“The Void Bites” by Kay Vaindal

I stand at the foot of the Palace Mall and its opulent towers, capped by Muscovite-inspired domes, looming before wispy, distant clouds. It was built in three days this past summer. Absent, then present, like May flies, mushroom heads, etc. A cricket chirps so loudly in the dying boxwood adjacent to the parking lot that I think I could pour my brain out of my head! I am on alcohol and cannabis and Vicodin but my park job was pristine, each tire like the steel leg of an awesome machine, plowed into asphalt, holding up the great beast of my SUV. The new Shopping Mall has thus far been more permanent than May flies and mushroom heads, but paint chips from the domes build rainbows in piles of raked boxwood leaves. The cricket ceases chirping. 

I did not snort the Vicodin. I did not crush it at all. I took it in pill form. I placed two chalky ovals on my tongue, and I did not dry-swallow them. I washed it down with a tall glass of orange juice, in preparation for my journey to the Shopping Mall. Today, I will die, and awaken a healed woman. Side effects, according to my research, may include diarrhea, and longer eyelashes. With gumption, I have come to accept both possible outcomes.

Within the palace is a forest, and shops. Outside is the Mojave. Inside: stunted oak trees growing in pots, skylights, an approximation of the cool crisp air of the east, where many shoppers lived once, or their parents live, or their parents’ parents are from, in times before HVACs. I have no interest in Forever 21, where once I would go to buy club wear that would tear and fall from my skin like all along it was a prop-vase, cheaply made, and as the seams ripped they exhaled the cries of a child-seamstress in Kuala Lumpur. It is impossible, said my ex who went to Smith College, to make art absent of your tears. During our last fight, I took her ugly Loft pantsuit down off the rack and tore it in half like some kind of She-Hulk, and the seams cried like children all the same. Pretender! they might have said. You think you hate us, the many threads making up this pantsuit, but you really hate yourself. You are not forever twenty-one. You have not been twenty-one for many years. Still, I have no interest in Loft. I have no interest in Nordstrom Rack, though the deals are appealing. 

Beside the Piercing Pagoda are the Void-Orbs. No light escapes them. There are four Void-Orbs here. Most shopping malls have three. This is one of the major benefits of living so near Las Vegas. I have spent many mornings at oxygen bars. There is no line, and only one technician, a strung-out looking kid with midwestern shoulders. I’ve seen him working at the dispensary near my apartment, too. 

As I approach, he locks his eyes on me. He begins his spiel. “Void technology harnesses the power of dark matter to reset your molecular system to healthy levels! Try today and get your first half-hour—”

“I’m in,” I say.

“—free with the purchase of any additional hourly package. Void technology is incredibly safe, and has been used for decades by the elites, but is now accessible in your very own community thanks to—”

“I’m in!” 

“You need to hear the risks,” he says.

“I looked online.”

“You signed the form online?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What’s your name?”

“Penny Vermillo.”

He looks me up on his outdated little iPad. He doesn’t find me, because that isn’t my name, and I didn’t sign the forms. He apologizes and produces the risks document on his iPad. I scan it. Yaddah, yaddah, yaddah. I sign my name with my index finger. I got gels done two or three weeks ago, and they’re peeling now, like torn flakes of ivory, chunks of cereal glued to my fingers. Penny Vermillo’s name is illegible, which is just as well. I give him Penny Vermillo’s ID, which I found on the sidewalk on the strip six weeks ago. She’s from Michigan. She’s twenty-three. I tested it on a bartender once, and he sucked his lips into his mouth when he looked at me so to say, that’s a rough twenty-three. But I am a white woman in the desert. There are rougher twenty-threes than me, and better thirty-fours.

The boy opens a Void-Orb for me. Inside it’s nothing. It is the primordial state of the universe, before the Big Bang, a super-dense black hole. Death, sleep, absence, anesthesia, May air without May flies, soil without mushrooms, the hottest night of the year, the coldest day, the place where the holes in your memory go. I feel its pull. The boy seems immune. Backlit by the glow of an Aeropostale, he looks at his iPad, and I let the void pull me forth like an undertow.

Hours later I step out. Or I am pulled out. Or I am reborn, gasping, under fluorescent lights. 

“How do you feel?” asks the boy.

“I think good,” I say. 

“Remember to hydrate,” he says, and I pay him three-thousand dollars, and I go home.

