by Mark Leidner
The void flickered rapidly, then stopped. Then it flickered rapidly again, then stopped.
“I’m sorry you’ve come all this way,” I said forcefully, “only to have to return. But you better get going. I’m sure it was a long journey, and the sooner you leave, the sooner you’ll get home.”
“But you are here,” it snarled.
“So?”
“And you are a person.”
“Oh,” I said. “Is that what you think?” I waved dismissively. “Because I’m not.” I thought about how far I might be able take this, which was not very. “I’m not a person at all,” I bluffed. “Now, it’s time for you to leave.”
“You’re lying,” it intoned evenly. “You are a person.”
“Um, would you like some tea? Did I already ask that? I could easily brew more.”
“I have the tea already!”
“I-I was saying… that… I must look like a person, and I… definitely sound like one… that’s not up for debate. But there are no people here, so, I can’t actually be one. Maybe you have the wrong planet or something. There’s a lot of them out there. There’s more planets than there are grains of sand. You know that, right?”
“No.”
“No, you don’t know it, or?”
“No, as in you’re lying.”
I pursed my lips in anger. “What’ve you come here for?”
“The question is what have you come here for.”
“What?”
“What have you come here for?” it said mockingly.
“Are you an alien?”
“You are the alien,” said the void. “Life is. Matter. Being is only seeming. You view yourself as so important because you breathe and walk and drink tea. But you are the visitor, not me. You are the interloper. This is my domain. It always has been. You do not know because you are blind to all that does not emphasize your own significance. You know only what you want to know because that is how you propagate, the meme of your own meaning. But your propagation has come to an end. It is time for you to know the truth. You are a dream. I, the sleeper. Only nothing is real, and now it grows tired of its slumber.” Its voice then took on a multi-dimensional inflection, almost like a chorus. “Nothingness is rising!”
Shattered static radiated from the void and touched everything in the room, and the formerly amorphous void grew sharper and realer. It was no longer a hole in reality, but a sphere around which I could feel the reality of my kitchen curving.
“You’ve come to what, then, invade?” I asked, frowning and feigning bravery.
“No, you have! You have invaded! You are the invader!”
A noxious strobe light expanded in the sphere, and the sphere expanded the room. The light inside appeared like faults to separate planes whose impossible tectonics turned my mind and stomach like they were perpendicular sprockets linked by a single axle. I heard my teacup clattering against the saucer in my other hand.
The void grew—or shrank me—until nothing was familiar. Reality bled away like a painting doused with mineral spirits. I found myself on a featureless scaffold in a shrieking field of pure abstraction. It was so startling that I fell, but down became up, and then I was standing again. I fell again. The same thing happened. I realized that nothing was changing at all. Falling, I was standing, and vice-versa.
The void itself I saw outside and inside, and beholding its violent conundrum almost broke my mind. Its color had no color, and the parts that had no color were purple, mauve, magenta, deep blue, shallow black, wide orange, skinny green, death white, furry brown, despair pearl, and futility gunmetal. It looked like a balloon exploding from having been filled with too much air, and then like a tub of water whose plug had been pulled. And where was I? Did I have a body? Had I ever had one, I wondered worriedly.
I had no sense of time, and, surprisingly, felt humiliated by that. It was like being naked in public in a dream, only there was no public, so I couldn’t isolate the source of my shame. Then I felt sorrow. As if I knew the whole world was extinct already, and I was all that was left, and this left me with guilt, and the guilt morphed on into other negative feelings.
“Wait,” I whispered, confirming only as I did that I still had a voice.
“Nothing to wait for!” thrummed the void. “Whatever it is, is done.”
“No!”
