The Art of Starving

by Sam J. Miller

  Outside, twilight had turned everything a deep dark blue. The tint gave a sad grandeur to the sorry spread of strip malls and trash and rust outside the window. I pressed my fingers to the table beside my water glass and pushed, just a little, with my mind, sending tiny shock waves through the table that made ripples in the water. I pushed harder and the ripples got bigger. Tariq frowned, unsettled without knowing why, looking around like maybe a little earthquake was happening.

  “I’m sorry I’m taking you away from the weight room,” I said.

  “I’m happy to be here,” he said. “With you.” But was he? I wouldn’t blame him if he was desperate to be anywhere else. I was irritable, starving, unpleasant. I stared at his face, wondering what he was feeling. I couldn’t penetrate whatever force field surrounded him. I’d have to make my powers stronger. “After this, we should go to a movie and make out,” I said. “Or maybe forget the movie part.”

  He smiled, and a flush of desire forced me to bite back a moan. Black stars bloomed by the dozen. The whole diner spun. “Bastien’s having a party. Tomorrow night, at his house. You up for that?”

  I wasn’t. But then my eyes locked onto Tariq’s, and I was. “Yes,” I said. “I am super up for that.”

  I lowered my face to the bowl of soup. I looked up, at the crowd in the diner, at all the crisscrossing lines made by people, the smells and emotions and energy that swirled around them, the traces they left, tiny as molecules sometimes, but still there, right there, right in front of me, a code I couldn’t crack, a riddle I couldn’t unravel. Because I was weak. Because I chose earthly attachments like Tariq and food over limitless power. I looked up, through fogging eyes, at the connections between people, the way they carried their pasts on their backs and their futures strapped to their chests, the way time itself was a shifting wave like smell or sound, something I could crack or control, if I pushed a little further, if I became a little stronger.

  My glass of water broke.

  I started to cry.

  “Hey,” Tariq said, looking bewildered, leaning forward to grab my hands under the table. “Hey, Matt. Don’t cry. Everything’s . . .”

  His voice trailed off. He looked down at his plate, at the carnage of pizza fries. And suddenly I wasn’t afraid of homophobe lunatics with guns or the waitress spitting in our food or someone from the slaughterhouse or his father’s tree farm seeing us and snitching. Nothing on earth frightened me as much as the thought that Tariq might leave me.

  “Come around the table,” I said. “Nobody knows us here. You don’t need to be ashamed of me.” A sob-hiccup.

  He came around. He draped his big strong arm across my shoulders. He stared out at the diner and dared anyone to give us a second glance. No one did.

  “What’s going on, Matt?” he whispered.

  “My mom is going to lose her job. And my sister won’t talk to me. And I . . . And I . . .”

  I stopped myself. I had been way, way too close to telling Tariq the thing that would make him run screaming out of my life. He’d tolerated so much of my awfulness. Expecting him to be understanding about my self-imposed starvation was absurd.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Keeping us a secret is hard for me, too.” There were lots more things he wanted to say, and he wanted to say them so bad I could hear them. Some of the things were precisely what I needed to hear. But he didn’t really say them, so they didn’t count.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, conceding defeat in the who-can-stay-silent-longer contest. “It’s the solstice. I’m a Wiccan, so I’m very sensitive to these things.”

  “Eat the goddamn soup,” he said in my ear, then bit it lightly.

  I ate two spoonfuls of the soup. I wept because it tasted so good, and because Tariq cared so much for me, and I wept because I was so, so weak.

  RULE #39

  Separation is an illusion. All living things are one. Trapped in our bodies, chained to dying animals, we forget that each of us is one with all creation. Only the Supreme Master of the Art of Starving can pierce through this illusion.

  DAY: 30

  TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 200

  I am strong, I told the mirror boy. He grinned a Real Boy’s smile, something he could turn on and off at will, because no one would ever again say to him, Why aren’t you ever smiling in any photographs?

