My part in the Martin Nicholls affair started months ago, when he called to ask if I would drive the 140 miles or so from Madison, Wisconsin, to Wausau that same evening. I had just thrown my bags down on my living room floor, hung my captain’s cap on the hat rack, set my pilot wings on the kitchen table, and was settling in for two weeks off, deciding what to do with my free time, when the phone rang.
No, it wasn’t an emergency emergency, he said, but he needed an old friend, someone he could trust. Yes, tonight. It had to be tonight. It had been years since college; he would be so happy to see me in person and catch up. Could I leave right now? Please don’t tell anyone, he asked, he couldn’t handle any press sniffing around his business again.
You might remember Martin Nicholls, if you’re a sports fan. Day after the Packers’ last-second 21-20 victory over San Francisco four or five years back, Martin held a rushed, end-of-day press conference where he announced his departure from the NFL to his estate in upper Wisconsin.
Big news, for a first-round draft pick to leave mid-season. Made front page headlines for a few days. Soon, however, his story was bowled over by some sports scandal involving price-fixing or something, and Martin Nicholls happily disappeared from the limelight. After that he split from his beautiful model wife, and then he was alone.
I looked at the clock and reviewed my options. It was 7:30 p.m. For him to call me after twelve years, out of the blue, alarmed me. He could have been suicidal. Perhaps I could talk him into a program. I agreed to come that night.
“Adios,” he said, and hung up.
Three hours later a 767 screeched overhead. I was near the airport, standing in front of a supermarket in an urban part of town outside Wausau. Martin had given me instructions to wait in the parking lot of the Ranchero Market on North 17th Avenue and wait for his call to the pay phone.
Another plane roared. Made me homesick. Not for my home, for the plane. I can’t stand not being in the air for too long. Honestly, I found the idea of two weeks off utterly depressing. With no wife, no kids, and nothing holding me back except four walls, a roof, and the payments on them both, the time ahead loomed before me like a lonely highway in the desert.
For me, nothing beats the air. I have the displeasure of having been born in the wrong body, as the wrong animal. When I was four I leapt from the play structure at my preschool—I’d just known that I could fly. And I did, for about two seconds.
Weeks later, after the cast was taken off my arm, I tried it again. I thought it would be different this time. It was. I broke a leg. After that I stopped trying to fly.
But the love of flight had taken hold. Posters of World War II aviators, models of P-51 Mustangs and Boeing 314 Dixie Clippers, and other paraphernalia for my imagination consumed all available wall and dresser space. Once the comic books started, my mother sat me down for a chat.
Without real wings, I settled on being a pilot. I received my first in-flight training at sixteen—a surprise birthday present from my father—and flew my own grasshopper illegally the year after that. From there I earned my private pilot certificate, my commercial license, and my flight instructor certificates and found work for Belle Airlines. That was thirty-five years ago, which makes me a veteran.
I think about it sometimes. It. The end. I can’t fly forever, and in a pilot’s life I’m passed my prime. Morbid considerations, maybe, but considerations nonetheless. I’ve always thought I’d like to die in flight. I used to think I’d crash a small pond jumper into an empty barn, or fly high enough for the air pressure to dissipate and the engines fail. There I would eject with no parachute and—
The phone rang.
“Here’s what I need.” Martin’s words came out in an avalanche. “Can you write this down—don’t forget it, I need it, and you have to get exactly what I need, what I need right now—”
I pulled out a pen and paper. He sounded much different, agitated, like a man losing control of himself. I’d seen it before. In the air you see a lot of things, one of them being people panicking. Panic attacks are common up there. It starts slow: at first a person can’t breathe. Then they look around, all wide-eyed and crazy, and sometimes they just spit their speech like a child spits their food: messy and mushy.
“Here it is.” Martin took a deep breath, which sounded labored and wheezy. “Twelve whole chickens, two pork loins, three tri-tips, a New York steak, six slabs of bacon, fourteen packages of processed bologna, ten packages of hot dogs like you get at the baseball park—chicken, beef, whatever they got, the more meat in them the better—forty or fifty cans of Vienna sausages—on second thought, just buy whatever they have in stock, the hot dogs I mean—a rump roast or two or seven, eight packs of pork ribs, ten or fifteen packs of hot links, however many whole frozen turkeys they have today, and clean out their selection of ham hocks.”
I finished writing. “Is that all?”
Martin cleared his throat, coughed, spoke. “Can you get me some oats? I need the fiber.”
