Life Among the Voids
Copyright 2016 by Roman Theodore Brandt
I’ve written a story containing subject matter that I’ve only skimmed in the past, but this is how it came to me and this is how I wrote it. I refuse to warn anyone about the content or apologize for it. If you don’t read to be moved, changed, or otherwise made uncomfortable, you’re already dead.
Roman Theodore Brandt
Table of Contents
Life Among the Voids
About the Author
Dedication
Life Among the Voids
I remember the fireworks on the lake, the whistling right before the boom, streaking across the sky in spider webs of light, the explosions shaking the windows of all the houses in the park, the water coated in a thin film of ash and memory. The crackling reds, the sparkling whites, the burning white-hot blues danced behind my eyelids long after they faded from the sky.
I remember my brother, sitting in his hoodie on the boat dock, staring up at a night sky that was alive with the burning remains of freedom. Harvey was like those fireworks. He was crazy and alive; he was controlled chaos, destructive beauty too far away to hurt anyone but himself. He was light, he was pain, he was magic and concussive, colorful anger. And if he was the fireworks, we were the ground below, in awe and lucky to be bathed in his light and kissed by the embers he left behind.
*
I got a phone call from Harvey the night before I left campus. His voice was far away, echoing off the walls of our bedroom at the lake house.
“I thought you’d want to know Mom’s a mess,” he said.
“You’re a mess,” I told him, and he was quiet. I could hear him breathing on the other end. I imagined him looking out our small, rectangle window that faced the lake, looking up at the stars.
“How’s school?”
I slammed the phone down. It rang again almost immediately. I sat staring at the wall, listening to the phone ring, with the sound vibrating behind my temples. Finally, I snatched it up, sending the cradle crashing off the night stand. “What?”
“You seem a little bothered,” he whispered into my ear.
“You know how school is.”
Harvey didn’t say anything. I could almost see him on the other side of the phone line, playing with the cord and trying to think of something normal to say, something not crazy, something funny or interesting or insulting. “She wrecked her car and walked home.”
“What?”
“Listen,” he said, “I just wanted to let you know it’s a goddamn circus here.”
I wanted to say something to him, but I couldn’t think of anything worth saying. I sat listening to the hum of the phone line and looking over at the dark window beside my bed.
“I don’t know what’s going on with Mom and Dad,” Harvey said, “I think they’re aliens.”
“You know—”
“Mom ate a whole stick of butter yesterday.” He paused for a second, and then he said, “She just sat there and ate it with a fork. Dad didn’t say anything about it, he just watched her eat a whole god damned stick of butter.”
“I have to sleep,” I told him.
He laughed a little. “Sorry,” he said.
“Go to sleep.”
“I will,” he said, and he hung up without saying goodbye as always.
Right before I had gone off to college, Harvey had got drunk and wound up at the police station in our hometown. I rode with Mom and Dad to go get him, but I stayed in the car when they went inside. It seemed like forever passed before they emerged from the building with my brother, stumbling toward the car and grinning like a dope when he saw me sitting in the backseat. Mom yanked the door open and stood there rigidly, waiting for him to get in.
“Hey, kid,” he said, slouching into the car and laughing. The air in the car smelled like alcohol.
“Get your leg in the car,” Mom said, and she slammed the door after he managed to pull his foot in.
“I was hoping you’d come,” he said, getting uncomfortably close, and then he let his head droop against my shoulder, wiping a long strand of slobber from his mouth. “Don’t tell anyone; I’m drunk.”
“I’m sure no one knows,” I told him.
“Shhh.” He patted my thigh.
“What were you thinking?” Mom asked from the driver’s seat. “I was worried sick. I’m sure your uncle is just as worried as I am.”
“Did he call?” Harvey asked her, and her mouth pursed into a single, angry line.
“He keeps to himself,” she said.
“If he were worried, don’t you think he would have called?”
“You’re drunk,” she said.
“You don’t say!”
“You ran away from home. I’m sure he’s beside himself.”
“I’m an adult,” Harvey said. “You can’t run away if you’re an adult.”
Mom shook her head as we pulled out onto the road. “No consideration for anyone.”
“Just call us next time, alright?” Dad said from the front seat.
“I didn’t hurt anybody. Fuck.” Harvey’s breath was warm on the skin of my neck. “Home, driver,” he said.
Mom laughed a little and then caught herself. “It’s not funny,” she told him.
“Looks like it’s you and me now,” he said to me. I looked up at Mom in the rearview mirror staring back at us, and then at the back of Dad’s head over the headrest. “Just you and me.”
“Shut up,” I said, and he laughed for a while, and then he just gave up trying to stay upright and collapsed against me with his head on my shoulder, his saliva soaking through the fabric of my shirt.
“Don’t leave me on that farm,” he whispered into my shirt, and then he was out.
