Hole in the Middle

by Kendra Fortmeyer

  He says, not looking up, “You said you were out late. I assumed that’s why you’re tired.”

  “You assumed I was out having fun? Do you remember who you’re talking to?”

  He looks up at me, eyebrow raised, his nose inches from the Hole.

  “Okay, fine,” I say, still feeling a little dubious. “Yeah. I am going out. I found a really great place in town. A club.”

  He pulls out a small ruler, takes measurements. “A club, huh?” he says. “Aren’t you a little young?”

  “It’s, um, all ages.”

  Taka frowns at his ruler. “I hope you’re being careful.”

  “Actually,” I hedge. He is so intent on his examination, I feel like I can test the words out without the consequences of having someone listen. “I might have let some people see the Hole.”

  He frowns at my stomach, then turns away, checking something on my chart. “Straighten up,” he instructs me. Disappointment curls deep in my chest.

  “A lot of people, actually,” I say, defiantly. “I’m not even sure how many. Hundreds, probably.”

  “That’s good,” he says. But he’s fading out again, entering something on the computer. I bounce my heels against the edge of the table like a child. At the computer, Taka pauses and clicks. Then clicks again. His frown deepens.

  “Have you noticed any changes in the Hole lately?” he asks.

  “Like what?” I ask.

  “Just changes. Pain, a change in sensation, in size—”

  “Change in size?” I ask. “What, is it getting bigger?”

  He glances up, sharply. “Do you feel like it’s any bigger?”

  “No,” I say, startled by his sudden intensity. “Why? Does it look bigger?”

  “Oh,” he says. “Of course not.” But there is something studied in this blankness. I recognize it: How to Avoid Your Patient’s Gaze When You Know Something about Their Body You’re Not Telling Them. They must teach it in medical school.

  “Is your mother in town?” Taka asks. I shake my head. Something around his eyes relaxes slightly. He pulls off his gloves, begins washing his hands. “Have her call me when she gets back, please.”

  I look out the window. “Okay,” I say, even though it isn’t. I want to ask, What are you hiding from me, and why are you telling my mother about it? I want to tell him, Something so big has happened to me. People have seen me for who I really am, and the world didn’t end like I always thought it would.

  I’m checking out when Amanda, the nurse, pokes her head into reception. She and the receptionist confer quickly, in low tones. The receptionist glances up at me with wide, purple-lined eyes as Amanda vanishes back into the offices on the silent swish of nurse’s shoes.

  “Dr. Takahashi would like you to come back on October eleventh,” the receptionist says, rolling her chair back to the window. She circles something illegible on a calendar. “That’s in two weeks. A Sunday.”

  “Why?” I ask. “He literally just saw me. Should I just run back there for a minute?”

  “That won’t be necessary,” the receptionist says. “He’d just like to see you back for a little checkup.”

  I don’t know this receptionist. She has frosted blond hair and a wispy little voice, and as she pulls back from the window for a series of kitten sneezes, I suddenly feel like everything about her is a lie.

  “He didn’t mention anything to me,” I say. “Is the office even open on Sundays?”

  She reaches for a tissue, delicately dabs at her nose. “Dr. Takahashi is very busy,” she says. “Come back in two weeks, please. We’re booked up back-to-back today.”

  But her eyes flicker to my stomach. I tug at the hem of my shirt, feeling suddenly exposed, and initial on the line, turn to go. The empty space in my middle burns as I step out of the office and into the bright velvet light of a southern September, wondering what it is that I’m not being told.

  12

  Texts I write and do not send to my best friend who isn’t home when I get there:

  hey I need to talk to y—

  hey this weird thing happened at Taka’s today, I feel like he is hiding something from me and I need you here to tell me that I’m paranoid or else I’ll go full-scale conspiracy theorist and start posting in chat rooms about the Illuminati’s involvement in 9/11

  hey I know you’re sick of it but can we go out tonight? I really need to get my mind off this thing Taka sai—

  hey are you at Todd’s

  is he talking about how much he likes string cheese again because that was really scintillat—

  Pull it together, M-Sto.

