We took a turn too fast. My stomach swung in zero gravity for a second, and I liked it. The fear. The freedom of letting go of that fear. Of embracing what might happen next. “There’s no . . . religious problem, with doing what you guys do?”
“No. Just don’t tell Allah.”
“Look at you,” I said, “a wealthy Arab whose money comes from selling Christmas trees to infidels.”
Tariq laughed, but his laugh was sad, and I had no idea what piece of my sentence had saddened him. I had a whole line of further Father Questions, intended to shake him, but now I didn’t have the heart to ask any of them. He had crested the wave of happy intoxication, and was crashing down hard into depression. I savored the taste of blood in my mouth, and was about to swallow it when I wondered whether even that minimal nourishment might take a tiny edge off my hunger.
How many calories are in blood?
I spat it out, into the night. And then, swift as a snake strike, I asked: “What was up with Ott and Bastien and my sister?”
“What was . . . up?” he asked, his voice slurring nervously.
“Yeah.” My instinct was to spin stories, dazzle him with words, trick him into letting something slip, but silence was far more tantalizing. People will tell all kinds of secrets just to fill an uncomfortable silence.
Tariq looked genuinely confused.
“I don’t know. I don’t think anything was.”
The road wobbled underneath us. It never felt like all four of his tires were touching the earth at once. His headlights showed us sheer rock faces, diners shut down for the night. At least it was late, the roads were empty, we’d probably hurt no one but ourselves when we crashed.
Was he lying?
Drunk, tired, disoriented—seeing through him should have been easy. But I couldn’t. Did that mean he really didn’t know about Ott’s and Bastien’s part in whatever happened? Or did it mean that there wasn’t anything there? That he was the only one involved?
“We stink,” he said.
“Speak for yourself,” I countered. “You moshed for, like, hours. I only did it a little.”
He took a deep breath through his nose. “Nope. You stink, too. And I think maybe we’re going to die,” he said and giggled, after he swerved to avoid hitting a deer that turned out to be a low-hanging tree branch.
“Everybody does,” I said.
A sudden, sharp pain distracted me from the prolonged ache in my stomach. My fingertips, bleeding again. I’d been gnawing them without realizing it.
And yet, this here is the weirdest part of the whole weird thing.
Hunger, revenge, anger aside, it felt good, being in that truck. Being Tariq’s “friend.” Careening toward death together.
I did not want the ride to end. I didn’t want to get home, get out of that truck, crawl alone into the lonely cavern of my bed. I wanted to press my warm body against his and fall asleep.
Realizing this made the black stars bloom in the air around me. Cursing, breathing, trying hard not to panic, I pressed the tips of my fingers to the glass and shut my eyes. Felt energy move through me; felt my lungs suck in chi from the cold dark endless curve of space. Focused the scream of self-hate that was trying to howl out of my throat and forced it out through my fingertips instead.
I opened my eyes, pulled back my hand.
Where my fingers had been pressed, tinted red where I’d been bleeding, were five tiny star-shaped cracks in his window.
RULE #19
Your body is eternally bonded to the bodies of the people you love, and those bonds will assert themselves in terrifying and unpredictable ways.
DAY: 14
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 1500
Coffee. Pancakes. Anger.
The smells woke me up, dragged me out of bed.
Somehow we had survived. Protected by Allah or Yahweh or whatever other god looks out for undeserving, drunken teenagers, we made it back to Hudson without dying. Now it was morning, and my mother was downstairs, sitting at the kitchen table and waiting for me.
Oh crap, I thought, hopping into my pants, she knows. Knows I snuck out of the house, went to the city, almost got trampled in a basement mosh pit, and finally got in a car with a drunk driver going ninety miles an hour down Route 9 at two in the morning.
Or maybe she just knows I got suspended from school?
I brushed my teeth, running through a litany of excuses, knowing she’d see through every one.
And then the trusty refrain of my broken stomach set in, the pain that blotted out everything else, and I marched bravely to the kitchen, to the food I could not let myself touch. Before I rounded the corner, I saw it. On the side of the fridge, still. The photo of my skinny mom. The young woman, probably not much older than I am now. My mom, before she lost control. Before terrible things happened to her, to transform her into the sphere before me.
It didn’t matter. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t happen to me. And I would control that. And I wouldn’t lose it, now that I knew about my powers.
“Morning,” I said. She sat at the table, pressing her hands to her face. Her wild brown hair still held the shape of her hairnet, which meant she’d only gotten in from work a little while ago, hadn’t changed, hadn’t showered. Pancakes were stacked ominously high on a plate before the place where I normally sat. I grabbed a mug of coffee.
“Why do you take it black?”
I shrugged. “Tastes better that way.”
“You’ve tried it with half-and-half?”
“No,” I said, “but—”
“Try it,” she said and handed me the jug.
I stared at it, watched thick creamy fat slosh in the little jug. “No, thanks.”
“I thought so,” she said. “Sit.”
I sat. Sipped. Waited.
Her face was red and lined and had never looked so old before. “I’m worried about you, Matt. Why aren’t you eating?”
I gulped, audibly, idiotically. I had not anticipated this. “I’m eating.”