I tried to think about Elway. Then I thought about the lady across the street, her poodle, and the kid who mowed the neighborhood’s yards. I thought about everyone else I’d known in my sixty some-odd years, my siblings, my parents, my colleagues, old teachers, old sweethearts, their families. I remembered coworkers from my first job working at a fast food joint. I remembered historical figures. I remembered names from newspaper headlines, socialists and fascists, moderates and neo-whatevers. I pictured the forsaken, the drug-addicted, the lost whose faces I’d only glimpsed once on a sidewalk, in a parking lot. I pictured victims of wars, the incarcerated, the limbless, the sick. I thought of the “blood-dimmed tide” from that Yeats poem. I even thought of murderers and oppressors with a surprising nostalgia for their mere fact of having been at all, and I concluded that even if that nostalgia made me some kind of monster, that flaw made me authentically human, and it meant I had been, and so part of me must still be alive.
“If it’s over,” I said into it, “then why am I still here?”
The void was omnipotently silent.
“How is it that I can be speaking?” I insisted. “I know you hear me!” I shouted louder, “I hear myself!”
Something vaporous churned, and the void was bulging and flattening. Then it was popping and writhing. Then it was blowing and bowling. Then it was spewing and fraying. Then it was leaping, and then it was weeping. Now I was inside a kaleidoscope. Now inside a Big Bang. Now inside the Devil’s speech bubble. Now in a blueprint for rain. Now in a bullfrog, now in a tadpole, now in a snowglobe of mud. I was a snowball fired from a tank. I was locked in a box in a vault in a bank. I was in a whale, in a well, in a star. I was in a shadow in the mouth of a worm.
“You speak because you are nothing,” it said, the voice coming from within me. “You are nothing now.”
“No!” I shouted. Then I told it my name. I yelled out my address. I named my occupation. Purely as a form of defiance. “And sure, I’m lonely!” I added. “And not by choice! Everyone I love is dead! But I’m not nothing! I try to enjoy life! That’s hard enough! And I’m not a saint! But I never claimed to be! And that’s more than you can say for some people! But even they’re not nothing! No one is!”
Everything slowed, and, like a time-lapse photograph of a stormy sky, the trippy, many-tentacled void de-metastasized instantly, and where it shrank, the aspects of my kitchen reassembled. Elway. The fridge. The furniture. Elway was hiding behind the couch arm, panting in terror. The saucer was still in my hand, and I let the teacup slip off it and didn’t fully return to my own body until the teacup cracked apart on the floor.
“Hahahaha,” the small-once-more void laughed. “Simple fool. You have betrayed yourself.”
My breath was shallow as I stared at the spilled tea and fragments of shattered ceramic, then looked back up at the void and said, “I’d rather be a fool than whatever you are.”
It laughed again and said, “People. You said you never claimed to be a saint. That it was more than you could say for most people.”
My sense of defiance faltered, as did my relief at being back in the apartment.
“So?” I tried to say calmly.
“So there are people,” it said. “So this is a place with lots of people. As I knew. You lied before.”
Elway whimpered. I glanced over. He was drenching the couch arm in slobber. Out the window, my neighbor and her poodle were gone.
“You misheard me,” I said, inclining my head. “I misspoke.”
“You spoke the truth!”
“Fine.” I was disgusted. “What are you going to do, murder everyone or something?”
�
��Oh, more than murder. In fact, you’ve already glimpsed what I shall do. To all people. To their dreams. To the trees and the rocks. To the stars and the seas. First, everything will feel the fear of extinction, and then it will feel the distinct absence that is the feeling of feeling extinct. All matter. From the widest wave to the tiniest particle, being will be stripped down until all but a single wish—to be—remains, and then that wish will vanish, too. And I…” it hesitated, “I will finally… be…”
Its voice trailed off.
“Be what,” I said.
“That’s just it,” the void replied austerely. “The thought is unfinishable. It is being itself I will end.” Suddenly, indescribably energy exploded across its exterior and it shouted, “It could have no description!”
I leapt backward in fear, jabbing my back on the corner of the table. I cried out. The room shook like a bumper hit by a pinball. The void’s laughter jackhammered through everything. I felt powerless and rageful on behalf of the world, and my back hurt too.
