by L. T. Vargus
I told her about the last dream. In detail. Her shoulders looked tense and she blinked a lot, but she didn’t say anything, so I went on.
“It’s like that’s the logical conclusion for how Nick sees the world. Murder. If you believe in your heart that there really is no meaning in the world, that the only interaction that’s real is controlling other people, then it’s OK to kill someone ’cause it doesn’t actually mean anything. Maybe it’s even the ultimate form of establishing your dominance and control.”
I sucked in a breath and sighed.
“I don’t know. If that’s what’s pouring out of my subconscious mind while I sleep, can I claim to be better than Nick or the bullies at school or anyone else? Are we all just coded to strive for control?”
“I don’t think so,” she said, her eyes danced along the wall. I don’t think she wanted to look at me. “It’s just a dream. And you can always change yourself. I was bulimic for a long time, and I’m changing that. Now maybe you found something ugly in yourself that you want to change, too.”
I nodded. In a way, she was right, I guess.
“I mean, would you rather just be oblivious to it?” she said. “A lot of people have almost no self-awareness at all.”
“It wasn’t just the dreams, either, though,” I said. “It was exciting to crawl into people’s windows and pick through their belongings. I felt free. And awake. Alive. I liked it.”
“I’m sure it was…” she trailed off as she reached for the right word. “Stimulating. But I don’t know that seeking out the most stimulation possible is a healthy way to live.”
“You’re right,” I said. I was quiet for a long time while I thought it over.
“Still, it’s more than that, too, though,” I said. “I mean, I kind of trapped you down here in a cage. I didn’t think of it that way before, but that’s what it is.”
“In a way,” she said. “But once you realized that, you wanted to change it right? And to talk about it. Communicating is like the opposite of trying to control someone, isn’t it?”
She finally looked at me and smiled, and I could see in her eyes that we were connected, not like we were in love or anything, but we were together, and it was real.
“I killed him,” I said. “Nick, I mean. He attacked me. Was strangling me. So I fought back. Stabbed him in the neck. Self defense, you know.”
And all of a sudden, I burst into tears. I tried to cover my face, but my mouth sprang open and emitted strange and muted sobs and gasps. Tears and snot flowed down my face like rain on a windshield.
’Cause I knew now that Nick was so wrong. All these things do have meaning. Even a life as bad as his has meaning. And it reminded me of that thing he said about how we only have so many years. In a way that’s exactly what gives it meaning. The people you know, and how it can’t be forever. Out of the billions of years the Earth has existed, Nick was here for 24 and Tammie for just 19. Now they’re gone. I knew them, but if you didn’t, it’s too late now. It will never happen again.
I leaned back against the cinder blocks and tried to angle myself away from Beth.
The meaning was so big, and the feelings in me got so big, that I sort of convulsed periodically from being overwhelmed. Like I was fighting it. Like if my muscles spasmed just right, I could regain control of myself and stop crying or something.
Beth moved to me and put a hand on my shoulder and rubbed my chest with the other.
“You’re OK,” she said. “It’s going to be OK.”
She just kept rubbing my chest, and I think something about that made it even harder to stop crying.
I think your brain does that with your companions. It carves out a spot in your imagination for them to sit, and you can feel them there all the time. And now that they’re gone, there’s a hole there. An empty space that I can feel always. It’s almost like a physical feeling, I mean. Like the universe doesn’t feel quite right.
“Let’s go home, Jake,” she said.
I felt like I could exhale. And I knew we could go home now. And I knew that I could tell her about everything that happened with Nick. All the details. Some day.
We sat in the vacant basement a moment longer, and I had this weird feeling, knowing that the old me would’ve been too scared. Would’ve froze. Would’ve hid these things from her forever. I don’t know how we ever would’ve gotten out of this room.
I guess she was right.
You can change yourself.
Chapter 33
IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME since I’ve written in here. Six or eight weeks, I guess. I didn’t feel like obsessing about myself on paper anymore, so I stopped for a while.
Don’t worry. I kept busy.
Winter came along and dumped thirteen inches of snow on everything tonight. The wind roared. The tree branches shivered. Plow trucks scraped by, their yellow lights circling over everything, but they couldn’t keep up. The fat flakes plunged to the ground faster than they could bulldoze them clear.
All of the people ran to hide, huddling around heating vents and fireplaces and wood burning stoves. The streets emptied. The businesses closed early.
