The dying human brain floods itself with more than a dozen neurochemicals, desperate to stimulate the rest of the body into saving itself. These include dopamine, which makes you feel pleasure, and norepinephrine, which makes you more alert. Scientists point to this chemical flood as the explanation for near-death experiences and other vivid imagery reported by people who survive a brush with death, but the sophisticated student of the Art of Starving knows it’s the other way around. Those experiences are real. The human mind, on the edge of breaking free of its body, stumbles into other realities, sees impossible things, accomplishes incomprehensible actions. They are the cause of the chemicals, not their consequence . . .
DAY: 19
TOTAL CALORIES: 0
Hunger was a pack of wolves, starving and mad, running through my bloodstream, gaunt ribs showing through mangy scabbed fur, fangs bared at every shadow.
Hunger pulled me out of bed after midnight, twisting my stomach like wringing out a wet towel, sinking savage talons into my skin and marionetting me: clothes on, socks off, down the hall, out the door, into the night.
“Whoa,” I might have said out loud. Black flowers shimmered in the air around me, swelled into storm clouds, threatened to blind me altogether. My hold on this world felt flimsy, tenuous, like at any moment I might pass out, fall away from my body.
But the answers were out there. The knowledge I needed was out in the night, and hunger goaded me on in pursuit of it. Mid-November by now, the ground frozen beneath my bare feet—bare feet what the hell is wrong with me, oh right, the common sense center of my brain is pinned to the mat beneath a great big brute named Hunger—the air so cold and clear that I felt like I was gulping down drugs, breathing in performance-enhancing steroids, sucking up the raw power of the universe. The night throbbed inside me. I was breaking the rules, no one could stop me. No rules bound me. The rules were made by people too afraid of their own power to ever claim it, who wanted to keep everyone else powerless. The police, my teachers, God, the president.
This town is dying.
I could smell it now, like a dead mouse rotting behind a bookshelf. I was shocked no one else could. Shuttered factories stunk like sewage pits; the empty strip malls smelled like rotten fruit. How did any of these people go about their days, living inside a rotting corpse?
I saw everything, the complex chains of cause and effect, the webs we were all caught in, the dry months and the hard harvest, the corporate trends five states over and the wars a half a world away.
The slaughterhouse will close. Within the next two weeks. Hundreds will lose their jobs.
I shivered to see the pieces come together. To feel this weird new insight spreading out like goose bumps across my body.
I saw the Main Street mom-and-pops shutting down one after another. I dug my heels into the dirt and felt the buildings that would be built in their places. Giant boxes, giant graves.
I ran. The wind ran with me, picking up, tugging at the trees, making a moaning sound that got louder as I ran faster and faster.
I howled. Tilted my head back and howled as loud as I could. Down the block, a dog barked back.
I howled again.
Silently, lightly, snow began to fall.
“Coincidence, that’s all,” I whispered, even as I sang-thought, I can make it snow, I can snuff the stars out one by one, I can control the very fabric of time and space!
But no. Power like this wasn’t sustainable. It might not even be survivable.
I might have run for hours. I might have stood beneath every window in Hudson, listening, smelling, seeing the patterns, understanding how truly helpless everyone was. Snow fell faster and faster. My feet burned. I felt like at any moment I would step up into the air and fly.
And then, all at once it was gone.
“Please,” I said, but the world did not care. Hunger was a pack of wolves, turning on one of their own, clawing and tearing at my stomach. Hunger made the world spin.
“Maya,” I whispered, into the jagged swirling snow, but flakes filled my mouth, pecked at my face. The wind howled laughter.
Somehow, I staggered home. Somehow, I ended up in our kitchen. I stared at the food on the shelves and in the fridge, and knew that even if I could eat it, it wouldn’t be enough. Hunger had progressed too far; the pain in my belly had become too sharp.
“Mom,” I whispered, standing over where she slept on the couch.
“Matt? What’s the matter, honey?” The black flowers blossomed all over my field of vision, until there was nothing more to see.