by Darrin Doyle
The curtains were drawn, but sunlight poured in. A humid breeze touched the top of McKenna’s head. She looked up. The ceiling was gone. Mist enchanted the air, an ethereal glow.
Maybe this is Heaven. Couldn’t I make it so? Climb into one of those beds? Sleep here forever.
“You look like I feel,” a voice said.
McKenna stepped into one of the “rooms.” She squinted through the toxic fog, grateful for the filter over her mouth. On a queen-sized bed, Audrey reposed.
She hadn’t bothered to clear the drywall and sawdust before lying down. She didn’t wear a mask. She watched McKenna approach. Her lips pulled histrionically at a cigarette. She blew a column of smoke toward the sky.
“That’s always been your problem,” McKenna said. “If you felt how you look, you wouldn’t be eating a city.”
Audrey considered this. She shrugged. McKenna dragged a chair from the writing desk and sat beside the bed.
Audrey scooted herself into a seated position against the headboard, grunting as if making a great effort. She was dressed in a brown WMU sweat suit. Her expensive feet were nowhere to be seen. Not even her padded socks. Just bare, exposed stumps. Didn’t they get cut by glass, splintered by wood? Where were her crutches? Did she crawl around the floor and eat things? Like she’d done with McKenna when she was a baby?
Maybe this was what Audrey longed for, a return to the days with McKenna, days of joy and crayons. It was a pleasant idea, and McKenna held onto it.
“You’re the first one to visit me,” Audrey said.
“Johann says he tried a few times.”
“Oh, him. He tried. He failed.”
“I thought you were in love with him.”
“Who said I wasn’t?”
“Are you? ”
“Is there a rule that says people you love should get better treatment than everyone else?”
“I thought so.”
Audrey shrugged. “News to me.” She took a drag. The ember sizzled a stray hair. She flicked her cigarette into the bathtub ten feet away. “Two points!”
McKenna waited.
“Look, we had no future. I cut him off a long time ago. End of story.”
(It’s a lie, but did McKenna know it at this moment? Or was it only years later, from reading books, when she learned that Audrey couldn’t bear Johann a child, so he’d sent her packing? Sent her back to Michigan, back to her destiny.)
Here comes that Hershey bar again.
“Chet wanted me to tell you ‘Hi.’ ”
With her fingers, Audrey flung the hair off her shoulders, did a head shake. A familiar move, whenever boys were mentioned. “Really? He’s sweet.”
“He’s got a kid.”
“Why are you here, exactly?” She rolled off the bed on the opposite side from McKenna. She came up with crutches under her arms. She looked gaunt and hollow-eyed. Her hands were skeletal, the skin papery and transparent.
“You don’t have to keep doing this,” McKenna said. “Some people don’t want you to—”
“Oh, let me guess. You’re here to boss me around. Because you don’t have a goddamned life of your own.”
“Come home! Or go somewhere! Do something.”
She blinked. “You really are saying this? You ?!”
McKenna stood from the chair. Audrey crutched to the bathtub. She leaned over and with a primal scream rent an enormous chunk of porcelain with her teeth. McKenna plugged her ears. Audrey took another bite, and another, and another. It was quick and brutal, her head whipping back and forth, a bedlam of obliteration mixed with the wails of a dying animal.
Fifteen seconds later, the tub was gone. Audrey sat on the floor and quietly slurped the shower curtain into her mouth, followed by a handful of plastic rings, which she ate like donuts while speaking.
“They wanted me, Kenny,” she said, chewing. She stood with difficulty. “I know you don’t like to hear it, but it’s the truth. I know most of my family hated me for being what I am. Hid me away, treated me like a disease. Listen, Kalamazoo needed me. This was their idea. They made the rules. They can’t just stop now and say good-bye. They can’t just be tired of me. That’s not how it works. I won’t allow it. I WON’T ALLOW IT!”
McKenna startled. Audrey burst into that same aggressive guffaw she’d used on Grandma Pencil, but this time, her voice was wheezy and thin. She stopped. Her breathing was labored. She rested on her crutches, her eyes closed.
