“Is that it?” he said quietly to himself, knowing the answer without even thinking about it.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Secrets
Anastasia turned up on the Thursday evening as agreed. Chris was sitting inside, waiting nervously, unable to settle. He paced the empty house a few times, looking for something to do, but he couldn’t concentrate. The doorbell rang, and he started, then gave a sigh of mixed relief. He headed quickly for the door, trying to maintain the impression that he was casual and relaxed, that there was nothing unusual going on. He took a few deep breaths, then opened the door, forcing himself to smile.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hello,” said Anastasia. She wasn’t alone. Behind her was a woman he didn’t recognize.
Anastasia headed up the stairs, beckoning the woman to follow her. “This is Sam,” she said as Chris stepped back to let her pass, holding the door open with one hand. The other woman gave him a brief nod and followed Anastasia inside. Chris was left looking stupidly after them, holding the open door. It took him a moment to regain his composure; then, he shut the door and followed them into the living room.
“What do you need?” asked Chris.
Sam was a shorter woman with dark hair and Mediterranean features. She stood in the background, behind Anastasia; unobtrusive, but obviously there. Chris glanced from her to Anastasia and back again.
Anastasia was looking around the room.
“You’ve unpacked some things,” she said.
“Yeah, well, there seemed little point in keeping everything in boxes still.”
Anastasia nodded.
“Stase?”
She shook her head. “Not now,” she said, glancing back at Sam. “I need some things from the kitchen and some bedding. That’s about it for now. We can sort out other things later.”
He looked at her, not quite understanding what she meant by sorting other things out. What other things? He moved over to the lounge and sat, looking up at her, holding his hands clasped together in front of him. He sighed.
“Take what you need,” he said.
He sat there listening as Anastasia and Sam wandered into the kitchen, taking what he presumed were pans, cutlery and plates. They moved upstairs to the bedroom next. There was the sound of opening drawers and cupboards. Chris sat there, helpless, listening to the creak of floorboards as they moved from room to room. Finally, they appeared to be done. There was the sound of feet coming down the stairs and then Anastasia appeared in the doorway.
“I’m done,” she said.
Chris stood, feeling awkward. Anastasia seemed fixed, intent on what she was doing.
“Can we talk?” he asked.
“No, not now,” she said. “I want you to come and look at what I’ve taken.”
“What for?”
She looked slightly exasperated then. Her voice was snappy. “Because it’s just better if you do. We need to agree what I’ve taken.”
Chris frowned. “Okaaay. I trust you. Why is this necessary?”
“It just is.” She disappeared back into the hallway.
Chris followed. Lined up against one wall were three large, black, plastic bags. Sam stood at one end of the hallway, not looking at him. He opened the first bag and looked inside. There were some sheets, a couple of pillowcases, a bedcover. The next bag had towels and some knives and forks. The last one had a couple of pans and some mugs.
“Okay,” he said. He didn’t quite know what else to say.
“All right,” Said Anastasia. “We’ll be going now. I’ll give you a call in a couple of days.”
“Let me give you a hand,” he said.
“No, it’s okay. We can manage,” she said.
Sam opened the door. Anastasia lifted two of the bags and Sam picked up the other. Chris stood watching, shoving his hands into his pockets. Anastasia put down one of the bags on the front step, pulling the door shut behind her.
Chris stood in the hallway a long time, just staring at the door. He felt the house around him, empty, hollow like the way he was feeling. There was growing understanding forming in the back of his head, but it wasn’t anything he was prepared to deal with in detail right then.
Finally, with a sigh, he turned back into the lounge, returned to the couch and sat, resting his head in his hands. He sat like that for a long time. Every couple of minutes, he expected the phone to ring. It didn’t.
Anastasia called him once or twice during the next couple of weeks. She was still blocking his calls at work and blocking the number she used to call him from. Chris tried to do things to keep himself occupied. He unpacked the remaining stuff from boxes in the house and put them away. He started painting the inside, just to keep himself occupied and to freshen up the environment a little. It remained empty, however. At work, he kept as much to himself as he could. He avoided talking about his private life—not that he did that much anyway, but now, he deliberately said nothing about home. A couple of times people asked after Anastasia, and he shrugged them off with non-committal answers that would steer any further questions away. It was a place of solitude, of frustration and of a ringing hollowness that shadowed every action. He’d asked her to come home a couple of times when they spoke, but she wasn’t having any of it, not then.