  I can pass, I said, and he believed me. Dressed in a hoodie and jeans and sturdy boots, I could have blended in with any gathering of average American adolescent males. A knit cap covered my wildfire hair.

  We can do this, I said. We’ve done this before. If the mirror boy had any doubts, he kept them to himself.

  An hour later I was at Bastien’s house, along with every high school A-lister in the county.

  “This isn’t going to be too miserable for you?” Tariq asked as we approached the front door.

  “Your friends aren’t all awful,” I said. Truthfully. “And parties are interesting, from an anthropological perspective. Such a strange ritual . . .”

  Tariq laughed. “Let’s just hope the natives don’t turn out to be cannibals.”

  “Anyway, if you enjoy parties like this, they can’t be completely worthless.” I touched his arm. He fought the urge to flinch away. “I want to know how to live in your world.”

  I was being sincere, and he could see it.

  “My world sucks,” he said, and he was being sincere. “But it’s nice to just make stupid jokes, to play video games, to feel on the same page with people. You know?”

  “Totally,” I said. “Wolves get something out of being part of a pack.”

  “You’re so deep,” he said, knocking lightly on my forehead. And then Bastien’s front door.

  And then we were inside. Tariq’s house was nice, but Bastien’s made it look like mine. So that’s how rich you are if you run a slaughterhouse, I thought, looking up at the double spiral staircases connecting the front hall to the second floor, the wide windows that let in so much light, the wings branching off in both directions to untold wonders. The potted palm tree, two stories high, indoors, standing right in front of us.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Yup. Everybody always wanted to come play at Bastien’s house. The best video game systems, the best snacks . . .”

  “ . . . the blood of the workers on his hands . . .”

  “That, too,” my communist boyfriend said.

  “I promise to try my hardest not to jump your bones,” I whispered.

  “I appreciate that.”

  The party was perfectly banal. It needs no description, deserves no aggrandizement. Parties happen every night. Kids get drunk and loud every night. A thousand parties are happening right now, as you read this, wherever and whenever you are.

  What made this one special was me. How I felt. I belonged. Weeks or months ago, at the party down by the Dunes, I had felt like an impostor. Now I knew I wasn’t simply equal to these kids—I was superior to them.

  Call it another manic energy burst, a spasm of adrenaline, but I felt fantastic, taller than the indoor palm tree, sturdy as the marble columns. I wasn’t slave to my impulses, the way these boys and girls were. I was stronger than my emotions, strong enough to bend and break my body into obedience, strong enough to access powers they could not imagine. I could joke and laugh with them, smile for photographs, but they were not my equals.

  An hour in and Tariq and I found ourselves in an upstairs room, massive and purposeless—no bed, no desk, just some comfortable chairs and little tables and a lot of books I’d bet good money had never been touched—just some random room for hanging out with friends, because when you’re that rich you can have all kinds of superfluous rooms. Half the soccer team was there. We sat on the floor, at the edge of the flow of conversation. Bottles were passed. Tariq drank from his, long, gasping gulps, then pressed one into my hand.

  “I don’t want any,” I said.

  “Come on,” he said, drawing out the second word pleadingly. “Get drunk. You’ll have more fun.�
��

  “I’m having fun now.”

  “You drank with me when we went to New York City. Why not now?”

  I shrugged. I wasn’t really drinking, I was trying to trick you into getting drunk because I wanted to avenge a horrific crime I erroneously believed you committed. “Maybe the question isn’t why I’m not drinking, it’s why you are.”

  Tariq made a sound like a game-show buzzer when you guessed incorrectly. “Nope. That’s not the question at all.”

  “I know you want to feel like you’re one of them,” I said.

  “I am one of them,” he said.

  “No you’re not. You’re going to have to accept it sooner or later.”

  “Everybody’s got something that makes them different,” he said softly. “Being gay doesn’t make us a separate species.”

  I thought it did, but instead of saying so, I said, “You’re so much better than them.”

  “They’re my friends.”

  “Your friends are—”

  “Stop talking now,” he said, pressing his finger too hard against my lips and reaching out to intercept the bottle on its way to someone else.

