“You’re not hungry?” Tariq said, and his eyes were shrewd and narrow.
I panicked. “Sorry,” I said, chop-sticking a loop of noodles into my mouth.
They tasted so good it hurt. I chewed twice, swallowed, speared another chunk of food.
My body laughed at me. You thought you could deny me indefinitely? I will always be here. You are weak. You can’t fight me forever.
Damn you, I thought, drowning in the taste of delicious pork fat. My body began to shut down, slow the rush of adrenaline, draw back its overextended senses. Before I knew it, I was done. My plate was empty. The battle was lost.
I sat back in a haze of despair, watching the scene I was no longer a part of. The happy conversation. The people eating carelessly, thoughtlessly, enjoying food for what it was, living in balance with their bodies, a balance I lacked. The koi in the tank, blowing mocking kisses at me.
And Tariq. So trim and full of energy. And his father. Fat and sluggish and exhausted. Like Tariq would be one day. Like I would be. My mom, small and happy on our fridge, large and sad at the kitchen table.
Why bother? Why keep breathing when every breath only brings us closer to pain, suffering, old age, sickness, loneliness, death?
“I’ll be right back,” I said. “I need to call my mom. I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be silly,” Mrs. Murat said. “Go! Tell your mother you’re in good hands.”
Hardly anyone was out in the parking lot. The highway beyond was bare. Everyone was at home, celebrating, enjoying the warmth and safety of their beautiful balanced lives. The night was well below freezing, and I had left my jacket inside. I wasn’t thinking straight, could barely think at all. Couldn’t argue with myself, couldn’t explain how This Was a Line I Swore I Would Never Cross, when I staggered out to the middle of the lot and squatted beside a lamppost and spun my head around six times clockwise and then six times counter-clockwise and then stuck my finger down my throat, just like I’d done all those times in junior high gym class so I could get a pass to the nurse’s office and escape my bullies for one glorious hour.
It all came up instantly, effortlessly. My shrunken stomach had already been uncomfortable with the heavy load I’d dumped on it. Within seconds my belly was empty and a hot puddle-pile of slimy partially digested pork lo mein lay steaming in the freezing air. I sat there, looking down at it, smelling bile and stomach acid, seeing bean sprouts and chewed water chestnut chunks, feeling the tears come flowing down my face.
So it’s true.
You are sick.
You are broken.
Now you know.
I heard the door open, saw Tariq scan the lot and come in my direction, wanted to get up and meet him halfway and hide the evidence of my crime, but I couldn’t move.
“Oh, my God,” he said, and dropped to his knees beside me. “Matt. Is everything—are you crying?” He leaned forward, embraced me—then saw the puddle of puke and drew back. “Is that—did you . . .”
I nodded.
“Are you sick?”
I nodded.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
I shook my head.
“Tell me what hurts.”
“I . . .”
I felt it coming. I could have stopped it. I didn’t. In that moment, I knew what Tariq felt about coming out—the wanting more than anything to utter one secret forbidden sentence but being more terrified of that sentence than any other, and I knew, in my pain, in my sickness, in my wishing I could snap my fingers and cease to be alive, that I had to say my sentence to keep myself from dying.
“I . . .”
Tariq’s eyes were black topaz galaxies, swirling supernovas of love and kindness, boring into me, seeing me, all of me.
“I haven’t eaten that much food in weeks,” I said.
“Why n—” He stopped. “Oh.”
I nodded.
“Do you . . . Are you . . . anorexic?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I . . . I’m something.” I took a breath, a deep deep breath, the deepest breath I’d ever taken. “I— I have an eating disorder.”
“Oh, baby,” he said, and kissed my forehead. He hugged me again, and I realized I had never heard that tenderness in his voice before. I began to sob, and I hugged him back, and we sat on the bitter-cold ground of a mostly empty parking lot, while the whole world celebrated a holiday without us.
“Your parents,” I whispered into his ear when the sobbing calmed somewhat. “They could come out.”
“Fuck them,” he said. “I don’t care about that right now.”
Eventually the position got uncomfortable for him, and he sat back so his knees were touching mine.
“Come inside,” he said. “You’re shivering.”
I nodded. I was.
RULE #42
The body’s truth is beyond beauty, beyond desire. It is magnificent in ways that have nothing to do with appearances or any of the other impermanent, shifting things society values. The body’s truth is the truth of the soul shining inside of it.
DAY: 33, CONTINUED . . .
“And here he is!” Mom said, when the door shut behind me, and I knew that tone of voice, and I rushed in without stopping to take off my boots, tracking in dirt, stomping like Frankenstein, because the happiness in her words meant Mom was talking to Maya—
Which she was. But when I burst into the kitchen, arms already raised for a hug, tears already halfway out of my eyes, I found that Maya wasn’t there. Only her voice, on the phone, which was better than nothing, but not as good as my sister, my whole entire fearless amazing sister, which is what I wanted, what I needed.
“Hey!” I said, taking the receiver. “Lucky timing!”
“I’ve been calling every ten minutes waiting for you to get home, so, no, it wasn’t luck, it was stubborn persistence.”
