The Hollowed

by Jay Caselberg

  “Right. What would you know?” said Chris.

  He stirred his coffee and Andy watched the room.

  They used to play a game with each other, ranking the yearly intake. This one had a great face; another: the face wasn’t so good but oh, what a body. And so it went. Andy was always eager to play, Bill hardly ever.

  As Chris sat there in the cafeteria with Andy, it all seemed a touch shallow. Plastic table tops and metal chairs ranked across the room, only a few full. This time he didn’t have the heart to play. Outside the drizzle went on. Andy tried to spark his enthusiasm, and as class ended and the cafeteria started to fill, Andy nudged him.

  “Good God, will you look at that one.”

  “Hmm, not bad,” Chris said without enthusiasm, his heart not really in it.

  “Oh, come on! She’s more than not bad.”

  “Yes, well, I suppose she’s all right,” he said, half-agreeing, mainly to shut Andy up.

  Somehow, this woman from the party had struck to the very core of him. Andy was right; all Chris had done was seen her. He hadn’t even talked to her. There had been that electric contact when their eyes had met, but he had no idea whether that was a mere construction that existed nowhere else than the inside of his head. Andy went on and on, and Chris’s gaze strained at the doorway, hoping against hope that she would appear. Not that he knew what he’d do if she did. There was no way he’d go up and introduce himself, or start talking to her. That was more Andy’s style.

  That was where they differed. Although he tried to cultivate an air of the debonair on the surface, deep inside he was somewhat shy and unsure of himself. Cool uncaring was his way of coping with the insecurities. After his father had died—they’d been close, and Chris had thought the world of him—he had become wary of forming bonds. He’d learned that they invariably let you down in the end.

  “So, what are you going to do about this girl?” said Andy. He’d realized at last that Chris wasn’t interested in playing.

  “I don’t know. What do you suggest I do? We don’t even know if she’s a student here.”

  “Listen, if she was in the library, it’s a fair bet she’s around for a reason. Ask about. See if anyone knows her.”

  “Sure, and who would I ask?”

  “Hey, whose party was it? Claire’s wasn’t it? Claire McDonald. Why don’t you ask her?”

  “I hardly know the girl. Sure I’m just going to walk up to her and ask her about this mystery woman.”

  “Well I could ask her. She’s been in a couple of my classes, and she hangs around with some of the guys I drink with.”

  Andy’s circle was pretty wide. Someone he knew was bound to know, or at least know someone who did. For a moment Chris had hope.

  “Can you do that for me?” he asked.

  “Sure, why not? It might take a couple of days to come up with anything though.”

  Chris shrugged and stared back down into his now cold coffee, looking at the white scum that had formed on the surface. He poked at it with his finger and wiped it on the table. Andy was watching him with a curious look on his face.

  “Man, you’ve got it bad,” he said.

  Chris said nothing.

  “I’ll see what I can do for you, my friend,” he said. “You can trust Andy to look after you.”

  Andy got up and left him in that solitary corner, shaking his head while he walked away. As he departed, Chris lifted the disposable cup to his lips and sipped thoughtfully at the remaining almost-cold coffee.

  Chapter Eight

  Conquest

  It was three days before Andy came up with anything, but true to his word, he’d found out what he could.

  “So…interesting,” he said, cornering Chris in the kitchen at home. Chris was standing in his robe and pajamas making breakfast. Bill had long gone. He was an early riser and was usually well away by the time they stumbled to their own particular versions of consciousness.

  “What?” Chris looked down at the half-burnt toast on his plate. It surely couldn’t be that.

  “This woman. The woman.”

  “What, have you found something out?”

  “I certainly have, dear boy. Doesn’t Andy always come up with the goods?”

  Chris put down his plate, then sat, looking across at him expectantly. Andy could see his eagerness and he played it for all it was worth.

  “So tell me…is she involved?” Chris asked.

  “Involved? Oh, I’m sure she’s very involved. Strikes me as the type, doesn’t she?”

  “Come on. You know what I mean.”

  “Oh, I see.” He grinned, and Chris barely restrained the urge to throw a piece of toast at him. Andy dragged out one of the chairs opposite, spun it around and sat, leaned over the back and reached for a piece of Chris’s toast. Chris slapped his hand away.

  “Come on, tell me,” he said. Mornings were not the best time for Andy to play games with him. “I’m really not in the mood, guy.”

  “Right,” Andy said, leaning forward with his elbows on the chair back and his fingers steepled in front of his face. He knew better than to push it too far. “Yeah, she’s a student. Anastasia. Anastasia Robins. I couldn’t get much on her background at all. No idea what the family does, but rumor has it that she comes from money. She’s come down from the big smoke, living locally in town somewhere. Sharing an apartment with another girl. She doesn’t hang around on weekends. And…what else? Oh yeah, she’s majoring in Biochem.”

  “Great. Just great,” Chris said, his hopes of anything already dwindling.

  “Well, you wanted to know.”

  “Yes, but what hope have I got? We’re not even in a related department. If she’s doing Biochem, she’s hardly likely to take English as an optional elective. She doesn’t stay around on weekends, and what are the odds that she’s not going to mix with riffraff like yours truly?” Chris pushed his plate across the table and buried his head in his hands.