“Good. Then eat,” she said, and stabbed my pancake heap with a fork. “Eat them all.”
“But, there . . . there must be ten pancakes here,” I whispered helplessly.
“Then you’d better get started.”
“Mom? Where is this coming from? I don’t—”
“You look sick. Can you even see yourself? Have you looked in a mirror lately?”
“Of course I ha—”
Up came Prop #3, following the pancakes and the half-and-half: a mirror.
Oh, no. This was an intervention.
My mother had obviously put a lot of thought into it. So the least I could do was look. I saw a chubby face and a fleshy neck staring back at me in that mirror. I saw a nose so large no one would ever love me. I saw a head too big for its body. More than that, I saw the ghost of Christmas future.
The way my cheeks would swell up, my chin triple, like Mom’s had. The way I would have to lumber through the world to get around. It sent a cyclone of broken glass shards spinning in my stomach, but I stared at him, that future failure, and at her, and I smiled, even though I felt like crying. I did it to make my mother feel better. Because pain was booming and crackling like thunder inside of her, and only I could hear it. Only I could see how close she was to breaking.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I said, and put the fork down. “I didn’t realize.”
She stood, and I saw her lower leg was encased in a plastic boot.
“What the hell?” I yelped. “What happened to you?”
“Last night, at work, I had a . . . a moment. I was swinging the hammer—”
The hammer is how they knock the hogs out. Before they kill them.
“—and I got distracted. And I missed. And hit my leg. The plant doctor said there’s a slight chance of a stress fracture.” She laughed, although it was not the kind of thing you laugh at. The hammer could kill a person as easily as a hog or shatter every bone in her leg.
“You’re such a pro, Ma,” I s
aid. “What distracted you?”
Here she turned, eyed me hard. “It was the strangest thing. I thought I heard you calling for me. Like when you were little, and you had a nightmare. Clear as if you’d been standing right there in the slaughterhouse with me.”
I shivered, turned cold inside. “You heard me calling you. Last night. When?”
“Just after eleven p.m.,” she said. “I know it sounds crazy, but I really did hear it. Mind playing tricks on me, probably—telling me I needed to get some damn sleep. But then, a mother just knows things.”
Had I called my mother with my mind? And had she heard me a hundred and twenty-five miles away?
Tear-blind, I stumbled out of my chair and swamped her in a hug.
“Shhh,” she said, because by then I was sobbing. Her hair smelled like pig blood, and it smelled wonderful.
“It’s—”
I said it several times, and each time I was weeping too hard to make any other words beyond it. She held me, and even though I was taller than her now, even though I was not that little nightmare-haunted boy anymore, my mother was a mountain of a woman who could keep me safe forever.
“It’s Maya,” I said, finally, when I felt sure I could say things without breaking.
“I know, honey.”
“I want to do something,” I said. “I want to help her.”
“So do I, Matt. All we can do is be there for—”
“No!” I said sharply, pushing her back. “No, that’s bullshit! I won’t accept that.”
“Matt,” she said, the mom-voice, the you-know-you’re-being-ridiculous tone made me madder.
“You know something,” I said. “I know you do.”
“No, honey,” she said, but she was exhausted from her long shift, and she was thinking, and her thoughts were raw and chaotic and overloaded with emotion.
“You’re not telling me something,” I said, and she turned her head away, wondering, trying to get her memory online, trying to figure out what she’d told me and what she hadn’t, what was true and what wasn’t.
“Your sister’s fine, Matt,” Mom said finally.
“She’s not! Why are you not doing anything to—”
“And why are you so eager to believe that something terrible happened to her?”
“I—”
“Why do you refuse to accept the possibility that maybe she’s actually okay?”
“Because she left!” I said, my voice cracking. I couldn’t see so well, so I sat back down. “Because she left you. And me. And went away. And she wouldn’t do that unless . . .”
I stopped myself, barely. Had my mother really convinced herself that everything was fine?
“There’s got to be something we can do,” I said. “We need to go get her. Bring her back. Call the cops. Find out what happened. Someone did something. They need to pay for it.”
“Life doesn’t always work like that, Matt,” she said, and in the heartbreaking clarity of her sadness in that moment I knew she was telling the truth. Her truth. But this truth was slippery, elusive. In an instant it had escaped my grasp.
Mom was letting go of Maya. Relinquishing control.
She’d done it before. Let my father go, let herself go.
I’d placate her, but I wouldn’t follow her path.
Not ever. I rolled up a pancake and ate it with my bare fingers, and then did the same for three more. By the end I had stopped crying, and she had started.
And I wondered for the first time, if maybe it wasn’t Maya who was breaking her heart.
RULE #20
Skin is the largest sense organ. Every centimeter of it is packed with sensory receptors, though sensitive parts have much more than others—your fingertips, for example, have one hundred times as many receptors per square inch as your back does. Scientists don’t use the phrase “sense of touch” anymore. They say it’s too simplistic. “Somatosensory system” is the new thing. Because what we think of as “touch” is actually a complicated network of different ways of acquiring information from the environment. Touch is the most complicated sense, the hardest to master, and the one with the most potential to cause great harm.
DAY: 14, CONTINUED . . .
