Life Among the Voids

by Roman Theodore Brandt

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” I yelled, and that made him laugh harder.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, trying not to laugh.

  “No you’re not.” I touched my lip and it was numb. I reached over and switched on the lamp. “What the fuck.”

  Harvey started laughing again.

  “Why did you do that?”

  “I wanted someone to feel something,” Harvey said, giggling, and he heaved his other shoe at me. I picked it up and launched myself out of bed and up onto the top bunk, pinning him down. He was still laughing when I hit him across the face with his own shoe, but now his laughing was maniacal, with his teeth and gums bleeding.

  “Fuck you! Are you stupid?” I yelled. He giggled a little, with blood filling his mouth, and he coughed and spit it out, choking.

  “Did you feel something when you hit me?” I tossed his shoe down onto the floor, and he gurgled a little. “Hit me again,” he whispered, grinning. “Do you feel anything?”

  I sat back, straddling him, and he started laughing again. “What the fuck,” I mumbled.

  “I want to feel something,” he said quietly.

  “Go to sleep.”

  He slapped me, cackling. “I want to feel something. Hit me.”

  “I want to sleep.”

  “Hit me,” he said, and he punched my shoulder. “Hit me so I can feel it like you do.”

  “Don’t say that to me,” I told him, with my stomach turning into a pit of ice.

  “Make me bleed so I feel like a human,” he said, and something inside me snapped. I drew my fist back and punched him right in the mouth, sending the blood he was about to swallow across his pillow and up my arm, staining everything red. “Fuck me up! Make me feel something!” he screamed, and he spit blood at me. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to choke him out until he was a corpse in the top bunk so that I could sleep. I balled up my fist, ready to hit him again.

  The door burst open, and I looked over to see Dad staring at us from the hall. “What are you boys doing?”

  *

  Harvey freaked out when the doctor tried to start the stiches, so they gave him something in an IV that turned him into a calm, soft-spoken pile of muscles. While the doctor worked, Harvey claimed to be Anne Hathaway’s body double and said he had bought and sold Minnesota with Monopoly money. Mom glared at him from the bedside chair, occasionally looking over to glare at me while Dad sat like a mannequin in the plastic chair against the far wall, waiting for it all to be over.

  “I think we’ve all had enough fun for one night,” she said.

  “I want a kitten,” Harvey mumbled around the doctor’s fingers.

  “Don’t talk while he’s working; you’re making it hard to fix your face.” Mom sighed and fished around in her purse. “I lost my car keys.”

  “What do you need your car keys for? You drove it into a wall,” Harvey said.

  “They’re coming to pick it up soon, and I need to find the keys.”

  “They’re still in it,” Dad said from the other side of the room.

  Mom stopped fishing around in her purse to look up at him with her mouth gaping, the bones of her face sharper and clearer than before. “Fuck. I locked it.”

  I rolled my eyes and slouched down in the chair, putting my head in my hands. “Oh my god.”

  The ride home from the ER was silent for a long time, and then Mom said from the passenger seat, “I don’t know what you two were thinking.”

  “I feel butchered,” Harvey said around the cotton in his mouth.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “You two little assholes,” Mom mumbled. She stared out the window, refusing to look at us. “I’m so tired. I just wanted to sleep through the night.”

  “Fuck off,” Harvey said, and he laughed a little.

  “I wish you would shut up,” I told him, and he looked over at me, smiling like an idiot with his cheek full of cotton.

  “You could have killed each other,” Mom yelled, and the car was quiet again. The air was tense and thick, and she switched the radio on, filling the car with the banter of midnight talk radio hosts.

  “I have stitches; I feel like a quilt,” he told me.

  “God, you’re stupid,” I said.

  “I’m stupid?” Harvey put his head back against the headrest. “You’re stupid. You’re a fucking moron.”

  “You’re going to lose that cotton,” Dad said, his voice stern. He glared back at us in the rear view mirror. “Don’t talk so much.”

  “You’re a fancy fucking college dick now,” Harvey announced, straining at his seat belt. “You left me on that farm, just like Mom and Dad did.”

