by Ilsa J. Bick
In answer, Kramer jerks open his desk drawer hard enough to make the pens chatter and yanks out a sheaf of paper-clipped pages, which he tosses onto his desk. “You might have gotten away with this … this rubbish if I was any other instructor, but I’m writing a book on the man, for God’s sake. No one except researchers is allowed access to this material. What, did you think I’d simply ignore this? Time to wake up, Ms. Lindsay. I’m not the headmaster, I don’t care about your sad little history, and I’m sure as hell not your bloody psychiatrist. Now I want to know where you got it.”
She has no idea what he’s talking about. Her eyes fall to the first page:
WHITE SPACE
A Short Story
by
Emma Lindsay
Lit. Seminar 058
“Got it?” She swallows. “I wrote it.”
Kramer’s ears flare Coke-can red. “You’ve got balls, I’ll give you that. Where did you get this? Did you download it from a pirate site?”
She’s getting a very bad feeling about this. Oh boy, is that possible? No, don’t be silly. The guy’s dead. “I-I don’t know what you’re t-talking about, sir.”
“You want to play it that way? Fine.” Kramer tweezes out a single sheet. “Take a good, hard look at this and then convince me why you shouldn’t be expelled.”
This is not happening; this is a nightmare. Tears threaten. Shit, don’t cry. She does what Kramer wants—and as her burning eyes trip over the watery letters and spaces of one word, then jump over white space to the next word and the next and the next, it’s as if an invisible fist has wrapped around her throat and begun to squeeze.
So how long would it take? There had to be a way to figure it. Maybe he should’ve stripped the clothes, but then what? Couldn’t bury them. The ground was frozen solid, and some things wouldn’t burn: snaps, buttons, zippers. And didn’t nylon melt? He thought it did, and there’d be the stink.
And didn’t how long really depend on how bad you wanted something? How much you were willing to risk? Sure. So, clothes or no clothes, if you were a wolf or coyote and starving because Wyoming winters were hard and game, scarce … and there was dinner lying right there? All that easy meat?
A wolf would strip that body to bones in no time.
A wave of unreality washes over Emma. A sudden headache spikes right where it always does, under that lacy cranial plate the doctors screwed into place between her eyes so her brain wouldn’t bubble out. (When the doctors had first shown her the plate, she’d thought, Great, the perfect accessory for every occasion.) The pain is blinding, and she shuts her eyes against the sudden tilt as the world seems to slump and run like superheated glass.
“Right. Wasn’t that interesting, Emma? I thought it was. And now let’s listen to yours, shall we? You’ve no objection if I read while you follow along?” Kramer asks, but it’s one of those rhetorical questions a person knows better than to answer. As Kramer drones, she stares at words and sentences that, up to five seconds ago, she thought were hers alone.
There had to be a way of calculating how long it would take. There must be rules, like physics or math; there were variables to take into account. Temperature, of course, but also the clothes. Maybe he should’ve stripped the clothes, but then what? He couldn’t bury them. The ground was frozen solid, and burning wouldn’t work because zippers, snaps, buttons didn’t burn and Gore-Tex melted.
Didn’t how long depend on how hungry you were? How badly you wanted something, and how much you were willing to risk? So if you were a coyote and starving to death because the snow was deep and the Wisconsin winter, hard—and then you stumbled on something that couldn’t fight back? Meat that was free and for the taking?
God help him, but he knew: a coyote would strip that body in no time.
“Other than your substitution of Wisconsin for Wyoming?” Kramer drills her with a look. “You see my problem.”
Emma just shakes her head. She is so mortified she wants to melt into the linoleum. God, maybe she really should be better about taking those damn pills. Better to be a zombie than feel this.
“I said, write in the style of Frank McDermott,” Kramer seethes. “I didn’t say steal.”
4
THE SEMINAR WAS a mistake.
She’d had an open slot for a junior-year elective. Any class coy enough to be called “Out of Their Minds: Madness and the Creative Process” made her nervous. Her adviser was more direct: Are you sure about this? The admin people at Holten Prep knew her … ah … shall we say, unusual circumstances. But since the only other alternative was animal husbandry, which was a Wisconsin thing and included a unit on neutering piglets, it was kind of a no-brainer.
