Negative space, p.3
Negative Space, page 3
“It doesn’t matter. We’ve got to go.”
“What?” I sat up fast. The world shivered and blurred and suddenly snapped clear—now in this weird, heightened focus. Kids ran from the house to their bikes and cars. “Is it cops?”
“No. Not at all.” He leaned down and grabbed my forearm and pulled at me. “We got to go now.”
“What?”
“It’s happening. He did it. It’s happening. Come on.” We ran down the driveway and dug our bikes out of the bushes and tore off toward downtown. Below, the lights looked like jellyfish and fireflies, and just then I decided I wanted to be buried at sea.
JILL
I combed Tricia’s property. Lights on everywhere, but no one around. Just cigarette butts, empty bottles and puke. I texted him again. Nothing. I biked down to his place. All the lights were off. I texted him again. I biked over to the grade school playground. No one. I texted him one last time and went home. Crept back to my room and climbed into bed. Tried to sleep but couldn’t. The air was like a flu and it twisted my dreams.
LU
I clicked refresh, refresh, refresh, refresh. And at 1:43 AM the posts began trickling through. Fifteen. My insides magenta and bubbling. Twenty-three. Subject lines printing a name I had only just learned that day. I clicked the name. An image appeared.
AHMIR
We passed the lot where Paulson’s department store had stood, and the storefront that used to be King Midas Computer Repair. The building where Carl’s Meats had been. Passing under street lights, then into dark, then back under light, over and over like a slow strobe. Everything dead except for us. The other kids—about seven or eight of them—raced by our sides, whooping over the rolling tear of tire on asphalt. Stirring up the humid dark.
Tyler swung left onto Crescent Street, past the Dunkin Donuts and Twisted Vision Body Art, then right onto Stable Avenue, toward Regal Lanes. We all slowed to a halt. Up ahead. Up ahead. Up ahead, under an LED and neon halo, about seventy kids swarmed the front of the bowling alley.
We’d hang there on weekends and after school and all through the summer. None of us really bowled but the A/C worked and most of the arcade games did, too. That place was all dull, ruptured magic: Decades-faded carpet and glitching House of the Dead cabinets; strobe lights and a beat-to-shit air hockey table; wanky butt-rock pumped through blown PA speakers. Kids lost their blow-job virginities and sucked their first whippets in the arcade’s dark, cobwebbed corners. We’d eat bars and drink in the crackling bit-crushed oblivion, the splattered clusters of pixel and polygon. It mattered to us tremendously. We were children.
We ditched our bikes and started running.
JILL
The night it happens, the moon is high and wide as a pupil, casting the mountains icy blue. Turkey vultures spiral and scream overheard. Bodies in rank wet clothes push toward the reek. Pink and white light bouncing off sweat-glazed skin. Wind like a riot. Everyone wanting a peek.
I wasn’t there but I can see it in my mind. I know what it was like. I know it like a dream. In that way, it’s still happening, and always will be.
AHMIR
The sweaty skins and muscles packed in tight like a clot of flies. Tricia, the Dirty Boys, those knife-rip bros and dozens of others I’d seen in school but never really knew. Everyone with their phones out, raised at arm’s length.
The boy’s body dangled just above the entrance. Eyes bulged. A tongue pushed through a distended mouth. His throat twisted through the loop of an orange extension cord. His pants smeared wet and brown, dribbling out the bottom of his left cuff. Flies already swarming.
All the world blurred, a vibrating hemorrhage, and it was fine because I could finally feel how little impact I’d ever have on the world. Losing that dread that one day you’ll somehow ruin everything, for yourself and everyone else. The realization that I could simply leave and the world wouldn’t miss me.
Vultures swam above in muggy beige and blue light and everyone around me felt as hollow as balloons. I took out my phone and started taking pictures, too. It was beautiful because we didn’t know him.
Then sirens. Honking and flashing lights, blue and white. The crowd heaved and pulled apart. I began to fall, but Tyler yanked me upright and we pushed through the scattering bodies back down to the alley where we’d stashed our bikes. We hopped on and booked out of there, cackling mad and rabid and still alive.
