by Ned Vizzini
I never liked eating the traditional American things: pork chops, steak, rack of lamb … I still don’t. Never mind vegetables. I used to like the foods that come in abstract shapes: chicken nuggets, Fruit Roll-Ups, hot dogs. I liked junk food. I could demolish a bag of Cheez Doodles; I’d have Doodle Cheez so far infused into my fingertips, I’d be tasting it on myself for a day. And so I had a good thing going with food. I thought about it the way everyone else did; when you’re hungry, you have some.
Then last fall happened, and I stopped eating.
Now I get mocked by these groceries, pizza places, ice-cream stores, delis, Chinese places, bakeries, sushi joints, McDonald’ses. They sit out in the street, pushing what I can’t enjoy. My stomach shrank or something; it doesn’t take in much, and if I force in a certain amount it rejects everything, sends me to the bathroom to vomit in the dark. It’s like a gnawing, the tug of a rope wrapped around the end of my esophagus. There’s a man down there and he wants food, but the only way he knows to ask for it is to tug on the rope, and when he does, it closes up the entrance so I can’t put anything in. If he would just relax, let the rope go, I’d be able to give him all the food he wanted. But he’s down there making me dizzy and tired, giving extra tugs as I pass restaurants that smell like fat and grease.
When I do eat, it’s one of two experiences: a Battle or a Slaughter. When I’m bad—when the Cycling is going on in my brain—it’s a Battle. Every bite hurts. My stomach wants no part of it. Everything is forced. The food wants to stay on the plate, and once it’s inside me, it wants to get back on the plate. People give me strange looks: What’s wrong, Craig, why aren’t you eating?
But then there are moments when it comes together. The Shift hasn’t happened yet, maybe it never will, but sometimes—just enough times to give me hope—my brain jars back into where it’s supposed to be. When I feel one of these (I call them the Fake Shifts) I should always eat, although I don’t; I sometimes stubbornly, foolishly try to hold the feeling and get things done while my mind can operate, and neglect to eat, and then I’m back where I started. But oh, when I slip back into being okay when I’m around food, watch out. It’s all going in. Eggs and hamburgers and fries and ice cream and marmalade and Fruity Pebbles and cookies and broccoli, even—and noodles and sauce. Screw you; I’m going to eat all of you. I’m Craig Gilner, and I will make myself strong from you. I don’t know when my body chemistry is going to line up to let me eat again, so you are all getting in me right now.
And that feels so good. I eat it all, and the man is away from his rope. He’s busy down there eating everything that falls inside, running around like a chicken with its head cut off, the head on the floor, munching food of its own. All my cells take the food in and they love it and they love my brain for it and I smile and I am full; I am full and functional and I can do anything, and once I eat—this is the amazing part—once I eat I sleep, I sleep like I should, like a hunter who just brought home a kill. . . but then I wake up and the man is back, my stomach is tight, and I don’t know what it was that got me to have a Slaughter eating experience. It’s not pot. It’s not girls. It’s not my family. I’ve started to think it must just be chemistry, in which case we’re looking for the Shift and we haven’t found it yet.
six
Night is here except for a thin gray at the edge of the sky and the trees are thick with rain and the drizzle is pissing on me as I come up to my house. No sunsets in spring. I lean in and ring the buzzer, streaked bronze from years of use—the most used buzzer in the building.
“Craig?”
“Hi, Mom.”
Bzzzzzzzzt. It growls deeply, amplified by the lobby. (Lobby. Mailroom, more like, just a compartment for mailboxes.) I throw open one door and then the other. It’s warm in the house, and it smells like cooked starch. The dogs greet me.
“Hi, Rudy. Hi, Jordan.” They’re little dogs. My sister named them; she’s nine. Rudy is a mutt; my father says he’s a cross between a chihuahua and a German shepherd, which must’ve been some wild dog sex. I hope the German shepherd was the guy. Otherwise the German shepherd girl probably wasn’t too satisfied. Rudy has a pronounced under-bite; he looks like two dogs where one is eating the other’s head from below, but when I take him for a walk, girls love him and talk to me. Then they realize that I’m young and/or messed up, and they move on.
