CREATURES OF THE VOID

CREATURES OF THE VOID

“The key that winds the spring of this story,” he said, “is that familiar device of fable and folklore wherein a person, in this case a woman, attempting to escape her destiny, runs into it head on.”  He had dropped his voice an octave on those last words, hoping the effect would arouse curiosity.  But it didn’t seem to work.

     “Well, then, tell us about it,” his sister said, bored by the idea.  “Is it a long story?  Most fables are very short.  I think we’re all in the mood for a long story.”

     “It’s not too long,” he said, “I think you’ll like it, though, and it’s long enough that it’ll fill a good portion of the evening.”

     “We won’t get tired?” the other woman said, “I can’t bear sitting for long stretches.”

     “When you get restless, just get up and pace around.  If we need to, we’ll all get up and pace around, and continue when we sit again.”

     “Is this going to be a scary story?” the little one asked, her voice suggesting that she was already apprehensive from the way he had introduced the idea that would govern his tale.

     “There are no monsters,” he said, “if that’s what you mean.  Besides, you’ll probably fall asleep long before it’s over.”

     “No I won’t!” she said, a touch of alarm in her voice, for she didn’t want to miss any of the unusual experiences the night had to offer.

     They were gathered in the kitchen of his sister’s apartment--he, his sister, his sister’s daughter, and the woman he had been seeing for the last several months, with whom he had been gradually settling into a domestic relation.  He wouldn’t characterize this relation as romantic, nor as passionate, even in the purely physical sense.  She was a handsome woman, large framed, substantial but not fat, very thick hair cut at mid-length, with a fine, straight nose and glistening blue eyes.  There was an iceberg-like quality about her.  She seemed cold and stand-offish, haughty, almost, but she wasn’t.  One got that impression on first glance, for she threw out around her an air of unapproachableness.  But she was very much the opposite, liking intimacy, responding to it with warmth and a very gentle pressure of her bodily presence.

     The kitchen was lit by three candles placed on the table round which they sat.  It was cold, for his sister’s apartment was heated by electricity, and they had wrapped themselves in blankets.  A storm had come off the lake, drenching the city with torrential rains, and behind the first blasts, a cold front swept in, dropping temperatures into the teens and transforming the torrent into blizzard.  Everything iced over quickly and the heavy snow accumulated right from the start, snapping power lines from the weight, casting the whole city into the dark.  People sought shelter where they may and were advised to stay put until the emergency was over.  And there seemed to be no end to it--for the darkness was filled with white sheets of snow swirling on the wind and curling against the windows of the apartment, which were already beginning to freeze over, a thin layer of ice making it hard to see out.

     “Do you believe in heaven?” he asked his niece, and she replied, “Of course, heaven is where God lives and it’s like paradise.”

     “Exactly,” he said.  “But some people don’t believe in heaven.  Did you know that?”

     “Is this the story, now?  Are you beginning the story?” his sister intoned irritably.

     “Let her answer,” he said, impatiently.

     “Did you know that some people don’t believe in heaven?”

     “Nooo,” his niece responded, looking at her mother and then at him, unsure of what he was asking her.

     “Well, it’s true.  Some people have no faith that the life we live has any meaning, and they don’t believe in anything.  For them, all is ashes, and they’re never happy.  But worst of all, they don’t like people; if they are women, they hate men, and if they are men, they hate themselves.  They hate everything, the country they live in and all the countries they don’t.  They hate the past, and they hate most of all people who don’t agree with them--they hate most those who have different opinions.  Everything for them is ashes.  You’re not like that, nor is your mother, nor am I like that, and neither is Myrna.”

     “Are there really people like that?” she asked.

     “Oh, yes.  Many.  More and more, people are becoming like that.  This is what my story is about.  One person who is just like that.”

     “Is it a real person?” she asked, a bit frightened.

     “Do you have to tell such a story?” his sister intervened.  “Why not change the subject.  Let’s not tell stories.  Let’s play games instead.”

     “She’s a made up person,” he said, ignoring his sister.  “But that doesn’t mean she isn’t real.”