LU
Hector Ferrera was Kinsfield’s 31st suicide that year. Fifty-seven residents had taken their own lives the year prior. Grownups didn’t understand it and neither did we, but we talked about it online, under fake names that didn’t make sense, trading information and telling lies. I don’t know why.
Apart from Jill, this may have been the only thing Tyler and I shared in common. At least then.
By next morning, more than a hundred pictures of Hector’s body had been posted. Eventually the mods would go through and compile the best shots—the essential angles—and clear out the rest, but I liked to be there at the start, so I could see them all.
The note they found on his body read I SEE YOU.
JILL
I didn’t find out until morning. Mom was crying in the kitchen. She’d seen it on the news. “We just saw him.” She said she couldn’t believe it.
AHMIR
I already knew things were going to change that summer. I could feel the future lying empty before us, there to be filled and molded.
We rode back to his place and snuck down to the basement. Smoked weed and cigarettes, ecstatic, rapping quietly over some of Marlon’s beats, scrolling through the pictures we’d taken until we were too tired to stand.
THREE
JILL
It’d be easy to say it started with Hector’s suicide but that’s not true, really. He was only a piece; a piece of something inherent to here, and maybe everywhere. It’s still happening. Right now. And so on. Pushing itself forward. Because suicide goes on forever. The wrists always bleeding out. The feet always leaving the bridge. The rope always catching short. It never ever stops.
Kinsfield is built on graves. Just like anywhere, but maybe more so. On footpaths, you’d find more arrowheads than you could fit in your pockets. So many no one even gave a shit about them anymore.
The town was shrinking. Every month it felt like there were fewer stores, fewer restaurants, fewer homes. Fewer people. Everything going to ruin like the old mills where our ancestors had worked, weaving fabrics and carving paper from pulped wood. Everything dissolved into vacant lots. The emptiness expanding.
The Ashuelot River pushed through a tear in the mountains, through the hydroelectric dam, snaking down across the west end of town. The marshes gnawed slowly at the neighborhoods. Night fell like a lid slipping between the sky and mountaintops, and you could go out in the choke of dark and feel Kinsfield breathe. It wasn’t just the trucks rumbling off Route 12A or the oscillations humming off the street lamps and warehouses. Beneath it all, you could hear Kinsfield gasping in and out.
AHMIR
I woke up on the gross couch in Tyler’s basement. He stood with his back to me, staring into the scrying mirror he’d made from an old picture frame and a can of black spray paint. His cheeks twitched. His teeth gnawed on something.
I sat up. The couch springs creaked beneath my weight. He turned. His face was blank. Someplace distant. Very slowly, he grinned. “About time. It’s almost four.”
LU
As long as I can remember there was that low hum of suicide ringing through my body. I’d close my eyes and have flashes of strange industrial machines punching holes in my skin. My form cracking on rocks beneath a jagged cliff. A thousand blades reducing me to ribbons. Rearranging my body in ways not available to me in life. Pushing me across a threshold to be reborn as something novel. That was one reason I followed the Forum—to see all the examples of brave individuals radically altering their state of being. Knowing that there was no chance of ever coming back.
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droplems.w/.dropples 06.07.2018 13:43
why is it all men?
THAT’S ALLOWABLE 06.07.2018 13:54
what is? The forum or the suicides?
becuase the answer to both is: it’s not.
droplems.w/.dropples 06.07.2018 13:58
i thought only dudes were offing themselves.
Misty_Paine_ 06.07.2018 14:07
Last year Sally Forrest slit her wrists under Lily Williams bridge. That summer Ariana Glad drowned herself. There’s a whole lot more. Yes, it’s mostly boys but not exclusively.
droplems.w/.dropples 06.07.2018 14:13
were they hot?
pi$$re$pek 06.07.2018 14:17
ariana was a thot
Cancer Wizard 06.07.2018 14:20
someone was telling me only the guys hang themselves. anyone confirm?