  “Oh my god,” Mom said loudly from the front of the car. She slumped down in her seat, becoming smaller to take up less space. “I think I want to walk home.”

  “Look at me, I’m Henry and I’m smarter than my whole family now!” Harvey yelled. “I can’t come visit because I have my dick in a book.”

  “Just stop it,” I mumbled.

  “We’ll get some ice cream when we get home,” Mom said, looking at him over the seat back and smiling. “What kind do you want?”

  “I don’t want fucking ice cream, Mom.” Harvey said, burying his face in his hands.

  “Well what do you want, then?” She asked.

  And right then, Harvey started to scream.

  Mom’s arm shot back and she grabbed his wrist, her knuckles white from the grip she had on him. He looked at her like a terrified animal, silent and scared beside me.

  “If you scream like that again, I will break your fucking arm,” she said quietly, glaring at him from around the headrest. She shook his wrist, and he yelped. “Loud noise sets off my headaches, and I can’t take that kind of screaming. Do you understand me?”

  “Let go!” He yelled, trying to pull away, but she yanked him forward, nearly out of his seat belt.

  “Hey, is that necessary?” Dad said, and the car swerved a little as he tried to grab Mom’s arm.

  “I am not fucking around,” she said.

  “Let me go!”

  She let go of him and her arm zipped back up to the front seat.

  Harvey looked over at me. “This is the baby section, back here. You and me.”

  Mom sighed. “Stop the car, David.”

  “What?” Dad said.

  “Stop the car. I can’t take this. I need some air.”

  “You’re going to walk?”

  She unbuckled her seat belt and it snapped back against the seat behind her. She looked over at him as he slowed down. I watched her pop the door open and slide down off the seat.

  “Mom, don’t do this.”

  “Henry, I’ll see you at home.”

  “Get back in the car,” Dad said, his voice stern, and the two of them stared at each other, Dad gripping the steering wheel and Mom wrapped in a blanket outside the car.

  She leaned into the vehicle and said, loudly, “Do I look like a child to you?” Then, whipping the end of her blanket around dramatically, she slammed the door shut with what strength she had. We followed her in the car for over a mile, with Dad yelling out the window for her to get in.

  Finally, Dad said, “Have it your way,” and sped away, kicking up gravel behind us. We left Mom by the side of the road. Harvey panicked, staring out the back window and watching her disappear. “Go back, go back!” he cried, and he strained in his seat belt to see her long after she was out of sight. He let out a whimper that became a scream. He screamed all the way home, and then I had to listen to him crying above me in the top bunk until he fell asleep.

  Dad went out to find Mom that night and brought her home. I heard them come in. “I just want to sit down,” she said.

  “I can’t believe I was so stupid.”

  “Listen,” she said, and then she sighed on the other side of the door, exasperated. “I don’t have time to be angry anymore, so let’s justr forget that it happened.”

  *

  I woke up to Harve
y crawling into bed with me. He didn’t say anything, and neither did I. I felt his hand searching for mine under the covers, and I found it and pulled it to my chest.

  “Is the door locked?” I asked him.

  “I don’t care anymore,” he said.

  *

  The next day, he left early and we spent the whole day trying to find him. Dad dropped Mom off at home when she got tired, and he and I went back out, driving down backroads with our headlights washing over forests and fields, expecting to see Harvey come darting out from between the corn stalks. Eventually, we headed back to the lake house with Dad glaring out at the road ahead.

  “I don’t know what’s in his head sometimes,” Dad said, and I looked out at the trees passing outside the car, imagining the silent ghosts in all the clearings, waiting to be discovered.

  At home I sat between Mom and Dad on the couch in the glow of the TV, bathed in reruns and trying not to think about all the things that could have happened to him.

  “He’s an adult,” Mom told me when I said we ought to look for him again. The darkness outside the house closed like water, deep and empty and heavy. The world was a void, and we were living inside it, with nothing left but us and the house, and Harvey trapped out there somewhere forever.

  He came back in the small hours of the morning without saying a word and plopped down between me and Dad on the couch.

