“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” I yell, almost choking up.
Thud.
The click-clack of the latch slamming into the strike plate.
I fall back and sink into the mattress a million miles deep, and sleep.
***
You were once an insect with a suit of armor scurrying beneath the feet of giant lizards. You were once a rodent with the skill to hide and survive massive asteroids peppering the planet, destroying it. Now, they all want to fuck with you—they all want to tell you what’s wrong with you.
You are now a soft mass of nothingness, and they want to remind you of it.
***
Karen’s pouring out the pills from my bedside bottles, actually counting them out. I can hear her doing it. I still refuse to open my eyes, although I am sitting up in bed.
Perhaps I’m even smiling.
“Well, I’ll be damned, Jack. You’re eating, you’re keeping up with your meds, and you’re taking a bath now and then. I’m really proud of you, big brother,” she says, as though she means it.
“I mean,” she continues with a little hesitation, “so long as you’re not just throwing the pills and food out the window, I guess.”
“I’m not,” I tell her, my eyes closed, my lips nearly as closed and barely letting the words out.
“Well, I appreciate that. I really do. I know you’re going to be OK, and eventually all of this will just pass and be a distant memory.”
A bright light splashes against the backs of my heavy lids. She’s parted the curtains yet again after I had closed them on one my night-crawls around my room.
“Just… just so I know,” Karen says with a waver in her voice, standing bedside. “Just so I know you’re really really taking your meds, would you mind just taking them in front of me? It’d just make me feel a whole lot better about things, Jack.”
I turn my head toward her, eyes closed, and tell her I will.
The unwelcomed warmth of light illuminates the back of my eyelids: pinkish flesh tones.
I hold out my hands and she places a sweating glass of water in one and a collection of capsules in the other.
“Thank you,” I tell her. Through my shut lids I see her smile at me, proud.
“Thank you, Jack,” she tells me, beaming. “You’re doing really really well.”
I swallow my pills and smile and hand her the water glass, which is dripping.
“Is it summer?” I ask her.
“Um, yeah, Jack. ‘Course it is. You know it’s summer,” she tells me, placing the glass on the nightstand.
“Is it hot outside?” I ask.
“Well, Jack, it’s summer—so, yeah, it’s pretty hot…. Wait, would you like to go outside? Maybe for a short walk? It’s hot out there, but you know how summers are in Chicago. The whole city melts and basks for joy. It’s beautiful out there. You wanna take a walk? Huh, Jack?”
“No,” I tell her, just then feeling the lick of the air conditioner goosebump my skin and liking it. “I think I’m alright here, for now. You go for a walk, though, and enjoy yourself. I know you’ve had a rough… time lately.”
“Are you sure you won’t come with me? Everything’s green and burnt and gorgeous right now. And all the kids in the neighborhood are sliding down Slip ‘N Slides and running through sprinklers and hoses and—god—it’s so cute.”
“Karen, that’s what we did as kids. When we were poor,” I tell her, though realizing I’m still poor and she is the only one who isn’t.
“Kids are kids,” she tells me.
“So, mansion-kids and poor kids are the same?” I ask. “Is that what you’re telling me, Karen?”
I feel an extraordinary amount of calmness. Just for a second.
I wish I had a glass of lemonade and a hatchet.
Not skipping a beat, Karen says, “Yes, they’re the same—the same the world over. Kids are kids. And they love summer. And sprinklers. And Slip ‘N Slides. And Rocket Pops. And movies in the park. Not everyone around here has pools and chauffeurs and all that jazz. You think owning a pool around here with the winters we get makes much sense, anyway?”
“I suppose not,” I tell her.
“So, you wanna take a walk? See all the kiddies having a good time in the sun?”
“What about my children?” I ask, staring at her through my eyelids.
“What chil—oh, Jack, come on. Don’t try to trick me that way.”
“What about my children, Karen, goddammit?”
“You don’t have any children, Jack,” she says, sternly.
