Casting Shadows Everywhere

by L. T. Vargus

  I stepped forward. She dove, splaying out flat to grasp after my ankles. I juked and kicked my feet up, but she got a piece of my pants with her claws and the rest of her sort of latched around my leg. It reminded me of a bee’s legs wrapping around your finger just before it stings you.

  “Let go,” I said.

  I strained to step free from her grip. My calf bulged. Her knuckles whitened. I paused for a second and struggled against her again, trying to catch her off guard. Not a chance. I let up.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll stay. Just let go of my foot already.”

  “You’re lying,” she said.

  She hugged herself against me harder, blonde hair swirling over her face.

  “I’ll never let go.”

  “Fine.”

  I bent over at the waist, resting my hands on my knees. Let her hold on, right? Let her wear herself down, gripping all tight like that. Yep. Go for it, dude. No sweat off my back. I’d just wait her out.

  I thought about that feeling you get when your team is losing. That terrible, helpless sensation like everything in the universe transpires out of your control. The opponent keeps your tribe on the defensive. Keeps attacking some weakness that usually isn’t there, but today it is, and you can’t fix it. Your will power seeps away like air gushing from a popped tire. It feels like you’ve been punched in the gut, and you’ll never win again. Never have control again. And always, the clock ticks down toward zero.

  People watch sports ’cause it simulates life and death, especially in any kind of playoff scenario. Winning is survival. Losing is death. We all survive and die vicariously through teams or boxers or poker players or whatever.

  But it was weird, ’cause I knew I wasn’t going to lose this time. Eventually she would let go. She’d fall asleep. She’d lose focus for just a second. She’d get hungry. She’d have to go to the bathroom. She’d scratch some itch that she could no longer ignore. Whatever the case might be, she would let go, and I would go home.

  Still, I had that feeling. Losing. Powerlessness. Death. Something wild thrashed out of my control, and beat me down, and laughed in my face all the while.

  Silence smothered us. Tranquility taunted us. I could see her chest throb when she breathed, but otherwise there was no movement. No noise. Nothing.

  I ripped my leg free. I guess her mind had wandered after all.

  “No!” she screamed.

  She scrambled to try to get to her feet, and I gave her a shove, almost a stiff arm, while she was off balance. She staggered into one of those running-slashing-falling-forward maneuvers. That gave me just enough space to race to the top of the stairs and get the door closed behind me.

  “No!”

  She hurled herself at the door, thumping on it again and again. She screamed all the while, mostly wordless, though she threw in some profanities here and there. Her voice was all raw and shrill. There was something almost demonic about it.

  I waited for a long time there, listening to her hysterics. I don’t really know why. That feeling of losing really swelled in my belly then, though I was still clueless as to why. I’d seemingly won in the short term, but everything had just careened out of my control again. I could feel it all around me. The world turned against me somehow, with gleeful cruelty, like a thousand kicks in the sack.

  It fucking hurt.

  Chapter 31

  ONCE AGAIN, I DIDN’T SLEEP so much as flail about that night. Kicking, twisting, swinging my arms, I brawled with the blanket and stomped on the sheets. My head butted the pillow. My mouth tasted like that wet dog smell mixed with pond scum. I could hear my heartbeat like someone pounding out a never-ending drum fill on my eardrum.

  I kept imagining a realtor coming to do some kind of walk-through at the vacant house early the next morning. I pictured an older woman with long dark hair and huge square glasses. She sported a pink and purple Cosby sweater and khakis and thumbed through a huge ring of keys before letting herself in.

  Leaflets were laid out on counter tops.

  Febreeze spritzed everywhere.

  She sliced open one of those Tollhouse loaf tube things of premade cookie dough and started cutting it up onto a metal cookie sheet. To give the place that smell of cookies baking, you know?

