My Eyes Are Black Holes

by Logan Ryan Smith

  I don’t know what you’re thinking, I hear Karen’s voice in my head. Dad was good to us.

  I shake the voice away and step into the hallway, which expands in both directions, one section at a time, like a telescope opening, until I can finally see the whole thing.

  It’s a long hallway, its wooden pathway partly covered down the middle by a thick burgundy rug. There’s three doors leading to more guestrooms across from me, and the end of the hall nearest me is adorned with a stained glass window of Saul climbing his horse, escaping a wormhole in the ground just below him. Or maybe that’s just how the light’s hitting the colored glass. The stairway landing opens up in the middle of this corridor. Just past the landing is the master bedroom, which I think has gone unused since Samuel’s passing. Or was he abducted by aliens? Or was it a car crash? Or the war?

  I’m not sure, it’s just something echoing through my skull, reminding me of an apocalyptic childhood spent with my face in the dirt and dry weeds, my socks full of burrs and my eyes often blinded by the sun as I sought out crystal palaces on the burning horizon. I came to that land of bright lights on distant horizons by finding ripples in reality and gladly walking into them. It was so much easier when I was young. Done so often, without fear. Those palaces, those beacons of light were my Holy Grail. Every time I crawled in that world, on that far off planet, the promise of eventual fulfillment was made and kept, even though the lights, those irradiated crystal palaces, never once got closer for all my travels. Eventually, I’d stumble out of that place, without trying. I’d walk around, sightless or seeing ghosts of starbursts and trip over the curb and lose a tooth and laugh and laugh with my red dripping mouth and my sister would tell mom and dad and dad would beat the shit out of me and I’d lose another tooth. They didn’t like taking me to the dentist. They didn’t like taking me anywhere. I’d simply sneak out through the cracks like a cockroach or rat, with a little more pride then than now. It’s how I got around. It’s how I got by.

  Anyway, Samuel wasn’t a bad guy. I don’t think. I hardly think about him, however. He left my sister this castle, which must mean he was a knight. Karen’s knight in shining armor.

  This makes me chuckle to myself a tad too much.

  Snapping to, I walk into the hallway, tentative and cautious not to fall down any trapdoors or step into any bear traps, which will be difficult with half-shut eyelids. Those bear traps could be anywhere. I think there’s one below the stained glass window of Saul climbing his horse, so I know they’re around. I don’t blame Karen. Bears are often vicious animals. I’m not too worried, however, since pretending to be dead is your best defense against them. It’s how I’ve gone my whole life without a single bear attack.

  At the stairway, I grip the hardwood rail carved with a Celtic design. The wooden stairs are covered down the middle with the same burgundy carpet as the hallway.

  I halt, wondering if I shouldn’t hazard a peek into that big empty master bedroom to see if Samuel’s sleeping in there (you never know), but then I hear a SCREAM and a hustle-and-bustle. Trying to pinpoint the direction of the disturbance, I feel my throat clench up and my knuckles go white on the railing.

  It’s just neighbors outside in their backyard playing a game of bags and drinking cans of Old Style beer and salty glasses of margaritas. I smell meat on the grill. It smells just like a body burning in a dumpster. My mouth waters against my will.

  The body’s basest desires always veto the will.

  On the second-floor landing, more rooms: another guestroom, a study, and a home gym. There’s one more door, closed, and I cannot recall where it goes. It’s down the hall toward the stained glass window portraying Saul falling off his horse into a wormhole. I thought he was climbing away from the wormhole upstairs, but perhaps he was on his descent. I assume there must be another stained glass window somewhere of Saul coming out of the wormhole transformed into Paul.

  Like that mystery, the mystery room will have to remain a mystery. I don’t have the energy and I’m really not liking the fact that there’s a room in the house that I’m not familiar with. It makes my skin goosebump and some static electricity begin to swirl inside my blood. I know this house. I know this house.

  I wonder if I don’t recognize the door because of my obscured vision, viewing this hallway through slightly parted eyelids. But, I refuse to open my eyes completely. That would be reckless of me.