What she hadn’t realized was that Kramer meant for them to write the occasional story in the style of fill-in-the-blank. This was a problem. Creative writing already weirded her out, and now she had to crawl around the heads of these guys, too? Seriously? Most of these writers ended up killing themselves. But there was no way she was getting sucked into making little Wilbur squeal.
The Bell Jar had been on this past summer’s reading list, and she’d decided to get a jump on it, starting right after finals and a couple days before her seventeenth birthday. Well … big mistake. The book completely freaked her out. Somehow she got … she became lost, slipping into the story the way she might slide into a tight pair of skinny jeans, and then into Esther’s head. Started looking at the world differently, too, as if staring through a bizarre set of lenses that showed her phantoms no one else could see. And once or twice, swear to God, she heard someone call her name, only to turn and find no one there.
Yet that feeling was … familiar, somehow. Like, I know this. This once happened. At some point, I was really and truly nuts. As if by reading all about Esther Greenwood, Plath’s stand-in for herself, she was remembering what it was like to go slowly insane; to be trussed in a straitjacket and forced to gag back too-sweet medicines and then locked away beneath a bell jar to rave. Which was crazy.
The Bell Jar was bad: an infection, a fever raging through her body, burning her up. It got so awful she spent a couple hours studying a wickedly jagged razor of clear glass, filched from the discards bucket at the hot shop, and thinking, What if? Go on, do it, you coward. You know you want to; you know this is the best way, the only way to pass through into …
Through? Into what? What she’d found down in Jasper’s cellar years ago? (And nope, no way she was thinking about that, nosirreebob.) And go where? Who the hell knew?
She hadn’t sliced and diced—obviously—but the temptation to cut, to filet herself, really hack those arteries and watch the blood bubble, still occasionally slithered into her mind like the black tangle of a nightmare she just couldn’t shake.
Honestly, after that whole Bell Jar mess, the prospect of studying the work of insane writers, slipping into their skins, made lopping off Wilbur’s balls almost attractive. But she was stuck.
5
THE CLASS HAD started with science fiction, which was okay, although Kramer was in love with the sound of his I’m-from-Cambridge-and-you’re-not voice: To paraphrase the incomparable though deeply disturbed Philip K. Dick, whoever manipulates words manipulates the existential texture of reality, as we blahdiddy-blahdiddy-blah-blah. But when Kramer began bloviating about quantum foam and Schrödinger’s cat and dark matter and more blahdiddy-blahdiddy-blah-blah, and everyone else was oh, awesome, that’s like, dude, so Star Trek … she just couldn’t help herself. Dark matter could only be inferred. In the case of Schrödinger’s kitty, collapsing probabilities through observation had nothing to do with massless particles popping out of quantum foam. And quantum effects could be observed on the macroscopic level at near absolute zero within the energy sink of a Bose-Einstein condensate, which therefore proved Hardy’s Paradox regarding the interaction of quantum and anti-quantum particles that might actually coexist in related timelines and alternative universes …
A single death glare from Kramer, though,
and she clammed up. Fine. Be ignorant. Mangle science. See what she cared.
After that, the class drifted to horror, specifically Wisconsin’s Most Famous Crazy Dead Writer, Frank McDermott, who was originally from somewhere in Wyoming and lived in England a good long time, but who was keeping score? Besides writing a bazillion mega-bestsellers, McDermott’s claim to fame was getting blown to smithereens by his equally wacko nutjob of a wife. (Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin murders, McDermott—Wisconsin was full of ’em. Had to be something in the water.) With his new! important! biography! Kramer hoped to solve the BIG MYSTERY: where was Waldo … er, Frank? Because, after the explosion, not one scrap of McDermott remained, not even his teeth. Which was a little strange.
Originally a quantum physics star—lotsa theories about multiverses and timelines and blah, blah—Meredith McDermott was fruitier than a nutcake. Years in institutions, suicide attempts—the whole nine yards. Maybe she turned to glass art the way a patient might take up painting, but what she made was unreal; museums and collectors fell all over themselves snapping up pieces.