  And then Beth started moaning from the basement and rattling chains like she was some animal caged down there. Like Frankenstein’s monster or something. And the realtor’s mouth popped open, and she dropped the cookie dough tube, which slapped and half-flattened on the kitchen floor. And the knife skittered over the cookie tray and onto the counter.

  I coiled the sheet into knots around my knees. The blanket crept up over my shoulders, and I bashed it back down. I didn’t fluff the pillow so much as pummel that shit.

  I really hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in several days now. (Since the whole Nick thing. Jesus. I’d barely even thought of that all day. And I won’t start now. I will leave it here in the parenthetical world and just move on. It’s too much.)

  The warmth crawled over my face then. The adrenaline and excitement and fear of it all. I knew I wouldn’t sleep, but I lay there in the dark anyway. I guess I wriggled more than I lay, but you get the point.

  The words “still life” popped into my head, like the art of inanimate objects. Paintings of bowls of fruit and shit, you know. Maybe the words came to me because I couldn’t keep still. I don’t know. It’s weird how that name, still life, is more interesting than the art itself in some ways.

  Loads of people lead a still life, I think. The stillest life of all. All the people that work the forty-hour-a-week office jobs and factory jobs and retail jobs and all that. The years of their life just melting away.

  I could be wrong. I don’t claim to know everything. But from a distance I see no purpose in it. No meaning. No growth.

  They cart themselves to and from work so they can buy new furniture and bigger TVs. What drives them to it? Don’t they ever wonder what for? Can’t they feel the emptiness of it all? Weren’t we made to be part of something bigger somehow? Something that actually matters.

  But I also knew I could never have a still life now, even if I wanted it. I’d crossed some line somewhere, some permanent threshold, and that was over for me.

  Maybe none of it matters anyway. Isn’t that what Nick was trying to say, really? That there is no meaning in any of it no matter what.

  All the things that drive our desires. The things we think we want coming from somewhere deep in a hole in our right brain that we can never peer into.

  So we ceaselessly struggle against each other. We clash. We crash. We collide. We lie and cheat and steal. And kill.

  But it’s all in some false hope. Because there’s nothing there.

  Our left brain tries to etch order into the chaos. It believes until the very end that our right brain is telling us these things for a purpose, a reason, that there’s a pot of gold at the end of the goddamn rainbow. But there’s not. Deep down, you know there’s not.

  There’s only the pitch black nothing.

  * * *

  Beth leaned against the wall under one of the windows, standing. Fractured sunlight curled down onto her through the glass blocks and fluttered over her face in a way that made it look like she was under water.

  Her eyes were open too wide somehow. They tracked me across the room, but otherwise she stood motionless. I couldn’t get a read on her expression. I planted my feet a couple yards short of her, and we looked at each other.

  “You must really get off on all of this, huh?” she said. “Keeping a girl trapped in the basement like a grasshopper in an old pickle jar with breathing holes stabbed in the lid.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Is that the only way you could actually get a girl, do you think? Kidnapping and imprisoning her?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, please. You always knew that this was never going to happen. Not really.”

  She undulated her hands between us in a w
ay that signified that by this she meant her and I being together romantically.

  My eyes traced a steel beam across the ceiling.

  “But you’re the one who kissed me,” I said.

  “For fuck’s sake! I felt sorry for you. And I was bored. Look, Jake, you are a nice guy, mostly. You really are, and you were always a good friend to me, but you’re just not...”

  She trailed off, apparently unable to find the words to properly capture my inadequacy as a man. I filled in the blank a thousand ways in my mind.

  “This has gone on way too long, and you know it. You’ve gotta let me out of here. You know it’s the right thing to do. You know it’s the only thing to do now. This entire situation is ridiculous. It’s over. Let’s go home.”

  The whole world faded out. My consciousness filtered down to the sound of my heart beating again, just like it did squatting in some strange house in the middle of the night. I think she kept talking. Kept pleading her case. But I only heard the bang of that misshapen muscle in my chest pumping blood all through me.

