55.

There was no grand announcement of her return to Mall City. No trumpets hailed her arrival. No palms tickled the hooves of her donkey. No brass band thrump ed as a welcoming committee adorned her neck with wreathes. No sash-wearing public official led a boisterous crowd in a prayer of thanks.

Not yet.

Audrey wouldn’t have wanted that sort of attention, anyway. Of course she wouldn’t. Everyone knows how humble, how unselfish she was—“the accidental Messiah,” I’ve actually seen written. Standing out from the crowd was never something she sought, even though her unabashed footlessness, her cultivated movie star good looks, her decision to hit the road with Lollapalooza, her coy flirtations, her Porsche, her romance with an international eatist older than her father, her unrelenting drive to remain, above all else, mysterious—these might seem like attempts to push herself into the spotlight.

But don’t be fooled by the facts. When Audrey drove that lonely, flat stretch of US 131, she didn’t know where she was going. She was guided by an impulse she didn’t understand. When she saw the exit signs for Kalamazoo, she followed them. When she arrived, she simply parked her bright red Porsche in an abandoned lot near the railroad tracks, then walked five blocks west to the downtown Radisson, pulling a suitcase much like McKenna had done through the Kalamazoo streets nine years earlier (with wheels, minus the harness).

In Audrey’s head, there lived no dreams of glory. There lived no plan.

There was anger. There was resentment. There was sickness, the need to be filled, the sick to be a vessel for something larger than her own insignificant self.

In Audrey’s head, there was probably no Toby. Probably no Murray. Maybe some McKenna? She must have had room in there for big sis, right?

The Radisson’s rate was $140 a night. When the hotel clerk asked, “How many nights?” she answered, “What ever this can get me,” and dropped three thousand in cash on the counter. She registered under Grandma Pencil’s real name. She spelled it, “Pen-cilochski.” Make of this what you will. When she entered Room 1022, she tipped the bellhop handsomely. She unpacked her suitcase, arranged her toiletries neatly on the bathroom counter, hung her dresses in the closet (she always was a girly-girl, more Misty than Grandma Pencil), put her unmentionables, socks, jeans, and other informal wear into the bureau drawers, and settled in for a long stay.

Her lip had stopped bleeding somewhere around D Avenue, twenty minutes outside of Kalamazoo. The balled handkerchief in her purse bore a dozen red splotches. She tossed it in the trash can beneath the desk. She cracked the plastic lock on the refrigerator and drank two whiskey sours while watching Headline News. She removed her new feet, which, when viewed without legs attached, looked nothing like human feet. They were thin bands of a space-age fiberglass; imagine a yardstick bent into thirds. In profile, they resembled the letter “Z.”

Audrey was nervous and didn’t know why. Her stomach felt bubbly and uncomfortable. She lay on the bed, thinking that her whole life had been a series of unrelated events that had nevertheless worked in concert to bring her to this precise moment. Her indigestion felt like the tip of an iceberg, hiding an immense, heavy shadow that had been inside her, unnoticed, for years. She was on the cusp of something spectacular. She knew she was going to eat something in Kalamazoo, but she didn’t know what. She tried to sleep. She couldn’t. Her arms tingled. She wondered if she was having a heart attack. She resisted the temptation to call Johann. No one should know where she was. Not yet. They would know soon—this was unavoidable—but not yet.

It was 2:30 a.m. when she sat up in bed. Why wait until morning? she thought. Why not start right now?

She dressed in the dark. She folded her hair into a bun and put on the 1996 World Series baseball cap that Johann had bought her. Opting for the crutches, she donned her stump covers and headed downstairs, via the elevator, into the night. The streets were empty of pedestrians, and a cool wind bore down upon her. Traffic lights swayed.

She looked about her, momentarily overwhelmed. All of this, she thought, could be hers. Could be inside her. She salivated.

But it was too much. It was impossible. No one would understand. A streetlamp here and there, sure, but everything ? They would arrest her. They would toss her in prison. If she was lucky. More likely, somebody would shoot her dead.

Now and then a car purred down Main Street. A teenager in baggy jeans and a sideways Detroit Tigers cap approached, sauntering by, flashing a gold smile, looking Audrey up and down with glassy eyes.

After he passed, Audrey felt a brief and terrifying urge to chase him, leap upon him, and devour him. What would he taste like? What would he do? Would he scream? Would he have time to grasp what was happening as he slid down her throat? Would he appreciate, even for an instant, the historic gullet he was entering?

Would he fill her?

Wasn’t this, after all, what her horrible gift was building toward?

Had she been put upon the earth not to consume concrete, glass, and steel, but flesh, bone, and blood? Was she evil, like Grandma said?

No. Eating this kid would give no satisfaction. She thought of McKenna’s hand halfway down her throat. She could have inhaled her sister like a spaghetti noodle. But the taste was wrong. It was the flavor of alive, and it had made her queasy.

She crutched along Rose Street. Two blocks ahead, she could see the intersection of a main road, and beyond that, the Amtrak station where her family had disembarked the train nine years ago.

