by Mark Leidner
Cody and Nessa Evans became an item immediately, something I wouldn’t have minded at all if I’d been blind. If I’d been blind, I wouldn’t have seen how jealously Cassidy looked at Cody and Nessa. Especially when Nessa was laughing at all the actually clever and sometimes cruelly surprising things Cody said. There was significantly less gusto in my and Cassidy Lastinger’s note-swapping thereafter, and, like a fool, I chose not to address it until it was too late. When Cody dumped Nessa after only one month, for no reason that anyone could discern, my life became a waking panic. There was a week where I tried to be his friend: we traded baseball cards at recess, and I gave him better deals than I would’ve given anyone else. And when I was playing football with Sam Washington, like a backstabbing bootlicker of the lowest order, I would deliberately throw the ball to Cody instead of Sam. But Cody was like Scotty had been in first grade. He didn’t give a damn about me and my transparent attempts to secure his allegiance. He was happy to accept any favors I threw his way, and, for all I know now, my pathetic appeasements sped rather than slowed him on his beeline for Cassidy.
Meanwhile, I could feel her slipping away, and I knew that once she jumped ship, there would be no begging her back. She had a long memory.
On the day I’ll remember for the rest of my life, Cody and I were sitting on top of the very monkey bars Cassidy Lastinger and I once climbed together so long ago in the innocence of first grade. Cody and I were flipping through each other’s baseball cards, intermittently surveilling the playground rather than playing on it, looking from our classmates to the cards and brokering deals over the latter.
I ask the reader: in all of literature, has there ever been a finer, more hideous example of the death of innocence and triumph of toxic masculinity than two boys, so obsessed with status and its loss or acquisition that they perch above the field of life instead of living on it, wasting precious recesses comparing possessions, bartering, albeit indirectly and unconsciously, over the affections, real or imagined, of distant women they didn’t deserve? We weren’t even friends!
Toward the end of recess, Sam Washington raced up to the monkey bars and looked up at me and told me to climb down, he needed to tell me something. I felt bad, but I had to play it cool.
“Just tell me from down there,” I said, bouncing my foot on a lower bar, which caused dirt to shake out of the bottom of my shoe. I watched Sam watch it fall to the ground where he stood. Then he looked sharply from Cody to me and said with his eyes, “Fuck you. We’re through.” Then he said with his words, “Rawls stole Cassidy’s backpack, and he won’t give it back.” I squinted across the playground and saw a commotion way the hell down by the swing set. I looked at Cody, then back down at Sam who was already walking away. He stopped. He turned around and said the fourth-grade equivalent of “I guess I’m only telling you because we used to be friends, and I know you really like her.” He spat into the dirt as if to clear the idea of any remaining friendship between us from his mind, then he dragged his foot through it and walked away.
I felt so bad I wanted to disappear. I turned to Cody, who hadn’t even looked up from the Trapper Keeper in which I kept my baseball cards. He just kept flipping pages, looking at the faces on my cards, completely uninterested in my real-world turmoil. I must have looked pretty lost, though, because I remember he suddenly shut it and sighed, “Well? You gonna go kick Rawls’ ass, or what?”
“Right,” I said, looking at his pump-up shoes.