  “Well, just forget about her and get on with your life. She’s only a girl.”

  “Christ! But what a girl,” he looked up again. “Why do I always go for the ones I can’t touch? Can you answer me that?”

  “Good old masochistic Chris Baron,” Andy said. “You just like beating up on yourself. I tell you, you ought to be like me. Just forget about it and have a good time. She’s probably so far up her own backside that you wouldn’t get anywhere anyway.”

  “Well, thanks for the encouragement.”

  “What are friends for?” Andy finished off the last of Chris’s toast, pushed his chair back, stood and grinned down at him. “Anyway, I’ve told you what you wanted to know. So, pull yourself together, man. It’s a new day out there. I’m off. Women to conquer, classes to skip, hearts to break.”

  Only after he’d gone did Chris realize that Andy had managed to finish all of his breakfast. He wasn’t really hungry anymore, so he stood and got himself ready to leave. He didn’t have any classes until later in the afternoon, but he wanted to get some research done in the library. Not that he was in any mood to find the concentration he needed.

  First stop was the cafeteria—the haven before the storm of his intellectual struggle.

  She was there.

  He stood at the door and the whole world rushed past his ears. She was sitting at a long table with a group bedecked in white lab coats. It took him a moment to see that she was wearing one too. Someone pushed past him, and he wavered, powerless to move. The sight of her had pinned him to the doorway like a dead butterfly. With a swallow, he pulled himself together. Briefly she glanced over in his direction and his heart stopped. Then she looked away and he could breathe again. He fumbled to readjust the notes and books held under his arm, then stirred himself from the door and walked inside.

  There was a table running parallel to her group. A couple of other tables ran between the two, but they were empty. Chris took up position facing where she sat. A hulking white lab coat blocked his view, and he shifted marginally to get
a better angle.

  It was the same as at the party. A corridor of silence closed in on his head and there, at the end of that long tunnel, sat Anastasia. He chewed on his thumb and watched. Others came and went, forming vague shadows in the edges of his vision, but they meant nothing. Every time she spoke, she had the attention of the entire group she was with. He was torn then. Should he get up and get himself a cup of coffee and stop sitting there staring like an idiot? What if she looked across and caught him?

  The lab coat in the way stood and wandered over to the serving area. Suddenly, unexpectedly, Chris was afforded an uninterrupted view. She looked across and he quickly dropped his gaze. He pulled out a book from his pile and opened at random. When he looked up again, she was talking to the girl beside her. She laughed, tossed back her head, and ran her fingers back through her hair. That gesture again. The same one she had made in the library.

  The owner of the lab coat returned and sat squarely in his way. He groaned to himself and gritted his teeth. He wasn’t going to shift position again.

  “Chris? Hello…Earth to Chris Baron.”

  He looked up and Andy was standing there at the end of the table grinning across at him. He lifted his eyebrows in acknowledgment.

  “So where were you?” he asked.

  Chris tilted his chin towards the other table.

  Andy glanced over, and his grin became even broader. “Oh, I see,” he said. He walked over and pulled out the chair beside Chris. He sprawled down on it and clasped his fingers behind his neck. With his legs stretched out and crossed beneath the table, he looked as if he owned the place.

  “God, she’s not bad, is she?”

  “I told you.”

  “A bit skinny for my taste.”

  At that moment, members of her group started looking at their watches and scraping their things together. A couple stood. He recognized one of them at the table’s end. He was in one of his classes. He knew him vaguely. His name was John Samson or something. As with most of the hard science majors, he probably took his class as an easy elective. Perhaps he had hope after all.

  Anastasia was still talking to someone, pushing her files and folders together as she stood. As a group, they were heading off to class, all boring geeks together, except Anastasia, of course. She glanced up, saw Chris looking. She held that glance for an instant too long, and a brief speculative look flashed across her face, then she looked away. Then, as a group, they left the cafeteria.

  “Contact,” said Andy.

  “Oh God,” Chris said and slapped his forehead with his fingers, once, twice, three times.

  “Well, what are you going to do about it?”

  “Oh God,” he said again, shaking his head. “Nothing. Nothing.”

  “What do you mean, nothing? I saw it.”

  Chris shook his head. “Well I can’t just walk up to her and introduce myself. She’ll think I’m an idiot.”

  “You’re an idiot if you don’t, my boy. Come on, what’s wrong with you?”

  “Well, she’s gone now anyway. So that’s that. You don’t really expect me to walk up in the middle of that lot do you?”

  Andy snorted. “I would.”

  “Yes, I know you would. No class, Gevers. No class.”

  “Who needs class when you’ve got style and panache like me?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “I don’t know, Chris. Sometimes you disappoint me. I have such high expectations for you. Make her yours. Make her quiver beneath your dominant touch.”

  Chris just shook his head again.

  “You want a coffee?” Andy asked and got to his feet.

  “No, thanks. Surprise, surprise, but I’ve got some work to do,” said Chris. He scraped his things together and left Andy to get his coffee while he headed for the library. He read the same page for the next two hours, over and over again.