  The cardigan I’ve picked out for tonight is saffron with tiny magenta flowers. I feel a tinge of self-consciousness as Steve waves me inside, but it dulls to a simmer as I step over the threshold, shouldering my way to the bar through crowds that part when they see who I am, or what. A few people call out to me, and I ignore them, and we are all more comfortable this way: they in their fiction that they are friends with the Hole Girl, and me in mine, in which I am noir as shit—so stoic, and so focused on a drink, that I can’t be bothered to look up.

  (Because in reality, what would we say? Them: You have a Hole in your middle! Me: Yeah. Do you? Them: Nah. Me: Dope. It’s easier just to head for the bar.)

  The bartender’s name is Frank, and I like him because he is an asshole. I slip onto my favorite stool and give him a what’s up nod, which he pretends not to recognize as a greeting because young people these days don’t know how to communicate, and also it would require recognizing a greeting.

  But he shocks me by saying, “Hey, Em.” Em as in Emma Lapis: the obviously fake name on my obviously fake ID about which Frank obviously gives zero fucks. It’s the only name anyone knows me by here, and then, Frank’s the only one who knows it. I don’t talk to people about myself. Who I am, where I go to school. Besides Frank and Steve, I don’t know anyone else’s name, either, or their Instagram handle. It’s what makes this place a place where I can come alive.

  I give Frank a hard once-over.

  “Saying hello?” I shout back over the music to him. (At him. In movies, people are always having conversations in clubs. Let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, THIS IS A FICTION.) “Using my name? What happened to you? Who died?”

  “My soul,” he answers, jerking his chin at the end of the bar. A fortysomething brunette in tight jeans and an awesome full-sleeve tattoo is leaning over a drink topped with a cloud of cherries and a green cocktail umbrella, giving love-crumb eyes to a man in a studded leather jacket.

  “It’s his ex-wife,” Steve shouts, coming up behind me. “Fran.”

  “Your name is Frank and you used to be married to a woman named Fran?” I shout. “How did you think that would turn out?”

  “Steve,” Frank says, evenly. Frank never shouts but is somehow always audible. I do not know if this is a property of being a bartender or just of being Frank. “Who’s watching the door?”

  “It’s like Nietzsche says,” Steve says, snapping his gum. He’s a rapid gum-chewer-and-snapper. “You gaze too long into the door, and the door gazes into you. I had to get out of there, man. It was some dark shit.”

  “Steve,” Frank says again.

  Steve grins toothily at me, snapping. “Nobody appreciates philosophy anymore,” he says, but he disappears back into the crowd.

  I eye the woman at the end of the bar. She’s older but looks awesome in her jeans and corset top. She slaps her date’s arm and laughs, and I suddenly feel bad for Frank.

  “What’ll it be?” Frank asks.

  I have an answer prepared this time. “What dark beers do you have?”

  “You want me to actually list ’em, or can I just make up names for a while until I get bored?”

  I pull my eyes away from the woman. “Hilarious. I’ll have you know, I am famil
iar with a great many beer titles. Brands. Names. What’s your darkest?”

  Frank says, not looking up, “Schmeineken.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  He returns with a beer so dark it’s nearly black. The rim is lined with eight lime wedges, a cloud of pearl onions and a tiny plastic cowboy that topples immediately from sight to drown in the foamy head.

  I glance at the drinks along the bar. It’s a small forest of garnishes: brightly colored cocktail umbrellas, fruit, mint, straws shaped like @ signs, celery, swords.

  “Dude,” I shout, “you shouldn’t let her get to you.”

  He glowers at me. “That’s two sixty-three,” he says.

  “That’s random,” I shout. “Why?”

  “Because,” he answers flatly, and stabs a final lemon wedge onto the rim.

  I lean against the bar and sip, letting the musky weight of the stout run down my insides, and watch customers watching me drink. I feel a buzz crawl up and through my veins. The music has shifted now to a house version of old-school Destiny’s Child that’s weirdly working, and my body is beginning to thrum in that way that makes me feel like wings could sprout from my fingers and lift me into flight. I rise from my stool, pretending not to notice the people pretending not to watch, the girls nearby me lifting their phones like they’re texting. For a moment, I hover on the metallic edge of self-consciousness, but then the beat drops, and I grin and drop my sweater and—

  “Oh my God, it’s her!” a voice shrieks. The sweater hits my ankles, and I turn, and a girl’s face is in my face: a prettyish woman in her twenties with silver-rimmed eyes, hands filled with Solo cups. Her breath is juniper and cigarettes. “My friends said you were, like, an Internet hoax, but they’re a bunch of dumb sluts,” she screams. Or maybe it’s hairy, crunchy lug nuts! See previous: audibility in bars.

