The Insides

by Jeremy P. Bushnell

“No one likes sugar that much,” Maja continues. “Enough to subsist entirely on sugar.”

  “That sounds,” Pig says, “like you’re asking how.”

  “I’m not asking how,” she says. “I’m asking why.”

  He makes an assessing face, measuring the request. “OK,” he says, finally. “I can show you something. I guess you’ve earned it.”

  He starts the car, shifts into drive, but he doesn’t go back out onto the road. Instead he pulls around the back of the market, beyond the air pumps, out to behind the Dumpster, finally parking next to a long succession of milk crates, stacked into towers.

  He tosses the mints back to her. “I’m gonna need a thing,” he says, getting up and exiting the car. She watches in the rearview as he goes around and opens the trunk. When he returns, taking his seat again, he has his pistol in his hand. He drops it in his lap, all the while watching her face, clearly trying to gauge the response that she’s clearly not offering.

  He takes the bag of candy back from her, tears it open. Fishes two mints out, pinching one in each hand.

  “OK,” he says. “Now check this out.”

  He lowers his jaw and pushes the mints into either side of his mouth, begins to chew, filling the car with the surprisingly loud sound of splintering crystals. As he grinds away, he reaches back into the bag and takes another pair of mints out, presses them back between his molars to replace the first, pulverized pair. Gnashes on them. And then another pair goes in. At this point Maja becomes curious as to how many of these things can be consumed by one person in a minute. But then two more go in—she’s already begun to lose count—and her curiosity begins to crumble, revealing something like dread behind it. Horror. Because watching him continue to push them in there: it’s horrifying. There’s no better word. It seems inhuman, as though his face is just an automatic component in some kind of consuming machine.

  You’ve worked with some fucked-up people, says the Archive, but am I wrong to think that this guy maybe takes first prize?

  No, Maja thinks. Not wrong.

  Little shards of candy are falling out of Pig’s mouth now, bouncing down into his lap, gathering around the gun.

  Pig pauses for a second, after he’s chewed up what might be the seventh pair of mints. About half the bag gone. He lets out a little moan of protest, the first sign of resistance to eating that she’s ever seen in him. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and a long string of saliva comes away from his lips.

  “OK,” he says, maybe not to her. He’s staring down at his chest. “It’s happening.” He takes a deep breath, as though he’s near completion of a Herculean labor.

  “What’s happening?” she asks.

  Pig nods heavily, pushes in a final pair of mints, crunches them up. “Magic,” he says, around the mouthful, his voice thick and syrupy.

  “Magic?” Maja asks.

  “Abracadabra,” Pig says, making a flourish in the air with one hand while he grips the pistol, tightly, in the other. He musters a grin. And then he vanishes.

  21

  LISTENING

  Ollie hears Donald’s voice, for the first time in a year.

  “Hey, Ollie,” she can hear him say to her voice mail. “It’s me, um, Donald. I know it’s been a long time since we talked and I’m—I’m sorry about that. I just heard about what happened last night and I just, I don’t know, I just wanted—”

  He sighs.

  “I just wanted to hear your voice, and to know that you were safe. I know I’ve been pretty shitty to you this year, and I know that I don’t really deserve anything from you. But I wanted to say that I was thinking of you, and that I hope you’re all right, and that if there’s any way that I can help you through this you can feel free to give me a call. You know. If you wanted. That’s it, I guess. Bye.”

  A confusion of emotions rises in her. On one level, she feels touched—it surprises her, to hear him express his regret; she’d always assumed that he was living now behind a wall of righteousness, impermeable to remorse. But on another level she feels angry—she realizes that she was waiting, as she listened to that message, for some news, any news, about Jesse, about how he was doing, any reassuring detail, anything that could maybe erase that vision of him in his room, in clown makeup. She feels enraged by the notion that Donald could break a year of silence and somehow neglect to say something as basic as Jesse is doing well. As she thinks over this dissatisfaction, forces it to take a shape, she admits something to herself: that what she really wanted to hear is not just Jesse is doing well but something more meaningful, something she could hold on to. What she really wanted to hear is Jesse misses you, something that would match the part in her that has been saying, this year, I miss Jesse. Something that would validate the voice in her that has been saying I have to get back to raising my son. The voice that she’s been trying so hard not to hear.

  “I miss Jesse,” she says, out loud, into the air of the Buick.

  “What?” Ulysses says.

  “Nothing,” Ollie says. Wait, though. Just a moment. Something falls into place within her.

  “I changed my mind,” she says.

  “Changed your mind what?” Ulysses says.

  “I don’t want to go to your place,” she says. “I want to go to Illuminated Farms. I want to see my kid.”

  Ulysses frowns. “Been a while since you’ve been out there, hasn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Ollie says. “Not since—well, you remember.” He should, anyway. She’d run to him when she had nowhere else to go, showed up in his driveway holding a gym bag filled with her literal dirty laundry on the night that everything with Donald went to shit. Ulysses coming out to meet her, his arms open to hold her. She could barely see him standing there, that’s how overrun she was with newly minted images of Donald’s face falling from incomprehension to dead-eyed blankness to contempt. An image of him pouring too much whiskey into a heavy drinking glass and then the image of him downing it and then the image of him turning the empty glass in his hand and then the image of him throwing it through the kitchen window. It took some time to find a place inside her where she could stuff all that shit away.

  That place inside her opens up now, for the first time in a long time, and she remembers what she felt, the night she confessed: not sorrow, not even remorse, really, that would only come later, once she realized the extent of the consequences. What she felt, at the moment, was embarrassment. Surely we can handle this like grown-ups, she remembers thinking. It’s only sex. That’s all we’re talking about here.

  She remembers feeling almost disassociated while watching his reaction: the very idea that her fidelity could be important enough, in its absence, to evoke sudden violence in this otherwise gentle man seemed strange to her, based on a misunderstanding so profound that it must be willful. After all, she’d told herself, each of them had fucked other people, in the years before they’d met, and this fact presented no special difficulty for either of them: If all the other guys she fucked in the past just didn’t matter, then how could fucking Ulysses now destroy everything?

  She tried, vainly, to explain to Donald what she meant: if you just rearranged the timeline, moved her offending actions to some faraway point, back in the past, their true significance would become clear, they would stand revealed as meaning nothing, absolutely nothing. It wasn’t until later that she realized that time doesn’t work that way. It’s not like a pile of photographs that you can shuffle. The distance between things matters. When you’re talking about time, that’s, in fact, the only thing you’re talking about.

  “You been back there since then?” Ulysses asks.

  “Nope,” Ollie says.

  “So I gotta ask, then,” Ulysses says. “Are you really so sure Donald’s going to be all that happy to see you, showing up unannounced?”

  “I don’t know,” Ollie says. “I’m not sure it matters.”

  “It matters to me,” Ulysses says.

  “What?” Ollie says, baffled.r />
  “You know,” Ulysses says, “I haven’t even talked to Donald since all that shit went down. So I’m not sure he’s going to be all that thrilled to see me, especially if I’m showing up with you.”

  “I don’t care about that,” Ollie says.

  “Of course you don’t,” Ulysses says. “ ’Cause that’s your whole thing.”

  “What do you mean? What’s my whole thing?”

  “Your whole thing,” Ulysses says, “is that you only give a shit about yourself.”

  “I want to see my kid,” Ollie says.

  Ulysses doesn’t respond to this, he just rolls on: “You’ve always been like that. You make decisions and then expect everyone to fall into line around you, and you don’t give a shit about how anybody’s going to feel about those decisions.”

  “Look,” she says—just saying something to say anything, so that she doesn’t have to pause to consider whether there’s validity in his charge—“if you feel so worried about what Donald’s going to think when he sees you, go ahead and drop me off at the end of the fucking driveway and I’ll walk the last fifty feet on my own—”

  “It’s not that,” Ulysses says.

  “Well,” Ollie says, practically sputtering, “if you’re so worried about whether Donald wants to see me I’ll just—I’ll just call him up, and tell him I’m coming and—” As if on cue, her phone starts to ring. She looks at the screen: it’s Victor again.

  Ulysses takes advantage of the gap. “That would probably be polite,” he says, “but it’s not that, either.”

  Ollie thumbs Victor’s call away. “Well, what the fuck is it then?”

  “It’s me,” Ulysses says. “It’s the way that I feel that you don’t ever think about. You know? When I heard that you were in trouble I felt worried. When I thought I could keep you safe I felt proud. When I thought you might come stay with me I felt excited. I felt happy, OK? But to you I’m just, whatever, I’m just a guy who you can fuck in a parking lot and then say, Y’know what, sorry, take me to some other guy’s place. It’s like I’m not even a person to you. It’s like I’m a dick and a car. And, yeah, sure, I’m a big strong tough motherfucker and I don’t look like I can be hurt real easy but I honestly don’t believe that you took even five seconds to consider whether your decision might have actually, you know”—he drops his volume here—“hurt me.”

  “OK,” Ollie says, quietly, because she has to admit that that’s true.

  They drive on for a few minutes, neither of them saying anything.

  “Look,” Ulysses says, his tone softer now. “After you left Donald, and you were staying with me—? That was—I know it was a tough time, but—”

  “Don’t,” Ollie says.

  “Just let me get this out,” Ulysses says. He checks the rearview mirror, shifts into the passing lane to get around someone. “It was a tough time, but I helped you. I helped you get on your feet and get out of there. I got you hooked up with Jon, and with, with Angel—and you know why?”

  “Because I was the best Goddamn butcher you’d ever seen?”

  This manages to pull a microscopic chuckle out of him. “Well, yes,” he says. “But you know why else?”

  “ ’Cause you wanted me out of your hair?”

  “Girl—” Ulysses says, exasperated. “That’s—you have it wrong. You have it exactly, one hundred percent, back-ass-ward wrong. Is that really what you think?”

  “Probably not,” Ollie says, slumping down in her seat a bit.

  “I got you out of there,” Ulysses says, “because you looked like you were done. Done with farm life. Done with trying to figure out whatever you were trying to figure out here in the Valley. Done with—being a mom.”

  “Of course I wasn’t done with being a mom,” Ollie says. “You’re not ever done.”

  “Yeah, well, you looked like it,” Ulysses says.

  “I probably did,” Ollie concedes, after a second.

  “Look,” Ulysses says. “What I’m trying to say here is that the time that you were there, when I was waking up to you in my bed every morning—? I loved it. I loved every second of it. I could see it wasn’t working for you and so I knew I had to let you go and that was hard as shit, but even knowing that—? Even knowing that it was still the happiest time in my life, and not a week goes by that I don’t hope that you’ll change your mind and come back up there to be with me. And so, yeah, there you have it, I guess.”

  He sighs. She sighs. “OK,” she says, after a minute. “I get it. I do. And I’m sorry. I don’t—I don’t really know what’s happening with my life right now. I’m caught up in something totally crazy and it’s getting people killed. It still might get me killed.”

  “I hear you,” Ulysses says. “And I’m sorry to be putting more on you right now—”

  “No,” she says. “It’s OK. This is gonna sound weird, but I think it’s the right time. It’s like—there’s nothing like being close to death to make you realize how much—just how much shit from your past never got dealt with. How many fucking loose ends you have. And I think whatever’s going on between us qualifies. It’s a thing that I’ve been trying not to think about, trying not to figure out. And I get that that’s hurtful.”

  “OK,” Ulysses says, a little cautiously.

  “But, listen, Ulysses, I can promise you something. I can promise you that I will think about us. That I will figure out what we are doing. That we will figure it out together. You’re right to ask me to. Help me get to my kid, and I can promise you that I’ll do it.”