She tried to recall that visit but could only envision a great, tangled ball of barbed wire, ten feet high, hundreds of pounds, thundering down the sidewalk, rolling on top of her, pinning her, puncturing her, a thousand tiny holes, a thousand streams of red.

She stopped abruptly. On her left was a parking garage, un-tended and dark. On her right, a row of parking meters. She approached the nearest one. She opened wide.

She became a vampire, staving off sunlight with the heavy Radis-son drapes, sleeping until 4 p.m., the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign a permanent presence on the door handle. Nights, she allowed herself one or two parking meters, but never two on the same block.

A week passed. She didn’t hear from anyone—her family, her agent, her ex-fiancé. This was both a comfort and a source of anxiety. Even if they wanted to, how would they contact her? She hadn’t told anyone where she was going. She was a big girl now, a grown woman. She’d told Johann she was going to America, to Moriarty Street, for a few days, maybe a few weeks. He was under strict orders not to telephone her. She knew that even if she hadn’t made this clear, Johann wouldn’t call. He wanted his space.

Only an hour into her visit, she’d stormed out of her childhood home with a bloody lip.

When she had arrived and opened the front door, she’d expected noise—a big shout from Toby, a bear-hug, maybe even some tears. Instead, McKenna and Murray stood in front of the staircase, arms crossed, frowning at her new feet. Two years and not even a smile. They said, “Hi, Audrey.” They acted nervous. Murray’s beard was entirely white, and he wore a hearing aid.

Stiff embraces were offered. McKenna suggested they “catch up” in the living room. Toby, she said, was in Detroit for a bodybuilding competition. Audrey collapsed onto the recliner, exhausted from the trip. McKenna, employing a volume that suggested someone was sleeping in the next room, asked about the flight and the weather in Germany. Audrey answered the questions politely. Murray blinked. Audrey recognized her surroundings in a detached way, like she’d entered a museum exhibit. The furniture, the paint, the carpet—it all looked exactly as it had seventeen months ago. Her sister and father were slightly more wilted, but otherwise the same. Kenny sported her trademark braids and bad complexion. Dad fidgeted with his bootlaces and didn’t make eye contact. But as familiar as they appeared, they were strangers now. They communicated to each other with gestures and facial expressions that Audrey didn’t want to understand.

Audrey’s mouth was dry; no drinks were offered. She didn’t even feel she had the authority to walk to the kitchen for a glass of water.

Then Kenny pointed at Audrey’s hand and asked, “Where’s the ring?”

After that, a blur. What started as an inquisition about the breakup with Johann turned quickly to other things—dead people who acted alive, alive people who acted dead, unhealed wounds, journal entries, betrayal, cradle-robbing, and so on. Voices rose into shouts, heads heated.

Then Murray said, “I don’t hate you. I hate the idea of you.”

More shouting. Audrey spat out cruel words about her sister and father. She called them “pointless air breathers.” She said she couldn’t wait until this rotten house was bulldozed. And when she saw that her bullets were bouncing off or missing their targets altogether, Audrey aimed the big gun: “No wonder Mom didn’t want to live with you losers.”

Audrey felt a punch in the face. So she left. In a hurry.

Some families would be concerned by such an exit. It was possible that Murray, in a few days, might contemplate picking up a phone. Might contemplate calling Johann and, after learning that Audrey hadn’t flown back to Germany, alert the police. Without a doubt, Murray might contemplate such actions. Might contemplate them into paste. The worker bee (the streaked gray hair made Audrey think of him this way) was a master contemplator. He’d contemplated himself a nice little life—a shabby house, a dysfunctional family, a job that crushed his spirit, an abandoned passion, and a wife driven to madness, despair, and suicide.

After she thinks this, Audrey says it aloud, as a fact, to Room 1022: “Mom committed suicide.”

The phrase is sickening on her lips. Vulgar, like saying “cunt.” Still, she takes a deep breath and repeats it: “Mom committed suicide.” She pauses. “Mom killed herself.”

At 8:38 a.m. on the morning of her sixth day eating Kalama-zoo, alone on the bed, beneath the covers, buoyed by a half-dozen pillows, Audrey accepted—Audrey knew—for the first time that her mother had intentionally swallowed too many Fluvoxamine tablets. Misty had washed them down with three glasses of gin. It was, quite suddenly, a fact. Nothing frightening. This was Real. This was Truth, stripped of its garment of mystery. And after saying it ten times, the phrase tasted like sugar.

The hotel room—bedcovers, desk lamp, drapes, striped wallpaper, bureau—shone with sharp, blinding detail. Clarity and precision surrounded Audrey, and she saw a message written not in words but in furniture, in objects. This message was Misty. Misty was speaking to her. She was infusing her life force into every square foot of carpet, every reflective inch of mirror, every glowing cathode ray, and every plastic component of the Mister Coffee.

Her mother was everywhere, and Audrey felt warmed. All of the anger caused by not-knowing, the confusion of wondering why her mother might—even in theory—do such a thing . . . all of these feelings drained from Audrey’s body in a pleasant rush.

