“She wasn’t trying to kill me,” Eva Bardo argued. “It was a mistake.”
“Mistake is a strange word to use, Misses Bardo.”
The handsome-looking young couple just sat there and stared at him. They wore cold smiles and seemed perfectly ignorant of the awkwardness in the room. Oscar found them quite odd at that moment.
He went on, saying, “I’d prefer not to argue and it would help Beth if you were both behind this.”
“Dr. Loste, my husband and I are Beth’s parents. Doesn’t that make us uniquely suited to help her?”
“I’ll put it to you this way,” said Oscar, “there is no way Beth is going to skip this mandated counseling. I don’t care how impressively you and your husband argue. If I were you, I’d give up right now because in this room, you’re not going to win.”
The Bardos faces dropped into dead scowls. Apparently they weren’t accustomed to being spoken to that way. Finally, Eva Bardo said, “I see, Doctor Loste.”
“It’s interesting,” said Lorne, “the family court judge spoke so highly of you. I have to say we were a bit surprised to find your practice all the way out here. Why practice in such a tough area?”
“I suppose this is just where I’m needed.”
“Understood then,” Lorne Bardo smiled. “We admire your integrity, doctor.”
The moment they left and the therapy room was quiet, Oscar slipped his hand into the pocket of the coat hanging on his chair. The gorgonorphan bottle felt oddly warm in his hands.
He leaned back in his chair and let the rest of the bottle flow down his throat. The taste was bitter and the syrup smelled like black licorice. Oscar felt something akin to nourishment, but more powerful, as though some ruthless and annoying itch had just been hacked with a razor blade. He put his head back and relaxed until he was nearly limp.
The sound of the empty cough syrup bottle hitting the floor brought him back to attention. When he went down to pick it up, he was astonished to see a strange glow emerging from the empty bottle. It had to be a hallucination, he thought. Sparkles, like shooting stars, began to dance and fire off in the residue of blue syrup. He even felt the light as warmth on his cheeks.
The stunning hallucination lacked no richness in detail, with moving bands of purple, blue and rain forest green and swirling flocks of flickering glitter and globs. He sensed a lifelike quality in the display, like the swarm of flashes from mating lightning bugs. When the light faded from the bottle, Oscar felt its absence the way one misses the sun when it passes behind a heavy cloud.
...
Chapter 2: The Black Hole
With only six percent of the building filled with tenants to light their windows at night, the fifty-nine-story apartment tower where Oscar lived resembled a shot of dud fireworks. The sign that had once read: Abadon Luxury Tower had been converted to advertising space. “CashNOW Loans and Bail Bonds,” was now the tallest feature in the Philadelphia skyline.
The Abadon Tower had been an architectural curiosity and tourist attraction when it was first built thirty years earlier. The building itself was a hollowed cylindrical shell of steel and concrete, with the largest and deepest center courtyard in the United States. Each of the twelve hundred apartments could look straight down to the bottom. It was so deep and narrow that the sun only lit the bottom directly for a few minutes per day. At night, from Oscar’s apartment, the bottom looked like an endless black hole.
When the neighborhood started to decline during the previous decade, a lack of interested tenants and the inescapable presence of gangs and homeless of all ages had turned the bottom of the courtyard into a dark carnival at night. Fighting, loud music and even the occasional screams would drift up all the way up to Oscar’s apartment on the fiftieth floor.
Garbage piles, like drifts of snow in Maine, had piled up in the courtyard from tenants and visitors simply throwing their trash over railing.
Certainly out of place in the building, Oscar had been planning to move for several years. However, the rent was cheap and most of the neighborhoods in Philadelphia were just as dangerous. His location on the highest occupied floor brought him some insulation from the building’s noise and crime.
The elevator was broken when it dropped Oscar off to his floor a few evenings later. The doors could barely grind open without him pushing. He had to step up several feet because the car was out of alignment.