  Mom changed the channel. “No consideration for anyone,” she said to him, and I remembered him passed out in the car, drooling on my shirt.

  “Shit happens,” he told her.

  “Your brother was worried sick.”

  “I was not,” I said.

  Harvey put his arm around me and laughed. “We can share a bunk tonight if you want.”

  “Shut up,” I told him.

  Harvey stared at me, his eyes flickering in the light of the TV from the shadows of his face.

  “We’re going to the fireworks as a family next week,” Mom said from her chair, and I looked up at the cracks in the ceiling, down at the TV, over at the window with Harvey’s eyes on me.

  “What do you want?” I asked him.

  “Henry, just let it go,” Dad said, but Harvey watched me the whole time. His eyes followed me when I got up to go to the bathroom, and they drilled through the walls between us until I returned.

  “I wish you’d stop staring at me,” I said, sitting down.

  “I bet you do,” he mumbled.

  “I want you boys to behave tonight,” Dad told us.

  Harvey looked away then for a minute or two, staring at the TV.

  “How is Bill, anyway?” Mom asked, trying to change the subject.

  Harvey laughed a little. “Who cares?” Then he looked over at me again, and this time his eyes were softer. “It’s going to be okay, you know.”

  “I know.”

  Mom looked over at Dad from under her afghan heap.

  “I know, too,” Harvey said, and his tone said that he knew everything. Things I kept to myself, especially from him.

  I thought of my room, high up in a dorm tower, a cinder block prison where I auditioned boys to replace him. I thought of those sad, stupid college boys who would show up ready to slap me around and make some money when what I really wanted them to do was to beat me into a gasping, aching lump of blood and bruises on the carpet. Those dreamy-eyed kids who came to my room for a little money and fun and left wild-eyed with gored knuckles. None of them made me feel anything but dead.

  “You don’t know anything,” I said quietly.

  He smacked his hand down onto my thigh, his smile getting bigger. “Whatever you say, kid.”

  I looked down at his big hand, his chewed fingernails, and I said, “Are you off your meds?”

  Dad slammed his hand down on the arm of the couch. “Henry, come on, let’s not do this.”

  Harvey’s grip on my thigh tightened.

  “Let go of me,” I said quietly. With a little laugh, he shrugged and let go.

  “Are you still taking your meds?” Mom wanted to know.

  Harvey sighed. “Mom, let’s not talk about meds. It’s depressing.”

  “You need to take your meds,” I told him.

  I looked over to see him staring right at me again, secret Zodiac signs dancing in his pupils, shifting and settling. A smile crossed his face, stretching his mouth to ugly proportions. “You need to fuck off,” he whispered.

  *

  After one particular med change when he was fifteen, he turned back into the Harvey I remember the most. The constellations reformed again and he woke me up and took me out to the garage. Mom and Dad saw me in the morning when I came to breakfast, and Harvey sat next to me smiling with his hand wrapped in a bloody T-shirt.

  I stared at my corn flakes drowning in the milk.

  When they sent Harvey to live on the farm with our uncle after that incident, I was haunted by our room full of his things. I went out to visit him in October of my senior year. The highway became a county road, which became a gravel road that ended in a big white house in the middle of a vast, ugly corn field desert. Harvey had transitioned awkwardly into the shit-covered hoodies and jeans of farm life. He stared at me as my taxi drove past him, his eyes following the car, not blinking.

  Uncle Bill insisted that we prayed before dinner, but Harvey just sat there staring at the food on his plate until it was over.

  “Amen,” said Uncle Bill.

  “A lot of good that did, I’m sure,” Harvey said quietly.

  “I’ll beat your ass, boy,” said Uncle Bill.

  I looked over at my uncle, a menacing smile stretching across his face, and then I glanced over at Harvey, who was looking at anything but Uncle Bill. He shrugged. “Don’t look at me,” Harvey said quietly.

  “What’s it like out here?” I asked him, and Harvey looked up, his eyes empty and grey.

  “For fuck sake, Henry.”

