And I realized something, somehow. For myself! Not with my supersenses, but with my mind.
Had I not been born gay, I might have loved it, too. I would have been welcomed into the fold. One of us, they would have chanted, like the Freaks in that movie, and I would have lived happily for my whole life in Hudson. I would never have seen the fear and anger and hatred my neighbors and classmates carried around inside them, aimed at everyone and everything that’s different, because I would have shared those fears and hatreds with them. I wouldn’t have known how bad it was, kind of like how you can’t smell the smell of your own house because it’s so familiar.
A ludicrous sentence shivered up my spine and into my brain, shocking me, terrifying me, delighting me, and almost escaping my lips:
Thank God I am gay.
“How is school?” she asked, and didn’t look up from her mug.
“Fine,” I said, because coffee or no coffee, we hadn’t reached the place where I could tell her about how Ott slammed the locker door on my hand last week or Nate Smith threatened to rape me.
“That’s good,” she said, and got up to pretend to busy herself with something in a drawer. Gracefully, in swift flicks timed to the rhythm of the conversation, I scraped small forkfuls of pancake into the napkin spread in my lap. Then I crushed it in both fists and slipped it into my backpack and went to school with syrup-stinking hands I never once let myself lick.
My mother was worried. I didn’t need Starvation Superpowers to see it, smell it, hear it hiding between her words. And I probably wasn’t half as slick as I thought I was, disposing of all those uneaten pancake atoms.
But I escaped without having to ingest a crumb. I’d fight my next battle when I came to it.
School passed swiftly, effortlessly. And by evening the worry was still there, but bigger, or maybe by then I was hungry enough to see it for what it really was. Her worry was a knotted swirl, a tapestry woven of a thousand threads. Her fear of the factory shutting down or of losing more friends to layoffs; her fear of getting laid off herself. Her love of the town and her fear of the future. Her worry about me, what I was going through. Her fears about Maya.
Mom and me barely spoke at dinner—and whenever she wasn’t looking I tossed food pieces into the Ziploc bag I’d left open in my lap—but I could hear so much even when she wasn’t speaking.
For the first time since my powers emerged, I wished I couldn’t.
RULE #13
Breath is the tool for uniting the body and the mind.
Chinese traditional medicine calls the energy that circulates in your body chi—which means breath. When you breathe, you’re literally sucking in life force, the flow of which sustains all living things. Sophisticated sages can draw great strength and nourishment from the air. And air has no calories. Master martial artists are said to be able to control the flow of chi through their bodies, and even project it out of their bodies to heal or to harm.
DAY: 10
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 1000
Hunger stretched out time, made me move faster without realizing it, made me seem manic and mad while, inside, I sat patiently in a bubble of calm. Words came out jangly and overflowing; sentences doubled up and intertwined.
The tater tots taught me early on how losing focus for even a second made my mind waver from its goal, left me defenseless against my body’s base and fleshy needs. My mind, it seemed, needed to grow stronger along with my senses.
At school I made myself sit and be still. I ignored my classmates, the words and emotions they disturbed the universe with, the stink of their bodies and their unwashed clothes and their hormones crackling in the air like popping corn. I could see now that I wasn’t universally hated, the way I’d imagined I was. Apathy, sweet and dull as gasoline, was the smell that came off most of them. And the hate of the actual homophobes had lost its sting, their coiled violence and cocked fists had ceased to frighten me.
Mostly.
Mostly I felt strong and unstoppable. Better than everyone. Superhuman.
But those moments still came. The ones where I caught someone staring, and shriveled inside. Where I saw my own reflection unexpectedly, and gasped with horror at the ugliness of it. When I felt weak and doomed. Subhuman.
You’re wondering, how is that possible, Matt? How can you be both sub-and superhuman?
That’s one of the more infuriating bugs in the human software. You can have two ideas that are total opposites and believe them both completely.
Of course, I ate. I couldn’t just starve myself. Not yet, anyway. But I ate very little, and every day I ate less.
When your body has passed a certain hunger threshold, food becomes the only thing you can focus on. The only thing you can think about. Pains pop up in the strangest places. Joints creak and scream, and their screaming sounds like the names of food. Very little is truly frightening, because you have learned the identity of your true worst enemy. And, spoiler alert: it’s you.
More than once, I spat out a strip of raw pink bleeding skin I’d unthinkingly torn away from a fingernail. So, another important thing to know about hunger: it can drive you into mild fugue states of self-cannibalism.
I sat, and I listened. I smelled. Did people know, looking at me, that I was transforming from a helpless sissy into something unspeakably powerful? I could barely see them, my peers, the people whose respect I once craved, the people whose hate I once dreaded.
At home, I kept researching.
Online I read about food developed by cultures with severely limited resources, and found tsampa. Tibetan roasted barley flour. Mountain food. Sherpas and yak herders take it with them on long journeys. Maximum nutrition, minimum space. Eat ten tablespoons a day—about 800 calories—and you should be able to keep your hunger in check. Keep the body alive. I found a place that shipped to Hudson, and put two ten pound bags on my mom’s debit card.
I clicked from Wikipedia to pornography. I watched superhuman torsos writhe and flail and grapple. Chiseled manly faces clenched in pain and pleasure. My stomach, angry at being ignored, clenched so tight I gasped. Black stars flashed in the air all around me, spiral galaxies of brain cells dying.
I stood up and collapsed.
I don’t think I was out for very long. If I was out at all.
The human body can go for up to thirty days without eating, I told myself over and over.
I was fine.
I was fine.
RULE #14
Should you ever need a reminder of what a savage animal your body is—should you ever start to doubt that you are chained to a wild creature—just hurt someone. Hurt them bad. And see how your body feels after.
DAY: 11
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 800
I invented a thing.
Food masturbation, I called it. In as much explicit detail as possible, I imagined a hot and heavy scene of mouth intercourse with cheeseburgers or pizza or the seafood fra diavolo at La Concha D’Oro in Catskill.