BBBeez911 06.07.2018 14:25
mostly, cuz hanging is mostly masucline. its violent & demonstrates anger. one last fuck u
yung_caligula 06.07.2018 14:29
its more than that. the loop is everything that is happening or was happening or will happen. the loop meets its self and either it ends or it starts again.
CRAZY BOB 06.07.2018 14:38
slow clap
AHMIR
We ate some sandwiches and hauled off on our bikes toward Cold Brook Drive, up to Liberty toward Jill’s place in the Shallows. She sat against the waist-high chain link in front of her yard, blue hair, a black dress and chubby legs stuffed into ripped fishnets. Messing around on her phone, her bike resting on its side. She looked up and gave a fake little half-smile. Her eyes puffy and red.
Tyler dropped his feet down to the pavement and slid the bike to a halt. Jill pushed off from the fence, hugging and kissing him. I felt nauseous. Then her face scrunched, her eyes nearly sealing shut. “Did you hear about Hector?” she said.
“No. What happened?” Tyler threw me a glance. I wasn’t about to say anything. I treasured any small secret between us.
“He died last night.”
“No shit.” He was going for something like “surprised” or “sympathetic” but it came off all wrong. He sounded unplugged.
“Bummer,” I said.
Jill’s face crumpled further.
“Sorry babe.”
She held her arms around her chest. “I have to go pee,” she said.
JILL
I sat on the toilet with my palms over my chest, trying to breathe. Took another Ativan. Texted Kennedy to see if she wanted to come with us.
Kennedy
sorry boo. when i move i puke.
I washed up, smeared on some more concealer and eye shadow and exhaled through my mouth and inhaled through my nose again and again until it was all out of me. I practiced my smile in the mirror. I made myself smile until I believed it and went back outside to the swollen, pollen-clogged air. A smile on my face. “Hey.”
Tyler smiled back. “Hey.”
I got close to him again. “So where’s this thing you want to show me?”
AHMIR
Tyler wanted to make us Internet Famous, so we started a video channel and went to a bunch of places trying to film ghosts. Mostly we just ended up drinking and getting high. He’d always say: “If we play this right, we’ll be set for life.” Like in a movie. Sometimes his pitch would be so powerful I’d almost believe him.
We’d shot our first segment about the Mica Witch. I tried telling the story about when we were little but he shut off the camera and said that it never happened.
“You guys haven’t been through the Abandonments, right?” Tyler said. Jill shook her head. Neither had I, but everyone knew about the place, and I knew Tyler had been aching to check it out. “Then let’s go.” He peeled off on his bike and we followed.
JILL
Dad always told me to stay away from there. That it was filled with junkies and bears. Ashley used to say it was haunted, or that it was a gateway to Hell, but I don’t even think she believed that. Sometimes I’d dream about the Abandonments even though I’d never been there.
LU
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pi$$re$pek 06.16.2018 01:01
song that makes you kill yourself after you hear it. listen if you dare:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUCyjDOlnPU
for real tho its pretty cool if yr into that sort of thing. heard it for the first time about a week ago and im still here so i bet you’ll be fine too.
DeadKID 06.18.2018 15:32
yeh this EDM guy did a dope version of it you can hear it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QAqJAfBjN8
pi$$re$pek 06.18.2018 15:50
this is sickkk!
pigate__(0_0)__ 06.18.2018 15:53
catch you in the obits boys!
AHMIR
We pedaled down over the Lily Williams Bridge, where Ted Pulaski and Marge Kramer hanged themselves the spring before. Turkey vultures circled above, setting down their big ugly bodies on thick maple branches. Stupid Rick had told me that when Conner Thomsen shot himself, his corpse was so rank the smell drove the vultures crazy, and forty or fifty swarmed his house, breaking their necks and wings on the windows and door frames trying to get inside.
Tyler signaled left and we chased him uphill, the river to our right. The sun ebbed down over the mountains and it began to feel like anything could happen.
