An Absent Presence
The golf cart buckles as I pull off the asphalt and onto dead grass. It buckles again as we climb back onto asphalt. The parking lot opens to the road on the other side, but there’s nothing stopping us from a little shortcut.
I stash the keys under the brake while Lauren crushes a cigarette under her sandal. She hops out of the cart, but I stare ahead, thoughts hazy and unpronounceable.
She taps my arm. “Let’s go.”
I follow her and together we wander between grey cabins. The houses on the river belong to people who don’t even live here. Vacation homes for retired, heterosexual couples who pay almost no property taxes so they do nothing for the local economy and infrastructure.
The rest of the town is usually empty. The pub, the barbershop, the grocery store. Everything is just peeling plaster and unpaved roads. Nothing much to do for a pair of twenty-year-olds bored out of our minds.
So we try to keep our minds off the feelings we can’t express. Those wordless gnawing things that challenge our limited vocabulary for what the hell anything makes us feel like.
A few times each summer, we take a break from getting plastered in Lauren’s basement to go swimming in the Mississippi. We’ll get in the water and swim out to a sandbank a couple-hundred feet away.
My parents sell and rent out golf carts, and even though I’m not allowed to take them wherever, Mom says it's fine if we’re just going to the river.
She doesn’t know I’m dating Lauren or that I’m gay. It’s a miracle Lauren and I know it about ourselves. For the longest time it was another absent presence neither of us had the tools to understand.
Hopefully, some day, the two of us can get the hell out of here and never look back.
What I like about the river is that it looks weightless and heavy at the same time. On some level, I know that tons of water is heavy and forceful, but watching it, so quick and constant, I have to believe it weighs nothing, right?
Lauren takes my hand and kisses me on the shoulder. The sun peeks through the sky as clouds move across it like tectonic plates. The air is still except for the fucking gnats everywhere.
“Haven’t I given these things enough of my blood?” I ask.
“That’s the problem. You’re a staple of their diet at this point,” Lauren says. As she walks, she kicks off her sandals and picks them up without missing a beat. “Your blood is essential to their ecosystem.”
As we walk between the cabins, I hold Lauren’s hand for a dangerous moment as fear bites my ankles. When we come out on the other side, something’s wrong.
The river is not. An error message like from a shitty old computer is. It reads Server Maintenance May Cause Outages. Please, Standby.
What does that even mean? The message encompasses the whole river, a grey box stretching endlessly in either direction, but it’s not there at the same time. It is but not here, I guess. This new absent presence gnashes the underside of my skin.
The sandbank still is across the way but the texture of the sand looks pixelated and clunky even from a distance.
Lauren’s face stays blank like she doesn’t know how to process; I know mine is too. A nothing in our heads bites and bleeds. We are clipping through the intended programming. Even that thought is absent-present. It crowds all available space in my head, numb and intense like an opioid migraine. Like teeth so sharp there’s no words for it.
Another pop up arrives with a harsh ding: The Application Existential Crisis has stopped unexpectedly with a single button to Force Close the program.
Another ding and this one says Do you want to allow this app to make changes to your device? Below that it reads Program name: transcendental crisis / File origin: Unknown plus two buttons for Yes and No.
Lauren and I both intuit that we are not supposed to see these things. But we have no functions intended for the inputs, so we continue ahead like everything is fine.
I wade through the error, my body bouncing to the bottom of the river and then ten feet in the air until I’m back to the wordlessness. I breathe. Maybe the water hasn’t loaded. Lauren is sideways, her arms stretched and twisted in directions they shouldn’t go. Algorithmically, we float, swimming-glitching through it all.
“Maybe we should go,” I say, and when I try to say things I don’t have words for a gap catches in my throat. “����.��."
“Why?” Lauren asks as her head stretches into the sky. “Is something wrong?”
Another wordless gnawing. More razor sharp teeth in my head. I want to tell her that everything is wrong. I want to tell her the truth.
I try to say it, try to load the thoughts into the hardware of my mouth and throat. I say, “���������nothing���.”
We spend the day there. We go through the motions and then we both go home. Maybe things will change tomorrow.
© 2022 Alice Pow
About the Author
Alice Pow is mostly certain that she doesn’t live in a simulation. Her prose has also appeared in Dragon Bike, Geek Out II and more. She co-wrote an episode of The Cryptonaturalist podcast and is the creator of Kaiju Cuties, a webcomic about giant gay and trans monsters. Find her on Twitter and elsewhere as @SummerTimeAlice.