     “How can she be made up and real at the same time?” his niece asked, knitting her brows, interested even if she was  scared. 

     “Well, if I told you a story about a frog who lived in a pond, you would know this frog is made up, right?”

     “Right,” she confirmed.

     “But you do know that frogs live in ponds, right?”

     “Right,” she confirmed again.

     “And this made up frog would have to be like them in many ways, or it would not be a frog who lived in a pond, right?”

     “I see,” she said, “This person who doesn’t believe is made up, but she is made up from real people, so she is both made up and real at the same time.”

     “Exactly,” he said, pleased at how quickly she saw the point.

     “Myrna,” his sister said, “do you want to hear this story?  Sounds like it’s going to be a bit of woman-bashing to me.”

     “I think I know this story, or at least, I know some part of it.  It’s worth hearing.  And I’m curious how it’s going to end.  Very curious.”  She said the word curious in such a way that she made the girl and her mother look at her.  A sense of something in the dim flickering glow of the candles made them look first at her and then at him.

     “It is going to end, isn’t it?” she asked him, as though there were something very disturbing they both knew about and which was going to be revealed in the story. 

     “It ends,” he said cryptically.

     “You’d better be careful,” Myrna said.

     And in response to that he seemed to stare across the room into the darkness while the others waited for him to begin.

     “Once upon a time,” he began, looking at his niece, “a time not so long ago. . .”

     “How long ago?” the girl interrupted, wanting to be clear about what was going to happen.  “Was it in my lifetime?” 

     “Yes,” her uncle said, “it all happened after you were born.”

     She grinned and leaned her elbows on the table, resting her chin in her hands, feeling like she was going to be a part of the story. 

     “Once upon a time,” he began again, “there was a woman who left home, the place where she grew up and was loved and became a woman, because she felt that home was boring and she wasn’t appreciated there for her talents, and nobody respected her, because they all knew her and she would always be just a sister and a daughter, a neighbor and a friend, and she wanted more than that.  She didn’t want to be loved.  That was not what she wanted.  She had plenty of love.  She had, in fact, too much love.  Everybody she knew already loved her, and she felt it was, perhaps, the love which made her so unhappy at home.  So it wasn’t to be loved that made her want to go away.  It was just the opposite.”

     “I want to be loved,” his niece said.  “I wouldn’t go away because mom loved me.”  This was an idea that had never occurred to her--that a girl or a young woman would reject her home and the people who loved her because they loved her.  

     “Of course you’re loved,” her mother said, patting her on the shoulder and stroking the back of her head.  Then she moved her chair close to her daughter’s and put her arm around her, for she feared this was going to be a bad story and would upset her daughter.  Her brother was, obviously, telling a story about someone he knew, probably someone he had loved.  Myrna seemed to know something about this woman already and was, apparently, very curious.  “Well, well,” she thought, and with her arm around her daughter, she looked across the candle glow to her brother, indicating he should continue.   

     “When she came to the city,” he went on, “she looked around at the tops of the tall buildings shining in the sun and at all the people dressed so fashionably, especially the women, and she almost danced on the sidewalk as she said to herself, ‘It is my destiny to succeed, to become so great that everyone in this city will know me and admire me.’ 

     “And so she began to plan.  And it wasn’t long before she started to become known.   This city,” he said, directing himself to his niece, “is very large, and there are many opportunities for people with ‘talent,’” and he emphasized that word sarcastically.  “This woman, let’s say her name was Eve, was very talented.  But it was not her destiny, as she thought, to become great.  Nor was it her destiny to become known.  Her destiny turned out to be quite different from anything she imagined.

     “She planned a career for herself in politics, and she was very good at it, establishing herself very quickly as a wise person who knew how to get necessary things done.  She made herself indispensable to people with power and influence.  And then one day she met a man who fell in love with her.  But she didn’t want his love.  Remember,” he said, looking at his neice, who had fastened her attention on him, “it was to get away from love that she left her home in the first place.  But also she thought it would get in the way of her plan. 