“I’m sorry I punched you,” McKenna said.
Audrey didn’t open her eyes. She swayed in place, her stumps padding on the floor in a delicate dance, her head bowed. She wanted to melt, dissolve into this nightmare domestic space she’d created. At last, she whispered, “I forgot all about that.”
The Hershey’s slid back and forth along the inside of McKen-na’s throat.
Audrey opened her eyes. “Did you apologize to Grandma?”
McKenna made a smiley face in the dust with the toe of her shoe.
“Of course not,” Audrey said. “You and those pigtails. Still a child.”
“Grandma’s sick, if you want to know. She’s in the hospital.”
“Oh.” She raised her left leg, picked a couple chunks of porcelain off her stump and ate them.
“She had a stroke.”
“Oh.”
“And by the way, she took back what she said.”
“Took what back?”
“That thing she said about Mom.”
Audrey gave her sister a hard sidelong stare. “Bullshit.”
“Honest. That’s why I came to see you. She said there’s no passage in the Bible that calls suicide a sin. Nothing explicit, anyway. I worked on her. Maybe it’s because . . .” McKenna paused, feeling the Hershey bar drift back down, the final time. “Anyway, I thought you should know.”
Audrey wiped her mouth. Blinked. Her eyes were watery and red from the dust. “Well. I guess our plan worked, then.” She coughed wetly. “I’m glad you told me.”
McKenna felt the urge to step in closer, perhaps touch her sister on the shoulder, but she couldn’t be sure of the outcome. “Remember how I used to feed you?”
The sun climbed from behind a cloud and brightened Audrey’s hair. Sounds of machinery, of repair, rumbled beneath Audrey’s voice: “I don’t remember.”
“You weren’t even a toddler yet. I smuggled crayons, soap, whatever you wanted. I can still see your face, so happy.” McKenna felt a rising sensation inside her, as if her blood were being drawn toward the sky. “And now I’m here. When nobody else is.”
Audrey’s jaw tightened. She pursed her lips. She seemed to be fighting to keep the words in her throat from escaping her mouth. When she looked up at McKenna, her eyes appeared scarred by the glaring sunlight. She nodded as if they’d come to a mutual agreement about something.
Then she brought a cigarette out of the pack and lit it. “I’m still going to finish eating.”
“Of course.”
“These people love me,” she puffed. “They do.”
“Of course. We all love you.”
60.
It was a crisis of calculation. Kalamazoo thought they could fund the reconstruction of an entire city with the profits from tacky celebrity merchandise. The plan worked for the first year. But the famous face never showed her famous face. She granted no interviews. She lived like a bat. She hated cameras. She didn’t speak publicly, didn’t smile. In many ways, and especially to the outside world, Audrey never was. She existed only as a name, a concept. At best, she was a caricature, a cartoon figure. At worst, she was a Freudian nightmare—the cherubic, fair-skinned girl-next-door with the mouth that might swallow your head.
Most importantly, though, Audrey stopped capturing hearts and imaginations because people didn’t believe in her. How many T-shirts can you sell of a fraud, a cheat? Ask Pete Rose. Ask Milli Vanilli. Ask Jim Bakker. Ask Tonya Harding.
To millions, she was a hoax. Conspiracy theories abounded. There is no Audrey Mapes, t
hey said. Kalamazoo bulldozes their own buildings in the dead of night so we’ll think they’re hot stuff. We’ve done the math: She’d have had to wolf down fifty buildings a day to finish in two years. Sure, there’s a girl named Audrey Mapes. A shyster who faked her way through a sideshow performing tricks any third-rate magician can do. She just “happens” to be gorgeous? With a handicap, no less? UC Berkeley did a comprehensive study in 1995, and they proved she couldn’t do what she said. But you didn’t care about that, did you, Kalamazoo? Slap adrawing of the pretty cripple on a bumper sticker; sell it for ten bucks. Instant attention, instant cash. Add computer effects to some grainy night-vision footage and boom—a modern-day legend!
Don’t you want to buy an oven mitt?