  I try to shrug her off, but she clings. “Can we take a selfie? We have to take a selfie. Oh my God, am I being super awkward?” She turns to the guy next to her, who’s eyeballing us both, nonplussed. “She’s, like, legit famous on Public Scrutiny!”

  Her drinks slosh as she ogles the Hole, and the buzz slowly dulls in my limbs. People staring at the Hole: yes, familiar, check it off the list. But not with this much recognition.

  “Public what?” I ask.

  “Public Scrutiny,” she says again. “Oh my God, you don’t know Public Scrutiny?” She turns to the guy again, lets her head fall on his denim-clad shoulder. “She’s, like, super famous on the Internet, and she doesn’t even know what Public Scrutiny is.”

  The guy grins down at her with wet teeth. The kind of smile that makes me worry, makes me wonder if she’s with anyone who can get her safely home. “Isn’t that something.” He flicks his pale eyes up to me, like this is a joke that we are sharing.

  “It’s basically the whole Internet,” the girl tells the guy and the guy’s shoulder and me.

  “Cool,” I say. I look for Frank, wanting to telegraph, Get this chick a cab, but he either doesn’t care or is way ahead of me, leaning on the till and thumbing through his phone. I slip out of her grip and into the crowd, trying to shake the weight of too many invisible eyes on my limbs. I can’t dance off a dim sense of dread at the girl’s recognition. It makes me awkward, graceless, feeling as though I am made of lip. My whole body becoming a mouth asking again and sweat-soaked again: Who are you, who are you looking at me?

  Vaguely nauseated, I leave the dance floor and cut out into the night. I risk a glance back at the bar, but my yellow sweater is long gone—either trampled into the beery underworld beneath the bar rail, or clutched tightly to the gin-soaked bosom of my biggest and only fan. The night air is unreasonably chilly for September. I wrap my arms around myself and scurry to my car under the soothing cover of dark.

  I get home at one thirty and drop into my desk chair, my heart jumping into my throat as I open my laptop. I check my email, delete Mother’s eighteen unread messages (forwards about gallery openings and fad diets and at least three labeled MORGAN I’M SERIOUS DO NOT DELETE), check my Facebook (a pile of missed birthdays and people “interested in events near me,” which is to say, nothing) and then, like it’s the most casual thing in the world, google “Public Scrutiny.”

  The first few results are dictionary definitions and a .co.uk site about increasing accountability in modern government. But the fifth result makes my stomach leap into my mouth.

  The website is garish and eye-searing: white microprint on a black background that makes the words seem to wiggle and jump. PUBLIC SCRUTINY screams a banner in green. NEWS. CULTURE. GOSSIP. And underneath it: YOUR WALLS HAVE EARS YOUR STREETS HAVE EYES.

  It’s tacky and awful and isn’t sure if it wants to be an anarchist political rag or a gossip site or some hybrid little sister of the two, punked up and decked out in their stolen leather jacket. My first thought is, What is this? and my second thought is Does anyone actually read this? and my third is Oh, my God.

  Because I’m the top story.

  The headlining photo is a camera phone shot taken in the Mansion, on the dance floor. I don’t know by whom. In the picture I have my arms lifted, twisting belly-dancer sinuous. It looks as though the smoke machine must have been on, wreathing my face in blue haze. Only the Hole is in clear focus. It cuts through my silhouette like a knife.

  Beneath, a caption in screaming green: FREAKISH DANCER BARES THE “HOLE” PACKAGE AT LOCAL CLUB. There’s a link to an article with a photo gallery. I check the byline, see that the article is over two weeks old. Numbly, I begin to scroll.

  An intrepid tipster (thanks, Sierra89!) sent PUBLIC SCRUTINY this shot from the Mansion’s Intergalactic Flash Jam on September 19. Optical illusion? Photoshop fake? Either way, somebody’s taking her Black Hole costume very seriously.

