Empty

Two tickets, lying on the floor, the ADMIT ONE glaring strangely in the sickly light from the fluorescent lamp. I can’t say why this picture sticks in my mind. I sit in the empty theatre, my earbuds buzzing in my ears and I stare between the empty stage, as empty as the face of a corpse, and the two tickets lying abandoned and forgotten. How strange to think they once symbolized value, that once they were worth the sum of eight dollars, and that now they lie forgotten on the floor. The people who once took those tickets from smiling volunteers in the lobby are long gone now, home in bed, perhaps with a book, or perhaps with homework. They will never think of those tickets again, now they have served their purpose.

And yet still they lie there, strangely incongruent with the surroundings, too perfectly placed, the light falling too perfectly into shadows around them. The black curtains on the stage drift in an unseen wind as if another world existed on the stage. A few hours ago it did. I like sitting here long after the last vestiges of peoples’ presence no longer lingers, to be the last to leave the theatre. It feels haunted, but at least it feels empty, not like the rest of the world, which so often feels like something delicate and beautiful, but is filled with meaningless nothingness, like an exquisite Venetian glass vase filled with lint. An undervalued container of great workmanship, meant to contain wonders, but is instead a measure of meaninglessness.

I stand and step down the creaking auditorium stairs, my sneakers making little scuff-scuff sounds on each step, the lyrics of some unnamable song swirling in my ears, wafting through all this space, this empty container, the sound as small as a single candle in a cathedral.

I walk out of the auditorium and into the light of the hallway. The school is empty, and deadly quiet, the quiet of a horror movie, the quiet of total emptiness and eternal, agonizing waiting, absent of people. It is eerie, and frightening, and I walk quickly down the hall towards the doors to the parking lot where my car is parked, the last remaining. I have always hated fluorescent lights a little, I couldn’t say why, and these seem to state the emptiness, as if their blue-green light can illuminate how empty it is while leaving the other hallways dark, hiding unseen things.

I skip down the steps and cross the parking lot to the waiting Chrysler Sebring, parked alone in the great emptiness between the school and the woods down the hill past the car and the track, and the football field below. The sky is the inky grey-blue of late October, Halloween, late in the evening. No stars show; it has been dreary and cloudy all day, and the only light comes from the streetlights, the same kind of light as the fluorescent bulbs in the building, and everything beyond the sphere of their unhealthy glow is obscured. For all I can see, the world ceases to exist beyond that awful green light.

I get into the car and throw my ipod into the seat next to me. I start the car. I do not turn the radio on. I flip the lights on and then to bright, illumination knifing through the darkness, exposing the world beyond, an explosion of light. The lights of the car are warmer, yellower, more like the sun. Perhaps that is why the fluorescent lights creep around the back of my mind and unsettle the dark recesses there. They bring to mind horror movies and strange operations and alien technology and science fiction, things not of this world.

I put the car in drive and start out of the parking lot, turning down strangely empty streets and out of town. The world seems abandoned, devoid of people. I think uneasily that its Halloween, All Hallows Eve, and that the elementary school kids should have been running amok on the streets in search of candy, going from house to house, lighted porch light to porch light, for hours now. They should be heading home, it’s past 10. But there is nary a light on these streets, save for the sickly glow of the street lights, more unnatural yellow-green.

I feel suddenly as if it is necessary to find someone, somewhere in all this emptiness. I think of home, and I am very, very eager to walk into the warm house and find my parents and my sister there, happy and warm, safe from this emptiness. Somehow our house always seems full, light and warmth softening every corner.

I relax a little when I leave the city and begin passing the silent, sleeping farms. Early to bed, early to rise, so they say. I don’t have to wonder about the deathly dark of the farm house windows. It’s perfectly logical that no one is awake at this hour, even if it is Halloween. I tell myself this, but I don’t, entirely, believe it.

I see a flash of eyes, lenses in the dark, and have that half-second of warning before the whitetail buck darts across the road in front of me, eyes blind, going into darkness from darkness, captured in this one instant of light. I have just enough rationality at the bottom of my brain to remember to pump the breaks. The nose of the car misses the deer by the barest inch and I seem unable to shake, only to reapply the gas and keep a watch on the nothingness. I feel my heartbeat thrumming between the pressure of my hands and the wheel. Out of the strange strip of existence lining the road, lighted by the headlights, I recognize the familiar trees and landmarks around the driveway up to the house.

I turn in just as my cell phone buzzes urgently in my pocket. Probably my mother, calling to wonder where I am, her mind full of dire visions of accidents and abductions. I have promised her not to use my cell phone when I’m driving, but to pull over and answer if I must. I consider neglecting to tell her of my almost-accident, knowing as I do that it will just feed her worry, but I know I wouldn’t withhold information from her—it would most certainly come back to haunt me later.

My first sight of the house startles me. It is dark, vacant, the windows reflecting nothingness into nothingness indefinitely. I feel a strange fear rising like some sort of sickness, starting in my stomach and crawling up my throat and making the hairs on the back of my neck rise.

I park in my usual place and hurry into the house. It is unusual that no one is home.

It is when I am almost to the door when I notice something else strange. My dog hasn’t rushed out from behind the house to welcome me like she always does. It is as if no one exists in the world but me and that deer I almost hit on the road. I don’t want to go into the house, afraid of what I will find, afraid of finding nothingness inside.

But I don’t want to stay outside either. The nothingness out there presses against my eyes and eardrums, I feel it clinging to my skin like the smell of wood smoke on a foggy cold morning. I reach for the door knob, my hand heavy and unwieldy. I hear a sound out of the darkness, the emptiness. I turn, and a pillar of ice forms right from the base of my skull all down my back and out across my shoulders as I feel fear shoot through every nerve right down to my finger tips and toes. I open my mouth in a silent scream and try to turn and run…

And then I wake up.