The One We Feed

by Kristina Meister

  Depending on what I wore, we did better or worse when I was alone. If I looked too cheap, I was mistaken for a hooker; too covered, and I looked as if I would do just fine against the elements. It was a balancing act, but I had found that loose men’s jeans, a thin t-shirt, and an ancient flannel button up were the perfect props. One hop in a dumpster, and I was the homeless girl they wanted to help.

  “Spare anything,” I said plaintively to an older woman with a few too many shopping bags. She ignored me.

  Wrong target, I thought. As a rule, I’d found it helpful not to address anyone talking on a phone, carrying a heavy load, in a hurry, or with a group of friends. If someone saw you as an annoyance, they didn’t bother to feel sympathy.

  It was the middle of Christmas shopping. There should have been more good cheer in the air, but it was several hours before I had enough spare change to get another flask and a hot dog, Cammy’s favorite food, smothered in sauerkraut and mustard.

  The man at the stand saw me coming and greeted me with a huge smile. “Miss you when you’re not around, Lily Bird.”

  He was a nice enough man, older, with no spouse and grabby hands. I tolerated it. Sometimes he gave me a few dogs that had been out a little long.

  “Yeah, Tommy Cat, like a bad headache.”

  He handed me the dog and a paper sack with a couple more. I leaned forward and kissed his cheek.

  “What’re the feminazis gonna say about you repaying kindness with favors?”

  I shrugged. “Who the fuck cares what they think? Can’t eat integrity. Besides, you’re a cutie.” I walked away and blew a kiss over my shoulder while he grinned.

  There was a line at the store, and they were out of Popov. I was short ten cents on a different brand, but luckily the man behind the counter cut me a break. By the time I got back to the bus stop, the sun had gone down. We hadn’t been in line for the shelter; it was the park again, or the poorly laid tile of one of the store fronts.

  Cammy was asleep when I came up and waved the hot dog under her nose. “Come on, my gal! Dog and sauce, at the ready.”

  She didn’t stir. I set the food aside and reached out timidly, my soul feeling as if it had frosted over. Her face was boiling hot.

  “Cammy?” I shook her slightly. Nothing happened. “Camille?”

  She gurgled but remained unconscious, barely propped against the bench.

  I jumped back and pressed my hands to either side of my forehead. Before long, I was crying. Pacing back and forth made it easier, but it did not supply me with a strategy. If I called the hospital, she would be furious. If I didn’t she would surely die. I tried to wake her several more times, but she was past that point. I tried not to think it, but my mind kept insisting she was past any point.

  Footsteps approached. I turned. A man had come to catch the bus, but he didn’t look like any man I’d ever seen waiting for public transit. He had a severe face with a pointy nose, cold eyes, and a crown of wavy auburn hair. He wore a fantastically expensive suit, designer shoes, and a very, very nice watch.

  Quickly, I realized he wasn’t walking toward the bench. He was coming toward me from a nice car parked down a side street, strolling as if the misery on my face was unimportant. I made a decision then, that if he wanted to help me, I’d pay anything.

  “Are you all right, my dear?” His voice was softer than I had expected, with a kind of refinement to it and superb elocution.

  I used my sleeve to mop my face of tears and snot. “My….” I sniffled. “My friend is sick. She has diabetes. I can’t wake her up.”

  He stepped forward and examined Camille’s ashen face, and, while I was glad for his time, I could have done without the slightly upturned nose.

  “Oh, dear,” he whispered.

  “She won’t go to the hospital. She hates them.”

  He shook his head sadly. “Terrible. I saw a clinic around the corner.”

  “It’s closed.”

  “Ah.” He leaned over her again and seemed to be smelling her. “Very tragic,” he said, but something about his tone was dispassionate, as if every evening he walked around keeping a tally of the homeless dead.

  “I….” I rushed to the purse and dug out the ring, peeling it open like a piece of fruit. He was rich. Maybe he had a personal doctor who had a wife that liked jewelry. “This is all we have. Do you know anyone who’ll look after her?”

