Negative space, p.1
Negative Space, page 1
Praise for B.R. Yeager & Negative Space
“Like smoke off a collision between Dennis Cooper’s George Miles Cycle and Beyond The Black Rainbow, absorbing the energy of mind control, reincarnation, parallel universes, altered states, school shootings, obsession, suicidal ideation, and so much else, B.R. Yeager’s multi-valent voicing of drugged up, occult youth reveals fresh tunnels into the gray space between the body and the spirit, the living and the dead, providing a well-aimed shot in the arm for the world of conceptual contemporary horror.”
—Blake Butler, author of Three Hundred Million
“Ever wonder where teenage children go at night? Perhaps it’s best not knowing the answer. There’s something amiss in Kinsfield, a drab, boring city much like your own, except for the teenage suicide epidemic, stagnant, ineffectual parents, cultish behavior that borders on psychosis, and strings, strings everywhere. B.R. Yeager’s Negative Space is a hypnotic collage of message boards, memes, and ruined bodies twisting at the end of a rope. Most modern novels have lost all concept of magic. B.R. Yeager’s Negative Space is a stunning refutation of the quotidian.”
—James Nulick, author of Haunted Girlfriend & Valencia
Negative Space
Copyright © 2020 by B.R. Yeager
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval without permission in writing from the author.
ISBN-13: 978-173356-945-3
ISBN-10: 1-733-56945-6
Cover design by Matthew Revert
www.apocalypse-party.com
First Edition
Printed in the USA
For Jamie, wherever you are
“The key question is, no matter how much you absorb of another person, can you have absorbed so much of them that when that primary brain perishes, you can feel that that person did not totally perish from the earth? In the wake of a human being’s death, what survives is a set of afterglows, some brighter and some dimmer, in the collective brains of those who were dearest to them. Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain, a collective corona that still glows.”
—Douglas Hofstadter
“Whatever the outcome of this madness you call a fair trial or Christian justice, you can know this: in my mind’s eye my thoughts light fires in your cities.”
—Charles Manson
CONTENTS
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
ONE
AHMIR
It was the way he just threw his body away. How he’d carve up his torso and arms with a box cutter, or go days without sleep, replacing whole meals with pills and cigarettes. Everyone knew Tyler was going to die young.
JILL
I met him in the hospital. Third floor at Sisters of Hope. Mom put me there because she thought I was going to hurt myself. I get it. I don’t blame her.
A staff woman called me into morning group. The room was grey and blank like the rest of the ward, except a couple posters: photos of sunsets or mountain ranges and something like Every Tomorrow Is A New Today printed in fancy, curling letters. There was a circle of chairs, filled by sad-faced, fucked-for-life women and men. Everyone already so much older and doomed than I was, apart from a boy. He was fading pink hair and plump lips and severe green eyes. Forearms all wrapped in bandages, with muddy remnants of older scars crawling above them.
The only free chair was between a chronic scratcher and an obese bald man with a Hitler mustache, sedate yellow eyes and a strand of drool forever hanging off his bottom lip. A nurse sat directly across from me. Muscular and tan. The skin around his right eye all black and purple. He looked me up and down and flashed some teeth. “What’s good?”
No one responded.
“Okay. Most of you know each other, but we have a couple new faces, so go around, introduce yourself, tell us a little something and you know the deal.”
Silence. A fart.
The nurse kept staring me down with that fucked up smirk. “Alright.” He let his clipboard fall to the floor. “My. Name. Is. Todd. I. Like. To. Work. On. Cars. Duh duh duh.”
The pink-haired boy raised a bandaged hand.
“Yes, Tyler?”
“But you really like the girls who come through here. Right?”
Todd kept smiling, but his face melted a little. “Don’t start this again.”
“It’s the best thing about this shitty gig. Am I right?”
“Alright.” Todd got up, walked to the doorway and waved his hand through the threshold.
“Hey.” The boy was looking at me now. Eyes wet and shaking. “You can’t sleep here.”
“What?” I said.
“Don’t go to sleep.”
I looked away.
Two stocky nurses pushed through the doorway. Todd pointed out the boy and they pulled his slight frame from the chair and out of the room. He didn’t put up a fight.
Todd returned to his seat, picked the clipboard off the floor and crossed his legs. “Let’s try that again.”
LU
I remember the box cutter he played with. Bright orange with black tape around the grip. Watching him in the lunchroom, slicing off dead skin from around his fingernails. Flipped my insides brackish and blue.
I only knew him because of her.
AHMIR
When we were little he told me about the Mica Witch. Said she lived by the old mica mines up in the hills, past the Highlands. When we were 11, we rallied the courage to hike up there and check it out. The trees formed a tunnel, with patches of sun breaking through and lighting up the iridescent flakes on the grass and weeds.