“No. No, that’s right. Can I have a glass of lemonade?” I ask her, turning my sightless gaze away from her.
“Sure. Sure, Jack. I’ll just go get that for you,” she says. And then, under her breath when she’s walking away, thinking I won’t hear: “I’ll just wait on you hand and foot, no problem.”
Thud.
The latch clacks into the strike plate as the door’s closed.
A blossom of stomach acid has wilted and weights drop in my lungs and my heart begins to calm. Before Karen can return with my lemonade I’ll be asleep for another eighteen hours.
***
Without thinking, my eyes open, revealing only a slit of whites, half my pupils, and I spot a tall, thin glass of lemonade on the nightstand. It’s brimming, and I realize all of the ice in it has melted. Parched, I sit up and down the glass of warm lemonade. The burnt light of summer spills in through the window and I refuse to look toward it.
My eyes are open and nothing disintegrates, but only because I’ve not peeled back my lids far enough. Only because I’m conscious of what that could do, so I will my eyes half-closed, refusing to unleash the full force of my whole orbs.
All of the room is here. I’m still here, a human being with limbs and fingers and toes and a head. I’m not a snake or a rat or an insect. Though I may be all things at once—though I may be guilty of false perception.
I’m whole and, at the moment, not a threat.
My vision keeps everything in its place.
For a moment I’m ecstatic, which is quickly followed by disappointment.
“Karen?” I call out.
Giggles and screams of children. They’re outside, melting in the sun like ice cream. Melting in the sun and laughing, full of cancer and future murder, throwing water balloons and firing off Super Soakers, completely at war with each other.
I hear a scream and imagine one of the kid’s blood-filled balloon-heads exploding and him falling, like a tree, to the ground. I imagine a world carpeted with the corpses of headless children.
If I start to feel better—really better—I’ll write the kid’s parents a message of gratitude and sorrow, pretending I’m the president.
“Karen—my eyes are partly open!” I yell, because it’s a big fucking house and she probably wouldn’t be able to hear me otherwise. This place is a mansion, in fact. The genuine article. It’s situated on Logan Boulevard in Logan Square of Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A., and it’s enormous and old and made of money. On the outside it’s some sort of grey stone webbed in ivy, and it looks a bit like a castle. On the inside, it’s room after room, for three whole stories. I’m on the third floor, though wherever you are in this place you’re likely far away from everything else. So, I yell.
“Karen, I’m hungry! I’d like some toast and fruit, please!”
Nothing.
“Karen, I’m thirsty! Please bring me some tea!”
Nothing.
“Karen, I’d like to take a walk now!”
Nothing.
“Karen, I murdered our parents!”
Nothing.
“You bitch!”
Nothing.
With all the shouting, and with time being what time is, I hardly noticed the light outside dying. I hope it’s not because I’ve got my eyes slightly open. I assume it isn’t. I know that’s a ridiculous thought to have, but I can’t help having it.
Which reminds me…
I ta
ke my clozapine, Prozac, and Xanax, dry-swallowing the pills because no one’s here to refill my goddamned lemonade or get me a fresh cup of tea or glass of water.
Outside, children play in the shimmering heat waves, and scream, pulled out of reality.
I don’t want to go out there. I don’t ever want to go out there. I decide to double-up on my meds, bruising my esophagus with each swallow.
Soon the temporary eternity draws over me and I’m sleeping, peacefully. Lifelessly.
***
I’m yanking on my limp dick, trying to rip it off, trying to get it hard, thinking of my wife. But it doesn’t work. So I think of Ms. Alston, my eighth-grade English teacher, and I keep her young and immortal and we’re together, fucking on her desk, pencils, papers, chalk, and red apples flying everywhere. Sometimes I’m the thirty-five-year-old me, sometimes I’m the thirteen-year-old me, and I’m giving Ms. Alston a rough pounding, her face aghast with ecstasy, her long strawberry-blonde hair spread out beneath her. As soon as her strawberry-blonde hair turns into a pool of blood, I come, firing my load right into my boxers, having decided the bathroom in the corner was too far away to retrieve a washcloth, some toilet paper.