LU
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n00d_hamster 05.11.2018 19:07
just smoked whorl for first time. saw my dad and my dog (both died last year.) they were folded up on the bed like a pile of clothes, or draped on a door like a towel. worst thing thats ever happened to me. anyone got tips for dealing with this shitty come down :((((
BBBeez911 05.11.2018 19:20
smoke alot of weed, preferably with a friend. watch a movie too … nothing intense or deep, just something fun and light and stupid. then smoke some more weed.
godspeed, young buck.
ARealBadTime 05.11.2018 19:21
or just kill yrself lol
AHMIR
Tyler skidded to a halt. We were about an hour away from town. We coasted past overgrown bushes into a deep rolling graveyard. Rows of chipped pale angels, half-ovals and crosses standing like sentries. He pointed beyond the cemetery to a steep hill. At the top, a pair of headlights scythed out through the twilight. “It’s up there.”
Tyler had found a way to sneak in online. He said we’d have to approach from the bottom of the hill, crawl through the brush, lay low, and wait for the security cruiser’s headlights to pass. This gave us about 20 minutes to get over the hill and to the fence. And if we followed the fence to our right, we’d find an opening.
Tyler handed Jill his flask. She swigged and handed it to me. It wasn’t the decent stuff from the night before—this time sour and cheap. Tyler took out a silver plastic packet, WHORL printed across the side, and pinched out a clump of dry, purple-grey leaves, stuffing them behind his lip and between his molars. Gnawing them gently. He snatched the flask back from me and swigged again.
When the sun was all the way gone we hid our bikes and each took another drink of whiskey. We jogged through the cemetery to the hill and started climbing. Pricker bushes tore at our arms, legs and cheeks. Tyler lifted his hand and we stopped. “You hear that?” Rumbling exhaust, a dim glow over the top of the hill. The pair of headlights cleaved above us. We dropped to the sharp, moist ground. The car stopped and idled.
I whispered that we should leave. Tyler hushed me and said to wait. Minute after minute rotted by. But then there was the sound of gravel shifting beneath tires, and the headlights gradually swerved away from over us and disappeared. “Now,” Tyler said, and we got up, running toward the lip of the hill, clearing it onto a dirt road. We kept running until we hit chain-link.
We followed the fence to the right, feeling along the links until Tyler stopped us. “I think this is it.” He pulled the chain-link back, put one leg through and then the other, then ducked on through. “Come on.” Jill followed, then me.
We heard exhaust rumble again and ran into the darkness.
JILL
Broken, weed-riddled asphalt twisted ahead like a dark serpent, leading through a wrecked up neighborhood. Burnt-out trailers and rain-rotted houses, with young trees growing around and through them. Rusted husks of old cars half-submerged in soft earth. Ruin and woods. We drank and smoked, listening.
“Do you feel that?” Tyler said.
“Feel what?” But I knew what he was talking about—this electric sensation in my belly, lassoed up from the earth.
“Like something buried right?” He smiled, and it was such a weird smile that I looked away. “Like a cusp.”
“What?” Ahmir said.
“Shhh. Let’s keep going.” We started walking again, listening to owl calls and coy-dog voices. “This place is so goddamn vibey.” Tyler tapped record on his phone, turned it towards himself and said, “Welcome to Hell.”
LU
According to Blake Wilson’s forward to The Entropic Pantheon:
Of what limited details exist pertaining to Baumhauer, few have been verified. To those who knew him personally he was not a philosopher but instead a physician, and an unremarkable one at that. His spiritual beliefs were largely kept private, and correspondence between he and his editor suggest an unfulfilled desire on his part to have this work published pseudonymously. Furthermore, posthumous (and, to be sure, factually baseless) speculation paired with the admittedly strange nature of his death do nothing but muddy a nuanced perception of a complicated man.
So instead we are left with only his work by which to know him. The book you hold in your hand is a testament to the power of discipline and imagination. A guidebook for the Will. Through it, brave men can possess a life of endless openness and endless discovery. Nothing will die and nothing will end.
AHMIR
Tyler stared into the camera, talking about a man who’d been obsessed with measuring the human soul. He called him the Modern Saint of Suicide. Jill turned from the camera, rubbing at her eyes with her fingertips.
