Out there, p.5
Out There, page 5
“I’ve spent my whole career studying those damn rocks,” Stuart said. “It’s going to be a relief.”
Dave drew Elise into the kitchen.
“Maybe we should stay here,” he said. “Stuart seems like an interesting guy to spend eternity with.”
Elise had had enough. “There is no eternity!” she said. “The void is the void. Anything else is a fantasy. What’s happened to you?”
“You don’t know that for sure,” Dave said. “What if you’re wrong? You really want it to be just you and me, forever?”
Elise’s heart broke a little. Dave wouldn’t even commit to a theoretical eternity with her unless his mom and Stuart came along. They’d been together three years, and when the void was first publicized she’d taken for granted that they’d cling to existence together until the bitter end. She hadn’t counted on Dave falling for this hype about an afterlife. Whether the void took them today or four months from now, it was clear they were no longer compatible.
Elise insisted they get back on the road, and Dave reluctantly agreed. They stopped for the night at a motel in Utah. In the morning Dave and his Kia were gone. On the TV screen Elise found a neon green Post-it note with a heart penciled on it. She figured he’d driven back to Colorado, to be voided with his mom and Stuart, or perhaps with his dad and the fruit salad lady. It was for the best, Elise told herself. She hitched her way west until she hit ocean.
At Ocean Beach, the western limit of San Francisco, she found a camp of around a hundred people living in tents. She set her bags in the sand, near a family with two young children who observed her warily. That first night, she met Robert. He’d come to the bonfire with a basket of groceries looted from Safeway. He watched as she warmed a piece of Wonder Bread near the flame. All the good bread had already been looted.
“You’re the last babe on the West Coast,” he whispered into her ear. She wanted to protest that this couldn’t possibly be true. Robert was just terrified of facing the void alone.
* * *
—
Robert had lied about the ship. He wasn’t the captain, just another passenger with a cheap interior room. Still, he had saved her. Tickets were scarce, and as they entered the bay Elise gazed at the shore, from which throngs of people begged to be allowed on board. Robert put his arm around her shoulders and coaxed her into their cramped quarters. Elise’s first instinct was to shove him away, but she took a deep breath and endured. She planned to lull Robert into complacency so she could escape him at the final moment. Though she maintained that the void led to ordinary death, the propaganda must have seeped into her consciousness on some level. She would allow no part of her body to touch Robert’s at the moment of absorption, just in case.
Later that night, the void hit the ocean, which really fucked with the waves. The ship pitched and rolled. Elise allowed Robert to put his tongue in her mouth. The ship heaved again and her jaw closed on the tip of his tongue.
“Ow, Elise,” Robert said. “What the fuck?” His tongue was bleeding. She brought him ice chips from the hall.
“Sorry,” she said. When he asked if she wanted to hear him play a few new songs on his guitar, she felt she couldn’t say no. Robert stared into her eyes as he strummed the guitar and sang in the style of Bob Dylan. She was sure it was a joke, but then he played several more songs and she realized it wasn’t. Just a few more months of this, she told herself, and you’ll be free.
* * *
—
The last months of existence were terrifying, the ship tossed like a toy as billions of gallons of seawater gushed into the void. In January, the western wall of the void loomed before them, trapping them between the two black margins. It was light for an hour a day, then half an hour, less, as the void closed the sky. The captain steered south, traversing the narrowing channel of sea.
Robert had grafted himself to Elise’s side. In the final minutes Elise remarked that they should probably use the bathroom before being voided, just in case it was a long trip.
“Good idea,” Robert said. “You stay put, beautiful.” The moment the bathroom door slid shut behind him, Elise ran out of the room, down two flights of stairs to the spa, where she climbed into a hot tub with three women who were wearing blindfolds and earplugs and pressing their fingers into each other’s forearms.