The questions no longer mattered. What mattered was the answer. And the answer was to swallow. The answer was to be the machine she was born to be—the monstrous, wondrous, evil, beautiful, freakish, glamour-girl machine. Mother had withdrawn herself from this life not to punish anyone, not because she was sad about something her family had done, not because she felt unloved. She’d done it to show Grandma Pencil what a Mapes girl could do when she put her mind to it. To show Grandma that you didn’t need a book, a ridiculous book written by white men pretending to speak for God. You didn’t need ten rules carved in a rock to know how to live forever. Religion was a safety net for the indecisive. It was the coward’s way of facing eternity. Even dopey atheists like Murray and Toby were more courageous than McKenna and Grandma Pencil.

Misty had known the secret. This was why she’d always worn that beguiling smile. She knew that men had invented religion because they are weak. They are incomplete. They bear a lack. Misty understood that a woman carries eternity with her every day, that a woman bleeds eternity fifty days a year, that a woman is a small link on grand chain, a chain connecting her to her mother, her mother’s mother, her mother’s mother’s mother, to every other woman in her family, womb to womb to womb.

Men. Men like Murray and Toby. Above all else, they needed to prove that they could create. As grown adults, they still needed mommy to clap for them, to squeal her approval. Make a bell that rings throughout the house! Make wings out of Sporks! Make an arm that’s thick as a fire hydrant! A neck that can crack walnuts!

Even Johann. He worked so goddamn hard just to get a coffin down his throat. He worked and worked. For the glory. For the craft, as he called it.

Men are watchmakers; women are forces of nature.

That’s why the nuns were the true freaks. They’d forsaken their place in the chain to live as sexless beings in service of an all-powerful Father. They were dead. McKenna, too, from the look of things, was heading down that path.

Yet Audrey herself had broken from the chain. Not by choice. Her womb was a desert. She’d learned about her infertility two weeks before flying to Grand Rapids. She and Johann had been trying to get pregnant for two years. Now their relationship was over, and it was his fault. His gift, his Chlamydia, had made her this way. His past haunting her, ruining her. She wasn’t average anymore.

Audrey climbed from the bed. She balanced awkwardly on her stumps, steadying herself by holding the mattress. She moved from the nightstand, to the table, to the easy chair. At the window, she pulled the cord, and with a dramatic rushing sound, the curtains parted. Daylight flooded the room. From the tenth floor—the hotel’s highest—she saw Kalamazoo stretching to the horizon. Truthfully, it didn’t look like much. A dozen low-lying buildings spilled together like toy blocks. To the north, street after street of two-story houses as grim and worn as the graduate students and blue-collar workers who lived there. The northwest showed part of Western Michigan University’s campus, where Audrey had taken, or tried to take, classes. Bronco Stadium, the recreation center, the running track. She could see West Main snaking up the hill, past the spot where trees had been cleared—Mountain Home cemetery. She remembered that cemetery. She remembered Grandma kneeling on the grass, oblivious to the heat, the wind, the world.

In the window, Audrey’s reflection hovered above the city. Like tenth grade English class, the movie version of Jane Eyre. Orson Welles’s gigantic face in the sky: “Jaayyyynnne . . . Jaaayyyynnne . . .”

She would haunt them like she’d been haunted. She would make them ask why. She would make them see that they were dying so they could see that they were living.

Once she was committed, it took Audrey two nights to eat every parking meter in the downtown area. She did it on a weekend, so nobody noticed right away. By noon Monday, every local news channel and the Gazette scrambled to write leadoff pieces. As you might expect, the headlines were uninspired, falling back on the vagaries of the interrogative: “Parking Meters Stolen?” and “Vanishing Meters?” “Meters Being Replaced?”

Late Monday night/early Tuesday morning, Audrey walked east on the deserted Main Street to the edge of downtown—six blocks distant—where she’d spotted an empty one-story building. On the large plate-glass window, a white placard read Available for Commercial Lease or Sale. The building had been a coffee shop for eight months, followed by a bicycle repair shop for five, so the flavors of grease and espresso beans saturated the glass, drywall, cement, copper wiring, plaster, brick, ceramic tiles, fiberglass insulation, and steel. She ate it in less than four hours, and she was proud of herself, especially the way she’d accessed the roof by way of the dumpster in back. This place didn’t have a ladder like The Caboose.

The sun was rising. A couple of drunks reposed on a loading dock across the street, watching as Audrey appraised the now-barren concrete lot. Who knows how long they’d been there? Audrey waved at them, and they crossed themselves.

She felt tired, but in a good way, like she’d put in a solid day’s work. (She’d never put in a solid day’s work, not ever. But did she contemplate this fact? Heck, no. Not her thing, contemplation. That’s precisely what she once said to McKenna: “Thinking about myself isn’t really my thing.”)

Her stomach did not feel full or satisfied. It growled. She ate a Begin One Way sign. There was an all-night gas station a hundred yards up the street. She purchased a Gatorade from a woman seated behind bulletproof glass.

She drank the Gatorade at the Kalamazoo River. Her stumps were aching from the new feet. Standing on the bridge, she peered over the rail. She searched for her reflection in the black water.