Like my dick at the thought of my wife, I don’t want to get up.
My eyes closed, Ms. Alston left behind on the desk, I slither out of my boxers, wipe the head of my cock with them, and throw the sticky pair blindly into the abyss.
Where are those endorphins?
Everything aches and feels askew, like living in a place where floor, walls, and windows are at such a slight tilt you may never notice, and never know there’s something wrong. You can just sense… something.
The meds. The meds aren’t working. I don’t want to get up. All my children are dead and have never existed at the same time. And I don’t want to get up. I’ve got nowhere to go. I don’t want to get up. I’ve got nowhere to be. I don’t want to get up. Both the darkness and the light are gateways to vanishing worlds. And I don’t want to get up.
***
“Wow, look at you,” Karen says, and I can literally see her glowing with pride, with hope, with relief, because I’ve revealed parts of my eyes for her, like a crocodile submerged in swamp water. My poor baby sister, putting up with me, as has always been the case since mom and dad kicked the bucket a long time ago. I was supposed to have been taking care of her, but it never was that way. I would fuck things up—spending electric bill money on whiskey or forgetting to pick her up from school—and she would solve the problems. She’d get an extra job. She’d walk home from school. She’d probably build a rocket ship if I accidentally left something important on the moon or something.
Karen looks a lot like mom. It makes me sick.
I look just like dad. Lately, anyway. I’ve grown into his jowly, droopy-eyed features. At the moment, I even have his stupid dirty beard, having not bothered to shave these past few weeks here in this bed within this large room within this giant house within this huge city within this oversized country.
I don’t belong here. I don’t belong anywhere.
I close my eyes and breathe. Just breathe.
“Now, you’re not going to play peek-a-boo with me, are you?” Karen asks, laughing but not laughing. “Those eyes are going to stay open, right?”
“Right,” I say, patting her knee as she sits next to me, both of us propped against the bed’s enormous and elaborate padded oak headboard.
“Do you think you’re up for a walk?” she asks.
I look at her through half-opened eyes, see mom, and look away to the window, which is a blinding and bottomless well of light. I look away from that, too.
“I…” I manage, before closing my eyes again.
“Jack,” Karen says. “Jack, come on now.” She’s holding me by the arm and shaking me gently at first, then less gently. “Jack, come on now. Seriously. Knock this off.”
I keep my eyes shut until she finally leaves with a sigh, the click-clack of the latch into the strike plate her final punctuation.
Once more unto the breach.
***
So warm. So much warmth in the dark. Slipping. Slipping. Slipped away. The room whorls around me, a universe forming in the wake of my open eyes, smoky and breathless.
I cough and sit up in bed and feel my heart race as I spy shimmering darkness in all four corners of the room. It’s an absence that vibrates. A hole in reality. It plants seeds of sickness in blood, in breath, in stomachs.
“Karen!” I scream. I’m fucking screaming and I can’t keep myself from screaming more.
“Karen! Get in here! Karen!”
I pull all the bedcovers to me and, breathing hard, try to keep my eyes on all four corners at once, fearing they’ll grow or advance upon me and swallow me up.
“Karen! Please! Get in here! They’re going to get me! There’s more of them now!” I yell, embarrassing myself, nearly hyperventilating.
I see one of the ripples in reality, shimmering, shift—in pixels—to the side, then replace the space it left behind with more of itself. Swelling. Growing its nothingness. Its absence.
The last twinkle of a billion dying stars about to go out.
Why did I open my eyes all the way?
I didn’t mean to!
