Behold the Void

by Philip Fracassi

  “And so we do,” Marcus agrees, talking at the floor now, as if ashamed. “Like I said, Christine and I had a fight. A horrible, horrible fight. We screamed and yelled and cried. I cried.” He sits up, faces Tom. “She said she was gonna leave me, Tom. Can you believe that? Divorce me, she said.”

  Tom swallows, says nothing.

  “I got so angry, so fucking hysterical. I saw red, you know? Like… totally out of my mind. I hit her, Tom. I admit it. I slapped her in the head so hard she went sprawling. I’d never hit a woman, but she was screaming, yelling at me… saying awful things. Insults. She was mocking me, man.”

  “Okay, so you fought,” Tom says, inching away from Marcus. “Then what?”

  “Then, nothing. She went storming off to the bedroom, locked me out. I opened up the liquor cabinet, called open bar, and started drinking. Must have gone through, oh hell, a fifth of whiskey before I finally passed out. I think… I think I tried to talk to her. Through the door, like. But she wasn’t having it, especially after I’d started drinking, started putting it all away for safe keeping, you know?”

  A joke between the two of them. A phrase they liked to pull out in good times, when they’d find a bottle in someone’s house, in a parent’s liquor cabinet; they’d drink it and throw that line around. Safe keeping.

  “Fine, then what? C’mon,” Tom says, impatient with the story and impatient to know the truth. The room is lightening steadily, the morning fully awake. Tom tries to avoid the misshapen windows with his eyes, tries to focus on the shadow of the man slumped a few feet away from him, focus on something he understands, or thought he did.

  “Okay, hold your horses,” Marcus says, raising his head, smiling openly now, the terrified man who’d called Tom on the phone that morning gone, vanished, tucked-away. Away for safe keeping, Tom thinks.

  “So I wake up on the couch,” he continues. “It’s like two in the morning, and I gotta piss. So I do my business, and I come out here, turn on the lights, sit at the table there. I was still pretty drunk, I guess. I suppose I still am even now. I sat at the table and thought about what she’d said, what she’d done, and all that anger came rushing back. Tearing away at my insides, a thrashing beast in my chest wanting to rip through my flesh, jump out into the world and destroy everything it could get its claws into. I was scared, to be honest, scared of the thoughts in my head, scared of that hot rage boiling inside me. You ever get angry like that, Tom?”

  “I guess,” Tom says lamely.

  Marcus nods, then pauses, lifts a finger into the air, as if testing for a breeze.

  “Then it strikes me, what I gotta do.”

  “The spoon,” Tom says.

  Marcus nods eagerly. “The spoon. I think, that’ll calm me down. That’ll settle my nerves. So I get a spoon out of the kitchen, sit at the table, and I do what I always do. I concentrate. I stare at that spoon and I will that motherfucker to bend.”

  Marcus throws his hands in the air with such veracity that Tom recoils, slides back another foot, out of reach.

  “And then it happened, Tom!” he says loudly, like a man who’d found God. “It was like a spotlight got turned on inside my head and all that anger, all that frustration and disappointment, all the shame and horror of my life—that bitch’s deceit—it all came pouring out, man, like a tidal wave it burst outward from right here.”

  Marcus points to the middle of his forehead, pokes it like his finger might slip inside, into the vortex of whatever mystical power he’d tapped into. “And my god, Tom, that spoon lifted right off the table, up into the air! I couldn’t believe it! It just… hovered there, like it was awaiting further instruction. So I thought about shapes, you know? Shapes it could take. And when I did, the spoon, in mid-air still, it just started stretching and bending and twisting like you wouldn’t believe.” Marcus twines his fingers together, mashing them into a writhing ball. “It was the most amazing moment of my life.”

  Tom nods, but doesn’t know what to say. Normally, he’d be laughing at Marcus, or, perhaps, in awe of what he’d done. But he looks around at the surreal destruction, the madness that has reshaped the windows and furniture, the dripping frames on the stucco walls, and knows there is more to the story. Knows there is a reason Marcus won’t open his eyes. Why he’d turned out the lights.

  “And then?” Tom says, almost whispering now.

