Forever, in Pieces

by Fawver, Kurt

  Ben stretched and yawned. Debunking the paranormal was a tedious affair.

  Groaning, he struggled free from his family’s miasmic couch and walked to the computer in his father’s office. It was on. It was always on, a luminous beacon of dead communication. He plopped into a creaky maple chair—his parents loved antiques—and connected to the internet. The dial-up modem squealed to its brethren. Soon, he was drowning in a sea of information and the “real” world—whatever that might be—melted away.

  Another two hours passed into ephemera.

  Mid-afternoon now.

  A perfunctory check of the patio and the front stoop revealed nothing. Ben wrung his hands. Patience was his virtue, but worry was his vice. If he didn’t catch the Valentines’ sender he’d remain suspended between the scissoring blades of desire and reason for another full year. He simply couldn’t hold out that long. It was impossible.

  Sometimes, deep within the trenches of night, he swore that he heard the lips whispering his name. Sometimes he’d find himself ensconced in a daydream, silently mouthing the word “Forever.” It seemed that incorporeal chains were fastened between himself and the objects in the box under his bed, and they could only be broken by incontrovertible evidence of banality or deceit. Perhaps not even then.

  Ben sighed, trudged to the kitchen, and made a peanut butter sandwich.

  He wasted another hour playing video games then tried to masturbate without imagining the dotted outline of a fragmentary woman, her features and forms endlessly spinning through sweating space. He couldn’t. He needed her fantastic indeterminability just to remain hard.

  Another hour died from inactivity. It was now late afternoon and twilight stars were beginning to invade the sky. Still no sign of visitation at either doors or windows. Ben was beginning to wonder if his plan had been discovered. Was it possible that the Valentines’ gifter had been monitoring his poor excuse for a stakeout (or, in this case, stakein) and laughing at his lackadaisical vigilance all along?

  Back on the couch after his self-gratification, he punched a cushion and swore. Outside, a trio of boys rode by on bicycles. They made loud noises steeped in furious argument or gleeful abandon; it was impossible to discern which was the case.

  Ben pulled at his hair and murmured “Why won’t you come? Why won’t you come when I’m looking?”

  The questions fell to the floor, ignored. Even silence refused to answer.

  Evening wore on and darkness seeped through the windows. Ben paced between the living room and the kitchen. How was he supposed to disprove the mystical if he couldn’t prove the mundane? His brilliant plan was crumbling. Nothing wasn’t supposed to happen.

  “Goddamn it!” Ben screamed, kicking over a stool in the kitchen.

  “Just show yourself! Just show yourself for once!” he cried.

  He ran out the back door, hopped off the patio, and, in an act of prostration to the gods of frustration and defeat, was about to throw himself down in the middle of his family’s lush, fenced-in lawn when a twitch of movement in the corner of his eye arrested the entire ceremony. He froze.

  It was probably just a cat, but hope springs eternal in places light cannot touch.

  Ben turned slowly and peered into the shadows at the corner of the house where he thought he’d seen motion. He crept forward, hands balled into fists.

  As he neared the Maginot Line where celestial glimmer met cimmerian pitch, a rat darted out from beside the house; it scampered by mere inches from Ben’s feet. This was neither the sadistic prankster nor the divine messenger for whom he had hoped. This was the stilettoed laugh of the absurdly ordinary. He kicked the ground and swore.

  His parents would be home in less than two hours. The plan had truly failed.

  Ben trudged back inside, locked the screen leading to the patio, and, with stale gaze and sullen steps, made his way upstairs to his room. As he opened the door to his increasingly embattled domain, a blast of torpid air rolled out. Its odor—sulfuric, with a hint of something pleasantly unnameable—was familiar. He had experienced this smell before, though he wasn’t immediately certain when or where. The memory flashed, a pop of light, a mirrored shimmer, then was gone.

  He stepped into his room.

  The skepticism that had been amassing armies in his chest suddenly fell to tatters under a sharp rain of unabashed wonder. Somehow, someway, lying atop his bed were a black envelope and an ornate, sliver, hexagonal box.