  I wanted to get up and walk dramatically away, but I sat and watched the party. We both had our walls up, and I could smell them between us, like burned cookies, something sweet turned noxious.

  An hour passed like that, us on the floor, saying little to each other and to the people around us, and the walls eroded bit by bit, and were almost gone when Ott walked in and scanned the room and saw me and stopped smiling.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said, his voice thick and drunk, “why does this fucking faggot have to be here?”

  Conversations stopped, with the record-scratch suddenness of sitcoms. The remark was probably meant to be quiet, a mild complaint to whatever deity waits on dumb drunk kids, but everybody heard it.

  I breathed in deep, through my nose, then held my breath. Felt the temperature change in the room. Smelled emotions churning, responses formulating. My skin tingled. How would they respond, these kids, my peers? I felt suspended between two moments, two worlds—the one where everyone thought like Ott and I was subhuman filth, and the one where people like Ott were a backward shrinking minority.

  “Not cool, man,” someone grumbled.

  “I mean it!” Ott cried, defensive and confused. “Where the hell did he come from? Why’s he always around all of a sudden?”

  “He’s my friend,” Tariq said, shocking me. He stood up, and stepped forward, shocking Ott. “So be quiet about him.”

  Ott opened his mouth, and I saw what he was wanting to say. I think Tariq saw it, too, so clearly was it written on the boy’s red, sweaty, drunken face. Something impugning Tariq’s manhood, implying that something more than friendship was at the root of his relationship with me.

  “Get out of here,” Tariq said, putting his hand on the drunk boy’s shoulder, gently, and then pushing, hard. “Go find another room to bring down.”

  Ott huffed and puffed and left.

  “And that’s why I don’t drink,” I said when Tariq returned to sit beside me.

  “Not everybody turns into a raging asshole,” he said.

  “No, but if he pulled that shit and I was drunk, he would not be breathing right now.”

  Tariq sniff-laughed, but I didn’t press the point.

  I basked. There is no other word for it. I sat beside the boy I loved and watched a party unfold. I let my stomach shout and wail in agony, and with every twist I felt proud. I watched people argue and laugh and joke and gossip. Felt, maybe for the first time, the thing Tariq had been talking about. The bliss of being a pack animal who has found his pack.

  A month before, when Tariq took me to our first party, I’d been a prey animal. A sheep with no herd, wandering into a world full of wolves.

  Now, thanks to the Art of Starving, I was a wolf.

  Herds are for sheep and pigs. Packs are for wolves.

  At one point I locked eyes with a girl, looking over at Tariq and me, who smiled apologetically and looked away. She knows, I thought. She sees. What we are. How we feel about each other. How many other people do?

  The thought made me giddy-happy. Maybe the world has more decent people in it than I thought. Maybe I’m not truly surrounded by homophobic assholes.

  I didn’t fight my hunger. I surrendered to it. Settled into a semi-meditation state. Focused on erasing my sense of self. Thought of Maya, briefly—but I had to set her aside along with every other emotion, every other attachment, every other aspect of myself that stood between me and the raw limitless power of the universe.

  I was so close. If I wanted to find Maya, reconnect with her, bring her home, punish our father for taking her away from us, stop the slaughterhouse from shutting down, save my mother’s job, keep our dying town alive a little longer, I had to push myself harder.

  A door slammed. Someone hollered. Stomped down the hall in our direction. Ott, I knew, from the dunce-heavy tread, and Bastien close behind, yelling at him to calm down, come back, don’t, stop.

  “Hey,” he said, standing in the doorway, whiskey bottle in hand.

  “Don’t start more shit, bro,” Tariq said without getting up.

  “Not here to start shit. Wanted to apologize. To . . . Matt. Can I? Apologize?”

  No one stopped him. He stepped in. He hadn’t come to apologize. He had come to hurt me. So I stood up and held out my hands, a gesture somewhere between Well? and Come at me, bro.

  “I’m sorry, Matt.”

