The worst thing that can happen to your body is not that it gets fat, or it gets sick, or even that it gets badly damaged. The worst thing that can happen to your body is when someone takes away your right to control it.
DAYS: -1–-27
AVERAGE DAILY CALORIES, APPROX.: 1800
Panic woke me up. Pain jolted me back to consciousness. I opened my eyes and barely registered that I was back in the hospital. Not that where I was mattered. What mattered was the tube down my throat, the blinding pain of it. I wanted to claw at it, rip it away, but I was so weak I could barely budge my arms. I coughed and heaved and thrashed. I grabbed hold of the tube and tugged, triggering raw pain all the way down to my stomach, hearing the gross wet gristly sounds it made against the walls of my esophagus.
Machines made noise. People came. Held me down. A nurse explained that I had passed out from malnutrition, that I was in critical condition. I tried to roar out my rage but the tube muffled the sound into an agonized gargle. I wanted to spew fire and break bones and paralyze people, but none of my powers worked. Someone stabbed me with a needle and all of it went away.
“Do you know where you are?”
“Columbia Greene Memorial Hospital,” I said to the lady doctor in glasses I had seen on my previous trip to the ER. I was groggy, sedated, stuffed full of tube food.
“No, Matt, you were transferred three days ago to the Eden Park Rehab Center. Out on Route Sixty-six. Where the nursing home used to be?”
“Okay,” I said.
She talked to me for a while. Dimly, through the drugs, I remembered that we’d had this conversation before. I was still pretty out of it, but I was coming around. Enough to hold on to the basics. Mom had authorized them to do whatever it took to make me healthy. They had a whole eating-disorder clinic there. They wanted me to get better. They were going to give me the tools to love and respect myself. How did I feel about all of that?
I stared at her. I opened my mouth to speak. But how could words help? How could anyone else understand? And why did they need to? This was my fight. I shut my mouth and turned my head away.
In choosing silence, I finally knew why Maya had made the same choice. Her silence wasn’t always anger and pain—it was also healing.
Understand: time passed. I talked to doctors. Went to groups. Saw films. Met beautiful interesting sick people. Visited with Mom and Maya, when they came, which was tons. I accepted that I was sick, and I learned why I was sick, and I learned what I needed to do to get better. I passed room inspections. I got gold stars.
None of that matters.
Oatmeal.
Unflavored, unsweetened oatmeal.
Did you even know that this was a thing? It is. And it is disgusting. I ate a lot of it. Tasteless, boring nutrition. A crucial stage in nursing someone back from Eating Disorder Hell to the Land of the Living. Presumably to help bulimics get used to the act of eating again, something so bland they’d never binge on it and then feel terrible afterward. That hadn’t really been my main problem, but I had decided not to fight it anymore. I would go with what they wanted. I would let them help me.
The walls of Eden Park were bright blue. The linens were light green. The view out my window was about as interesting as unsweetened oatmeal. A bare field of turnips, empty because it was the wrong time of year, full of ice and snow and mud. And then a hill, in the distance. A tiny, unremarkable hill.
The interesting stuff was in the other direction. Where I couldn’t see. The highway full of government inspection trucks and tractors and bulldozers and journalists. The town beyond, where construction and demolition and renovation and assessment were ongoing. Hudson was on the national news every night for a while, with my neighbors giving breathless accounts of the events of that night to reporters from dozens of stations. The Great Hog Rampage. Exhaustive investigations were still in progress, but government inspectors said initial information indicated the company had skimped on necessary precautions as it closed up, which led to a systems failure on the pig cage locks. Towns beyond our borders were reporting raids from random rogue hogs, but nothing worse than a plundered garden or garbage can. Whatever mysterious force had marshalled all those animals into an organized bloodthirsty savage force for violent destruction had vanished. No witnesses, no security camera footage turned up any information about a boy with the supernatural ability to control an army of swine.