After many hours, the snow finally stopped, and the wind died down, but the temperature plummeted. The slushy stuff that plows and shovels and salt had stirred up now hardened into thick sheets of ice. The cold gripped everything and held it still.
The weather guy on TV warned it was “dicey” out there. He cautioned to only go out in an emergency.
But I couldn’t sleep, so I went out at 2:46 am to trudge around in it for a while anyway.
The streets were empty. No cars. No pedestrians. No birds. No movement at all. The wind died down now that the storm had moved on, and everything stood motionless.
The snow deadened the noise even more like those foam sheets they hang in the room where the marching band practices at school. It killed all the reverberations in a way that made the silence seem closer and dryer than usual, like it was right on top of me. I fought back a little with the crunch and squeak of my walking.
A bank sign caked with snow glowed faintly red from the concealed light within. I kicked my way through powdery white stuff and thought back on how it all went down.
It had only been a few months since all of this started. In some ways it seemed like it was just a few days, and in other ways it felt like forever ago that I first hung out at Nick and Donnie’s apartment and heard stories about bridge shitting and dead bodies and sour cream guns. Did I have more perspective with the passing of time? Maybe.
I started out thinking about Beth. She and I are still friends, and I know now that it’s all we can ever be. The whole basement thing changed things between us. In a weird way, I think it might have made us closer. (I mean, a man and a woman share a certain bond once he’s locked her in a confined space for an extended period, right? OK not really.) It’s a different kind of close, though. Like people who went through something fucked up together and now have deep yet mixed feelings about each other. A close with damage that can never be repaired.
Don’t take that the wrong way, though. She still means a lot to me. I guess I just don’t idealize her the way I used to, and in turn she is definitely a little more closed off to me or something, which I can understand.
Like I passed her in the hall at school today, and I think she probably saw me, but she kept talking to Nikki Turner like she didn’t.
That’s fine, really. I mean, not only do I empathize with her point of view, I’m almost embarrassed when I think back to the crush I had on her in the first place. Not ’cause of anything about her so much as how naive I was about everything for so long.
I guess every dumb kid probably endures a crush on some girl that seems unattainable. Maybe if they all got a little closer, they’d see that most of it was in their imagination. Like I said, there’s nothing wrong with Beth. She’s a good person and all that, but I can see now that I was in love with the idea of “winning” a person, not in love with an actual p
erson.
In any case, I am thankful as hell that she decided to lie to her parents about the basement stuff. She told them she ran away to a friend’s house. I guess they were so happy that she was home and safe and all of that, they didn’t really feel the need to dig all that deeply, or if they did, she found some way to shut it down, I guess. I owe her for that.
I inhaled too deeply and felt the sharp pain of the cold taking hold deep within my nose. It felt like the skin in my nostrils was cracking. I stopped and slipped my gloves off to rub at it for a second, and the silence enveloped me again. After a second I heard the plow grinding along somewhere in the distance.
I’ve been working on a bunch of shit, though. I write 2,000 words every day to try to wire that skill into my brain. I don’t know if obsessively writing about yourself in a journal helps you that much in the long run, so I’ve written fiction instead. Dialogue, mostly. That’s what I want to get good at. I think my writing mostly sucks for now, but I’m a long way from putting in my 10,000 hours, so that’s OK. I will get there.
I started making myself read at least 100 pages a day as well. I figure that’s wiring some shit, too. And it’s a good habit.
I also do this high intensity interval training now on this old exercise bike in the basement of our apartment building. It’s this crazy exercise routine where you do a balls-out sprint for one minute and then cool down for three minutes and repeat a few times. I guess sprinting like that is way more effective than the typical low intensity workout like jogging or whatever. It kicks your metabolism up for days at a time and floods your brain with endorphins and stuff. Sweat pours from everywhere, and I feel sick about twenty seconds into the first sprint, but if I power through the pain of the first ten minutes, this rush comes over me and lasts for the rest of the day. I feel warm all over and have all of this energy.
It’s funny ’cause I’m not even into all that vanity workout bullshit. I don’t care what I look like. I sure as shit am not going to post pictures of my shirtless self on Instagram to show my progress or anything like that. I think we can all agree that those people are the worst. I just think we weren’t designed to be sedentary is all. It’s better for my mind to get some exercise along with the cardiovascular benefits, and it’s always better to start right now.
