Life Among the Voids Read online

  “I guess so.”

  “Well don’t you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We’re going out to the island, Henry.”

  “Okay.” My voice was small, because there was no getting out of it, and if there was no getting out of it, it was okay to feel the blood rushing to my head and want to cry.

  “I’ll get dressed,” I said quietly.

  Out on the island, Harvey took me into the trees where it was dark, so dark no one could ever see us. I didn’t have to be afraid anymore. Not even the stars could see us, there. Harvey took me into the dark and flooded my brain with sound and color. The trees hid everything else.

  Harvey was like those trees, dark and deep and empty, with his big frame standing over me as I bled from my mouth.

  His voice was as thick as syrup. “What do you feel?”

  I spat out blood and coughed, collapsing on the ground, drooling invisible blood in the dark. “I feel everything,” I murmured.

  *

  A few days later, Mom called us into the living room, where the TV was blasting talk shows. Harvey had finally started taking his meds again, and his eyes were glassy and distant, his lips curled into a vague, dopey smile when I came into the room.

  “Turn that down, David,” Mom said to Dad, and the voices from the TV stopped, leaving only the video.

  Mom sat huddled under the afghan on the couch beside him, looking around at the rest of us with her big, wet eyes. “My boys,” she said, her voice cracking.

  Dad handed her the box of tissues, and she sat there holding it in her hands like it was a relic of some previous life.

  “I’ve been trying to figure this all out in my head,” she said. “I mean, you know by now that things aren’t okay. I’m not okay.”

  “None of us are okay,” Harvey said agreeably, his eyes fixed on the TV, silent paternity tests reflected on his corneas. Mom switched the TV off. Harvey blinked and looked at her. “Sorry.”

  She ran her hand through his hair, messing it up. “Shh.”

  I stood in the doorway, waiting. “What is it, Mom?”

  Mom took a shaky breath. “Listen, I’m sick.”

  “With what?” Harvey asked.

  “We found out a few months ago,” she said, her voice thick with medication.

  “We sold the house,” Dad said.

  “God damn it; I’m getting to that.”

  “Sorry,” Dad said.

  “You tell it, David; you’re better at it,” Mom said, yanking tissues out of the box in her hand and tossing it back onto the side table.

  He looked away, out the window, at some faraway place. “Sorry.”

  “No, no,” she said, angry and weak and sad. “You tell it; you do all the voices better than I do.” They both laughed a little, and then Dad sighed. Mom wiped her nose. “I’m an asshole anyway,” she muttered, and what smile Dad had left was gone.

  “Mom, why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

  Harvey laughed a little. “Listen to him, like he was the only one.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Well, the truth is,” Mom said, picking up her can of ensure and addressing the straw. “The truth is that we didn’t want you kids to worry.”

  “We didn’t do treatment,” Dad said, and the ensure can stopped halfway to Mom’s mouth. She closed her eyes.

  Harvey and I glanced at each other.

  “God damn it,” she whispered. “I was getting to that, too.”

  We all sat in silence around her, waiting for her to take a breath or say something or prove she was still alive.

  “Before anyone makes a big deal of it, I’m too far gone,” Mom said. She took a sip of her ensure and coughed a few times, wiping spittle from her mouth. “God damn it,” she whispered. “So we went a few places your father and I had always wanted to go.”

  “I just don’t get it,” Harvey said.

  “It’s not for you to get,” Mom said, her voice razor sharp.

  “You’re just letting yourself die.”

  “Letting myself die,” Mom said, and she chuckled a little. She looked over at Dad, and then she put her head back against the chair, exhausted and unable to correct him. “Sure, I’m just letting myself die.”

  “We went to Paris,” Dad said, trying to change the subject.

  “That sounds nice, at least,” I said, and Mom smiled for the first time, her eyes brimming with tears.

  “Yeah, it was,” she said.

  “What happened to the stuff in my room?” Harvey asked.

  “That’s what you care about,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  Harvey just sat there, looking down at his hands, and then he looked up at me, his blue eyes full of thoughts I’d never know. “I care about Mom. I just want to know what happened to my stuff.”

  “It’s in a storage unit,” Mom told him, having obviously been expecting him to ask. She took another sip from her straw. “You know, this stuff isn’t bad.”

  “It’s your life juice,” Harvey laughed. “Keep drinking Ensure.”

  I smiled, because it was so stupid.

  Mom reached a hand out and messed up Harvey’s hair. “Alright, sure,” she said.

  “It keeps you alive.”

  I rolled my eyes. “It just supplies her with nutrients when she can’t hold food down.”

  “I know that. You’re such a trauma bomb.” Harvey didn’t look at any of us for a minute, and then he looked over at Mom again as she retracted her hand back under the afghan. “Just keep drinking it, that’s all I’m saying.”

  Mom sighed and put the container down. “I think that’s all for now.”

  “We might go out on the lake after you leave,” Dad said.

  “We might,” Mom said.

  “We’ve talked about it already,” Dad said.

  “David, I don’t want to upset them.”

  “They need to know, so they don’t just find out through the newspapers.”

  Mom sighed. “Look,” she said, “Don’t worry. We’re just going to go out on the boat and it’ll all be okay.”

