“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.