  Without thinking, Ben ran to the front door. It remained locked. He ran to each and every window on the first floor of the house. Locked, locked, locked, locked; they were all locked tight. He jogged back upstairs and stared at the Valentine. It was impossible. He had been outside for less than five minutes. No one could have broken in, sneaked to his room, left the gifts, and fled without a trace in so little time. Impossible. Unless, of course, the perpetrator was still in the house. It was a clichéd conclusion, but it was also the last bastion of logic.

  Ben raced around the house, moving from closet to closet, flinging doors wide open; he shined flashlights under furniture; he even searched inside particularly expansive cabinets. He found no one. A crazy, zig-zagging fissure was beginning to split his mind. There was no one in the house—no one that could’ve ever been in the house—and yet the Valentine was lying upon his bed, yearning to be taken into his hands. Reason did not complement reality. Ben sprinted back to his room. Though his head was collapsing, his pulse had never beaten stronger or with more urgency.

  Once inside his room again, he knelt beside his bed and gently tore one side from the black envelope. The card within—a constant unflinching as entropy—read:

  “Ben. You doubt me. You doubt us. You mustn’t. You must believe. Together we fill the void. Together we are the answers. Together, Ben. Only together. Forever.”

  She knew. She knew him. She knew him too well. His confusion, his trepidation, his newfound faith in gods that could be poked and prodded, measured and verified: these were the magicks she sought to dispel with her words and her flesh.

  Ben delicately placed the card back on the bed and reached for the ornate silver hexagon. Its top and sides were engraved with obscure glyphs, some of which vaguely resembled mathematical symbols. A few were reminiscent of Cyrillic letters. Neither comparison was accurate, though; there was something wrong with these marks, something Ben couldn’t quite comprehend. If he had to explain what was strange about these glyphs, he would have stammered something about them feeling too heavy. A length of meaning, interminable and chaotic, seemed to stretch out behind each of the tiny, arcane symbols. Ben began to trace several with his finger. As he worked along their sharp angles, a crushing weight descended upon his chest and a roiling, churning river of images burst into his mind just below his consciousness. His breath and his thoughts were subsumed by an endless vista of potentiality. He was drowning.

  Resisting on instinct alone, Ben dropped his hand from the gaudy container. He gasped for blessed oxygen.

  He couldn’t imagine what rested inside the box if the box itself was so powerful, so overwhelming. Minutes ticked by. He didn’t want to see or hold the object within the metallic hexagon, but, at the same time, all he wanted to do was see and hold it. Ben was facing himself in a standoff at high noon. No matter what choices he made, he would be both the loser and the winner, the hero and the villain, the dead and the living.

  With palms sweating and chilled, he summoned a lax, flabby sort of courage and, in one quick flick of the wrist, flipped up the box’s lid. Glancing over its rim, he bore witness to the box’s contents. A gasp trickled from the corner of his mouth. There, resting on what seemed to be a silk interior, was a glistening, throbbing heart roughly the size of his fist. It pumped no blood. It fed no vital stream. It was not connected to any tangible system of electrical impulses and cellular directives. And yet it beat. Impossible, unless Forever was more than a fiction, more than mischief and hoax.

  Ben reached in and picked up the heart. Its ex
pansion and contraction did not falter; in fact—though it may have been entirely imaginary—he sensed a quickening of its pulse.

  His hands slick with the clear, viscous fluid that covered the entire organ, Ben peered into one of its severed arteries. He saw nothing but striated muscle and space. No battery pack ran this object; no tendrils of wire snaked through its pulpy interior. He turned it over and over again, examining it from every angle, but found only more unbroken, pumping flesh. No forgery, not even those produced by Hollywood wizards, could match the intricacy of the instrument in his hands.

  He laughed, a bellowing, whipping rain of manic mirth. All sense slid away, all logic fled in horror. They were no longer of use to him, anyway. The fissure that had been forming inside his head tore wide open, metastasizing into a fathomless chasm that pulsed in time with the beating of the heart in his hands. Glee, thoughtless, wicked glee, flew screeching from its depths. Ben brought the heart to his mouth and kissed it. With the tip of his tongue, he tickled the rims of each stunted artery and vein. Strings of liquid drizzled off his chin.

