Life is suffering. Embrace it, endure it, and you will be stronger than everyone around you. Because everyone else struggles against the suffering, and you have learned to float on its current.
DAY: 13
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 800
These rules aren’t mine, mostly. I stole lots of them. Others I adapted, amended, updated.
Several rules ago, I said I thought I might be a Buddhist, but I don’t think I really know what that means. There is a lot of stuff on the internet about Buddhism, but it’s hard to make sense of. It’s not so much a religion as it is a philosophy or a way of life. It’s about not being materialistic. It’s about finding inner peace and enlightenment. So nothing like any of the really good stories I loved in the Old Testament. The kind where there’s fire and plague and smiting of the wicked.
And while I know that in Buddhism there are Four Noble Truths, I really only cared about the First one:
Life is suffering.
That, right there, was enough to make me a Buddhist. Or make me want to be one. Because that much I already knew was true.
It was especially true that Saturday, sitting, waiting, walking around the house, wondering when Tariq would pull up. Listening for the sound of his truck tires crunching on the dirt drive.
Because I’d made up my mind. On this trip, I’d start to question him. Nothing direct. Not at first. Just enough to feel him out, smell whether he had anything to offer on the subject of Bastien and Ott and Maya.
I opened my bedroom window and stuck my head out and shut my eyes so I could simply hear. Let my mind drift with the wind, focused on the sound of every passing vehicle, noticed for the first time how every single one had its own unique rhythm, a sound that belonged solely to it, made up of a million diverse pieces—engines, pistons, brakes, shocks, parts made of metal and plastic and rubber, none of which I knew the name of.
By then I had listened a couple dozen times to a CD Tariq had made for me. Punk rock was scary, its noise and its anger, but it was fascinating, too, the way horror movies had mesmerized me when I was a child, and for the same reason: because I believed that if I could survive the experience, I’d emerge stronger. These songs were raw rage, naked emotion, howls that combined the shriek of frightened infants with the bellowing of angry adults. They scared me, but they also made sense.
Rage, I understood.
I felt rage, even if I also feared it.
I couldn’t have told you what any of the songs were about. Incomprehensible lyrics with the occasional stray scrap that made sense, lines about love and rejection and The Man and long-defeated municipal legislative agendas—tough terse band names intended to intimidate, with words like Dead, Chain, Sex, Clash, Toxic.
Five tracks in, I felt close to crying. It was like I had never really heard a song before. Never really listened. Was it the power my hunger gave me, or was this what songs felt like to everyone? I shut my eyes, and I was there, inside the singer’s head, inside the echoing snare drum. I felt what they felt even without understanding a single word.
Music was magic. It could make you feel someone else’s emotions.
These were the songs Maya used to listen to. The ones she guarded so jealously, relishing her job as Older Sibling, enforcing Mom’s rules about no movies or music with cursing in it. Listening to them now, I felt like I could feel her. Like we were connected. And it made me so happy.
I heard the music before I felt the truck, a windborne squall of churning chords, and I shut my eyes and felt it swell inside me as he came closer.
“Hey, Matt.”
“Hey,” I said, getting in. “Thanks for taking me along. What’s the occasion?”
He smiled. “I figured your multiple assassination deserves celebrating. You are now a legend.”
“Legend?” I said, and fought a war within myself over whether to believe him.
“Yup. Everybody is talking about it. It was pretty impressive to start with, but by the time the rumor mill got through with it, you had broken every window in the gym and caused concussions and forced the physical education department to ban dodgeball from Hudson High forever.”
“Wow,” I said, and then wondered whether I could trust my own memory of what happened. After all, given my abilities . . . “But for real—were any of those guys seriously injured?”
“Nah. Only their pride.”
I was surprisingly relieved. “They’re probably pretty mad at me,” I said.
“Actually, they’re impressed. Nobody thought you had it in you.”
Again the pleasure rush. I could see the peril in that feeling. I could see why bullies bullied.
“Anyway,” Tariq said. “You excited about our road trip?”
“I am,” I said. “I’ve never been to New York City before.”
“For real? How is that possible? It’s so close!”