“Is that all?”
“Some roast beef, prime rib . . .” He then listed off another dozen or so items that on second thought were absolutely vital.
“Martin, this will cost at least—”
“I have a tab. Just give them my name. They know me.”
“You have a tab?”
“Jesus Christ, I was MVP, remember? They know who I am.” He talked like I was stupid or something. But no MVP I knew, or anyone, ever, had a tab for meat at the grocery. Unless—
“You gonna tell me what this is for? I just drove three hours to get here. Are you having a party or something?”
He snickered. “Party? Yeah, sure. You and me, bud. There’ll be drinks, dancing, steaks!” He laughed and laughed, then choked, coughed, sputtered. “Just get here. Please. Here’s the address . . .”
I wrote it down, hung up the phone, and went inside.
He was telling the truth, too. The man had a running tab for meat.
After three attendants packed my trunk, back seat, and floors full of frozen meat, I sped off, the meat piled so high I couldn’t see out the back window. Soon the city lights faded far behind me. I drove out of the city, fifteen or twenty miles, into the wilderness, and there was no longer any need to see out the back window, for I was all alone.
I wound through a forest of birch and cedar trees so thick the moonlight never touched the floor. I ascended a mountain towards my old, isolated friend’s even more isolated estate, and soon found myself at a gated mansion set far back at the top. The twelve-foot high gate was already open. Vines snaked around the bars. Dead leaves flew up as my car passed. The gate shut behind on its own, and I drove the last two hundred feet up to the face of Martin Nicholls’s manor.
I stepped out of the car, heard the birds first. They were all around me. If you remember the news story of Martin’s seclusion upstate, you may also remember that he’d retired on an old bird sanctuary.
I turned as a hooded oriole perched itself on my car’s antenna. To my left I identified a black-headed gull, several sparrows, a warbler, even a mountain bluebird. Birds aren’t usually out at night. These ones were.
Overgrown shrubs and bushes and trees lined the property. Flowers had been planted, had grown, matured, and died; now their skeletons wound around the house. All the foliage (the entire estate, in fact) had been neglected for some time.
The mansion itself was symmetrically perfect, with two massive domed structures that jutted up on either side of the house like turrets. I guessed from left to right the place stretched two hundred feet, one hundred on either side of me, since I stood in the exact middle. Behind my car, near the circular driveway, was one of those tasteless statues of a mermaid standing straight up, spitting water ten feet into the air. There were, in fact, three of those girls, all with their heads back, breasts jutting out of their seashell bikinis, covered in birdshit, ready to do Martin’s bidding.
The car, too (I assumed it to be Martin’s) sat caked in dust and dirt. From the looks of it, it hadn’t moved in many months, possibly a year.
In any case, the meat shouldn’t sit there in my back seat, and I would need help to bring it all in. I honked the horn twice to signal Martin.
He didn’t come out.
I honked again, waited.
Then, a voice, amplified by a megaphone, exploded from inside the house.
“YES, THANK YOU, COME IN RIGHT AWAY! AND DON’T FORGET THE GROCERIES!”
The front door opened with a tiny push, and I stepped into a beautiful, marble-floored reception area. Ahead stretched a wide staircase that started as one then split off into two and wrapped around the second story. The hallways extended along either side of the upstairs hallway, and led to various rooms, so the whole upper floor was one big open circle that overlooked the entryway.
The house, though, was under invasion of dust. It had a smell to it, too: a sour, rotten odor. Full of sweat and fog and funk and age.
And meat. Of course, the meat.
Red meat. Cold meat. Raw meat. Cooked meat.
Days of cooking. Lifetimes of cooking.
The stench of boiled, baked, sautéed meat had buried itself in the walls, in the bannisters, the furniture. It had claimed the house, held it hostage, and I doubted any amount of washing or de-stinkefying could expel it.
“QUICKLY, QUICKLY, IN THE KITCHEN!”
I rounded the corner to the kitchen, a turkey under each arm.
I stopped abruptly when I saw him.
“Glover, my friend,” said the 800-pound bloated bag of mush in the corner. He let go of the megaphone and it rolled onto the floor. “You came!”
I turned away, almost at once. Martin, my friend, was leaned up in the shadowy corner. Some yellow from the porch lights outside the kitchen streamed in between the cracks of the blinds, casting slivers of light that cut across his bulbous, mushroomlike head. Both his head and body were coated in a greasy sheen.
