It's Kind of a Funny Story

But then there are moments when it comes together. The Shift hasn’t happened yet, maybe it never will, but sometimes—just enough times to give me hope—my brain jars back into where it’s supposed to be. When I feel one of these (I call them the Fake Shifts) I should always eat, although I don’t; I sometimes stubbornly, foolishly try to hold the feeling and get things done while my mind can operate, and neglect to eat, and then I’m back where I started. But oh, when I slip back into being okay when I’m around food, watch out. It’s all going in. Eggs and hamburgers and fries and ice cream and marmalade and Fruity Pebbles and cookies and broccoli, even—and noodles and sauce. Screw you; I’m going to eat all of you. I’m Craig Gilner, and I will make myself strong from you. I don’t know when my body chemistry is going to line up to let me eat again, so you are all getting in me right now.

And that feels so good. I eat it all, and the man is away from his rope. He’s busy down there eating everything that falls inside, running around like a chicken with its head cut off, the head on the floor, munching food of its own. All my cells take the food in and they love it and they love my brain for it and I smile and I am full; I am full and functional and I can do anything, and once I eat—this is the amazing part—once I eat I sleep, I sleep like I should, like a hunter who just brought home a kill. . . but then I wake up and the man is back, my stomach is tight, and I don’t know what it was that got me to have a Slaughter eating experience. It’s not pot. It’s not girls. It’s not my family. I’ve started to think it must just be chemistry, in which case we’re looking for the Shift and we haven’t found it yet.

six

Night is here except for a thin gray at the edge of the sky and the trees are thick with rain and the drizzle is pissing on me as I come up to my house. No sunsets in spring. I lean in and ring the buzzer, streaked bronze from years of use—the most used buzzer in the building.

“Craig?”

“Hi, Mom.”

Bzzzzzzzzt. It growls deeply, amplified by the lobby. (Lobby. Mailroom, more like, just a compartment for mailboxes.) I throw open one door and then the other. It’s warm in the house, and it smells like cooked starch. The dogs greet me.

“Hi, Rudy. Hi, Jordan.” They’re little dogs. My sister named them; she’s nine. Rudy is a mutt; my father says he’s a cross between a chihuahua and a German shepherd, which must’ve been some wild dog sex. I hope the German shepherd was the guy. Otherwise the German shepherd girl probably wasn’t too satisfied. Rudy has a pronounced under-bite; he looks like two dogs where one is eating the other’s head from below, but when I take him for a walk, girls love him and talk to me. Then they realize that I’m young and/or messed up, and they move on.

Jordan, a Tibetan spaniel, looks like a small, brown lion. He’s small and cute but completely crazy. His breed was devised in Tibet for the purpose of guarding monasteries. When he came into our home, he immediately fixated on the house as a monastery, the bathroom as the most sacred monastic cell, and my mom as the Abbess. You can’t go near my mother without Jordan protecting her. When she’s in the bathroom in the morning, Jordan has to be in there with her, placed up on the counter by the sink as she brushes her teeth.

Jordan barks at me. Since I started losing it, he started barking at me. It’s not something any of us mention.

“Craig, how was Dr. Minerva?” Mom comes out of the kitchen. She’s still tall and skinny, looking better each year. I know that’s weird to think, but what the hell—she’s just a woman who happens to be my mom. It’s amazing how she looks more stately and confident as she gets older. I’ve seen pictures of her in college and she didn’t look like much. Dad is looking like he made a better decision every year.

“It . . . was okay.” I hug her. She’s taken such good care of me since I got bad; I owe her everything and I love her and I tell her these days, although every time I say it, it gets a little diluted. I think you run out of I love yous.

“Are you still happy with her?”

“Yeah.”

“Because if you’re not we’ll get you someone else.”

You can’t afford to get anyone else, I think, looking at the crack in the wall next to my mom. This crack in our front hallway has been there for three or four years. Dad paints over it and it just recracks. We’ve tried putting a mirror over it but it’s a strange place to put a mirror—on one side of a hallway—and my sister started calling it the Vampire Mirror to tell if people who came into the house were vampires, and it came down after a few weeks, when I came home stoned and stumbled into it. Now there’s an exposed crack again. It’s never going to get fixed.

“You don’t need to get anyone else.”

“How’s your eating? Are you hungry?”

Yes, I think. I am going to eat the food my mom made me. I’m still in control of my mind and I have medication and I am going to make this happen.

“Yes.”