The Empties

I almost didn’t notice it.

When I came home from work, pushing the buttons to make it go, I walked into my place and missed it at first. The difference. Something was a little off, just slightly unfamiliar. I stood in the middle of the living room, body still and eyes scanning, and someone watching would think I was listening for a robber or remembering something I left at work. But it was my apartment. I was staring it down.

Still focused, I put down my bag and took off my coat, spinning around at different angles. I was trying to catch what it was that didn’t make sense, what buzzed wrong. I couldn’t figure it, like a blind-spot in my eye that got fuzzier the more I used it. I remembered the picture and went off to find it, emerging in the living room with the print in hand. It was a photo I’d taken of my Christmas tree last month, another thing for the list of things I wasn’t sure why I still did. Maybe because you’re supposed to, or maybe out of habit, or maybe wishful thinking that I had a family to share it with.

Maybe that.

I held up the photo in front of me, looking back and forth and comparing, like those Guess-What’s-Wrong comics where there’s two almost identical panels side-by-side with X amount of things different. My head went left, right, left, hitting every detail and registering them.

Nothing. But there was something there I wasn’t getting. Something overlooked.

I put down the picture and turned on the television, on it one boxer smashing another. His defeat was being recorded into his face-landscape, leaving a permanent record of this day: the day he lost it all. I watched it as I sat, sat, sat down further into the point where my armchair should’ve been stopping me. I hit that apex and lost my balance, my legs going up and my arms shooting out to catch myself. I hit the ground hard, teeth and eyelids clamping shut with a flash of light.

My eyes opened into confusion, looking at the coffee table at eye-level, the stain-dusty ground beneath me with four rug-dimples where the armchair had flattened and smoothed the fabric. This was a space that hadn’t existed since I’d moved in and now I was sitting in it. The view felt strange and cold, an unwelcome empty in my home.

My armchair was gone. So big I’d missed it, looking for the tiny details when it was so large. Overlooked thoroughly, an entire piece of furniture was vanished.

I called my landlord, asked him if he’d been in here, if some kind of repo man or ex-girlfriend had gotten in and taken my chair. In Swear-I’m-Not-Crazy voice I asked him, could there be some reason why it’s gone. He said exactly three words, one of which wasn’t even a real one:

“What?” Then,

“What?” Then,

“Dunno.”

I hung up, staring into where my chair used to be.

The next morning, I forgot to look to see if it was back, so when I got home I was expecting it to be there, like it was a dream, a dream or something similar, something like an hallucination unprovoked.

At night I came in, tired from the buttons, and there it was. The empty space where my chair should have been. The chair was not only gone, in it’s place was a brutish empty with just as much presence as my beaten-down-brown corduroy chair. A block of air which stared. I kept my eye on it, moving into the bedroom doorway and throwing my bag onto the bed without moving my stare.

The noise that came back was wrong. Instead of bag-bouncing-on-bed, there was bag-hitting-floor, and when I turned away from the living room empty to look behind me, I saw another one.

Another empty.

My bed was gone.

I just pushed my buttons at work, not telling anyone about the furniture or the empties, going about the business with a secret in my eyes. I considered calling the cops but then I didn’t. And as I kept quiet over the days, my apartment died off piece by piece. Each opening of the door at night found another thing gone. The coffee table. A lamp. My refrigerator. Some things I replaced, most I didn’t.

My life was filling with the empties. A cold moved in that held back my movement, the air hostile against me. I sat lonely and listened to it, missing my television and wondering what the world was doing. I slept between blankets on the floor until those disappeared, and then I just curled up in a ball and dreamed.

One day I woke up and my legs were gone. I sat up quietly and looked down at the empty attached to my waist. It wanted me gone, wanted me all to itself. The room was nothing, the apartment a cleared out square from floor to ceiling and the memory of anything else scrubbed clean.

I knew there was no use fighting the empties. When they want you gone you go away and that’s that. Nothing could save my armchair, or my old guitar I’d stopped playing, or my television, or my closet doors, and nothing could save me.

I went back to sleep without a word, waiting for it to happen.

Originally written 03.21.04