The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo

by Darrin Doyle

  Audrey felt a punch in the face. So she left. In a hurry.

  Some families would be concerned by such an exit. It was possible that Murray, in a few days, might contemplate picking up a phone. Might contemplate calling Johann and, after learning that Audrey hadn’t flown back to Germany, alert the police. Without a doubt, Murray might contemplate such actions. Might contemplate them into paste. The worker bee (the streaked gray hair made Audrey think of him this way) was a master contemplator. He’d contemplated himself a nice little life—a shabby house, a dysfunctional family, a job that crushed his spirit, an abandoned passion, and a wife driven to madness, despair, and suicide.

  After she thinks this, Audrey says it aloud, as a fact, to Room 1022: “Mom committed suicide.”

  The phrase is sickening on her lips. Vulgar, like saying “cunt.” Still, she takes a deep breath and repeats it: “Mom committed suicide.” She pauses. “Mom killed herself.”

  At 8:38 a.m. on the morning of her sixth day eating Kalama-zoo, alone on the bed, beneath the covers, buoyed by a half-dozen pillows, Audrey accepted—Audrey knew—for the first time that her mother had intentionally swallowed too many Fluvoxamine tablets. Misty had washed them down with three glasses of gin. It was, quite suddenly, a fact. Nothing frightening. This was Real. This was Truth, stripped of its garment of mystery. And after saying it ten times, the phrase tasted like sugar.

  The hotel room—bedcovers, desk lamp, drapes, striped wallpaper, bureau—shone with sharp, blinding detail. Clarity and precision surrounded Audrey, and she saw a message written not in words but in furniture, in objects. This message was Misty. Misty was speaking to her. She was infusing her life force into every square foot of carpet, every reflective inch of mirror, every glowing cathode ray, and every plastic component of the Mister Coffee.

  Her mother was everywhere, and Audrey felt warmed. All of the anger caused by not-knowing, the confusion of wondering why her mother might—even in theory—do such a thing . . . all of these feelings drained from Audrey’s body in a pleasant rush.

  The questions no longer mattered. What mattered was the answer. And the answer was to swallow. The answer was to be the machine she was born to be—the monstrous, wondrous, evil, beautiful, freakish, glamour-girl machine. Mother had withdrawn herself from this life not to punish anyone, not because she was sad about something her family had done, not because she felt unloved. She’d done it to show Grandma Pencil what a Mapes girl could do when she put her mind to it. To show Grandma that you didn’t need a book, a ridiculous book written by white men pretending to speak for God. You didn’t need ten rules carved in a rock to know how to live forever. Religion was a safety net for the indecisive. It was the coward’s way of facing eternity. Even dopey atheists like Murray and Toby were more courageous than McKenna and Grandma Pencil.

  Misty had known the secret. This was why she’d always worn that beguiling smile. She knew that men had invented religion because they are weak. They are incomplete. They bear a lack. Misty understood that a woman carries eternity with her every day, that a woman bleeds eternity fifty days a year, that a woman is a small link on grand chain, a chain connecting her to her mother, her mother’s mother, her mother’s mother’s mother, to every other woman in her family, womb to womb to womb.

  Men. Men like Murray and Toby. Above all else, they needed to prove that they could create. As grown adults, they still needed mommy to clap for them, to squeal her approval. Make a bell that rings throughout the house! Make wings out of Sporks! Make an arm that’s thick as a fire hydrant! A neck that can crack walnuts!

  Even Johann. He worked so goddamn hard just to get a coffin down his throat. He worked and worked. For the glory. For the craft, as he called it.

  Men are watchmakers; women are forces of nature.

  That’s why the nuns were the true freaks. They’d forsaken their place in the chain to live as sexless beings in service of an all-powerful Father. They were dead. McKenna, too, from the look of things, was heading down that path.

  Yet Audrey herself had broken from the chain. Not by choice. Her womb was a desert. She’d learned about her infertility two weeks before flying to Grand Rapids. She and Johann had been trying to get pregnant for two years. Now their relationship was over, and it was his fault. His gift, his Chlamydia, had made her this way. His past haunting her, ruining her. She wasn’t average anymore.