When he came back home one Friday and found the letter, it was like a body blow, but a blow that he’d been expecting. Anastasia was initiating divorce proceedings. He read the letter over three times, then placed it gently down on the kitchen table and stood staring down at it. It was there in black and white, undeniable.
She must have been planning it for ages, just like she planned everything; and yet, she had kept it from him. She hadn’t even bothered to discuss what she was going to do.
She had been in control of it. She always had. Chris, in many ways, had been just along for the ride, an accessory that suited as long as it was fashionable.
He wondered if there was anyone else—a new, more modern accessory.
He flattered himself that there wasn’t, that they’d just grown too far apart, but he cursed himself for letting things get too far away. Anastasia would have probably worked to take them from his grasp anyway, but at least he could have tried.
As part of the final process, he thought about buying out her share of the house, but there was just too much baggage there. The house was part of what had happened, and he couldn’t really live there anymore, not that he ever really had. Houses accumulate memories like places and they stalk the rooms, especially late at night when everything is still and quiet, and there is time to listen to what the walls are telling you. He ended up selling the house and paying her out of the proceeds as part of the divorce settlement. Fees, lawyers, process and waste. The architects and the dreams. The architecture of dreams that came to nothing and it had all evaporated in a pointless antagonism that had no real reason to exist in the first place.
In reflection, there was little he could find that was good or right. They had been driven by Anastasia’s ambition, and beneath that ambition, he thought that maybe she didn’t really feel or care, that maybe she couldn’t. All she’d had was want. It was a desperate driving need that battered at her underlying persona, shaping it to its own desires. He believed that she, the true Anastasia, had perhaps drowned within.
Was that a product of their environment, a symptom of modern life? He didn’t know. All he really knew was that every day, every one of us is bombarded with images and thoughts of extremes that pound at us through pictures and movies and news and everything else that assails us through our day-to-day existence. All of it is underpinned by the constant need to consume. It is that production of need that becomes our true role in life. He didn’t know whether he wanted a part of that, but within, inside, in that strangely echoing place, he knew it was unavoidable.
Eventually, he reached the point where he was removed enough to really analyze what had happened, not only between them, but to them. Shreds of what had taken place at the cath
edral came back to him when he least expected, and though he tried to put them away, still they returned. It was a violation, what had been done to him, what he’d done to himself, but he thought perhaps it was a necessary violation. He even wondered whether he would be better off sitting blank-eyed in a doorway and then taken away to refill with something that would wash away the pain and hurt and betrayal, if they could ever do it. Then he would take pause, reflect again, and think that the largest betrayal was probably his own betrayal of himself.
It was a betrayal that had taken years to accomplish.
And after all, the black bird had granted his wish; it had left him truly alone.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Framing Glass
You’ve heard the expression, “the milk of human kindness.” Back before there were cartons, tetra packs, plastic containers, milk was delivered in thick glass bottles and the empties were collected every morning. You could hear the milkman clinking and rattling from door to door, a white wire basket held in one hand. He’d grab a bunch of bottles, collecting a handful with a finger shoved down each neck, and one for his thumb, pressing against the others to keep them in place. He’d carry them back and slot them into his basket, ready to return for washing and refilling, and he’d replace them with full ones. Sometimes, the lady of the house would wash them for him, even though they were always rewashed. Often though, there’d be a thin white scum left on the inside of the bottle—perhaps a few drops, or a dead fly to swirl around in tainted milk in the bottom of the glass inside. Sometimes even, there’d be a small shiny piece of thick foil, left from the cap as it had been peeled away, shining dully in the streetlights.
The early morning milkman would carry the empty bottles back to his truck, and they’d be taken away. Taken away to refill.
