As previously stated, the manufacturers of the human body have a very strict returns policy. You can’t simply snap your fingers and say, “Okay, I’m done, take it away, boys.” You can’t just decide to stop being alive. You have to do something. Usually something pretty sucky.
THE LAST DAY
TOTAL CALORIES: 0
When I got to the slaughterhouse it was abandoned, shut down for the night, which would have been unheard of a month before, but these were the final days of its transition into obsolescence. The workers were home in their beds, asleep, unemployed, poised to lose everything, so no one could stop or even see me as I raised my arms and watched the massive hydraulic loading bay door open slowly as I walked in and followed the familiar metal walkway that my mom used to take me and Maya down when we were little. She’d point out the pigs in their cages and then take us down to the huge long freezer hall where the cleaned skinned hacked-apart carcasses were kept, always careful not to let us anywhere near the bloody slaughter rooms. I blinked those memories away.
How had I gotten here?
I was outside my body, watching myself. I was a force of nature. I could do anything. No one could stop me. What did it matter what a forest fire did? Who was to blame for a flood?
Easy as thinking about it, I used my power and erased my image from every camera I walked past.
I felt them as I moved into the main bay, every pig asleep and dreaming in its cage. They tingled like extensions of my body, limbs I never knew I had, and when I whispered, “Awake,” I could feel them open their eyes, fear keeping them silent, confusion making them anxious, for they were aware of me as a predator, but they perceived no threat from me.
Unlocking the cages was the only truly difficult part of the whole process. I had to kneel and put both hands on the metal grid floor, extend myself through it to the entire iron system of cages and doors and locks, smell the overwhelming almost-fatal stink of the ocean of pig shit that waited beneath me, for every cage was built on the same grid, so excrement could pass easily through. I felt for the locks, fumbled around the bars and slotting mechanisms, grunted and thrusted a couple times before they moved, and then they only rattled against their own restraints. And then I was shaking every door, lifting and pushing, pulling and easing, and the pigs began to whistle and snort anxiously, and then—the gates swung open as one. Two thousand pigs stepped daintily into freedom.
Pigs are omnivorous. Pigs eat people all the time. And some of these pigs were big, with fierce tusks and eyes full of rage. The kind of totally understandable rage you’d have if you spent your whole life in a cage so small you could not turn around.
And once they were out, when it was too late to turn back—that’s when it occurred to me to be afraid. They might eat me, I thought.
They stood still, or wandered around, snuffling nervously, socializing awkwardly. Once again, as I had at Bastien’s party, I pierced the veil of separation. I understood that the same divine spark lived inside of them. I could feel on my skin, in my arms, in my brain, the army of docile minds at my command. When I turned and headed for the exit, they followed me.
Here is something you maybe don’t know. Up close, like really close, close enough to make eye contact and feel weird about it . . . Pigs are freaky. There is something so close to human about their faces. And something so intelligent, too. If science discovered tomorrow that pigs were a race of hyperintelligent aliens who had spent thousands of years studying humanity to prepare for some horrific mass extermination, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.
Pigs are monstrous-looking things. And I marched my own army of monsters into town.
As we moved, I wrapped myself in a thick wide cloud of pheromone smell, a fog that said, Do not look here, there is nothing to see, there is no one, which was as close as I could come to an invisibility cloak.
They grew boisterous as we marched. They had never experienced freedom before. They had never felt night air on their skin. They made loud noises. They rooted in garbage. They fought. They did not mind the cold. Whether through pheromones or mere force of will, I controlled them as effortlessly as my own arms. And as we went, my anger seeped into them.
I felt the layout of the town ahead of me. Smelled where everyone who had ever done me wrong was sleeping. I broke two hundred pigs off from the pack, sent them to Ott’s house. I sent two hundred more to the high school.
Destroy, I told them. Break windows, tusk down doors, get inside, roar, squeal, swarm, rip down curtains, shred paintings, crush toys. Harm no people, but ruin everything they own. Make them wish they were dead. Eat whatever you can eat. Shit on everything.