I shrugged, decided not to say any of the real reasons. Because my mother never had enough time off from work to take us anywhere fun. Because we never had any money. Because, unlike you, my parents couldn’t afford to buy me a truck and give me the gas money to go wherever I wanted to go whenever I wanted to go there.
Saturday, late afternoon, the sky darkening already. I paused a second before shutting the door behind me, smelling the air, feeling the cold of the coming twilight. Rain felt likely. Mom was at work. She couldn’t stop me from getting in the car with a boy I had sworn to destroy. She couldn’t make me leave the bottle of scotch behind. She couldn’t make me eat.
I was invincible.
We drove south on a punk rock carpet of sound, intricate melodies overlapping inarticulate guitar distortion. He wore all black, strong and graceful as a ninja.
“We’re driving to Poughkeepsie, then taking the train into the city. Then we’ll take the subway to the club. Okay?”
“Sure,” I said.
The music made my heart beat faster. Where had it been all my life, this sound, these noises, all the profanity and bare unashamed feeling that they’d never in a million years play on the radio or in the supermarket or any of the other places people play music? How big it was, this ocean of music, and here I was standing in water that was up to my ankles. Maya was out there, knee-deep in the same sea.
“You don’t say much,” Tariq said. “I thought it was just you didn’t want to talk to all those assholes at school.”
“That’s certainly true,” I said, watching the world darken before my eyes. “You seem to find plenty to say to them.”
He nodded. “It’s complicated. I’ve known most of those guys since we were little kids, you know? They weren’t always such jerks.”
“But they’re jerks now.”
Again, Tariq nodded. “Some of them, anyway. Sometimes.” I took him in: his profile, the slope of his wide nose, the smell of the dinner his mother cooked, spices I couldn’t name, meat so rich I could feel it on my tongue.
“Like Bastien and Ott,” I said.
He laughed. “They’re not so bad. They have their moments. They can be assholes, but it’s mostly harmless stuff.”
Both my eyebrows skyrocketed. There were a dozen things I could have said, but I decided to be strategic—and neutral. “Just because you don’t feel the harm doesn’t mean it’s harmless.”
“That’s true.”
“And anyway, I wonder. People say sticks and stones, words will never hurt me, all that bullshit, but the first thing you find out in kindergarten is that words can hurt. And if someone’s capable of hurting someone else with words, aren’t they also capable of hurting someone physically?”
Tariq shrugged. I breathed deep, but his guard was up. He didn’t like talking about his best friends.
I gave it a second, and then pressed the point. “You don’t think so?”
“No. I think so.”
Already the streetlights were stuttering on. “And would they? Hurt someone?”
Silence. Stalemate—he wouldn’t say anything else on the subject, not for the moment anyway. I’d have to sneak up on it another way. The scotch would help.
Many miles passed before he said, “In a way I envy you, you know? You don’t need to be disconnected from all these people. You don’t feel this pressure, to be some person they expect you to be instead of yourself.” I smelled something on him, then: the rush of yearning, the hunger for release. Bingo. I reached into my bag and my hand closed on the neck of the scotch bottle—but then something stopped me from pulling it out.
That smell.
The smell of wanting to be drunk. Of desperation for booze.
I’d been smelling it all my life. A knowing settled in my stomach, half eerie suspicion and half gut certainty. My mother is an alcoholic. She had kept it in check for longer than I’d been alive. She went weeks sometimes without thinking about it. It was why she went to synagogue so often, when I was pretty sure she didn’t believe a word of it. But it was still there, below the surface. Just like this bottle, hidden away. Forgotten sometimes. But there. How had I missed it?
“This song is so good,” I said, cranking up the stereo.
He smiled and sang along, and so did I. By Poughkeepsie my whole body was singing. We stood on the platform and waited for a southbound train. We stood so close I could feel his heat against the cold of the night. Lights glimmered and flashed on a bridge. The river was a wide rush of wind and water, cold and alive, the weight of the night so heavy it could crack me open. My empty aching belly gurgled out a song, every cramp and spasm an affirmation, a lyric: I am alive, I am an adult, I control my life, I can do anything.