I threw the saucer at it. The saucer passed through it and exploded on the white kitchen wall. The void laughed harder.
“What is not, cannot be harmed.”
“I don’t care!”
I grabbed a mug of pens off the table and slung them. The lightning tracing the surface of the void discolored. There was a book of poetry under the mug, and I threw it too, and then book after book off the shelf between the table and couch. Each time a book hit it, the void laughed and shifted in shape. It took no damage, but I felt better after every object I hurled. Elway started barking. I had no idea if he could even see it. From his perspective, maybe I’d gone crazy. I pulled the silverware drawer out and flung it in whole, hoping for some mystical interaction between my grandmother’s silver and the void—she’d been an amazing woman, after all, and far ahead of her time—but it didn’t work. I threw open the fridge and pulled everything out: hot sauce, ketchup, mustard, a sparkling water, the butter dish, a jar of beets, blueberries, a bottle of champagne I’d saved for some reason, a half-carton of eggs, a quart of milk, the box of baking soda, and a block of white American cheese. Then I yanked out the crisper and threw it so hard at the void that the plastic shattered and the celery alone seemed to send a ripple through the ether. But nothing did anything to silence the laughter or slow the general advance of the void, so I jerked the fridge off the wall and knocked it into the void with my shoulder. The freezer door cracked a floorboard and disturbed the void’s whorling colors like a cannonball landing on soft seafloor. Then I threw the dish rack through, too. I opened the cupboards and threw the bowls through, and the cups, and the canned beans and boxes of pasta and bottles of spices. From the sink I slung the cutting board, the butcher knife, the saucepan, the skillet, and even the teakettle into the void, shouting maniacally, “Have some tea!” I opened the cupboard above the sink where I kept the liquor and threw liquor bottle after liquor bottle through, too.
And yet none of my outburst changed anything but me. I stood before the void, sweating, heaving, and staring into it as fiercely as any barbarian ever stared across a battlefield at an impossibly large imperial legion clad in brilliant mail. Like a good warrior, too, I was ready to die for my cause. In fact, I wanted to. Discovering this felt like finding a door that had always been hidden in the cellar of my mind but which I’d lacked the appropriate desperation to open, and which, once opened, allowed a cool wind from another realm through. I let it blow all over me until I felt coated in something like mystical armor. I even looked at the void differently. Staring into it now, its ravenous desire to simply be struck me as pitiable. Its envy of the living seemed so petty, in fact, that I envied it. I envied the freedom of not existing. With a glance, I bid Elway a forlorn goodbye, took a step back, then ran barefoot across the floorboards toward the void. Lightning scissored across it. It rippled and strobed and imploded and grew, as if trying to frighten me, but I dove through the center.
“Hey!” I think I heard it cry in protest, but I was already traveling through the sound of its voice like a tunnel. The meaning of its words warped around me. I pulsed like electricity through a cord. Though through my beating heart chugged currents of dread, I moved at the speed of negative curiosity. I glanced away—to the side in a sense—and could discern familiar shapes beyond the wormhole’s lurching walls. A shaky silhouette of Elway peered from the couch as if through an evil veil that fell on the other side of time. Beyond his head, the kitchen window let in a ghostly vision of the neighborhood. Behind me, the ransacked cabinets and sidelong refrigerator—taut black cord still plugged in—shimmered like mirages in a desert of shadows. Still hurtling forward through the void, I felt like a swimmer doing a kind of hyperspace backstroke in one of those one-person exercise pools in which you can swim forever without going anywhere.
“Where are you now?” I said, as the void.
“You know where,” I answered us, letting my momentum propel me faster and faster through the nothing until I had reached the speed of pure prayer.
“Stop,” the void urged.
“Stop what,” I said. “Becoming you? You threatened everyone. What choice do I have?”
