Every day was the same for me. I'd wake up, eat breakfast, go running, eat lunch, take my nap, have dinner, run some more, and then go back to sleep. It was about as monotonous as a life could be. And I had been living that life for decades.
There were occasional hiccups. I got married back in the 80s, and I had a kid. I hated my neighbors and fought with them once in a while. My crazy brother occasionally came to my house for a visit after the asylum let him go. Without his medication, he would think he was a superhero.
Hey, I never said my life was average. It was just boring. Not that I didn't love my wife and kid, and sometimes my brother, but I needed something more. Something to stamp my face in the history books. Something to make me feel special.
See, my career wasn't very fulfilling. You try being a professional eater sometimes. Yes, you heard that correctly. I was a professional eater. The only marketable skill I had back then was eating. And more eating. Lots of eating. I ate all day, every day. You should have seen my physique. I was nearly perfectly round. I practically rolled everywhere I went; walking was out of the question.
That was probably because of the accident, though. Back in War, I had the misfortune of stepping on a landmine. I lost both of my arms and both of my legs. Let me tell you, a purple heart award can inspire some pride, but it can't bring back lost limbs. I missed my arms and legs. I still do. I miss them even more because I shouldn't have lost them to begin with. My accident happened my second day at 'Nam.
At least Sheila didn't have to marry me out of pity. She was nearly as round as I was, and she could eat nearly as well. Most people would have trouble telling us apart if she wasn't wearing her lipstick. Oh, and she also had neither arms nor legs. Cute couple, we were. Everyone loved us back in the 80s.
Eventually, though, people grew tired of our act. Even our best friends moved on to people who were less freakish. I guess I spent a little too much time moping, because Sheila left me in '88. The nerve of that woman! Who else could ever love me? I was a lonely, fat, destitute man with no friends and without a leg to stand on.
All I had left was my career, and within a few years, even that began to grow tiresome. A guy can only eat so much before the act begins to lose its meaning. My boss gave me a bit of a raise in '94, but that didn't help my self-esteem much. Maybe if I'd had any financial problems, it might have, but I was a blob. I was not physically capable of being spendthrift. I had a fortune stashed away. People had been paying twenty-five cents each to watch me eat since I first found work after the War. Multiply that by the millions of people and subtract any good way to spend the money, and you have a healthy bank account.
Finally, in December of 2004, I lost my will to live. Having no family to speak of except my completely insane brother, I woke up one Monday, put on my best pitiful expression, and took the bus over to the Namco building so I could give my suicide note to my boss. My plan was then to leap from the window of his office and end everything.
Things couldn't have gone more wrong.
XXX
"I'm gonna do it," I told him. "I'm gonna jump."
"Think about what you're giving up. You have so much to live for!" He looked pretty frantic.
"I have nothing to live for. No family. No friends. My work doesn't make me happy anymore. I have nothing." And I was right. I didn't have anything.
"Have some more pellets." Dirty, stinking pellets.
"I'm sick of your pellets. I want…"
"You want… bigger pellets? Power pellets?"
"I don't know what I want."
He walked over to me and put his hand on top of my head in a final demeaning gesture.
"I'm sick of you, too," I said. "I want meaning in my life. You've sucked it all out."
"I've done nothing but give you a career."
"You let other people get their kicks watching a hideous blob like me eat. Eat! That's all I do. Everyone else does it, too, so my career is built on something normal people do three times a day."
"You're better at it than they are. You are special."
"No, I'm not. Eating pellets doesn't make me special."
"What, then? Do you want something else to eat?"
I didn't answer. I think my brain switched off that minute, and what happened next would change my life forever. I looked my boss in his face, blinked twice, and bit him on the hand.
"Yeowch!" He clutched his hand. Some blood tricked down his wrist. When he saw it, he put his finger in his mouth to suck on it. "What do you think you're doing?"
"I'm doing what I was always meant to do," I said. "I must thank you for showing me my true calling."
He took a couple of steps back, his face as puzzled as a face could possibly be. "And that is…?"
"Eating!" I didn't bother letting the word sink in before I launched myself (no easy task for someone with no legs) toward my boss's head and swallowed him down to his torso. As I began to chew, I smiled for the first time in many, many years.
XXX
I'm guessing you've never found yourself alone in your boss's office. Most people haven't. I'm almost positive you've never been alone in your boss's office with a corpse. That being the case, I can't blame you for not predicting that I wouldn't panic. Most people would think a situation like that would cause someone to panic, but that's just not the case. I'd just eaten my boss. My tormenter. He could no longer force me to perform for him, like I was some sort of Pac animal. And he tasted pretty good, too. I was king of the world at that moment. My entire life had led up to that point, and there I was, on top.
Unfortunately, I knew it couldn't last. Someone was going to come up the stairs, see the bloody mess on the floor and around my mouth, and get suspicious. If that happened and I wasn't prepared, I was as good as dead. Heck, I was as good as dead, anyway. What, was I supposed to waltz out of the building with blood all over my chin? Not even my brother would be that dumb. No, I had to make sure there were no witnesses.
