Michael Seidlinger: Falter Kingdom

My eyes half open, I bring the laptop with me to bed, under the covers, and I can almost forget about graduation. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the kind of stuff I’ve been trying to ignore all day. I see the kind of stuff that started this morning.

This time it’s the bedroom door opening by itself.

It started with one of my mom’s vases found shattered to pieces in the hall. Mom thought it was me, stumbling half asleep at night, who broke it. I’m not that clumsy. Still, she installed night-lights in the hallway like they would help.

The door cracks open, maybe three inches, just enough to see one of the night-lights: no one at the door.

The door closes as gently as it opened, the sound of the door clicking back into place.

The whole thing lasts maybe ten minutes. But yeah, some things I can’t just push aside. Some things make it harder to veg out on videos.

Stuff’s been happening all day. It’s all so exhausting to think about.

What’s causing it, well, yeah, about that…

I’ll get to it. Just let me watch one more video.

IT WAS AN HOUR OR SO BEFORE SCHOOL LET UP FOR THEweekend, but Brad, Blaire, Steve, and I were late for final period so were like, Fuck it, and walked the trail that led from Meadows through to the southern tip of the city and beyond. Walk far enough and you’ll see all the buildings let up and some sense of a forest pulling in, taking over.

The spring weather in full effect, I felt pretty good. Getting out of final period made this work for me so damn well.

The fact that Brad always has a cooler full of beer in the trunk of his car didn’t hurt either. I usually wait until someone cracks one open before cracking into my first, but that day, it was different.

“You guys hear?”

Brad was driving me crazy, spreading gossip like an attention whore, a walking tabloid.

Brad brought along some dude I don’t really know named Steve, and they were going on and on about the latest on Nikki.

Nikki Dillon. She’s the “hot” girl — has been since sophomore year.

Nikki Dillon — the one who seemed to have a new guy every week. Not because she slept around; the world knows it’s more like she just lets guys audition to play that role. Doubt anyone ever gets in her pants, which makes the whole world only want to know more, everyone talking about the latest.

Like clockwork, I’d hear about it just like I was hearing about it now.

Brad with the “Yo, so I heard from Kev who heard from James who heard from Greg,” and then it goes on like that, a stepped-on piece of gossip that I shouldn’t care about.

But it’s Nikki.

Everyone is at least somewhat interested in hearing about the latest on Nikki. And Blaire is no different. Blaire’s been a bud of mine since sixth grade. She and I might have given it a shot if: 1) I hadn’t met Becca, and 2) Blaire lost that thing I can’t stand. She has this way about her that makes it so that we never get along. Let me make better sense of it.

I mean, Blaire’s great. She does my homework and I do hers for the subjects where we falter, the stuff I’ll never need and the stuff she’ll pledge, later in life, to be against (she thinks extracurricular activities are a waste of time).

Blaire just, I don’t know, seems to see through the front I put up. And by “front” I mean I’m usually not really listening to people.

It’s okay.

It’s true… I’m really not.

I kind of do this thing where I listen, but I’m also paying more attention to how the conversation works. There’s a sense to every conversation, even the ones that are nonsense. There’s a rise and fall to everything said, and there’s momentum that I pay attention to all the time, watching where it’ll go next. And on that day, hearing Brad tell us about Nikki’s latest guy, I listened but I also sipped from a can of beer. And beyond that, I walked the trail, my gaze to the ground, listening to how Brad and Steve traded gossip that couldn’t be true with this sort of mutual enthusiasm that I almost felt jealous about not having.

But I had the beer so I had a perfectly good excuse.

Blaire looked at me, that judging look.

I offered a can. “Want one?”

“Um, yeah, okay.”

I knew what she was thinking. “What?”

Blaire shook her head. “Nothing.”

Here we go again. Either I kept asking or she’d just tell me.

I took another gulp.

She didn’t even open her can.

Blaire sighed. “I’m just saying, when are you going to tell her?”

Why now? But then why did I even need to ask? I already had the answer: because it’s Blaire. She brings up whatever she wants whenever she wants. It’s probably why she’s stuck around. Persistence makes for someone who isn’t easy to ignore. It’s complicated.

“I figure it’s almost graduation,” I told her.

“That’s disgusting.” Blaire made a face. “Ugh.”

“She’s going up north and I’m staying here going to State. It’ll work itself out naturally.”

Blaire rolled her eyes. “I don’t get you, Hunter. I really don’t.”

There probably wouldn’t be a whole lot to get if we really got along. But Blaire has always been sort of my opposite. If she were in my shoes, she would have ended things with Becca weeks after going steady.

Where am I? I’m years in, putting in time.

But, you know.

Maybe you don’t.

That’s kind of why I’m going on about what happened on this day.

Yeah, well, we walked the trail to the point where it ends and it’s all just trees and, even at high noon, you get, at best, an inch of light before it’s all shadows. This is where we all used to go to get scared. All the grade school kids hung around this forested zone back when shadows were all we needed to get our thrills. But little do the kids know that if you keep walking south, you’ll end up in a clearing that really shouldn’t be there. You don’t really see it coming until you clear the last patch of trees. It’s a muddy pasture pockmarked with rocks and beer cans and other garbage. Footprints in the mud all over the place.

I couldn’t tell you how often this place becomes the scene of a killer party. We’re talking some of the best I can remember. I can’t really remember any one party in particular, but yeah, it’s usually half the school, bonfires and plenty of what we need to get mellow.

During those parties, everyone can almost be the same person.

But the clearing wasn’t where we were going that day. We had somewhere else far more secluded in mind.

You keep walking south, pushing past a water tower and that one abandoned car without wheels or axles, totally shot to shit, full of bullet holes — eventually you’ll get there.

This is the place.

Falter Kingdom.

I’ll try to explain it. It’s kind of a simple picture, nothing really wrong with it. You might see it and think, “So? Just another place where high school kids chill and smoke.” But the first clue is how it should be a sewer tunnel but it’s too big to be one. The concrete opening is the size of a car tunnel, and looking in you see nothing but darkness.

That darkness, it doesn’t let up.

Someone painted a crown around the opening of the tunnel. You can see the black paint, the spikes of the crown, from really far away. It has something to do with the lore, what people say about it.

I’ve been here a number of times but I’ve never taken part.

The thing about Falter Kingdom is that it’s not just any tunnel. The tunnel is full of darkness and it goes on and on and on, without end. People say that initially it was supposed to be part of the city subway system, but the mass transit authority discovered that, a couple miles in, there was a weak point, a sort of fissure. The fissure released all sorts of frequencies and energies and stuff. That’s what you get when people turn spirituality into hard science.