  “Mom, what are you talking about?” Harvey asked.

  “Harvey, shut up,” I said.

  “We’ll be out on the lake, you and me,” She said, looking over at Dad dreamily.

  “Mom, I don’t want you to die,” Harvey said.

  “It’s not death; it’s being born again.”

  “Born again on the lake,” I said.

  “I think I’ll take my pills when we’re out there,” she said.

  Dad smiled sadly. “Listen, we didn’t want to upset you boys.”

  “This is nuts,” I said. “How could you even think about doing this?”

  The TV buzzed in the background, the crowd hissing at the results of a paternity test.

  “Why do we watch this trash?” Mom asked. “Let’s go outside. The fireworks will be starting soon.” She started to get up, and then said, “The insurance people are coming soon to get my car. We ought to get the keys out of it.”

  *

  Carnage is always more colorful and shocking in the morning, so when Dad rolled the door of the garage open to reveal Mom’s destroyed car, I laughed a little. The dead headlights stared at each other, and the rest of the front end was mostly gone, revealing an ugly mechanical brain. The air in the garage smelled like deployed airbags and overheated circuits.

  I blinked at the mess, trying to imagine my skeleton of a mother wrenching the door open to climb out and stare up at the milky way. “I don’t know how she’s still alive.”

  “Yeah, I know; she’s immortal or something,” Harvey said.

  Dad stood staring at the car with his hands on his hips, and then he stretched. “She was a little shaken up, obviously. Can you boys get me my lockout tools?”

  *

  The rest of the summer went by quickly. Too quickly, I thought. On the last night at the lake, Harvey and I sat out on boat dock and looked out at the water, which had
become cold and dark and unknowable.

  “You should take me back to school with you,” Harvey said.

  I laughed. “What? Where would you live?”

  “I could stay with you.”

  We were quiet for a while, and then I said, “You could be my roommate. You could go to school too.”

  “I’m no good at school, kid,” he said softly, and then he said, “Anyway, I was kidding. I’ll be alright.”

  “You could hit him. You could defend yourself. No one would know.”

  “I know. I could do a lot of things.”

  “Are you scared to go back?”

  Harvey sat there for a minute, looking out at the water. Finally, he said, “I guess so.”

  “I’d be shitting my pants.”

  “Here,” he said, grabbing my hand. He laughed. “Feel my heart.”

  I tried to pull my hand back, but he stuck it up under his hoodie, and my skin cells against his chest were electric, sending currents back to my brain, misfiring in my skull.

  “Feel it,” he said.

  “You’re so weird,” I told him, feeling the panicked beating of his heart, trying to break out of his ribcage. He smiled over at me with his eyes shining in the moonlight.

  “That’s how I feel about going back,” he said.

  “Shut up.”

  He was still holding my hand in place, but I was done trying to pull away. I felt his heart pounding and I thought of all the nights I slept with my head on his chest with my lip busted or my eye swollen shut, the sick muscle in my chest pumping saline memories through my arteries into his veins, my red blood cells dissolving in his capillaries. He let go of my wrist, and I leaned over and pulled his hoodie up over his head and tossed it behind us. He laughed and looked out at the water, sitting there in just his pajama pants, and he said, “Aren’t you tired of hiding?”

  “Hiding what?”

  “Everything.”

  The lake was silent around us, lapping at the pier, rolling below us.

  I looked up at the sky, trying to make out the constellations. “It’s not that easy.”

  He shrugged, his muscled body tense. “Maybe we can go away.”

  “I’ll think of something,” I told him, and he looked away with his heart still pounding. I watched the vein in his neck pulse, and I said, “Just don’t do anything stupid.”

  “Sometimes I feel so alone out there I think I’ll never see another human again.”

  “There’s Uncle Bill,” I said, and then I regretted saying it.

  Harvey smiled and didn’t look at me. “For now,” he said. “Anyway, you know what I mean.”

  We sat suffocating in the thickness of everything we still couldn’t say out loud, even in private.

  “Yeah,” I said finally. “I know.”

  *

  Harvey and I packed and walked to the bus stop together the next morning after the tow truck took Mom’s car away, neither of us saying anything. I was shaky and angry and scared, and Harvey bit his lip so hard it drew blood. We stood at the bus stop, waiting to be collected and taken back to where we came from: me, to a campus and a dorm room filled with textbooks and empty space, and Harvey to a lonely farm in the middle of nowhere. We were children again, but orphans this time, waiting to be sent away.

  “I don’t know what to do with myself, knowing what’s happening out on that lake,” I told him, and he didn’t look at me.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said quietly, and he took a ragged breath, looking up at the sign for the park office, squinting at the cheerful lettering.

  I shut my eyes, trying not to think about anything, not the bus stop or the bus coming to take us away, and definitely not the two middle-aged figures floating out toward the center of the lake in a row boat.

  All the way home, I squeezed my eyes shut against the image of my mother asleep in the boat, the medicine circulating in the highways of her arteries, making the beating of her heart heavier with each second. Those sleeping veins below her skin pulsing slow and steady, pumping poison into every limb, suspecting nothing. Back in my dorm, I shut the door behind me and sat on the bed, staring out at the impossibly green trees, the disgustingly bright sky. I listened to all the idiots and assholes going about their day, completely unaware that it was all over.

