Mom doesn’t believe in climate change or global warming. She doesn’t believe in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or the hurricanes sweeping up the coastline or the wildfires in California. Instead, she watches conspiracy theory videos on YouTube with the brightness turned up to maximum, her frown lines carved deep underneath the grimy overhead bulb in the kitchen. The light is blocked by the bodies of dead flies. By clustered, winged darkness. She watches the videos and says, “Where’s all the pollution they warned us about in the seventies?” She says, “I’m still waiting for that acid rain.” She says, “It’s not as easy for them to get the country riled up as it was back then. People are waking up!”

When I wake up, it’s always dark. It’s only the beginning of November, but winter has come early this year. Mom takes this as more evidence against climate change, but the reality is that there’s a drought this year, and that’s why the trees in Central Park have shed their leaves almost as soon as they turned their colors. One morning I’d walk to school beneath their towering bodies and look up to see brilliant silhouettes of flame, and the next day there were only bare branches, long and skeletal and cold. Like Tommy’s fingers. I squint through the empty spaces in the trees and imagine my brother’s hands scraping the blank sky, imagine his nails slicing through the cloudy white. Like tearing through a massive cataract. His face and hands are all I see of him most of the time, those bony planes and protrusions poking out from layers of wool and cotton and cashmere. Layers that he wears even inside our heated apartment because he’s so cold. So cold all the time now. 

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In between classes, I scan the news on my phone. Today it’s about the carbon sink failure. These carbon sinks—these rainforests and oceans, the soil of the earth itself—are supposed to mop up pollution. But apparently they absorbed almost no carbon over the past year, and this has not been factored into the climate change prediction models that currently exist. When it is, those models will get worse.

The future stretches before me like a road disappearing into dense gray mist. I try to picture myself in this future but instead I feel dizzy, unsteady, like the descent just before sleep that wakes you up again. You’re only falling asleep, but you think you’re actually falling. A vertiginous drop that startles you out of your dream.

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After school, I take the bus to the grocery store. Its bright lights, its stripped-bare chemical smell, assail and excite me. I ate breakfast and lunch, like I always do, but I’m suddenly ravenous. I want to grab sweets by the handful, rip off the wrappers and shove them down my throat. I force myself to take a shopping basket like a normal person.

Something inside of me starts ticking.

The basket doesn’t stay empty for long. Immediately I line the bottom with three Entenmann’s cakes, the big sheet ones: Yellow Fudge and Birthday Cake and Devil’s Food. I add individually wrapped Hostess cupcakes. Then ice cream, the pints so cold they hurt my fingers: Ben and Jerry’s Americone Dream, Pumpkin Cheesecake, Half Baked. I need milk, too; it brings everything up more easily than water does. But there’s milk at home. Months ago, when this whole thing started, I convinced Mom to buy loads of it by telling her I was worried about osteoporosis. Even if she sees the recent studies arguing that the dairy/bone benefits are a myth, she’ll just dismiss them as a conspiracy theory. Sometimes it works in my favor to have a mother who is determined to see what she wants to see—and only that. Only ever that.

When I get home, lugging my haul, the apartment is empty. Mom won’t be home from work until nearly seven. Tommy is already back from school, but he’s in the downstairs gym, on the elliptical machine, pedaling to nowhere. He always chooses the one in front of the mirror, he told me once, so he can picture the calories disappearing into the air. “Fat leaves the body when you breathe it out,” he said. “You don’t sweat it out. You don’t shit it out. You…exhale it. Sometimes I pretend I can see it leaving me every time I breathe.”

“That’s…kind of beautiful?” He laughed. “Oh, shut up. No it’s not. Nothing about this is beautiful.”

It’s true: his breath stinks. It’s the breath of someone who hasn’t eaten in days, reeking of ketones. At least I can cover my scent up; I just rinse my mouth after purging and I’m good to go.

Although today in Math I did notice Sarah looking at me sideways, her eyes gone slitted and strange, and I thought I saw her nose twitch—but I hadn’t purged since the previous night, and I’d brushed my teeth twice since then and had a hot shower and was wearing clean clothes.

But sometimes I think I’m starting to leak the scent out of my pores. Like my pores are actually open wounds, black and gaping and smelling of rotting food, and no matter what I do, I can’t cover them up.

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          This is what my brother and I say to each other, mostly, now:

          “How was your workout?” 

            He gives me a thumbs-up. “How was your purge?”

            I do the same. 