“I know, I know, this looks bad,” he said, raising his rolling red arms that could block out the sun. “But you know what, I’m happy, and that’s all that matters. That’s what’s important, right? Hey, Glover—Gloooo-verrrr! Look at me, come on, don’t treat me like a leper.”
I must have looked like a kid avoiding his parent’s gaze; I still hadn’t seen Martin straight on. Slowly I turned my head, cautiously, saw a little, turned away, turned back, keeping my head now in one place, so I only saw him at an angle.
“Your face!” I said.
“Oh, that.” He rolled his eyes, his hand going up to his forehead, as if he’d just realized it was there. “Yeah, yeah, oh well. What can you do?”
“But—it’s completely red! And—?” There were bands across his face. White bands of muscle.
I turned slowly and faced him straight on, as curious now as disgusted. He was still mostly bathed in darkness, and I stepped forward to get a better look.
Martin’s face had lost its roundness. It was now almost completely flat, like a slab of steak. His nose had faded into the planar surface of the skin beneath his eyes. His hairline fled toward the back side of his skull. His eyes were sunk far back into the flatness of his Mack truck face, so far back that his skin covered them over, giving him vision troubles. Ears he still had, only they were tinier and pulled back tight against the side of his head.
Then there were the bands of color that ran diagonally, haphazardly, across his face every which way, like scars, or meaty muscles.
His head looked like a rectangular piece of meat.
“Martin,” I said, steadying myself on his kitchen counter to sit down on a stool, “I know it’s not my place, but I think you have a problem.”
His breathing came in short wheezes, his red and white striped shirt stretching across his waist, his stomach bulging sideways, three feet across. Down near his groin, at the bottom of his stomach, his fat, wormlike loins were impossibly stacked on each other. A little bit of his hairless fish-white stomach peeked out under his shirt. His arms rested on the sides of his body like propped-up sausages.
A giant balloon man, made of pork.
“Yeah, you could be right.” He mouth-breathed, unable to get air. “I do need help. You’re such a good friend, that’s why I called you.”
His breath snagged in his fatty windpipe, and he coughed and gasped and burped and farted, all at the same time.
When he stopped rumbling, all the fat around his midsection hung so low his legs appeared to connect with his stomach. The skin around his calves was pulled tight, stretched and red with broken blood vessels.
“In the morning,” he said, “we’ll call someone. A doctor—a good doctor. A physical therapist. I will start changing myself, by God. But, tonight, I have to eat. I can’t expect to change my life in a few hours, and you already bought all the things I needed—and, really, thank you soooo much—so could you continue being a good friend and bring the groceries in, so I could have a nosh? I couldn’t get myself up tonight, and had to call someone.”
Then he smiled somewhat deviously, bringing his fingers together and touching the tubby tips. “I’m famished.”
I agreed to cook for him, on the condition that he agree to see a doctor friend of mine that very night. The doctor was a nice man with a moustache, I told him, whom I’d flown several times before in a private plane, and who I was sure would do me a favor. In fact, he lived less than a half hour away.
“Fine, fine!” Martin snapped, eyes hurt and brooding. He looked away, crossed what he could of his heavy arms, and pouted angrily. “Just get me the meat. Pig liver first!”
I called my friend, who agreed to come at once. Doctors are like that. I was halfway through cooking Martin’s fifth course, three lamb shanks (after the pig liver, two packages of boiled hot dogs, a 32-ounce filet, and a whole roasted chicken), when Dr. Harris arrived to examine Martin.
Later, the doctor took me into the living room, sat down, and shook his head as I passed him a cup of tea. Martin was in the kitchen, gorging himself on a rump roast, slurping greedily, and muttering and singing under his breath, clearly in some kind of edible ecstasy.
“I’ll have to check the blood work to be sure,” the good doctor said, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if his LDL was north of 350. 400 maybe. That’s your cholesterol, your bad cholesterol. Very high numbers are 200. I’ve never seen anyone above 300 live very long.”
The doctor sipped his tea. “His blood pressure is 260 over 140. That’s near death. Heart attack any second. How he’s lived this long is a miracle.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes more, absorbed in our thoughts, listening to Martin defile himself in the next room.
Finally, the doctor set his teacup down and slapped his knees. “I’ll be in touch about the blood when I get the results back. I’ll hurry up the lab in the morning, should have results soon.
“My advice is to get him a trainer right away. But be careful—your friend’s blood pressure is so high while resting his heart could explode with too much movement. Go easy. I’ll be back in a week or so to check on him.”
