Ilsa Bick - White Space

She’s so flabbergasted her jaw unhinges. “P-Professor Kramer, wh-what did I do ?”

In answer, Kramer jerks open his desk drawer hard enough to make the pens chatter and yanks out a sheaf of paper-clipped pages, which he tosses onto his desk. “You might have gotten away with this … this rubbish if I was any other instructor, but I’m writing a book on the man, for God’s sake. No one except researchers is allowed access to this material. What, did you think I’d simply ignore this? Time to wake up, Ms. Lindsay. I’m not the headmaster, I don’t care about your sad little history, and I’m sure as hell not your bloody psychiatrist. Now I want to know where you got it.”

She has no idea what he’s talking about. Her eyes fall to the first page:

WHITE SPACE

A Short Story

by

Emma Lindsay

Lit. Seminar 058

“Got it?” She swallows. “I wrote it.”

Kramer’s ears flare Coke-can red. “You’ve got balls, I’ll give you that. Where did you get this? Did you download it from a pirate site?”

She’s getting a very bad feeling about this. Oh boy, is that possible? No, don’t be silly. The guy’s dead . “I-I don’t know what you’re t-talking about, sir.”

“You want to play it that way? Fine.” Kramer tweezes out a single sheet. “Take a good, hard look at this and then convince me why you shouldn’t be expelled.”

This is not happening; this is a nightmare . Tears threaten. Shit, don’t cry . She does what Kramer wants—and as her burning eyes trip over the watery letters and spaces of one word, then jump over white space to the next word and the next and the next, it’s as if an invisible fist has wrapped around her throat and begun to squeeze.

So how long would it take? There had to be a way to figure it. Maybe he should’ve stripped the clothes, but then what? Couldn’t bury them. The ground was frozen solid, and some things wouldn’t burn: snaps, buttons, zippers. And didn’t nylon melt? He thought it did, and there’d be the stink .

And didn’t how long really depend on how bad you wanted something? How much you were willing to risk? Sure. So, clothes or no clothes, if you were a wolf or coyote and starving because Wyoming winters were hard and game, scarce … and there was dinner lying right there? All that easy meat?

A wolf would strip that body to bones in no time .

A wave of unreality washes over Emma. A sudden headache spikes right where it always does, under that lacy cranial plate the doctors screwed into place between her eyes so her brain wouldn’t bubble out. (When the doctors had first shown her the plate, she’d thought, Great, the perfect accessory for every occasion .) The pain is blinding, and she shuts her eyes against the sudden tilt as the world seems to slump and run like superheated glass.

“Right. Wasn’t that interesting, Emma? I thought it was. And now let’s listen to yours , shall we? You’ve no objection if I read while you follow along?” Kramer asks, but it’s one of those rhetorical questions a person knows better than to answer. As Kramer drones, she stares at words and sentences that, up to five seconds ago, she thought were hers alone.

There had to be a way of calculating how long it would take. There must be rules, like physics or math; there were variables to take into account. Temperature, of course, but also the clothes. Maybe he should’ve stripped the clothes, but then what? He couldn’t bury them. The ground was frozen solid, and burning wouldn’t work because zippers, snaps, buttons didn’t burn and Gore-Tex melted .

Didn’t how long depend on how hungry you were? How badly you wanted something, and how much you were willing to risk? So if you were a coyote and starving to death because the snow was deep and the Wisconsin winter, hard—and then you stumbled on something that couldn’t fight back? Meat that was free and for the taking?

God help him, but he knew: a coyote would strip that body in no time .

“Other than your substitution of Wisconsin for Wyoming?” Kramer drills her with a look. “You see my problem.”

Emma just shakes her head. She is so mortified she wants to melt into the linoleum. God, maybe she really should be better about taking those damn pills. Better to be a zombie than feel this.

“I said, write in the style of Frank McDermott,” Kramer seethes. “I didn’t say steal .”

4

THE SEMINAR WASa mistake.

She’d had an open slot for a junior-year elective. Any class coy enough to be called “Out of Their Minds: Madness and the Creative Process” made her nervous. Her adviser was more direct: Are you sure about this? The admin people at Holten Prep knew her … ah … shall we say, unusual circumstances. But since the only other alternative was animal husbandry, which was a Wisconsin thing and included a unit on neutering piglets, it was kind of a no-brainer.

What she hadn’t realized was that Kramer meant for them to write the occasional story in the style of fill-in-the-blank . This was a problem. Creative writing already weirded her out, and now she had to crawl around the heads of these guys, too? Seriously? Most of these writers ended up killing themselves. But there was no way she was getting sucked into making little Wilbur squeal.

The Bell Jar had been on this past summer’s reading list, and she’d decided to get a jump on it, starting right after finals and a couple days before her seventeenth birthday. Well … big mistake. The book completely freaked her out. Somehow she got … she became lost , slipping into the story the way she might slide into a tight pair of skinny jeans, and then into Esther’s head. Started looking at the world differently, too, as if staring through a bizarre set of lenses that showed her phantoms no one else could see. And once or twice, swear to God, she heard someone call her name, only to turn and find no one there.

Yet that feeling was … familiar , somehow. Like, I know this. This once happened. At some point, I was really and truly nuts . As if by reading all about Esther Greenwood, Plath’s stand-in for herself, she was remembering what it was like to go slowly insane; to be trussed in a straitjacket and forced to gag back too-sweet medicines and then locked away beneath a bell jar to rave. Which was crazy.

The Bell Jar was bad: an infection, a fever raging through her body, burning her up. It got so awful she spent a couple hours studying a wickedly jagged razor of clear glass, filched from the discards bucket at the hot shop, and thinking, What if? Go on, do it, you coward. You know you want to; you know this is the best way, the only way to pass through into …

Through? Into what? What she’d found down in Jasper’s cellar years ago? (And nope, no way she was thinking about that , nosirreebob.) And go where? Who the hell knew?

She hadn’t sliced and diced—obviously—but the temptation to cut, to filet herself, really hack those arteries and watch the blood bubble, still occasionally slithered into her mind like the black tangle of a nightmare she just couldn’t shake.

Honestly, after that whole Bell Jar mess, the prospect of studying the work of insane writers, slipping into their skins, made lopping off Wilbur’s balls almost attractive. But she was stuck.

5

THE CLASS HADstarted with science fiction, which was okay, although Kramer was in love with the sound of his I’m-from-Cambridge-and-you’re-not voice: To paraphrase the incomparable though deeply disturbed Philip K. Dick, whoever manipulates words manipulates the existential texture of reality, as we blahdiddy-blahdiddy-blah-blah . But when Kramer began bloviating about quantum foam and Schrödinger’s cat and dark matter and more blahdiddy-blahdiddy-blah-blah , and everyone else was oh, awesome, that’s like, dude, so Star Trek … she just couldn’t help herself. Dark matter could only be inferred. In the case of Schrödinger’s kitty, collapsing probabilities through observation had nothing to do with massless particles popping out of quantum foam. And quantum effects could be observed on the macroscopic level at near absolute zero within the energy sink of a Bose-Einstein condensate, which therefore proved Hardy’s Paradox regarding the interaction of quantum and anti-quantum particles that might actually coexist in related timelines and alternative universes …