn’t read him, couldn’t get a handle on what he was feeling. Anger, yes, but confusion, too—fear and the uncertainty that comes when you find out you were wrong about someone. “Missed you at school today, Tariq.”

  “Yeah, well.” Tariq shrugged, said nothing more. I smelled worry. Maybe shame. And my newly magnificent mind, amped up by the Art of Starving, made the connections.

  He is worried about what Ott will think, seeing him hang out with Known Degenerate Matt.

  He is worried about what Ott will say to other people. He is worried what other conclusions people will draw.

  “The guys always come here,” Tariq said to me. “The soccer team. It’s a good spot to get drunk, smoke up.”

  Ott asked, “You smoke, Matt?”

  From a hoodie pocket he pulled a plastic baggie, and squatted down on the ground beside me.

  “No,” I said, my face deadly serious. “I get high on life.”

  Then I laughed. They laughed. They didn’t notice my expression of disgust.

  Three tokes in, smiling already, Ott said: “Nice moves in dodgeball the other day. Since when are you a ninja?”

  I shrugged.

  “A week ago you were throwing like a girl.”

  “Shut up, Ott,” Tariq said.

  “What?” he said, wide-eyed, genuinely surprised at Tariq’s objection. “It’s true! Right, Matt?”

  “Pretty true,” I said, laughing, because dumbass Ott had just stumbled on my secret. He’d decoded everything. He had sensed my growing powers.

  Ott smoked pot, and we smoked cigarettes. And even once the weed had mellowed him out, Ott remained on edge with me. I caught glimmers of hostility aimed in my direction; shards of discomfort. I knew why, of course, but I didn’t know how to dig into it. My initial assessment had been correct: Tariq was the one I could get the truth out of. Because he wanted something from me. Friendship? Approval? Forgiveness?

  We walked back through the pine forest, Tariq’s father’s empire, his family fortune. Tariq was desperate to confess. I was so close to convincing him to do just that. And once I had what I needed, it would be so easy to burn this whole place to ash.

  RULE #22

  The internet is an excellent place for people with eating disorders. Packed with sites and forums with all the tips and tricks you need to cover up your eating disorder until you disappeared from this earth altogether.

  Which is to say, the internet is a terrible place for people with eating disorders.

  DAYS: 16–18

  AVERAGE DAILY CALORIES, APPROX.: 600

  My second day of suspension meant something very special: an entire day of Quality Time with my mother. It coincided with that rarest of events, a Whole Day Off for her.

  “Word at the plant is that you murdered twenty people and then told the principal to go screw himself,” she said when she woke me up that morning.

  “Lies and slanders,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “I killed at least fifty people.”

  “Can’t believe I raised such a slacker,” she said. “Now get dressed.”

  “What the hell,” I mumbled, my mouth filthy with sleep taste. “It’s earlier than when I get up for school. And I don’t go to school today!”

  “It’s not a vacation, slugger, it’s suspension,” she said, pulling wide the blinds. “Get dressed.”

  Hunger was a fog, a blanket of gray mist that covered everything. Hunger wrapped me up in a snug blanket of cold and quiet, blinded me to the distant dangers and fears that normally kept me in a stressed-out state of high alert. I took my morning ration of two tablespoons of tsampa, just to be on the safe side.

  Something was different when I came downstairs. A disturbance in the air. An echo.

  Music. Real music, not a recording.

  Could I hear the past now?

  “Were you playing Maya’s guitar?” I asked.

  “Christ, kid, you heard that? Thought you were asleep. Plus, I didn’t even turn the goddamn amplifier on.”

  “I didn’t know you played the guitar,” I said because I couldn’t tell which one was more astonishing, the fact that I could maybe hear the past or the fact that I’d never known something so important about her.

  “There’s a lot you don’
t know about your fat old mother,” she said. “I used to have hopes and dreams the same as you two.”

  “You wanted to be a rock star?”

  She showed a thin and rueful smile. “I wrote songs, had crazy ideas about playing them for people.” Then she flapped her hand to whisk away these unhelpful, unwelcome memories. “But winter’s coming, and it’s a Tuesday. Which means half off at the Salvation Army. We’re going shopping.”

  Once we got there, I fingered jackets and pants in an ecstasy of information, glimpsing scraps of every garment’s past life. A fight between a boyfriend and girlfriend; the shirt she donated, along with every other article of clothing he owned, while he was at work the next day. The mothball vacuum cleaner smell of the closet where a coat spent a decade; the hard tavern nights of smoke and barstool pleather that a pair of jeans endured. The pajama bottoms an old man died in. A hat a meth-head loved, until she ended up in prison. And through it all I thought of my mother and the lives she didn’t get to live.

  “Pick out whatever you want,” she said. “Call me Mrs. Moneybags, but only on Tuesdays. And only here.” The night before, I had spent entirely too much time on an eating-disorder support website. I read it and felt sick and sorry for these poor miserable tormented souls. But I also scribbled down copious notes.

  For example: baggy clothes. Buy big bulky items to hide inside. That way no one will remark, as my mother did, on how thin you are. No one can tell underneath all that fabric. And when I met my mom at the cash register weighted down with oversize sweaters, et cetera, she was overjoyed to see how fully I had thrown myself into the trip, considering that clothes shopping had always been one position higher than “dentist” on the list of Things I Hate.

  “These are gigantic,” she said, holding up a hoodie that could have housed ten of me.

  “It’s the style.”

  “I thought skinny jeans and tight shirts were the style.”

  “Yeah, yesterday’s style,” I said. “I’m fashion forward.”

  “You’re ridiculous, is what you are.”

  I nodded. “Yes. Yes I am.”

  In the car, she clutched her leg and winced and waited a solid three minutes for the pain to die down.