  Forever had given him a sign. Forever had given him her heart. He had been a fool to doubt.

  He knew that tonight, for the first time in many nights, he’d pull the safe out from under the floorboard and cradle it in his arms as he slept.

  At such thoughts, the heart in his hands beat ever faster, ever hungrier.

  February 14th, 2000

  His dorm room was swathed in black fabric. Black sheets, black blankets, a black carpet, black towels hanging on a silver rod, black jacket draped over a black chair. A particle hewn from the fabric of twilight orbited every atom in the room.

  Ben sat on his bed, reading Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments. Unlike many of the people he’d met in his classes, his interest in philosophy wasn’t pure posturing. He didn’t read Nietzsche so he could justify his youthful angst and he didn’t memorize lines of Sartre so that he could wax intellectual with the arty kids who smoked clove cigarettes in the dorm lounge. Rather, he loved philosophy because it fashioned a slim doorway to abstraction. It granted him moments of reprieve from the solid, too-sharply defined world, moments in which he could wade in contemplative formlessness. Ideas didn’t require substance or volume; they merely required someone to believe. Ben found solace in this controlled ephemerality.

  Tonight, though, he was unable to lose himself in the intricate thoughts of dead men because tonight was both a Friday and Valentine’s Day.

  Certainly, either occasion would have been sufficient reason for mass bacchanalia on a university campus but, combined, the possibilities were endless. Ben had seen flyers that promoted lingerie parties, foam parties, costume parties, pimp-and-ho parties, and ever-popular but relatively pedestrian keggers. Most of the festivities were held off-campus or in Greek housing, but a daring few—utterly disregarding university policy—had been organized in dorms. Ben was well aware of the existence of these covert bashes, since his neighbors across the hallway were throwing one.

  He hadn’t been invited.

  Actually, he’d never even spoken to his neighbor across the hall—a pug-nosed blonde guy who rarely wore a shirt and tended to yell incoherent monosyllables like “woo” and “yah” when he was drunk, which, as it happened, was more than half of any given week.

  Ben shook his head and rubbed his temples.

  Bass beats exploded against the walls of his room; the thrum of conversation corkscrewed into his ears; an acid current drifted under his door and crawled upon his skin, burning and laughing. He simply couldn’t focus on the impalpable with a sweating, bellowing, fecund mass so near his hallowed space.

  Someone stumbled against his door, smashing an elbow or a knee into unyielding wood. Epithets were screamed; mindless guffaws followed. Bass continued to pound.

  Ben snapped shut his book and sighed. The idiots across the hallway were misunderstanding the holiday. Romance was an atomic whisper, not an empty roar. He just wanted some quiet time, a few hours spent reading and a few hours spent with Forever, but the party was a distraction he couldn’t easily ignore. He hoped that its attendees would soon tire of the cramped spaces of a dorm room and wander into the night in search of less constraining debaucheries. After all, he had big plans.

  Earlier in the day, after his newest Valentine’s gift had arrived and he had realized its full implications, Ben ran to the on-campus general store and bought a box of chocolates and two scented candles. He wanted to find a bottle of wine, too, but he had no social connections that would allow for underage drinking. The candy and ambient lighting would have to do. He’d also considered purchasing a box of condoms, but didn’t really see any point—conception was clearly out of the question and disease was a distant concern.

  He couldn’t, or perhaps wouldn’t, envision Forever’s nether regions as a flowering infirmary. The very notion was blasphemy.

  Outside, glass shattered, instantly producing a compound of shrieks and chortles.

  This wasn’t how he had dreamed the evening would play out. He’d pictured stellar vistas overhead and a downy pile of blankets beneath, passages of Hegel or Schopenhauer read aloud and long draughts of flowing carmine. He’d pictured laughter and hushed secrets, revealed only in the union of lips and moist flesh. He’d pictured no one else within miles. But pictures were, unfortunately, only approximations of reality. If Ben was to lose his virginity tonight, it would be without starshine and glaze.