  Ulysses adjusts his grip on the steering wheel but doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t know if he’s thinking about it, or refusing, or agreeing, or what. She waits, but before he gives any sign of what he’s thinking her phone starts to ring.

  “Jesus Christ,” she says, pulling it out of her pocket yet again. It’s Victor, and the fact that he’s called her twice in the past five minutes causes an ominous feeling to lurch up inside her: it probably means that something actually urgent is happening. “I gotta take this,” she says to Ulysses’s cryptically impassive face.

  “Did you listen to my message?” is the first thing Victor says to her.

  “Of course not,” Ollie says. “What’s up?”

  “We have a—” He says something that gaps out as the Buick slips between a pair of rising hills.

  “What?” Ollie says.

  “A problem,” Victor says. “We have a problem at the apartment.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the portal. To the Inside. I think it’s coming open again.”

  “What? How can you tell?”

  “I’m in the kitchen—? The air looks weird in here.”

  “Weird how?”

  “I don’t know,” Victor says. “It defies most of the words I’d use to describe it.”

  “Try,” Ollie says.

  “If I had to try,” Victor says, “I’d say the air in the kitchen is darkling.”

  Ollie shakes her head. It doesn’t matter. “Victor, you know what to do. You have to banish it.”

  “I’m not sure I can do it,” Victor says. “You—” He gaps out again.

  “Listen, Victor, I’m losing signal,” she says, loudly, hoping he can hear her. “But you can do it. You know how. We’ve done it twice already. You just have to do it on your own this time; I can’t come help. Not right now.” No response. She’s not sure if they’re still connected but she forges on. “Find a tool. Whatever’s your best thing. Is Rufus still there? He’s good at this shit; get him to help you. Just get the thing gone.”

  Her phone bleats; the call’s been dropped. She sighs heavily.

  “Everything all right?” Ulysses says.

  “I do not know,” she says.

  “You need me to turn around?” he asks.

  She considers the question for what feels like a very long time.

  “No,” she says, finally.

  22

  TRICKY

  Maja blinks at
Pig’s seat, empty except for the half-eaten bag of mints. She waits a moment to see if he will return. The moment elongates, becomes a minute.

  That’s a good trick, hazards the Archive.

  Quiet, Maja thinks.

  She looks for Pig, widening her surveillance beyond the car, encompassing the gas station, its market. No sign of him. She goes wider, looking out over the territory they’ve covered today, out over the whole state. She sighs, knowing she’s going to need to go wider still. She can look across the whole planet when she needs to, but it brings her back to feeling like she did when she was a kid, hiding in her closet, projecting her awareness halfway across the globe, looking for places warmed by the sun. Stretching her consciousness that way makes it feel thin, fragile, like so much flung gossamer: she didn’t mind that sensation so much when she was a spacey kid but as an adult it leaves her feeling vulnerable, psychically flensed. But Pig’s vanishing act has unnerved her, so she does it. She scans the world for Pig’s unique prickle. Nothing. Her sense of apprehension doubles.

  She reels back in, looks for signs of him in the local past, signs she knows should be there—the traces of his presence at the pumps, for instance. Even these seem to jitter in her mind, degrading as she tries to review them. It is not merely as though he is not here. It is as though he has never existed. It is as though he has gone somewhere outside of space and time entirely.

  And then suddenly he’s back, sitting right there, grinning at her, as though he’s never left. Except, she realizes, as her attention ranges over him, it’s not as though he’s never left. It’s as though he has just come into the world for the first time. It’s as though he is brand-new. There is no history on him, not a single thing she can read.

  Except—wait—there is something. If she looks deeply she can find the usual shadowed layer of fragments that she gets from him, the Cubist photographs that comprise his past. But there’s something else, too. More recent information. Facts about where he went, what he did when he was there. She can feel them slipping away, though, like dreams upon waking. She concentrates, closes her eyes, even as Pig opens his mouth and begins talking to her, hoping to apprehend the important details before they can deliquesce. Hoping to turn them into things that she will be able to remember.