“I’m sorry,” I said. “I feel like that’s my fault.”
“Shh,” she said, waving her hand to dismiss that “crazy” concept.
“I can’t believe they won’t give you any time off,” I said. “A week, at least, so you heal properly.”
“They offered,” she said, putting the car into drive, wearing her I Do Not Want to Continue This Conversation face. “But there’s layoffs coming, and being a woman I got to work harder than the others.”
“That’s a shitty fact,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “It is. We haven’t been bowling in forever. You and your sister loved that. Wanna go to Chatham?”
“You can’t bowl with your leg like that,” I said.
“I can watch you. Treat you to one of those paper boats of fried chicken fingers you used to love so much.”
I thought of the things we used to do, the Mom-and-the-Kids activities she could actually afford when we were little and had the day off from school. McDonald’s, the mall, Friendly’s. All involved food. Food was how we bonded, how we talked.
“Let’s go down to the boat launch,” I said. “Feed the ducks.”
We bought popcorn at a gas station and parked at the edge of the Hudson, but there were no ducks.
“Too cold,” she said, sitting down on a bench. “Too late in the season.”
She threw some kernels into the water and ate some. I even had a kernel or two myself. Rains up north had swelled the river, and random debris bobbed and swam with the current. In the sunlight, out in the world, she looked older than I’d ever seen her. Her drab brown hair needed cutting, and her pale skin had lines I’d never noticed. My mom was the terror of every hog in town, the fearless warrior who brought my sister and me into the world and then carried us safely to (relative) maturity. Yet in the grand scheme of things, she was no different from any piece of flotsam on the river, carried helplessly south. We all were.
“Did you love my father?”
Mom drew in a breath, the standard moment of decision where she usually redirected me to a safer subject. Instead, she startled me.
“I did.”
“Good,” I said. “That makes me happy.”
She sighed. “We weren’t a good fit. No one’s fault. You can like someone and also really dislike them at the same time.”
“Sometimes it’s like that,” I said, thinking of Tariq.
Mom looked at me, then reached out to hold my shoulder.
I had to work hard not to use my new abilities on my mother. It felt wrong, an invasion of her privacy, an inversion of our natural roles. But in that moment I knew what she was feeling, maybe from the look on her face and maybe from the simple human telepathy of two people who love each other and know each other well. She looked at me, and she saw that I was a person, that I was learning things about pain and heartache and suffering that she did not know, could not know, that I had a whole world inside me that had nothing to do with her.
“Somebody hurt Maya, Mom.”
Mom sighed. “Your sister has been going through a really difficult period. Trust me. I know what she’s going through. You can’t see it because she’s still your big sister and you idolize her, but she’s been working through some really difficult stuff.”
“That’s not true. She was fine . . . and then she was gone.”
“Your sister acted like she was a hundred percent in control, but that doesn’t mean she was fine. When I was her age—” and here my mother paused, frowned, debated with herself— “when I was around her age, I ran away from home myself.”
“What?” I said, staring at her face, but not looking too closely, not sniffing beneath the surface to find out more. “Why?”
“It’s complicated. A lot of reasons. That’s what I want you to understand. It isn’t always just one terrible thing. Sometimes, it’s a million little ones.
“I’m telling you all of this now because I need you to know that Maya is going to be all right. Whatever she’s going through, no matter how painful, she’s going to get through it. Do you believe that?”
I tried to answer. No words came out.
“I turned out okay. Didn’t I?”
“The best,” I whispered, and lay my head on her shoulder.
“Oh, honey,” Mom said, and stroked my hair.
Unlike our last conversation, I wasn’t sad. I didn’t want to cry. I wanted to rage and scream and burn things down. I wanted revenge—for more than just Maya now. On a world that could turn my bighearted mother (who used to write songs!) into a shell. On a world that could be so hard on a person that her only escape was running away from everything she knew.
Many a magnificent supervillain was motivated by revenge.
Maybe that’s what I was becoming. A supervillain.
“You need a haircut,” she said at last.
“You need a haircut.”
“Fine. Let’s go get haircuts.”
Which we did. From the same guy who’s been cutting my hair since I was five. Except: now I could see clear as day that he was a closet case. Couldn’t tell if that was because of my abilities or my fledgling gaydar. Gaydar is a real thing, evidently—a superpower that even the most mortal among us can acquire—and when he was finished, he and my mother smiled at me in the mirror behind me, and it was the same cut I’ve been getting since puberty. I looked at my reflection in a state of confusion and shock, because this boy was not me, this haircut was projecting the image of some clean and well-mannered normal person who I most certainly was not. A haircut is a costume, a disguise we wear to trick people into thinking we’re someone better or more successful or cooler or just different than we really are, and this insight made me want to scream and shatter the mirror, and I controlled myself only with great difficulty, because my hunger had progressed so far that I was in a more-or-less constant state of war with my body.
All of which brings me to: vision.
Sight is the most limited sense. The one we rely on too much. The easiest one to fool. It’s the most human sense, the one that helps us navigate the man-made world of signs and symbols and words and fashion. We’re trained to trust our eyes above all our other senses, but that’s a lie. Appearances deceive. Sight must be subjugated to the other senses, or you’ll be misled.