Lights went on as we walked. Screams sounded. I felt bad, knowing how many good and innocent people would be terrified in their beds by my squealing army. And dimly, distantly, I wondered if so much collateral damage was necessary, when who I really wanted to hurt was my father.
But no. There were lots of people I really wanted to hurt. And I would get to all of them.
McDonald’s. Wal-Mart. The correctional facility. Everywhere people made a living exploiting other people, working them like animals, I broke off a smaller group of pigs to decimate and disrupt. And I could see them, hear their breath and watch the world through their eyes. Feel their joy at shattering glass, snarfing down gaping mouthfuls of frozen french fries, shredding stuffed animals, tipping pharmacy shelves into a domino effect of chain reaction chaos. I tasted the food they ate. But it did not diminish my hunger.
I took my pigs through the rich neighborhood. I ravaged every expensive beautiful thing I would never have. And each new spray of broken glass thrilled me, rocked me with waves of pleasure. Every act of violence and destruction thrummed in my body like a chord on the guitar of me. To punish the guilty, to destroy the proud—it felt good, righteous, intoxicating, like when you beat a hard level in a video game.
But when each act was over, I was hungry again. Hollow again. Violence temporarily filled the void, but it faded fast, and the void remained. Cold emptiness and the sound of sirens.
I took off my shoes, felt the frozen earth beneath me. Felt every single fire. Breathed out, fed them oxygen, saw them swell. I fanned the flames with every step I took. A hundred spiraling swirls of flame blossomed behind me as we moved.
A gun shot. Two gun shots, followed by pigs shrieking. Pain flared through my shoulders, where one of my pigs had been shot. The other pigs felt it, too, the agony threaded through all of us as we shared one porcine mind. They squealed as one, and then they got angrier.
By the time I got to where I was going, I had sent so many off on separate missions of violent mayhem that I only had three hundred pigs left, but that was more than enough to utterly destroy Bastien’s house. At a clap of my hands they charged the doors. Two climbed onto the backs of others, to better bash in windows. Smash, I thought, ravage. Crush, dismantle, gut, mutilate—the thesaurus pulsed in my veins, the sheer pleasure of words combining with the joy of violence.
I smelled them inside. Both of them.
“Come out!” I called to Bastien, but mostly his father, this man who could so heartlessly make decisions that hurt so many people, and never be punished for it, and would in fact most likely be rewarded, promoted, considered a hero for putting more money into the pockets of corporate shareholders.
Silence. My pigs paused, listening.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” I said gleefully, laughing, quoting a movie monster. “We’re just going to bash your brains out!”
Pigs poured through the broken-down door. They charged up the twin staircases, barreled into the kitchen and dining room. Broke beautiful expensive things in an orgy of glee.
Remember: throughout this process, I was barely half-present. Watching myself move, somewhere between joy and terror. Controlling the pigs, telling them where to go and what to do . . . it never occurred to me to wonder, Can I do this crazy thing? I stretched out my arms, and it was done.
So when I held out both hands, palms up, and then reached out—feeling my reach go beyond my physical body, felt it go beyond the limitations of time and space. I felt like I could have grabbed anything, a fistful of the sun, a rock from Jupiter, my father. I would get to him next, when I finished this warm-up. He was the main event. For right now, what I wanted was much closer.
“Come,” I whispered.
Bastien’s father appeared at the top of the stairs. I had never seen him before. He was a short man and pudgy. Wearing pajamas that were too big for him. Rubbing his eyes, barely able to see without the glasses he’d left on his bedside table when the screams of hell and breaking glass had pulled him out of sleep.
“Oh, God.”
Bastien appeared behind him. Half-asleep but also half-smiling. Probably confident he was having a dream. He said, “What’s going on, Matt? What the hell—what’s going on?”
“Be still,” I said, and the pigs were still. Silent. Staring at Bastien and his father like the wise freaky semihuman creatures that they were.
And now, here, fear began to leak into Bastien’s face. The pigs had been a simple freak occurrence at first. What did he care what they did to a house they were about to move out of anyway? But now he knew that something else was going on. Something he had no explanation for. He thought maybe I really was something to be feared.