Yes, pretend you’ve been chosen, Kalamazoo. Pretend you matter. Exploit the world so you can find an identity. Shame on you, Kalamazoo. We knew you were desperate, but geez.
Of course, millions of believers remained, all around the world. Audrey received fan letters from Argentina, Zimbabwe, Russia, Malaysia, Mexico, India, Iceland. Families saved money to pilgrimage to Kalamazoo in hopes of catching a glimpse of the “Miracle Mouth of Michigan.” Unable to actually see her, they did their best to elicit stories from the locals. Most every Kalamazoo resident had met Audrey. She’d slept in their beds. She’d played “Simon Says” with their children. She’d taken coffee with them, kissed their babies good-bye. But no one was talking anymore. They were all talked out. Even the most destitute refused fifty bucks for an anecdote of their encounter with the eternal. That’s how badly they wanted Audrey gone. She’d become a bad dream; they wanted to wake up, or at least move on to a different dream. Travelers inevitably left Kalamazoo with a few dozen photographs of construction vehicles, a profound sense of disillusionment, and a souvenir tennis visor.
The merchandise stopped selling. The cash dried up. Construction crews went weeks, months, without getting paid. Flatbeds bearing lumber were turned away due to lack of funds. Businesses and homes couldn’t be reassembled. Campus dormitories lacked walls. Church parishioners waited impatiently for Italian marble altars that never came. A waiting list was created. By August of 1999, the backlog was one thousand strong. An emergency meeting was called. Taxes were raised. Undocumented laborers were shipped in to speed production. Shoddy materials saved the city a bundle, but now and then a house caught fire.
People stopped helping one another. They noticed each other’s crooked teeth, love handles, double chins. The imperfections sickened them. They elbowed each other in the pews, if they were lucky enough to have pews. They no longer kicked off their sheets in the morning and rushed out to gab with their neighbors. Instead, they huddled under the covers and cursed Audrey. Out of a job indefinitely. All those lucky assholes that got their houses eaten first. Who came up with the stupid spiral idea, anyway? Rich people, probably. Portage was probably behind the whole thing.
Some people actually moved away. Most didn’t. But they talked about it.
Audrey ate through it all. Protesters gathered. Unruly crowds waved crude messages—“Mapes Rapes the ’Zoo,” “Audrey Can Eat Shit For All I Care,” “Beelzebub Called, He Wants His Appetite Back,” “Bite on THIS, Mapes!” and “Last Time I Checked, Gluttony Was a Sin.”
The friendliest Gazette editorials commanded her to leave town and never return. The others called for a criminal investigation. Local television news ignored her. The evening “Mapes Watch” was replaced by the “West Michigan Golf Course Spotlight.” Activists or ganized; petitions were circulated. Twenty-five thousand signatures for Audrey’s immediate ouster were presented to the mayor.
Mayor Bowman stood firm. Not much longer, he said. We need patience, he said. We need to stick to the plan. No one said it would be easy.
It was October, 1999.
Security forces were doubled. Two dozen rent-a-cops guarded the downtown structures Audrey ate: the court house; the Michigan News Agency, which hadn’t missed a day of business in thirty years; Jiffy Print; a parking garage.
One night, three angry, unemployed men carrying handguns snuck past security into the dry cleaners Audrey was ingesting.
The men emerged five minutes later. Their faces were bloodless. They surrendered without resistance.
One of them said, “I never expected it to move. Jesus. Was that her ?”
Another one said, “I think she’s alive.”
The other one didn’t speak for a month, until after Audrey was gone.
Even as she fed on the machinery of civilization, she wasted away.
Even as she consumed the muscle of society, she shriveled.
Even as she chewed cinder blocks the size of Buicks, she shrank.
In darkness, she drifted through corridors. Outside every window hung a moon she could never swallow. Clouds she could never wrap herself in. Stars that twinkled, stillborn, into her eyes.
Icy wind crept into her lungs, swirling.
Her flesh withered. A veil shrouded her eyes, turning them to ink. Her bones screamed softly, and her hair fell out, slow and gray, in the moonlight. Her once-enchanting glow faded. Her rib-cage yawned.
She ate her own teeth, and then she ate no more.