     “In order to make him go away, she told him a story.  This is the story she told.  Once upon a time, a very lovely woman died and went to heaven, and when she looked around she found that heaven was indeed a paradise, just as you said,” he said to his niece, for he had adopted an attitude now of addressing his story exclusively to her, and she listened with a serious air, focusing on him from under her mother’s arm.

     “And as she looked around, she saw that everything was beautiful, like the countryside in spring, and all the people were fine and lovely--the men were handsome and the women were pretty--and everyone was happy.  And everywhere she went she heard beautiful music, and the sun was always at noon, and it was never too hot and never too windy.  She walked barefoot in the warm grass, over the violets and primroses, whose odors rose up as she passed and perfumed the air.  But she knew she was not going to be happy there, and that no matter how hard she tried to make herself happy, she just wouldn’t succeed.  She noticed, however, that everywhere she stepped, she left behind a footprint of ash.  And the thought of it made her smile.  And then, not long after she arrived in heaven, a man came to her and introduced himself. 

     “Now, she didn’t like this man, because he had a glint in his eye and a curl to his lips that made her think he knew all about her.  She bent down to pick up a violet out of the grass, and when she touched it, it turned to ash and left a film of dust on her fingers.  When she rose, she had a puzzled look on her face.  But the man only laughed.  He said to her, ‘The inside is outside and the outside is inside, and nothing is what it seems, not even eternity.  You’ll become used to it, and after a while you won’t try to pick the flowers anymore.’

     “Then, on a dare, she reached out and touched him, and, with wide eyes and a shout of alarm, he instantly fell into a soft blanket of white ash on the grass, and the woman laughed, saying to herself, ‘You really didn’t know me at all, did you?’”

     “Why did she do that?” his niece cried out, sitting up and getting out from under her mother’s arm, shocked at the cruelty of turning a man into ashes and at the apparent motivelessness of the act. 

     “Well, why do you think?” he asked, reconciling himself to a discussion of what seemed to disturb her.

     The wind was beating against the windows and the noise of it made them listen for a moment, reminding them of the storm outside.  They clutched at their blankets, and the candlelight made the darkness around them seem darker.

     “You oughtn’t to be telling such a story to a child,” his sister said, “Don’t you have any sense?”

     “It’s a fairy tale,” he said, trying to justify himself, feeling a twinge of regret for alarming his niece, for he was only just warming up and he hadn’t realized the image he presented might seem cruel to her.  “That ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall’ business from Snow White is pretty malevolent stuff.  You know that movie, don’t you?” he asked his niece.

     “The queen was jealous of Snow White and wanted her heart cut out,” she told him.

     “Well, this woman isn’t a witch.  But sometimes people can behave like one, can’t they?”

     She nodded her head in agreement, serious, obviously thinking about his question, her large front teeth glinting  through what appeared to be a worried smile.  

     “And remember, this is a made-up story, a fairy tale.” 

     His sister looked at Myrna, and they exchanged glances in what became a prolonged silence, the darkness around the table once again compelling them to listen to the wind outside. 

     “It’s a good thing we have global warming,” Myrna said, trying to fill the gap.  “Imagine how bad it would be if we didn’t!” 

     Then the girl said to her uncle, “The man who fell in love with Eve, he must have been a bad man.”

     “No,” he said.  “Just the opposite.  He was an ordinary guy who liked her because she was very smart and pretty.  She had light brown hair and clear, brown eyes, and such a smile that when she smiled at him he felt comfortable all over, like he had always known her.”

     “Why would she want to turn him into ashes?”

     “Enough of this story,” his sister said.  “She won’t get it, anyway.  She doesn’t see the point, and you’re not going to tell her the point, because I won’t let you.”

     “Do you want to hear the rest of the story?” he asked his niece.

     “Yes, I do.  Eve is not a witch, but she’s not a nice person either.”

     “That’s right,” he said, proud of her and glad she wanted to go on.