When he got out, the only thing he could hear was a trace of drunken cackling and shouting wafting up from the dark pit. It never stopped in the building. He stood in front of his apartment door, leaning against the center railing. Looking down, he could see only blackness.
He pulled out a white paper drugstore bag from his coat pocket. He looked like one of the homeless drunks as he poured some gorgonorphan down his throat like a suckling calf. The liquid seemed like magic, gliding down his throat with no resistance. Oscar steadied himself against the metal railing, which felt several inches too short and made it easy for someone to tumble over.
He heard someone whisper from nearby, “Oscar. Psst. Hey, Oscar.”
Stanley, his only neighbor on the floor, had one leg over the railing. “I can’t take this place anymore, Oscar. I’m finally doing it today,” he said. Stanley’s face looked flushed and puffy from crying. He was in his early twenties, with a boyish complexion that seemed at odds with the collar of tattoos around his neck. “This whole place is fucked,” he told Oscar. “I’m doing it tonight.”
Stanley had been threatening suicide for months and this was the third time Oscar had found him like this.
Oscar followed the railing around until he was closer to him. Then he leaned his elbows against the metal, taking his bottle of gorgonorphan out of the paper bag. “I hope you don’t mind if I take my medicine,” he said as he threw back a sip.
“Nah, I don’t mind,” said Stanley, who seemed to find Oscar’s behavior strange.
They both stared down at the emptiness. Oscar took another swig of cough syrup. He told Stanley, who now had both legs over the railing, “You know, Stanley, we’re the last tenants on this entire floor.”
“Shit. You’re right,” he said, looking around at all the dark windows. “I knew a lot of people left but I didn’t realize it was just us now. By the way,” he asked, “why would you, a shrink, a god-damned doctor, be living in this portal to hell?”
“You can’t beat this view,” Oscar said, staring down the black hole.
“Seriously,” Stanley went on, “why wouldn’t someone like you just move some place nice, out of this city, out of all this darkness?”
“It’s up to us to hold down the fort. Besides, where would I go? Darkness is everywhere.”
“It’s been so bad lately, Oscar,” Stanley said as he stared down to the bottom and shook his head. “I just keep waiting for some light to come through but it never does. The days and nights are getting darker. It’s like I can feel the life draining out of the city. And me. And I’m so alone.”
Oscar listened carefully, nodding and sipping his cough syrup.
Stanley went on, saying, “Sometimes I feel like none of this is real. I know saying something like that is about as sane as hanging over this railing but I can’t help it. Do you ever feel like that, Oscar? I mean, look around at this city. Isn’t it like we’ve crossed into hell or something? Do you think there’s any way it could be true, that this isn’t real at all?”
Oscar felt the cough syrup running through the blood vessels in his brain. The feeling of whirling dizziness was accompanied by an odd clarity of mind. He told Stanley, “I’m not going to lie to you. Sometimes it seems like that to me too.”
“It does?” Stanley answered. Oscar’s admission had obviously been comforting to him.
“But it is real. Every bit of it. As real as anything else.”
Tears shimmered in Stanley’s eyes. With his hands tightening on the railing and his legs dangling limp, he said, “There’s so much darkness. How could there be so much
darkness?” He whimpered.
Oscar took another bitter sip, letting the syrup roll around in his mouth before he swallowed. He locked onto Stanley’s eyes, telling him, “Fuck the darkness. You need to look darkness dead in the face and tell it, you’re not going to make me like you. You’re not going to make me as cold as the rest of this. You say, I’m going to keep the important parts of me alive and, darkness, there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“What the hell are you drinking?” Stanley asked him. “And I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with that.”
“I have the flu. It’s my medicine. And what I mean by what I said is that you need to survive. And I’m not talking about just your body.”
They both heard footsteps slapping the concrete at the same time. The click clack sounded close by. Stanley, in what seemed like an instinctive move to protect himself, brought his legs back over the railing to safety. For a moment, they both looked like frightened children. Then, at the same time, they saw the man just across their floor in front of one of the vacant apartments.
