Behold the Void

by Philip Fracassi

  “Wow,” Mike said, the fear of the thing in the trees forgotten, the beating sun barely registering through his awe of this miraculous artifact from the real world of Cops and Robbers. He wanted to reach for them again, but pulled his hands short when Joe lifted the pistol, pointed it casually at the bridge of Mike’s nose. Mike’s breath caught despite knowing full-well that it was just a toy. Still…

  “All right, ass-hole,” Joe said, stretching out the pronunciation of his favorite dirty word, “time for you to get into jail. You’ve been charged with three counts of armed robbery, two murders and… and…”

  “Breaking out of prison,” Mike finished, helping the plot along.

  Joe nodded in agreement. “Right. That alone is like forty years in the pen. Now let’s go, move it. Hands up, no funny stuff.”

  Mike put his hands up and turned around, fighting off the unease he felt—it’s just a game, dummy—knowing Joe still had that pistol pointed at the back of his head. He thought of that cold finger brushing his cheek, and shuddered.

  “Walk, varmint!” Joe yelled, and gave Mike a little shove.

  “Fine, geez,” Mike said, liking the game less and less and suddenly feeling like he might want to go home for a while, lay down in his cool bed. Maybe, if he was lucky, his dad would feel like playing, or maybe the two of them could go swimming. He was tired of playing with Joe every day and missed doing stuff with his father. “Listen,” he said, dropping his arms and half-turning, “I think I’m gonna just go home for a bit. I don’t feel like playing right now. It’s too hot.”

  He started to turn the rest of the way around, but Joe shoved him again. Harder this time. So hard Mike almost stumbled.

  “Bullshit,” Joe said, and his voice didn’t sound like Joe’s. It was like Joe was pretending to be older. Meaner. Mike was really feeling done with the game now, but wasn’t sure how to end it without seeming stupid. He lifted his hands back up, albeit half-heartedly.

  “You can’t quit just because you got caught first, Mike,” said the older-sounding Joe. “How’d you like it if I quit every game just because you were winning? That would be like cheating, wouldn’t it?”

  Mike kept walking, hands raised all the way over his head, and said nothing.

  “And I’m not gonna let you cheat. You have to serve time for the things you’ve done,” Joe continued, and Mike felt the cold circle of the pistol barrel resting lightly against the back of his skull. “So you’re going to prison, asswipe. And then, after, oh… I’ll say ten minutes… I’ll let you go.”

  Then, in the space of a heartbeat, Joe’s young, normal voice was back, and Mike found his fear and tension abating at the sound of it, the normalcy of it. Joe spoke to him in a near-whisper as they walked, as if not wanting to alert the other Joe, the older Joe, to his plan. “Then you can be the cop and I’ll be the robber, okay, Mike?”

  Reassured by the return of young Joe, and not wanting to be called a cheat for the rest of the summer, Mike relented. Ten minutes, he thought. Big dealio.

  “All right, fine,” he said with a sigh, eyeing the ground ahead. “So where’s this prison of yours?”

  For a terrifying moment, Mike thought Joe would march him back toward the trees, back to whatever it was that had snuck up behind him, run its finger up his spine, curled its hand around his neck…

  “Down there,” Joe said, and Mike knew what he meant without even seeing him point. The cove.

  In a lot of ways, it was the perfect prison. Secured on all sides by high rock faces, only one stairway to guard. Mike couldn’t help but think it a top-notch idea, and was almost sad they hadn’t thought of using the cove as a prison base in summers past.

  As they reached the stairs, Mike lowered his arms to grip the black paint-flaked railing, his feet feeling the hot grooves of the corrugated metal steps as they descended.

  “All the way down,” Joe said.

  Mike noticed as they walked how much beach there was that morning. The water was pulled back pretty far and barely brushed the lower edge of rocks. They passed the step where the waterline reached at high tide, an easy marker because the steps below were crusted and rough, the railing coarse with rust in areas. If you looked around, you could see the waterline on the rocks, as well. They were dark brown and moss-flecked to about ten feet, and above that were more khaki and clean. There was a line of white salt that had crusted over the many years, like a chalked marker of how high you could expect the water to get.

