white hole

wes by night, in his room with a black sharpie, drawing Xs all over his body. the chart of them: inside left forearm, inside right thigh, left anklebone, slightly off-center forehead, left eyelid, right earlobe, the soft underbelly of his chin, in the hollow of his throat, and now the marker hovered over the ridge of an iliac crest - he stood naked in front of the mirror, eyes focused on his own eyes. he knew how stoned he was, felt his brain soggy with it. he ran his free hand through his hair and idly thought about shaving it all off. he’d done it before, in a drunken fit, taken the clippers to his scalp and watched with great zeal the way the follicles fell. he’d let it grow out of boredom, enjoyed the way women would touch it, exclaiming at the tight curls.

he was born with violence inchoate, in diametric opposition to his immediate family, who were as calm and settled as lambs in a pasture. his mother had been a kind woman, soft like a marshmallow and slightly dumb, preferring mass-marketed paperbacks to the science-fiction her husband devoured. he figured the violence came from his paternal grandfather, who was a wicked drunk, who lived alone in a dilapidated and messy house after his wife’s cancer had made an antecedent of her. figured it skipped a generation. a recessive trait. he only remembered a few family visits, and they had always ended badly, with the old man slurring into his Canadian Club, smile pasted poorly to his mouth as he spoke nasty truths that he perverted to suit the moment. he had used his fists on his wife, that much wes knew - he’d never asked his father, but the way his face tautened, the way his arms hung ready at his sides, (instead of nested in pockets as they usually were) versed him of a threat from the old man. it took wes’ father a good half hour to calm down, usually just as they hit the bridge over a perpetually muddy river. the silence broke easily, as though sliding aside. he would light his pipe and begin casual conversation as though they were driving back from the mall. as though his father didn’t exist. only once did wes bring the subject up, just as they passed over the bridge, and his father’s speech became terse, as though the words had to squirm to get past his clenched teeth.

music was playing, something low, something urgent. wes wasn’t listening to it, but it informed his heartbeat. the cold from outdoors leaked in through the old window, set badly in its frame. he drew a pair of black, fingerless gloves over his hands and flexed his fingers. tilted his head. all at once he felt ridiculous and flung the gloves from him. they crumpled in a corner like dead rodents. he put clothes on, not even bothering to note what they were, opting for a loose brown sweater, a white t-shirt and jeans. the girl kept invading his thoughts like an unanswered phonecall. the girl from the bookstore. their brief words, swallowed up by the spines of the books. his conflicting desire to walk with her to her destination (back the way he’d come) and his desire to find a bar and drown himself in whiskey. he had another girl on his mind that day. she called herself Charlie, short for Charlene. nice girl. he met her a month ago at the movies. walking out the door. lighting her cigarette. the flash of gratitude - and something else - in her eyes. the casual conversation leading to a drink in a dark pub. that drink leading to another. leading to karaoke - she sang, he didn’t - leading to her apartment and a drunken fumble in the hallway, sloppy movements leading to her slapping him across the face. the lacuna of horror as she realized what she’d done. dissolving into giggles which veered to shrieking as he grabbed her by the hair and dragged her into her apartment. collapsing like buildings detonated from the foundation onto her couch, grappling with one another’s twisted wreckage. over the month, it had gotten worse. she confessed her rape fantasy to him and he obliged her. the rope burns on his palms. her helpless, contorted snarl still rang in his ears.

“what’s your name?”

“saskiya,” she said, staring at him unrelentingly. flicking her hair over a shoulder. narrowing her eyes. shading her gaze from the sun.

“that russian or something?”

she shrugged. “yeah. what’s yours?“

“viktor,” he lied, unsure why.

“that russian?” her lips curved like a saber unsheathing.

“da.”

“well, thanks for the smoke,” she said, and started to walk. he followed alongside.

“you walking this way?”