     “Well, this man, after hearing her story about the woman who died and went to paradise, should have let Eve alone, but his feelings were very strong, and sometimes when we feel so strongly about things, we don’t listen enough to what our reason tells us.  So this man, let’s say his name is Matthew, decided he would try a different method to soften Eve and win her over.  At first, he let her alone, but he always kept in touch enough to know what she was doing.  And every time she needed some help, he was there. In the beginning it was help at work, but then he would arrange to meet her by accident on the weekends, or in the evenings, and he would say, ‘I thought that was you, I recognized your coat,’ and then he would help her carry groceries, or run an errand for her, or give her a ride somewhere, and she became used to seeing him, and so sometimes she let him take her out to dinner or to a concert or a movie.

     “And he was always good, never making demands on her and letting her determine where they would go and what they would do and how long they would be together.  And after a while they came to know each other very well; they almost became friends.  Sometimes, when they walked, he would reach for her hand, and she would let him hold it for a while, but only for a while.  He was very much in love with her, and she seemed to get used to the idea, though she never gave him any reason to think she might ever change her mind about him.

     “But slowly and gradually she began to change.  When it first started happening she didn’t think anything about it.  She thought she was just getting used to having him around.  But she would unthinkingly take extra care in the morning putting on her makeup, and she would favor this dress one day or that slack suit the next because she noticed how he looked at her when she wore them.  She began to notice many things about how he reacted to her and started, at first without even realizing it, doing things on purpose because they seemed to make him feel good. 

     “Then one night, as they were saying goodnight to each other, he kissed her, and she kissed him back.  And when he left, she went into her apartment and began to storm around the living room, feeling all sorts of emotions that she didn’t want to feel.  She picked up a magazine off the coffee table and threw it against the shelves on the wall, knocking off the knickknacks, sending them scattering and breaking into pieces.  She hated him.  She hated him with a blind fury.  She felt like he had attacked her, like he had, in fact. . .,” and here his sister’s eyes got wide in alarm, and she shook her head, stopping him from completing the thought.  He caught his breath and rethought his phrasing, continuing with, “. . .like he had in fact hurt her.  She felt like his kiss was a punch in the face, and she hated him.  And at the same time, she felt like she was falling in love with him, like she wanted him to kiss her.  She knew she was in love with him.  So she went to bed that night confused and very upset. 

     “The next day, she was sure she was in love with him.  Now, you, I’m sure, would be happy to feel that way about anybody, wouldn’t you?” he asked his niece.

     “I think so.  I love my mom,” she said, snuggling against her, “and I love you.  That makes me happy.”

     “Of course, that’s what being in love is supposed to do, right?”

     “Right.”

     “Well, love didn’t make Eve happy.  She hated Matthew because she had fallen in love with him.  She felt like he oppressed her, like he sat on her heart and kept her from breathing.”

     “Now that’s enough!” his sister shouted, putting her hands on the table, lifting herself up.  “You’re crazy as a loon.  I don’t want this story to go on.  I refuse to hear it!”

     And with that, she took up one of the candles and left the table and searched for and found a box of crackers in the cupboard by the sink.  These she emptied in a bowl and put on the table, then she searched in the drawer beside the stove for a couple of old decks of cards she kept there. 

     “Let’s play rummy.  We all like that game, don’t we?”

     “But mom,” her daughter pleaded.

     “No ‘mom,’” she said.  “I don’t want this to go on.  It’s too much,” she said to her brother.

     He didn’t insist.  He got up from the table and looked out the window, then took a candle and walked into the bedroom.  He came back with a couple of pillows under his arm and said, “If we’re going to play cards, Jena needs to sit up higher.  Here, sweetie, put these on your chair.”

     Now, her head at eye level with the others, she felt like an adult.  After a clumsy shuffle, her mother began to deal out the cards, and when each had seven, she put the decks in the middle of the table.  They began to draw and discard, and round and round they went, keeping their eyes on the cards in their hands, looking at the discards, each attending to his or her own position in the game.  The only sounds that came to them were the muffled moans of the wind outside, the crunching of crackers as every now and then someone reached and nibbled, and the soft slap of cards hitting the table. 