  Audrey climbed from the bed. She balanced awkwardly on her stumps, steadying herself by holding the mattress. She moved from the nightstand, to the table, to the easy chair. At the window, she pulled the cord, and with a dramatic rushing sound, the curtains parted. Daylight flooded the room. From the tenth floor—the hotel’s highest—she saw Kalamazoo stretching to the horizon. Truthfully, it didn’t look like much. A dozen low-lying buildings spilled together like toy blocks. To the north, street after street of two-story houses as grim and worn as the graduate students and blue-collar workers who lived there. The northwest showed part of Western Michigan University’s campus, where Audrey had taken, or tried to take, classes. Bronco Stadium, the recreation center, the running track. She could see West Main snaking up the hill, past the spot where trees had been cleared—Mountain Home cemetery. She remembered that cemetery. She remembered Grandma kneeling on the grass, oblivious to the heat, the wind, the world.

  In the window, Audrey’s reflection hovered above the city. Like tenth grade English class, the movie version of Jane Eyre. Orson Welles’s gigantic face in the sky: “Jaayyyynnne . . . Jaaayyyynnne . . .”

  She would haunt them like she’d been haunted. She would make them ask why. She would make them see that they were dying so they could see that they were living.

  Once she was committed, it took Audrey two nights to eat every parking meter in the downtown area. She did it on a weekend, so nobody noticed right away. By noon Monday, every local news channel and the Gazette scrambled to write leadoff pieces. As you might expect, the headlines were uninspired, falling back on the vagaries of the interrogative: “Parking Meters Stolen?” and “Vanishing Meters?” “Meters Being Replaced?”

  Late Monday night/early Tuesday morning, Audrey walked east on the deserted Main Street to the edge of downtown—six blocks distant—where she’d spotted an empty one-story building. On the large plate-glass window, a white placard read Available for Commercial Lease or Sale. The building had been a coffee shop for eight months, followed by a bicycle repair shop for five, so the flavors of grease and espresso beans saturated the glass, drywall, cement, copper wiring, plaster, brick, ceramic tiles, fiberglass insulation, and steel. She ate it in less than four hours, and she was proud of herself, especially the way she’d accessed the roof by way of the dumpster in back. This place didn’t have a ladder like The Caboose.

  The sun was rising. A couple of drunks reposed on a loading dock across the street, watching as Audrey appraised the now-barren concrete lot. Who knows how long they’d been there? Audrey waved at them, and they crossed themselves.

  She felt tired, but in a good way, like she’d put in a solid day’s work. (She’d never put in a solid day’s work, not ever. But did she contemplate this fact? Heck, no. Not her thing, contemplation. That’s precisely what she once said to McKenna: “Thinking about myself isn’t really my thing.”)

  Her stomach did not feel full or satisfied. It growled. She ate a Begin One Way sign. There was an all-night gas station a hundred yards up the street. She purchased a Gatorade from a woman seated behind bulletproof glass.

  She drank the Gatorade at the Kalamazoo River. Her stumps were aching from the new feet. Standing on the bridge, she peered over the rail. She searched for her reflection in the black water.

  That’s how it began. After a few more sneaky nights of gobbling abandoned buildings, Audrey was caught. The cops handcuffed her and put her in the cruiser. They radioed ahead about who they were bringing. The officer behind the wheel couldn’t stop gawking at Audrey in the rearview mirror. At the station, conversations went silent, the c
licking keyboards died. Everyone turned to see—officers, secretaries, custodians, pimps and whores, perverts, crackheads, petty thieves, and even the two homeless drunks from the other morning. All the riffraff and boys in blue stood as equals when she entered the room; all were held motionless by her spell. So striking. Such a cute nose. She batted her eyes, flashed the “aw, shucks” grin, blew kisses.

  They treated her “special” this time. Her own holding cell. Fresh coffee whenever she asked. The next day, faces appeared constantly at her 1011 × 1011 door window. Faces that beamed when she caught their eyes. Cops brought lemon squares that their wives had baked. Lawyers gave her their cards. Clerks offered Band-Aids for her stumps, which were still adjusting to the feet. (Even MIT eggheads cannot fool the body, it seems.) She signed autographs but politely refused to be photographed.