  The mystery room will have to remain a mystery because, while I’m uncomfortable, I just don’t care, really. I don’t need to know.

  At the foot of the stairs on the first floor, bright white light bleeds through the squares of glass in the front door, as well as the rectangles of translucent glass on each side of it. To my right is a large living room, to my left a large den. Back and beyond those rooms are the dining room and kitchen. There’s a TV room somewhere down here, too. In the den there’s another stairway leading down into the basement, which is just another whole floor of rooms: an apartment-like space that was used by Samuel’s ailing mother for a time, a laundry room, a game room, and a sort of utility room that maybe the maid used to live in.

  Karen doesn’t have a maid. If she did, I wouldn’t have had to leave the goddamned room. I wouldn’t have to risk breaking my neck on the stairs. I wouldn’t have to hear the happiness of strangers. I wouldn’t have to worry about making them all disappear—making everything disappear in the wake of my vision.

  This is not a God complex. God wouldn’t worry about making you disappear. God never worries about making anyone disappear. She just disappears you. Disappears whole places—like Atlantis. Disappears whole universes so as to keep us stuck—trapped—in this one.

  I shuffle through the living room, my pajama pants a tad too long (they were Samuel’s, I’m guessing) and dragging with each step. I just now realize my pajama top is soaked through with sweat, this trek down two floors having been more than I bargained for.

  In the kitchen, I stand at the sink and don’t move. After a time, it’s dark, and all I’ve done is squint at the backyard, which is fenced in by a stone wall. The detached garage is back there, and, in a section of tilled dirt, tomatoes, rhubarb, rosemary, basil, sunflowers, and other green and alive things sprout and swell. I can see everything just fine out there because of the security lights.

  The backyard’s OK. Because of the wall, I think it’s OK.

  I’d never go out there, of course.

  Remembering my hunger, and surrounded by absolute silence, I hear my stomach growl, my breath go shallow, and the blood rushing through my eyeballs. I hear my heartbeat and wait to see if I can hear anyone else’s.

  No. No one else’s.

  From the big silver fridge, I pull out an onion, a tomato, a block of cheddar, mayonnaise, and brown mustard. There’s a frosty six-pack of Miller bottles in there and I start to feel something like life stirring in me. These sights and the remembered flavors give me newfound energy.

  With my bottle of beer and onion-and-cheese sandwich, I plunk down on the plush couch in the TV room and watch movies such as Missing Link, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Planet of the Apes, and Better Off Dead—selecting movies from Karen’s bookshelf of videotapes until the sun comes up. Watching these through half-moon eyelids, I’m gushing with a familiar feeling—it reminds me of being a kid, comfortable, and always falling asleep to movies late at night in the living room on the filthy carpet, but fighting to stay awake and finish the film through drooping lids.

  My lids don’t have far to droop. I finally fall asleep to dreams of bear maulings and babies drowning in toilets.

  ***

  What did our parents’ will leave for Karen? This giant house? No. That was Samuel’s—I think. Bags of money? No. No, but it did leave her a little bit of money. Not much. But some. What our parents will really left Karen was confirmation she was their favorite. Their baby. The one they would always protect, as best they could. How’d they do that when they had so little to leave either of us in the first place?
Simple: They left me out of the will completely. Like I didn’t even exist. Like I wasn’t even their goddamned son, even though I’m a spitting image of my father and possess his keen mind and wicked sense of humor.

  For instance, here’s a good joke I learned from him: My girlfriend called me a pedophile the other day, which is a really big word for a twelve-year-old.

  ***

  Car tires slipping through gravel. An engine halting. A car door, then a trunk, slamming shut.

  Karen. She’s finally back.

  Like a stupid, lonely, forgotten puppy, I leap from my supine position on the couch and sprint toward the kitchen, my too-long pajama pants causing me to slip on the way. I slam up against the kitchen sink and scan the backyard, eying the garage, feeling my heart race, probably smiling. I stand there, watching the garage for an hour through the curtains of my lashes, but no one ever comes out of it and no one from outside comes into the house.

