Lobster boat. Men who work lobster boats are strong. Their arms are thick with muscles and hair. Their chests are broad and mighty. They laugh loudly and drink whiskey. They get in fights. They enjoy watching football. My father belongs to that strange and foreign nation, the Country of Men, to which I have no membership.
I draped my jeans over the full-length mirror, then hung a hoodie there, then covered it up with as many clothes as I could add without causing it to collapse.
It had been a long time since I stared out the window and dreamed up elaborate stories starring my father. Watching the road and concentrating all my energy on magically conjuring him up. My knuckles white on the windowsill, my forehead scrunched to high hell with wanting. Listening for the sound of truck tires on gravel. Praying.
I’m not that desperate stupid kid anymore.
But still.
I’ve read The Art of War. I’ve taken notes. I’ve learned a lot about how to fight and win.
I’ve read The Dharma Bums three times. And I’ve been waiting patiently for the Hudson High School library’s lone other book by Jack Kerouac to be returned. On the Road, it’s called, and that sounds like my father, too.
And I think I might be kind of considering converting—to Buddhism.
RULE #6
Every superhero, every Chosen One, goes through a painful and difficult process of Becoming. On this, all the relevant literature is in agreement. Ask any comic book aficionado, any movie buff. The heroes doubt themselves, even when confronted with irrefutable evidence. They’ve spent their whole lives listening to weak and powerless people who hate and fear anything that is different, who say that superhuman abilities simply don’t exist, and they believe it.
The warrior studying the Art of Starving will pass through a period of pain and confusion. Doubt. Fear. This is normal. You are learning that a different set of rules applies to you.
DAY: 3
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 500
The walk to school was one thing. Cold morning, no wind—maybe the stink of the slaughterhouse was a little bit worse than normal, but not so bad that I stopped to wonder.
As soon as I stepped foot inside Hudson High, though, I knew something was different.
The place stunk. Like: way worse than normal. Mold and rotten meat seemed to fill the lockers; the seats in every classroom stunk of decades of ill-washed ass. Even from across the school I could smell the gym, an inanimate object brought to screaming life by dripping sweat and the grimy festering smell of fear. The cafeteria throbbed with waterlogged broccoli, clots of hamburger meat, dirty hairnets.
First-period math class, I looked around the room in shock, to smell all the stinks these smiling catalog-model boys and girls carried around with them. Boys whose boxer shorts were walking atrocities. Girls reeking of cigarette smoke. I could tell who wore hand-me-downs; how many times they’d been handed down.
A flood of smells everywhere I went, and I felt certain I would drown in it. Between classes, I ran for the bathroom, knowing I was about to puke, but the smell in there was so bad it stopped me at the door. The digested dinners of a hundred sallow boys. The pungent boutique of bottom-grade swamp-rot marijuana.
Stumbling back to class, nose buried in the crook of my elbow, I almost collided with two girls, Regan and Jeanine, best friends since forever, and knew at once that Jeanine had been orally intimate with Regan’s boyfriend that very morning.
Fear had me off-balance, made me desperate to know what the hell was going on, frantic for proof that either I was right, or that I was merely going insane. I had to test the validity of what my nose told me was true.
“Oh, hey, Jeanine, didn’t see you on the bus this morning.”
“No,” she said, panic surging through her, panic that had a smell like wet dog, “I got a ride.”
“From who?” Regan asked, and that was all I needed to hear. I pretended to get a call on my cell, held it to my ear and said, “Hello?” as I hurried off, wailing inside. In that moment, insanity or delusion would have been so much easier to handle. Was this happening? Was I able to perceive things by . . . smelling them?
“I want this to stop,” I whispered out loud.
But no one was listening. No one could help me.
RULE #7
You are your nose.
Smell is the sense most closely associated with memory. It’s the most evocative sense—the one that causes your brain to work the hardest. Scientists now believe that the nose can actually distinguish between over a trillion unique odors, making it vastly more sophisticated than any other sense organ.
Every day, you breathe in clouds of unspeakably disgusting stuff. Every single person you pass is surrounded by a floating swamp of grotesque debris—dead skin, fecal flakes, microscopic filth. Your puny human senses keep you blessedly ignorant of these facts. Until you discover you can hone them.
DAY: 3, CONTINUED . . .
Hunger was the answer. It had to be. Hunger had flipped a switch, sent my nose into overdrive.
I skipped class. Went to the library. Ransacked Wikipedia. Learned about the nose, the human sense of smell, how they worked. How they could be controlled. Kept my nose in my elbow, breathing in my threadbare sweater and the pale flesh beneath. The stink of me was familiar, at least, and unlikely to make me lose my mind. Slowly, painstakingly, I opened myself up. Let myself smell the school beyond. The library at least provided a buffer, the warm calm smell of books, paper, glue, hot computer plastic, cheap copier toner. By the time lunchtime came around, I wasn’t ready to risk the cafeteria, but I did have a plan.
Breath held, I sprinted to the boys’ locker room. I took hand towels from the laundry bin beside the shower, each one damp with a different boy’s sweat.
I went to the side doors where the smokers go, where the alarm is broken, propped it open with the brick strategically left loose in the wall for that purpose. I sat down, outside, gratefully gulping down cold October air. Then I held the first towel to my nose and sniffed.
I smelled cotton and sweat; a flood of body odor that made me gag. The same horrific tidal wave of stink.
I shut my eyes. I let myself settle, rooting myself in the stomach-churn of hunger that radiated out through my entire body. I took ten breaths like that, letting go of a lifetime’s learning that hunger was something to be avoided, sated. Hunger was my friend. Maybe hunger was my friend. I sniffed again. Sniffed deeper. Let my nose do the work; let it sort through that churning stew of revolting pieces and find . . . find what?
And then I found: something. I wasn’t sure what. A shape, a ghost. An outline seemed to glimmer: a person, conjured up by smell.
I breathed deeper. I let go of everything I thought I knew about the sense of smell. About what my nose could do. I let go of my own small-mindedness. My own lack of imagination. My own disbelief that my nose was capable of this thing that was . . . more.