The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo (18 page)

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.