That’s how it began. After a few more sneaky nights of gobbling abandoned buildings, Audrey was caught. The cops handcuffed her and put her in the cruiser. They radioed ahead about who they were bringing. The officer behind the wheel couldn’t stop gawking at Audrey in the rearview mirror. At the station, conversations went silent, the clicking keyboards died. Everyone turned to see—officers, secretaries, custodians, pimps and whores, perverts, crackheads, petty thieves, and even the two homeless drunks from the other morning. All the riffraff and boys in blue stood as equals when she entered the room; all were held motionless by her spell. So striking. Such a cute nose. She batted her eyes, flashed the “aw, shucks” grin, blew kisses.

They treated her “special” this time. Her own holding cell. Fresh coffee whenever she asked. The next day, faces appeared constantly at her 10¹¹ × 10¹¹ door window. Faces that beamed when she caught their eyes. Cops brought lemon squares that their wives had baked. Lawyers gave her their cards. Clerks offered Band-Aids for her stumps, which were still adjusting to the feet. (Even MIT eggheads cannot fool the body, it seems.) She signed autographs but politely refused to be photographed.

The press caught wind of her return. The Gazette ran a frontpage piece, “Caboose Eater Returns for Another Taste of Kalama-zoo.” The article reads more like entertainment puffery than hard news. A sample:

Audrey Mapes, that golden-haired enchantress who worked the alternative music crowd into a frenzy at the Lollapalooza festival the last three summers with her jaw-dropping ‘eatistry’ was apprehended in a barren lot on the corner of Portage and Vine at 5:20 a.m. Thursday morning. The lot wasn’t barren the night before Mapes’s arrival, however. A two-story building had resided there. Until three weeks ago, the ground floor had housed Purple Pete’s Aquarium Supplies, and the upstairs had been The Lock Shop. Both businesses had moved out, and the building was empty. The property is owned and managed by Dale Wermer of Hotspots Commercial Leasing, Ltd. He tells the Gazette, “I got a call from KPD this morning. It felt like someone kicked me in the gut. This girl just came out of nowhere, for no reason, to my property, and chomped it to bits. I’m overjoyed. Things like this don’t happen to me.” Wermer says he has no intention of filing charges against Ms. Mapes, but he hopes that she will consider eating his home garage so he can build a new one.

And so it went. The owners of the other abandoned buildings came forward. They skipped the legal system and leapt in front of the cameras, practically bursting out of their skins to show off the gutted foundations, grinning hugely while holding up a plywood scrap missing a U-shaped bite. “I’m putting this on E-bay!”

No one pressed charges. No one complained. Each property owner, citing various reasons, said she’d done them a favor: free publicity; removing a blight they couldn’t afford to remove; collecting insurance; providing them a deep, spiritual reminder of their past selves, before they became money-grubbing real estate tycoons. One man said, “The way she gobbled my building . . . I realized that’s exactly what I’ve been doing, gobbling up properties. No reason, no joy. I’m out of this business, as of this moment. Look out, culinary school!” Even Car Park, the notoriously reptilian company whose meters she’d consumed, laughed off her act of vandalism: “Half of them were jamming quarters, anyway.” They giddily proclaimed that next month (October) would be “Audrey Mapes Month,” which meant free downtown parking, ALL DAY, EVERY DAY (except Tuesdays and Wednesdays 8 a.m.—5 p.m., and Fridays from 12—4 p.m.)!

Audrey accepted Dale Wermer’s invitation to eat his garage. Her only stipulation was that no cameras record the event. To help achieve this, she ate at night. Still, a crowd of three hundred locals surrounded the house. A few cameras flashed, some videotapes rolled, but it’s doubtful they caught much. When she finished, the Wermers let her sleep in their guestroom.

The Wermers’ telephone rang all through breakfast the next day. Audrey received thirty requests: Other people wanted her to eat their roofs, sheds, or front porches so they could rebuild them. City managers wanted her to eat blighted houses with deadbeat landlords. College students wanted her to eat a dunk tank for charity. A distraught man wanted her to eat his philandering wife’s clothing. A ska band wanted her to eat their instruments while they rocked in front of a live audience. An elderly woman wanted her to eat the mental ward where her husband was receiving care.

And meanwhile, for the first time in history, every resident of Kalamazoo woke up excited. Whether it was at the crack of dawn or the crack of noon, they kicked off their sheets and phoned friends and family. They talked to each other. At the breakfast joints—The Flame, Sweetwater’s Donut Mill, The Corvette Café—at the bars—The Green Top, Waldo’s Tavern, Bell’s Brewery—at the laundromats—Duds ’N Suds, Norge Village, Ye Olde Laundromat—all around Kalamazoo, strangers chatted. High school kids and retirees gabbed across bus aisles. Janitors and accountants chuckled warmly, sipping coffee together. Phlebotomists and plasma donors high-fived. Barber shops, classrooms, libraries, dealerships, factories, gas stations, hobby shops, supermarkets—any place people could gather, they gathered to talk about the Incredible Eating Girl. They asked questions: Why had she come back? Why here ? What would she eat next? Was it all a trick? Was it a publicity stunt? Was she human? Was she good? Was she evil? Was she single? Was she actually seven different people with power tools? Where did she come from? What was her purpose? Were they being tested? Was it a government experiment? Had the water supply been dosed with LSD? Was there any limit to what she could eat? Would she start charging a fee?