  Marcus scrambles forward quickly, like a spider, his face catching the full light of day for the first time. He clamps a strong hand around Tom’s ankle before he can pull back. His face is stretched in agony, and Tom can see red splotches on his cheekbones, the grizzled beard lining his jaw, the deep-set lines of his years. Tom has a feeling this is what an insane person looks like. This is the embodiment of madness, and he prays Marcus will keep his eyes closed, closed tight, because he does not want to see the eyes that are part of such a face—the eyes of a demon crawling toward him across the floor, clutching at his worn boot.

  Marcus opens his mouth as if to wail, or to cry and moan, but only words escape. “I couldn’t stop it,” he says, sobbing, the tears spilling from beneath his closed lids. Snot runs from his nose and Tom wants to be free of his friend, wants his pale, clawed hand off his leg. He feels again that strong desire to run, to run and never look back.

  “What do you mean?” Tom says, and jerks his boot from Marcus’s clutch, not caring what the man thinks.

  Marcus doesn’t seem to notice, or care, but simply crawls closer, palms smacking against dusty hardwood, trying to find Tom’s face with blinded eyes. “I mean just that!” he yells, spittle flying through sunbeams. “I couldn’t stop it! The spoon, it fell away. I looked at the table, started imagining more shapes in my head, and the great thing lifted from the floor, Tom! Lifted up and began re-forming itself in the air! New and violent shapes, twisting and pulsing with the energy pouring from my mind. I looked away, horrified, willed my mind to stop, to STOP! But it wouldn’t stop. And wherever my eyes fell, things began to take new shapes, to bend, to melt. Wood ran like water, metal bubbled and stretched, the damned windows started moving around like they were floating in hot oil and I made myself look away, away! God, the chairs… they warped and danced. The walls bellowed like goddamn sails… it was incredible, Tom. Incredible and terrifying, because I’d lost control. It was awful… so awful. And yet, amazing. So I, well, I turned off all the lights, turned them all off, so it was dark, so I wouldn’t see anymore. If I couldn’t see anything, I couldn’t hurt anything, right? Right?”

  Marcus stops, breathing heavy, a line of drool runs from his hung head to the floor. His body sags, his forehead lowers until he’s almost lying flat on his face. His fingers are splayed, white-knuckled. A creature waiting to pounce, Tom thinks.

  “Marcus?”

  He’s crying again, lightly now, and when his voice comes, it’s nothing but a harsh whisper in the morning light, echoing off the dusty hardwood. “There was so much noise, Tom. The way things sound when they bend like that, it’s louder than you’d think. Like a dying animal. The furniture would moan and scream, like it was in pain, like I was hurting it… Anyway, she must have woken up…”

  “Jesus god,” Tom spits, scrambling to his feet.

  “You have to believe me, Tom! I wanted it to stop, I did! I tried, I tried…” Marcus pushes himself back into his corner, back into the shadows, as if afraid for his very life. “We fought,” he said, crying into his hands. “We fought! She was gonna leave me, Tom. She was gonna divorce me…”

  Tom’s skin turns ice-cold. He steps back, spins and looks to the hallway. “Marcus, where’s Christine?”

  Marcus doesn’t answer, just cries quietly in the corner, and Tom feels more fear than he’s ever felt before. Christine.

  “Marcus!” he yells, ready to yank the man off the floor and beat him, stop him from his goddamned blubbering. “Where is she!”

  But he isn’t blubbering anymore, Tom realizes. As he watches Marcus’s body shake, hears the choking sounds coming from
his mouth… Oh god no, he thinks.

  The son-of-a-bitch… he’s laughing.

  Tom turns away as if in a dream, walks down the hallway, away from the bellowing laughter, away from the mad ghoul in the living room.

  The bedroom door is at the end of the hall. He notices right away that the frame is stretched, the doorway almost seven feet high and alarmingly bowed. The knob still works, so Tom twists it and pushes the door inward.

  The bedroom has red walls. She called it rose, he thinks. The bedframe, dark, heavy teak is pulled like taffy, reaching nearly to the opposite wall, fifteen feet or more end-to-end. The nightstand is a mound of lapped wood spread across the ground like a lumpy mountain range in miniature. The bureau where she hangs her dresses is flattened against the far wall, the top of it curling downward like a cresting wave flowing back into itself. One wall, Tom couldn’t help but notice, is cratered with large potholes, like it had been struck with meteors. The bathroom door is open and the toilet is springing water like a fountain, soaking the carpet, the porcelain bowl’s maw lengthened to the height of the ceiling, big enough for a man to walk into. A gateway.