  I held it out. It was a stunning piece, a thin platinum band with a light sprinkling of tiny diamonds twisted around a large emerald. He reached out and slowly plucked it from my fingers. The eyes slanted shrewdly and looked for occlusions, then he tucked it away in his pocket.

  “I think I might know exactly the right person to help you.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. Cammy would scold me for being so trusting, but I didn’t care. Anything was better than dying alone on a bus bench.

  Someone got out of the car and came toward us. I shielded my eyes against the headlights. It was a woman’s silhouette, and, for some reason, it looked familiar.

  “What have you found, Devlin?” she asked with a lovely lilt in her voice, a sound that could have charmed a grizzly bear.

  She stepped out of the light and smiled at me. Golden curls, wide hazel eyes, pink lips, and dimpled chin; she was more real than she had ever been.

  “Eva?” I sobbed. I reached for her, my head suddenly dizzy. Her hand caught my arm and cradled me as I fell.

  “I’ll take her,” the man said. “What about this one?”

  As I faded out, Eva clucked her tongue. “She’s a big girl, isn’t she? Plump.”

  Chapter 26

  Awake

  The rumbling of the engine and the thumping of the tires over rough terrain brought me to. I was sprawled upon a cold metal floor. It was dark. Voices were in conversation around me. I sat up and looked around. There was only a little light bouncing in from poorly sealed cracks, but I could tell I was in the back of a moving van and that there were a few others with me. I recognized one of them from the shelter. I didn’t know him well, but he smiled at me.

  “What’s going on, Eddy?”

  He was smiling too big to talk. Everyone was smiling. It was strange, like we were all returning from a great big party and had all taken advantage of the same designated driver.

  I scanned the space and found Cammy slumped against the wheel well as if she’d been tossed in haphazardly. The truck was jerking so roughly that I couldn’t stand, but I could crawl to her. She was still out, her face so hot that it had turned the metal warm. I tugged on her scarves and coat, trying to get them off of her. She smelled, but that wasn’t important. I needed to get her hot skin in contact with the cool air.

  “She’s gonna be fine!” Eddy said finally. “My Uncle’s gonna take care of everyone. He’s a doctor, you know.”

  I frowned. “Is that who we’re going to see?”

  He nodded. “See, he was real sick a while back. Had, like, something bad with his heart. I thought he was dead, but he’s okay! He’s going to take care of me now!”

  I smiled, but something felt wrong. “My sister, she found me. I thought she was dead too, but….”

  “Yeah,” said a middle-aged woman with a carpet bag. “My mother found me by the old canal. I always liked it so much. Used to go there a lot as a kid.”

  I sat back against the wall of the truck, frowning. How likely was it that all of our long lost relatives had come at once to collect us from a miserable life? But the more I thought about it, the more plausible it seemed. After all, there were lots of support groups out there. Maybe one of them was for relatives of homeless people looking for their loved ones. But two presumed dead relatives at the same time?

  I pulled my knees up to my chest and took Cammy’s lifeless hand. The truck rumbled on for a couple hours. Eventually the conversation fell silent and eyes drooped. The sounds of the highway rushed by us and the temperature dropped, but Cammy’s fever did not improve.

  When the truck finally
did stop, I almost didn’t believe it. My backside still vibrated, even as I stood up. The gate was lifted, and a man in a black suit blinked up at us.

  “Time to get out, everyone.”

  We were at a gas station. Old cars in various states of decomposition were parked all around. The expensive car was there too, but Eva didn’t get out of it.

  Desert stretched all around us in every direction, and, though I looked around wildly, there were no other buildings in sight.

  I got down. The man took hold of my arm and shoved me toward the station, but I refused to budge. I shook him off and scowled at him.

  “Where are we?” I demanded. “You were supposed to take my friend to a doctor. She’s sick!”

  He looked at me with such disdain that it was as if I had spoken in gibberish. “We have lots of doctors here, but it’s a secret. I promise. Just go inside. Someone will explain.”

