A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens: Short Story (2 page)

As Kyle left the café, all he could think about was that he'd just had the best sex of his life and that Lauren was the most gorgeous girl in the world. And that he was walking out on all that. Walking out on Lauren.

Kyle's mother sounded worried. “Are you sure you're alright? It's not like you to call like this. Not that I mind. You should call more often. I almost forget I have a son.”

That again. Every time Kyle called her, his mother reminded him that he should call more often. And she wondered why he didn't.

“Well, I've got a strange question for you. Hum. Huh.”

“Well, what is it? I'll be glad to help if I can. What do you need?”

“No, Mom, it's not that. Well. Hum. Have you been getting, like, weird phone calls lately?”

“What do you mean weird phone calls? Perverts? Pranks? No, I haven't.”

“No, not really. That's not what I mean.”

“Well, I can't guess what you mean, Kyle.”

“Like, someone pretending to be someone else?”

“I'm not sure what — Oh! Wait a minute! There was this man the other day . . .”

“Yes?” Damn! Whoever this was had been bothering his mother, too.

“Well, this man, he said he was taking a survey, but, really, he was trying to sell me insurance.”

“Oh. Nothing else?”

“Kyle, just what is going on?”

“Nothing, Mom, I'm just tired, okay. I — Huh. Look. This may sound weird, but when's the last time you spoke to Dad?”

“That's okay, I know you miss him. You were always closer to him than you were to me. I know you were. Don't deny it. The last time I spoke with him was at the hospital. He was on so much medication; I don't think he even knew where he was. He was mumbling something about your Uncle Flip. And then he went to sleep. When I got home, the hospital called to say that he'd died.”

Kyle had heard all this before. Even after eight years, it still hurt. He didn't want to cry with his mom on the phone.

“Thanks, Mom. Anyway, I should get off the phone. I'll be late for work.”

“I love you, Kyle. Don't work too hard. Maybe you should take a vacation. I could give you money for a trip. Are you eating enough? You should go back to school. You could get a better job then, you know. You should get a girlfriend. You — ”

“Mom. I gotta go. Love you. Bye.”

After he hung up, his phone flashed to indicate there were some messages. He checked: five hang-ups. He was pretty sure what those were. That psycho again.

Kyle wasn't surprised that his mom had desperately squeezed in most of her usual litany at the end of their conversation. Not for nothing had Kyle moved to another city. After his dad died — when Kyle was fifteen — his mom had tried to compensate for their mutual loss by micromanaging Kyle's life. She meant well, but he had ended up not knowing what he wanted, with his life, his education, or anything. Faced with the seemingly limitless options of school, he had chosen to drop out and move out on his own; maybe that way he'd eventually sort out what his own ideas were. It didn't work. He was twenty-three, and he still had no clue.

He sighed, because he was exhausted and because he dreaded going to work. Lauren would be there. He'd feared things would turn out awkward. He should never have asked her out. He should have let her stay a pleasant fantasy. Someone to masturbate to before going to sleep.

But, he corrected himself, she had asked him out, not the other way around. She had brought him flowers. She had sat on his lap, taken her clothes off, kissed him.

As usual, he didn't know what to think, what to feel.

Half an hour after he got to work, the sky suddenly darkened and rain came down like divine wrath. And kept on going all day. Business was dead, and Kyle spent a lot of time dusting shelves, pointedly avoiding Lauren. Despite himself, he couldn't help looking at her whenever he thought she wouldn't notice. He should just confront her and ask her what the hell all that phone business was really about. And then tell her to fuck off, get another job, get out of his life, and just stop being so sexy in front of him all the time.

Or maybe he should just quit. Get away. Travel. Like his mom had said.

Then again, he could just sulk and ignore everything until it went away. Unplug his phone for a while and not pay attention to everything inside himself that was screaming to him to be with Lauren.

There hadn't been anyone in the store for hours. He saw Lauren talking to Cass, in hushed tones so he couldn't hear. Then Lauren came straight at him.

“Let's go,” she said.

“Huh? Where? I mean, I don't have anything to say to you.”

“Stop being stupid.” She grabbed his hand and walked him toward the door.

“What are you doing? My shift doesn't end for another two hours.”

“It's okay, I cleared it with Cass. It's so quiet. She can handle the store by herself.”

Kyle took his hand back. “We can't go out there. Look at that rain.”

“So we'll get wet.”