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The binge itself is always anticlimactic. I get so excited when I’m buying the food—I think What a feast, finally I’m going to get to eat everything I’ve been craving all day—but when I’m actually chewing and swallowing, it doesn’t taste like much at all. And the more I eat and the fuller I get, the worse the food tastes, the pleasure narrowing like a thread in front of me, thinning out into nothingness, until all I can think about is the purge.

The purge is what really matters. The purge is the point.

When I’m done eating, I stand sideways in front of my bedroom mirror and take a Before picture on my phone. My belly is stretched out in front of me—I can’t suck it in even a tiny bit—and I look like I’m pregnant. Pregnant with death, I think, and I don’t know why.

I bring my phone to the bathroom and put on some music to accompany my purge. I used to listen to “Uptown Funk” all the time when I was puking because the repeated line Don’t believe me, just watch sounded so much like So bulimic, just watch. Good thing I never did karaoke back then. Drunk me would definitely have ended up singing the misheard, bulimic-coded lyrics to an audience of shocked friends. Oops.

By back then, I mean back when I had friends.

In the bathroom I do some crazy bending and jumping movements, thrashing up and down so everything in my stomach mixes together and distributes evenly, like a horrible vomit smoothie. I can no longer purge the typical way—my gag reflex is completely dead; I don’t even have a Russell’s Sign because I can get my hand so far down my throat by now, teeth bypassing the knuckles entirely—so I do it the weird way. I wait until I feel the need to burp, and then I fold myself neatly in half over the toilet, my legs ramrod-straight, and as I burp I shove my right hand down my throat until I’m deepthroating it all the way to the wrist, at the same time pressing on my stomach with my left hand, and as the liters of cake and ice cream and milk rise up out of me in a sugary beige fountain it’s like a fucking orgasm, it’s better than sex, this abrupt feeling of weightlessness, the sweetness drowning my tongue again and my stomach suddenly so empty I can almost see the light streaking through my body, the endorphins shuddering through my brain, the dopamine crashing into my bloodstream. 

I vomit until my legs wobble and I sink to my knees, my head spinning like a top. A few strands of hair have escaped my bun and are trailing into the toilet bowl, but I’m too drained to care. I’ll take a shower in a minute. My eyes are streaming, my right hand is covered in vomit and drool, but finally, finally, I feel like I’m not here. I’m nothing but a flicker, a thought—no, not even that. I’m a piece of dust floating in a beam of sunlight, one second away from vanishing back into shadow.

I stand up and inhale hard, try to suck in my stomach again. This time I can suck it in until it nearly touches my spine. I take an After picture and flip back and forth between the two, feeling a shivery excitement at the difference: my magic disappearing act. Even my face has changed. In the Before picture my expression is dull, my eyes downcast. But in the After picture my eyes are bright and wet and red and my grin is feral, sharp, beautifully inhuman.

 

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Just after I’ve changed into fresh clothes after my shower, Tommy comes home from the gym. His cheeks are flushed vermillion from exertion. It’s one of the rare times I see him without his heavy layers on, and now that his T-shirt is covered in sweat, the material has turned nearly translucent. I can see his sternum pressing through it. I can almost see his heart, slamming against his ribs in an uneven rhythm, struggling to beat. My heart does that too: the consequence of daily purges without replenishing my potassium. I like to listen to its palpitations as I’m lying awake at night, imagining that I can feel it disintegrating like paper in the rain.  

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The headlines on my phone have begun telling me that we are on track to 3.1 degrees Celsius of warming. The headlines say that this, finally, is something humans will not be able to survive. 

I wash my hands over and over, scrubbing them under hot water until they’re bright red, but my fingers still smell of vomit.

I think about one of the primary tenets of capitalism: exponential growth on a planet with finite resources. The curves of production and profit and industry going up, up, up past the edge of the chart—the opposite of the curves on Tommy’s growth chart, which are plummeting downward, past the fifth percentile and far beyond it. No, these lines are winged, flying off the page, into the infinity of space that surrounds the paper. Into the infinity of space that surrounds the earth.

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Fall slides into winter. I still walk through the park every morning, staring up at the branches that seem to be growing thinner and thinner every day, like someone is scraping another layer of bark off them with a blade every night. They follow my brother’s course faithfully.

The sun is barely up but I put my earbuds in anyway, listening to songs that remind me of purging, even though they’re not actually about it. I probably have more songs on my B/P playlist than most people have on the playlist they dedicate to their crush. I wouldn’t know. I don’t have any crushes. I don’t have any faces that flash through my head on giddy, delirious repeat. I don’t have anything in my head but these things:

Images of moose with huge portions of their hair rubbed off by tick infestations—the ticks, like diseases, seem to thrive in warming temperatures—and ranked on a scale of increasing severity from one to five, culminating in the final stage, the Ghost Moose. This last image is nothing but a scabbed, hairless body supporting an overlarge head. The eyes have already gone hollow, sunken back into their skulls, huge glassy balls of dark.

A photograph of men in Kenya guarding the last two white rhinos from poachers, guns gleaming against a cloudless blue sky.

Tommy chewing on carrot sticks, on raw onions, on rusk.

Me chewing my fingernails down to nubs so they won’t tear my throat.

Tommy throwing away food at dinner: folding it into napkins, stuffing it into his pockets, smearing fettuccine between the pages of books until the pages turn greasy and translucent. (Mom, facedown in her YouTube videos, notices nothing.)

Me throwing away a piece of tooth that’s come loose. A tiny chip like a speck of marble. What does the greater statue of me look like? These days, I can only see pieces when I look in the mirror. The edge of a cheek, a stray finger, the front of a thigh. Tectonic plates that have come unhinged, that won’t slide back together.

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Midway through December, after one of his workouts, my brother confides in me that he only ever feels warm when he’s in a hot bath. “Not even when I exercise anymore,” he says. “I get on the elliptical and I’m shivering, and after a while my skin feels warm and I sweat, but I still feel cold on the inside.” His knees are thicker than his thighs by now. Veins streak up and down his limbs like the scars left by a lightning strike; his arms are all tendon and ligament wrapped around bone. “The cold feels like it’s coming from inside me.” 

Sometimes I’m cold right after purging, but that goes away in the shower. And when I’m bingeing I always feel hot, blood rushing to my skin like a full-body blush. Like my body is ashamed of what I’m doing, even though I’m not.

“I can’t imagine being you,” I say. “It must be horrible.”

His eyelids flicker. “I can’t imagine being you.” He pronounces you like he’s spitting out a tack. “It must be horrible.”

I grit my teeth. I can feel something like sand coming off them. Every part of me is dissolving, chipping off, falling away. Inside my ribcage, my heart stutters like the beginning of a sentence that just won’t come. “What’s so horrible about eating whatever you want and not having to keep the calories?”

“What’s so horrible about being as thin as you want?”

“What’s so horrible about being able to take all the emotions you don’t want to feel and just vomit them out of you, and then you’re clean, you’re done with them, you’re numbed out and high?”

“What’s so horrible about being able to get high on your own emptiness, on your strength and your willpower, on your superiority, on how you’re able to get by on so little, you may as well be made of air?”

“What’s so horrible about being able to exorcise the darkness inside you, over and over again, and it keeps coming back but that’s life, like, eternal return, and it’s not that you have to do it over and over again, it’s that you get to?”

“What’s so horrible about how when you starve all the colors are sharper, the music is more beautiful, even your thoughts are clearer, ringing like bells inside your head?”

“What’s so horrible,” I say, “about killing yourself piece by piece, slowly, because doing it quickly would be too easy? What’s so horrible about dying before the earth does?”

At last he gets it.

“Nothing.” He smiles at me. “Because then we won’t have to see it.” His teeth are still whiter than mine, but his eyes are sunken back in his skull like the moose’s. Huge glassy balls of dark. Has he reached the final, most severe stage on the chart yet? Stage Five: Ghost Brother. But of course there must be more stages, ones that aren’t even on the chart. There is always something worse than what you see in front of you. Always another level further down.

I reach for his hand. His fingers are freezing, brittle sticks, like matches left out in the cold. The skin is dry because he’s beginning to be afraid of lotion. The fatty acids in it, the possibility of them leaking through the skin barrier and being absorbed.

And now we’re hugging, and I try to make him warm, although I know I can’t. He’s still sweaty from his workout, but it’s true: the cold is coming from inside him. I can feel it leaking from his pores, just as he can probably smell the bile oozing out of mine. I think about my brother’s death: iron deficiency anemia, heart attack, shock, organ failure. Just as he is thinking of mine: esophageal rupture, abdominal compartment syndrome, stomach rupture, heart failure.

I feel the contours of his ribcage while his hands rest against my back, the back that’s still solid with muscle and fat but which houses organs I know are deteriorating, decomposing, decaying. Turning into my own private garbage patch. And on the outside I continue to live, to blithely breathe, to use up the oxygen that I know is diminishing, slowly but irrevocably, all across the world.