I thanked the doctor, walked him out, watched him drive off.
It was 1:30 in the morning. I stood in the driveway and reviewed my options. I could leave, leave my friend alone in his overbright mansion with his mountain of meat, or I could stay and try to help him.
The thought of planting myself in his house for any amount of time invoked cottonmouth, a distressed stomach, sweating, numbness, and a tingling scalp, but the anchor of responsibility, to do the right thing, prevented me from leaving. Never leave a fallen man behind, I heard the little voice inside of me say. With a sigh, I resigned myself to stay the night.
The next day the doctor called. Lab results were in. Martin Nicholls’s LDL numbers, the bad cholesterol, were at 612. His blood sugar stood at a whopping 1,500. His TSH level (thyroid) was north of 400. A normal TSH level was in the 1 to 5 range.
It looked like death was imminent. I heard the pity in the doctor’s voice and the disappointed tone he took when I told him that against all pleading Martin refused to be taken to a hospital or be ambulanced out of his home.
There was little anyone could do but let him eat himself to death.
And eat he did. That day he consumed over twenty-five pounds of beef, pork, and chicken. All day I found myself walking in and out of his giant meat freezer, in and out, to cook and return for more. The meat I’d stacked the night before, I carried out now by the armful.
To his credit, Martin recognized the need for help, and in exchange for my assistance (plus, he couldn’t hoist himself off the floor alone) he agreed to see a man named Sebastian Fit, a dietician and exercise guru I found in the phone book.
Sebastian rang the doorbell in bright green shorts and a skin-tight shirt, chipper and light, armed to the gills with pre-portioned food bowls and organic frozen berries.
“Okay, gang!” the man cheerfully squealed upon entering the home. “It’s time to butter up those buns!”
He skidded to a halt just inside the kitchen, the expression stripped from his face, no doubt in shock at the sight of the hippo in the corner who was slick with grease, surrounded by old plastic wrappings, and drenched in meat sweat.
Martin grinned at the trainer like a Mack truck, toothily, mouth-breathing as usual and wheezing more than normal. His shirt was pulled so tight his tummy rolls looked like smooth kielbasa sausages. His whole body—head, arms, chest, stomach, legs—shook with each inhale, so great was the amount of force needed to help him breathe. On the exhale the same body parts trembled in aftershock, ripples of fat reversing their course. I think his mind and body had transcended in many ways the foul or lovely nature of being human; he now exemplified a level of comfort and acceptance for himself normally reserved for enlightened mystics.
“Meat!” Martin yelled through gritted teeth. “MEAT!”
“I’m sorry,” I explained to the trainer. “I refused to feed him for the last two hours, since I knew you were coming. He must be starving. He eats every fifteen minutes, so you can imagine the hunger.”
Sebastian the Trainer treated my old friend with respect. He smiled and explained his program while lovingly stacking his measly frozen food containers in the fridge, labeling each with the weekday and time of consumption, so even a three-year-old could survive on his own.
Each meal had its own inspirational, halfway enlightening and fully mediocre statement, like “Don’t worry about the trek up the mountain. Think about the view from the top.” Then there was Wednesday’s factually inaccurate 6 p.m. dinner quote: “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll be among the stars.” Then there was my favorite: Thursday’s poignant lunchtime notification—“Once you choose positivity, anything is possible.”
Sebastian presented Martin with his first meal on his new diet plan, removing the stainless steel dome top from the plate and waving a mashed sweet potato, a mousy, perfectly sterile piece of chicken parmesan, a quarter-cup of blueberries, and a fistful of spinach with raspberry vinaigrette under Martin’s supremely disappointed smell holes.
Martin ate, but all the while stared intensely with bloodshot eyes at his new trainer, making Sebastian uncomfortable for sure, muttering under his breath while shoving a hand full of berries to his mouth and grinding his food to mush.
After letting my friend digest and rise from his mid-day lethargy, Sebastian engaged Martin in a little exercise, which consisted of Martin flapping his arms under Sebastian’s commands, sitting up a little straighter, and wiggling his toes. After leaking nearly a gallon of saltwater sweat, Martin took a nap, shining the floor with his legs as he twitched.
The next couple days went like that: Martin eating scraps, fluttering different body parts, sweating, sleeping, and over again. Sebastian had taken this on as a full-time assignment; a bedroom was made up on the second floor. I often heard him singing in the shower, in his room, on the stairs. Jolly guy. I moved up to the third floor for solitude; often I still heard him through the vents, the floor, the walls.