  Nothing happens, but one tall, menacing sunflower out in the garden slowly turns to face me and stretches toward me and mumbles something. It sounds like someone choking on blood, and I can’t make out a word.

  “Speak up!” I yell, but it just continues staring at me, gurgling words.

  “Shut the fuck up! Shut the FUCK UP!” I scream. “I’ll blow your fucking head off! I’ll blow you to bits!”

  But it just shivers in the summer evening breeze, chuckling at me, knowing I will not step outside this house. It must have turned toward me, confusing my hooded black holes for the suns they once were.

  Filled with disappointment, I shuffle back to the couch and sink into it. On the TV a man is strangling an old woman in her bed. The actor looks a lot like my father. The video looks, disturbingly, a lot like a home video. A snuff film. It’s grainy and distorted and the videotape keeps jumping back and replaying the killing—her old blue face shaken back and forth, a complete blur. Her veiny hands grip the actor’s wrists. She has a burn-scar on much of her left hand, the one nearest the camera. It just keeps playing to the point where she’s about to die before jumping back to the beginning of the strangulation. I want it to stop, but I’m completely drained of energy and cannot manage getting up to fix the tracking on the VCR. Plus, I just don’t care. I fall back to sleep, the sounds of murder in my ears.

  ***

  Sprinklers schuka-schuka outside and children squeal with glee. I awake on the couch and the TV’s on and it’s still showing the strangulation of that poor old woman.

  My eyes are black holes. I see the world, and the world goes away.

  Sleep.

  ***

  I said before that I hardly knew Samuel. That I hardly think about him. Truth is, his death drove me a bit crazy. I was fond of the guy. I liked him. We got along. We’d spend hours sucking down cheap American pilsners in the game room, playing ping pong and air hockey, or challenging each other to a little drunk-driving in Super Mario Kart on his SNES, hooting and hollering. Sometimes we’d hear his bed-ridden mother moan complaint at our noise from her room down the hall and we’d snicker like children in trouble. We argued over the White Sox (me) and Cubs (him) and a couple times I nearly knocked his teeth out—literally. He and Karen called the cops on me—their own brother-in-law and brother, respectively—and I’d spend the night in jail and wind up back here in the morning to join them for toast and tea. Sometimes I wished it was Karen’s teeth I was knocking out but Samuel’s would always do just fine.

  I come to, now, up out of the darkness, suddenly awake and standing near the kitchen, by the sliding glass door leading out back, saying all this into the phone. I’m wrapped in the coil cord, absent-mindedly plucking it, with the phone cradled between my shoulder and ear. I’m eying the outside, the daylight, through narrowed eyes, but not seeing it.

  My monologue is answered by dial-tone, which turns into its howler tone, beeping and honking and alarming.

  I ask the phone to calm down. I tell it I’m not finished, and then I say, “I want to speak to your manager. You are offering me very shoddy service,” and slam the handset down on the hook and unravel myself from the cord in a frantic fit.

  Crying.

  That cord was trying to strangle me to death!

  My eyes are black holes.

  My brain is a wormhole.

  ***

  I wake up again on the couch, in daytime, and peek over the couch back toward the kitchen, where flies buzz and swarm. My concern is not for all the food I’ve left to rot on the counters over these countless days, but how the flies managed to escape from my stomach. Unnerved, I scamper over the back of the couch and tumble to the hardwood floor, the old hag choking on the TV now providing a comforting backdrop noise I’ve grown used to. Her straining gasps and death throes are now a soft summer rain to these ears.

  On my elbows, I belly-crawl to the kitchen, aware that the sunflower in the backyard is watching and mocking me.

  The rotting cheese and salami and oxygenating mayonnaise and moldy bread invades my senses with a rich, sickening sweetness.

  I stop, gag, and vomit a green acidic film onto the floor inches below my face and I wonder if this happened because the flies are no longer in my stomach to keep my system balanced.

  Flies eat shit.