Suddenly the ship was still, cradled by the void’s walls. Blackness pressed in from both directions. Elise heard Robert’s voice calling her name from across the deck. She dipped her head underwater, hoping her air would last long enough. But the void was too slow. She came gasping to the surface, and Robert spotted her. “Elise!” he said. “Thank God!” He jumped into the tub and placed his hands on her knees. The void had begun eating her right and left sides in perfect symmetry and she could no longer move. In her last moments of corporeal existence, just before she was transported to an infinite white plain upon which it was impossible to hide from the orb of bluish light representing Robert, she took small pleasure in watching his face disappear.
Shelter
In the basement of the house in Iowa that Reese and Mark were renting for the summer, there was a concrete vault, eight by five feet, presumably built as a storm shelter. Reese stored the house’s Shop-Vac there, along with a crate of Carr’s rosemary crackers she’d drunkenly ordered one night, and a case of wine shipped from their friends’ vineyard in Sonoma. Beyond the shelter, in the half-aboveground section of basement, the walls around a window had started to leak. This summer was set to break rainfall records. The threat of catastrophic flooding was on everyone’s lips. “Stay dry,” strangers told Reese, at the grocery store and the gas station. Rain wept into the pens where the house’s owner had once raised rabbits for meat. Each morning, Reese went downstairs, wheeled the Shop-Vac from the shelter, and used it to suck up the night’s accumulated water. She resented being left alone with this burden. Mark was always at the studio in Solon, with his band. He was not taking the situation seriously enough.
One day Reese came down to find the door of the shelter locked. It was a metal door with a keyhole in the knob. Reese wrapped her hand around the knob and twisted. She pressed her cheek against the door and listened. She could not quite bring herself to knock.
Reese circled back to the flooded room. Drops of water raced down the wall above the rabbit pens, which still held clay food dishes and a rotting bale of alfalfa, chicken wire threaded with white fur. More rain was forecast for the rest of the week.
Upstairs, Mark stood at the kitchen counter spreading almond butter on toast. From across the kitchen Reese was struck by a vision of him as a stranger. Mark was suddenly not her boyfriend of five years but an unfamiliar man in his late thirties with thinning hair, a swollen stomach, and small, soft hands. She could not imagine spotting this man across a train platform in some Central European capital and allowing the crowd to carry her to him, brushing against him in hope that some part of her would stick, burr-like, to the weft of his flannel.
He turned. The spell broke and Mark was Mark again.
“Did you lock the shelter?” Reese said.
“Huh?”
“The door of the shelter is locked.”
“We don’t even have a key to that room,” Mark said. He shoved the bread back into its sweaty bag. A tuft of almond butter rose from his thumb knuckle. In earlier eras she would have licked it off. It would have launched an erotic exchange.
“The Shop-Vac’s locked in the shelter,” Reese said. She handed Mark a paper towel. “It’s getting wet down there.”
“I’ll call a contractor today. This guy Todd Fischer has good Yelp reviews.”
“I don’t like the name Todd.” Reese had had an unsettling sexual encounter with a Todd in high school, in the wings of the stage where the marching band practiced. During their courtship Mark would have seized upon this allusion, a thread he could pull to unravel her.
Mark peeled his jacket from the back of a chair. “I’m late. See you tonight.” He kissed her cheek, hurting her with his beard.
* * *
—
They’d come to Iowa so Mark and his psychedelic metal band, Psilocybin, could finish their new album. Eight months ago, Reese and Mark had received a no-fault eviction notice from their apartment in San Francisco. Their landlord was selling the building to condo developers. Mark and Reese accepted the legally mandated thirty-thousand-dollar relocation payment. They complained bitterly on social media but were secretly relieved to be thrust from the city. Most of their friends had already moved to LA or Portland.
Reese kept her job as a copywriter for a pornographic website that catered to certain increasingly mainstream kinks that fell under the rubric of BDSM. She was tasked with crafting unique descriptions for videos that had all begun to merge together in what she imagined as a vat of yowling, flesh-toned putty. The day she found the shelter locked, Reese sat at the kitchen table with the jar of almond butter and a spoon. She logged in to her work email and unzipped the folder with the day’s batch of videos. In the first, a naked girl with very pale skin had been rigged to an erotic torture device in the company’s cavernous brick-lined studio. The girl was blindfolded, her back fixed in an extreme arch. A bald, oiled man entered the room and began to lap at her vagina. The girl shrieked with pleasure, though the man’s technique was questionable. After a few minutes he left. Two women wearing latex body suits entered the room and began inserting dildos of escalating girth into the girl’s asshole.