  On the bed, on the mattress, is a brown comforter and a humped tangle of bedding. The thing underneath is lumpy and large, like a bag of playground balls with a sheet tossed over them. Tom walks to the bed, clutches the sheet in one sweating fist.

  He thinks, for a moment, that he’ll throw it back and reveal the prank, the joke. The hoax they’d pulled over on him. She’d run from the closet screaming, “We got you! We got you!” and Marcus would slap his back and it would be like it was, before they had fallen in love, before the deceit, before the promise of a future. For two of them at least.

  He jerks the sheet away and screams. His sanity leaps from him like a burned animal, his mind snaps like kindling and he screams and screams. His throat is raw with it and the screams continue, ripping his vocal chords. He claws at his face, his neck, pulls his eyes wide, absorbing the horror.

  We argued. She was gonna leave me, Tom.

  The words ring through his head, and the revulsion gives way to the sharp pang of fear, of self-preservation. He turns in a panic, bolts for the bedroom door, runs down the hall toward the living room, not stopping, not thinking of anything at all but run! Run!

  He slips around the corner, falls to a knee, springs back up and sprints for the front door. He sees a shadow in his peripheral vision coming from the kitchen but he doesn’t wait to see, just throws himself toward the door, reaches for the doorknob…

  …and it lifts away. Like a balloon shooting into the sky, it lifts higher and higher. Tom feels like jumping for it, almost giggling at the image, and watches in stupid awe as the entire wall stretches upward, upward, the building itself taking on a new shape, bending to the will of the man he’d betrayed, the man who’d been empowered by rage and had gone insane with it.

  “Tom,” a steady voice says from behind him, dark and unforgiving. “I can see you.”

  Tom closes his eyes, tries to think of the dream. Tries to think of the earth wrapping itself around him, of his lips melting in a kiss.

  There is harsh laughter, the laughter of the devil.

  Tom turns, opens his eyes, and looks into the red-rimmed, bulging eyes of madness staring back. He feels a jolt of pain in his spine as the ceiling rushes toward him and he thinks, perhaps lastly, of her body as a golden horizon, and he the setting sun.

  Altar

  Gary stared anxiously through the humidity-smeared rear window of the station wagon. The grill of the white Cadillac trailing behind them twinkled in the heat, the chrome glinting like a metal mouth bearing down on the rear bumper every time the brakes squealed them to a stop. Gary stared absently at two shadowy figures, blackened and hazy, hovering behind the Caddy’s sloping windshield like strange voyeurs from another world, a world in which things like air conditioning and tinted windows proliferated.

  Martha had a tendency to brake hard and turn hard, forcing Gary to use the palms of his hands to balance himself against the hot plastic of the car interior with every change in direction, digging the heels of his bare feet into the rough fabric of the wagon’s rear bed at every all-too-brief red light. To make things worse, Gary wore nothing but a swimsuit, and the sun coming through the large wagon windows was sliding across his skin in slanted white quadrangles, smearing like hot butter across his small frame with every twist of the road. He felt like a bug trapped under the concentrated bright eye of a magnifying glass.

  Despite the front windows being down there was little ventilation in the rear, and though the ride was short his skin was already moist with sweat. Particularly annoying was the purple sugar spilled across his chest and the back of his hand from the ripped-open pouch of Lik-M-Aid Fun Dip, which had coughed out a puff of powder when Martha barreled over a particularly large pothole. The crashing bump had briefly levitated him before slamming him down against the wide floor of the wagon’s rear hold, making him bite his tongue while simultaneously creating the Fun Dip fiasco he was currently saddled with.

  “Sorry!” Martha said, floating a hand in the air without turning her head. Then to herself, “Been more and more of those lately... damn roads.”

  “Mom, god,” snapped Abby, her voice chiding but her eyes never leaving the notebook where she scribbled love letters in bright green ink to Timmy Northrup, her teenage crush. “You made me mess up,” she mumbled.

  “Sorry,” Martha repeated, her tone more weary than sorrowful. “Didn’t see it.”