Black doll’s eyes shined at them from the other side of the courtyard. It took Oscar a moment to realize that he was looking into the face of a strange mask, a carved black ivory owl’s face with red and gold adornment. The man behind the owl face wore a professional-looking suit with crisp lines and a tasteful maroon tie. The figure stood staring at Oscar and Stanley.
With his eyes wide and his mouth hanging open, Stanley asked Oscar, “Did I somehow miss that today is Halloween?”
Oscar pulled out the bottle of gorgonorphan from his side pocket. He sucked a sip out of the bottle, looking like a neighborhood drunk fresh out of the liquor store. He pointed to the man in the suit and mask, telling Stanley, “Don’t worry, Stan. I got this guy figured. He shouted to the masked figure, “Do you hear that, asshole?” I got your number. You don’t scare us one bit!”
“Are you OK?” Asked Stanley. “You’re acting pretty fucked up.”
Oscar started to get louder. “The mask,” he explained as he gestured with the bottle in his hand, “isn’t what’s really odd about this guy. Granted it’s weird, not something you’d find in a corner costume shop. But it’s the suit that really gets me. My dad was a tailor. So I know a little bit about fabric and fit. It’s probably fifteen hundred dollars that crazy asshole is wearing. You’re not from the neighborhood, are you, mister masked man?”
For a moment, the light wind stopped and there was a break in the faint music in the courtyard. Oscar and Stanley could hear the person breathing under the mask. The figure stayed fixed on them like a viper with eyes pointed at a field mouse.
Sinking into a sideways smile, Oscar shouted, “So that brings me to my educated, professional assessment of Mister Owl over there.” Pointing across the courtyard, he said, “You had a job interview earlier today somewhere downtown. Didn’t you?”
The masked figure stood in silence.
“And I’m afraid it didn’t go well. They wanted to go a in a different direction. I think you needed that job, that income. I see that kind of desperation every day. I think the rejection got to you this time. You probably maxed out the old credit card with that suit and now you couldn’t go home and face the misses. Not in defeat. So you wandered around the city, losing your mind a little more with every step. I see people lose it just like that.”
Oscar was beginning to wobble on his feet and his eyes were sinking shut. Stanley put a hand on his shoulder and the touch seemed to inject some sobriety.
Oscar went on, shouting, “You probably stole the mask from one of those Haitian voodoo head shops. They have some weird shit in there. Of course all this brings you to this building, the good old Black Hole Tower. This place is a magnet for nutcases. It has like a gravity that pulls in wackjobs. They can spot it from just about anywhere and it’s easy to just wander in. So you got nowhere to go, Mister Owl Man. The big city roughed you up. You’re lost aren’t you, little birdy?”
The figure just stood there.
“I’m getting a little sick of this,” Oscar shouted. “Why don’t you fly away! Fly away before one of the goons on the lower floors spots that suit. I don’t think that mask is scaring anybody!”
Stanley whispered, “It’s fucking scaring me.”
The masked man slowly raised and pointed a white-gloved finger at Oscar. The gesture had the feeling of a mark of death. After a few tense seconds, the black beak turned away from them. The figure started for the stairwell, then opened the door and disappeared into the red stairwell light. Oscar tried to spot him on the way down the stairs but it seemed as though the Owlman had vanished or decided to bother someone on a lower floor.
Stanley looked flustered but no longer sad or in despair. The strange meeting had at least temporarily relieved his suicidal depression. “What the hell do you think that was about?” He asked Oscar.
“I don’t know but it was a nice suit,” Oscar said as he started to giggle.
“Why did he point at you like that? It was fucking scary.”
“Who cares?” Oscar said, taking a clumsy step toward his door. He stopped, asking, “You gonna be OK tonight, Stan?”
“Are you?” Stanley said, laughing a little.
Oscar caught himself from stumbling over. His eyes were barely holding themselves open. He laughed, saying, “I’m fucking amazing. I’m gonna fall asleep as soon as that door closes but I need to know that you’re gonna be alright tonight.”