     And then, in a manner as though she were making small talk, not even looking at him, his niece broke the concentrated silence with, “What did Eve do after Matthew kissed her?”  She was, evidently, stimulated by the images he had presented to her, and these stuck in her mind and formed the immediate context of her interests and feelings and of her growing awareness, so that the card playing was a kind of thin layer of obscuring tissue through which she had now to more dimly perceive the story that had been unfolding, and she didn’t like it.  She felt that Eve had something important to say to her, and she felt very strongly that her uncle wanted her to know about it.  She felt also that whatever this was, her mother was opposed to her knowing it and was protecting her.  Her mother was very wise and she loved her.  But she wanted, she needed, to know.

     “Oh,” he said, looking at his sister and at Myrna, both of whom had very negative expressions on their faces, “it’s just here that the fable begins to get interesting.”  Myrna had drawn a card and set down a row of three fives beside the other cards she had already dropped, and looking over the table at his layers and runs, emptied three more cards from her hand, discarded her last card and went out. 

     As they were counting up their points, his niece asked again what Eve had done after Matthew kissed her.  He looked across at his sister, who was shuffling the two decks, and she refused to look up.  Myrna said, under her breath, “Keep it simple.”  And once again he stared across the room into the darkness, and, pulling their blankets over their arms, they all fell silent, waiting for him to begin. 

     “Do you know what it’s like to not belong anywhere?” he asked his niece.  “Of course, you don’t, you can’t imagine it, because you have never had that happen.  Do you know the homeless people who live on the streets outside?”

     “I don’t know them,” his niece replied, puzzled about the connection between these people and the story about Eve.  She tried to imagine homeless people but didn’t have a very good idea of them except that they sat on the sidewalks and on the grass in the parks.

     “I can help you to understand what happened to Eve after Matthew kissed her by telling you about another person.  One time, when I lived in Japan, I knew a man named Ali who came from the eastern part of a country called Pakistan.  While we lived in Japan, that country, Pakistan, fought a civil war, and the eastern part became a new country when it was over.  Ali was born in the western part and lived only a short time in the eastern part before he came to Japan.  Now, when the new country came to be, they wouldn’t accept Ali as a citizen because he was originally from the west, and the west wouldn’t accept him because he had moved to the east.  Poor Ali had no country; he was, no matter where he went, always an alien and would always be one--that is, an alien--for no country would recognize him as one of its own.  It was as though he had never lived on this earth.  Ali was homeless.  He didn’t belong anywhere.”

     “What happened to him?” his niece burst out, alarmed for poor Ali.

     “In truth,” her uncle said, making his point rather too forcefully, “the Japanese put him in jail, because that’s what their law required.”

     “Oh, no!” she cried out.

     “That’s it,” his sister said.  “No more.  You’re traumatizing her.”

     “No, mom, no, I want to hear the story, mom, stop!” 

     Her mother had risen from the table and was dragging her from the chair by the arm, the pillows beneath her spilling onto the floor.  “You’re going to bed, now, because it’s getting late.”

     “No!” she said, sternly and effectively, for her mother had let her arm go.  “I want to hear the story.  I want to know what happened to her.  It’s not fair.  I want to know!”

     Her mother relented, and they had all settled once again into their places and under their blankets.  Myrna had a troubled look on her face, herself beginning to feel that this story was one she might not want to hear, while his sister, a single mother, found the story suddenly coming too close to home and felt there might be something in it too touching upon her own circumstances to bear.  And so, alienated from the world at large by the storm and sitting nervously within a cold and dimly lighted room, the two women prepared themselves as he proceeded with his tale.

     Again, addressing himself exclusively to his niece, he said, “Eve was very troubled about her feelings for Matthew; they were the same feelings, you see, that drove her away from home and made it impossible for her to live there, and she knew that the same thing was happening now in the city.  She felt like she couldn’t live here anymore.  She didn’t know where she could live.  Just like Ali, she felt homeless.”

     “Why didn’t she just tell Matthew to go away?” his niece interrupted with what seemed to her the simplest solution.

     “The reason why, Jena, is she was in love with him.”

     “I don’t understand,” she replied, looking at her mother and then at Myrna, neither of whom offered to help her.  Her mother impatiently shoved the bowl of crackers in front of her daughter and said, “I don’t understand it either.  It’s too crazy for me.”