  The press caught wind of her return. The Gazette ran a frontpage piece, “Caboose Eater Returns for Another Taste of Kalama-zoo.” The article reads more like entertainment puffery than hard news. A sample:

  Audrey Mapes, that golden-haired enchantress who worked the alternative music crowd into a frenzy at the Lollapalooza festival the last three summers with her jaw-dropping ‘eatistry’ was apprehended in a barren lot on the corner of Portage and Vine at 5:20 a.m. Thursday morning. The lot wasn’t barren the night before Mapes’s arrival, however. A two-story building had resided there. Until three weeks ago, the ground floor had housed Purple Pete’s Aquarium Supplies, and the upstairs had been The Lock Shop. Both businesses had moved out, and the building was empty. The property is owned and managed by Dale Wermer of Hotspots Commercial Leasing, Ltd. He tells the Gazette, “I got a call from KPD this morning. It felt like someone kicked me in the gut. This girl just came out of nowhere, for no reason, to my property, and chomped it to bits. I’m overjoyed. Things like this don’t happen to me.” Wermer says he has no intention of filing charges against Ms. Mapes, but he hopes that she will consider eating his home garage so he can build a new one.

  And so it went. The owners of the other abandoned buildings came forward. They skipped the legal system and leapt in front of the cameras, practically bursting out of their skins to show off the gutted foundations, grinning hugely while holding up a plywood scrap missing a U-shaped bite. “I’m putting this on E-bay!”

  No one pressed charges. No one complained. Each property owner, citing various reasons, said she’d done them a favor: free publicity; removing a blight they couldn’t afford to remove; collecting insurance; providing them a deep, spiritual reminder of their past selves, before they became money-grubbing real estate tycoons. One man said, “The way she gobbled my building . . . I realized that’s exactly what I’ve been doing, gobbling up properties. No reason, no joy. I’m out of this business, as of this moment. Look out, culinary school!” Even Car Park, the notoriously reptilian company whose meters she’d consumed, laughed off her act of vandalism: “Half of them were jamming quarters, anyway.” They giddily proclaimed that next month (October) would be “Audrey Mapes Month,” which meant free downtown parking, ALL DAY, EVERY DAY (except Tuesdays and Wednesdays 8 a.m.—5 p.m., and Fridays from 12—4 p.m.)!

  Audrey accepted Dale Wermer’s invitation to eat his garage. Her only stipulation was that no cameras record the event. To help achieve this, she ate at night. Still, a crowd of three hundred locals surrounded the house. A few cameras flashed, some videotapes rolled, but it’s doubtful they caught much. When she finished, the Wermers let her sleep in their guestroom.

  The Wermers’ telephone rang all through breakfast the next day. Audrey received thirty requests: Other people wanted her to eat their roofs, sheds, or front porches so they could rebuild them. City managers wanted her to eat blighted houses with deadbeat landlords. College students wanted her to eat a dunk tank for charity. A distraught man wanted her to eat his philandering wife’s clothing. A ska band wanted her to eat their instruments while they rocked in front of a live audience. An elderly woman wanted her to eat the mental ward where her husband was receiving care.

  And meanwhile, for the first time in history, every resident of Kalamazoo woke up excited. Whether it was at the crack of dawn or the crack of noon, they kicked off their sheets and phoned friends and family. They talked to each other. At the breakfast joints—The Flame, Sweetwater’s Donut Mill, The Corvette Café—at the bars—The Green Top, Waldo’s Tavern, Bell’s Brewery—at the laundromats—Duds ’N Suds, Norge Village, Ye Olde Laundromat—all around Kalamazoo, strangers chatted. High school kids and retirees gabbed across bus aisles. Janitors and accountants chuckled warmly, sipping coffee together. Phlebotomists and plasma donors high-fived. Barber shops, classrooms, libraries, dealerships, factories, gas stations, hobby shops, supermarkets—any place people could gather, they gathered to talk about the Incredible Eating Girl. They asked questions: Why had she come back? Why here ? What would she eat next? Was it all a trick? Was it a publicity stunt? Was she human? Was she good? Was she evil? Was she single? Was she actually seven different people with power tools? Where did she come from? What was her purpose? Were they being tested? Was it a government experiment? Had the water supply been dosed with LSD? Was there any limit to what she could eat? Would she start charging a fee?