  I didn’t believe him. My skin was crawling, but everyone else was clambering out, stretching their limbs, and waving at the nice car. I tried to stay outside and see what they did with Cammy, but the man pushed me into the grubby station and said that they were taking her through a different entrance. I fought, but when he squeezed my arm so hard I thought it might break, I gave up. The door shut behind us. A narrow-faced man in a white coat came out of a back room and walked up and down in front of us.

  “Name?” he asked the first person in the line.

  “Sandra!” the carpet bag lady said cheerfully.

  “And who referred you here?”

  “Um...my mother?”

  “Excellent,” he said.

  Each person was asked the same questions, who we were, how we’d come to be there, who had been the one to find us. One by one, the others were admitted into the next room, where they vanished.

  I was last in line, but when he came to me the man did not ask me the questions. He stared me up and down with narrow eyes. I scowled back impertinently.

  “You got a problem?”

  Thin brows lifted. He made a mark on the clipboard. The outer door opened finally, and my sister came in, followed by the well-dressed man.

  “What’s the problem?” she snapped at the man with the clipboard.

  He pointed at me with his pen. “This one’s hostile.”

  “Eva,” I interrupted, “is Cammy okay? I know they said they were taking care of her, but she….”

  Eva sighed laboriously and pushed past the ineffectual administrator. She put her hand on my shoulder and smiled a bit condescendingly.

  “Hey, sweetie, haven’t I always been there for you?”

  I looked down at my shoes, uncertain what I could say. I was so happy to find out it had all been a horrible mistake that I didn’t care about how the past had actually occurred. I wanted to hold her close and apologize for all the terrible things I had said. I certainly didn’t want to embarrass her in front of her boyfriend.

  I shrugged.

  “I’ve made sure Cammy is taken care of,” she said. “I’ll do the same for you!”

  “Where are we? Is this where you work now?”

  She reached up and began to arrange my unruly hair. “No, dear. It’s a special hospital. You’ve been ill. Don’t you remember?”

  “No,” I said doubtfully, but then I recalled the bloody vomit and the fact that I had no idea how I had ended up in the field where Cammy had found me. “Well….”

  “See? Now, let this man care for you. I promise it will all be fine.”

  I wasn’t sure what to think, but her smile was so angelic, and I longed to have her back so badly, that I couldn’t refuse. The administrator wrote some things down on his board, then waved me into the other room. It was tiny, like a closet, but there was a hole in the floor and a ladder descending into it. I glanced back at Eva uncertainly.

  “We’re going that way too,” she said.

  I reached out and climbed onto the ladder. The hole below was dark, but not completely. When I reached the bottom, I found myself in another room, something like an office, and there were several people wearing suits inside. I glanced over their impassive faces, prepared to utter a quick soubriquet, when their mouths opened and a noise like a fire alarm burst in on my eardrums. I lifted my hands, but the sound shattered my nerves. My knees buckled. I gripped my head in agony, but nothing helped. I fell onto the floor and lost consciousness yet again.

  I awoke to the sound of a screaming so shrill, it defied reason. Slammed back into my own mind, I sat up and hit my head on a metal ceiling. My vision cleared like smoke in a breeze. I steadied myself, leaning against the fence in front of me. I quickly realized, though, that it was not a fence. What I was gripping so tenaciously were the bars of a cage. Someone had taken away my shoes, my flannel shirt, and both pairs of socks, and had dumped my body in an animal cage.

  I gasped and slid backward. Across from me, the man in the cage was still screaming. With a horrible turning of my stomach, I realized it was Eddy. His fingers were twisted around the metal bars, and, with all his strength, he was pulling and pushing, his eyes so wild that he didn’t seem human. He was bleeding from self-inflicted wounds and seemed to be foaming at the mouth in rage.

  “Please let us out,” my neighbor whispered under her sobs, as if she too had been screaming to no avail and had finally lost her voice. They had taken her shoes too.