     “Well, you see, Jena, everything turned to ashes for Eve because loving Matthew threatened to take away the one thing, the only thing, she wanted--,” and here he paused, seeming to search the darkness above and behind her for a way to put it that she would understand.  “The very thing that made her Eve,” he finally concluded.  But her face had scrunched up at this, and he knew that his explanation was no good.  So he said, searching for an analogy, “Think about yourself.  What is it that makes you Jena and not someone else?”

     She thought about it for a few moments, while he looked at her and gave her time.  He was surprised, finally, by what she said, for he hadn’t anticipated her being a thinker, and what she said stopped him for a moment.

     “What makes me Jena and not someone else is you and mom.”

     “Ah!” he replied, after his initial surprise.  “If Eve thought that way, there wouldn’t be a story to tell.”  And for a few moments he just looked at her, admiringly.  But then his attitude seemed to change, and, rising slightly from his chair, he said, “It’s not that Eve was selfish: She was too caught up in the idea of self-hood, which meant for her Eve alone! Eve by herself! Eve pure and clean! Untarnished by anything that might change her.”  He pronounced these phrases as though he were declaiming before an audience, and Myrna had been jolted by the change in him and began to pay more attention to his face as he spoke than to his words.

     “Loving Matthew,” he continued, settling again into his seat, “meant that she would have to step out of herself, like someone stepping out of a house in order to go into the world.  And the thought of it turned everything to ashes for Eve.  She was so oppressed by the feeling of love that she felt she was going to die.  If she stayed in the city, she would smother and die.  The city meant death, and so she had to flee it.  She had to run away from death.  Do you understand now?”

     “I don’t ever want to feel like that,” she cried out with a shiver, having gotten pale at the ideas he had put into her and at the change that had come over him.  Looking at her mother, she reached out her hand.  Her mother rose from the table then and went to her daughter’s side, put her arm around her, and said, “Do you want to hear anymore of this story?  Eve was mixed up, that’s all.  There’s nothing more to learn about her.  She ran away, and that’s how the story ends.  You really don’t want to hear anymore, do you?”

     “Does the story have a happy ending?” she asked her uncle rather courageously, “because if it does, I want to hear it all.”

     “No,” he said gravely.  “Running away from death, she ran right into it.  The story has a horrible ending.  Maybe I shouldn’t tell any more.  Your mother’s right.”  But after a brief pause, he asked her, “Do you want to hear more?”

     “No,” she said, leaning her head against her mother’s stomach and nestling under her arm.  “Why does it have to have a horrible ending?” she shouted and began to cry, all her natural sympathies having been invoked for the image of Eve she had been slowly creating.  She saw her opening the front door of a dark little house in a row of houses on a city block and stepping into the sunshine, and, coming down the steps to the sidewalk, suddenly falling to the pavement and lying there lifeless and empty, like one of her dolls lying on the floor with its eyes open, staring dully upward.  This image reached down deep into her tender and unlearned compassions and released a torrent of tears.  Her mother soothed her, all the while glaring silently at her brother, rubbing her back, cooing that it was only a story, and that there was no such person as Eve.  But it did no good.  She sobbed and sobbed.

     Myrna, feeling exposed under her blanket, had become thoughtful, recalling the horrible death of the person whom she believed at first and now knew the story was about.  She looked at him now with a new interest, for she had learned more about him this night than she had in all the months they had been seeing each other.  Reflexively in the cold she wrapped her arms about herself, and in her mind she shielded herself by the same bodily movement from all his cold and passionless scrutiny.  She hissed at him under her breath, “Monster.”  But he paid no heed, neither to her nor to his sister and niece.  He was staring still into the darkness above and behind his niece.  She wondered if he was meditating the murder of that poor woman, and whether he was feeling revenged by it or mourning her loss.  It was impossible to tell, for his features were impassive.  His last words resonated in her still, “Running away from death, she ran right into it.”  There was an iciness in his voice that made the words sound like a judgment--a verdict from hell.  And she realized, as she warmed herself by the close self-hugging of her arms, that he was an evil man--was, or had become, evil; and the revelation shook her like a chill.  He had blown out the candles, then, and she found herself not alone sitting in the dark.