  I send Caro a Facebook message with a link: I’M FAMOUS ON SOME SHITTY PART OF THE INTERNET. I’m looking through the site masthead, trying to figure out who these people are, when my phone rings. I fumble past a text from Mother (SHANA TOVA DID YOU FIND A GOOD PLACE TO GO TO TEMPLE FOR ROSH HASHANAH?) and answer the call.

  “Oh my God,” Caro says.

  I step out into the hallway. Her bedroom door yawns open, dark and vacant, the doorframe freckled with sticky notes: florid, riparian, polemic. “Where are you?” I whisper.

  “Work,” she says. Her voice has a damp, echoing quality. “Graveyard shift.”

  “Is your new job in a dungeon? It sounds like you’re in a dungeon.”

  “One: basically, yes. The bathroom at Walgreens. And two: lots of places echo; don’t be place-ist.”

  “Are you sitting on a toilet right now?”

  “No,” she says reverberantly. “I mean, I could, for verisimilitude. I told Tricia I had the runs when I saw your message; she’s covering for me. Anyway, Morgan: holy shit, are you all right?”

  I look around my room. Same windows, same walls. Same deep blue shadows thrown into the same corners from my desk lamp, just like they were last night, and the night before.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “This is a big deal. This is a really big fucking deal.” There is a muffling, a wash of static. “Just a minute!” Caro shouts to someone else, and then her breath is there again in my ear. “Is there anything I can do?” she asks.

  “I don’t think so,” I say, scrolling absently. I spot a link below the article, in red: Comments: 57.

  “Just a minute,” Caro shouts again to somebody else. “I’m shitting my brains out in here.” She sighs, turns back to the receiver. “Jesus. Some people don’t have any respect.”

  “You’re telling me,” I say automatically. I click to expand the comments, and the page triples in length. There are comments and comments within comments. They spill heavily to the bottom, punctuated by more links. Comments <1, 2, 3>.

  “You should probably get back to work before you get in trouble,” I
tell Caroline.

  “I’ll get off at five a.m.,” she says. “Are you going to stay up? Want to go to Waffle House?”

  “I’m fine,” I say distantly. “I think I’m going to go to bed, actually. Thanks for pretending to have diarrhea for me.”

  “Hey, anytime,” she says. “Seriously. We’ll talk about this in the morning.”

  “Yep,” I say. “Wash your hands.”

  “Love you,” she says, and then her voice is gone, leaving me with the sudden awareness of the warmth of the phone against my ear. I hold it there for a few seconds before replacing it on the desk. Then I begin to read.

  It’s a borderline rabid discussion about whether or not the picture is Photoshopped. About whether it’s a trick of mirrors. About makeup artists people know who could totally do that, just watch this video, isn’t that amazing. There are people accusing each other of being Nazis, of being gay, of being gay Nazis; spammers offering to EARN $$$ MONEY FROM HOME START TODAY. It’s basically Internet business as usual. But now, surreally, it’s my business on the Internet. It’s like seeing a teacher in the grocery store: the shock of an uprooted face among the same old apples and oranges, the sense that these familiar things should have nothing in common, but somehow, you are realizing for the first time, they do.

  I click on the second page, and my stomach drops.

  jpnfile: I CAN TELL U WAT TO DO WITH THE EXTRA HOLE

  atlasunplugged: lol

  jpnfile: B==D~~ 2X

  B====D~~

  yaya13: SHES ASKING FOR IT SHOWING OFF LIKE THAT I BET SHE LUVS IT IN EVERY HOLE WHATTA SLUT FREAK

  I turn away from the computer, a sickening roar in my ears. I get it, I do. Of all of the extremely obvious metaphors my body invites, GIANT WALKING VAGINA is in the top five; my artist’s self-portrait for AP Art last year was done in the style of Georgia O’Keeffe for a reason. But this feels more personal than a few douchey guys at the Mansion air-humping the Hole while their girlfriends frown nearby. More vitriolic. Behind the safe anonymity of the screen, there’s an unleashing of lust and scorn and hate that I’ve never felt in real life. I wrap my left arm around my middle, as though these strangers are in my room now, shouting slut slut slut in mechanical voices, grinding the air to a pulp.