“Karen! Karen!” I scream out one last time, then I yank the covers over my head and listen: crackle crackle crackle. Static electricity. Under the covers, my whole fucking body’s radiating with static electricity. With every small shift, each heave of chest from a heavy breath—a blue spark. I’m igniting all over and giving myself away, like trying to hide from a murderer by setting off a warehouse of fireworks. The warehouse you’re in. Eventually I’m just a blue flame and I feel the electric energy shake me, jimmy me, pulse through me, and suck the life from me, sparks firing from every pore in my pathetic body.
Seizuring.
When the blue fire ceases, I’m still here, under the covers, but sinking quickly from exhaustion, gratefully, back into the warmth of darkness.
***
My heavy lids lift. There’s the door. My heavy lids drop. I roll over. My heavy lids lift. There’s the window, full of light. I try to will my eyes to stay open partly, but I feel the beetles in my skin, and so I use all my will to will them away.
My heavy lids drop.
“Karen, I’m… hungry,” I say, before I lose the will to stay awake.
***
Electricity. It’s shaking this giant stone house. The windows rattle. White light. Blue light. Blackness. White light. Blue light. Blackness. Over and over again the pattern slaps against the window in my room, along with lashes of rain. Summer rain. Shadows stretch and retract, and I watch the corners of the room, shaking beetles from my skin while making sure I’m not on fire with blue flame.
BOOM!
Rattlerattlerattlerattle.
Eternal war. We are not welcome here.
I almost yell out for Karen but my mouth, my throat are so dry, I only manage a guttural whine.
Where is that fucking fucking fucking bitch?
I’m so thirsty.
I need help.
I need someone to take care of me. Protect me. Hide me.
I need someone to try to kill me.
I’m so thirsty.
Before I realize I’ve left the bed, my head is under the spout of the bathroom tub, and a heavy, lukewarm gush of metallic water is hitting my face, and I’m choking, choking, choking, swallowing, swallowing, swallowing, coughing, coughing, coughing.
Then I’m on the floor, soaked, dripping, arm slung over the side of the clawfoot tub, breathing heavy and laughing, laughing, laughing, as thunder quakes the house and lightning outside brings the dead back to life.
***
Cold, cool, familiar. The sensation on the side of my face. For some reason this cold bathroom tile on the side of my face reminds me of childhood, and it’s comforting. Comforting until I’m fully awake, awash in rusty summer light from the tiny bathroom window as well as
the large bedroom window visible through the open bathroom door. It feels warmer, too, as my face peels away from the tile, my skin sticky and unwashed. My beard itchy with beetles.
Only after I’ve pulled myself away from the floor’s embrace do I realize I’d laid there for days and days. Waiting. Waiting for someone to come find me there and usher me back to the soft landscape of the bed. But there’s been no one. Just me. And sleep. And darkness. And light.
No Karen. No Dr. Wilson. No dead mom and dad.
Propped up on palms, legs bent behind me, I call, “Karen?” but know there’ll be no answer no matter how loud I yell it.
I shouldn’t have opened my eyes, even a little.
***
A few days later, after trying to will myself out of existence, hunger finally overrules my attempts. It’s time to leave the room. I permit my eyes to open halfway, once more, and the view causes my skin to crawl, my heart to beat hard in fear. I place bare feet on the wood floor. I’m backlit by summer afternoon light. I take slow steps toward the door, feeling the room expand and contract around me. For a moment that expansion/contraction is too much, snapping back and forth like a rubber band, and I catch myself sucking in giant lungfulls of air, the oxygen sucked out of this universe unable to decide between beginning anew or wiping everything out forever.
The brass doorknob cools the center of my palm and I grip and turn and pull. Immediately across from me, on the wall, is a portrait of me, and I’m so hideous I flinch and almost dive back into the safety of my room. Taking another look, I realize it’s not a portrait of me, but my father. It was done when he was around my age, shortly after I had been born. My mother commissioned it, knowing it would flatter him but really hoping an artist would capture the essence of a man about to slowly wither and die from an inability to love outside himself, despite things such as the birth of a son and the unconditional love of a wife.
My Eyes Are Black Holes Page 2
