Issue 2 - December 2007 - Prose
Untitled by Ross Jamieson
He had a problem. He knew that all too well, now.
Victor first came to this realisation towards the latter half of his teenage years, not far from twenty, in fact. His problem was one of sleep, albeit not in the traditional sense of not getting enough, though this was a symptom; his problem lay in what happened when he closed his eyes at night. He was terrified of what happened when he closed his eyes. Whenever he lay down to rest and his consciousness began to blur with the shapes and colours on the backs of his eyelids, a moment's panic would grip him and he would start awake again. The darkness of unconscious was an unfathomable, unrecognisable place to Victor. He knew in his rational mind that it could only be a product of his own psyche, but this knowledge was a tiny torch to take into a very dark night.
This dread turned what should be a time of relaxation into a program of mental exercise, where he would think whatever he could think to keep his mind ticking, to keep treading water. Inevitably, however, he would tire beyond endurance and slip under the surface, and would always wake up feeling that something was wrong, that he had left something behind on the bottom. If he thought back, he could chart the occurrences back to his mid-teens, when it had been more of a niggling feeling, like crumbs left on a plate. Now, though, it felt somehow more significant, primordial, as though something under there wanted more than the crumbs he was leaving behind. It was a deep, nauseous feeling that began to pervade his waking life, growing on him like mold.
He found that, like staying in the shallow end of the pool, sleeping during daylight hours seemed a more secure experience. It helped Victor affirm the fact that the darkness wasn't a real darkness, only a mental one. This meant, of course, that he was forced to abandon his normal life by day, though his fear had grown so that anything that could ease his sense of disassembly took priority over any sense of normality retained. The onset of sleep for Victor was something akin to being awake for his own autopsy, like watching pieces of himself being taken away, and the holes where something used to be sewn up, empty.
He lived alone, in a flat owned by his father, in a dull neighbourhood shy of the city centre. Victor's father lived and worked abroad, and had bought the property to use as a crash-pad after separating from Victor's mother. He called one day from Hong Kong or Delhi or Tokyo to say that he had decided to sell the family home, where Victor had stayed with his mother since he was a child, and that Victor should move into the flat. His father didn't say anything when Victor asked where mother was going to live. As it turns out, it didn't matter; his mother seemed enormously relieved at the prospect, and promptly packed two small suitcases and left. It was the only conversation Victor had had with his father for years and they hadn't had another since. His mother subsequently sent him a letter, telling him that she had moved back to the village where she grew up, somewhere to the north, in the mountains. So be it. Victor grew fond of his eaves flat and through sleepless nights memorised all of its sounds and silences.
Sometimes though, as his head fogged and eyes strained in the early hours of the morning, he often heard, or thought he heard, the sound of a door opening somewhere in the flat, but only when he was too far into the fog to emerge. He lay, eyes closed, fixed like dead weights, listening as someone emerged into his flat from a corner he couldn't picture, and went about opening and closing doors and rattling the window frames, picking things up, putting things down, not putting things down, opening doors and closing them yet again. His frustration intensified the more this happened, and the surer he became that his possessions were wandering off into the night, in the pockets of a stranger. When it first started he would investigate on rising from his stupor, poking his head into the hallway, looking into the living room, the kitchen, the bathroom. Everything always looked the same to begin with, but the longer this went on, the more things looked as though they had been moved, just a little. Victor wondered if he was imagining it, to the point where he considered getting a camera and photographing the books on the shelf, the tins in the kitchen cabinets, the clutter on the table in the living room, to see if they really were being moved, or if his night terrors were bleeding into his waking life. In the end he did snap a few pictures on an old Leica his dad left behind, but he never had the film developed, not really wanting to know either way.
Eventually, the sounds in his flat became unbearable to the point that chewing on his thumbnail couldn't ease his mind anymore, and he began taking long walks through the city in the dark. At first, these walks were just to get away, an exasperated sweeping out the door to somewhere where he wasn't terrorised by the angles of the magazines on the coffee table. After a while, though, he started to enjoy the stillness and the briskness of the city at night, and the yellow, regular pulse of the streetlamps became familiar to him. Walking past the darkened shop fronts and bars, closing for the night, the empty playgrounds and parks, the university campus where he had briefly flirted with higher education, made him feel a little less isolated from the world. A voice heckled him from the back of his head, telling him this was crap, but he just kept walking. He was hardly a consummate performer, but he knew by now how to ignore the nags in the cheap seats.
Victor was out on one of his walks when an incident occurred. It didn't seem all that significant at the time, but it circled the edge of his thoughts afterwards, observing from afar.