Turned out the lady was also a complete pyro. She would’ve had plenty on hand in her studio, too: propane tanks, cylinders of oxygen, acetylene, MAPP. To that she’d thrown in gasoline and kerosene and, as a kind of exclamation point, a bag of fertilizer.
The fireball was immense. The explosion chunked a blast crater seventy feet long and fifteen feet deep. Emma bet Old Frank was tip-typing away in writer heaven before he knew he was dead.
Even so, there ought to have been plenty of Frank McDermott shrapnel: bits and pieces zipping hither and thither at high speeds to get hung up on branches or blast divots into tree trunks. Science was science. No matter what the movies said, for a person to completely vaporize, you needed either an atomic bomb or about a ton of dynamite. So why couldn’t the police find a single, solitary bone? A watch? Something? All that was recovered at the scene were the barn’s iron bolts, sliders, and hinges—and a coagulated lake of slumped, amorphous glass.
And only the barn burned. The house hadn’t. Neither had Meredith’s workshop or the woods or even the fields, despite the fact that the local fire department was twenty miles away and no response team arrived until hours after the explosion. Just plain weird.
And where was Meredith? What happened to the McDermotts’ little kid? All the police ever found was the family car, miles away after it lost an argument with a very big oak. No bodies, though. Just a dead car.
And a whole lotta blood.
6
THE UNFINISHED MANUSCRIPTS were also weird.
Three—and there might be more—were quietly decomposing under house arrest in some vault in England. No one was allowed to see or handle them, period. All scholars like Kramer got were a few choice bits copied from the originals: not enough to make much sense of the stories but just enough to whet their appetites.
This tallied, though. McDermott was a squirrel. Not even his editors were allowed to hang on to his original manuscripts, which were penned on homemade parchment scrolls—no one was quite sure whether these were vellum or the hide of some more exotic animal—with a special ink McDermott also formulated himself. Since the guy made more money than God, the editors put up with it. They also mentioned how the longer they handled those scrolls, the more the ink changed color to a shade as vibrant as freshly clotted blood, as one editor put it. Even this wasn’t necessarily news. From the description, Emma thought McDermott’s brew must be chemically related to iron gall ink, which oxidized with exposure to air. In other words, the ink rusted, and the stuff literally ate through parchment. All the academics made this sound so spooky, but honestly, it was just chemistry. Mozart and Rembrandt and Bach used the same ink. So did Dickens. BFD. All McDermott had done was tweak the original recipe so his work had a built-in termination date: a nice way of sticking it to people like Kramer. Give McDermott an A for effort; Emma almost admired the guy.
Probably would have, if she hadn’t been so freaked about her story.
7
WHAT KRAMER HANDED her was a fragment—a note, really—from a book she’d never read, because McDermott never got around to writing it. All that scholars like Kramer knew about this novel, Satan’s Skin, came from this and a few other jotted entries. The plot involved a demon-grimoire stitching itself back together, only the pages had been reused in other books and so the characters kept jumping off the page while debating the nature of quantum realities. Some loopy Matrix meets Inkheart-with-a-vengeance crap like that.
Her story was about these eight kids stranded in a spooky house during a snowstorm who begin to disappear one by one. Okay, it wasn’t all original; she’d taken a cue from this awesome John Cusack movie. (Sure, the film was completely freaky. All the characters turn out to be alters: different personalities hallucinated by this completely insane, wacko killer. But the idea that people who thought they were real weren’t—well, it was just so cool.) Her first draft had written itself, pretty much. Considering how writing creeped her out, this should’ve tripped some alarms.
As it happened, her story was a subplot of Satan’s Skin. There were differences. In McDermott’s version, the kids—and yeah, there were eight—were nameless. The oldest, a complete psychopath, murdered his nasty drunk of a dad, who deserved it, the abusive SOB. (All McDermott’s dads and quite a few moms were the same, too. Guy had some serious parental unit issues.) In her version, the characters had names, but her hero—this sweet, sensitive, gorgeous, hunky, completely yes-please guy—had killed his nasty dad in self-defense and was haunted by what he’d done.