Reese fast-forwarded, searching for elements she’d need to mention in her description. She jotted notes on a legal pad. Right on cue, at the twenty-one-minute mark, the bald man reappeared and masturbated until his semen latticed the girl’s wide, youthful face. Reese thought of cinnamon buns. Her stomach growled; she spooned almond butter into her stale mouth. On the pad she wrote “Facial.”
After three hours Reese had written descriptions for five videos. She snapped her laptop closed, stood and stretched, peeled a freckled banana. Mark had texted, Todd coming tomorrow. Sorry his name is Todd.
Reese walked to the sliding door, pried the dowel from its gutter, and stepped into the thick air of the screened-in deck. Drizzle perforated the sodden lawn. Insects moaned. Heat gathered on her skin like a shroud.
For the first few weeks, Reese had enjoyed the solitude of her days, the big windows opening onto the creek and blurry hills that comprised their glut of land. Now she felt uneasy. The house had locked its inner chamber against her. It was rejecting her as a body rejects a foreign object: a silicone implant, a valve from the heart of a pig. She wished Mark hadn’t taken the car to the studio that morning, though she did not know where she would go if she had it.
* * *
—
The afternoon held three fucking-machine videos, two dungeon orgies, and one caning tutorial. When she’d finished her synopses Reese transferred a load of laundry to the dryer and went to the basement to check on the water level. She held her hand under the sill and let rain drip into her palm. She brought her cupped hand to her face and dipped her tongue in. The water tasted like metal and cut grass and the dryer sheet she’d just held.
Reese knew she had to drain the pool on the floor before the mold issued poison through the vents. She went to the shelter and twisted the knob again. She leaned her weight against the door. She kicked its white face, the sole of her Vans leaving a feathered gray scuff.
The house’s owner, Scott, was a friend of Mark’s parents. He had lived in Shanghai for a decade with his Chinese wife and their son. Reese went upstairs, closed the porn tabs on her browser, and began composing an email to Scott. Mark would not like her doing this. He would want to parse her email for tact before she sent it, because Scott was letting them live there for almost nothing. But Reese was annoyed at how unhelpful Scott had been regarding the basement leak. He’d told them to have it fixed, and that he’d reimburse them, but how were they supposed to know who to hire, who would give them a fair price? Now there was the matter of this shelter for which they had no key. I look forward to your prompt attention regarding this matter, she concluded.
Reese struggled to individuate her descriptions of the three fucking-machine videos. She was running out of ways to describe a vagina as hungry. Her pussy is ravenous. Her pussy had a light lunch and now it’s dinnertime. Her pussy slavers for nourishment. Her pussy is about to faint from low blood sugar. Her pussy carries almonds in its purse to tide it over until the next meal.
An email pinged in her box. Hairs rose on Reese’s forearms, her constituent cells priming for battle. Sorry, but I’m not sure what you mean, Scott had written. That room locks from the inside.
* * *
—
Mark brought home a rotisserie chicken from the Solon supermarket. They sat at the kitchen table and ate the chicken along with a salad Reese had made from what was left in the crisper: heirloom tomatoes with the bruises cut out, a rubbery yellow pepper, slivered red onion, and a conspicuously large, wrinkled cucumber reduced to harmless cubes.
“Water’s getting deep down there,” Reese said.
“Todd’s coming tomorrow,” Mark said. “He can check out the lock, too.”
“Can you take the day off? I don’t want to be alone in the house with a stranger.”
“I would, but we’ve really gotta keep plugging away on these last tracks,” Mark said. “Todd’s a solid dude. Nothing but five stars on Yelp.”