Martin couldn’t stick to only the scraps Sebastian provided. He was afraid his body, too used to the influx of hot dogs, linguica, pork loin, ribs, ground beef, and duck pate, might revolt against him and shut down if he stopped the meat train. Nodding understandingly, Sebastian settled for two rounds of physical exercise each day, and a decrease in one pound of meat per week until Martin’s health improved.
Here the narrative takes a slight detour. For it was here, with adequate time away from Martin, and buffered by Sebastian, that I had the space to begin forming my own theory about Martin’s physical changes.
First of all, I didn’t believe that eating in and of itself could have transfigured his body, face, hands, feet so grotesquely. I have seen large people, fat people, obese people—insanely obese people—before. Every two or three flights I make brings in someone who needs two seats—sometimes all three in the row—to fit in the plane. Though everybody is different in body type, they all still look human.
Not so, with Martin. The weight was one thing, but it was his body itself that simultaneously interested and disgusted me:
The flattened face like a slab of steak with a receding hairline.
His belly of a dozen sausage links.
His hot dog fingers (which I realized were, in fact, getting thinner).
His legs. They shone and dripped with sweat, sure, but they were also proportionately much skinnier than one would expect from an 800-pound man. At the top, around the thighs, they bulged thick and juicy, but they tapered down past the knees, until they were thin as broomsticks.
His feet. You could hardly grip half of one with both hands. If you can imagine an hourglass with a longer middle section, that was generally the look of his legs and feet as a whole.
I was most drawn to his feet. Something beneath those pressure socks called to me, told me to look there.
While he was sleeping that night, I snuck downstairs and unrolled one clammy, sticky sock from around his left ankle, stripped it off in one motion, and shined my small pen light at his foot.
Though webbed toes wouldn’t be the right description, it was close. His toes weren’t toes anymore, just fused bumps of flesh set like a leg of chicken or turkey. Raw chicken. Little bumps of pink flesh dotted them all the way around. They felt almost scaly. And the toenails were completely disintegrated.
A freakish and unthinkable suspicion began to fester in my mind. It had been there, under the surface of conscious thought, for days, but until now I hadn’t given it the courtesy of real contemplation. The thought went from a hunch to near certainty.
Given the amount of meat consumed by Martin Nicholls, given the changes in his body, the receding hairline, the flat, meaty face, the sausage stomach, the chicken legs—no matter how ludicrous, insane, or farcical it seemed—the evidence was clear that Martin Nicholls was slowly turning into a giant piece of meat.
• • •
“Interesting.” Martin gurgled and stared past me, his blubbery tummy rising and falling gently. He narrowed his eyebrows and nodded slightly as I told him my theory. He was calm that day, sober and focused like I’d never seen him before.
It was a full minute before he spoke again. “Makes sense.” He thought some more, nodded again, and repeated, “Yeah, it makes sense.”
That it made no logical sense didn’t bother him. “Who the hell’s eaten twenty-five pounds of anything a day,” he said, throwing his hands up. “What government’s tested that? Who’d even think of it?” His eyes lit up. “Maybe I’m the first.”
“The question is,” I asked, “can you stop eating? You heard the doctor. If you go on like this, you’ll die, maybe next week, or even tomorrow. You’ve got to quit.”
He rubbed his flat, greasy chin. “It’s the hunger, the obsessing. When I don’t eat, even for an hour, there’s a voice in me that yells. It screams, Glover. What can I do? I can’t fight it.” He thought, shook his head, and threw his hand in the air. “It didn’t start out this way. But it got worse. Much worse. First, I just liked to eat the stuff. Ham, beef, whatever. Steaks with dinner, packages of ham or turkey at lunch. I had the money to buy the best meat—so, why not? Then, at some point . . . I couldn’t stop.”
He looked at the ceiling. “When I needed pâté for breakfast, that’s when I knew I had a problem. I’d put it on toast, then I ate it out of the can. For lunch, more beef, more sausages, more bacon . . . I haven’t had a vegetable in months,” he admitted, his voice cracking, his head drooping.
Then, as if struck by a revelation, he whipped his head around at me in terror. “What if, what if I did stop eating so much? What if I only ate fruit or salads or smoothies but never turned back into myself. I’m almost 800 pounds of pure meat. What if I stay like this forever?”