  “Language,” Uncle Bill said around a mouthful of chicken.

  I asked Harvey again that night, standing on the edge of what was once a corn field.

  “What’s it like out here?”

  He sighed, staring out at the empty, rolling hills I knew stretched out invisibly toward the dark horizon. The sky was so clear out here, I could see the milky way. “You ever want to run away, Henry?”

  “I don’t suppose so,” I said.

  He was quiet for a minute, and then he said, “Must be nice.”

  “Do you?”

  “You don’t want to know what happens out here,” he said. “You don’t want to know what he’s done.”

  My heart was lead at that point, no longer beating, buried under the fields for some future archeologist to dig up and mislabel.

  “Listen, I’ll talk to Mom and Dad when I get back.”

  “Maybe,” he said, and he stopped, thinking for a minute, and then he continued, “Maybe one day when I run into the fields there’ll be a combine waiting to meet me.”

  My stomach got really cold and I nearly died imagining it. “Harvey, no.”

  I took his hand, and for once, he didn’t pull away. We stood there, watching the corn move in the buzzing glow of the safety light from the barn.

  Back home, I sat in the blue living room, drowning in the laughter of the TV audience.

  “Uncle Bill is hurting him,” I said finally, and Mom and Dad were quiet.

  “Did he say that?” Mom wanted to know after a few minutes.

  “Not exactly.”

  They looked at each other.

  “Maybe we should bring him back home,” Dad said.

  Mom sat back in her chair, crossing her arms in front of her. “You do what you want, David. You’re better at these things than I am. I just don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

  He never moved back home. Harvey had become a ghost, showing up for holidays with his eyes a little more dead every time, trailing Uncle Bill like he was on a leash. He developed a weird half-country accent that gave his words more gravity when
we talked.

  “You ever cut yourself before?” he asked me on one of his visits, sitting on his bedroom floor.

  “No.”

  “Well,” he said, “you should try it. It’s like coming up for air.”

  “What, like with scissors?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” he said, looking up at me. The constellations were back.

  “Okay, like with a knife or something.”

  He shrugged and looked down at the carpet. “I can’t feel anything unless I do it.”

  “Harvey, don’t talk like that.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with it,” he said, his voice a little sharper. “You ought to try it.”

  That was the first and last time I ever truly understood Harvey. He lived in the back of my mind, a voice that told me to lure boys into the restroom for fights and let them beat the fuck out of me. He was the reason I let one of them smash my head against the tile wall and had to ride in an ambulance to the hospital with Mom glaring at me saying things like “I wish you’d straighten up already. You’re about to go to college, Henry.”

  When Harvey shook me awake at two in the morning the third day at the lake house, his face was just inches from mine. “Get up,” he said, and he pulled me out of bed. I struggled to stay on my feet, stumbling the dresser. “Get some clothes on, okay?”

  “Harvey,” I slurred, and I inhaled when he turned the light on, flooding the room with a harsh, florescent glow. “Harvey, what do you want?”

  “Don’t be stupid. Get dressed.”

  I stood grasping the post of the bunk bed. “Jesus, Harvey, what time is it?”

  “Time for you to get dressed,” he said, pulling his pants on. “We’re going on an adventure.”

  “I want to sleep,” I mumbled, climbing back into bed. “Turn the fucking light off, Harvey.”

  He laughed and followed me into my bed, curling up behind me.

  “Stop touching me,” I groaned against my pillow. “I’m not even awake.”

  “Listen,” he said, with his body against mine. “We’re going on an adventure, Henry, so you’ll have to get up eventually.”

  My brain was a misfiring clump of neurons. “I don’t want to go on an adventure.”

  He sighed again, a little sharper than before. “Fuck off; you do too.” He put his arm around me slowly, like an anaconda tightening. He was bigger than me, and he was in one of his moods. “You know you always do.”

  “I just want to go to sleep.”

  “No you don’t,” he whispered, and I could hear the smile in his voice. His grip tightened, and I was struggling to breathe now. His breathing quickened, and he laughed a little. “You want to go on an adventure, right?”