Negative space, p.23
Negative Space, page 23
“Okay.”
“We’re cutting back hours across the board. It’s not just you. So until further notice, we can only give you 20 hours a week.”
“Okay.” Maximum cold. Maximum blue.
She grinned big. “Thanks for being such a trooper.”
I worked my shift and caught the 3:15 bus back home. Arnie was still in our bedroom under the covers. I poured the salt. I knelt at our shrine. I lit the candles. I blew gently through my lips. I unzipped my pants. Stroking up and down. Nestled in between my beats. The strings washed over me.
I’m in an alabaster room. The dot on the wall speaks to me: “... but she did not put the blame on her staggering old age or the dark clouds that barely permitted her to make out the shape of things, but on something that she herself could not really define and that she conceived confusedly as a progressive breakdown of time. ‘The years nowadays don’t pass the way the old ones used to,’ she would say, feeling that everyday reality was slipping through her hands.”
To my right is a wall-length window. A room reflected in the glass. A different room than the one I inhabit. I pull the tubes and cables from my skin and nose and stand. Behind the glass is the Golden Market, tinted blue and grey, as though it’d been drowned far beneath the ocean. Inside, people with bloated faces and sallow skin sway on their feet, occasionally pulled by tangled clumps of string. Eyes filled by black and blank. I put my hand to the glass and it gently pushes through, no resistance at all. The rest of my body follows, and I float into the store.
The people don’t see me, or if they do, they don’t respond to my presence. They’re somewhere between sleep and death, or the space between breaths and heartbeats. A walking apnea. I float through the aisles, the food smelling rotten. Bottles filled with sand and mold. I float to the back of the store, into Tanzy’s office.
She sits in her chair. Rocking back and forth. Her eyes black, like a shark’s. Streams of drool, streams of string pouring from her mouth to her blouse. I float down. My body falls through hers, and I feel the inside of her form. A nervous twitching. Ancient traumas. My strings flood her lungs, weaving into an impossible knot. A slick purple tumor.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper. When the tumor is complete, I open my eyes and disappear.
I spurted and closed the gate, washed my hands and went to bed.
The next day I went to Tanzy’s office and asked for more shifts. She was on the verge of going wet. “There’s nothing I can do,” she said. Plague-pale skin. Dark rings around her eyes. She hacked and coughed, spitting black and purple phlegm into her Kleenex. “There’s nothing I can do.”
AHMIR
He drowned the apartment in piss. Fucking smashing through my bedroom door in the way early morning, naked, skin ripped to shit, his waist shrunk so small I could’ve choked it, pissing streams onto what little I owned. Punching holes in the walls and windows, reducing his knuckles and forearms to wet pulp. Pacing the rooms with an extension cord tied in a loop wide enough to fit a head through.
JILL
I spent the day in bed, under a comforter, clutching my sides. Feeling like ruins. A pile of rubble. Totaled. The shit she’d had me drink still coursing through me, making the space throb.
Tilly bopped in and out, blasting redneck rap from her cellphone. I pressed my fingernails into my palm, wondering if they were sharp enough to slit her throat. “Hey,” she yelled. “Hey.”
“What.”
“Someone’s here for you. Jesus.”
I sat up and let the comforter fall from my face. Maddie stood in the doorway. That sad smile.
I got up and walked into the hall, slamming the door behind me. “I’m so, so sorry,” she said. “That was so shitty of me.”
“Whatever. It’s fine.” I tried not to make eye contact. She looked exhausted but still beautiful.
She grabbed my hands. “Hey. It’s not okay. You don’t deserve that.”
I let her pull me close. I wanted to say I didn’t deserve it, but just kept my mouth shut, feeling her warmth and grit.
LU
Arnie hid beneath the card table again. A careless and bent oval of salt poured around him. I crawled under and put my arms around his waist.
“They’re coming in,” he said.
“Okay.” I stroked his hair.
“They’re coming for me.”
“Okay.”
He was silent for a long while. Finally, I told him about my hours. His eyes widened. “So you can stay here with me.”
“I still have to work.”
“But you can stay here longer.”
I pulled away. “Arnie, we need money.” A thick metal sheet slipped between my heart and his.
“But they’re coming for me.”
I went all the way wet. “We need money.”
I got up and we didn’t say anything else to each other the rest of the night.
AHMIR
Chucky’s SUV ripped through the parking lot so I booked upstairs to my room and locked the door. I listened to Tyler’s footsteps clatter down to meet him. The door unlocking and opening. Muffled conversation. Footsteps ascending back up the stairs. A fist slamming on my door. “What?” I shouted.
“Open up.” I’d expected Tyler’s voice. It was Chucky’s.
I got up, inhaled, and opened the door. He stood there with a black eye and a big grin, holding a blue duffle bag. “Mind if I come in?”
I stepped out of the way. My stomach twisted around. Chucky shut the door behind him and stared at me with massive black pupils. “Long time no see.”
“Yeah.” I looked away. “Been busy.”
“I see that. I see that. Real trill.” He bit his lip and looked around. “You’ve been doing good work.” He stuffed his pinky up his nostril and blew a wad of mucus onto the carpet. “I’m a happy boy.”
“Good. I’m glad.”
“It is good. It so is. Real trill. Yo, I’ve got a little thing I’d like you to do for me.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. But just you. As in only you and me know about this. You feel me?”
“Yeah.”
“Like I love Tyler, but you know.”
I did.
“So I want you to hold onto this for me.” He handed me the duffle bag. “I’ll make it worth your while.”
The bag’s weight seemed to shift moment to moment, at times like it was filled with hand weights and others like it was filled with feathers. “For how long?”
“Just a little bit.”
“What is it?”
His smile vanished. “You know you’re not ever supposed to ask that.”
“Right. Okay.”
“This is between you and me, right?”
“Right.”
He smiled again. “Trill. Trill. Be seeing you.” He opened the door and exited, winding around to Tyler’s room. I stuffed the duffle bag in my closet. When he finally stumbled outside, and his SUV roared out of the parking lot, I dug the bag out of the closet. Inside were nine tightly wrapped bricks of ashy, purple-grey leaves. I zipped it up and stuffed it back in the closet, tossing all my dirty clothes on top.
JILL
I told her about Tyler. As best I could. “Sometimes I don’t remember what it was like. At all. It’s just blank.” She told me it’d make sense to me someday.
I asked her to show me her ritual again. I wanted to learn. She brought me back to her dorm. We sipped from the bottle. We lit her candles. My hum stuttered against her hum; my body shuddered against her body. Falling in and out of harmony. The air shifted. We pulled the rest of our clothes off and lapped at each other until we quaked all the way in tangled arms and legs. I drifted and dreamed of rabbits and green fields and her face, dripping gold.
LU
I woke up alone on our mattress. The clock burning blue in the dark. 3:38 AM. The door was open. Something clopped in the room over.
I slipped through the dark into the living room and switched on the light. Arnie stood, pointing a knife at my face. Mouth a shallow cave. Eyes frozen, dead lava. He took two steps toward me.
“Arnie,” I said.
He took another step.
“Arnie.”
His face shifted. His lips tremored and his eyes came live then glassy. The knife fell from his hand to the floor, almost slicing his feet. “You’re here,” he said. “You’re here.”
I went in the bathroom and locked the door behind me and curled into the shower. Arnie slumped against the door and whined. I didn’t even try to sleep.
AHMIR
Tyler sat on the couch, staring into his lap. “What did Chucky want?”
“Just to sell me some shit,” I said.
“Oh.” He still wouldn’t look at me. “You’ve got customers at the bridge in an hour.”
“Shit. Give me some notice next time.”
“It’s not my fault you get up when you do. I’ve been up for hours.” Sometimes it seemed like he didn’t sleep at all.
“Whatever. Who is it?”
He finally looked up. “Does it fucking matter? They want Xans and Adderall.”