I tried to console him. “You got this way from eating too much. If you ate something else it would steer you away and into a . . . different figure, perhaps.”
“What, like a giant piece of lettuce? And how much do I eat? Twenty-five pounds a day?”
“You could try eating less. If you ate normal again, you might be normal again.”
“And starve?” He rested his chin on his sternum. “Face it. There’s no solution. If I stop eating, the voices start. If I eat something else, I risk turning into something else. If I keep eating like I am, well . . .” He sighed. “It’s hopeless.”
Inwardly I agreed with him, but said nothing. He slouched there for the rest of the night. In the morning I made sure the trainer and my friend the doctor had everything they would need for the future, then I drove home. I think Martin was glad to see me go. I don’t think he wanted his old friend to see him suffering.
• • •
About three months later I was staying in a hotel at Central Wisconsin Airport, just fifteen miles south of Wausau. My flight to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport got delayed on account of my copilot coming down with pneumonia, so I was given a rental car and put up for the night. The next morning I would receive a new copilot and be on my way.
I decided to check on Martin. I called but got no answer. I tried two more times, with no success. A little worried, I hopped in my rental car and drove to his mansion, hoping to find him sleeping but otherwise safe.
The gate was again open but this time did not close behind me. There were three cars in the driveway now: Martin’s (still covered in bird shit), Sebastian’s, and my friend the doctor’s. What were they all doing here on a Tuesday night at 11 p.m.? Martin and Sebastian, of course, both lived there, but the doctor?
I went inside. Martin’s normal spot against the wall was deserted. And the kitchen was spotless. The grease skids on the floor were gone. No more dishes scattered on the counters. No more meat wrappers anywhere. The place sparkled.
I yelled for Martin. No answer. I was about to leave the kitchen and start up the stairs in the entryway, when an icy draft blew against my back. I circled the refrigerator and entered the 10-foot by 10-foot stand-in meat locker.
Sebastian’s frozen body hung from a meat hook. His upper half was mostly intact, his eyes and mouth wide in permanent terror. His legs, however, were missing. Cut cleanly off at the knee.
I whipped around. To my right, hanging too from the ceiling, was part of a woman’s body. The maid’s. I could tell it was her from the apron hanging on her lower half. The head had been lopped off. So had both her arms. Dangling from the meat hook was only a torso and legs.
There was a third body, back and to the left. I didn’t need to look hard to know it was my friend, the doctor.
“Glover!” Martin’s mountainous voice boomed in the tiny freezer, as he stepped into the light, a pistol in hand.
His flattened face had regained its shape, though the cheekbones were higher, like a woman’s. His hairline had returned, his hair thicker and fuller, long and silky. His eyes were different colors now: one brown, one blue—the shade of blue consistent with the maid’s eyes.
My eyes traced down his body; his torso had shrunk. His chest was more muscular, while the lower half of his stomach still puffed out like an inner tube.
One arm was longer than the other. His right hand had longer nails—a woman’s nails—than the left.
Though he was still obese, 600 pounds or so, the overall meat-body look had largely disappeared. His skin glowed warm and creamy instead of red and inflamed. The white muscle bands in his face were gone.
Martin grinned and stepped fully into the freezer, his gun trained on me. “Your theory was right. Well, almost. I was turning into something else. So you figured that if I ate something else, perhaps I could become something else.
“But there’s more to it than just eating.” He motioned around the room. “I haven’t eaten much of them. Maybe sixty pounds total. The trick isn’t in the quantity I eat, but the amount of thought I put into eating. The concentration, the visualization. If I ate a pork loin while thinking positively about pork loins”—he slapped his free hand across his belly—“that’s what I became.”
He motioned to the decapitated maid. “Likewise, if I imagine the arm while I eat it, or, say, the eyes”—he leaned in close so I could see his bright blue eyeball—“if I really feel it, if I’m positive enough, suddenly it’s easier to become the thing.”
He pointed across the freezer wall, where he’d displayed a huge banner with sloppy words drawn in crayon. “It’s all right there,” he said. “Sebastian was right.”
The banner read: “Once you choose positivity, anything is possible.”
He turned back, looked at me like I was dead wood.
“What about me?” I asked.
“I’m missing a good lower stomach. And I like yours.” He cocked the gun and pointed it at me.
“Adios,” he said. He stepped forward and pulled the trigger.
A funny thing about half-meat people: the combination of weight, sweat, and grease makes them a bit slippery.