“Up there,” he whispered. He pointed to an old rundown cabin. The windows broken, front door knocked off its hinges, and black burn marks streaked across its side. Tyler said that it wasn’t the Mica Witch’s real home, but the place she trapped folks to eat and make tools out of. He called it her trap house. He said her real home was up further.
The ground changed from grass and soil to brown rock, opening into a mammoth hole. The cave walls glistened in the dull light. Tyler grabbed my arm and began pulling me inside. “Let’s go.”
“I can’t,” I whined
“Don’t be a rag. Let’s go see her.”
I pulled away and locked my arms around my stomach and shook my head.
“Whatever.” He stepped through the cave’s mouth and into the abyss. I started to cry.
It probably wasn’t even five minutes. Noise echoed out from deep within the cave. Stones clattering. Nasal grunts and heavy breathing. And then Tyler ran out from the dark. “Go. Go, go, go.” We ran until we could see houses again.
He told me he saw her. Perched over a lantern and an array of shimmering stones. Humming to herself. Her hands wet with red, dancing in the deep orange light. The way he described her, I could see her in my mind. Weeks later I was still seeing her in my dreams. It wasn’t until I broke down in class, weeping crazy after five days of no sleep, that he finally admitted he’d made the whole thing up.
JILL
I kept myself awake all night. The raw bedsprings and reek of bleach made it easy. The sun edged over the horizon, dying the whole sky blood and milk, and I almost felt safe. At 8:00, a round nurse peeked through the door frame and said it was time for morning group.
A young woman named Kim sat in Todd’s place. She told the group that Todd was out sick. Her voice was like a baby’s.
I sat down next to Tyler. He wouldn’t look at me.
Kim led an exercise about “positive and negative methods of coping.” She went around the circle, asking each of us to share one way we cope with our illness. Then she’d repeat what we had said back to us and ask whether we thought it was a positive or a negative way to cope.
“I cut,” I said.
“‘I cut.’ Yes, okay. Now, do you think …”
“It’s negative.”
“Yes. Okay. We appreciate your honesty.” Her eyes turned to Tyler.
“When it gets bad, I try and go someplace else,” he said.
“And do you think going someplace else is a positive or a negative method of coping?”
He smiled weird. “Depends where I go.”
Once everyone had shared, Kim recited some lines about the personal responsibility of recovery and dismissed us. Some shuffled back to their rooms or moved the chairs to the tables so they could play cards. The fat bald Hitler turned on the TV. The Price is Right.
A finger tapped my shoulder. “Hey.” I turned. Tyler gnawed on his bottom lip. His eyes shy even as they probed my face.
“Hey,” I said. Some shake and crack to my voice.
“What are you in for?”
“Just stupid shit.”
He laughed a little and gave a beautiful smile. “Yeah, it’s all stupid shit.”
“Right. Maybe.”
“I’ve seen you in school.”
& nbsp; “Me too,” I lied.
We sat down at a table and talked about bands and shows and video games. Books. He even made me laugh a couple times. He was nice. I liked him.
And then he stopped. His face went static. He looked away from me.
“Hey,” I whispered. I thought I’d upset him, even though we’d only just been talking about Pokémon.
“What?” He rubbed at his eyes.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. Just trying to remember something.”
“Yeah?”
“Or something I’m still seeing.” His pupils were enormous. Twin black holes. His plump lips curled into a rigid smile. “Nah, it’s fine. It’s stupid.”
AHMIR
He was the first guy who ever got me high. He asked me: “Want to feel something amazing?” I nodded. He put his hands around my neck. I started to scream, and the world swam when he let go, like seeing it for the first time. Like a baby. And when the world turned normal, I asked him to do it again.
He taught me about whippets and showed me the difference between inhaling cigarettes and weed. We made a bowl out of tinfoil and a John Cena candy dispenser. He stole pills from his mom and we’d lie in the grass talking about what we were going to do when we grew up.
In some ways, I owe him for everything.
LU
I dreamt about him. That he was standing over my bed. That I was following him through an immense black woods. Floating in a black void sea. In a round, grey room. Walls gently expanding and contracting. Shallow breaths. A rotted-out hole in the floorboards, opening into a stagnant, obsidian pool. He knelt at its lip, reaching his hands deep into the water. The water reached back. It stretched upward into a small, whirling torrent, up into his mouth and down his throat, until it was all the way inside him. Then he turned to me, found my eyes, and smiled wide.
JILL
Me and Tyler linked up again the next day. He said he’d had a dream about me. “I think it was supposed to be a long time from now. I don’t know. But you were walking in the woods. You were calling my name and looked like you’d been crying, but it felt good to know you were looking for me.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.
“Sorry.”
“No. Don’t be.” I leaned in and kissed his cheek. He tasted like salt and vegetable oil. “I love it.”
AHMIR
“This is the real shit right here.” He held out a silver packet with WHORL printed on a sticker across the side. He said he’d gotten it from the downtown Getty Mart. “Totally legal.” The packet was filled with dry, greyish-purple leaves that smelled like burned bodies.