“sure.”

they walked like that together, smoking, silent. her phone rang and she answered it, holding a conversation with the other end while completely ignoring wes. he found he didn’t mind. eventually, she ended the call. “where are you going?” she asked offhandedly, as though the answer didn’t matter to her overmuch.

“down the street. you?”

“same place,” she said without missing a beat. “but seriously, where are you going?”

“just walking.”

“ah.”

again, silence intruded like a third wheel. a few daring birds had taken up perches in the still-bare trees. they made tremulous song. clouds passed over the sun and they both felt chilled. “well, viktor,” she said finally, “this is my stop. thanks again, for the smoke.”

“any time.”

and just like that, she turned. wes walked another block without thinking, then stopped in front of a run-down apartment complex, staring at a broken window. it had grown dark, and the sky was clotted with clouds like rhexic blisters. the thought passed him that he should follow her at a distance, but then Charlie’s gasping laughter came back to him and he crossed wires, imagining the rape of saskiya. he grew uncontrollable within himself, felt his muscles writhing over his skeleton. he lit another cigarette and headed home.


wes by night, staring into the mirror, suffused with smoke. the music had ended and he inhabited a limbo of action. felt like he was floating instead of standing stationary. closed his eyes and tried to feel himself further and further above his skull, lifting out of his body as though drawn out by a celestial hand. it only lasted a second, that vertiginous sensation, tipping over a precipice, before he was snatched back earthbound, rocking back on his heels. his eyes flew open like startled shutters. old, crusted hate shook itself loose from its cage and pissed acidly into his stomach. shook itself like a kenneled dog, ears flat, frothing at the corners of its mouth. wes turned away from the mirror, lowered himself to the hardwood, beginning a series of calisthenics to purge. he did this until sweat dripped from his brow and his abdomen quivered from the effort.

hours later, in the whirl of a padded booth in some bar. friends all around, crowding, jostling elbows, roaring with drink. enough alcohol on their breath to breathe fire if ignited. wes, jammed in the corner but fighting back, just as rowdy and boisterous if not more. he never knew what he was saying, but he knew it made the table shake with their laughter. had to remind himself of their names, sometimes, in foggy attempts to reinstate his hold on reality. lucas. norris. jake. the two girls from another table, coquettish in tone but garish in demeanor. jake’s hand on the blonde one’s thigh. running up her leg. her attempts to fend him off. her contradictory giggles. her burnished cheeks and darting eyes. drinking a cosmopolitan. the other, red-headed, gigantic breasts, amazonian. flirting dangerously with lucas. norris trying to horn in on the action, clueless to their intended targets. the bar tilted like a pinball machine, dislodging their coterie into the chilly grasp of the evening. it had rained. the sidewalks and streets were slick with it. just as always, they shouted and caterwauled the whole way back to wes’ apartment, where music played again. wes could see the faint marks of the sharpied Xs. he’d spent a good time rubbing the visible ones off, but if he looked hard enough, he could still see them.

three splayed out in the living room. someone turned on the television and there was a squealing fight, between the blonde and jake, over control of the remote. wes, in the kitchen, with norris, lines of coke on the table. norris had arranged them like a galaxy. they railed them at the same time, each taking an arm of the spiral. a small pile remained. “white hole,” said wes, randomly. they sat, spinning in their respective orbits, talking on topics neither of them knew shit about, expatiating like scholars on life and the universe. wes found himself talking about saskiya, said things he didn’t know he felt. found himself talking about Charlie. norris looked lost throughout the narrative, grayed-out by the alcohol and the cocaine, nodded his head irregularly. wes, angry, slammed his fist on the table, and norris’ eyes snapped open. they got up and went to the living room, norris falling once against the wall with a giant thud. books fell from a shelf, scattering across the floor; wes fell on his friend like a hungry mongrel, whaling on him even as he crumpled beneath the fury. the next thing: jake & lucas, tearing him from his prey. the next thing: alone, in the living room, the music still on, blasting. the next thing: the blonde girl, teetering out of the bathroom, eyes half-open, terror slathered on her face. she’d been crying: her cheeks ran ashy with mascara and her lips were smeared with shakily-applied paint. they stared at one another as two tourists gawking at respective disasters. “get out,” wes snarled, and she fled, one heel in her hand. the door slamming shut behind her. shaking the walls. the next thing: dark, and dream.