Jordan, a Tibetan spaniel, looks like a small, brown lion. He’s small and cute but completely crazy. His breed was devised in Tibet for the purpose of guarding monasteries. When he came into our home, he immediately fixated on the house as a monastery, the bathroom as the most sacred monastic cell, and my mom as the Abbess. You can’t go near my mother without Jordan protecting her. When she’s in the bathroom in the morning, Jordan has to be in there with her, placed up on the counter by the sink as she brushes her teeth.
Jordan barks at me. Since I started losing it, he started barking at me. It’s not something any of us mention.
“Craig, how was Dr. Minerva?” Mom comes out of the kitchen. She’s still tall and skinny, looking better each year. I know that’s weird to think, but what the hell—she’s just a woman who happens to be my mom. It’s amazing how she looks more stately and confident as she gets older. I’ve seen pictures of her in college and she didn’t look like much. Dad is looking like he made a better decision every year.
“It . . . was okay.” I hug her. She’s taken such good care of me since I got bad; I owe her everything and I love her and I tell her these days, although every time I say it, it gets a little diluted. I think you run out of I love yous.
“Are you still happy with her?”
“Yeah.”
“Because if you’re not we’ll get you someone else.”
You can’t afford to get anyone else, I think, looking at the crack in the wall next to my mom. This crack in our front hallway has been there for three or four years. Dad paints over it and it just recracks. We’ve tried putting a mirror over it but it’s a strange place to put a mirror—on one side of a hallway— and my sister started calling it the Vampire Mirror to tell if people who came into the house were vampires, and it came down after a few weeks, when I came home stoned and stumbled into it. Now there’s an exposed crack again. It’s never going to get fixed.
“You don’t need to get anyone else.”
“How’s your eating? Are you hungry?”
Yes, I think. I am going to eat the food my mom made me. I’m still in control of my mind and I have medication and I am going to make this happen.
“Yes.”
“Good! To the kitchen!”
I go in, and the place is all set for me. Dad and my sister, Sarah, are sitting at the circular table, knives and forks in hand, posing for me.
“How do we look?” Dad asks, banging his silverware on the table. “Do we look hungry?”
My parents are always looking into new ways to fix me. They’ve tried acupuncture, yoga, cognitive therapy, relaxation tapes, various kinds of forced exercise (until I found my bike), self-help books, Tae Bo, and feng shui in my room. They’ve spent a lot of money on me. I’m ashamed.
“Eat! Eat! Eat!” Sarah says. “We were waiting for you.”
“Is this necessary?” I ask.
“We’re just making things more homey for you.” Mom brings a baking pan over to the table. It smells hot and juicy. Inside the pan are big orange things cut in half.
“We have squash"—she turns back to the stove—"rice, and chicken.” She brings over a pot of white rice with vegetable bits sprinkled over it and a plate of chicken patties. I go for them—a star-shaped one, a dinosaur-shaped one. Sarah grabs at the dinosaur-shaped one at the same time.
“The dinosaurs are mine!”
“Okay.” I let her. She kicks me under the table. “How’re you feeling?” she whispers.
“Not good.”
She nods. Sarah knows what this means. It means she’ll see me on the couch tonight, tossing and turning and sweating as Mom brings m
e warm milk. It means she’ll see me watching TV, but not really watching, just staring and not laughing, as I don’t do my homework. It means she’ll see me sinking and failing. She reacts well to this. She does more schoolwork and has more fun. She doesn’t want to end up like me. At least I’m giving someone an example not to follow.
“I’m sorry. They’re trying to do a big thing for you.”
“I can tell.”