Speculation raged, theories abounded. Young and old, black and white, gay and straight, rich and poor, flat-chested and buxom, hippies and jocks, nymphomaniacs and the frigid, appliance repairmen and appliance breakers, swimmers and joggers, the bold, the shy, the fat, the skinny, the hirsute, the bald, the sociopaths, the Celtic musicians, the CEOs, the soccer moms, the depressed, the terminally ill, and the glue-sniffers—all felt united by their common humanity. They finally had something to share, in the name of love for their sweet city.

It’s too bad Audrey never cared about them.

She accepted a few of the requests. Not all. Not the ones that asked her to eat for charity or in front of a crowd. In the pitch of night, she devoured. The families gave her a place to sleep, let her watch videos, knitted sweaters for her. Gave her the love she never got on Moriarty Street. She played the part of the waif pretty well, with the wide eyes and crutches and all. The pre-dawn air became a percussive concert of splintering lumber, tinkling glass, operatic metal. Crowds gathered. Requests poured in. Too many requests.

One night, at a residence where she was supposed to swallow only the roof, Audrey kept going. She ingested the whole house, including furniture, appliances, tchotchke.

The family didn’t protest. They climbed out of their camper—Mike and Judith Crawford and their two sons, Mike Junior and Pete, ages eleven and thirteen—and stood like towheaded zombies: mesmerized, awestruck, speechless. Everything was gone. Their entire life had been reduced to a billowing cloud of dust.

They joined the gathered crowd in raucous applause.

Sheepishly, a rotund man stepped to Audrey’s side and tugged her shirtsleeve. “Excuse me, miss,” he mumbled. He cleared his throat, twisting the nightcap in his hairy hands. The applause died down, and someone handed Audrey a damp cloth. Audrey said thanks. The rotund man waited patiently while Audrey toweled drywall powder from her cheeks and forehead. When she finished, he said, “I’m Jim Logan, from next door? I run the pet store downtown. Um, if you aren’t busy, like, tomorrow, do you think you could, I mean, would you mind doing that to our house?” Behind him, huddled in nightgowns against the cool October morning, stood his wife Monica and three daughters.

The Logan girls looked to be ages six through ten. The youngest clung to the middle one’s arm, and the middle daughter’s stance and expression suggested she was wary of Audrey and prepared to defend her little sister should this savage blond lady decide to turn that pretty set of chompers on them. The girl’s brow was set firmly, stern and uncompromising. At only eight years of age, she was her sister’s keeper; she would claw out the eyes of a grizzly bear if it stepped too close.

“I’d be happy to eat your home, Mister Logan,” Audrey said.

People underestimate the seductive power of Audrey’s gift. To witness everyday objects disappearing into that mouth was like seeing Jesus jog up to the house after being crucified and say, “Stick your finger in this hole, bub.” For the Mapeses, Audrey had been a gradual buildup over many years, but by the time she got to Kalamazoo, she was darn good at what she did. And what she did was impossible.

All they could do was stare. It was shocking, deeply unreal. Physically numbing. A narcotic. It was a fairy tale played out before their eyes. Violent, horrific, grotesque, and at the same time it seemed, for lack of a better word, expected. Comforting.

Of course, their blown minds said. Of course there is a shapely woman with the face of an angel standing in my living room, gorging herself on my coffee table. Why wouldn’t there be?

The snaps of teak so bombastic you have to cover your ears. Her grunts wet and vulgar. Her face animalistic; twisted and unseemly. To watch for more than a few seconds is difficult. Because of the tingling sensation it evokes, it feels embarrassing. The impulse is to squint, flinch, peek. And yet you want to be near it. Like a fire. You need to be close. Scorch your arm hair. Sting your eyes with its smoke. Throw yourself on the flames.

People asked for it. The reasons? Neighbor envy. Desire for attention. Curiosity. Sexual turn-on. The search for a spiritual awakening, a mystical communion with the divine. To have a good story to tell at the next family reunion. Just because. Name your reason.

Inevitably, the neighbor asked for it, too. And every neighbor has a neighbor has a neighbor has a neighbor.

The national media caught wind. White vans crowned with satellite dishes flowed into the city. Reporters flooded government offices and restaurants, brandishing power suits, smiles, and laptops. They offered hard cash for information about Audrey’s whereabouts. They rarely looked anyone in the eyes. The insincerity in their voices cut into the locals like piss cuts snow.

Kalamazooans were onto them. They knew these big city folks meant trouble. They knew that Audrey hated (claimed to hate) the spotlight. But all it takes is one mouth—as Sister Maximil-lian loved to say, “Loose lips sink ships.” Media crews soon discovered Audrey and attached themselves to her like barnacles. They camped on the lawn of the house she was slated to eat. The family, the Polegas, had packed their clothing and stood in the foyer ready to go stay a few months at a relative’s house (that’s the protocol that fell into place) when they noticed the sea of cameras, microphones, and stiff hair waiting outside.