I climbed down the monkey bars and walked quickly to the swings, or maybe I ran slowly. I felt like an executioner, uncowled by circumstance and cursed with just enough conscience to hate himself to the core for what he was about to do, but not one ounce more. The whole class was standing in a semicircle in the sand that spread out from the swing. Cassidy was sitting on the ground and crying. People were laughing at her. Rawls was holding her backpack over his head, laughing. On the backpack were four faces of some boy band the name of which I don’t remember and whose music I’ve still never heard. She’d gotten it recently at a concert that her mom and dad had taken her to, and it was her prized possession. It was exactly the kind of thing Rawls, with his spray-painted shoes, would’ve stolen—an emblem of comfort, an emblem of familial happiness, an emblem of beloved men. I didn’t want to fight Rawls because I felt sorry for him. I don’t even think Cassidy wanted me to. It wasn’t who I was. I was a peacemaker, I think. At least that’s what I was when I was at my best. Maybe a more indicting term would be a person desperate for everyone to like him. But seeing Cassidy crying on the ground, just looking up at me, there was almost a dare in her mortified eyes. She, too, I think, knew that Rawls was the real victim here, in the grand scheme of things. It made me wonder, just for a second, if this whole damned damsel in distress thing had been engineered—if only subconsciously—to throw a wrench in the social order. My stomach knotted. I suddenly felt that I and every single one of us was doomed. I looked around, but Mrs. Taylor was nowhere to be found. This was the world we lived in now. A playground with no teacher. And love, to the extent it existed at all, was a bridge whose bricks fell out from under your feet as you walked and then sprinted across it.
I jumped into the circle and fought Rawls. It wasn’t glorious. No punches were thrown. I yanked one strap of Cassidy’s boy band backpack while Rawls yanked the other. We were evenly matched. I saw fear in his eyes, nothing more, but he never backed down. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to hurt him, but I couldn’t bear the loss of my status that losing to him would have set in stone. I realized that if he wouldn’t let go of the backpack, I could sling him around and around until he got tired, so that’s what I did. It eventually became like a merry-go-round that, when it got too much for him, he released. He went sprawling across the grass ass over head. He rolled all the way to the half-buried tires, and for a moment an old memory of Candace as an innocent farm girl and me as a happily whipped pig flitted through my imagination and made me loathe who I’d grown into even more.
Cassidy Lastinger got her backpack back. That made it that much more surprising—and yet somehow not, the more I think about it—when that afternoon during social studies, she wrote me a note with one line: “What would you do if we broke up?”
Without thinking, I replied below her handwriting: “I’d probably cry.” I immediately regretted this response, but when she didn’t pass a reply back, I thought that perhaps brutal honesty had inspired enough pity in her to stay my execution a while longer.
The next morning, Cassidy cut me loose in a note written on pink notebook paper. She even asked Mrs. Taylor if she could switch seats to be next to Cody. Cody became the new teacher’s pet, and Mrs. Taylor showed him all the affection she’d once shown me. Sam Washington and I were never friends again, and by the end of the year Rawls had grown into a dangerous and unpredictable bully.
I think I cried myself to sleep every night the summer after fourth grade. No one was as strong and smart and fun and wise and loving and alive as Cassidy, but she was gone now, and part of the cool kids thereafter.
Reflecting back now as the depressed, disgusting, zit-faced shipwreck of a fifth grader I have become—adrift in a middle school social order I have not even the energy to attempt to scrutinize—I stare blankly at my teachers and classmates, see nothing familiar or extraordinary in their faces, find no totemic magic in their names, and know they see me the same way.
I regret the fight. Because of my status, because of Rawls’ lack of it—because of a hundred things—it was unfair and unnecessary. Yet had I done nothing, I’d regret that just as much. And wouldn’t I have lost Cassidy to Cody either way? Or to someone or something else? And by what right did I even call her mine? What force drove me to obsess over whether I was “going with” someone or not? And what is the point of these regrets? Why do I have them? And what’s the point of a life if all it is is an endless piling up of regrets? Followed by interminable analysis?
Masturbation, which I discovered that summer,
felt like finding a magic power, and I don’t mean that in a positive way. I mean it like how winning the lottery feels good but ruins the winners’ lives. I’d lie in bed awake at night gratified briefly only to writhe, sleepless for hours beneath the enormous weight of guilt that it brought down. I didn’t do it that much, I don’t think, and when I did, it wasn’t particularly sexual. It was more mechanical, engaged in specifically to distract myself from an all-pervasive anguish. It left me hollow, penetrated by oblivion, and lonelier than I had been before I’d done it. I used it then, I realize now, the same way a grown-up might take a drink, or shoot heroin, or go to a movie, or open a book, or seek any other form of escape.
