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.
RULE #24
The body’s truth is not the only truth.
DAY: ∞; A BRIEF PAUSE, SOMEWHERE OUTSIDE OF TIME AND SPACE
“You’re being selfish,” Maya said, taking a Marlboro from a pack bent into the shape of a boy’s back pants pocket.
“No I’m not,” I said, and then looked around. “Where are we?”
We sat on a long bent piece of driftwood, on a beach, barefoot, cold surf crashing around our feet, thick fog obscuring the distance in every direction.
“Is this Providence?”
Maya shrugged. “Sort of.”
“When did we—how did we . . .” I looked at my hands in frustration, inspected my clothes, found no clues. “I don’t remember coming here.”
“You don’t come here. You just . . . end up here.”
“Oh,” I said, remembering everything—running barefoot, starving, through the streets, waking Mom up, seeing the terror and worry in her eyes, riding to the hospital . . . “It’s a dream.”
Maya shrugged. “Probably. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”
“Of course it does,” I said, feeling sadness seize my throat and moisten my eyes. “I was so happy to be talking to you. To have you back with us. But you’re not my sister. You’re just a part of my subconscious.”
She made a face. “That’s rude.”
The face was so perfectly Maya that I faltered, wondered: What if this is her? Really her?
She stared at the horizon. She didn’t look at me. Her hair was loose and wind-tossed. She wore what she wore the night she went to meet Tariq. Thin olive cardigan. Butch patched jeans. The T-shirt she made that said Destroy All Monsters! and had a drawing of a punk rock Mothra. The waves were getting higher, soaking us up to our knees by now. “What would you say to me if I was your sister?” she asked.
“I would ask you what happened.”
“And if I said I didn’t want to tell you? Or that it doesn’t have anything to do with you? Or that I’m fine? What would you actually say to me?”
“I don’t know,” I said after a while.
“Maybe that’s part of the problem.”
I picked up a rock, threw it into the water. The rules of physics seemed to behave pretty well in this particular dream. “Okay. Tell me more about the problem.”
“What does it matter what I say? I’m just a part of your subconscious.”
A wave crested higher, soaked me to my belly, the water bitter and cold, salt scouring me.
“You’re trying to win someone else’s fight for them,” she said, and shivered and hugged her knees to her chest. “But you’ll never even truly understand how they feel, or the way they’re hurting, so how can you hope to succeed?”
“I have to try,” I said. “I have to do something.”
“You need to understand who you are,” she said, and turned to me, and don’t ask me how but somehow I looked into those eyes and knew it was her, really truly her, Maya, somehow, her spirit or her soul or her subconscious. She took a final drag on her cigarette, then flicked it into the sea. “Try to fight someone else’s war, and you will end up one of the casualties. Believe me. I should know.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. She didn’t answer. I asked it again, louder, screaming now, but a wave was coming in, higher than the rest, crashing down over both of us, dragging us down and away.
RULE #25
If you don’t take care of your body, someone else might.
DAY: 20
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 2000
Scenes from a small-town emergency room at 3 a.m.: Man with pitchfork in arm.