That evening I flipped through photographs, slow then fast, then quizzed myself on their contents. Simple stuff—Was the person in photo #10 a man or a woman? How many African Americans were in photo #22?—then harder, How many people in that crowd? What word was misspelled in that page full of text?
Back at school, suspension over, I logged body language cues from the people around me, looking for tells and tics that betrayed when someone was going to lie, evade, escalate, distract. I gave a trophy in the trophy case a quick glance and then recited the names and years on the trophy by memory. I watched people for hours on end, learned the connections between body language and future action, until I could almost sort of predict what someone was going to do—before they did it.
I spent as much time as I could in the high school halls with Tariq and Bastien and Ott. By now the latter two had begun to begrudgingly accept me as a member of the human race. I scanned their faces, watched the way their jaws moved and their eyebrows twitched. I could see the shape of the secrets just below the surface and the careful way they looked at me.
But I wasn’t good enough to see what the secrets were, not yet.
At every meal, now, Mom said, “You need to eat, Matt.”
“I will,” I said, but I wouldn’t. I was too close.
And every time, the look in Mom’s eyes was too familiar. It was the same look that those boys had, during dodgeball, when they realized they should be scared of me.
RULE #23
The dying human brain floods itself with more than a dozen neurochemicals, desperate to stimulate the rest of the body into saving itself. These include dopamine, which makes you feel pleasure, and norepinephrine, which makes you more alert. Scie
ntists point to this chemical flood as the explanation for near-death experiences and other vivid imagery reported by people who survive a brush with death, but the sophisticated student of the Art of Starving knows it’s the other way around. Those experiences are real. The human mind, on the edge of breaking free of its body, stumbles into other realities, sees impossible things, accomplishes incomprehensible actions. They are the cause of the chemicals, not their consequence . . .
DAY: 19
TOTAL CALORIES: 0
Hunger was a pack of wolves, starving and mad, running through my bloodstream, gaunt ribs showing through mangy scabbed fur, fangs bared at every shadow.
Hunger pulled me out of bed after midnight, twisting my stomach like wringing out a wet towel, sinking savage talons into my skin and marionetting me: clothes on, socks off, down the hall, out the door, into the night.
“Whoa,” I might have said out loud. Black flowers shimmered in the air around me, swelled into storm clouds, threatened to blind me altogether. My hold on this world felt flimsy, tenuous, like at any moment I might pass out, fall away from my body.
But the answers were out there. The knowledge I needed was out in the night, and hunger goaded me on in pursuit of it. Mid-November by now, the ground frozen beneath my bare feet—bare feet what the hell is wrong with me, oh right, the common sense center of my brain is pinned to the mat beneath a great big brute named Hunger—the air so cold and clear that I felt like I was gulping down drugs, breathing in performance-enhancing steroids, sucking up the raw power of the universe. The night throbbed inside me. I was breaking the rules, no one could stop me. No rules bound me. The rules were made by people too afraid of their own power to ever claim it, who wanted to keep everyone else powerless. The police, my teachers, God, the president.
This town is dying.
I could smell it now, like a dead mouse rotting behind a bookshelf. I was shocked no one else could. Shuttered factories stunk like sewage pits; the empty strip malls smelled like rotten fruit. How did any of these people go about their days, living inside a rotting corpse?
I saw everything, the complex chains of cause and effect, the webs we were all caught in, the dry months and the hard harvest, the corporate trends five states over and the wars a half a world away.
The slaughterhouse will close. Within the next two weeks. Hundreds will lose their jobs.
I shivered to see the pieces come together. To feel this weird new insight spreading out like goose bumps across my body.
I saw the Main Street mom-and-pops shutting down one after another. I dug my heels into the dirt and felt the buildings that would be built in their places. Giant boxes, giant graves.
I ran. The wind ran with me, picking up, tugging at the trees, making a moaning sound that got louder as I ran faster and faster.
I howled. Tilted my head back and howled as loud as I could. Down the block, a dog barked back.
I howled again.
Silently, lightly, snow began to fall.
“Coincidence, that’s all,” I whispered, even as I sang-thought, I can make it snow, I can snuff the stars out one by one, I can control the very fabric of time and space!
But no. Power like this wasn’t sustainable. It might not even be survivable.
I might have run for hours. I might have stood beneath every window in Hudson, listening, smelling, seeing the patterns, understanding how truly helpless everyone was. Snow fell faster and faster. My feet burned. I felt like at any moment I would step up into the air and fly.
And then, all at once it was gone.
“Please,” I said, but the world did not care. Hunger was a pack of wolves, turning on one of their own, clawing and tearing at my stomach. Hunger made the world spin.
“Maya,” I whispered, into the jagged swirling snow, but flakes filled my mouth, pecked at my face. The wind howled laughter.
Somehow, I staggered home. Somehow, I ended up in our kitchen. I stared at the food on the shelves and in the fridge, and knew that even if I could eat it, it wouldn’t be enough. Hunger had progressed too far; the pain in my belly had become too sharp.