That seemed like a million years ago. Here I was, having left home for college, and I found myself to be a piece that never quite fit into anyone else’s puzzle. I stood at parties like a statue with my new haircut, wishing I could talk to someone. I ate pizza alone in my dorm room and watched the other people at my school laugh and talk and kiss, and all I could think about was the throbbing mess in my head, the tangle of beatings and whispered secrets that I had left to die on a farm in Ohio. I didn’t deserve to be happy. I didn’t deserve friends or conversation. I kept a pocket knife in my backpack for when I wanted to feel something. I couldn’t count all the times and places I had watched my own blood swirling down a drain, like coming up for air.
Don’t leave me on that farm, he said. That was all he asked of me in the end, and here I was, drowning in my freedom.
*
I was brushing my teeth, staring at the void in the mirror, when the phone rang again. It was odd to get all calls from our lake house. I hadn’t been there in years. To be honest, I kind of forgot it existed. It was in a separate part of my brain, a little house on a lake in a forest at the end of the world. At first I just stared at the caller ID, and then I spit the toothpaste out into the sink. I picked up on the third ring.
“What took you so long?” Mom’s voice crackled over the line, sending birds flapping from their perches around campus.
“Mom, why are you calling from lake?”
There was silence on the other end, and then I heard her talking to my father, their voices low.
“Mom?”
“Yeah,” she said, “Listen, Honey, why don’t you come to the lake house for the summer? When are finals?”
“I have a week left.” I looked over at the calendar, marked red from every test I’d failed. Don’t ask how I’m doing, I wanted to say; don’t tell me you’re proud of me.
“Well, you ought to come out for the summer. It’s the last year they’re doing the fireworks.” Mom cough
ed a little. “Your brother is already here.”
I pictured Harvey, passed out drunk on the sofa, stumbling through the woods, Mom and Dad watching him drool at the kitchen table, doped up on his medication.
“Yeah, I know,” I said.
“It’ll be fun,” Mom told me.
“Yeah, I don’t think—”
“What are you gonna do, huh? Stick around an empty college town all summer feeling sorry for yourself?”
“I’ve made friends here,” I told her, which was a lie.
I looked up at my calendar again and sighed.
“Your father and I haven’t seen you all year. Will you come out to the lake?”
“Yeah, okay,” I said, “I’ll come out to the lake.”
I thought about the fireworks, the fair, swimming in the lake in the flickering home movies in my head.
“Okay,” Mom said. “Pack your toothbrush.”
“I’m not stupid.”
“Listen, just humor me and say ‘okay, Mom; thanks.’”
I looked over at my abandoned toothbrush on the counter, foamy with toothpaste. “Okay, Mom; thanks.”
She laughed, her voice echoing out across the lake, several hours down the highway from where I sat on my hard mattress, completely alone in a town full of loud music and loud conversations. “You’re welcome,” she said, and then she hung up. I sat there with the receiver in my hand until I heard the buzzing of the dial tone, then I yanked the cord out of the wall.
*
Harvey was a handsome gorilla of an older brother, a sturdy farm boy with buzzed hair. He smiled at me from the station platform as my bus pulled up. His eyes found me immediately and he waved a little, and my stomach filled up with acid.
“I’m here,” I said to myself, waving back.
When I got off the bus, he grabbed my suitcase out of my hand. “It’s been eight thousand years, kid,” he said. I wanted to melt into the sidewalk and be gone. I shouldn’t have come here. I followed him to Dad’s car and he heaved the suitcase into the backseat.
“You don’t know what I have in there,” I told him.
He laughed. “I didn’t hear anything break.”
On the way home, he talked about how crazy Mom was now.
“You won’t believe it,” he said, staring out at the road. His eyes were a little darker than I remembered, and a little deeper in his face. “One second she’s normal and the next she’s a damn psycho.”
“She’s always been weird.”
“We’re all weird,” he said, and then he laughed. “We’re all fucking weird.”
I thought of all the parties and social functions where I sat on the sofa holding my red solo cup, dreaming of having friends and social skills. “I’m not weird.”
“Oh yeah?” he said. “You make any friends at college, since you’re so normal now?”
I shrugged and thought about my empty dorm room. “I made plenty of friends.”
Harvey stared out at the road ahead, his face an unreadable mask of silence, and then he said, “Well good for you, kid. I was worried for a while.”
“You don’t have to worry about me. If anything, I should be worried about you.”
I immediately regretted saying that. Harvey flexed his fingers on the wheel and laughed a little. “Why’s that?”
“Never mind.”
“No, tell me why you should be worried about me. I’m all ears.”
“It’s nothing. I just worry, that’s all.”
He chuckled. “You’re worried about me, all alone on that farm with him.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
He sighed and relaxed a little. I thought of him sitting in one of the bare mattresses in one of the spare rooms in our uncle’s house, staring out at the endless gravel road leading away toward the horizon.
“How is Uncle Bill?”
His grip on the wheel tightened, the tendons in his knuckles flexing and cracking. “He’s alive so far.”
Harvey had lived in the back of my mind when I went off to college. He was huge in my memory, looming over all my childhood experiences. Something happened in his brain when he was in middle school when we went out to our uncle’s house for the summer, and the constellations in his head broke formation and reformed into pictures I would never be able to understand. My uncle’s house was in the middle of nowhere, and all I really remember about what happened was that I woke up to the sound of vomiting coming from down the hall. I found Harvey in the bathroom, throwing up into the toilet. He looked over at me with his eyes wet from crying and said, “Go away.”
