Negative space, p.25
Negative Space, page 25
“Yeah,” the kid said.
“So what? They cut your little pee pee tip off?”
I laughed. Or I thought I did, but my body was too numb for it to manifest. Regardless, when I saw the look on the kid’s face I felt a pit of guilt, even though he couldn’t have known what was happening inside me.
Mom called every day, then every other day, then every week, etc. I couldn’t pick up. If I talked to her, she’d ask me how I was doing and everything would become real again, and I didn’t know how to go back to that.
JILL
The semester wound down and I actually did pretty decent in all my classes. Maddie said that it was our ritual. “The more you give to it the more it gives back. Like that.”
I was helping her pack when she pitched it. “I want you to come home with me for the summer. I want you to meet my family.”
I wrapped my arms around my stomach. “You’ll get sick of me.”
“I’m not going to get sick of you. I’m going to get sick of not seeing you.”
“I don’t know.”
She put her wrists around my neck and looked me in the eyes. “Trust me. Please.”
“Okay.” I pressed my forehead against hers. “Yeah, I’ll come.”
LU
My hair stained grey. My skin cracked into miniature valleys. I changed so slowly I didn’t even see it happening. Always dying becoming who I needed to be.
The future pushed forward. Max went frail and splintered and perished (he went to sleep and stopped breathing). I took over his shop with his boyfriend, until he went frail and splintered and perished. Then it was me and Eugene, until he went frail and splintered and perished. The polar bears went extinct. East Boston sunk beneath the ocean. The west coast burned to cinder. Thousands died in a tube shot through space, floating frozen and static forever.
I’m still here. Here for some time.
AHMIR
Eddie Gorn always got sat next to me. A huge and quiet guy, always dragging this big black gym bag around with him. One time, I showed up to my shift and his bag was behind my chair. I started moving it (heavy—like it was full of pipes or tools). He came up behind me and grabbed my wrist. “You touching my bag?”
“I was just moving it.”
He let go. “Don’t touch my fucking bag.” He stared me down all through the rest of the shift. The next week he was gone. Police came through, asking about him. Apparently, he’d beaten a guy to death with a hammer. We never saw him again.
JILL
The drive wasn’t anything special. I realized state borders were arbitrary. Just identical towns, identical cities, identical plains, identical mountains, alternating like a strobe. New York could have been Massachusetts. Pennsylvania could have been New Hampshire.
But it was nice. We listened to a podcast about 19th century whaling. We sang along to classic rock. She told me about her family—her seven brothers and sisters, her hippie parents, her witchy grandma. We passed by barns with big pastel flowers painted on the side. “Those are hexes,” Maddie said, pointing. “Protective sigils.”
Most signs of civilization fell away into rolling pastures and rocky meadows. The sun fell behind the horizon. With no street lamps, I could only see the space immediately before us. A dull orange glow far ahead. My heart pounded up against my ribs. Maddie ran her hand up my knee and twined her fingers through mine. “We’re here.” She turned off the stereo.
Over the car’s exhaust, I could still hear music.
We rolled up to a large bonfire in front of a monstrous, peeling farmhouse. Ten figures stood around the flame, some playing guitars, others fiddles and washboards. Everyone looking towards us, grinning wide, the fire shimmering off their skin.
She parked and killed the engine. We got out. A woman with thick tan wrinkles and bright pink hair rushed us, sweeping Maddie up in her arms. “My god, it’s been too long. Too long.”
Maddie laughed. “It’s been like two months.”
“Two months is too long.” She turned to me. “And you must be Jill.” She pulled me in close. Her skin smelled like red wine and lilacs. “I’ve heard so much about you.”
A man with a grey billy-goat beard came up behind us. He puffed on a long bent joint and hand it to me. “Welcome,” he said, winking.
We sat down on the hay bales in front of the fire, listening to the music echoing through the hills. Maddy’s parents shot me a barrage of pleasant questions until Maddie made them stop. It felt like I’d been there before. In a dream or before I was born. It felt like home. A real home. Better than home, maybe. We watched the fire until it died to black embers and Maddie and I fell asleep in the grass, wrapped in each other’s arms.
AHMIR
I finally sifted through Tyler’s dad’s notebooks, cracking one open to the middle.
April 16th ‘93
Wade Tinian suicide. Hanging. Visited location. Took grass from the site. Ritual in basement. 1:25AM. Burned three offerings, 1 tab LSD, unknown dosage. Sense of paranoia and physical tremors but no confirmable contact.
April 19th ‘93
Wade Tinian’s funeral at Hillside Cemetery. 3:05AM. Burned three offerings, 300 milligrams mescaline at gravesite. No confirmable contact but a hell of a time. Maybe too nervous about being caught?
April 22nd ‘93
Ritual in basement. 2:00AM. Burned three offerings, 300 milligrams mescaline, three day fast. Nothing like the second ritual. Visuals in the dark, movement. Light trails, something else too. Because of noise upstairs?
July 22nd ‘93
Jerry Buck suicide. Hanging. Visited location. Collected pussy willows from the area. Ritual in basement. 2:50AM. Burned three offerings (paper circles AND plants), 300 milligrams mescaline.
Light visuals but no sense of contact.
I flipped further.
November 1st (???) ‘94 (???)
Alice talked about snow on the ground. There are only leaves. Said xmas was next week. Yesterday was Halloween. Calendar still says ‘94 so I’m not too far out. Might change tomorrow.
November 2nd ‘94
Now there’s snow. Stores have xmas decor up. I caught up? Ritual in basement. 3:13AM. Burned one offering. One tab of LSD. Could feel my fingers stripping apart into smaller and smaller pieces. Like thin black hair. Closed my eyes and saw a pile of baby blue birds, crawling on top of each other, gasping for air. Couldn’t sleep until late morning. Alice seems upset.
November 4th ‘94 (?????)
House is completely different. Alice looks years older. Tyler in early teens maybe. They look sick. Tried talking to them but they act like I’m not here. They just stand there. Nothing has any substance. Try to touch a wall and my hand goes right through.
I opened another notebook. I nearly dropped it.
A page covered with squiggled lines like veins.
A simple drawing of a loop with three circles resting at the bottom.
A spiral filled with spirals.
A tracing of a hand. His hand.
NAME OF THE WORLD
NAME OF THE LOST
MY HAND
HIS NAME
His son’s words and drawings, but from over a decade earlier, in his own handwriting.
I clapped the book shut and thought about burning them.
I took Tyler’s envelope in both hands. I pressed my thumb up through the seam and let the seal tear, working my nail slowly across. I breathed in, slipping out the piece of paper and unfolding it. Familiar chicken-scratch handwriting. I SEE YOU, it read.
JILL
She took me to the pasture and let me milk a mammoth brown cow. She taught me how to drive a tractor. We rode horses through the woods. We smoked weed on the roof and pointed out clouds that looked like penises. We fed tiny chunks of raw chicken to her brother’s Venus flytrap. We fucked each other with fresh-picked ears of corn. We built a fire under a billion stars and told ghost stories. We took bets to see how many cigarette butts the rooster would eat. We let the goats hop on top of our backs and nibble our hair. We built an altar of stones, sticks and berries at the top of a hill, and when we hummed a family of deer came to us, licking our palms and nuzzling our cheeks. We bathed in streams and made bread from scratch. We pulled ticks and leeches off each other’s backs. We wrote rap songs about farm life and smoking meth. We stayed up a whole night watching movies about vampires and warlocks. We left clumps of hair, string and silver buttons for a family of crows. When it stormed for three days and we lost power, I rocked her gently in the dark and told her I loved her.
AHMIR
Tasha had been calling three times a day for a week straight. Thursday night I finally answered. “Didn’t think you’d ever pick up.” Her voice was flattened. Distant. Alien.
“Hey.” Long silence. “Been meaning to call.”
“You need to come home.”
I rolled my eyes. “You need to come home.”
“No, you need to come home.” Her voice was wrong and stilted, like a recording that’d been chopped up. “Mom’s sick. It’s bad. You need to come home.”
“She’s sick?”
“Yes.”
I squeezed the phone hard. “Put her on.”
Pregnant silence. “I can’t.”
“Put her on.” But I hung up before she could answer. I punched the wall until the plaster caved. Then I got on Marcus’s laptop and ordered a plane ticket with his debit card info.
JILL
September came too fast. I wanted to live out there with Maddie and her family forever. It was the only world I ever wanted.
“Well, you can come back for Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and next summer.” Maddie said. “I’m glad you liked it so much. But I think it’s good to have time to miss things, too.”
I thought about the campus of cold grey towers and tiny box rooms with bad circulation.
“I’ve been wanting to ask you something,” Maddie said.
“Yeah?”
“I want to see where you grew up.”
“That’s not a question.”
“Can we go?”
“I assure you it’s not nearly as cool as here.”
“I don’t care. I want to know where you came from. I want to know that about you.”
“Maybe. Someday.”
“Okay, hear me out: Kinsfield is only like two hours from school, right?”
“Yeah.”
“How about we just go up there before we go back. Stay the night in some fun scuzzy motel, and just make a day of it, and head to campus that night.”
“I don’t know.”
“Please?” She nudged her forehead into my shoulder. “I’ll give you so much head. Like, all the head.”
I laughed. “Why does it matter to you so much?”
“Because I love you. And I want to know everything about you. Even the stuff that ain’t pretty.” Her pupils almost seemed ringed with gold.
“Okay,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
She smiled huge and pulled me in. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”
TWENTY-SIX
LU
It comes out in glass and string. He tells me he no longer believes in any other place but here. He tells me about waters rendered undrinkable and soil turned foul. He tells me that everything is only a projection, a vibration between places we can’t sense. He tells me about insects that spend their entire lives buried in animal flesh. He tells me about ulcerated and abscessed oxygen in the spaces we used to inhabit. He tells me about tremors in light spectrums and their consequences. He tells me about the bottoms of oceans and the gaps between atoms. He tells me about the Earth’s skin and the wounds they carry. He tells me about blurred motion always at the corners of his sight. He tells me how he never once desired anything, how his acts never had anything to do with desire.
He goes on for hours, maybe days, and when he finishes he slow dissipates, like a mind falling asleep, or a star collapsing, and I wake up in an alabaster room, to a dot on the wall speaking to me.
JILL
I see him. No longer flat. He’s filled—not with blood and organs and muscle and bone, but not air either. His skin bloats and sags. He smiles and looks almost embarrassed. “It’s me,” he says. “I’m still here.” He lifts his hand, waving a cigarette between his knuckles. “It’s okay! I can smoke as much as I want to now!”
I woke up and grabbed onto Maddie until she stretched awake. We got dressed and ate bacon and eggs and said goodbye to her folks and siblings, and we got on the road.
The sky was silver and bright. We listened to podcasts about ghosts and murderers and phone scammers. We sang along to every other song on Bat Out of Hell.
My stomach twisted and cramped as we hit New England. We got into a fight about the meaning of the word “tamper.” We stopped and ate and made up at an Olive Garden atop a curling hill, like a green and beige castle from a worse timeline. I cried in the bathroom. Something crawled inside me that hadn’t been there before.
AHMIR
TSA searched my bag twice, with the drug dogs and everything, and I nearly missed my flight. On takeoff I imagined the plane stripping apart into smaller and smaller flakes until it was only dust. I fell down through the atmosphere, smashing through birds and branches toward a grey car. I woke as the landing gear collided with Earth, bouncing off the strip, shaking the cabin. A thick septic reek clogged the air. The woman next to me had shit herself.
I got off the plane to a throng of unhappy white people waiting to depart. I called Tasha. Voicemail. I called again. “Hey. It’s me. I’m here. I’m like, at Manchester Airport. Can you pick me up?”
I texted her. Waited almost half an hour when she finally got back. “So—what the fuck?” She sounded confused or pissed, but not anything like when I last spoke to her. Her cadence had returned, flowing familiar.
“What?” I said.
“We haven’t heard from you in like three years and suddenly you’re just dropping by?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Are you fucking high? What are you talking about?”
“I’m here for Mom. You told me to come home.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You said Mom was sick.”
“Ahmir, do you even remember the last time we talked?”
I hung up. My face ached, like slivers in my retinas. I paced up and down the airport, into night and early morning, before laying down on a bench. Closing my eyes.
A world of string. His face on plastic bags, dancing between branches in the breeze. He’s so happy.
I woke. Businessmen and tired looking families swarmed the terminal. I checked my phone. Almost noon. A message:
Marcus
Where are you man?
I almost called Tasha. I almost called Mom. Instead, I called Marlon.
JILL
We rolled into Kinsfield and it was like I’d been gone a hundred years. Half the town had vanished. Buildings that’d been condemned were now broken down into lots, and businesses that’d been live were now shuttered. Only the Highlands had expanded, stretching past the freshly-leveled wall of trees.
I asked her what she wanted to see. The thing inside me turned. I cried. Maddie said she was so sorry. I told her it was fine and asked if she wanted to see my old house. “Only if you want to,” she said. We drove down to the Shallows and onto my street. I passed by twice before realizing I’d missed it. The house had been knocked down and cleared, now just a chain-link fence around some grass and a concrete foundation.
AHMIR
Marlon pulled up to the curb in his old grey Camry. A smile on his face. I knew some of it was a put on—a mask. Just wasn’t sure how much yet. I threw my bag in the backseat and got in. “You just saved my life, brother.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said.
“What’s good?
“Some things. A few things are good.” He pulled out of the lot toward the I-93 onramp. “You hungry?”
“I can wait until town. Want to do Utopia?”
“Oh, dude. Utopia’s been gone for a minute now.” He told me about Jare. His plunge off the Lily Williams. It was sad to hear but it didn’t surprise me much. “Most places are closed up now, but there’re still a couple spots.”
Marlon turned up the music. Occasionally we sang and rapped along to songs about codeine and girls with no love in them. Neither of us spoke much. He got off the highway onto Route 9 and the outside grew familiar. The trees opened up. The outskirts’ farms rolled out around us. Decayed barns in dead fields. A figure standing in the center, raising their right hand but never moving; raising their hand forever. A scarecrow.
We rolled through the Highlands into downtown. Rows of houses boarded up. Shops caved in or flattened completely. Entire streets closed. All the asphalt broken up and choked with knee-high weeds.
“What the hell happened?” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s like someone dropped a bomb on here.”
“It’s been like this. Probably just that you’ve been gone a while.”
“I haven’t been gone that long.”
“Three years is a long time.”
“It hasn’t been three years.”
He sighed. “I don’t know what to tell you man, but I think I know how to count.”
I pressed my face into the side window, scanning over the dead streets. “Look, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“No. I’m sorry I …”
“I said don’t worry about it.”
“Really though.”
He punched me in the shoulder. “Dude, for real.” He was grinning; true this time. “It’s just good to see you.” He pulled into the Panda Garden plaza. We smoked a bowl in the parking lot, then went in. Almost all the tables were empty. We ordered lo mein, soups and scallion pancakes, and talked about music and younger days, his accounts always slightly different from my own memories, the same way mine were likely different from his.
LU
The breathing machines remind me of her. Sometimes my room feels identical to the one she had lain in. I know I’m so distant from there. That’s how things are now. I remember, or maybe remember, what happened or may have happened sixty years ago and it feels like today, while everything new is water slipping off plastic.