Nobody held her. Nobody came running when she finally cried out, her ragged voice indistinguishable from the machines on the streets, the earthmovers.
She relived the baths, the tender hands. She splashed diamonds in the sun.
She was my sister.
She shivered on a concrete floor that smelled of gasoline.
61.
McKenna chews.
Alone in the house on Moriarty Street.
From her bedroom, she watches unshapely tourists come and go.
They point. They snap photos. They bang the metal porch door with their umbrella handles. “Hello? Hello?” They ring the bell once, twice, three times. They cup their hands and peer into basement windows. They chisel hunks of cement from the front steps and stuff them into their purses. Then scurry to their minivans.
At night, McKenna watches television. She drinks tea. She prays. Writes. Prays. Chews. Writes. Prays. Writes. Chews.
She talks to Grandma Pencil on the phone. She talks to Murray on the phone. She talks to Toby on the phone. She tells them every thing here is fine. They never discuss Audrey.
A new millennium has dawned. The world remains unended, for now.
What’s left of Audrey resides in a plot next to Misty, at peace. She might eat her way out of the coffin. Then they’d believe. Then she’d get that statue.
Except Audrey is ash now, so this would truly require a miracle.
She died on the last Christmas Eve of the twentieth century. No one knows how or where.
One morning, her body was seen blowing down the middle of Main Street like an empty plastic bag. At least that’s what some people say.
Some people had honestly believed that nothing could kill her. Some people wrote books about her immortality.
What’s certain is that there was enormous pressure from all sides to perform an autopsy. Huge sums of money—seven, eight figures—were offered for her body. Everyone wanted to take a look. Everyone wanted to put her in jars.
Murray has recently relocated to Arizona. Put himself up in a modest house with a view of a butte or two. Audrey’s death hit him pretty hard. He hadn’t expected it. The only other girl in his life, snatched away. Maybe that’s how he saw it. He never said it in so many words, but it’s worth thinking about.
McKenna was never much of a girl, never the daddy’s girl a daddy likes to fawn over. McKenna knows this. She accepts it.
Early retirement from Hanson Mold pays some of Murray’s bills. He also lives off Misty’s life insurance, which has grown in a mutual fund for ten years.
Toby lives in the south side of Grand Rapids. He still supervises lawn furniture at Lowe’s and frets about his puny muscles. His steady girlfriend Amber, plucked hot and steaming from the cradle at nineteen years of age, manages his fading bodyb
uilding career.
Grandma Pencil did suffer a stroke in 1999. McKenna hadn’t lied to Audrey about that. Grandma recovered, mostly. She sold her house and most of her possessions and was taken in like a stray puppy by the geezers.
The stroke put half of her face to sleep. It also wiped out half of her memories. A happy occurrence, really. Some experiences are better left forgotten. She doesn’t even remember what Audrey did to her, how for five years Audrey took away everything she treasured, including her will to live. How she’d had to resort to the same mental numbness that had allowed her to survive internment camp and the agonizing mystery of her father’s fate. How she’d learned to view all of her possessions as temporal, insignificant, already gone. How she’d learned that loving things was always a dead end.
Grandma doesn’t remember these valuable lessons, so there’s no immediate need for McKenna to apologize for unlocking the back door, for letting the monster inside every time.
A confession wouldn’t hurt, though. Next week.
62.
In time, the tourists stop coming.
2005.
McKenna celebrates her thirty-third birthday with a bowl of instant pudding. Tapioca. She doesn’t need much. Canned soups, bread, eggs, milk. She makes everything last. She turns the thermostat as low as she can stand it, spends evenings curled up in Misty’s old quilt, fills pages by candlelight. Her hand cramps.
When Grandma sold her house and moved in with the nuns five years ago, McKenna lugged all of Murray’s inventions back here, stored them in the attic. Sometimes she goes up there and picks through the boxes, reconnects with something. Murray doesn’t know she has these things. He’d be embarrassed. They phone each other every month, although both of his ears are quite deaf now, and he hates his hearing aids, so conversation is awkward. He calls to make sure she got the check.