  They were well below that now.

  Mike’s feet hit the hot sand. It was strewn with bits of seaweed and broken seashells, the occasional chipped sand dollar, pieces of shellfish and jagged, ugly little rocks. The beach went about eight feet before it met the softly-lapping edge of the ocean. The water in the cove was a dark greenish-black that looked bottomless. Beyond, it got bluer, stretching to the horizon, an infinity of moving, living sea.

  Mike winced as something hard and cold banged against his wrist. “Ow!” he yelped, and spun.

  As if fearing an attack, Joe quickly clamped the other handcuff to the stanchion at the bottom of the stairs, a thick black metal rod that sunk deeply into sand where it met the bottom of the stairway, also long-buried out of sight below the surface.

  Joe hopped three quick steps up the stairs, a smile splitting his face.

  Mike looked down at his wrist, saw the cuff firmly on it, locked tight. With his other hand, he grabbed the cuff snapped around the metal stanchion, raised it absently to the top, where it met a very solid, very un-rusted, handrail. He tugged, but the railing didn’t budge. He tugged harder, felt a pinch on the inside of his wrist.

  “It’s too tight,” he said quietly, as if to himself, looking hard at that sturdy handrail where it met the sunken stanchion.

  He looked up at Joe, saw that smile and, in that moment—on that particular moment of that particular day of that particular summer—Mike thought that maybe he hated Joe Denton. Thought that maybe, just maybe, he might want to skip summer with Joe Denton next year. He might want to take a leaping pass on their shack of a summer place, his too-busy-to-play father, the dried-up old beach, the shitty old grove of fir trees and this rocky, tadpole-shaped cove to boot, with its rusted staircase and feet-sucking currents. But most of all, Mike thought—all of this shooting through his brain in a split-second—he’d like to go next summer without seeing the fucking smile currently plastered on Joe Denton’s tan, pimply face. Yeah, Mike thought absently, he’d be pretty cool with that, all right. Pretty goddamned cool.

  Mike turned away from that smile, looked toward the ocean. He’d already decided that once Joe let him go he was going home, whether Joe thought it was cheating or not. He was going to go home and ask his dad—insist that his dad—play something with him. Cards, Monopoly, catch with the air-deprived football that sat lifeless on their porch every summer… something. Anything. Because suddenly, just like that, Mike was all done with Joe Denton’s bullshit.

  “You gotta stay ten minutes!” Joe howled, having already run up to the top of the stairs. “No cheating!” he yelled down.

  Mike turned, looked up at Joe, a small shadow against the cloudless blue sky stretched out far above him, and nodded.

  “Don’t see how I could cheat, dipshit. You locked me up here.”

  Joe’s wolfish smiled faltered. He wasn’t used to being called names by Mike. Mike was the nice one, Mike was the soft one. But Joe didn’t think he looked soft now, handcuffed to the bottom of the stairs, naked but for his faded red swimsuit, all of the ocean behind him. Joe thought that perhaps Mike looked just a little bit pissed off.

  “Look, I’ll be back in ten minutes. I’m gonna run home and take a dump, and then you can be the cop and if you catch me, you can lock me up. It’ll be fun, okay?”

  Mike didn’t respond except to turn away and sit down on the bottom step of the staircase, the sun glowing on his shoulders, his feet digging into the rough wet sand. For the briefest of moments, Joe considered calling the
whole thing off and unlocking his buddy. He didn’t want there to be hard feelings.

  But the game was the game, after all.

  Joe turned and began walking back toward his house. The heat was getting bad and he smiled to himself at the thought of changing back into his suit for a nice cool swim later on. That would cheer Mike up. And hell, maybe Joe would cheat a little when he got back and let Mike catch him right away, then he could use the cuffs and they’d be even.

  Pleased at his own generosity and sense of fairness, Joe jogged toward the Barn. He didn’t know that his shorts had a worn hole in them, or notice that the key to the handcuffs had slipped through the hole, bounced off the rubber heel of his sneaker, and nosedived into a cluster of tall grass as he ran for home.