  They eat the shit in my stomach and keep me healthy.

  Undeterred, I crawl through my own stomach acid and it burns through the elbows of my pajama top.

  Slithering up the side of the cupboards to the counters, I watch the flies buzz and zip and zap this way and that. Most of them are scampering along the rotting landscapes of left out and forgotten food. They seem too fast to catch in the air, so I snatch the largest chunks of moldy cheddar and green bread and shovel it all into my mouth, too fast for most of the flies to escape, and attempt to swallow as much whole as possible, not wanting to injure the flies before they can return to their home inside me.

  Once I’ve devoured all their favorite landing places, I hop throughout the large kitchen, my jaw snapping like a Venus flytrap at every little black pixel of life swarming in the air. I chomp and I chomp and I chomp and I laugh and I laugh and I laugh, knowing I’m making myself healthy.

  I’m bringing my children home.

  I’m getting better.

  Caught up in the chase, and distracted by my own clacking jaw, I slip on a bit of yellowed mayonnaise and crack my head on the corner of the counter and everything goes black so much more efficiently than usual.

  ***

  When I was a little boy I heard God speak. She told me my vision was unlike anyone else’s vision. She told me she loved me and that it was OK that others wouldn’t believe what I see, or see my visions, or even begin to understand the power of my sight. She said I would grow up isolated, alone, and persecuted. She said I would be seen as something lower than an artist, scum, or the homeless. She held me to her breast and let me suckle and when I bit her nipple she laughed and told me it tickled. She told me I was special, that I was the only one of me in the entire universe. She was always haloed in light. It was a trick God always pulled, leaving herself dark in the light, impossible to know.

  When I asked why I had to share her with dad she slapped me and sent me out of the room and told me to never speak of our talk to anyone.

  I have never actually seen God, but, I have tasted the real blood of God.

  ***

  “Yes… mmhmm… yes. That’s right. I had toast and tea for breakfast…. Mmhmm. No. No, I’m doing OK. I’m alright. I feel pretty good. What? What was that? Oh, yes… I’m keeping up with my meds. I think they’re doing me a world of good. Hmm? No, no I don’t think so…. Well, I just don’t feel like I need to return to work right now. In fact, I may tender my resignation. What? Ha! No, no, I don’t think so. I’m sure everything will run just fine without…. No, I’m really certain it will. I think I just need time for me. How are you, by the—no, really, I’m OK. Everything’s fine. I’m just taking some time for me, like I said. It’s been a rough couple… years, I gu
ess. You’re good to call, though. I—yes… no, I really do appreciate it. I probably should let you go—what? Oh, come on now, I know you’ve got better things to do than talk to me…. Uh-huh. Uh-huh… OK, alright. Uh-huh… uh-huh…. OK, OK… bye now.”

  I hang the phone up and hear some kind of chattering or noise coming from it as I do.

  ***

  In the living room the walls are lined with inset bookshelves and I peruse them even though I know there’s a much larger selection of books in the study upstairs—even though I know reading through barely opened eyes would prove a challenge. But, I finger the spines of titles like The Selfish Gene, A Brief History of Time, The Haunting of Hill House, and Concrete Island, feeling like I’m absorbing each book by this simple touch. And, knowing that I am. My eyes closed, I feel the world enter me, I feel the stories and the knowledge and the universe swirl in me.

  If I opened a book beneath my dark eyes: blank pages. Just countless blank pages on the wind, like paper airplanes thrown by armless children.

  I don’t need to, and should never open a book. I don’t need to, and should never open any door leading out of here.

  Any door leading out of here leads out of myself. If I leave, I cease to exist. When I cease to exist, the world ceases to exist.

  I do not want to destroy the world.

  ***

  I spent the last hour trying to get the microwave to turn on with my head in it.

  It didn’t work.

  ***

  With trepidation I twirl open the Venetian blinds at the front of the house. The smallish front lawn is not bordered by a protective stone wall, like the backyard. Instead, it has a wrought-iron fence, which doesn’t keep the world out—visually, or otherwise.