“Is she in there? Is she in there?” Seventy-five voices. A gust of perfume, choking.

“Has she started yet?”

“How does it feel?”

“Aren’t you afraid she’ll swallow your children?”

“Does she snore?”

“Does she sleep in the nude?”

“Is she a Satanist?”

“Can she come to the window with a blender in her mouth? I just need one picture, dude.”

Audrey wouldn’t eat crayon one until they all disappeared. It took three weeks for the last van to vamoose. Those news corporations have deep pockets, but no story equals no money.

This particular episode inspired The Plan.

The citizens of Kalamazoo have been called many things. Boring. Unadventurous. Unfashionable. Narrow-minded. Jealous (of Ann Arbor, of East Lansing, of any place with regular helpings of sunlight).

Never have these simple, hardworking people been called geniuses. Well, let these scribblings be the first to claim it, loud and proud.

In October of 1997, when a police cruiser’s spotlight illuminated an abashed Audrey Mapes with a four-foot section of PVC pipe protruding from her mouth, the citizens of Kalamazoo immediately recognized that they had something special. Their freak had returned. Out of all the cities in these United States, she’d chosen this one.

Knowing that Audrey was special isn’t what made them geniuses, though. Recognizing her gift was one thing; doing something with her gift was another.

After the national media swept into town and were laboriously swept back out, the Kalamazoo City Council met for an emergency closed-door session. Two days of round-the-clock meetings ensued, and with the help of Audrey’s agent and publicity manager, both of whom had flown in when the story broke, the council emerged with a proposal, The Mapes Initiative: For a New ’Zoo, which was presented and voted on by the citizens in a hastily or ganized election. The proposal, approved by an amazing 99.8 percent of the voters, was then ratified by the mayor.

The first half of the legislation laid out strict ground rules for protecting Audrey from the media. It dictated a “comfort radius” of two hundred feet. It stated that no direct questions should be asked to Audrey (no such consideration for her family in Grand Rapids). The council was smart about rules regarding videotaping. They knew she preferred to eat in the dead of night, so film-ing her in action was allowed so long as reporters respected the comfort radius and didn’t disturb the neighbors with “bright lights” or “loud noises.” This made it effectively impossible to get usable shots. Additional provisions restricted the distribution of any footage or photographs without Audrey’s permission.

One glaring omission in the Initiative—no limits were placed upon artists’ renderings of Audrey Mapes. This was Kalamazoo’s ace in the hole.

That’s all fine and dandy. But the second half of the proposal contained the genius. Section 11.1 decreed that “Every structure and object devoured by Audrey Mapes will be re-made to resemble exactly, in as fine and minute detail as humanly possible, the original structure or object.” In other words, as Audrey ate, the city would rebuild. Once she finished one structure, the people would gather to reconstruct it. And “reconstruct” is the precise word.

Painstaking care, for instance, would be taken to ensure that an olive green house with forest green trim would be repainted just so, using the same type of lumber, the same layout of windows, the same thickness of window glass, the same number of bricks constituting the chimney. A three-bedroom home with one-and-a-half baths and a stairwell with an oak banister would be reborn identically. Whenever possible, they would consult original blueprints. As a backup, they would take pictures of everything as documentation. If necessary, they would amass old photographs, journal entries, home movies, piles of store receipts. They would interview family and friends, home repairmen, furnace servicers, and the like.

In the case of a business, lavatories would house an identical number and brand of toilets, sinks, hand dryers, wastebaskets. Cubicle walls from the same manufacturer would be assembled to reflect the original pattern. Meticulous measurements would be taken. Desks, computers, telephone lines, fax machines, window blinds, carpets, potted plants, water coolers—all exactly the same as before.

Using every available resource, each new structure, inside and out, would be the structure now residing in Audrey Mapes’s bottomless belly.

It took dedication. Teamwork. Camaraderie. Respect. Money.

Patience. Kindness. Empathy. Compassion. Discipline. Pride. Love.

Heart. Brains. Stomach.

Daily life continues pretty much as normal for most citizens, except everyone you see—your coworkers, the gas station attendant, the mailman, your kids’ teachers, the congress of teenagers skateboarding in Bronson Park—looks ready to burst into song. The air is lighter, crisper. The radios play jangly pop songs around the clock.

One night, you awake to a distant noise. A faint buzzing. Like a plane or helicopter, but more ragged, more staccato. You swat at your ear. Half-asleep, you realize that no, it’s not a fly. It’s nothing, you tell your husband. No reason to get excited. Go back to sleep.

Two nights later, your children appear at your bedside. The digital clock reads 3:24 a.m.

Audrey’s coming, your youngest says. Her front-tooth gap is so cute you want to smother her in kisses.

Come here, Mom and Dad! your twelve-year-old son says. It’s true!

Your husband throws open the window. You sit up. Your heart races. Your breath comes short and hot. You knew for months that this day would arrive, but still, now that it is here, the rush is pure and overwhelming. You clutch your daughter’s hand. Both of you are suddenly giggling. She’s coming! She’s coming!

Up and down your street, windows are lighted. Men and women step out onto porches, pinching bathrobes at the neck. Word spreads: She has arrived.

The next morning, unable to control your smile, you tell your coworkers the news. They make an announcement on the hospital P.A. All day, doctors, nurses, administrators, and patients—an equal mix of friends and strangers—congratulate you.

Your children can’t concentrate on their schoolwork, but that’s okay. Chances like this come once in a lifetime. Math, spelling, science projects. You try to help, but time feels short. There’s so much to do. Soon you give them the answers, to get it out of the way.

You spend every spare moment packing clothes and making arrangements. You’re on the phone constantly, lining up relatives and friends who can put up your family. You take photos of all your belongings, careful to document the positions of every item in the house. You are near frenzy trying to finish. You snap at your husband. He snaps back. You dig up receipts and instruction manuals so you can remember brand names and models. You call Consumers Energy, the cable company, and the phone company, approximating a shutoff date.

Every night, the sound grows louder, until it is impossible to sleep. Your street is alive with people twenty-four hours a day. Your exhausted family huddles together under one blanket, shivering in anticipation.

One night, the noise is deafening. It rattles the walls, drops pictures to the floor. The children tremble, clutch at your neck. “Are we going to die, Mommy? Is she going to eat us?” You try to answer, but your throat is thick with dust.

When you awake the next day, it is a miracle. You are still alive.

Then your doorbell rings.

She moved from house to house, business to business, school to school, church to church, park bench to park bench, street lamp to street lamp, stop sign to stop sign, traffic signal to traffic signal, telephone pole to telephone pole, swing set to swing set, mailbox to mailbox, parking ramp to parking ramp, picket fence to picket fence, basketball hoop to basketball hoop, fountain to fountain, church to church, library to library, viaduct to viaduct, gazebo to gazebo. Every manmade structure came down, with a few notable exceptions: Sidewalks and roads were ignored; so were vehicles (she did chomp the occasional canoe in someone’s garage, an ATV here and there); so were cemeteries.

People were kind to Audrey. Warm and giving. They welcomed her into their homes, treated her like family, fed her, bathed her, knitted her scarves in the winter, gave her a bed where she could sleep through the day. When night fell, they ate one last meal with her, maybe played a couple games of euchre, and then left her to her business. At sunrise, exhausted and covered with soot, snow, insulation, what-have-you, she went to the next house and pressed the doorbell.

Through 1997 and 1998, morale was high. Kalamazoo was united. Everyone felt special, everyone had a purpose. Unemployment was virtually eliminated. Construction companies were always hiring, and suppliers—for lumber, concrete, piping, wiring, paint, glass, insulation, furniture, appliances, electronics, books, CDs, toys—were swamped with orders. T-shirt companies, novelty stores, and trinket manufacturers kicked into high gear: twenty-four hours a day, they cranked out souvenirs of the momentous occasion. Shirts (My City was Swallowed and All I Got was this Lousy Shirt ); coffee mugs (Audrey Can Eat My City Anytime ); pins (Audrey for President ); baseball caps (Kalamazoo Says—EAT ME!); bumper stickers (Honk if a Gorgeous Blond Just Ate Your House ). There was the Audrey Mapes nutcracker; the Audrey Mapes lunchbox; the Audrey Mapes alarm clock; the Audrey Mapes toothpaste/toothbrush set; the Audrey Mapes Halloween Mask; the Kellogg’s breakfast cereal (Audrey-O’s with Marshmallow Homes). Orders poured in from around the globe. The city became a whirling dervish of economic activity, a parade of semis streaming in and out all day and night, every month of the year. Even in the harshest January snowstorms, construction continued. Neighbors helped neighbors. Families and friends went to live with one another; they bonded into the night over extended meals, discussing the trivialities of their lives, but also the big things—death, love, hope, fear, sanity, depression, God, the future.

Kalamazoo became a worldwide phenomenon. The media returned, of course, mere weeks after they were first ousted, but this time, they played by the rules. After all, nobody wanted her to stop eating. Jesus, they’d be out of jobs. They treated her like a rare animal on protected national land, respecting her nocturnal feeding habits and being as minimally invasive as possible. Reporters and camera operators donned camouflage, used night vision technology, whispered into their microphones. Like nature show hosts, they caught spooky green footage of a shadowy silhouette with glowing eyes and a flowing mane of hair squatting in a corner, munching.

This took more effort than it was worth, though. Mostly, they left her alone and stuck to capturing audio recordings of her chomping, before/after shots of buildings, and interviews with local residents. So many interviews. Suddenly, everyone’s opinion mattered. They tracked down classmates from college, cops who’d arrested her, the lady who sold her the Gatorade. They descended upon Grand Rapids and staked out the house on Moriarty Street. Getting no answers there, they located Sheenie the midwife, who was happy to discuss Audrey’s birth in sticky detail. They found North Park teachers, nurses from Doctor Burger’s office, high school boys she’d blown.

Maybe it was all the toxins in the air. Maybe it was the general bubble of goodwill that Kalamazoo had become. What ever the case, the media used the interviews not to tell a story of freakish Audrey Mapes and her mouth but to tell a story of human beings. Of a once-depressed city, a bleak, gray, middle-American burg where smiles were once as rare as rainbows. Now, however, there was light. There was hope. Women’s Groups championed Audrey as evidence that there was nothing an unmarried broad couldn’t accomplish. Physical Disabilities support groups said the same thing about people with limb loss. B.A.B.E. (Blondes Are Better at Everything), Children of Factory Workers, Atheists Unite!, The Southpaw Society—all claimed Audrey as their own. Memberships skyrocketed. Kalamazoo had died and been resurrected. This was the triumph. This was the moral. Heaven was right here on Earth. Heaven was the mouth-breathing bag boy at the Jewel-Osco; it was the shell-shocked WWII vet at the halfway house who dressed like Uncle Sam; it was the single mother of two who’d just earned her master’s degree; it was the president of WMU; it was the out-of-work guitarist singing for two bucks a day to an empty sidewalk; it was you and me.

Jealousy grew in other cities. They wanted to be Heaven, too. Grand Rapids was livid—Audrey wasn’t even from Kalamazoo! On Moriarty Street, hate letters filled the Mapes mailbox. The outlying communities were especially green. Portage, an adjoining suburban community, had fought for years, and recently won the right, to be recognized as an autonomous city. Now this decision was biting them in the ass, hard. They petitioned Audrey. They sent videos of their overachieving schoolchildren singing “We Are the World.” They offered money, lots of money, for Audrey to ditch Kalamazoo and eat their city instead. If she didn’t want the cash, they reasoned, she could give it to her favorite charity. Heck, they would start a charity in her name, maybe one for babies without feet? When every attempt failed, they wrote a letter to the Mayor of Kalamazoo, pleading: Let us rescind our cityhood! Absorb us back into Kalamazoo! This was all a big mistake!

Finally, they grumbled. It’s BS, they said. Discrimination. Who does that girl think she is, anyway? They printed their own T -shirts : Portage—Too Rich For Audrey’s Blood.

No matter how wonderfully life is treating us, it’s human nature to get antsy, to want more. Jesus understood this. He spread his miracles out. Even the sensational turns bland after a while. Supermodels can’t keep their husbands’ eyes from wandering. Professional baseball players demand raises. The flawless Jamaican beach becomes “too sandy.” That’s why Heaven is an unimaginable concept, why we envision it in childlike terms—hanging out with dead relatives, reuniting with our dogs, trading licks with Hen-drix. We envision happiness in the most generic sense, transferring our everyday, pragmatic needs and pleasures to a place with clouds for a floor. We can’t really, truly, wrap our minds around the idea of perfection. It doesn’t exist. Perfection, if we’re honest, sounds like death. At rest. It’s boring.

A frenzy cannot be sustained. No one has the energy. The girl herself was hardly ever seen, so Audrey faded into the background. She continued grazing on the city. In fact, her pace increased dramatically, to five, ten, fifteen structures a day. The construction crews dutifully rebuilt. They had it down to a science by this point. Imagine barn-raising by Amish pill-poppers. Families, businesses, and churches dutifully moved back into their new dwellings and ordered identical versions of everything they’d lost.

They stuck to the plan. They would remake their lives. To a person, the Kalamazooans had a vested interest in making it work. They’d voted on it, all except the children and the institutionalized—an amazing show of solidarity, an unheard-of level of support. By following the proposal to the letter, they believed there could be freshness in familiarity. Originality in a copy. New in the old. Change without change.

Of course, they soon realized what the Mapes family already knew: Such dreams are more impossible than swallowing a city.

Your three-year-old’s primitive drawings, the autographed photo of Ray Bolger, the deck of cards you bought in Paris when you were eighteen, love letters written to your ex-sweetheart, porno tapes you couldn’t admit to having, the half-ounce of weed in your bottom drawer, the flattened penny you placed on the tracks in 1957, the one poem you’ve ever written, penciled on a napkin.

No one had calculated the value of these possessions. They hadn’t thought it through. They’d been caught up in the heat of the moment. Sure, a few people undoubtedly secreted away their most cherished tokens before Audrey came calling. But most didn’t. As time passed and they settled into their “new” lives, they felt a nagging incompleteness, an unnamable sensation of loss. Something wasn’t right. They squirmed in their recliners.

“I don’t think they gave us the same one we had before. This thing puts my ass to sleep.”

“Honey, give it time. That old one was broken in, remember?”

“Humph.”

Discomfort turned to annoyance.

When the local news went to its nightly “Audrey Watch,” they grabbed the remote. Switched to CNN. MSNBC. Fox News. On every channel, the millennium was approaching. Computers weren’t encoded properly. Y2K loomed on the horizon.

The family gathered in front of the TV, shivering.