“That’s good, too,” I said. “Happy Christmas, nonbeliever.”
“To you, too.” Her voice was rough and ragged, like she’d had a cold or been smoking too many cigarettes or screaming or singing too loud. Or all of the above. And there they were again, the waves in the background. She was near the beach. In real life. “Did you and your boyfriend have a nice date?”
“Shhh,” I said, looking over at Mom, who was washing dishes with a deep beautiful smile on her face.
“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “Mom can’t hear me. So? Did you? Have a nice date.”
“Yeah. How did you . . .”
“Mom said you were with your ‘friend’ Tariq.” She let out a ragged breath. “Listen, brother. I gotta confess, I was kind of a jerk. Tariq told me he liked you. I never passed the word to you, ’cause I was pretty crushed out on him myself. It was stupid. You should forgive me.” I had missed this so much: my sister, the bossy older sibling, the one who always made up the rules, still deciding where the conversation went, when I had so many questions I needed to ask her.
My head hurt with questions. Why did you do this to us? Are you with Dad? What’s he like? Can you two come and take me away? When are you coming back? What’s up with that status update that said your band broke up? How could you abandon me? Instead I said, “How are things going?”
She sighed. “These people are just not serious about music,” she said. My supercharged hearing heard waves crashing and wind blustering through the wires. “But I’ve been able to get a lot of work done. I’m writing some really good songs, I think. Getting away from everything has been so, so good for me.”
“Well, maybe not so good for your schoolwork and chances of getting into a good college and entire future. According to Mom . . .”
“She makes some good points.”
“We need to see you,” I said, looking over at Mom, too scared to mention Dad as long as she stood there. “I need your number. I need to call you again.”
“No,” she said, and she said it sadly, but she said it in that Maya way that meant there’d be no arguing about it. The Matt of a month or two ag
o would have dropped it right there. But I wasn’t that Matt anymore.
“Why not?”
“We definitely need to talk. I know that. I want to. But I can’t.”
Short pause. “Why not?”
I heard her through the phone. The conflicted whispers of her thoughts. Her own pain, almost audible, every bit as real as mine. In the end, she chose silence.
“Fine,” I said finally. “But call me. Soon. On my cell.”
“Maybe.”
“I miss you,” I said.
I pictured her, conjured her up as she had been before she left. Brown hair cut pixie short, probably getting shaggy by now, eyebrows arched somewhere between skepticism and amusement. Maya was not beautiful, but not beautiful in the way the Mona Lisa or Virginia Woolf were not beautiful—my sister was beyond beauty, beyond convention. Her ears were multiply pierced. Even seated, she looked tall and strong. She wore a studded jean jacket and corduroys. She wore them with ease and grace, and she was not afraid of anything.
“I miss you, too,” she said.
My stomach whimpered. I shut my eyes against the ocean-pull of words I wanted to say. I’m dying. I need help. I can’t stop. I want to stop. But I can’t. Tears sprang to my eyes, and I prayed she could hear them in my voice, that I could project through the phone lines the depth of my fear and my hurt. “I need you. Okay? Please? Come home?”
She took a long time before she said, “Soon, Matt.”
Later, when I got out of bed to go to the bathroom, I heard my mom sobbing in her room. I wondered if Maya was crying, too, in that house by the sea near Providence, or wherever she was, and whether it meant anything that we were all three crying together, apart.
RULE #43
You are never alone, no matter how alone you think you are.
DAY: ∞; A BRIEF CIGARETTE BREAK, OUTSIDE THE TIME/SPACE CONTINUUM
I realize I don’t know who you are anymore, Reader.
In the beginning, you were me. I started out writing this Rulebook for myself, messages sent into the ether in the hopes that they’d reach a younger dumber version of myself, someone so desperate for guidance that he’d turn to anyone, even someone as messed-up as a marginally less-messed-up version of himself.
Somewhere along the line, I realized I was writing for boys in general, especially the lost lonely isolated ones, the boys with no one in their lives to teach them The Rules, or the boys who had to settle for less-than-perfect guidance from exploitative or predatory men who know hunger when they see it and know how to use your hunger against you.
Then, before I knew it, in my twisted starving mind, the audience I imagined was everyone, all the millions who don’t fit into neat boxes, everybody who got bent or broken on the way to becoming a grown-up, who Ideates Suicidally, who is at war with their own body.
But then I realized I am as flawed as any guide can be. And now I know that anyone looking to me for rules to live by is sort of screwed.
I don’t think this is a rulebook at all. It might be what the therapeutic professions call A Cry for Help. It might be a road map to how to get to where you know you need help.
I started out thinking I had so much to offer. But I’ve got nothing to share but the hope that my pain can be helpful to someone.
RULE #44
Your mommy really can make everything better.
DAY: 34
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 200
“Did she tell you anything?” I asked my mom the next morning. “When you talked, before I came home? About . . . anything? Why she left, when she’s coming back?”