*** 

Luis notices the bite-marks that night. We’re in a back-together phase. I was going to break things off, but decided to give it another chance with my newly-adjusted molecular system. He tightens his grip on the back of my neck. “You seeing other people again?” he says.

I take my tongue off his face. “Hm?”

“Looks like somebody bit the shit out of you.”

“Hm?” 

He pulls my shirt off the rest of the way. My body is covered in tiny arcs, like the bites of a child, a chimpanzee, a petite adult. They litter my hips, my back, my ribs, shoulders, collarbones. 

“Jesus Christ,” says Luis, touching one with a gentleness that reminds me of the early days of our relationship, when we both liked each other. The caress plants goosebumps on my arms. “Were you, like, assaulted?” he asks in a voice sort of like the one he uses when we’re at the movies and he doesn’t want to upset anybody by asking me for the popcorn, which was one of my first turn-offs about him.

I touch my skin. It doesn’t hurt, but the bruises are evident, and I feel a few crusts of dried blood under my fingers. “It must be some sort of rash,” I tell him, which is an obvious lie. We bite each other enough to know the marks of human teeth. 

“You using?” he asks.

I snort a laugh.

“Lost time?”

“Just in the Void-Orb.”

Luis scoffs. “You’re not buying into that shit, are you?”

“It helped.”

Luis hugs me. I’m a statue in his arms. We do not have sex. This is a break from our routine. Usually we meet twice a week, and he makes me dinner, some kind of chicken and some kind of vegetable, because he’s into macros, and we drink a couple beers in front of the TV, and he tells me about something some guy at the gym said or did, and sometimes I suck his dick, and sometimes he puts it in me, and then I leave, because I don’t like staying over, so I always forget to bring my medicine. Tonight, I just leave.

I park outside the liquor store and look up the risks document I signed. It’s way in my junk email, buried under a hundred emails from fake women named things like Danica and Rosé. 

When I first came to Vegas, I was with an older woman named Ann. We met at the beach in Santa Monica. She thought she would marry me, and we would have IVF babies together in the Mojave, little desert babies, with warm complexions and hobbies like hiking and chess. I dumped Ann for a dude named Derek Shitner who was really into sticking his thumb up me. Ann married a lawyer named Sara and they have two desert babies named Brooke and Rodney, and all four of them wear glasses. The motel room I shared with Derek Shitner for two months was infested with tiny mites, which climbed in my hair, and on the hotplate, and the spoons, and on Derek’s thumb. I remember the bites like dotted lines on my skin. 

Nowhere in the risks document for Void-Orb does it mention human-sized bugs crawling inside their pockets of nothing, gnawing on the people who lie there between life and death. I’m out of liquor, so I think about going in and buying some bottles. Then I think about my freshly-adjusted molecular system, which I should probably allow to acclimate for at least the afternoon.

I drive to Henderson’s newest shopping mall and, sober, park like shit. More paint chips have fallen off the Muscovite domes, exfoliated by sand-in-wind like the walls of canyons and rock formations outside the city. The doors to the palace gasp open to admit me. I march past Piercing Pagoda. Today, another employee mans the Void. Her face is young but her hair hangs stringy and dry, over-bleached. I figure she’s been dyeing it in her sink since the fifth grade. “Void technology harnesses the power of dark matter to reset your molecular system to healthy levels!” she tells me.

I lift up my shirt. “What is this?”

“An outtie?” she says.

I point to a bite mark, purplish now, square teeth visible atop inflamed skin. 

“I don’t know,” says the girl with the bad hair.

“I got this in your orb yesterday. Dozens of them.”

“That’s not possible,” says the girl.

“Well, it happened.”

She looks at me. “Are you sure you’re not misremembering something else you did yesterday?”

“Your hair looks terrible.”

“Go to the doctor,” she says, which is good advice. 

I traverse the open plains of the parking lot again. Ann liked to hike. She took me up into the Spring Mountains constantly, where the air is thin and cool and my fingers swelled like sausages, and I’d remove my rings one-by-one. There, on a cliffside, you can look to the north. Interpretive signs—exfoliated by sand-wind, barely legible—will tell you about Desert National Wildlife Refuge, the vast white pits between brown, dry ranges. A man there pointed west and said that’s where more nuclear bombs were dropped than anywhere on earth. He said, that’s where the end of the world grows out of. He reeked of weed. Ann laughed nervously. She was ready to go back to the car but I stayed for a long time and talked to him about all sorts of things, war, space, the universe, black holes, dreams. In the car, Ann and I had our first blowout fight. 