The realignments of those stars eventually told him to punch me awake for the first time when I was ten and he had just turned thirteen. I woke up with my mouth a mess, gasping for air. Harvey sat on the edge of my bed with his knuckles bloody, his eyes searching mine for what I’ll never know, and then he smiled and lifted me up out of bed, still coughing and choking on my own blood, and he pulled me to him. I stained his T-shirt with my tears and my red blood cells.
In the walls of my chest, something had been growing, just an embryo at the time, a clump of life spinning in the void, waiting to be real. It grew emotions and an umbilical cord that attached somewhere inside him. Now, five years later, it was a mess across three states, blood dripping from the tissue stretched down highways and around traffic lights and freeway exits from a lonely farm in the Midwest to the room where I lived by myself on campus. It was pure, white-hot pain, liquid and seething under my skin at night, aching to snap and recoil but afraid to be disconnected and sent back into the void to suffocate. I used to watch the stars behind his eyes connect like dots into patterns but could never quite translate the message. It all became combustion, purifying and hot in the shimmering filmstrip of my memory.
*
Dinner the first night was the circus Harvey promised. When we came into the kitchen, Mom was already sitting at the table like an art installation, wrapped in the afghan from the back of the sofa. She smiled a little when we sat down, and then again, even broader, when Dad sat down. Dad looked like he’d aged about ten years since I last saw him. Mom watched him scoot up to the table.
“Look, David,” She said, reaching out of the afghan to pick up her coffee mug. “Look at these two.”
Dad smiled sheepishly at us. “How’s school, Henry?”
I glanced over at Harvey, and he grinned, raising an eyebrow. I wanted to get back on the bus and go back to campus. Or even better, I wanted to stretch myself across the tracks and wait for the train, rumbling in the distance, thunder in the tracks shaking far away.
They were all staring at me like a bunch of vultures, waiting for me to spill my intestines on the table. “Dad, I don’t want to talk about school.”
“Come on, Henry,” Mom said, sipping from her mug. “All good grades, I bet.”
Harvey giggled a little. “All good grades, right Henry?”
I kicked him under the table, and he flinched. I wanted to put his head through the plate of food in front of him.
“Sure, Harvey. All good grades.”
He looked from Mom to Dad and then glared at me.
“It’s nice to have the family together again,” Mom murmured to her coffee mug.
“Why are we at the lake house?” Harvey asked abruptly, and I stared at Mom, because this was the one question I couldn’t make myself ask her.
“The fireworks are better at the lake, Harvey.” Mom put her mug down on the table a little hard, the sound making Dad wince.
“Let’s just tell them,” Dad said.
A noise came out of Mom that I had never heard before. She picked up her mug again and smashed it on the table. Coffee went everywhere, soaking the afghan and spotting our clothes. Harvey laughed hysterically for a second.
“What the fuck,” I mumbled.
“I told you,” Harvey mouthed to me from across the table.
“I’m sorry,” Mom said, standing up quickly to fish the napkins from where we sat. J
ust as quickly, she tumbled forward, catching herself before she put her face into the meatloaf. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
Dad was already out of his seat, gripping the back of the chair. “You want me to call 911?”
“David, I fell is all.”
“Mom’s doing her own stunts,” Harvey said, and she sighed, smiling a little.
“I suppose I am,” she told us. She sat back down and flung her coffee soaked afghan around her frame again, tighter this time. She looked at Dad. “Sit down,” she said, and he sat back down.
“What did you need?” He wanted to know.
“What?”
“Did you just get up for fun?”
“I got napkins to clean up the mess; didn’t you see? Are you all a bunch of idiots?” She looked around at us with her eyes all crazy, and then she looked down at her food, ruined by the coffee. “Fuck,” she said quietly. She sighed and slouched back in her chair like a child. “It’s cold in here,” she added.
“It’s too hot,” Harvey said immediately, and she shot him a look that might have been a knife if she’d had her way.
“I think we’re all on different continents in this family,” she told him after a minute, and with that, no one said anything else throughout the entire meal. We all sat and ate in weird, angry silence, with Mom presiding over the mood, clanking her fork across her plate just a little louder than everyone else, shoving forkfuls of coffee-soaked potatoes into her mouth until she finally stood up and walked away, leaving the vinyl dinette chair behind and dragging her afghan behind her all the way down the hall to the bathroom.
“She ate too much.” Harvey stuffed a chunk of dead cow into his mouth and talked around it. “She’s gonna go barf it all up now like a classy broad.”
“That’s not nice,” Dad said, getting up to follow her down the narrow hallway.
The sounds of retching from the bathroom came next. The wet, angry gurgling and intermittent crying were the only sounds as Harvey and I finished our plates.
*
The night, Harvey threw a shoe at me from the top bunk. He waited until we had turned the lights out and heaved it down at me, and it hit my mouth. I coughed and sat up with the taste of blood and gravel in the back of my throat. Harvey’s laughter echoed from the top bunk, and the springs of his mattress squeaked.