51.

UC Berkeley funded a team of doctors, medical students, and physiologists to examine Audrey. She participated willingly. Both her agent and The Jim Rose Sideshow, Inc. said it would be great for publicity. The only contractual stipulation was that Audrey should never eat any “non-food” in front of the research team. Not a bite. Her Lollapalooza performances would continue, but she would wait four hours before going to the lab.

The tests were rigorous and lasted an entire month. First, the researchers acquired Herr Essenalles’s medical records to use as a model of an exceptionally vigorous digestive system. Whereas his sphincter and stomach lining were unusually thick, and his mucus, hydrochloric acid, and pepsin were especially prolific and potent, Audrey’s tests revealed nothing abnormal. Her teeth, mouth, throat, stomach, small intestine, pancreas, liver, gallbladder, biliary tract, large intestine (including ascending, traverse, descending, and sigmoid colon), rectum, and anus—all of it looked and acted “textbook.” The eggheads scratched their chins and wondered, as did everyone: “Even if you concede, hypotheti-cally, that she eats this stuff . . . which is of course ludicrous . . . Where the hell does it go ?”

They examined her stool. They sliced it, diced it, blended it, smeared it on slides and read it under microscopes. They tested its chemical makeup, protein level, electrolytes, sugars, fats. They kept their eyes peeled for undigested hunks of glass, stainless steel, timber, sawdust, plastic, cardboard, Plexiglas, concrete, suede, leather. They found nothing of the sort. They’d been given a list of all the materials Audrey consumed during her stage show. Her poop confirmed none of it. There should have been high levels of some very toxic elements. The picnic table, for instance, made of pressure-treated wood, would have contained enough arsenic to kill ten people. And yet her waste revealed only the tracest amounts (approximately 0.010 parts per million), consistent with natural arsenic levels in California tap water. The researchers did find evidence of a chili dog, French fries, green grapes, a chocolate shake, apple juice, macaroni and cheese, and real dairy butter.

So Audrey was receiving nourishment from actual food. Ah ha! Not surprising to the researchers. More surprising if you’d grown up with her, in which case you knew that she ate so-called “real” food only sparingly. Perhaps she needed food to live, perhaps not. The family never checked. Maybe she was being social. Maybe she didn’t want to appear rude when the co-freaks asked her to hit Denny’s after a long day of grossing out the masses.

They sampled her digestive fluids. Drew blood. Charted her breathing, heart rate, cholesterol level, blood pressure, and body mass index. Measured her brain, arms, legs, fingers, hands, skull, chest. Sampled hair and skin. Performed throat cultures, counted antibodies. Completed a gynecological exam. They requested and received her entire medical history—birth records, hospital records, height and weight charts, vision tests, hearing tests, dental records, scoliosis screenings, immunizations. They tested her coordination, balance, reflexes, spatial sensitivity. They assessed her IQ, EQ, math and verbal skills, and personality type. They snapped photographs of everything—in close-up, wide shot, and shots for perspective and scale.

Normal, normal, normal. Maddeningly normal. Excruciatingly normal. Audrey was the human equivalent of the center of the center yellow line. In every area, she represented the statistical mean, to within a fraction of a decimal. Disgustingly representative. Putridly unremarkable. Rancidly ordinary. None of the researchers had ever seen anyone so normal. Her only abnormal feature was her missing feet, but even this turned out to be a dead end. Congenital birth defects were almost always accompanied by some additional aberrance—a weakened heart wall, poor circulation, breathing problems, brittle bones. But for Audrey, the defect appeared to be anomalous, affecting nothing.

She was unnerving, this run-of-the-mill, standard, fence-sitting girl. She was living, breathing par. They checked and rechecked their data. Tested and retested. They pulled out their hair. They hurled books. They couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. One despondent young man called a suicide hotline and checked into a safe house. The chances of a person being so statistically average in so many areas? Simply calculating those odds would require three or four calculators taped together.

With tears in their eyes, they pleaded with Audrey to “eat something crazy” under rigorous scientific observation. Viewing this pro cess, they were certain, would expose her uniqueness.

“Do you really want to be average ?” they asked, grimacing, as if merely uttering the word made them angry.

“Everyone is special,” they goaded. “Didn’t you ever watch Sesame Street ?”

They positioned bowls of sparkling test tubes, like shiny candies, on the counter. Then they exited the lab to “answer an important call.” (Could they have known how this image, the snack food in a bowl, turned her stomach?) They tempted Audrey with handmade mahogany chairs. They “accidentally” ripped their lab coats on the corners of desks: “Whoops. That’s a shame. Now I’ll have to throw away this perfectly delicious garment.” Long, slow walk to the garbage chute. “Too bad there’s nothing else we can do with it.” Disappointed, wistful glances as they slunk out the door.

Audrey never budged. The researchers were allowed to attend her Lollapalooza performances, so every day they scribbled in their note pads, pushed their glasses to the tops of their noses, whispered to one another, bobbed and weaved behind towering slackers to get an unimpeded view of Audrey’s mouth, throat, and chest as the items went down.

When the month expired, the elaborate, costly study was deemed “inconclusive.” That’s what they wrote in the literature, anyway.

In person, the exhausted, demoralized researchers didn’t hide their “humble” opinion:

Audrey Mapes was a goddamned hoax.