  Speculation raged, theories abounded. Young and old, black and white, gay and straight, rich and poor, flat-chested and buxom, hippies and jocks, nymphomaniacs and the frigid, appliance repairmen and appliance breakers, swimmers and joggers, the bold, the shy, the fat, the skinny, the hirsute, the bald, the sociopaths, the Celtic musicians, the CEOs, the soccer moms, the depressed, the terminally ill, and the glue-sniffers—all felt united by their common humanity. They finally had something to share, in the name of love for their sweet city.

  It’s too bad Audrey never cared about them.

  She accepted a few of the requests. Not all. Not the ones that asked her to eat for charity or in front of a crowd. In the pitch of night, she devoured. The families gave her a place to sleep, let her watch videos, knitted sweaters for her. Gave her the love she never got on Moriarty Street. She played the part of the waif pretty well, with the wide eyes and crutches and all. The pre-dawn air became a percussive concert of splintering lumber, tinkling glass, operatic metal. Crowds gathered. Requests poured in. Too many requests.

  One night, at a residence where she was supposed to swallow only the roof, Audrey kept going. She ingested the whole house, including furniture, appliances, tchotchke.

  The family didn’t protest. They climbed out of their camper—Mike and Judith Crawford and their two sons, Mike Junior and Pete, ages eleven and thirteen—and stood like towheaded zombies: mesmerized, awestruck, speechless. Everything was gone. Their entire life had been reduced to a billowing cloud of dust.

  They joined the gathered crowd in raucous applause.

  Sheepishly, a rotund man stepped to Audrey’s side and tugged her shirtsleeve. “Excuse me, miss,” he mumbled. He cleared his throat, twisting the nightcap in his hairy hands. The applause died down, and someone handed Audrey a damp cloth. Audrey said thanks. The rotund man waited patiently while Audrey toweled drywall powder from her cheeks and forehead. When she finished, he said, “I’m Jim Logan, from next door? I run the pet store downtown. Um, if you aren’t busy, like, tomorrow, do you think you could, I mean, would you mind doing that to our house?” Behind him, huddled in nightgowns against the cool October morning, stood his wife Monica and three daughters.

  The Logan girls looked to be ages six through ten. The youngest clung to the middle one’s arm, and the middle daughter’s stance and expression suggested she was wary of Audrey and prepared to defend her little sister should this savage blond lady decide to turn that pretty set of chompers on them. The girl’s brow was set firmly, stern and uncompromising. At only eight years of age, she was her sister’s keeper; she would claw out the eyes of a grizzly bear if it stepped too close.

  “I’d be happy to eat your home, Mister Logan,” Audrey said.

  People underestimate
the seductive power of Audrey’s gift. To witness everyday objects disappearing into that mouth was like seeing Jesus jog up to the house after being crucified and say, “Stick your finger in this hole, bub.” For the Mapeses, Audrey had been a gradual buildup over many years, but by the time she got to Kalamazoo, she was darn good at what she did. And what she did was impossible.

  All they could do was stare. It was shocking, deeply unreal. Physically numbing. A narcotic. It was a fairy tale played out before their eyes. Violent, horrific, grotesque, and at the same time it seemed, for lack of a better word, expected. Comforting.

  Of course, their blown minds said. Of course there is a shapely woman with the face of an angel standing in my living room, gorging herself on my coffee table. Why wouldn’t there be?

  The snaps of teak so bombastic you have to cover your ears. Her grunts wet and vulgar. Her face animalistic; twisted and unseemly. To watch for more than a few seconds is difficult. Because of the tingling sensation it evokes, it feels embarrassing. The impulse is to squint, flinch, peek. And yet you want to be near it. Like a fire. You need to be close. Scorch your arm hair. Sting your eyes with its smoke. Throw yourself on the flames.

  People asked for it. The reasons? Neighbor envy. Desire for attention. Curiosity. Sexual turn-on. The search for a spiritual awakening, a mystical communion with the divine. To have a good story to tell at the next family reunion. Just because. Name your reason.

  Inevitably, the neighbor asked for it, too. And every neighbor has a neighbor has a neighbor has a neighbor.

  The national media caught wind. White vans crowned with satellite dishes flowed into the city. Reporters flooded government offices and restaurants, brandishing power suits, smiles, and laptops. They offered hard cash for information about Audrey’s whereabouts. They rarely looked anyone in the eyes. The insincerity in their voices cut into the locals like piss cuts snow.