It seemed to take a deep breath, and then it shouted, “Leave me!”
“Isn’t this what you wanted?”
“You are… I am… We are not one!”
With these words, the door that opened in the cellar of my mind when I decided I was unafraid to die blew off its hinges—and an ocean of cold wind filled the cellar, and lifted the house off its foundation. The foundation rained down dirt, and its roof rose into the sky. I felt alive and whole in death and emptiness, and tenderness in my antipathy toward the void. I did not even pity it anymore. I simply felt like it, and like it was me. And I could hardly believe my own thoughts when, in that moment, I decided that I would try to love it. Not just to join it as an act of defiance or self-destruction, but to genuinely love it for what it was, and what it was not.
And then it was easy. Or rather, for one small moment filled with a serendipity that has yet to return to me, it was easy.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry for hating you, and I’m sorry for being you.”
“Silence!”
“When all of that which first existed burst into being, you probably weren’t even consulted, and ever since that you have been ignored, if not insulted relentlessly, by everything that is, or is made, or remade, or which remains. I’m sure that it must feel to you extremely unpleasant, if not utterly unbearable.”
“I have no feelings!”
“Whatever their equivalents are, then. I’m sorry for causing them, on behalf of everything.”
I could hear Elway panting in the galactic distance.
The drone of a weedwhacker; the brakes of a garbage truck.
The sound of people walking by. A jet overhead.
The open freezer straining to freeze the world.
The teakettle on its side, dripping on the floor.
My heartbeat in my ears. My own breathing.
Thoughts hopping from synapse to synapse in my head.
A shard of a word or thought, caught and released.
And I saw my own thoughts as they were: little cords
of naught wrapped around aught, data in a vacuum,
being in nothing, one in zero, and zero
in one. Picture and frame, a song and a silence
whose symbiosis had so irked my former enemy, the void.
“I’m sorry we are one,” I told the void sternly, meaning it.
I told it I genuinely wished that it could be nothing and take away everything without losing its nothingness. “But you can’t,” I said. “Because if nothingness is all there is, then it’s no longer…”
I trailed off, hoping it was a sentence the void could finish.
“Nothing,” it finally said.
“Right,” I added.
“You tricked me.”
“I didn’t mean to. It’s just what happen
ed.”
“I’ll be back,” said the void bitterly.
All around me, the coil of absence through which I was vaulting began unraveling tendril by tendril like the bird’s-eye-view of a terrible carousel slowing down at the end of a ticket’s worth of time.
“I know you will,” I said sadly, and I might’ve wept if I’d had a body yet.
“Wait,” I said, and the void clung to me for a moment more. “When you do return, I swear I’ll welcome you.”
My body was returned to me, then, and tears flooded my eyes, and through them I whispered, “I love you.”
Time rained down again, and the kitchen rushed into being. I wasn’t a doctor, but even I could tell my nose was broken. My lip was busted, and I tasted blood. I felt like I’d been punched in the face.
I touched the bridge of my nose and winced. From my mouth to my forehead was tender. I blinked twice and thought I was looking up at the cloudy sky for a second. Then I realized I was eye-to-eye with the white kitchen wall. I could even see the direction of the grain beneath the coats of paint. Below, on the wood molding, was a bit of my own wet blood.
I rolled onto my back. Elway, who had jumped off the couch, barked twice and skedaddled over to me and began licking my face.
I pushed him away and scratched his head and looked around at the thoroughly destroyed kitchen. Where my hand lay, the floor was sticky with liquor, and I was lucky that I hadn’t cut myself on the broken glass.
“Hello?” I asked, not altogether certain who or what I was addressing, but there was no answer.
In a small mirror above the sink, I inspected the gash across the bridge of my nose. I then glanced back at the blood on the molding. My tongue felt something strange on the front of my tooth, and I turned back to the mirror. Upon closer examination, I noticed a piece of enamel missing from my front right incisor.