“Mom,” I whispered, standing over where she slept on the couch.
“Matt? What’s the matter, honey?” The black flowers blossomed all over my field of vision, until there was nothing more to see.
RULE #24
The body’s truth is not the only truth.
DAY: ∞; A BRIEF PAUSE, SOMEWHERE OUTSIDE OF TIME AND SPACE
“You’re being selfish,” Maya said, taking a Marlboro from a pack bent into the shape of a boy’s back pants pocket.
“No I’m not,” I said, and then looked around. “Where are we?”
We sat on a long bent piece of driftwood, on a beach, barefoot, cold surf crashing around our feet, thick fog obscuring the distance in every direction.
“Is this Providence?”
Maya shrugged. “Sort of.”
“When did we—how did we . . .” I looked at my hands in frustration, inspected my clothes, found no clues. “I don’t remember coming here.”
“You don’t come here. You just . . . end up here.”
“Oh,” I said, remembering everything—running barefoot, starving, through the streets, waking Mom up, seeing the terror and worry in her eyes, riding to the hospital . . . “It’s a dream.”
Maya shrugged. “Probably. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”
“Of course it does,” I said, feeling sadness seize my throat and moisten my eyes. “I was so happy to be talking to you. To have you back with us. But you’re not my sister. You’re just a part of my subconscious.”
She made a face. “That’s rude.”
The face was so perfectly Maya that I faltered, wondered: What if this is her? Really her?
She stared at the horizon. She didn’t look at me. Her hair was loose and wind-tossed. She wore what she wore the night she went to meet Tariq. Thin olive cardigan. Butch patched jeans. The T-shirt she made that said Destroy All Monsters! and had a drawing of a punk rock Mothra. The waves were getting higher, soaking us up to our knees by now. “What would you say to me if I was your sister?” she asked.
“I would ask you what happened.”
“And if I said I didn’t want to tell you? Or that it doesn’t have anything to do with you? Or that I’m fine? What would you actually say to me?”
“I don’t know,” I said after a while.
“Maybe that’s part of the problem.”
I picked up a rock, threw it into the water. The rules of physics seemed to behave pretty well in this particular dream. “Okay. Tell me more about the problem.”
“What does it matter what I say? I’m just a part of your subconscious.”
A wave crested higher, soaked me to my belly, the water bitter and cold, salt scouring me.
“You’re trying to win someone else’s fight for them,” she said, and shivered and hugged her knees to her chest. “But you’ll never even truly understand how they feel, or the way they’re hurting, so how can you hope to succeed?”
“I have to try,” I said. “I have to do something.”
“You need to understand who you are,” she said, and turned to me, and don’t ask me how but somehow I looked into those eyes and knew it was her, really truly her, Maya, somehow, her spirit or her soul or her subconscious. She took a final drag on her cigarette, then flicked it into the sea. “Try to fight someone else’s war, and you will end up one of the casualties. Believe me. I should know.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. She didn’t answer. I asked it again, louder, screaming now, but a wave was coming in, higher than the rest, crashing down over both of us, dragging us down and away.
RULE #25
If you don’t take care of your body, someone else might.
DAY: 20
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 2000
Scenes from a small-town emergency room at 3 a.m.:
Man with pitchfork in arm.
A prisoner from the corr
ectional facility, wheeled in unconscious and bleeding, strapped down, under armed guard.
Developmentally disabled man brought in an ambulance, wailing loudly about the pains in his leg, apologizing when his mother urges him to keep his voice down, wailing some more, making sounds midway between words and shrieks.
Boy with entire roll of paper towels wrapped around profusely bleeding thumb.
Teen boy and girl with shifty twitchy eyes and grubby hands, waiting for their friend to get assessed for a concussion, sneaking into the men’s room together when no one—but me—is looking, emerging one hundred and ninety seconds later with smiles so big only sex or drugs could have caused them.
Funny-looking boy, very unconscious, presenting with significant malnutrition, hooked up to a feeding tube.
I had woken up enough on the ride over to tell the triage lady that I thought I had food poisoning; had been vomiting since sharing a chicken sandwich with a friend at school and that she’d been feeling sick, too. Wasn’t alert enough to assess whether she—or my mother—bought a word of that utter horseshit; thanked all the gods that I was too out of it to give my lies away with nervousness. Sat down in the waiting area with my mother. Kept flickering in and out of awareness, although I never went back to the dream-beach where I’d met Maya.
“Hey!” the nurse hollered to a different prisoner. “Get your finger out of there! I’m watching you!”
And then I went away for a while.
When I came to I was in a room, sedated, half in and half out of my body.
A tube went down my throat. A machine pumped liquid food into me. I felt my senses dulling, my abilities disappearing as scientifically concocted nutrition-rich sludge bubbled and frothed into my belly. My throat clenched. I coughed. I gagged. I panicked. I wanted to rip it out but my hands wouldn’t cooperate. And then I went away again.
“Matt?” said a lady when I returned. The tube was gone. My gut agony was gone. My supersenses were—gone. I floated on a thick smothering cloud of painkillers and sedatives.
The Art of Starving Page 11