  He reached under his pillow and withdrew a small, polished obsidian box. His fingers glided easily across its surface and over its rounded corners and edges. A tremor, a roseate wave of heat, perpetually oscillated about its perimeter. And yet it was only a transport, a vessel in which ecstasy, its lone passenger, had traversed unknown distances. Inside was the fear-inducer, the leveler of kingdoms, the meatus of God’s scorn and man’s delight. With chilled, tremulous hands, he removed the box’s top and tried to let the party next door dissolve into meaningless white noise.

  But it wouldn’t. The polyphonic orgy did not hush for his special moment.

  A tiny, viperous area of Ben’s brain began to squirm. The party across the hall was unacceptable. Tonight had to retain some petty semblance of perfection.

  He leaped off the bed and strode to the door. He had no blueprint for quieting his neighbors, no vengeful mousetrap to set before them. His hands balled into fists, he halted and considered what he might be able to accomplish by marching across the hall. He knew he wouldn’t have the bravado to confront anyone. His stomach twisted at simple, casual greetings; asking for—or better yet, demanding—silence from a virtual stranger was beyond the scope of his social powers.

  What could he do? What could he possibly do? He was failing Forever.

  In her card this year, she’d written: “Ben. You and I are alone. Always alone together. Always together alone. Make sure we’re alone. Tonight. Tonight we rend galaxies with the force of our love. But only alone and in quietus, Ben. Only alone and in quietus. Forever.”

  He couldn’t give her the solitude or the stillness she deserved—not with a party raging seven feet away. No immediate resolution presented itself. How could this be his night of satin dreams? How could this be his indoctrination into the secret order of the sexually initiated? How could he be so impotent?

  Bass continued to pound and inchoate voices continued to rise and fall. Someone began singing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, replacing all the lyrics with one repeated phrase: “My cock.”

  Ben screamed and threw a punch at the door. It slammed in time to one of the throbbing beats. He drew back and smashed his fist against unforgiving oak again and again, matching the pulse outside. His knuckles split open and bled, and still he pounded the door. Bone cracked, splintered. Wood slivered into gaping wounds. Still, he pounded.

  Pain forced time to curve inward, upon itself. Ben hit the door for what may have been minutes or millennia.

  Finally, the singing stopped. Feminine laughter tickled the air. The
bass continued pumping at full volume.

  Ben slumped, panting, onto the floor. The door was beautifully spattered and oozing, a post-modern hybrid of Jackson Pollock and Edgar Allen Poe. His hand had worked artistry; unfortunately, it had also been tenderized in the process. It lay on his lap in a pile of crimson rivulets and fleshy flecks. Two of his knuckles—both entirely stripped of skin—were chipped and broken. They sparkled in the dim yellow light of his reading lamp.

  A tiny, feathered part of Ben’s brain chirruped for medical attention but it was drowned in the blissful wash of emptiness that swept over him. He was soiled and spent and, oddly enough, satisfied.

  The bass continued to hammer at the door and he didn’t care. Something had changed. Something had either died or been born. Perhaps both.

  Exhausted, Ben crawled to his bed, rolled himself upon it, and fell into a sleep reserved only for gladiators, mystics, and lovers.

  Two nights later, after his hand had been sutured and set, Ben would unzip his fly and enter the deep, damp, rubicund realms of which he’d fantasized. He would be overcome with pleasure, with joy, and with a sense of gratification unlike any other he’d ever experienced. And yet, whenever he recalled the sequence of events in the months and years to come, he always felt that the night he’d mutilated his hand was truly the night he had lost his virginity.

  February 14th, 2004

  A FedEx truck pulled up in front of Ben’s apartment, the bottom floor of a fading duplex home. He knew the truck would be arriving today and he knew what it would be bringing, so he’d called in sick to work earlier that morning. The bookstore could manage itself without him for one day.

  As the deliveryman descended the stairs of his vehicle, Ben glanced at a list on the coffee table, a compilation of everything that Forever had sent him since he was six years old. It included, itemized by year: