The Nothing That Is

by Kyle Winkler

And to anyone who’s ever had an asshole boss.

plangent

That voice that sounded like two voices layered on top of one another. One voice wearing another voice like a sleeve.

I think he had no legit way to shitcan me. And, let’s be honest—I did most of his work for him. Why would you fire someone like that? You don’t. Instead, tyrants berate their captives and keep them weak.

There was a moment where I knew I hated the Rodnickis (and their dipshit kids), but I also understood why they acted the way they did. It was terrifying to be unsure about money. Even more terrifying to let someone else run you over, tell you what to do. So, in self-preservation, they did the running over first. It wasn’t right, of course, but it checked out in the realm of human motivations and the drama of psychology. All I could think was that people would be better off separated like betta fish. If not, we’d tear each other apart.

I shifted my feet/stomped on the floorboard to get Tina’s attention. That is, if the music hit that brief nothing that exists between songs. Tina called it the Nothing That Is. An eternal pause, a place of safety before the chaos of guitar and drums. She said she sometimes cherished that moment more than anything.

A man sat behind me. He was in a wingback chair at the head of a long dining table under a strange sheet. There was a golden ring around his head to hold the sheet and there were spaces for his eyes and a flap for his mouth when he ate. I had a brief thought that this was made from the same thing as the bright smoke and cold fire. He was staring straight ahead. His eyes were wide open. I slipped but caught myself. The man didn’t turn his head or give any notion that he knew I was there. Not at first. I tried to talk but I couldn’t think of anything to say. Sorry? For what? I mean, I knew who this was. I had never been more certain of a person’s identity in my life. Mr. Dinosaur sat as if he’d been there forty thousand years.

He turned his head to look at me. But the way he did it was as if an unseen hand was pushing his chin toward me. The weird sheet didn’t rumple like cloth should.

For some reason, I craved possession of the spoon. It was an information gatherer and a weapon (no, it wasn’t—but cowards will have their shields).

Peristalsis is the involuntary act of your esophagus squeezing partially chewed food into the stomach. This was the nightmare version of peristalsis. I collapsed backward onto the table. The metal spoon wobbled and sank down inside him like an old iron ship into the sea.

Although I hadn’t accepted, I felt as if my even showing up that night was an acknowledgement of perpetual complicity.

As I watched the documentary more closely this time, I grew terrified of the prospect, or fact, of actual dinosaurs. They had lived so long ago and for so long. Hundreds of millions of years. It was staggering. Whereas humans had only been around a blip of a fraction of that time. What, one hundred thousand years? A little more? Moreover, dinosaurs I’d always associated with each other as a boy were apparently eons apart in time, like the brontosaur and the tyrannosaur or the triceratops. The latter two were in a whole other era of time than the former. What the hell? My mind could not correlate everything that’d gone on that day, and trying to slather a layer of time icing over it wasn’t doing me any favors.

Before I was able to set the new answering machine down, the Manager—a frumpy, middle-aged masturbator with hair oil leaking into his polo collar—leaned into Sean’s ear and (loud enough for me to glean) said that if he didn’t straighten out the dot matrix printer display before closing, he’d lose his weekend hours and no lunch breaks. My knuckles whitened. I felt my gut froth with nuclear rage. I wanted to chew this manager’s nose off and spit it into the register drawer.

When I paid attention again, Chessman was trying to placate Rodnicki. Something about not prosecuting if the money was paid back within a certain amount of time. He was smiling. It was a cruel smile. One made by those who claim moral victory over those they capture. It was an evil kindergarten teacher’s smile.

I wasn’t sure about all this but didn’t want to stir it up with the police and had no way to say that sometimes a person can be pushed to kill themselves and it’s not really “taking your own life,” but rather “giving in to the atmospheric pressures that are only obeying the distant pulses and waves that emanate from so far away in the universe that there’s no imagination mutant enough to hug it alive.”