Negative Space by Mike Robinson (best ereader for students txt) 📕

There was a clearing just outside, a puncture in the dense woods. Spreading through Max was an eerie feeling that they’d entered a kind of inverse dimension, a place where legends had skin, uttered amongst themselves their own myths of towering cities, flying machines and the strange, hairless apes that made them.

“We’re here,” said Feldman. He loosened his tie, unbuttoned his cuffs, then began unbuttoning his shirt.

What is he doing?

Karen looked out the window. “There are people out there.”

Now shirtless and shoeless, Feldman climbed from the car and motioned them out. The limo driver remained in his seat, reading a newspaper.

“Come on,” Feldman said. “It’s all right.”

Max glanced at Karen and Karen glanced at him, sharing a tight, unspoken promise to stick by one another. Slowly they maneuvered out of the limousine, just as Feldman unbuckled his belt, pants falling like a demolished building.

The air had cold sharp teeth. Nocturnal woodland noises pulsed in humming, buzzing percussion. Moonlight split into tiny slivers by the grand high canopy.

Max looked about. Looked toward the clearing where the moon shone down unimpeded, The limo’s headlights still burned, twin suns on the redwood trunks. With enough illumination, Max’s eyes needed no adjustment to the scene before him—though the rest of him, he imagined, would now need far longer to adjust.

Scattered throughout the trees and the clearing were about twenty people, most bare naked, some adorned in clinging threads of a shirt or underwear. One man had on only a watch, another the last of a sock on his right foot. All stared at Max and Karen as they climbed from the vehicle. Some fixated, others went back to their individual business: picking at blades of grass, banging rocks, gnawing on a hunk of meat that looked like a squirrel, the result of a smoked-out campfire in the clearing. In hefty voices some spoke words, or things resembling words. Their eyes were hollow of concern. White drops of wild clarity.

“What...is this?” Karen said.

“They’re re-experiencing the world, these people,” Feldman said. “Refreshed to a base awe, terror, joy, love, a base on which to build a new human mode. A new construct of understanding and approach to how we inherit our unique position. They are a second draft, if you will. Brushstrokes of a collective masterpiece. What is currently left for us? Adding to failure. We are rerouting back to the start. To begin art, to begin consciousness, again.”

Feldman pointed to one of the fully nude men, sitting on a rock and watching a large moth with something like curious excitement. Loopy smiles. Childhood exhumed in his face.

“Robert Campbell,” Feldman said. “Four kids, two-story house on Keller Avenue and a financial consultant since he was twenty-nine. The world needs now only a moth to enthrall him.”

One of the men approached a bare-chested woman and palmed one of her breasts. She yelped and struck him on the shoulder, trotted away and he followed, grin unbroken. She laughed. Eyes so dazed, so unplugged, so....

...not here.

Like a hungry cat to the can opener, Feldman hurried back to the limousine, leaned in.

Max fought heightening nausea. I’m at a zoo. He closed his eyes. I’m at a goddamn zoo. Gonna feed us to them. Stop. Fucking ridiculous. But then, what wasn’t ridiculous? What had happened? He had seen something never meant to be seen. God’s egregious typo.

Max moved in close to Karen.

“We need to get out of here,” he rasped.

She batted away a mosquito. “Where? How?”

Feldman returned, holding carefully a long thin vial filled with liquid.

“There is a species of large climbing vine in the jungles of the Amazon and the Orinoco basins—Banisteriopsis caapi is the botanical name for it,” Feldman said. “When this vine’s bark is boiled, it produces this.” Feldman indicated the vial. “Yaje, or Ayahuasca, juice. Once ingested, it opens realms long closed to us, exhibits for us the remarkable vastness and utter strangeness of this place we share. It makes of one an ancient human ancestor, small and wondering and humbled. It turns the stars back into heavens, puts minds back into pebbles and peaks. I found my meaning in it. The elder in me, the elder in all of us, emerged and spoke to me.”

Max and Karen glanced at one another.

“He is our Grandfather.” Feldman outstretched the vial. “Would you like a taste?”

“No,” Karen snapped. “We want to go back. Now.”

Feldman regarded them, the physical weight of his gaze moving back and forth. Distantly, he seemed almost disappointed.

Fuck you fuck you.

“This is a cyclical process,” said Feldman. “It is ineluctable. Either we seek to renew, or nature will do so for us. An indivisible entity cannot defy itself.”

The man looked at the vial, then peered wistfully up at the towering redwoods. He looked disappointed, and for a fleeting second Max almost felt ashamed.

“Shane can take you back into town,” Feldman said. “If you wish not to stay.”

“Who’s S—?”

“The driver.”

Both Max and Karen hurried past Feldman, climbed into the limousine, the weight of the man’s gaze hardly lifting. Don’t look back, Max thought. Don’t fucking look back.

After a brief exchange with Feldman, Shane the driver started the engine and pulled away, back toward the road.

—don’t look back—

Long moments of purring silence. The tall straight cavern of the woods close and suffocating.

“This is my first time in a limo,” Karen said.

“Mine too.”

Suddenly she rose from her seat, scrounged about the miniature bar. Opened the fridge where arrayed on the shelves were more vials of the liquid.

“What are you doing?” Max said.

“Taking a souvenir,” she said, swiping one of the vials and shutting the fridge. “I don’t know what we can do but maybe we can get this stuff tested.”

Max threw a glance at the dark shrub of Shane’s head. “He can’t hear us, right?”

***

Upon stopping at the Peters, Shane climbed out to open the door for them.

Hastily Max got out first, waving him back. “We can get it,” he said.

They exited, the vial clutched within Karen’s baggy sweatshirt, then watched as the limo slunk back onto the dark-slick