  Abby turned her head absently toward the rear of the wagon and caught Gary’s eye. She smiled, her expression one of amused surprise, as if he had just now come into existence.

  She lifted a hand to her mouth, pantomiming a cup, and pretended to drink from it. She followed this with a cross-eyed look and a wobbling of her head. Gary knew she was pretending to be drunk, and almost laughed, but when he shifted his eyes to the back of his mom’s head his smile disappeared. His mother did drink. He knew that sometimes she drank a lot. It was one of the reasons their father had left them, at least according to Abby.

  He looked back at the still-smiling Abby, and as the sun hit her face, he thought for the millionth time how very pretty she was. She had black hair and blue eyes like he did, like their mother, but her complexion was more olive, like their father’s. Gary knew boys thought she was cute—enough of his friends had told him so—and he certainly held no argument with it. He wished he was more like her, and often imitated her expressions, her mannerisms, in the hopes of being thought of as highly as she was by other kids. But he was small, he knew, and thin, and paler than she. He was skinny and boney like his mother, who they called Martha at her request but never felt right about it. Martha was quite pale, quite thin, having become more so since their father left. But she, also, was quite beautiful. He knew that. He knew she had been.

  Abby snapped her fingers, bringing Gary back. He looked into her eyes, tried to smile. She returned his smile and then she gave him “the Wink.” The Wink wasn’t a quick, darting wink, but a heavy, prolonged wink—the kind where her whole face got into the act—a snarl of her lips and a crease in her cheek and forehead, her eyelids squeezed together in a passionate, overlapping embrace of lashes.

  Gary loved that wink, and it always made him smile. It was the one Abby gave him when things seemed bad but always ended up okay. The one that said: “Don’t forget, don’t worry. We’re in this together.”

  They arrived at the pool.

  Martha dropped the rear gate of the wagon and grabbed a large canvas bag filled with towels, sunscreen, snacks, and water bottles. Gary clutched his own towel and his blue swimming goggles tightly to his chest, waiting for Martha to hurry it up so he could slide out the back.

  “Do you want your sandals?” Martha asked, grabbing a smaller mesh bag that carried Gary’s sandals, t-shirt and the tattered paperback she’d been reading for the last month. He saw a flash of something monstrous on the cover of the thick little
book, its hateful black eyes staring out at him from within the dirty white crisscrossed plastic mesh of the bag. He hated that book and didn’t understand why his mother was reading it. He preferred Encyclopedia Brown himself, or his books about the nice fat lady, Ms. Piggle Wiggle, who always knew the right things to do about bad, nasty children. In the last one he read she had made a boy stay locked inside his dirty room until, one day, the room was piled so high with filth and garbage that the boy was trapped, and he couldn’t eat or sleep or get out of the room and he likely would have died had he not realized, at the very end, that in order to survive he must be clean. So the boy cleaned everything up and never dirtied his room again. Gary thought that was a book worth reading.

  “Gary?” she said again, now holding his small flip-flops between her fingers, jostling them for his attention. “The pavement’s hot.”

  “Okay,” he said, just to keep things moving; anything to get out of the hot, stuffy wagon and into the cool, clear water. He slid his bottom onto the hard plastic shell of the dropped gate, sat patiently while Martha slipped the blue plastic sandals onto his feet. He could hear laughter and joyous screams coming from just over the high brown-brick wall that separated the pool from the parking lot.

  His mother finally took a step back and allowed Gary to slip to the ground. Abby walked ahead, weaving carelessly between parked cars toward the black-glassed double doors below the entry sign reading Akheron Community Center, a low slung beige-bricked building that served as a portal to the recreation center sprawled beyond. He clutched his towel tightly and ran to catch up with her.

  “Watch for cars, please!” Martha yelled at his heels. “Even parked cars move sometimes, you know!”

  Abby turned, hearing the slaps of the sandals on pavement. She smiled vaguely, then turned back and kept walking. Gary could see the straps of her bikini through the sunlit white-and-green-striped cotton dress she had pulled over it. She also had on flip-flops, silly ones with sparkly stones all over them, and carried her own bag with things Gary couldn’t imagine needing at a pool. He knew what was in there because he snuck a look when they were waiting for her that morning.