  And I guess I don’t really remember how it started. I just remember feeling the strength in my hands. Impossible strength that squeezed at Beth’s throat.

  Closed it.

  Crushed it.

  I felt all those tubes collapse under the pressure of my grip. It felt good.

  And I remember how scared she looked. Her eyes huge and blue and wet with fear.

  Her mouth sprang open, and her tongue flapped about like it could somehow get out of the way and she’d be able to breathe again or something.

  And it was funny ’cause she barely even fought me. Her fingers dug at my arms a little bit, but she didn’t even break the skin. She didn’t reach for my face. She didn’t kick at me. Nothing. She just lay down to die like a perfect victim.

  She let me do it. She was so soft.

  I mean, she squirmed. That’s about the best you could say for her efforts. She squirmed. Pretty pathetic.

  My heart hammered in my ears the whole time. I could hear the sound of my own survival while I took hers away. And it felt that final, too, even before it was over.

  Like I was setting the whole world on fire and burning it to the ground.

  I could feel her fear like it was vibrating off of her. Some wave in the air that penetrated my skin. And I knew that in some way Beth and I would be together forever now. In this basement. In this final embrace. Forever.

  Drool cascaded from the corners of her lips like a mouth breathing hound dog with those two thick strings of spit hanging down.

  Her face went all splotchy and darkened into the progression of colors, just like Tony Vasser’s outside of Dairy Queen all those years ago. It was weird ’cause I remember thinking how nice her skin looked just then. The texture of it, I mean. All smooth and creamy like the surface of a glass of milk.

  Her color was fading from purple to blue when she passed out, but I knew I wasn’t done. Not yet. I squeezed the fuck out of her neck. I kept expecting my hands to cramp up, you know, but they never did. I’m pretty sure I could have choked her forever.

  Her face was all gray now like someone smeared charcoal all over it. It didn’t look real. It just seemed like some special effects sequence in a not so scary horror movie. The ones that just make you laugh the whole time.

  It wasn’t until I finally let go and tried to uncurl my fingers that I felt the pain in them. The stiffness. Beth’s body did a free fall to the floor like a dummy and something kind of crunched on impact. The back of her head maybe. I’m not really sure.

  I stood over the corpse and massaged at my hands, straightening my fingers out over and over. Stretching them. My mind was weirdly clear. Not any kind of religious or philosophical clarity, I mean. Just clear of thoughts. Empty. Blank.

  I looked her over. Even as fucked up as she looked, all gray like that, I kind of expected her to get up. Like part of my imagination couldn’t reconcile the idea that a few minutes ago she was alive and now she was dead. Forever. It didn’t seem really possible. Like whatever magic electrical juice flowing in her nervous system that made her alive before was just gone and would never come back. Physically, she was identical. Same body. Same organs. Same brain. But the juice was just gone for good.

  I grabbed the wrists and dragged the body over to the sump pit and scooted it into the water. It flopped in head first, and the trunk of the body seemed to kind of hesitate over the hole before it fell and yanked the limp legs behind it in a weird way that reminded me of Wile E. Coyote holding up a sign before he falls off of a cliff. I remember reading that once a body is immersed in water, it’s like a million times harder to get any evidence or whatever off of it. It messes up the body temperature, too, for determining the time of death.

  Anyway, the pit was only like four feet deep so the socked feet dangled out of the top. It looked like a joke. Like those fake arms and feet people have sticking out of the trunk of their minivans and stuff.

  I tilted my head into the sink and splashed some water on my face. I didn’t dry it off. I just rested my weight on the lip of the sink and let the moisture drip away. Wetness clung to my jaw and tried its best to hold on, but the droplets formed and fell. Slowly, but I was patient. My face was all flushed, so the cool water felt nice. The drips eventually stopped, but I stayed there, elbows rested on the sink’s edge.

  Eventually I realized that I was lingering there. That part of me didn’t want to leave yet. Isn’t that weird?