“So, Craig, how was school today?” Dad asks. He forks into the squash and looks at me through his glasses. He’s short and wears glasses, but like he says, at least he has hair—thick, dark stuff that he passed on to me. He tells me I’m blessed; the genes are good on both sides, and if I think I’m depressed now, imagine if I knew I was going to lose my hair like everyone else! Ha.
“All right,” I say.
“What’d you do?”
“Sat in class and followed instructions.”
We clink at our food. I take my first bite—a carefully constructed forkful of chicken, rice, and squash—and mash it into my mouth. I will eat this, I chew it and feel that it tastes good and rear my tongue back and send it down. I hold it. All right. It’s in there.
“What did you do in . . . let’s see . . . American History?”
“That one wasn’t so good. The teacher called on me and I couldn’t talk.”
“Oh, Craig .. .” Mom is like.
I start constructing another bite.
“What do you mean you couldn’t talk?” Dad asks.
“I knew the answer, but… I just. . .”
“You trailed off,” Mom says.
I nod as I take in the next bite.
“Craig, you can’t keep doing that.”
“Honey—” Mom tells him.
“When you know the answer to something, you have to speak up for yourself; how can that not be clear?”
Dad takes in a heaping forkful of squash and chews it like a furnace.
“Don’t jump on him,” Mom says.
“I’m not, I’m being friendly.” Dad smiles. “Craig, you are blessed with a good mind. You just have to have confidence in it and talk when people call on you. Like you used to do. Back when they had to tell you to stop talking.”
“It’s different now . . .” Third bite.
“We know. Your mother and I know and we’re doing everything we can to help you. Right?” He looks across the table at Mom.
“Yes.”
“Me too,” Sarah says. “I’m doing everything I can, too.”
“That’s right.” Mom reaches across to ruffle her hair. “You’re doing great.”
“Yesterday, I could’ve smoked pot, but didn’t,” I say, looking up, curled over my plate.
“Craig!” Dad snaps.
“Let’s not talk about this,” Mom says.
“But you should know; it’s important. I’m doing experiments with my mind, to see how it got the way it is.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Not around your sister,” Mom says. “I want to tell you some news about Jordan.” Hearing his name, the dog walks into the kitchen, takes up his position by Mom. “I took him to the vet today.”
“So you didn’t go to work?”
“Right.”
“And that’s why you cooked.”
“Exactly.”
I’m jealous of her. Can you be jealous of your mom for being able to handle things? I couldn’t take a day off, take a dog to the vet, and cook dinner. That’s like three times too much stuff for me to get done in one day. How am I ever going to have my own house?
“So you want to know what happened at the vet?”
“It’s crazy,” Sarah says.
“We took him in for the seizures he’s been having,” Mom says. “And you’ll never believe what the vet said.”
“What?”
“They took some blood tests last time, and the results came back—I was sitting in the little room with Jordan; he was being very good. The vet comes in and looks at the papers and says, ‘These numbers are not compatible with life.’“
I laugh. There’s a bite on my fork in front of me. It shakes. “What do you mean?”
“That’s what I asked him. And it turns out that a dog’s blood-sugar level is supposed to be between forty and one hundred. You know what Jordan’s is?”
“What?”
“Nine.”
“Ruff!” Jordan barks.
“Then"—Mom is laughing now—"there’s some sort of other number, some enzyme ratio level, that’s supposed to be between ten and thirty, and Jordan’s is one eighty!”
“Good dog,” Dad says.
“The vet didn’t know what to make of it. He told me to keep giving him the supplements and the vitamins, but that basically he’s a medical miracle.”
I look over at Jordan, the Tibetan spaniel. Pushed-in shaggy face, black nose, big dark eyes like mine. Panting and drooling. Resting on his furry front legs.
“He shouldn’t be alive, but he is,” Mom says.
I look at Jordan more. Why are you bothering? You’ve got an excuse. You’ve got bad blood. You must like living; I guess I would if I were you. Going from meal to meal and guarding Mom. It’s a life. It doesn’t involve tests or homework. You don’t have to buy things.
“Craig?”