“No, honey,” Mom said. And smiled at how strong my coffee was. “Do you think she’ll come home soon?” I asked, staring at Maya’s shut door, aware of what a ridiculous question I was asking, because of course Mom had no idea, of course I was being a little boy looking to his mommy to make him feel better about something out of everyone’s control.
“Of course, honey,” Mom said, and believing her felt good. Standing in the hallway felt good.
Back in my room, I turned off the lights and stuck my head out the window, smelling the winter air, feeling the wind on me, but the cold winter air still told me little.
He was out there, somewhere. My father. I would know his smell when I found it.
I meditated, dug deep down into my freshly emptied stomach. And found: nothing.
Every time I shut my eyes, I saw Tariq. His eyes on me. Not when he learned the truth, there in the Spring Garden parking lot, because in that moment he had exuded only care and concern, but later, when he dropped me off at home. When he’d had some time to think about things. When I got out of the family wagon and they all gave me a rousing good-night, and our eyes met, and he looked away just a little too fast, and I saw the rising fear in his eyes, the realization of just how messed-up I was.
If he broke up with me, I’d die. I knew it. Ever since the moment I learned the truth about who he was and how he felt about me, he’d been the thing propping me up. The thing that took the place of my Mission of Bloody Vengeance. The thing I loved instead of myself.
I took On the Road out of my backpack. It still smelled like his house, faintly like him. Pine and cigarettes and his mom’s vanilla candles. Underneath that, I smelled the previous borrower—patchouli and chocolate—and beneath that another—beer, summer—a whole shifting totem pole of people who had borrowed that book.
I read it in one sitting, crouched beneath my freezing window, crying in spots at the wild madcap journey these two men were on, and how much beauty they found, and how much sadness, getting up often to make coffee or get cigarettes, and it was dark when I neared the end, and I felt like I owned the night, and I was my own person, and I was still reading when I heard my mom stir as she got ready for the night shift, but before that, somewhere on Sal and Dean’s fourth or fifth crisscross of the country, I made a decision.
RULE #45
Some sicknesses are so severe they can trump even the most powerful positive force on the planet.
DAY: 35
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 50
Reader, I made love to him.
December 27: no school. I held the book in my hands and waited until dawn had passed and a reasonable hour arrived, and then texted him, bantered back and forth a bit, told him to come get me. I felt it inside me like a bubble of pure light, this secret: I knew what would happen today, but he did not.
“Hey!” he said when he met me down the block, when I was up in his truck, when he smiled and we kissed. He had no idea what was about to happen. I did. I had never felt a power like that, not even when I could make it snow or conjure fire out of the air or smell a bully’s deepest shame and know exactly how to use it to destroy him.
Was there a new distance between us? Was his happiness at seeing me any less than what it had been before he knew about my sickness? I couldn’t tell.
“I stayed up all night,” I said. “I read On the Road in one sitting.”
“And?”
“I loved it,” I said.
“Me too!” he said.
“I have to read it again.”
“Yeah you do. Where do you want to go today?”
“To the pines,” I said. “The deep pine clearing.”
“You sure?” he asked, blowing on his hands because his truck was sluggish and the heater slow to come around. “Pretty cold out there.”
“We’ll sit in the truck,” I said. “Our portable home.”
“Sounds good,” he said and kissed me again and looked at me from the driver’s seat, across the wide gulf that separated us, and his eyes scanned me in the light of day looking for signs of my sickness.
“They weren’t gay,” I said. “Were they? The two guys in On the Road?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Best friends, but pretty straight. They sleep with an awful lot of women. And there’s gay people in the book, friends of theirs, and they certainly don’t let society’s expectations limit them, so it’s not like t
hey would be too afraid or repressed to act on those impulses if they felt them.”
“True,” I said.
“That’s our book,” he said. “The gay-guy version of On the Road is our story to write. Our wild and crazy adventures when we leave this town and drive to every awesome hidden secret place on this super huge planet.”
“That book sounds amazing.”
The truck rattled on through empty after-Christmas streets, stopping for Dunkin’ Donuts coffee.
“It felt so . . . forbidden, somehow,” I said. “Staying up all night. When I was a little kid my mom used to make me take naps, and I hated it, and not sleeping felt like such a rebellious act.”
“Yeah,” Tariq said—but his mind was elsewhere, on me, on last night, on what he learned about me. “What are you going to do?” he asked. “About . . . that thing?”
For a second I couldn’t speak, I was so grateful to him for not saying it. To hear him use the words eating disorder would make it too real, too frightening. “I don’t know.”
“You have to get help.”
“I know.”
“You’ll die if you don’t.”
“I know.”
He turned to me. “So what are you going to do?”
“Eyes on the road,” I said, but he did not take them off me. “Eyes on the road!”
“Answer my question.”
A car horn blared as his truck inched into the opposite lane.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay! The ER doctor gave me some numbers for therapists. I’m going to call them.”
His eyes still on me. The truck still drifting.
“I don’t have the numbers with me!”
More car horns. Some brakes squeaking.
“Okay!” I said. “As soon as I get home! I’ll do it.”
The Art of Starving Page 19