  Somewhere on the lake, far down the highway, a gunshot echoed across the water. Birds took off from the trees, their fluttering silhouettes dark against the sunset, and then both my parents were gone. I was completely alone in this world, with no one to shield me from the oncoming voids of death and old age.

  *

  Harvey called me in the middle of the night a few days later, and he was a mess.

  “Will you come with me to the storage unit?”

  “What?” I peered into the darkness of my dorm room, trying to see anything.

  “I can’t do it alone,” he said, and then he started sobbing. My heart started pounding, a salty, angry pain for him, the umbilical connection dripping red down the freeways between us. “I can’t do it, Henry. I have the stupid key and I can’t do it.”

  “I can’t just come down there like that,” I said quietly.

  He sniffed, and then he said, “I have the stupid key. Please don’t make me open it by myself.”

  So I called a taxi and I went. The roads between campus and the farm were dotted with dimly lit farmhouse windows, shining empty into the night. When I pulled into the long, dirt driveway, he came stumbling toward the car in his boxers and a hoodie, his face wet with tears.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, letting himself drop into the backseat beside me.

  “Don’t be sorry. It’s okay.”

  He sighed and put his head back against the seat. “I don’t want to be here anymore.”

  On the way to our hometown, he fell asleep, only waking up when we pulled up to the storage facility, the long, low cinder block buildings that our mother had chosen for Harvey’s things. We parked in front of the unit, and the driver said “This is the place.”

  “This is surreal,” Harvey said. “She was the last person to touch this key.”

  We got out and popped the padlock open and rolled up the flimsy, metal door to reveal Harvey’s old bedroom, reconfigured in the harsh beams of the headlights into stacks of forgotten boxes and dressers and a bed propped up sideways against the wall, ancient playsets collecting dust, stuffed animals rotting in the corner.

  “It looks so weird like this,” he said.

  I looked over at him, his eyes scanning the contents to make sure that it was all there. “You want to go inside?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Not yet,” he whispered.

  I took his hand, and he gripped mine, his fingers cold and wet. I thought of mom packing all this into here, carefully arranging the boxes for the best use of space.

  “Not yet,” he said again, staring at the stacks and the disembodied furniture in the darkness. We stood there staring for a long time before either of us moved.

  *

  Harvey showed up on campus a few months later, dirty and confused and lost, and wandered into the administration building. I got the phone call after breakfast. When I got there, he looked like a little boy, sad and hunched over in the wooden chair in the hallway, watching me force the heavy door open.

  “Hey, kid,” he said. “I thought I’d visit.”

  I took him back to my dorm and he fell asleep on my bed, curled up into a fetal position, and I left him there when I went to class. He slept the whole day, and then that night when he woke up, I said, “You were tired.”

  “I’m always tired,” he told me, and he laughed a little. He was a stranger, calm and polite and humble. He looked back over his shoulder everywhere we went. I took him with me to the bathroom at the end of the hall and he stood there in the next shower, letting the water run down his naked body and swirl the farm dirt and sweat down the drain at his feet. I watched him close his eyes and I thought of the endless, dirty fields and th
e big, red barn against the sunrise and the sunset, the sun rising and falling in my mind on fast forward, and I thought about how funny it was that whatever had happened to him over the years had never kept the sun from crossing the sky, but it had deepened the holes inside my brother to festering wounds.

  I took him to the coffee shop on campus after that, and I bought him a latte. He sat down across from me with his clear plastic cup of coffee and sighed.

  “How long are you staying?” I asked him.

  “Already trying to get rid of me,” he mumbled, stirring his coffee with the straw.

  “No, I just meant…” I looked into his eyes, looking for the shifting stars, the constellations, but in their place, I saw dark, empty retinas and pupils with no connection to the void outside the atmosphere. They were a new void, dark and complete, the last stage of the death of a star system.

  “When are you done with school?”

  “I just started last year.”

  He smiled and let go of the straw, letting it swirl crazily through the coffee whirlpool he’d created.

  “I can’t just drop out,” I told him.

  “No, I know.”

  I watched him lean back in the booth, stretching, and my own muscles suddenly felt tense and stiff.

  “We could run away. You ever think about that?” He asked me, smiling.

  “I don’t have anything to run away from.”

  “We could just go. We could get a little house and it could just be you and me. No one would ever know.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this,” I said, a little colder than I meant to, thinking of the strange boys and their strange fists and all the blood I swallowed that meant nothing in the end.

  Harvey wasn’t looking at me anymore, he was stirring his coffee. “I can’t stay on that fucking farm another second.”

  “It’s not the worst way to end up,” I told him, and he laughed, the old laugh I remembered.

  “I can’t believe you,” he said. “Did you know that Mom and Dad knew about you and me?”

  “Stop.” I looked around to make sure no one was listening to us. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

  “That’s how it is, then?” He asked. “Like it never even happened?”

  I looked him right in the eye and said, “Maybe it was all in your head.”