You shouldn’t be able to be alive and you are. You want to trade?
“I… I guess it’s cool.”
“It’s very cool,” Mom says. “It’s by God’s grace that this dog lives.”
Oh, right, God. Forgot about him. He’s definitely, according to Mom, going to have a role in me getting better. But I find God to be an ineffectual shrink. He adopts the “do nothing” method of therapy. You tell him your problems and he, ah, does nothing.
“I’m done,” Sarah says. She picks up her plate and trots out of the room, calling to Jordan. He follows.
“I can’t eat any more either,” I say. I’ve managed five bites. My stomach is churning and closing fast. It’s all such inoffensive food; I shouldn’t have any problems with it. I should be able to eat three plates of it. I’m a growing boy; I shouldn’t have trouble sleeping; I should be playing sports! I should be making out with girls. I should be finding what I love about this world. I should be frickin’eating and sleeping and drinking and studying and watching TV and being normal.
“Try a little more, Craig,” Mom says. “No pressure, but you should eat.”
That’s right. I’m going to eat. I slice off the top of the squash, in streets and avenues, a big chunk, and put it on my fork and get it in my mouth. I’m going to eat you. I chew it, soft and yielding, easily molded into a shape that fits down my throat. It tastes sweet. Now hold it. It’s in my stomach. I’m sweating. The sweating gets worse around my parents. My stomach has it. My stomach is full of six bites of this meal. I can take six bites. I won’t lose it. I won’t lose this meal that my mom has made. If the dog can live, I can eat. I hold it. I make a fist. I tense my muscles.
“Are you okay?”
“One second,” I say.
I lose.
My stomach hitches as I leave the table.
What were you trying to do, soldier?
I was trying to eat, sir!
And what happened?
I got caught thinking about some crap, sir!
What kind of crap?
How I want to live less than my parents’dog.
Are you still concentrated on the enemy, soldier?
I don’t think so.
Do you even know who the enemy is?
I think… it’s me.
That’s right.
I have to concentrate on myself.
Yes. But not right now, because now you’re going to the bathroom to throw up! It’s tough to fight when you’re throwing up!
I stumble into the bathroom, turn off the light, close the door. The horrible thing is that I like this part, because when it’s over I know I’ll be warm; I’ll have the warmth in me of a body having just
been through a trauma. I bear down on the toilet in the dark—I know just where to go—and my stomach hitches again and slams up at me, and I open up and groan. It comes out, and I hear my mother outside, sniffling, and my dad muttering, probably holding her. I grip the handle and flush a few times, alternating filling the toilet and flushing it. When I’m done I’ll go to sleep, and I won’t do any homework; I’m not up to it tonight.
And I think as I’m down there:
The Shift is coming. The Shift has to be coming. Because if you keep on living like this you’ll die.
seven
So why am I depressed? That’s the million-dollar question, baby, the Tootsie Roll question; not even the owl knows the answer to that one. I don’t know either. All I know is the chronology.
Two years ago I got into one of the best high schools in Manhattan: Executive Pre-Professional High School. It’s a new school set up to create the leaders of tomorrow; corporate internships are mandatory; the higher-ups of Merrill Lynch come and speak to classes and distribute travel mugs and stuff. This billionaire philanthropist named Bernard Lutz set it up in conjunction with the public school system, like a school within a school—all you have to do to get in is pass a test. Then your whole high school is paid for and you have access to 800 of the smartest, most interesting students in the world— not to mention the teachers and visiting dignitaries. You can come out of Executive Pre-Professional High School and go right to Wall Street, although that’s not what you should do; what you should do is come out and go to Harvard and then law school. That’s how you end up being, like, President.
I’ll admit it: I kind of want to be President.
So this test—they named it the Bernard Lutz Philanthropic Exam, in honor of his philanthrop-icness—became fairly important in my life. It became more important than, uh, food, for instance. I bought the book for it—Bernard Lutz puts out his own line of test-prep books for his own test—and started studying three hours a day.