thinking this hell wasn’t real.
The sun rose and lit the faces of impossibly tall buildings, but not her. Not yet. Darnell was thankful for the night, for the cold that reminded her of Alaska. The smell lessened at night, the shuffle of the mob seemed to slow, the hunger abated. And while there was no sleep, time seemed to pass in long jerks of unconsciousness.
Her prayers had changed over the course of days. At first, she had prayed for it to end, to wake up in that filthy and cramped hotel they’d paid too much for, or to wake up in her home or on a plane. Later, she’d prayed for her soul to go away, for it to leak out her nose or ears and drift up to heaven, to fly away from all the bad her body had done. Now she simply prayed for the cool nighttime, the numbness, the brief interludes of not knowing where she was, what she was doing.
She prayed for the snow.
She thought it would be colder in October in New York, but it had been warm everywhere. A warm year. Not much snow, even back home. And snow made everything look whole. It was the flesh of the soil, the epidermis of Alaska. It turned brown like decay in the sun. But there was no snow in New York City. No flesh. No gleaming white skin to cover the asphalt bones, the gristle in the gutters, the stained underbelly of Manhattan. All that remained was the rot, the putrid browns and the ash charcoals of an Alaskan thaw. And a green hat floating on it like a patch of kelp in Coal Bay, a spot of life among the dead, a remembrance of hope, a symbol of her sorrow, something to pretend she was following.
Anything. Anything but the scent of the terrified and hidden living, clinging to the dark corners for one more day, watching with hope that same sunrise Darnell Lippman sensed with utter dread, a day of hoping not to be eaten, a day of dreading to be fed.
39 • Lewis Lippman
The fat lay in golden layers beneath the skin. It was like roe, stored away amid the deep organs and the bright muscle. The color of butter and the texture of firm cottage cheese, it came away easily and went down hungrily.
Lewis pawed into the woman’s steaming abdomen. He made happy, wet smacking sounds and slurped raw fat down his throat. It was as glorious as it was vile. He ate and ate, squishy fists of the stuff oozing through his fingers, his belly straining against a belt he couldn’t command his hands to loosen, his distended flesh pinched tight against his blue jeans like a bloated fish that’d been pulled behind his boat for miles.
His bladder and bowels released while he ate. They went at the same time to make more room—and his blue jeans, already caked to his skin, filled with gore. He felt all this, tasted all this. He knelt over the morbidly obese woman they’d caught running through the streets, screaming her fool head off, and he made her fat his fat.
And as Lewis Lippman wallowed in the woman’s meat, slurping her golden goodness, he thought about how he’d always hated fat people. And now, how he couldn’t get enough.
It was a matter of will, he’d always thought. He hated them for that, for being weak. Why couldn’t they just
Lewis remembered giving them dirty looks in the marina. He would fire up a cigarette and glare at the waddling tourists who tottered down a finger pier into one of the whale-spotting boats. The docks would groan and shift on the Styrofoam floats as they went.
He even said something once in the Chinese restaurant where he and the boys often went for the lunch buffet. He watched as a man well over three hundred pounds grabbed his dirty plate, squeezed out of the booth, and went to attack his seconds or thirds.
“Don’tcha think you’ve had enough?” he grumbled, just loud enough for the man and his fat family to hear. Kyle and the others laughed, even though Kyle was lugging around a few extra pounds himself. But nothing gross, not like this.
Flashing back to the gruesome present, Lewis watched himself as he dug sideways under the woman’s skin. Here was that feller from the buffet that day. No telling them apart from their insides like this. He scooped the fat with his hands, tearing it away from the skin and the meat below, like cleaning a fish.
Lewis used to shock the tourists he took out in his boat by cutting off a piece of a fresh catch and popping it in his mouth. He’d offer them a chunk on the end of his fillet knife and take pleasure in the way they recoiled from him. Once they were out on the sea with him and Kyle, they were stuck. Hauling in the fish they’d dreamed of catching—that they’d paid good money to catch—Lewis would watch them as the seas picked up and they turned a hundred shades of green. He’d delight in their sickness, watch them turn up their noses to the smell when the belly of a nice big jack was opened like a purse, his knife the zipper, the ripe contents sliding toward feet picked off the deck in a hurry.
It was fun, that, having them trapped out there, the sea roiling the lunches in their landlubbing guts, the smell of fish innards that Lewis had become inured to crowding their noses with a ripe stench. He and the others would turn and smile as their fares lost it over the gunwale. Crowds of little fish would come to the surface and chew the lost breakfasts of strangers from Montana, Idaho, and the Dakotas.
And now Lewis was the passenger, the one shitting himself at sea, this concrete sea. A world he’d dreamed of seeing, that he’d fantasized about from a distance, Times Square with all those crowds as the ball dropped, as the date changed for the East Coast well ahead of the great big nothing that happened in Coal Bay.
He was the tourist, now. He was trapped in this skull of his, watching the guts spill, smelling the horror, feeling sick and being unable to vomit. He was the man growing bloated like a fish dragged on the end of a line, the man with his plate, bending over seconds and thirds. No willpower. No willpower in the world was enough.
Lewis tried to remember days on the docks, smoking cigarettes, watching fat tourists from the Dakotas bend the finger piers as they crowded onto whale-spotting boats. He tried to remember it again without him glaring, without the sneers and jokes to Kyle and the others. In his mind, he took another glorious drag from that smoke before flicking it into the sea with a sputtering hiss. He tried to travel back there, to pretend the little globules of yellow fat sucked out of his palms were caviar and that the rats burrowing in among his knees to feed alongside him were little fish, nosing up to the surface, eating the chum from the guts of strangers, and that this time he wouldn’t turn and smile and judge anymore.
40 • Darnell Lippman
Darnell had hoped and prayed from the moment she was attacked that someone would come for her. But not like this. This wasn’t a rescue. It was the hand of some angry god reaching down from the clouds and plucking her off the ground. She was discarded fruit, all of them were. Nasty fruit fallen from a tree and riddled with worms, and now they have come to choose the rotten among the rotten.
They lured them into their trap with blood. Blood and something else. Darnell thought of her husband chumming for sharks off Spit Point. She knew what these people were doing, and still it worked. It was like that cartoon she’d clipped for Lewis, the one with a fish commenting on a hook before going for the bait. It knew, and still it went. It had no choice. There was only the hunger.
This wasn’t the first trap they’d set. She’d seen them try before, the helicopters swooping in among the same low buildings, the same alleys. Whatever they’d used the first time didn’t work. The smell wasn’t right. Darnell wondered if it was animal blood at first, or human blood with the life melted out of it, maybe with the soul evaporated. That first time, she could smell the copper in the air, but it didn’t move her feet. It wasn’t the same.
They came back the next day with something different; her group could smell it. Their shuffling went from aimless to concerted action as they spilled into the baited alley, the
Darnell and the others bit. The alley tightened between a set of rusty green dumpsters. She was near the