Cops and random vigilante assholes moved in packs through the town on motorcycles and piled into the backs of pickup trucks. Wielding shotguns, lassoes, pitchforks, torches. Anything that could be used to hurt and kill little lost swine. Militia mobs of all sizes moved through the forests on foot. Every few hours I’d hear a gunshot. One more attempted murder of a pig, because of me.
Bastien’s family had moved already, his father’s pre-existing plans to move to the Utica hog slaughterhouse having been sped up significantly.
If either one of them had tried to finger me as the bloodthirsty architect of the Great Hog Rampage, their allegations fell on disbelieving ears. And I didn’t exactly feel comfortable calling them up to compare notes and find out What Really Happened.
Dr. Kashtan came every day. She brought the Register-Star so I could follow the events as they unfolded. But Eden Park had no televisions, probably because you couldn’t watch a single channel for thirty seconds without being besieged by beautiful horrible unrealistic human bodies.
“Your fingernails may never fully recover,” she said after a week or so of oatmeal. When, I guess, she figured I was strong enough for bad news. “But the big problem is, you damaged your heart,” she said. Damaged. Heart. The words thudded against me. “Malnutrition has thinned and weakened the walls of your heart. It’s a muscle, after all. The starving human body cannibalizes all available tissue.”
When I was twelve, my mom learned she had high cholesterol. The news terrified me in ways I couldn’t put a finger on. Now I knew why. It was because for the first time I realized that our bodies are clumsy machines full of strange parts that need expensive maintenance—and we do things to them that have consequences we can’t anticipate.
“There will be residual effects, possibly for the rest of your life. Especially in autonomic regulation—which means that standing up, sitting down, anytime the heart needs to pump blood differently due to a shift in position, you may get light-headed, pass out, even experience cognitive changes—memory loss, compromised information processing . . . a lot of things. You may require surgery at some point.”
“Um, okay,” I said, hiding my fear. Then I ate some more unflavored, unsweetened Jell-O.
Yes. That, too, is a thing. And it is worse than the oatmeal. I spooned it into me, emptiness heaped onto emptiness. When it was gone, I was still the same person. In the same busted body.
I’m telling you the shortened version. I’m leaving out my lapses and relapses, my days when I wouldn’t eat, my frequent moments where the Boy in the Mirror would find me and mock my disgusting flabby soft pale grub-body. I’m condensing months into paragraphs.
Sometimes Mom and Maya came together, and sometimes one came alone. We talked about the devastation. We talked about the weather. We talked about Mom, and her own recovery, the therapy appointments, and the church-basement meetings. We talked about nothing. We talked.
I didn’t know what was real anymore. What had actually happened; what part I played.
Because what I remembered couldn’t possibly be true. There was no way Puny Matt murdered our whole town with an army of marauding swine.
The most likely explanation: I heard a whole lot of stories about a freak pig escape, and my mind filtered all of that through its own sickness and self-importance to produce a crazy story where I had supervillain abilities and used them to liberate a couple thousand pigs and then use them to burn the whole shitty town down, murdered our town with an army of marauding swine, and then summoned my sister up out of thin air, and she talked me into getting help.
Which would be worse? If it was all made up and I was merely crazy, or if it was true and I had been a monster?
The monster, definitely. Not because monsters are bad. But because I wasn’t one anymore.
And I couldn’t ask her. Not yet. Because if it was my damaged mind, I didn’t want her knowing how messed up I had really been.
“Can’t wait for you to see what a mob scene our stupid little town has become,” Maya said on a Monday morning when she visited me by herself. “Haven’t had this much excitement since that time when you were seven, and an allosaurus went tearing through downtown.”
“That was a blast,” I said.
I didn’t ask, Did you really appear beside me on an ice bridge I built to march my Swine Army across the Hudson River? Was any of that real? I couldn’t ask. For lots of reasons.
“This book is terrible,” Maya said, plucking On the Road from my hands.