Both her draft and McDermott’s fragment shared something else: neither ended. Kramer said McDermott’s note stopped in midsentence, a little like Edwin Drood, although Dickens had the decency to put in a period before up and dying. Hers was like McDermott’s. Not only had she written herself into a corner; she couldn’t figure a way to tie up all those loose ends. The last sentence just sort of floated all by its lonesome. Since her assignment was only a first draft, she had the go-to of needing feedback from the Great Bloviator … er, Kramer.
But, to be honest? Imagining a final period or the end set up a sick fluttering in her stomach. She just couldn’t do it. She’d never admit this to a soul, but … well … her hero was the perfect guy and she … she really liked him. In that way. Okay, okay, fine, she even daydreamed about him, and how lame was that? Mariane had this stalker thing for Taylor Lautner—seriously, the girl was obsessed with those pecs and that six-pack—but at least she drooled over a real guy. Emma’s perfect boyfriend was an idea that lived in her head, but he was also so real, the most well-rounded of her characters. The others were just one-dimensional placeholders. This guy she actually thought of as a complete person. Wrapping up his story would be so final, a lowering of that damn bell jar. Once done, her guy was finished, no way out of the box—not unless she decided to chuck science and write herself into The Continuing Adventures of Emma Lindsay, Loser and Social Misfit. Maybe that was why writers did sequels; they just couldn’t let the story really die.
Anyway. Her draft and McDermott’s fragment were virtually identical.
“Other than the madwoman in the attic, which is so utterly Brontë but perhaps understandable considering Meredith McDermott’s long history of mental illness, that subplot is baffling,” Kramer said. “It’s as if these teens in Satan’s Skin are … stand-ins? Alters? Different possible versions and aspects of McDermott himself? Because, clearly, the man’s reworking his abusive past. That miserable childhood in Wyoming always haunted him, and of course, the snow and deadening cold are symbolic of slow soul murder. Very Joycean, wouldn’t you agree? He does much the same with the mother in Whispers—absolutely brilliant; we’ll be reading that after break … and of course, madness as a slow cancer, a rot eating away at the very fabric of reality, is rendered with stunning effect in this very bizarre little Victorian pastiche that exists only in fragments itself and yet is thoroughl
y blahdiddy-blahdiddy-blah-blah.”
Numb, Emma grayed out. Who gave a wet fart what McDermott had in mind? How had she copied a manuscript she hadn’t known existed?
Hating Kramer would’ve been easy; he was such an asshole. But she couldn’t, not really. From his perspective, she was a cheater, a plagiarist, the academic scum of the earth. But he just didn’t know the whole sordid story.
No one did.
8
EVERYTHING SHE KNEW about her bio parents fit the back of a stamp, with room to spare. Dear Old Drug-Addled Dad tried a two-point set to see if Baby really bounced against a backboard. (Uh, that would be no.) Mommy Dearest boogied before Dad tested whether she might be less sucky on a layup. Later, Daddy hung himself in lockup because—oops—someone forgot to confiscate the shoelaces of his All Stars. Big whoopsie-daisy there.
Cue ten years of Child Protective Services and a parade of foster parents, group homes, doctors, staring shrinks, clucking social workers. Her headaches got worse, thanks to Dear Old Dad. All that head trauma started off a chain reaction of growing fractures. She got older and uglier as her skull grew lumpier and bumpier.
Then Jasper, a crusty old sea dog with a fondness for bourbon, Big Band, and paint, showed up. Why he wanted to foster a kid, especially one with her history and looks, she never could figure. (Before her surgeries, she could have been a stunt double for those bubble-heads playing the Mos Eisley Cantina.) Jasper got her surgerized so her brain wouldn’t go ker-splat all over the floor. Fixed up her face, too. Then he whisked her away from all the do-gooders to an ancient stone cottage waaay up north overlooking Devil’s Cauldron, a dark blue inlet of rust-red sandstone layered over ancient volcanic rock on the northern tip of Madeline Island in Lake Superior.