I put on my least dirty clothes and loaded up the backpack, got on my bike and hauled to the Lily Williams Bridge. I threw the bike in some bushes, slid down the trail to the riverbank and waited.
One hour. I texted Tyler but he didn’t respond. Kicked rocks into the river. Two hours. Texted Tyler. Called him. No answer. I climbed back up the trail, dug my bike out and headed home. Tyler was in the same spot as he’d been when I left, watching another video of anime girls dying, this time torn apart by gunfire.
“No one showed,” I said.
“Yeah?” He didn’t look up.
“Yeah.”
“Shit.” He slowly ground his teeth. Gnawed. His eyes turned to black holes.
I went upstairs and dug the duffle bag out from under my clothes. I unzipped it and counted the bricks. One two three four five six seven eight. Only eight. I went back downstairs, slapped Tyler in the face and asked him where the ninth was.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. He still wouldn’t look at me.
“I know you took it.” Almost in tears. “Who the fuck else would’ve taken it?”
He shrunk his voice into a mocking whine. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I went back upstairs and kicked in his bedroom door. It stank of old sweat, puke and piss. I kicked through the humps of clothes, pulled up his mattress and tore out his closet. Nothing. Then I saw it: a pile of purple leaves atop his closed laptop. I grabbed the computer and threw it into the wall. The leaves fluttered in the stale air. The plaster caved into a dent and the laptop broke apart. The windows collapsed into shards.
“You fucking idiot.” Tyler stood in the doorway, finally looking me in the eyes. Still nothing behind them. “You fucking idiot.”
JILL
I made it to winter break and I had no place to go home to. I sure as hell wasn’t going to Virginia. So I got a waiver to stay on campus through the month.
“You sure you don’t want to come with me?” Maddie asked. “My parents would love you.”
I almost said yes. But I couldn’t get that close yet. That worry that she’d get sick of me.
“Okay,” she said. “But here.” She gathered her altar into a box and pushed it into my arms. “Keep these safe for me.”
We kissed and fooled around and she said that she’d miss me. I already missed her.
LU
Arnie was in a separate space from me now. Even if I could have pulled his body into mine, I wouldn’t have seen what he saw, or felt what he felt. And I knew that if I didn’t leave then he would’ve ground me into ash. I had nothing left in Kinsfield.
I packed a bag while he was asleep and hid it outside, beneath a shrub. I wrote a note and folded it into my pocket. I won’t tell you what it said. Then I went back to bed.
I got up earlier than usual. I kissed Arnie’s forehead. He stretched and twisted under the blanket. “Where are you going?” He whispered, eyes still closed.
“To work.”
“Okay.” He started snoring again.
I laid the note on our shrine, collected my bag and hopped the bus. Stopped by Golden Market and taped a letter of resignation to the glass door. Stopped by an ATM and emptied out my checking account. Headed to the Greyhound station. I was a baby shedding old teeth. Something electric crawling inside my face. The soles of my shoes clapping off the concrete. All the lawns feeling wild and verdant. And above my head everything soared vast, opening up; orange and red emerging from inky blue. Fresh watercolor swimming far out past the atmosphere.
And I left knowing it would ruin him. For decades I’ve told myself I had no other choice, but now I know that probably isn’t true. Sometimes I tell myself I was only a child then, but usually I know that’s also a lie.
I don’t know how long he lived. I want to believe he’s still here, but I can’t. That would be unfair of me. I can only hope he lived longer than I’d estimate, and that it was gentle when he left.
I bought a bus ticket to Boston.
Throughout the half-dozen hour ride, I hummed to myself as children screamed and men and women threw up. Keeping my eyes out the window, watching trees and mountains turn to plains and glass and concrete. Past becoming future.
I reached the station and took the T into Fenway, before heading down David Ortiz Drive to Brookline Avenue on foot, onto Fullerton Street, following the sidewalk until the space grew familiar. I found Max’s apartment building.
I hit the buzzer maybe twenty times. No answer. I sat beside the door. The sun ebbed over the horizon and a narcotic dark fell. The surrounding towers and complexes flickered in a state of half-life.