THE VOID
IT WAS THE MORNING. I WAS MAKING FACES AT ELWAY, MY eight-year old terrier, while waiting for the teakettle to boil. That’s when a rift in reality opened near the far kitchen wall. Through it I could see into a kind of void. It was shaped like a winking eye, had ruffled edges, and at first was just hovering there, undulating, kind of like it was looking at me.
I glanced at Elway. He looked from me to the void, more confused than afraid, I think, and so I tried, for his sake, to remain calm too. That’s when the void began speaking:
“I would like a face like yours,” it said. Its voice echoed coldly, but was also awkward, as if it wasn’t used to speaking in this language.
“And shoulders like yours,” the void quavered. Its center seemed to comprise a cauldron of vaguely gaseous elements, but the more I looked into it, I felt fainter, almost hypnotized, and the less I understood what I saw.
“I’d also like a posture like yours,” the void added. “And shoes like yours, too.”
“Shoes?” was the first thing I said. “But I’m not wearing shoes.” I lifted my foot so it could see. “I just woke up.”
The void rippled once, like a pond a stone had been thrown into, and then was instantaneously placid.
“Exactly,” it seemed to seethe. “I want shoes that are not shoes.”
Then something like a chuckle rolled out from within it. I felt a wind, and the teakettle whistled, startling me.
I turned around and nixed the stove, hoping the void would be gone, somehow, when I turned back to face the kitchen wall.
It wasn’t. It was still hovering there, watching, possibly waiting for confirmation that I was afraid. I don’t know why I thought that, but I did think it, and as soon as I did, I didn’t want it to know my fear. It felt like some kind of tense boardroom negotiation, but I had no idea what the stakes were. I was only sure it wasn’t money or property or status or power.
I scooped the tealeaves into a sleeve and set it in the cup, trying to pretend I routinely entertained interdimensional vortices. I poured the hot water over the tea and dipped the sleeve several times. Then I turned around to see the appearance of the void had still not changed.
“Shoes,” I said. “Uh, okay.” I nodded. “Anything else?”
“A nice apartment,” it announced, “like this. And I’d like a nice day of the week, like this one, for the date to be on. And a nice planet like this one, too. To live on.” Then the void dimpled and said as if it hadn’t been talking to me previously: “You there. Answer me now. Is it cloudy out? Or sunny?”
I frowned at its tone, then looked out the window on instinct. It was shaping up to be a beautiful day, actually. After tea, I had planned on getting dressed, walking to the co-op, doing some shopping, and then meeting a friend for lunch at my favorite café.
“Sunny,” I said. Then I blew on my tea.
“Thank you,” the void answered, “for confirming what I already knew to be true about the weather!”
Mirthless laughter thudded from somewhere within it. I felt a prickling on my skin, and the room got hotter or colder, but I couldn’t tell which. I glared into the center of the void, trying to find its mind or its face, but peering into it only made the void shrink until I could hardly see it at all. Maybe it’s like a distant star, I thought. Looked at straight on, it goes away.
The relief at having discovered something vanished when I turned my head and saw the void anew. Through the corner of my eye, it seemed not to have shrunk but stretched out, expanding to fill, or replace, the entire apartment. I wasn’t across the room from it, I was inside it, on its edge. This frightened me so much that I looked at it directly again, causing it to shrink until I could hardly see it. But still it was there.
“Well,” I said quickly so as not to stutter. “Will you be staying long then?”
The void flickered and changed into several shapes which, in all my knowledge of geometry, I had no reference point for. Then I felt my back go cold, like the sun had gone out behind me. Like if I turned around, everything would be missing—the world replaced by the void, cold and cruel and airless.