I experimented in secret. In the cafeteria at lunch, eyes closed, I slipped off my shoes and pressed my feet to the floor.
I saw, through the soles of my feet. I saw the shape of the room, the hallway beyond it, the whole school. I saw the crowds of kids moving past. I felt the heavy kids and the slim ones, the plodding confidence of the jocks and the delicate steps of shy girls.
I went to the restroom and grasped a metal pipe with bare hands. I felt with my fingertips, as sounds traveled through the pipes. The vibrations were sound waves, and my skin could decode them as well as my ear could. From one end of the school to the other, from top to bottom, murmurs in classrooms and gossip in the girls’ room and the thuds and whirs of massive machines.
I pushed it further, letting my body take the lead, surrendering to the sounds. My awareness extended along the pipes, into the ground, past the school, under the fields and into the houses beyond, the muted voices of televisions and arguments, my neighbors, their words incomprehensible, but already I could feel them getting clearer, the entire town a party line for me to spy on anytime I wanted, thanks to the plumbing that connects every building.
I stood in the hallway, feeling people move through the world around me. I charted the infinitesimal changes in air pressure as people came, went, stopped, stayed. My skin sucked up all that information, basking in the feel. I felt the vibrations in my hair. I felt like the whole world was part of me.
I drifted off. I lost interest in my own exercises halfway through. I thought about food or schoolwork, both of which were sources of much self-abuse. More and more my concentration would falter; I’d lose the thread of classroom conversation or forget how to use a Scantron form in the middle of a test. At home I’d read a hundred pages of Jane Eyre, only to realize I didn’t remember a word of it.
I was terrified. Of myself. Of the thing I was becoming. Of what I could not stop.
I took myself on a tour of my own body. Stripped down to a T-shirt, I pressed my fingers to different spots. Studied acupuncture charts, YouTube videos. Once you understand how the body works together, you can manipulate pressure points in yourself and others. To heal and to hurt.
But pressure point manipulation is the kind of thing people spend a lifetime learning, and you can mess yourself up pretty bad if you’re not skilled. Never mind the Five-Point-Palm Exploding-Heart Technique; there’s plenty of mundane tricks that can go horrifically wrong. And while eventually I mastered the moves to make my hand temporarily incapable of feeling pain while still remaining fully functional—testing it by holding a lighter flame to my thumb and feeling nothing—there were a lot of mistakes along the way.
I spent a long time around the neck. The throat chakra deals with truth, after all, and maybe the right acupressure points could render someone incapable of speaking lies. Like Wonder Woman’s magic lasso. Maybe I could pinch a nerve and make Tariq tell me everything.
It didn’t work. All I achieved was paralysis in my vocal cords, which went on for so long I was convinced it was permanent, and I screamed myself to sleep, silently.
I spent a long time staring at myself in the mirror. Standing there naked, forcing myself to endure the wretched sight, as I poked and pulled and tapped out little tunes on the keyboard of my body. I thought about how easy it would be to tap the right sequence and stop my breath, arrest the flow of blood, burst the brain, make my muscles melt.
I felt the blood move through my own veins, the organs pumping and tightening, the muscles dragging my bones.
And I puked. More than once. Because the body is a pretty gross place. Astonishing, the complex systems of blood and guts and waste required to keep us alive for even one second. Overwhelming, the number of things that can go wrong. Knowing too much can be dangerous.
RULE #21
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Caffeine is a central nervous system stimulant, and the most widely consumed psychoactive substance in the world. It blocks the action of adenosine, a hormone that causes drowsiness. Most importantly for our purposes, however: it kick-starts the human metabolism by triggering lipolysis, the breakdown of fat into energy. Everyone responds differently to caffeine, however, so the student of the Art of Starving should experiment with different amounts to figure out how much leads to heart palpitations and anxiety . . . and stop just short of there.
When your body wants something, that’s when it’s weakest. If someone knows what you want, they can hurt you in all sorts of ways.
DAY: 15
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 800
Monday was the first day of my suspension. At noon, my phone pinged. An email.
An email from Maya.
I clicked it open, my heart already pounding, imagining the long, detailed replies she could have sent to my million messages, my two-word ones, and the ones that went forever, all my endless questions finally answered, and found: one small line, and one small link.
Hey Matt here’s some music you might like.
The link took me to a cloud storage site and downloaded a folder full of songs.
“Really?” I muttered, miserable.
While I watched the songs download, I typed and then deleted a dozen angry sentences. I cursed her out, called her selfish, demanded she return, begged her to explain what (or who) had driven her away. But of course I couldn’t send any of it.
The songs were punk-rock classics, old stuff from the Clash and the Dead Kennedys, and if there were secrets and clues buried inside of them they’d been dug in too deep for me to find. Only the last track mattered: “Black Coffee” by Destroy All Monsters!, Maya’s band.
And the song was good. Her voice was harsh and unyielding, the melody line intricate, the drums punishing. The production professional but raw, attesting to at least some level of actual studio activity. So maybe that much wasn’t a complete and utter lie. The chorus: chilling, chanted and then screamed, accusatory, and overwhelming.
The Art of Starving Page 9