I hugged my bag to my chest and belly. It felt like a pillow filled with glass. My mind running through everything I’d lost or thrown away. Too tired to cry, I nodded in and out of brief slumbers (internal flashes of black ropes and Arnie’s face, but through a veil, already so far from where I was now). Clusters of legs and feet swept past. Then a familiar laugh.
Max walked with another man, hand in hand. They untangled their fingers and Max reached into his jeans, removing a set of keys. They huddled up to the door. I reached my hand toward him. He didn’t see me. “Uncle Max,” I said.
He looked down. His face washed a thousand different ways, but all soft and lukewarm. “Lou? What are you doing here?” No knives in his voice. Hundreds pushed through the other man’s face.
“What the fuck Max,” the man said.
Max knelt down and tousled my hair. “You okay, Palsy?”
I nodded.
“What the fuck,” the man said again.
Max turned back to him. “It’s my goddamn nephew.”
The man’s face changed, switching blue and pillowy. He lifted his hands to his mouth and knelt down beside Max. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry.”
Max ignored him, turning back to me. “What’re you doing out here? Your folks around?”
I shook my head.
His eyes changed. He took my hand and pulled me to my feet. “Let’s get you inside,” he said.
Max’s building was a husk, a remainder from a hundred years prior. We pushed into the elevator, and it shuddered upward, tremoring like old hands. The bell chimed on the seventh floor and Max led me to his apartment. We went inside (filled with books—not just on shelves but stacked into towers as high as my chest; walls covered in paintings of men and women with purple skin contorted and screaming) and Max sat me on his couch. The other man went to another room.
I told Max that I didn’t know where else to go. I went all the way wet, saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” over and over.
Max leaned in and hugged me close, both soft and muscular. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay.” He went to go make tea. I coiled onto the couch and fell asleep almost immediately.
All the world is water. It’s always been. It took me eighteen years to drown. My body bloats and inflates, pushing in a direction I only know as up. My skin breaks a surface I never knew was there, the water slipping off my knees, chest and face. I breathe. Dying becoming who I need to be. The world is bright light, and it’s inside me, too. I’m there right now.
AHMIR
I gathered up leaves from the sidewalk, tore them up and baked them until they turned black. They didn’t look anything like the leaves in the bricks. I went out and bought a children’s paint set from the Dollar Tree and soaked the leaves in purple paint and baked them again. They looked even worse.
A fist hammered on the front door. I looked through the window and saw Chucky’s SUV. “Open up,” he whooped. I almost couldn’t breathe at all.
I opened the door. Chucky smiled wide. Big void pupils. “What’s good, brotha?” He came in for a hug. I stayed stiff. “Let’s go up to your office.” We headed up the stairs, each step creaking like a dying nerve. I wondered how much blood I’d have to lose before I passed out.
We stepped into my room. I opened the closet, scooped up the duffle bag and handed it over to him. He lifted the bag twice like a hand weight, screwing up his face. He unzipped it, looked inside, then back at me. “One’s missing.”
“What?” I’d been practicing my Big Fucking Idiot look in the mirror.
“There are supposed to be nine bricks in here and there are only eight.” He zipped the bag back up and set it on the floor. “That means one’s missing.”
“I don’t even know what’s in there, man. I didn’t even look.”
He rolled his eyes. “Of course you looked. Everyone looks.” He reached toward his waist.
I turned and started toward the door. Chucky caught my elbow and grabbed my shoulder, swinging me into the wall, so hard the plaster gave. He twisted my arm around my back, pressing me into the fresh dent. I kicked and screamed and tried to worm away but he pushed me down and batted at the side of my face.
“Hey. Hey. It was your fucking boyfriend, right?”
I yelled and gurgled.
“Just say it was your boyfriend. That’s all you got to do.”
I just kept yelling.
He got up off my back and kicked me in the face. My eyebrow exploded. I cried and screamed and just lay there as Chucky collected the duffle bag and headed for Tyler’s room.