Reese watched as Mark tore the skin from a breast and set it aside. He pried up shards of white meat with his fork and wrapped the meat in its own skin, then placed the packet in his mouth so the skin wouldn’t lodge between his incisors. He appeared so self-possessed, so contented by his tiny rituals, that Reese was filled with resentment. She knew her anger didn’t correspond to the actual structure of their lives. She was free to do as she liked. She was not bound to the home by anything but the fact that they possessed a single car. And yet she felt a primordial rage toward Mark, as though he were a brute husband who went out to conquer the world, while she was trapped in this house with its flooded basement. She endeavored to say nothing to Mark, and to observe how much time would pass before he noticed.
Reese waited while Mark washed the grease from his hands in the kitchen sink. When it was her turn, Mark stood behind her and coiled warm, wet fingers around the roots of her hair. He slid his other hand down the front of her sweatpants. She felt his penis firm against her ass. He pulled down her pants and entered her. She came quickly, her orgasm urged along by frustration, her hands planted on the metal floor of the sink.
Mark pulled out and came on the small of her back. Reese stayed still while he blotted the tip of his penis on her tailbone. She waited, bent over the sink, while Mark wetted a dish towel and wiped her down. Reese felt like an expensive horse or a sports car kept under drop cloths and buffed weekly with chamois. Her eyes rested on the surface of the trash, a litter of small gray bones.
“Are you okay?” She looked up and found Mark watching her carefully, having perceived the threat of her mood. He’d passed the test this time. Her resentment dissolved, and she felt embarrassed for her childishness.
“I’m fine,” she said, and leaned over to kiss his cheek above the beard line.
* * *
—
Todd arrived at one the next afternoon. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man in his forties, his hair close-cropped around a deeply corrugated forehead. He looked uncannily similar to a guy from one of the Men in Pain videos Reese had synopsized that morning. In the video the man was tied to a chair with a length of nautical-looking rope. A woman in a red latex bodysuit and six-inch red heels entered the room and made a short speech before flogging him. Reese imagined the performers drinking beer in the Armory Club after the shoot, the woman cracking jokes as she rubbed balm into the man’s stiletto welts.
In Todd’s presence, Reese folded herself into a hostess persona she had culled from movies and snippets of conventional pornography. She wished she had lemonade to offer.
“Can I get you anything?” she said. “Glass of water?”
Todd said no thanks. “Let’s have a look at the issue,” he prompted. Reese felt hurt, absurdly, that he cared only about the “issue” and not about her. She realized she’d harbored a fantasy about this working man whom Mark, oblivious to the threat of being cuckolded, had hired and sent to the house to be greeted by his bored girlfriend. She had imagined having to dodge Todd’s advances, or perhaps acquiesce to them, depending on how attractive he turned out to be.
But the real Todd was all business. Reese led him down the basement stairs, wishing she’d worn pants that more aggressively displayed her ass.
Todd stepped into the pool of water. He ran his thumb along the seal of the window, laid his palm on the weeping wall. Reese felt embarrassed, as if it were her own body that was leaking, her salty runoff beneath Todd’s thumb. Maybe she was no longer hot. She had wasted her best years on Mark.
“You’ve got serious groundwater problems,” Todd said. “The foundation needs shoring up, but we have to wait for the rain to quit. In the meantime you’ll need to keep it as dry as you can. You got a Shop-Vac?”
Reese explained that the Shop-Vac was imprisoned. She led Todd to the shelter. He jiggled the knob, then ran his hands along the edges of the door as if searching for a hidden release.
“The owner says it locks from the inside,” she said. “I think somebody’s living in there.”
She’d been half-joking, but Todd fixed her with a serious look and said, “I highly doubt that.” He gave the knob one last turn, then shrugged and said he could at least get the water up. He brought his own Shop-Vac down from his truck. Reese watched the hose suck water into the machine’s belly. When he had drained the pool, Todd emptied the Shop-Vac in the utility sink, brushed his hands on his jeans, and said he should be going. Reese flinched at the prospect of his departure, which felt like a rejection. She fumbled for an excuse to make him stay.