“I love it,” I said, leaning forward to grab it back and feeling a sudden swoon. My old friends, the black stars, bloomed on the walls.
“Of course you do,” she said, blind to my sudden paleness. “It’s a book about male privilege.”
“It’s a book about men,” I said. “I’ll give you that much. But they don’t hurt women. They want to get away from the same nineteen fifties Ozzie and Harriet smiley, fake, evil male-dominated society that was oppressing women.”
“Abortions were illegal back then, you know. The pill hadn’t been invented. They ride around banging chicks, and those chicks get pregnant, and get stuck raising kids these irresponsible men will never help them with. Anyway, you only like the book because everybody knows these two guys were in love with each other, but too scared to ever admit it or do anything about it.”
“I guess,” I said. I did not say I like it because Dad liked Jack Kerouac or I liked it because Tariq gave it to me or I like it because Tariq likes it.
“Also?” she said. “Remember that this is the fifties. Jim Crow time. These guys couldn’t have gone driving around having wild adventures all over America if they were black. Lots of businesses wouldn’t serve them, lots of mechanics wouldn’t repair their cars, and they’d risk physical violence if they ended up in a whites-only ‘sundown town.’ So it’s a book about white privilege, too.” She handed me back the book.
“Maya,” I said. “Why did you choose him over us? Over me?”
She scooted closer to me. Her body felt tight and warm and strong. “Do you remember when we were little kids, how upset you used to get whenever I asked Mom about Dad?”
I didn’t.
“It was because you saw how upset she got. But as I got older, Mom and me started having more conversations about him. Who he was, what he was like, why they weren’t together.”
“She hardly ever said a word about him with me,” I said.
“That’s because you used to freak out.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“I do. Anyway, last summer Mom gave me his mother’s old mailing address, told me if I wanted to get in touch with him that was the only way that might work, and for all Mom knew the lady moved or died years ago. But she also told me that before I did that, I needed to know what really happened between them.” Maya looked at me, the hard, shrewd look that reminded me she was ten times stronger than me, and what on earth had I been thinking back when I thought I could save her? “Are you sure you want to know?”
“If you have to ask me that question, the answer is probably no,” I said. “But yes. I want to know.”
“He used to beat her. It was a terribly abusive relationship. She loved him, but he was horrible. And it took a long time for her to get up the courage to leave him forever and cut all ties with him.”
I was a drum. Empty inside. Echoing. Trying hard not to think about the words drumming into me.
“I know,” she said, and touched my wetted eyes. “That’s how I felt. I wanted to . . . I don’t know what. Tell him off? Kill him? Get revenge? It was dumb, but that’s what I thought.”
She took my hand and held it. I wondered if she knew how alike we were, in our hunger for justice, in our dangerous drive for revenge. Your sister takes things too far, her bandmate had said, and so, evidently, did I.
“So I reached out. Sent a letter. Said I wanted to meet. Used my bassist’s house as the mailing address. He wrote back right away. Said he’d always dreamed of getting this letter. Always felt angry that he was robbed of the chance to be a father. Said he wanted to meet. So we set it up. Arranged to meet at a diner on the thruway.
“I saw him before he saw me,” she said, and grabbed and then released a fistful of my hair. “I recognized him by the bright-red hair, the same as yours. And he was handsome like you, too.”
“I’m not handsome,” I muttered.
“Keep telling yourself that lie, kid,” she said. “Whatever makes you feel better. Anyway, I came in the door, and his back was to me. And I remembered what Mom said—about how much she loved him, how he had this weird charisma that kept her coming back even when she knew it was the wrong thing to do, that it was almost like magic—”
I thought of me controlling pigs with my smell, and wondered if maybe my father wasn’t a little bit of a hunger artist himself. If maybe everyone wasn’t. If maybe a certain amount of supernatural power lived inside us all.
“And I didn’t want to like this man. Not even a little. I thought, if I sit down and talk to him, even if it’s just to tell him off, I’ll listen to what he has to say. I’ll treat him with respect, because that’s the way I was raised. And what if he casts his spell on me? What if I let go of this anger, this hate? Are we going to just be . . . I don’t know, friends? Buddies? I didn’t want that. I didn’t want him to be in my life at all. But I couldn’t just walk away. Not after what he did to Mom. And got away with.”
“So what did you do?” I whispered.
“Had a bit of a nervous breakdown, I guess. I don’t remember my thought process at all. I didn’t think. I just . . . acted. He was sitting at the counter of this greasy-spoon restaurant, near the waitress’s station. A big glass pot of coffee was steaming on a Bunn burner, not three feet away. And I just—I . . .”
Here, my sister started crying. Really let loose. I put my arms around her. Held her so tight I felt it in my weakened, starved heart.
“I grabbed it,” she said finally, “the pot of coffee. I snatched it off the burner. And I swung it as hard as I could against his head.”
More sobbing. I remembered my dream, of the diner, of Maya, of exploding pots and an ocean of scalding hot coffee and an avalanche of broken glass. And her song: “Black Coffee.”
“The blood—” she said. “The smell . . . the burning. I thought I might have killed him. Blinded him. Disfigured him for life. I ran out the door, across the parking lot, through a little stretch of woods, to a Howard Johnson motel. I called my bassist. She picked me up. Promised not to tell. But I couldn’t go home. I was convinced he’d track me down, come find me, come kill me. Or call the cops, have them come and arrest me for assault. Put me in jail. But Ani was amazing. Knew just what to do. How to keep me safe. She called everybody over, the whole band—didn’t tell them what had happened, but said we had to go to Providence to do some recording. And there I’ve been, ever since.
“I didn’t choose him over you and Mom,” she said.
I couldn’t say it. But I had to. So I did. “But you did leave. You left us.”
She didn’t pause. Didn’t hesitate. Didn’t contemplate diving into one of her patented Maya Ice-You-Out silences. “I did. That wasn’t my intention, but it’s what happened. It was really dumb. And selfish. And the whole time I was there, I kept coming up with rationalizations, ways to explain this that didn’t involve me being a jerk, and I could choose not to see what it was doing to you and Mom. But now I see what a crock of shit all that was.” Without blinking, she said, “Mom talked to Tariq.”
Time stopped. Stars imploded. Whole continents slid into the sea. I remembered the questions I’d been too afraid to ask when she’d said, It’s no good to be alone. I said, “Whaaa,” and it went on and on while my weak hungry heart wobbled. “Why did . . . Mom . . . talk to him?”
“She went to curse him out, actually. For breaking your heart.”
“Oh.”
“She’s a smart lady. As a general rule she knows lots more than she lets on.”
“I know,” I whispered, overwhelmed and dizzy and not from faulty autonomic regulation this time, “but I . . . didn’t she . . . how did she . . .”
“She loves you no matter what. That’s what’s important for you to know.”
So the conversation I was most afraid of having really didn’t need to happen at all. Okay. That was something.
Maya got up off the bed, went to the window. Her spiky brown hair had been freshly dyed black. Her every step was full of the confidence that would help her conquer the world. I had questions. So many questions. But there would be time. We were both broken, but we were both getting better. Which maybe everyone is.
She hummed a melody, lovely and sad, something I recognized from the eight-song solo demo album she’d been working on. My sister had found a way to channel our addictive/obsessive character traits into something positive. To create, instead of destroy. Maybe I could, too. Eventually.
“Here,” she said, and left a Ziploc bag on my bedside table. “Since you stole mine while I was away. I know you like these. So I made some for you. Probably not as good as Mom’s.”
I ate that tuna-fish sandwich slowly, savoring the too-thickly-sliced challah and the excessive mayonnaise and the touch of lime, chewing every bite a couple dozen times, and when it was gone I felt way closer to being Better than after a whole mountain of unflavored unsweetened oatmeal.