We walked deep into the marsh behind my mom’s duplex. The summer before we’d nicknamed it Blood Swamp. He handed me his glass bowl, overflowing with the purple-grey leaves. He said it was going to change my life forever.
I lit the bowl and took one long hit. I tried to hold it in but couldn’t, rasping and hacking showers of grey phlegm. I opened my eyes and Tyler’s face had changed. Hundreds of tiny black strings crawled from his nostrils and tear ducts.
I looked up through the branches to the sky. I thought they were birds, at first. But they were millions more of the thin black strands, stretching down through the atmosphere, grasping trees and wrapping around trunks. A gust ripped through the swamp and a thousand leaves tore free, raining down all over us.
I tumbled backward onto my ass and back. The leaves grew into tarps. Tarps with arms and legs and faces I may have recognized. They covered my eyes and everything was all muddy flapping wings and whispers that didn’t make sense and my body stripped into tinier and tinier strands.
Then it all fell away, and I was just there, back in the marsh with Tyler. He puffed long on the bowl, his face a flat, smeared disc. “This is what it really looks like.” He stood over me, a wide grin and big black eyes, reaching a hand down and pulling me back to my feet.
I checked my phone to see what time it was and the screen was covered in fresh cracks.
JILL
Dr. Clark did my outtake at the end of the week and scheduled me to leave with a script for Ativan.
“I’m going to miss you.” Tyler’s eyes were small and slick. I took his arm and led him down the hall to the front desk. I scribbled my number on one of his bandages.
“Call me when you’re out,” I said.
“Okay.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
We kissed. A dark heat pulsed through his tattered, crusted lips, through his chest and ruined arms, engulfing my skin. A foreign landscape I was now a part of.
A nurse came and escorted me out. Mom and Dad met me down in the lobby.
He called that Tuesday afternoon. And that was that.
LU
People say there’s no more history left to make. They say we have no more mythology. So let’s tell a story. Let’s say that once there was a town. This town. Home to women and men and minor gods and warlocks. I loved one of them. I won’t tell you his name yet.
AHMIR
The myth is that I honored him. That I summoned strength and dragged him through the woods and buried him in the river like he’d asked. The myth is clean and sensical because it needs to be. The truth is stupid. The truth never makes sense unless you force it to, just like anything.
TWO
AHMIR
It was the last day of junior year so Tyler and I ditched school right after lunch, cutting across the sports field to the back trails above the marshes. The trenches roiled with the stench of dead swollen dogs; when it rained the whole place reeked of fur and flies. Tyler took out a glass bowl and packed it with some mid-grade he’d bought off Dut Mosier. I asked him what the plan was and he said he didn’t know. “Fuck around until Tricia’s party?” He puffed three perfect rings and handed the bowl to me. “It’s cherried.”
“That place sketches me out. Tricia sketches me out.” Two winters before she had snorted something like 70 grams of Adderall and stabbed her sister with an X-Acto knife.
He put an arm around my shoulder. “My guy’s going to be there and he says he’s got crazy mushies. And don’t worry.” He rubbed my head and face. “I’ll protect you.”
There were lots of things to love about Tyler, even if folks don’t talk about that stuff anymore. If he liked you—if he saw you as an ally, even temporarily—he’d make you feel like the center of his universe. And you’d believe it, at least for a while.
The trail rose into an incline, all rotted up boards and loading palettes. Tyler put his shit away and we climbed, steadying ourselves on tree trunks and thin branches, up from the brush into downtown.
JILL
Everyone was going to Tricia’s party, but the thought of being around that many people made me shake, so I asked Lu if she wanted to hang out. She smiled, never making eye contact. I don’t think she had any other friends.
LU
She flipped me alabaster and lukewarm. Steady. Everyone else seemed like they’d kill me if they knew what was inside.
I’d play out her day in my head. Close my eyes and conjure her mornings. My insides in her form. Feeling the weight of her comforter. Her muscles (my muscles) going tense stretching out of bed, then rubbery. Fabric slushing soft and loose against her skin (my skin). I’d sit inside her face as she’d eat toast and cereal and grapefruits. Feeling it crumble down her throat (my throat). Dust playing off our skin in the warm nuclear light.
I’d feel her walking across pavement, my feet in her shoes, the wind yielding over our face and body. Our hands in her pockets. Alabaster and lukewarm.
People would have killed me if they knew about that.
Jill’s mom pulled her car up to the curb and we got in the backseat. It smelled like dead plastic pine needles. Jill’s mom turned around to face me and smiled. “You excited for summer?”
“Yes,” I lied. Summer break was full of knives. I already missed school’s framework. An anchor.
“Any big plans?”
“Mom.” Jill leaned in toward me and mouthed sorry.
“Okay, okay. Just being friendly.” She turned back to the steering wheel and pulled out of the lot, and already I felt like I’d done something wrong.