When Martin Nicholls cocked his gun and stepped forward, his clubbed cut of prime hoof twisted on his weight, rolling his ankle. Down he went, the barrel of his gun pointing up at his face, the jolt of hitting the floor causing him to pull the trigger.
Meaty chunks exploded on the walls and ceiling.
After some time, I left the freezer, letting the door shut behind me. I sat in the kitchen for what felt like hours, just thinking. I picked up the phone several times and contemplated calling the police, but each time couldn’t bring myself to punch in the numbers. Instead I held the phone next to my head, listening to the dial tone until it became just another background noise.
Eventually the sun rose, and I hung up the phone.
In Martin’s room I found a notebook documenting the last few weeks. He’d indeed found that eating parts of the human helped recreate his physical form. Eating them whole seemed to help him visualize and think positively. Hence, the reason he only had to eat a single eye to gain its form. Obviously, he couldn’t eat an entire arm, leg, or groin in one bite. Those he cut up.
Most fingers, he found, however, can be chewed whole, if not swallowed in two bites. So can teeth, fingernails, ears, or other body parts. He wrote that he liked the knuckles on the maid’s left hand, so he ate those. When I returned to the freezer to compare the third knuckle on his left hand to the rest of his knuckles, I found it daintier and more feminine than its hairy, brutish companions . . .
• • •
You might remember the profile the media did on Martin Nicholls after his football career. One network did a whole breakdown of his property, almost to the yard. It’s big news for the locals when a famous person settles in a smaller, nondescript location like outer Wausau, since it tends to raise house prices, and may help with tourism.
As I said previously, a small footnote in that broadcast was that Martin owned an old bird sanctuary. As I may have said, too, there are many thousands of birds in this area: hawks, terns, red-necked phalaropes, long-tailed jaegers, snipes, orioles, wrens, and partridges. One of the previous owners had erected an expansive net that stretched three hundred feet long and approximately one hundred feet wide, similar to one you’d find in a zoo.
I fixed the holes in the netting, meticulously examining each one to safeguard against unauthorized exits. Then I gathered the birds.
With some of the many thousands of dollars I found under Martin’s bed I bought dozens, if not hundreds, of each breed of bird I desired, flown in from all over the world—parrots, macaws, lovebirds, canaries, cardinals, double-crested cormorants, owls, doves, robins, bluebirds, sparrows, finches and more.
I mingled these with the birds I collected from this native area, and soon the mesh enclosure was full of God-knows-how-many squawks and squeaks and chirps and gibbers and whistles and bird songs, day and night.
Over the next few months I took time off from my real job, to focus primarily on restoring the bird sanctuary. The airline was good enough to let me scale back to domestic flights only; on off-nights I stayed at Martin’s house.
Ditching the cars that sat collecting dust in the front yard took some effort. Since I couldn’t risk enlisting anyone’s help, I had to drive each car to Lake Michigan and take the bus back to Wausau. I couldn’t afford to leave a paper trail, so I financed my trips with Martin’s cash.
The bodies I kept in the freezer. I wasn’t sure what to do with them. Fortunately, this whole process has gone by fairly quickly, and in the last few months not a single person has come calling about the maid, the doctor, or the trainer.
No one has disrupted my eating.
The first thing I’ll say about that—the eating—is that swallowing the birds whole is too damn difficult. They really are bigger than you think. What you’ve got to do, in my experience, is focus only on the parts of the bird you like, while you chew and swallow. Being untrained, it took me many hundreds of birds to get the right effect.
Lately I’ve focused on the beak, and have crafted just the right size and weight with which to break nuts and seeds on my long flight south for the winter.
About a month ago, my toes were replaced with the talons of a great horned owl. I then sprouted my first feather; now I am in full bloom. Two weeks ago I lost my human eyes and gained the eyes of a red-tailed hawk. I’ve replaced most of my parts, but left my fingers, since I’ve found them useful as both bird and man.
Just this morning I lifted myself off the ground with the beating and flapping of my new wings. Afterwards I peeled back the mesh door of the sanctuary to let the rest of my birds out, and then came inside one last time to burn the last of Martin’s notes on the stove.
In just a few minutes I will be long gone, above the airplanes, swimming in the clouds with no steel or metal confining me, as is my birthright. Don’t bother scanning the skies; you won’t find me.
Submitted April 06, 2017 at 05:57AM by videonarc http://ift.tt/2oKLHAY nosleep
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