  As Joe came around the side of his house, he saw a man standing at the front door preparing to knock. He was a tall, lean black man, wearing a pale blue shirt and wide-brimmed hat with a badge at the front. A cop. Joe’s eyes darted to the driveway where another officer stood watching him eagerly, leaning against a silver-and-blue police car, the engine still running.

  The officer at the door looked down at Joe with a mixture of concern and wariness, as if Joe might take off again any second. Like I’m a criminal, he thought absently.

  “You Joe?” the officer said, and Joe found himself studying the heavy black belt around the officer’s waist, ticking off all the articles he knew were in it because his father had shown him that stuff his whole life, right down to the heavy black gun he had snapped into the holster.

  “Yes sir,” Joe said, well aware of how to speak to officers of the law, whether they were in uniform or not.

  “Joe,” the tall man said, dropping to a knee so he was eye-to-eye with the boy. “My name is Jack Gordon, and the officer over there is Tim Wells. We’re friends with your dad, and you need to come with us, okay? We’re gonna take you to your folks.”

  Joe’s body felt numb with fear, his mind trying to process this strange turn of events. His brain emptied like milk spilling across the floor and down a drain. New sparks of thought came to him, filling all the empty space. Were his parents dead? Were they in jail? Were they shot? Murdered? Or had they just been hurt? Maybe their car broke down. Maybe, maybe, maybe… the possibilities piled up, overwhelmed him.

  He looked to the other officer, who was already opening the back door of the cruiser, waiting expectantly for Joe to crawl in.

  “What happened?” Joe said finally, mustering just enough sense to form the words.

  The officer—Officer Gordon, he remembered—looked away, as if trying to come up with the right answer, then looked Joe square in the eye once more.

  “There’s been an accident, son. Your mom was hurt, but she’s gonna be okay, you understand? Everyone is going to be okay. But your dad is with her at the hospital right now, and he asked us, as a favor, to come get you and bring you to them. Would that be all right? You can call him first if you want, I have the number to the hospital and we can go inside and call him first. They’ll put him on, okay?”

  Joe realized he was trembling, and that, at some point during Office Gordon’s talk, he had started to cry. “No,” he said. A deep fear tore apart his young mind, strained his heart. “I want to just go. You’re cops, so it’s okay, my dad always said…”

  Officer Gordon nodded, stood tall. “That’s right, son.” He nodded to the cruiser. “Okay, hop in. We’ll be there in thirty minutes and you can see your dad.”

  Joe nodded and ran for the car. He leapt into the cool back seat and the second officer closed the door behind him. Joe stared forward through the thick Plexiglas divider, heard the squawking of the police radio, eyeballed the riot shotgun sticking up from the middle of the broad console of instruments.

  Officer Gordon got behind the wheel and the second officer, a young guy, Joe noticed, closed the passenger door, turned around and smiled at Joe.

  “We’ll use the lights and sirens, get there real fast. It’ll be fun,” he said, and flicked some switches and Joe heard the loud blurping-whine of the siren as they turned around and pulled out of the gravel driveway, accelerating so quickly that Joe felt himself pushed gently into the back of the seat.

  He didn’t care about the lights or the sirens, his dad had shown him that stuff a million times. All he cared about, all he could think about, was that his mom and dad were okay, that they weren’t hurt. That they weren’t going to die, is what Joe was really thinking, but he kept that thought buried, deep down where he couldn’t reach it.

  As the cruiser accelerated down Seaside Avenue toward the hospital, sirens blaring in the hot day’s sun, Joe sat still and silent, anxious about what he would find at the hospital. He was as afraid as he’d ever been in his short life, and a million horrible images were racing through his mind. Joe had no brain capacity left to think about anything other than his beloved parents.

  One could say that, apart from worrying about his folks, Joe Denton wasn’t thinking about anything at all.

  * * *

  Paul Klein was drunk. Well, pretty drunk. He’d been drinking. More than usual. Quite a bit, in fact. He looked out the window of the small guest bedroom he used as a “summer office,” saw the bright square of light taunting him.