November, almost a year since he stopped going to his classes at the university, a fact he was ruminating on as he walked. Since then he had made no further effort to get out into the world or make new friends and as he crossed a wide road and entered a residential area popular with students, he thought about the last time he had even had a conversation with someone. There was his older sister, who called occasionally, always from a different place. She had left home when she was fifteen and Victor only ten and had never settled anywhere for long since. The conversation between the distant siblings was never particularly effusive, but they still stayed on the line for hours, comforting in the shared silence.
Victor frowned. How long had it been since they last spoke? By and large, her calls came in around once a month, though she was by no means a regimented person; it had to have been at least two since he last spoke to her. He wasn't one for calendar-crossing either, but it definitely felt like it had been too long. Should he worry? Did she sound okay the last time they spoke? 'She never sounds okay…' he said to himself. Had she said anything strange? He couldn't remember. He would have noticed if she sounded…
He started suddenly, almost teetering over to avoid colliding with a woman walking in the opposite direction. He had become occupied with thinking of his sister and had been staring at nothing through narrowed eyes. 'Sorry.' He said, looking up and seeing that the woman wasn't alone. A small girl, ten years old maybe, was hanging off the end of the young woman's arm, staring up at him as you might expect a young girl to stare at a strange man in the street. 'I wasn't paying…'
'S'alright.' She pre-empted him, and Victor couldn't help but feel she was giving him a very strange look. Her lips pursed slightly and her eyes seemed to move around his face before meeting his with an impassive gaze. The pair made no motions to leave, so Victor sidled around them on the kerbside and continued his walk. When he reached the end of the street, he looked back over his shoulder. They were still standing, hand in hand, under the glow of the streetlamp, watching him. They were both wearing black coats, but he couldn't quite make out their faces. He was sure the woman was frowning.
The incident sparked something of a panic attack in Victor. With each step he made towards home, he thought more and more of the woman and the look on her face as he had rounded the corner. He chewed his thumbnail. Did she know him? Had she recognised him and he failed to recognise her? Did she know something about him? By the time he opened the front door he had exhausted a long list of possible and increasingly implausible list of reasons why she had looked at him so strangely. Did she think he was a vagrant of some kind? A drunk? Did she know he was a vampiric freak who barely left his house, and even then only to wander the streets at night?
He went into the bedroom and closed the door, breathing heavily and shaking. He sloped forward and knelt down by his bed, as if to pray. He did not pray; instead he hunched over his crossed arms and sobbed exactly twice. Letting a few tears well, they broke and rolled down his cheeks as he fell asleep. Doors opened, doors closed.
Man with a cat by Cynthia Olson
His cat disappeared, on the same day his wife slipped on the uneven pavement and cracked her jaw on the concrete. Holding twin bags of groceries she had no free hand to stop her fall, as her brain shook in her skull. He also lay passed out, in the spare bedroom, where he had been for three days with two bottles of vodka, side by side on the pressed wood side-table. Rising only for a piss in the guest toilet across the hall, he barely noticed her collapsed silhouette beyond the Venetian blinds, turned downward to block the hundred degree heat. He'd forgotten to lift his boxers and would have fallen himself if not for the support of the armchair as he crossed the living room.
No drop of blood marked her descent, only a puddle of melted vanilla ice cream where it had seeped from the carton. The cat was no where to be found. All of the groceries had spoilt by then, except a few canned goods and a box of Rice Crispies. Her calves and the backs of her hands were blistered with third degree burns, the undertaker would later say. No one knew how long she had baked in the sun.
Two-days later at the closed casket service, the cat still had not turned up. The man trembled as the alcohol left his blood and he placed a dish of cat chow outside the back door. At the memorial service her brothers delivered practiced messages of condolence to him, but did not shake his hand, silently wiping themselves clean of him.
Pausing at the stone with his daughter's name carved deep, he crouched in a labored effort to pull a tall weed away. They grew quickly this time of year.
Driving home he parked the blue Lincoln sedan next to his wife's white Chevrolet and avoided entering the empty house. He would look for the cat.
He began in the garage. The cat was, after all, an outdoor cat. He uncovered the mulch bin. He looked into the barrel of the washing machine, and in the dryer where a load of laundry was now wrinkled. He walked away from the house toward the hedge of roses. He saw that two were ready to be clipped and wondered where she'd kept the shears. Returning to the garage for a flashlight he peered into the drainage ditch that ran along the drive and continued on through the neighboring fields all the way to the reservoir eight miles distant. He walked around the house three times in all, searching under various shrubs.
By dusk, rings of sweat had formed under the arms of his dress shirt and along his back collar. Finally, he gave up. He determined that the cat was lost to coyotes. He would enter the house alone. Retrieving his keys where he'd left them atop the washing machine, he leaned against the rider-mower looking at the dusty windshield of the Chevy. As the stars began to show themselves in the clear night and he sat still in the cluttered, empty space he heard a small noise. Opening the trunk of his wife's car he saw the cat, quite alive. It had been locked within for these three days.