The Art of Starving

by Sam J. Miller

  Pigs are monstrous-looking things. And I marched my own army of monsters into town.

  As we moved, I wrapped myself in a thick wide cloud of pheromone smell, a fog that said, Do not look here, there is nothing to see, there is no one, which was as close as I could come to an invisibility cloak.

  They grew boisterous as we marched. They had never experienced freedom before. They had never felt night air on their skin. They made loud noises. They rooted in garbage. They fought. They did not mind the cold. Whether through pheromones or mere force of will, I controlled them as effortlessly as my own arms. And as we went, my anger seeped into them.

  I felt the layout of the town ahead of me. Smelled where everyone who had ever done me wrong was sleeping. I broke two hundred pigs off from the pack, sent them to Ott’s house. I sent two hundred more to the high school.

  Destroy, I told them. Break windows, tusk down doors, get inside, roar, squeal, swarm, rip down curtains, shred paintings, crush toys. Harm no people, but ruin everything they own. Make them wish they were dead. Eat whatever you can eat. Shit on everything.

  Lights went on as we walked. Screams sounded. I felt bad, knowing how many good and innocent people would be terrified in their beds by my squealing army. And dimly, distantly, I wondered if so much collateral damage was necessary, when who I really wanted to hurt was my father.

  But no. There were lots of people I really wanted to hurt. And I would get to all of them.

  McDonald’s. Wal-Mart. The correctional facility. Everywhere people made a living exploiting other people, working them like animals, I broke off a smaller group of pigs to decimate and disrupt. And I could see them, hear their breath and watch the world through their eyes. Feel their joy at shattering glass, snarfing down gaping mouthfuls of frozen french fries, shredding stuffed animals, tipping pharmacy shelves into a domino effect of chain reaction chaos. I tasted the food they ate. But it did not diminish my hunger.

  I took my pigs through the rich neighborhood. I ravaged every expensive beautiful thing I would never have. And each new spray of broken glass thrilled me, rocked me with waves of pleasure. Every act of violence and destruction thrummed in my body like a chord on the guitar of me. To punish the guilty, to destroy the proud—it felt good, righteous, intoxicating, like when you beat a hard level in a video game.

  But when each act was over, I was hungry again. Hollow again. Violence temporarily filled the void, but it faded fast, and the void remained. Cold emptiness and the sound of sirens.

  I took off my shoes, felt the frozen earth beneath me. Felt every single fire. Breathed out, fed them oxygen, saw them swell. I fanned the flames with every step I took. A hundred spiraling swirls of flame blossomed behind me as we moved.

  A gun shot. Two gun shots, followed by pigs shrieking. Pain flared through my shoulders, where one of my pigs had been shot. The other pigs felt it, too, the agony threaded through all of us as we shared one porcine mind. They squealed as one, and then they got angrier.

  By the time I got to where I was going, I had sent so many off on separate missions of violent mayhem that I only had three hundred pigs left, but that was more than enough to utterly destroy Bastien’s house. At a clap of my hands they charged the doors. Two climbed onto the backs of others, to better bash in windows. Smash, I thought, ravage. Crush, dismantle, gut, mutilate—the thesaurus pulsed in my veins, the sheer pleasure of words combining with the joy of violence.

  I smelled them inside. Both of them.

  “Come out!” I called to Bastien, but mostly his father, this man who could so heartlessly make decisions that hurt so many people, and never be punished for it, and would in fact most likely be rewarded, promoted, considered a hero for putting more money into the pockets of corporate shareholders.

  Silence. My pigs paused, listening.

  “We’re not going to hurt you,” I said gleefully, laughing, quoting a movie monster. “We’re just going to bash your brains out!”

  Pigs poured through the broken-down door. They charged up the twin staircases, barreled into the kitchen and dining room. Broke beautiful expensive things in an orgy of glee.

  Remember: throughout this process, I was barely half-present. Watching myself move, somewhere between joy and terror. Controlling the pigs, telling them where to go and what to do . . . it never occurred to me to wonder, Can I do this crazy thing? I stretched out my arms, and it was done.

  So when I held out both hands, palms up, and then reached out—feeling my reach go beyond my physical body, felt it go beyond the limitations of time and space. I felt like I could have grabbed anything, a fistful of the sun, a rock from Jupiter, my father. I would get to him next, when I finished this warm-up. He was the main event. For right now, what I wanted was much closer.

  “Come,” I whispered.

  Bastien’s father appeared at the top of the stairs. I had never seen him before. He was a short man and pudgy. Wearing pajamas that were too big for him. Rubbing his eyes, barely able to see without the glasses he’d left on his bedside table when the screams of hell and breaking glass had pulled him out of sleep.

  “Oh, God.”

  Bastien appeared behind him. Half-asleep but also half-smiling. Probably confident he was having a dream. He said, “What’s going on, Matt? What the hell—what’s going on?”

  “Be still,” I said, and the pigs were still. Silent. Staring at Bastien and his father like the wise freaky semihuman creatures that they were.

  And now, here, fear began to leak into Bastien’s face. The pigs had been a simple freak occurrence at first. What did he care what they did to a house they were about to move out of anyway? But now he knew that something else was going on. Something he had no explanation for. He thought maybe I really was something to be feared.

  “What the hell are you?” he asked, and took another step forward, confidently, menacingly.

  I was not, in fact, a movie monster. Movie monsters know what to say. Villains always have some terrifying retort up their sleeves—Your worst nightmare; The last thing you’ll ever see; You can call me Death, etc. Me, I just made the hogs roar. Wail. Shriek. Bellow.

  Wondered if my father could hear them, wherever he was. If the sirens and bells would wake him up and he would know that they tolled for him, that the Angel of Death was making his way through the night to punish him.

  “Bastien?” his father said, practically blind as a bat and looking for his son to explain all this away.

  A twitch of my finger, and the hog closest to him made a sudden lunge, swung his head, grazed Bastien’s father’s calf with one tusk. He yelp-screamed, stepped back, but did not stumble. A fall would have been fatal. They would have torn him to shreds in an instant.

  Bastien took a step forward. The last of his bravery fled from his face.

  I saw how it would happen. Two hogs would go in for each leg. They would bring him down swiftly, pulling away great chunks of skin, and tugging in different directions once he was on the ground. His father would go down two and a half seconds later. His screams would bring the rest of the pack in, a dozen squealing roaring grunting animals cleaving and chomping bone and skin and muscle and inner organs.

  And what would that change? What would killing them accomplish that I hadn’t already done? Better to let them live with this, with a story to tell, with psychological scars. Better to let them be haunted.

  I turned and left. My pigs followed.

  I shivered at how close I had come to murdering them.

  Murder is special. The savage monstrous part of my brain that had taken control told me so. To kill someone is to enter into a relationship with them, one that will last as long as you live.

  You should save it for someone really important to you.

  By now our sleepy small-town night was as loud as noontime in Manhattan. I followed the smell of my father, faint but getting stronger, as I moved west. To the river. Through downtown, along Columbia Street, the poor part of town, where my pigs remained in tight formati
on and did not do the slightest bit of damage to people or property. Turning north on Second Street, down the hill, past the Shacks, across the train tracks, to the river.

  He was there. Across the river. Could pigs swim? The only other way to cross would be to take a ten-mile detour, following the river south to the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, walking them to the other side, and then walking north again through Catskill and then Athens and who knew how many other towns standing between me and him.

  But no, there were other options. Of course there were. I had all the power in the universe.

  I knelt down. My knees scraped frozen mud, but the river itself moved too fast to freeze over. I stuck both hands into the water. A weaker boy would have winced at the sharp stabbing coldness of the water, but I was stronger than it was. I saw its secrets, saw how badly it wanted to be ice.

  I stood. I raised both arms.

  With a stretching sound, ice formed on the river in front of me. A small jagged triangle at first, but growing. Widening. Extending.

  I stepped out onto it. Pushed my arms forward and watched the ice expand. Pigs stepped out. The lights of Athens sparkled like frozen fireflies on the black water ahead. Black stars filled the air. My mind balked at the magnitude of what I was asking it to do.

  You can do this, I whispered, even as I staggered. I would level every city between me and him. I would reduce the whole Hudson Valley to shit-stinking rubble.

  Again, I staggered. This time I dropped to one knee. The ice cracked and thinned beneath me. A piece broke off, and a pig fell, screaming, into the river.

  Cracks formed around my hands, where they pressed against the thinning ice. Giant squids and white whales and plesiosaurs swam in the black water beneath. My mind in overdrive, summoning up new horrors, new monsters, snatching out of the ether anything that might be of some assistance in burning down the world.

  Screaming for help.

  I pulled myself back up. Stood there. Tried to take a step. Couldn’t.

  “Please,” I whispered, possibly not out loud. And then: I felt the soft weight of a hand on my shoulder.

  All the anger leaked out of me.

  Because I knew whose hand it was.

  I turned around, unbelieving, and whispered, “Maya?”

  “I heard you calling me,” she said.

  “You . . . how did you . . . ?”

  “I can do things, too,” she said and wrapped both arms tight around me. “What, do you think you’re the only one?”

  RULE #49

  The worst thing that can happen to your body is not that it gets fat, or it gets sick, or even that it gets badly damaged. The worst thing that can happen to your body is when someone takes away your right to control it.

  DAYS: -1–-27

  AVERAGE DAILY CALORIES, APPROX.: 1800

  Panic woke me up. Pain jolted me back to consciousness. I opened my eyes and barely registered that I was back in the hospital. Not that where I was mattered. What mattered was the tube down my throat, the blinding pain of it. I wanted to claw at it, rip it away, but I was so weak I could barely budge my arms. I coughed and heaved and thrashed. I grabbed hold of the tube and tugged, triggering raw pain all the way down to my stomach, hearing the gross wet gristly sounds it made against the walls of my esophagus.

  Machines made noise. People came. Held me down. A nurse explained that I had passed out from malnutrition, that I was in critical condition. I tried to roar out my rage but the tube muffled the sound into an agonized gargle. I wanted to spew fire and break bones and paralyze people, but none of my powers worked. Someone stabbed me with a needle and all of it went away.

  “Do you know where you are?”

  “Columbia Greene Memorial Hospital,” I said to the lady doctor in glasses I had seen on my previous trip to the ER. I was groggy, sedated, stuffed full of tube food.

  “No, Matt, you were transferred three days ago to the Eden Park Rehab Center. Out on Route Sixty-six. Where the nursing home used to be?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  She talked to me for a while. Dimly, through the drugs, I remembered that we’d had this conversation before. I was still pretty out of it, but I was coming around. Enough to hold on to the basics. Mom had authorized them to do whatever it took to make me healthy. They had a whole eating-disorder clinic there. They wanted me to get better. They were going to give me the tools to love and respect myself. How did I feel about all of that?

  I stared at her. I opened my mouth to speak. But how could words help? How could anyone else understand? And why did they need to? This was my fight. I shut my mouth and turned my head away.

  In choosing silence, I finally knew why Maya had made the same choice. Her silence wasn’t always anger and pain—it was also healing.

  Understand: time passed. I talked to doctors. Went to groups. Saw films. Met beautiful interesting sick people. Visited with Mom and Maya, when they came, which was tons. I accepted that I was sick, and I learned why I was sick, and I learned what I needed to do to get better. I passed room inspections. I got gold stars.

  None of that matters.

  Oatmeal.

  Unflavored, unsweetened oatmeal.

  Did you even know that this was a thing? It is. And it is disgusting. I ate a lot of it. Tasteless, boring nutrition. A crucial stage in nursing someone back from Eating Disorder Hell to the Land of the Living. Presumably to help bulimics get used to the act of eating again, something so bland they’d never binge on it and then feel terrible afterward. That hadn’t really been my main problem, but I had decided not to fight it anymore. I would go with what they wanted. I would let them help me.

  The walls of Eden Park were bright blue. The linens were light green. The view out my window was about as interesting as unsweetened oatmeal. A bare field of turnips, empty because it was the wrong time of year, full of ice and snow and mud. And then a hill, in the distance. A tiny, unremarkable hill.

  The interesting stuff was in the other direction. Where I couldn’t see. The highway full of government inspection trucks and tractors and bulldozers and journalists. The town beyond, where construction and demolition and renovation and assessment were ongoing. Hudson was on the national news every night for a while, with my neighbors giving breathless accounts of the events of that night to reporters from dozens of stations. The Great Hog Rampage. Exhaustive investigations were still in progress, but government inspectors said initial information indicated the company had skimped on necessary precautions as it closed up, which led to a systems failure on the pig cage locks. Towns beyond our borders were reporting raids from random rogue hogs, but nothing worse than a plundered garden or garbage can. Whatever mysterious force had marshalled all those animals into an organized bloodthirsty savage force for violent destruction had vanished. No witnesses, no security camera footage turned up any information about a boy with the supernatural ability to control an army of swine.

  Cops and random vigilante assholes moved in packs through the town on motorcycles and piled into the backs of pickup trucks. Wielding shotguns, lassoes, pitchforks, torches. Anything that could be used to hurt and kill little lost swine. Militia mobs of all sizes moved through the forests on foot. Every few hours I’d hear a gunshot. One more attempted murder of a pig, because of me.

  Bastien’s family had moved already, his father’s pre-existing plans to move to the Utica hog slaughterhouse having been sped up significantly.

  If either one of them had tried to finger me as the bloodthirsty architect of the Great Hog Rampage, their allegations fell on disbelieving ears. And I didn’t exactly feel comfortable calling them up to compare notes and find out What Really Happened.

  Dr. Kashtan came every day. She brought the Register-Star so I could follow the events as they unfolded. But Eden Park had no televisions, probably because you couldn’t watch a single channel for thirty seconds without being besieged by beautiful horrible unrealistic human bodies.

  “Your fingernails may never fully recover,” she said aft
er a week or so of oatmeal. When, I guess, she figured I was strong enough for bad news. “But the big problem is, you damaged your heart,” she said. Damaged. Heart. The words thudded against me. “Malnutrition has thinned and weakened the walls of your heart. It’s a muscle, after all. The starving human body cannibalizes all available tissue.”

  When I was twelve, my mom learned she had high cholesterol. The news terrified me in ways I couldn’t put a finger on. Now I knew why. It was because for the first time I realized that our bodies are clumsy machines full of strange parts that need expensive maintenance—and we do things to them that have consequences we can’t anticipate.

  “There will be residual effects, possibly for the rest of your life. Especially in autonomic regulation—which means that standing up, sitting down, anytime the heart needs to pump blood differently due to a shift in position, you may get light-headed, pass out, even experience cognitive changes—memory loss, compromised information processing . . . a lot of things. You may require surgery at some point.”

  “Um, okay,” I said, hiding my fear. Then I ate some more unflavored, unsweetened Jell-O.

  Yes. That, too, is a thing. And it is worse than the oatmeal. I spooned it into me, emptiness heaped onto emptiness. When it was gone, I was still the same person. In the same busted body.

  I’m telling you the shortened version. I’m leaving out my lapses and relapses, my days when I wouldn’t eat, my frequent moments where the Boy in the Mirror would find me and mock my disgusting flabby soft pale grub-body. I’m condensing months into paragraphs.

  Sometimes Mom and Maya came together, and sometimes one came alone. We talked about the devastation. We talked about the weather. We talked about Mom, and her own recovery, the therapy appointments, and the church-basement meetings. We talked about nothing. We talked.

  I didn’t know what was real anymore. What had actually happened; what part I played.

  Because what I remembered couldn’t possibly be true. There was no way Puny Matt murdered our whole town with an army of marauding swine.