  “What’s happening?” I asked her, but she just shook her head.

  As I looked around, I recognized the people from my truck ride, but Cammy was not among them. There were others inmates, too, wearing white hospital gowns and thin drawstring pants. For some inexplicable reason they were all catatonic, their skin bruised, their faces blank. There were at least twenty of us, total, imprisoned in a long white room with a table and door at one end.

  Eddy carried on for another five minutes, slamming against the door of his cage so hard that it rocked on its base. Soon a man with a cattle prod came in and, in full view of all of us, shocked him until he was in such pain from the spasms that he could no longer fight. Then the man waved the prod like a cane and walked back out, whistling.

  With a feeling of horrible, overwhelming certainty, I leaned back in the cage, no longer wanting to figure out what was happening. Cammy was dead and Eva was not, but she hated me enough to throw me in a cage like a kennel dog.

  I don’t know how long I lay there sobbing, listening to the others going through the many stages of grieving, occasionally getting the cattle prod, sometimes a stomped finger. Eventually, I stopped listening. I curled up in a tiny ball and closed my eyes, but the overhead lights were so bright, they cut through my lids and kept me awake.

  At some point, they came and got Eddy. He was gone for almost two hours. When they brought him back, he looked like another person completely. His face was pale and his eyes seemed haunted. Someone had taken his clothes and given him a hospital gown and pants. He was dragged back in and thrown into his pen, eyes rolling back into his skull, tongue hanging out.

  His return was met by a renewal of all the horrible sobs and screams, until they came for Sandra. She kicked and screamed, but she was so emaciated that there was no chance she could ever be a match for them. She wasn’t gone for half as long, but was brought back in much the same condition as Eddy.

  One by one, we were dragged away, until I was the only one left. I sat with my knees up to my chest, my arms squeezing them so tightly that I couldn’t breathe, looking around me in horror. I was the only one left that remembered anything.

  When they came for me, in their lab coats and sensible shoes, sheer terror took over. I fought hard: I drew blood. I kicked and thrashed. I punched and bit. I raised hell, but none of it did any good. Someone hit me across the face with a heavy object and knocked me senseless.

  Coming to, I could feel my legs dragging across the cement floor. They lifted me onto an examination table and stripped me. I tried to struggle, but they were so much stronger. There was a sudden jab in my arm, and all was peace.


  The next day, or perhaps weeks later, the house music began. Incessant and thumping, it went on and on, from one song to the next, but each so similar that it was impossible to distinguish among them. It pulsed like an extra heartbeat, until every nerve danced with it and could no longer keep its own natural cadence. I tried to block it out, tear strips of cloth from my gown to stuff in my ears, but it was so loud and so penetrating that it seeped into every pore, until silence seemed like a memory.

  They did not feed us, except to shove pills or pre-measured water down our throats. Our toilets were a little tray in the floor of the cage, cleaned once a day. The keepers did not speak to us, look at us, or even bother to pretend we had spoken to them. It was as if we did not exist.

  Soon, I began to think that we did not.

  Perhaps my life had been a fabrication. I had never existed. My parents were a lie. My home was a lie. Everything I had ever done was a lie. I lay with my face to the metal base of my cage, staring vacantly into the corridor of our day-lit hell.

  When Eddy began to defecate on himself, they came and pulled him from the cage. He never came back. Two days, or better said two waterings later, it was Sandra.

  A new truckload of people was brought in. I didn’t even notice them. They were like noisy additions to the music that, even when turned off, whispered in my thoughts. One of them reached out and touched my ankle, trying to wake me. It wasn’t real.

  Before the recent acquisitions had been redressed, they came for me. I had been in one position so long and starved to such a degree that it was impossible to stand. The man sent for me, took hold of my wrist, and dragged me through the room, while his fellow with the cattle prod shocked any dissenters.

  I was left in a room and remained, unmoving, for an eternity. There was no music in the room, no bright light. When the door clicked open and several people entered, I was almost lucid. I looked up at the fuzzy shapes.