  Shouldn’t drink so much, he thought, staring at the light. He knew Mike could come home any minute, and he’d have to be a dad again. Be responsible again. Take time out for nurturing, for betterment, or whatever it was he was supposed to be doing and failing miserably at. He filled the little shot glass etched with a seagull—the one they bought their first summer here, almost ten years ago now—from the Jack Daniel’s fifth staining a square on the rough pine surface where the whiskey had slopped over the sides and gathered at the bottle’s bottom, soaking into the wood with the patient, destructive nature only whiskey had. He smoothed his hand over the cream pages of the moleskin journal splayed open on the desktop, ran a finger over the words etched in wobbly ink.

  Is this a suicide note? he thought, honestly filled with wonder at the idea and, more wondrous, unsure of the answer. No, no, he quickly replied to his own question. Not rhetorical, then. No, he would never do it. Two reasons.

  One, he was a coward. Two, Mike.

  He had Mike to worry about. Poor little Mike who had already lost his mother, his mother who had breathed her last in the very room Paul now sat in. In those days, the room was still a guest room. There was a twin bed, a giant dresser with an oval mirror perched atop it, the glass set into a wooden frame carved like waves. They’d first seen the dresser while treasure-hunting at an antique shop in Seattle. It had cost more to have the thing shipped to the summer cabin than it had to buy it, Paul recalled. He remembered how much he hated that large oval mirror, set into the dark, twisting, writhing frame of staid motion. It seemed to catch every moment, that mirror. How many times, when she had been sick, had he inadvertently seen her pale reflection, seen his own darkened eyes? Like the mirror wouldn’t let him get away from the pain. He’d look at her, see death. Look away, not wanting to see another moment of it, needing respite, and see her yellow-tinted eyes watching him in the mirror, and he knew that she saw his disgust, his surrender. The good husband mask would drop away, and their stares would meet in that alternate dimension for a moment, and then she would close her tired eyes and hate him, hate herself.

  When she was dead, Paul gave the dresser, the bed, and the small table and nightstand that filled out the rest of the room to Goodwill. He painted the room himself, from a deep blue to a stark white, wanting it clean, wanting it empty. Empty of everything. Thoughts, feelings, diseases, death. Memories. It took three coats.

  He’d found the desk at a yard sale, a massive six-drawer pine monstrosity that appeared to have been beaten and tortured most of its life. It was scratched and the drawers stuck a bit; there was a dark Rorschach-esque stain on its surface, seeped deep into the porous, knotty wood. From an ink bottle, perhaps. Blood, perhaps. Paul didn’t really care. He had the massi
ve thing delivered, all but wedged into the room where his wife of ten years had been eaten alive from the inside.

  Now, every summer, he’d throw his laptop on the scuffed pine desktop and try to work on an article or two. He knew as well as anyone the importance of publishing to the right journals, and he hadn’t come out with anything in years. So he tried to work, the mail order bookcase sitting glumly at his back filled with medical texts and reference books.

  And he tried. Oh, Lord, how he tried. Trying was what he was best at, after all. Trying to be a good husband. A good surgeon. A good father. But now he was at the halfway point—mid-40s, wife dead, his services down to one hospital and a half-ass private practice, his only child forlorn, distant, entering his teen years without a mother, without a role model, without the proper guidance and support, and without the right amount of love or friendship that a child should expect from a father.

  Paul stared at the scrawled words on the pages. His journal, his diary, his life spilled out on 90 lb. cream. He saw the words and nearly cried at each hateful barb he’d attacked himself with. Words like mistake, worthless, failure.

  He lifted his hand and stared at the circle of dead silver around his finger. What made him whole was now an empty symbol, a circle defining a void within. He turned back a page and read from the beginning of his last entry.

  Every day I feel as if I am searching for the other part of myself. I dream in hopes I’ll be there, hiding, and I’d be willing to follow myself back home, into the real world, where the parts of me combine and are whole again. Jung says the self, if whole, is harmonious.

  I am discord. I spiral ever downward. I’m always falling, and every day I fall further and further, close myself up more and more from the things around me, from myself, my past, my son. Soon I will be but a speck, a dot on the great surface. And soon that speck will vanish, leaving only a vibrating emptiness behind.