“You’re a good man, Oscar Loste. You take care of people.”
“Not always.”
“I’ll be OK tonight,” said Stanley as he wiped the last remnants of crying from the corners of his eyes. “Get some sleep.”
When Oscar got inside, he collapsed on the couch in his clothes. As he fell into a still sleep, he felt a pressure on his body, as though he was being lifted to the sky. An explosion of sparkles and shooting stars began to appear behind his eyelids. After a few moments, the current pulling on his body relented and the warm colors faded to black.
...
In their next session, Oscar handed Beth some crayons and paper, telling her to draw Mister Smiler. The little girl seemed excited at the proposition. She immediately slid down from the couch and started to decide which colors to use. Beth wanted to be as realistic as possible with her depiction. It was difficult for her with her bandages but she managed to get a good grip on the crayons. After she got going, the picture seemed to come together very easily, as though she was quite familiar with the way he looked.
When she was finished, she proudly held up a picture of a gray man with long, slender limbs. She drew them with just a few crayon strokes. Mister Smiler’s face was just a setting for a massive black eyeball. Beth even drew in strokes for his eyelashes.
“So what do you and Mister Smiler talk about?” Oscar asked Beth after she sat back on the couch.
“Umm. All kinds of stuff. He tells me about my other lives. I ask him questions. When I get scared, he tells me that it’s going to be OK.”
“What kinds of questions do you ask him?”
“I ask him about the stars. I can see them from my window sometimes. I ask him about bugs.” She angled her eyes to ceiling to remember. “I ask him about the ocean. I’ve never seen the ocean. He’s been everywhere and he knows everything. Some things he won’t tell me.”
“What won’t he tell you about?”
“The past,” she said with some sadness in her face. “My nightmares.”
“You seem curious about the sciences,” said Oscar. “That’s great. I suppose you get that from your mom and dad.”
“Mister Smiler knows everything about that stuff,” She said.
“I have an interest in the sciences too,” Oscar told her, seizing the opportunity to question the phenomenon. “Would it be OK if I asked Mister Smiler about his thoughts on physics, chemistry, maybe biology? I don’t get the chance to talk to a real expert very often.”
“He says you’re too dumb to un
derstand most of it.”
“I assumed that,” Oscar told her. “Still, it would be nice just to hear his thoughts.”
“He says he will if you don’t start acting like a jerk about it.”
“I promise,” said Oscar. “I’d like to get Mister Smiler’s thoughts on the tides. What causes that to happen?”
Beth turned to her invisible friend, who seemed to be providing her with information. She eventually nodded and giggled at what she heard. She told Oscar, “He says you’re silly and should know that at your age.”
“I guess Mister Smiler doesn’t understand what causes the tides. That’s OK. We’ll move on.”
“Wait,” Beth interrupted. “He says he’ll explain it to you.” Beth nodded to the empty air with a hint of confusion in her face. “OK,” she said, “I don’t get it but I’ll tell him. Mister Smiler says it’s the moon’s gravity. He says it makes a...” She seemed to have forgotten the term that she had been given and was looking for Mister Smiler to fill her in. “Bulge,” she said finally, with some awkwardness. “The gravity sucks up a bulge of water up toward the moon.” The answer didn’t seem to make any sense to her.
“That’s an interesting way to describe it,” said Oscar. “Since Mister Smiler understands the tides so well, maybe he understands quantum mechanics. After all, he is some sort of trans-dimensional being. Quantum mechanics should be second nature to him.”
“He says you need to make your question specific. He says you’re too dumb for a general discussion of physics.” She had some trouble mouthing the words and there didn’t seem to be a trace of recognition in her expression. It seemed as though little Beth was just reading lines.
“Mister Smiler is correct,” said Oscar. “I am no physicist. However I did see one of those TV documentaries about it. I didn’t understand it too well though. Maybe he can explain why it is that two objects can never really touch. It made no sense to me when I saw it on public broadcasting.”
Enter the Uncreated Night Page 2