I drive to the clinic by my apartment and do another shit parking job. I’ve had so many UTIs treated here. I’ve declined so many pamphlets. I’ve pissed into dozens of cups. They’ve dutifully drawn my blood when I’ve felt exhausted, and described to them all the symptoms I peeled from the google page for anemia and then I’ll make a big show of cringing away from the needle. No anemia, they say. Then they’ll look at me and offer a pamphlet about healthy eating, which I will decline, because Luis gives me chicken and vegetables twice a week, and if there’s any leftovers he’ll pack them in a little box for me to take home, and I’ll forget they’re in there and order a crunchwrap while they grow moldy in my fridge, and then I feed chicken and vegetables to the stray cats, who can digest mold.

On the intake form, I check the box beside injury. 

They call me back much faster than they would if I had checked illness or OB-GYN, which I’ll have to keep in mind for next time. The doctor is a tall thin man with white teeth and a Boston accent. “Definitely human,” he agrees, poking. “We’ll want you on a pretty serious round of antibiotics. You don’t remember how you got these?”

“It’s from the Void-Orb,” I tell him again.

He shakes his head and offers me a pamphlet on achieving sobriety and a SAFE kit. I take the pamphlet, but not the kit.

*** 

In the tub, I scrape scabs off a bite mark on my abdomen. It’s the same one I showed the girl with the bad hair. I measure it against my thumb: about the same size. Blood enters the bath water like little cirrus clouds. I close my eyes and think back to the void.

There is nothing. No one. No time. I was dead; I’m alive again. Trying to consider my four-and-a-half hours floating in a tear in space-time is like trying to consider what life was like inside my mother’s gut. 

The faucet’s still running. I let the excess water drain through the overflow valve. We’re under an emergency water conservation notice, because Lake Mead is as low as it’s been in decades, unveiling prohibition era mummies and pieces of rusted metal ostensibly from the B-29 that crashed on a clear day in 1948 when the pilot thought he was a whole lot higher up than he was. I can’t really care about a water conservation notice when I’m covered in all these little marks like faint smiles. 

A braver person, I imagine, would demand answers. A braver me would call up Mike and get so much cocaine an elephant couldn’t pass outside of consciousness, even in a rip in existence in the Palace Mall. There are hundreds of caffeine pills inside my mirror, from when I was working the night shift at Batavia and the morning shift at Carl’s Jr. I wouldn’t even need to call Mike. 

Maybe my molecular system has been readjusted to bravery, and loyalty, and heroism. Maybe I’ll slay the demons hovering a half-step outside of our world. Maybe I’ll sit down across from Oprah Winfrey and say, why, yes, of course I was afraid. But that’s the thing, Ms. Winfrey, fear can’t stop you.

I pop open another Miller Lite and I fall asleep in the tub. In my dreams, there is darkness like inside a cave. A cricket chirps. A pale face floats above me, skin only, nothing behind it, no jaw, no eyes, no teeth. It smiles at me. I smile back. 

*** 

The bites heal. I start going to Luis’s house three or four times a week, and then six, and then I move in. Sometimes he makes shrimp, which curl like cute little smiles in the frying pan. For our first anniversary he gets me a houseplant, which I will probably let die. Still, that day, warped with sentimentality, I leave a good review for the Palace Mall Void-Orb, because I was going to text Luis sorry dont think itll work long term not you me i am crazy remember xoxo before I went in there, and then I’d still need a pamphlet on healthy eating. For our first anniversary I get him a Welcome! mat that I stole from down the street because I forgot it was our anniversary until he got me a houseplant, but he thinks it’s so sweet, and symbolic of being our best selves, and building our home together.

At night I drink a bottle of wine and scroll Reddit. On the popular page, a headline: Man found dead in Houston Void-Orb. Click. The image is blurred and red. First responders say he suffered severe lacerations while inside the minor tear in space produced by the orb. I click the image to unblur it. The man is not a man so much as a pile, an elbow here, an ear there. His thigh sits closest to the camera, femur emerging from it like a limb of mutton. I zoom in. All along his skin, the bruises and cuts make a pattern like so many little moons, bite marks, some that ripped chunks of flesh away with them,  

Top comment: obvious hoax.

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