That’s the thing, man. Whatever ideas I get, whatever I think I might want to achieve, I fucking go get it. Immediately. I used to spend all my time obsessing about the things that were seemingly out of my control and wondering what these things meant about me. Like all I could do was watch what happened to me and wonder who that made me. I felt destined to merely observe life. But I realize now that there are things I can control, a bunch of them, and that’s where all of my attention goes. Life is way too fucking short, so leap straight for the goddamn jugular while you’ve got the chance, I say.
I stomped through a little wooded area by the tennis courts behind the school. A row of pine trees to my right slumped under the weight of the snow. I thought about giving one a shake, but I decided I was too cold for such nonsense and kept moving.
Even when I look back on what happened with Nick, there’s a sadness to it, but it’s out of my control now, so I don’t concern myself with it much. I got that weepy bullshit out of my system in the basement, thankfully, and just moved on. I just let it go like a little kid watching his balloon float upward and forever out of view.
The cold dried out my skin now as I lifted my feet to march past Nick’s apartment. I thought maybe Donnie would be there playing video games, but all the lights were off. I guess maybe he moved away after everything that happened.
A construction crew found the bodies in the partially excavated foundation they were working on a few blocks from there. I don’t know if Nick thought they were filling it in, and he could just sneak the bodies in, and no one would take note or what. I guess maybe when you have to hide four bodies at a moment’s notice, you don’t have a lot of time to think of the long term.
Aside from Tammie, they identified two others. A husband and wife in their fifties. The cops think they probably interrupted Nick during one of his burglaries. Because of course they found tons of stolen loot in his apartment along with $27,000 cash hidden under the floorboards. One of the things they found was an opal and diamond ring that belonged to the dead woman.
The other body is a younger girl. Or I guess I should say “was” a younger girl. They think twenties or thirties. But they don’t know her name. Jane Doe. She was rotted worse than the others, so they tried to identify her via dental records, but so far have come up empty.
The cold hardened the top layer of snow, so my steps packed more of a crunch than before. My cheeks hurt, and when I licked my lips, they felt all dry and cracked like lizard skin or something.
I still puzzle over Nick’s view of the world. My mind tumbles and spins all the things he said over and over like a washing machine I can’t turn off. I know he was wrong, but maybe there was some kernel of truth in there somewhere. Or, if not truth, at least something important.
I don’t know.
I look for meaning even though I know I won’t really find it. I do it because I have no choice, I think. I can see the meaning in something like Tammie’s death, in that she was a unique individual that is gone forever. But that doesn’t really give me meaning going forward in my own life — not all the way, at least. It doesn’t give me a direction or a goal or fulfillment or anything like that.
But I look for meaning anyway. I look for it in books. I look for it in relationships. I look for it in the endless crowds of kids funneling in and out of the school. I look for it in death. I look for it in the snow in the middle of the night while the rest of the world sleeps. I look for it goddamn everywhere.
I look for meaning because I’m still here.
Chapter 34
HOLY FUCK, DUDE. YOU ARE not going to believe this. I hope, as a matter of fact, that you’re sitting down right now. (For the sake of your own physical well being, of course.)
The McRib is back.
Yes, you read that correctly. (Of course, if you weren’t sitting, you probably just fainted and bashed your damn head in. Idiot! I told you to sit the hell down.) The most delicious sandwich on Earth is back for a limited time. I just pounded down two of these sons a bitches. Smeared BBQ sauce frickin’ everywhere. And believe you me, I was loving every minute of it. Yep. These little motherfuckers are tasty as hell.
* * *
Wow. I should probably burn this journal.
Author's Note
Thanks so much for reading Casting Shadows Everywhere. Leave a review on Amazon, and let us know what you think.
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- More Books by Tim McBain & L.T. Vargus -
The Violet Darger series
The Victor Loshak series
The Scattered and the Dead series
The Clowns
The Awake in the Dark series
- About the Authors -
L.T. Vargus grew up in Hell, Michigan, which is a lot smaller, quieter, and less fiery than one might imagine. When not glued to her computer, she can be found sewing, fantasizing about food, and rotting her brain in front of the TV.
If you want to wax poetic about pizza or cats, you can contact L.T. (the L is for Lex) at [email protected] or on Twitter @ltvargus.
Tim McBain writes because life is short, and he wants to make something awesome before he
dies. Additionally, he likes to move it, move it.
You can connect with Tim on Facebook or via email at [email protected].
LTVargus.com