In front of me, it pulsed lavender and violet and a strange shade of black that also looked like a new shade of orange. A ghostly sparkle moved across the tear in the air it occupied almost like a smile. I smelled ozone, or what I thought was ozone, or what people mean when they say something smells like ozone without knowing how ozone actually smells, which I didn’t.
“I ask if you’re, uh, staying long because I don’t think I’ve brewed enough tea for two.” I gestured nervously to the kettle. “And if you’re hungry, I’m out of eggs, too. Uh, I’d actually planned on going shopping later this morn—”
“What is eggs?” the void shouted. “And tea?” It looked at me then scrutinizingly, like a corridor of dimness receding into eternity. “What is tea?”
I lifted the cup. “You mean this?”
“Yes, what is that?”
“Uh, a beverage.”
“And a beverage? What is that?”
“Something you drink.”
“What is drinking?”
“It’s a… what?”
“What is it?”
“A process where you… there’s a fluid, and you… you pour it into yourself.”
“When?”
“What do you mean when?”
“When do you do that?”
“Whenever you want.”
“When do you do that?”
“In the morning, uh, usually. For tea, anyway.”
The void was silent.
When the silence got awkward, I added, “But some people drink tea all day. And tea’s not even the main th—”
“Yes,” the void hissed. “‘People.’ Say it again.”
“What?”
“Say the word,” growled a mouth of clouds within clouds inside the void. “‘People.’ Say it. I want to be people. Now say it.”
I stared at the void for a second. “People,” I said quietly.
“Yesssssss,” it said. “Yessssssssss.” It paused and then the colors changed shape and the shapes changed colors and then they resumed their enormous empty dimness. “People,” it whispered almost vulgarly.
“What about people?” I asked, unsure if I should have.
“People,” it repeated to itself like a zombie. “People. People.”
A new hum emanating from somewhere caused me to look around the room. It sounded a bit like the score in a horror movie when the main character is walking toward some gloomy door that should never be opened. But it sounded like it was coming not from the void but from all around.
“Uh,” I said. “Yeah. People. I get it, I think.” I laughed nervously.
“People,” it replied creepily.
I looked around again, nodding. “Yeah. Uh-huh. Well, there’s certainly lots of people on Earth, I guess.”
The tendrils of its edges danced where they met reality. “Yes! There are, aren’t there? Lots and lots of people here upon the Earth, home of the people, and the planet of the vibrant sky.”
Its sinister cadence and oddly poetic diction set off some kind of alarm and woke in me a sense of responsibility I hadn’t felt before. The hum was louder too. I suddenly felt afraid not just for myself, but for all the people on Earth.
“Actually,” I said, “I’m not sure there are other people around here, frankly, in all honesty.”
“What?”
I shrugged as casually as I could under the circumstances. “Yeah,” I said. Then I turned to the window, and when I saw what I saw, I moved to block the void’s view. Across the street, my neighbor, a widow about my age, was throwing a ball with her poodle. I squinted as if staring out at nothing as she bent down and picked up the ball and threw it into the side yard, and the poodle raced around her house after it. It was so innocent that I felt like an astronaut seeing Earth from space for the first time—while also pretending not to be seeing anything of any importance.
I shook my head, as if confirming the emptiness of the view, then faced the void again. “See? There really is no one here. In the world, I mean. I’m sorry if you came here expecting otherwise.” I hesitated, trying to seem improvisational. “It happens all the time, actually. Expectations, I mean, uh, getting squelched under the, um, best laid plans and all that.” I forced laughter. “I’m sure you’ll agree it applies, you know, to whatever you are, too.” When it didn’t react, I lifted my teacup at it. “You do agree, right?”
It was silent.
“I myself didn’t expect to find you here this morning, yet here you are. So that’s all I’m saying. And you—you’ve come here in search of…” I cleared my throat, “people I think you said?” I glanced around again as a pretense. “Which, as you can see, aren’t here. It’s almost kind of funny isn’t it? Me and you, I mean, not being that different. In that both of our expectations are apparently out of whack with the actuality of our given situation.”