  He saw her regularly over the next few days, now that he was looking. The cafeteria became his hunting ground as he sat in ambush, hoping for a glimpse. She clearly noticed him more than once, but feigned to look as if she hadn’t. He caught her looking over in his direction from time to time. Chris was beginning to wonder if she might draw attention to his presence and his constant watching, a nudge and a gesture in his direction to one of her friends, but she didn’t. She continued blithely sitting following the group discussions, and occasionally looking over at him. He didn’t know what she was playing at, and yet, as much as he thought about it, he couldn’t muster the courage to breach the barrier he had constructed around himself.

  Sometimes he wished he had Andy’s guts. It didn’t seem right with the way he’d been brought up—what was proper, what was right. After his father had died, his grandfather, an old-school bank manager, had been a significant presence. It was funny how politeness translated to reserve in his upbringing. So he sat and watched, longing for something to happen and yet afraid that it might. On occasion, he would pass her on the way to his class or the library. He’d be walking, composing notes in his head and look up and suddenly she’d be there. His insides would drop away and leave him feeling cold and empty, flustered, all thought gone from him. And then she’d be gone.

  There had to be an end to it. He started to think of ways he could contrive to be near her, to work up to a point where he could engineer an introduction. Slowly, over the next couple of weeks, Chris kept watching. He monitored when she’d be in the cafeteria, and where she went when she left. He noted the times that he passed her on the way to the library, and he watched whom she sat with and tried to work out if he recognized any of them. Time and again, it came back to the same thing—there was no real common link. But despite all that, his obsession continued.

  One day, he was sitting in the cafeteria watching, Andy beside him. Anastasia stood, left the group she was with and strode across the intervening space to their table. She leaned down and planted her palms firmly on the tabletop directly across from Chris. He looked down at those slim, pale hands and then, slowly, slowly up to her face. She was wearing a black tee shirt that looped at the neck, giving him an uninterrupted view of her chest as his eyes rose slowly to her face. She fixed him with that clear green gaze, making sure she had him, just as he’d seen her do to a hundred others, and then she spoke.

  “All right,” she said. “So, who the hell are you?”

  That was it. He was lost.

  He stammered out a reply, not really paying any attention to what he was saying, but it didn’t matter. It was too late for it to matter. Far too late.

  She nodded and strode away, leaving him there to bang his head slowly on the table, muttering, “Idiot,” while Andy, grinning like a fool, sat next to him.

  Chapter Nine

  Bubbles

  After the conversation with Stase at the kitchen table that morning, Chris decided he wasn’t going to talk to her about his suspicions any more—not until he had some sort of concrete proof that he wasn’t imagining everything. And he set about making plans about how he was going to get that proof. The first step was to find the old homeless guy who called himself Patrick.

  Despite his memory of what Patrick had said, the doubt was still there working away in Chris’s mind. He wondered how one could ever be sure that he was not losing his mind, that he was not simply conjuring things as a circumstantial convenience. That was the question—what happens when you can’t even believe the stories you tell yourself, the stories that the world and everything that shapes it concoct to make you believe? Everyone shared that particular gift to some degree, coloring their personal truths with their own version of reality, but it was a matter of magnitude. He wondered whether it was possible truly to recognize faults in your own mind—belief becoming a construct of personal experience and need. Well, now things had happened that made him determined to find out.

  There was still work and the house and the day to day. He could have easily just gone back to the everyday routine and slipped into that easy non-thinking existence without pause, but
the doubt wouldn’t let him. From what Chris believed he could reliably remember—but he didn’t know how much of that was even barely reliable now—he’d only really seen the man calling himself Patrick in the daytime. It’s funny how you notice people every day and yet don’t notice them at all. When you needed to put them into place and context, it was harder than it might at first seem. Chris needed to see Patrick soon and if he had to see him in the daytime, that meant work wasn’t an option. He had some vacation days accrued and he decided he was going to use them. He’d go in on the Monday, arrange it as soon as he could and take the time he needed. He had to come up with some plausible explanation to tell Stase, but he could think of something, especially the way things had been going in their relationship. And on top of everything, even though they were talking again, he still had an uneasy feeling about what was happening in the strangely movable life between them.

  Dutifully, he turned up at work on the Monday morning as he’d planned. Things were pretty slow in the office, so it was no problem to take a few days. When he came home that evening and told Stase, she was clearly not impressed.

  “Why now?” she said, a faint frown etched between her brows.

  “I just think I need some space to get my thoughts together. Just a few days, that’s all.”

  This seemed to mollify her a little, but she wasn’t completely happy, and she wasted no time making her feelings felt. “It’s important that we spend time together. Don’t you understand that, Chris? I don’t think it’s very considerate of you to take this time without talking to me about it first. We should spend our break time together. You know I can’t afford to take any time off at the moment.”

  Chris walked up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. “I would have talked to you about it, but it was a sort of spur-of-the-moment thing. I don’t need the distraction of work at the moment. Things are slow enough that I won’t be missed, and I thought I’d take the opportunity. I really need some time to think and sort things out in my own mind. You must understand that.”