  He crossed the room, stopped in front of me. Took a long sip. He telegraphed his actions to me clear as day, trying hard to concentrate in spite of how falling-down drunk he was. I knew what was coming. I could have stopped him or stepped aside. But I wanted him to do it. I wanted an excuse.

  We’d been buddies a couple days before, watching stars in the bed of Tariq’s truck. Or, if not buddies, at least he hadn’t hated me so much that the very sight of me made him want to murder things. What had changed? Was it just the alcohol? Simple intoxication making him lose control of whatever it was that made him so afraid of me?

  “Sorry for what?” I asked—and I could see it now, dimly, the anger he carried inside, the thing he fought against, every day of his life—

  “For . . .” A bad ad-libber, Ott had to work on that one for a little while. “Being a jerk.”

  At this point he skipped to the main event, which was pouring the whole bottle of whiskey over my head.

  I let him soak me in expensive booze.

  “What the fucking hell, dude!” Tariq leaped up, struck the bottle from his hand, drew back a fist.

  “Stop,” I said, my voice sounding eerie-calm. Tariq stopped as much from fear as anything else.

  Time slowed down.

  “Ott,” I said, and he was an open book, a painting to be read, every hurt and anger spelled out in the pores on his face. I wasn’t reading his mind so much as really seeing him, all of him, the scared damaged little boy inside the bully’s body, and somehow I already knew, or suspected, the truth.

  Time stopped.

  People were statues all around us. Mouths opened midsentence, arms frozen midflail.

  “What . . . happened?” Ott asked, his mouth opening and closing.

  He could move. I could move. No one else could.

  Time had stopped. Because I wanted it to.

  “Ott,” I said, taking a step closer, “why do you have such a problem with gay people?”

  “I . . .” Ott’s mind spun open like a scroll. Ott’s mind wasn’t separate from mine. We were four feet apart, but we were one. Two sundered pieces of the same whole. My starvation-crazed body had broken through the delusion of separation, let go of its ego long enough to see that Ott and I—and everyone—were one.

  “What the hell are you?” Ott whispered, and I heard his heart pound, and his mother calling him to supper, and every remembered sound inside his head.

  And just like that—I didn’t hate him anymor
e. I understood him, completely. I saw him, all of him, the complex messy angry sad sensitive creature that he was. I saw the true Ott, the pure unsullied part of him, the divine spark, the spirit that was separate from the body with all its blood and shit and needs and flaws, the innocent child Ott had been before he’d been battered and deformed by this broken horrible world.

  My voice softened. “Why do gay people make you so afraid?”

  Because I saw it. The secret. I don’t know how, but I did, as clearly as if someone whispered it in my ear. I saw it, and Ott saw me see it. Tears flowed from both eyes simultaneously. It would have been so easy to destroy him. To let time start up again, to expose him in front of everyone. But that would only hurt him more. And the more someone is hurting, the more likely it is that they’ll hurt others.

  “Is that all?” I said, stepping closer. “A little thing like that?”

  He hissed, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” but by now the tears were a torrent.

  “You did something naughty with another boy,” I said. “You were twelve. He was twelve. Baseball camp.”

  I’m pretty sure Ott was trying to say How did you know that, but the words weren’t coming out as words at all. More like wails.

  “And you’ve been miserable about that ever since.”

  He wiped one eye with a clumsy, shaking hand. And nodded the tiniest of nods.

  “Do you know how many straight kids mess around? It’s just curiosity. I’m not going to tell anyone,” I said.

  He flinched. Made eye contact. Looked confused, mistrustful.

  “You’re fine, Ott.”

  The world around us sped up. Sound bled back in, slowly. The statues of our fellow partygoers came back to life.

  “You fucking asshole,” Tariq said to Ott, his fist still drawn back.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Really. We’re cool.”

  Ott stared at me, mouth open, terrified, confused, but not crying anymore.

  “Right, Ott? We’re cool?”

  Ott nodded.

  “I’ll get you a change of clothes,” Bastien said, as baffled as Tariq was.

  RULE #40