(it’s his house. it’s his parent’s bedroom. two bookshelves, facing each other like sentinels over the king-size bed. his father’s, crammed with paperbacks, seeming to lean. then fall. both fall, scattering their cargo over the bed and the floor, covering a body that lay on the sheets. the sound of a car backfiring, echoing. the acrid smell of smoke. a gray-white ghost of it in the air. the fan, turning, turning, faster, cracks in the ceiling spidering out from it. a graveyard with heaving headstones. the ground, undulating. cracks in the sky. trees planted upside-down in the mud, roots in the clouds. their weight is tearing out the sky.)


the bellicose growl of the bar behind him, wes standing outside. (wes is out cold on his couch) dazed by the temperature, feels afloat in the lukewarm air. the buildings around him seem unreal, permeable, like weird spongiforms grown up out of the asphalt. he has always prided himself on seeming less intoxicated than he actually is. a troupe of girls passes him, each of them engaged with their cellphones. he seems a blur of blued curves. feels himself swell up, primally, sizing them - but then they are gone & he watches them go, through the cloud of his cigarette smoke. wes plunges his hands into his back pockets and snarls silently at the stars.

as he lists slightly by the bar, dollar bills crammed into a fist, he overheads a woman talking. she is discussing her past with another man, who leans towards her on his stool as though about to fall on her with lust. she is confessing: she was a siamese twin, severed from a sister at birth. felt guilty every day that she lived. she paused, downed the rest of her pink, frothy drink. fixed her eyes on wes. "you know what i'm talkin about, don't you darlin? you know what its like - to lose somebody. someone close to you gets tore outta the world, you spend the rest of your goddamn life tryin to paste over the hole..."

"no," wes lied. "sorry."

she shrugs. gives him a nasty, irregular smile. "ever'body has. you, too - maybe you jus don't know it yet." with that, she turned back to her man, grabbing his thigh. wes ordered a double in her cloyingly perfumed wake. his chemistry boiling, he returned to the table feeling newly arrogant. swept his eyes over the tableaux of his friends and their girls. felt nothing for them.


wes had spent his time in college as a whirlwind passing through a small town. he enjoyed a sotto-voce notoriety among the women of their academic terrarium - that he was a violent fuck, an aggressor, despite his bland & limpid smiles. he was personable in society, yet, even to the ones who knew him best, seemed distant & aloof, as though constantly occupied with something burning intensely, in his brain. hed majored in business, though seemed largely unconcerned with his progress, enjoying a steadily average GPA. he knew none of his professors by name, and preferred it that way.

only once had he come afoul of campus law, when a high-strung girl - Christine - had shrilly invoked the police on him for attempted rape. it had come to a farce of a hearing, where the girl had broken down & admitted to having wanted it. he had walked into sunlight, arrogantly free & clear -


- how many times had he surfaced from blinding oblivion in the same place, pretzeled on his couch, head going nova? the familiar agony - no matter how frequent, never ceased to cause him new pain in a new place. this time, behind his eyeballs, under his fingernails. the mirror showed his face, messily bisected by a ruddy line of dried blood, from jawline, under the nose, to just below the eye. the same hue, flaky on the dull ridge of his knuckles -



saskiya had reached a modicum of homeostasis, arriving at wakefulness in her own bed. she felt at peace, lying inert as though paralyzed, eyes twitching to & fro in her skull. eventually, however, the exacting lassitude of sleep pooled in her muscles & she stretched, hearing joints pop & feeling herself extend like taffy on a pull. she yawned like a cat & turned her head to see Henry, still asleep, curled like a child around his pillow, tucked into a near-fetal ball.