The first person who would notice the dead head of the company would be his personal secretary, so I paged her over the intercom. "Will Miss Julie Kraus please come to the President's office? We have an urgent situation."
She didn't exactly make things difficult for me. The first thing I noticed when she stepped through the door was that she was dressed entirely in pink. Her business suit, shoes, and cute little pink hat all made her look something like a walking marshmallow. Appropriately, her lipstick was cherry red, as if for dessert. Her face froze in the most charming expression you could imagine right before I ate her. She was always a sweet girl. I liked her up to the end.
About then, I realized I had forgotten breakfast. I was starving. You'd think I wouldn't be, after eating two people whole, but you have to remember that I was a professional eater. Everything up to that point was barely an appetizer. I needed more. Fortunately, I was in pretty good-sized office building, and it was packed with people. And I had just learned that people taste pretty darn scrumdiddlyumptious.
Namco Headquarters was sixty stories tall. Sixty levels, if you prefer. I was on the top, and I needed to get to the bottom before anyone called the police. To get there safely, I had to eat every person on every level of the building. Most of these levels were filled with mazes of cubicles, with nearly every nook and cranny taken up by one of Namco's office drones. I had to make sure I got them all, and that meant covering every inch of territory, eating as I went.
Something about my strategy felt awfully familiar, but I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was.
XXX
Level 59 started out easy. Most of the company muckety-mucks worked up there, and they were slow. Most of them were pretty fat and juicy, too, so I got to savor every bite. First class dining, it was, but it didn't last. I got most of the executives pretty quickly, but I overlooked a frightened secretary until the very end. She was pale and frightened and not half as delicious as the pink marshmallow lady, but she had the presence of mind to call security before I got to her.
Drat. Security. There I was, just trying to make my escape, and then some brutes were going to show up to teach me how there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. The security guards probably tasted like pork, anyway, and I hated pork.
They arrived just as I was starting to make a dent in level 58. There were four of them: Officers Inky, Pinky, Blinky, and Clyde. All four looked at me like they wanted to play a game of Good Cop, Bad Cop, only without the good cop. I would have been okay with that had they not been carrying nasty-looking clubs. What if one of them hit me over the head with one of those? I can't eat very well when I have a headache.
The going was quite a bit tougher with the security guys chasing me everywhere. Fortunately, they never seemed to catch on to my objective. If they'd had a shred of brains, they could have guarded some portion of the room to keep me from eating the people hiding there, and that would have prevented me from moving on to the next level. Instead, though, they chased me around the cubicle maze, showing no sign whatsoever of any sort of coordinated attack. I had to muster all of my skill to avoid them, but I managed.
A couple of times, they caught me near the edge of the building, and they attempted to close in for the kill. To this dilemma I found an ingenious solution; I broke through the window, circled around the outside edge of the building, and reemerged through the window on the opposite side. No matter how many times I did this, it sill baffled the security officers.
XXX
Have you ever tried eating nothing but turkey on Thanksgiving? For a while, you're completely satisfied, but you eventually have to eat something with a different taste. Cranberry sauce, maybe. Or pumpkin pie. You can't get through a whole holiday eating nothing but bird.
My trip through the Namco building was a little like that. By about the 12th level, everyone started to lose their taste. I had to find something for dessert, and fast. As luck would have it, though, some geezer was having a retirement party on the eleventh floor, and that meant food. Lots of food. I don't think I'd ever known a plate of fruit to taste that good. Getting to the buffet while running from Inky, Pinky, Blinky, and Clyde was anything but easy, but I found I could lure them away and then race back to grab a mouthful before they could figure out where I'd gone. The longer that went on, the more grateful I became for how easy the office cubicle structure made hiding around corners.
The hardest part of the level had to be figuring out which wine went best with uncooked meat.
XXX
I finally reached the ground floor. Only a few tasty morsels stood between me and my freedom. I made a note to sell off my Namco stock later that afternoon. After all my efforts, only about ten people remained with the company. That number would be down to four within a couple of minutes.
Then came the hardest part: getting rid of the security officers. Sure, I'd just snacked on an entire office building full of people of similar size, but your average office drone doesn't wield a blunt object. Inky, Pinky, Blinky, and Clyde seemed to be experts and bashing skulls in. I was only assuming that, but I didn't want to find out from experience.
I still had to eat them somehow, though. If I didn't, they'd call the city police, and I'd be in the slammer by the end of the afternoon. The problem was getting past their clubs.
I then made my mistake. I stopped to think things over. If you're ever being chased by people who want to brain you with something, for crying out loud, do your thinking while you're running. I was just getting to the idea that some sort of power pellet might make me strong enough to eat even an armed security force when Pinky and Clyde managed to get within range and bring their clubs down on my head.
Everything went dark.
XXX
My trial was a circus. My plea was insanity. My verdict was guilty, and my sentence was death.
I filed an appeal, and in the meantime, my lawyer advised me to locate a support group. My life was essentially over, but I'd never felt better.
I held my head high at the beginning of the first meeting of my group. Everyone looked at me like they loved me. Everyone smiled. Everyone wanted me to get better.
I spoke, for once confident that someone really wanted to hear me: "My name is Pac Man, and I have an eating disorder."