  But I also knew, of course, that leaving would be for the best. I gathered up my things and headed up the stairs. I peeled the padlock out of the clasp and shoved it in my pocket. Again, I hesitated. I looked around the kitchen for a second, looked at the empty spots where clumps of dust and hair had replaced the stove and fridge.

  I walked out into the garage and observed its emptiness as well. As my feet shuffled near the door, they paused for another beat. My sleeve covered hand hung a moment just short of the doorknob. I have no clue what I might have been waiting for. Nothing happened, of course.

  I pushed open the door and stepped away from the building.

  That’s when I woke up.

  Chapter 32

  I SPRANG FROM THE BED and threw on the dirty jeans and t-shirt from the day before without thinking. I guess they were the closest garments, maybe. My mind was going a million miles a minute about non-hygiene and fashion related topics just then.

  The dream rattled me. Things I had never seen about myself came clearer now. Though I didn’t fully know what to make of it, it all made more sense than ever in its own way.

  Remember all of that stuff I said about the bullies being obsessed with control and how I wasn’t like that? Yeah. I’m full of shit. I needed to see Beth immediately.

  * * *

  “When you’re a kid, you look for order in the universe. That’s how you learn everything. Like, when I was a toddler one time I fell asleep on the couch in the afternoon. And when I woke up a couple hours later, it was dark out, right?” I said.

  She nodded and leaned back so the crown of her head rested against the cinder block wall.

  “I remember thinking that must mean that if you go to sleep in the living room, you wake up at night. ’Cause I knew that whenever I went to sleep in my bedroom, I woke up in the morning. I thought I controlled the whole day turning to night and vice versa thing based on where I slept. I looked for order — a pattern in what little data I had — to try to understand how it worked, and that’s what I came up with.”

  “I get it,” she said.

  I scratched my chin.

  “Nick gave me… He was trying to teach me. He had me shoplift and get drunk and help him break into houses and stuff. He was trying to teach me how the world really works, or the order he sees in it, at least.”

  I sighed, trying to think of the best way to explain it.

  “He talked about how all these corporations lie and cheat and steal to get what they want. ’Cause they filter all of the mean
ing out of the world until all that’s left is profit. Like the cigarette companies were literally killing their customers and lying about it all those years ’cause the only thing that’s real to them is the money. Right and wrong no longer exist. The money in the bank account is the only reality. So Nick looked at all of that together, and he thought it meant that there’s no real meaning in anything. Like everything we’re taught is a big lie.”

  I swallowed and continued.

  “He said the world operates in chaos, you know? No good. No bad. No morality. It’s all just a sequence of events without meaning. We’re just animals that are here for a short while, and seeing it as anything beyond that is just mushy stuff or delusion.”

  Shrugging, I picked at a dried fleck of cafeteria marinara on my jeans.

  “So I looked at all of that, too. And I tried to find my own order in it, I guess. I started having all of these dreams. About you, mostly.”

  Her lips moved slightly, but I couldn’t read her expression.

  “If you take the meaning out of the world, all that’s left is controlling each other. Even a sociopath with no empathy at all still gets the animal urge to establish a place in the pecking order. Like bullies at school, you know? If you can’t actually connect with other people, it just leaves controlling people, asserting your will, getting what you want out of them. Winning. Like other people are just another thing to consume. We are driven to do it way beyond what makes any damn sense.”

  I played with the strings on my hoodie.

  “And I didn’t realize it right away, but these dreams were all about controlling you. At first, it’s like I was saving you. Like we’d be surrounded by zombies, and I would rescue you and take you some place safe. And that meant you needed me, like I could sort of require you to love me that way, you know?”

  My lips felt dry and chapped. I ran my tongue over them.

  “And then over time, it got weirder, like you were more and more scared of me, and everything was all confused, and it was more like I was directly controlling you against your will. Taking you somewhere. And then…”