“What the hell are you?” he asked, and took another step forward, confidently, menacingly.
I was not, in fact, a movie monster. Movie monsters know what to say. Villains always have some terrifying retort up their sleeves—Your worst nightmare; The last thing you’ll ever see; You can call me Death, etc. Me, I just made the hogs roar. Wail. Shriek. Bellow.
Wondered if my father could hear them, wherever he was. If the sirens and bells would wake him up and he would know that they tolled for him, that the Angel of Death was making his way through the night to punish him.
“Bastien?” his father said, practically blind as a bat and looking for his son to explain all this away.
A twitch of my finger, and the hog closest to him made a sudden lunge, swung his head, grazed Bastien’s father’s calf with one tusk. He yelp-screamed, stepped back, but did not stumble. A fall would have been fatal. They would have torn him to shreds in an instant.
Bastien took a step forward. The last of his bravery fled from his face.
I saw how it would happen. Two hogs would go in for each leg. They would bring him down swiftly, pulling away great chunks of skin, and tugging in different directions once he was on the ground. His father would go down two and a half seconds later. His screams would bring the rest of the pack in, a dozen squealing roaring grunting animals cleaving and chomping bone and skin and muscle and inner organs.
And what would that change? What would killing them accomplish that I hadn’t already done? Better to let them live with this, with a story to tell, with psychological scars. Better to let them be haunted.
I turned and left. My pigs followed.
I shivered at how close I had come to murdering them.
Murder is special. The savage monstrous part of my brain that had taken control told me so. To kill someone is to enter into a relationship with them, one that will last as long as you live.
You should save it for someone really important to you.
By now our sleepy small-town night was as loud as noontime in Manhattan. I followed the smell of my father, faint but getting stronger, as I moved west. To the river. Through downtown, along Columbia Street, the poor part of town, where my pigs remained in tight formation and did not do the slightest bit of damage to people or property. Turning north on Second Street, down the hill, past the Shacks, across the train tracks, to the river.
He was there. Across the river. Could pigs swim? The only other way to cross would be to take a ten-mile detour, following the river south to the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, walking them to the other side, and then walking north again through Catskill and then Athens and who knew how many other towns standing between me and him.
But no, there were other options. Of course there were. I had all the power in the universe.
I knelt down. My knees scraped frozen mud, but the river itself moved too fast to freeze over. I stuck both hands into the water. A weaker boy would have winced at the sharp stabbing coldness of the water, but I was stronger than it was. I saw its secrets, saw how badly it wanted to be ice.
I stood. I raised both arms.
With a stretching sound, ice formed on the river in front of me. A small jagged triangle at first, but growing. Widening. Extending.
I stepped out onto it. Pushed my arms forward and watched the ice expand. Pigs stepped out. The lights of Athens sparkled like frozen fireflies on the black water ahead. Black stars filled the air. My mind balked at the magnitude of what I was asking it to do.
You can do this, I whispered, even as I staggered. I would level every city between me and him. I would reduce the whole Hudson Valley to shit-stinking rubble.
Again, I staggered. This time I dropped to one knee. The ice cracked and thinned beneath me. A piece broke off, and a pig fell, screaming, into the river.
Cracks formed around my hands, where they pressed against the thinning ice. Giant squids and white whales and plesiosaurs swam in the black water beneath. My mind in overdrive, summoning up new horrors, new monsters, snatching out of the ether anything that might be of some assistance in burning down the world.
Screaming for help.
I pulled myself back up. Stood there. Tried to take a step. Couldn’t.
“Please,” I whispered, possibly not out loud. And then: I felt the soft weight of a hand on my shoulder.
All the anger leaked out of me.
Because I knew whose hand it was.
I turned around, unbelieving, and whispered, “Maya?”
“I heard you calling me,” she said.
“You . . . how did you . . . ?”
“I can do things, too,” she said and wrapped both arms tight around me. “What, do you think you’re the only one?”