Maybe sometimes, what they put in the bottles the next time around wasn’t quite the same as the stuff they’d put in before. Maybe that’s what happened to Patrick, to some of the others. Maybe that’s what happens to all of them some way. There are traces of what they were, but the essence has changed. They’re tainted, but tainted with vestiges of themselves. Chris continues to tell himself that had to be the explanation for what happened with Anastasia. He wonders if the same thing happened to him.
Over time, Chris decided that there was a possible reason for what happened to him. He didn’t live in the particular macrocosm shaped by the media, the images and sensations we are bombarded with every day. He had existed for years in his own microcosm, or rather Anastasia’s. He was totally protected from the outside world by a bubble of someone else’s construction, and by his own complicity in its design. Perhaps in the end, she left Chris because those strange black birds really were looking after him, but he was not so sure.
He continues to look out windows, on buses, in cafes, in cars, and think about his ex-wife, expecting to see her walking past, or standing on the side of the street, staring at him as he passes, her face turning to track him with a blank expression. He practices his reaction in his head, the expression he’ll use, whether he’ll gesture, whether he’ll stop and get off the bus and try to catch up with her, but it will never happen like that. Occasionally, he even thinks he’s caught a glimpse of her in a passing car or through a shop window and his heart and guts grow cold. But it’s never her. His memory reaches out and tries to make her there and how she was before. It’s a haunting where the ghost is nothing more than his own memories and broken aspirations.
He heard something once, about how it takes you one full year for every four years you’ve been together to get over a significant relationship. Or was it the other way around? Either way, it was just too damned long. It was always going to be too damned long. He wonders sometimes if she does the same sort of thing, imagining that she’ll catch a glimpse of him as he passes. He doubts it. She was always far too bound in her own version of reality and he’s no longer a part of that, not that he ever really was.
“You’ll always be my friend,” she’d said.
Yeah right.
The markers in all of our lives are stuck together in a disorganized collage of memories, abbreviated like street signs, pointing the way, but existing only as self-defining shorthand.
If Chris spends enough time looking at those places, he discovers that there is a taste that comes with that observation. It is a bitter taste that flows through him like a shudder, but it passes, just like everything else. All memories pass and fade with time, blurring and reshaping to our own convenience. Everything passes.
Now, at least, he can remember what it’s like.
Down the street, jackhammers are busy making alterations to someone else’s life. The builders pound away, ripping apart the old and reshaping it into something habitable. From time to time, Chris gazes out the window of his rented apartment half-expecting a white van to pull up and two clean-cut guys in white coats to step out. It hasn’t happened yet; perhaps it never will.
He thinks he’s safe from his own mental constructions…for now.
And the cathedral? The place or places where he thought it all happened? There were wisps, fragments that floated up when he was thinking about nothing in particular, painting cinematic images on the inner screen that tells him what has been. But that’s just memory. And really, it doesn’t matter, because memory is transitory too. He avoids other people’s memories, and he doesn’t watch television very much anymore.
He’s the one in control.
Chris scrapes his things together, ready to head out the front door. A flicker of dark motion over the other side of the street catches his attention. Perched on the fence across the street sits a black bird. He stops on the top step, staring across at it accusingly. He frowns and the accusation fades. It could be any bird, but somehow he is convinced it is the same one, the one that has been haunting him over the past few weeks and months.
“Just fuck off,” he whispers at it. “I don’t need you anymore.”
As he wanders down to the bus stop, there’s the hint of a smile on his lips.
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About the Author
Jay Caselberg was born in a country town in Australia and then traveled extensively while growing up and later for his day job. He writes across many genres, both at short story and novel length, crossing the boundaries of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery, and the Literary, generally with a dark edge. He is currently based in Germany.
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Copyright
The Hollowed
Written by Jay Caselberg
Executive Editor: Michael A. Wills
Editorial Assistant: Ivy M. Wills
This story is a work of fiction. All the characters, organizations, locations, and events portrayed in this story are either the product of the author’s imagination, fictitious, or used fictitiously. No claim to the trademark, copyright, or intellectual property of any identifiable company, organization, product, or public name is made. Any character resembling an actual person, living or dead, would be coincidental and quite remarkable.
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