The sex was even better the second time. She teased him and teased him until it felt as though his cock would burst. Then she slid on him at just the right moment, and he had the longest orgasm ever. When she came on top of him, she cooed in the sexiest way, squirming sinuously, her whole body exuding heaven.

Fuck
, Kyle thought.
I don't care about that phone shit anymore.

They'd come in from the rain soaking wet. One look at each other, and they exploded in laughter so hard their stomachs cramped; they could hardly breathe.

Kyle didn't remember who started taking whose clothes off first, but in no time they were naked and fucking their way to Kyle's bedroom.

Afterward, they lay in bed not talking, sometimes grunting, sometimes nibbling, sometimes sniffing each other's skin, sometimes slowly — almost absent-mindedly — rubbing against each other, until Lauren said, “Okay, we have to talk. About your dad. And I don't care how funny you are, or how good the sex is, you better not walk out on me this time. Or we're through.”

“But this is my bed. My apartment.” And he thought,
I'm funny? Cool. No-one's ever told me that before.

“Pretty clever of me, eh?”

In the end, she had just given him a number. His dad's phone number, she claimed. He'd given it to her that time she'd answered the phone for Kyle. Call him, she'd said, let him tell you. And then call me. Call me. And he could hear in her voice: I know you're hurting, but don't fuck this up between us.

After she left, he stared at the number. The area code was 666. What the hell? And what was with the thirteen-digit extension?

Why am I believing any of this?

Because the world's greatest girl thought he was funny and liked to fuck him, fuck him better than anyone else ever had.

He picked up the phone: a dozen more hang-ups in his voicemail. Shit. He put the phone back down again.

And then he thought:
Every time I don't decide something I end up feeling like I made a decision anyway. The wrong one. Always the wrong one. How had I ever had the guts to move out from Mom's? A rare moment, that.

“Well,” Kyle said out loud, “here's another rare moment.”

And he punched the weird number on his phone. He got the familiar “If you know the extension number of your party please enter it now.” But it continued, in a snarky: “If you don't, hang up now and stop wasting everyone's time.”

Kyle punched in the thirteen-digit extension. It was then that he noticed it included both the year his father was born and the year he died.

He got his dad's voicemail.

Kyle's father had been his best friend. When he died the world got darker, almost too dark for Kyle to handle. If it hadn't been for Uncle Flip, Kyle might not have been able to cope.

Kyle and his dad watched the same stupid TV shows together, went out to the movies at least once a week, shopped for CDs, played cards and board games every night (Kyle's mom never understood why they liked that so much), took bike rides, went camping — they did everything together, they were the best of pals. Unlike his friends with their parents, Kyle had never been embarrassed by his dad. Dad was the greatest. Unqualified.

Kyle hadn't left a message, but his dad — or, rather, the voice claiming to be his dad — called back in less than five minutes. “There's all kinds of fancy features on this phone, you know. Call display and all that. Even email and internet. Haven't figured out how to use those yet, though. You know I was never into all that computer stuff. But, hey, I've got lots of time now.”

Could Kyle let himself believe that was really his dad on the phone? Why would anyone go to the trouble of playing such a cruel prank on him?

“Listen, Da — I mean, how can it be you? How do I know this is really you?” Kyle was still precariously perched on a seesaw of rage and tears, but managed to keep it internal. He had to see this through, one way or another.

“I know this is hard, son. I hate to hurt you or upset you. But this can be a good thing. We can be pals again, right? Ask me something. Anything. It's me. Really me.”

It sounded so much like him. “No. I don't know. You tell me something.”

“Well . . . While I think about that, I want to say that's one hell of nice girlfriend you've got there. She told me to wait before calling you again, that she'd ease you into the idea. Meanwhile, she even called me a few times to keep me company until you were ready. A real sweetheart, she is. Hang on to her.”

Kyle felt himself blush, remembering the two times he'd had sex with Lauren. “Yeah, she's great.”

“Good. She likes you a lot, you know. When you find someone you love you shouldn't let them slip away. You shouldn't . . .” Kyle's dad trailed off. There was a long silence.

“Dad? Are you still there?”

“Yeah. Sorry about that. Anyway, I think I remembered something, something to prove to you who I am. The summer you were fourteen, at least once a week we played Risk in the basement, through the whole night, creeping back to bed just as the sun started to come up. Your mother would always still be asleep when I slipped in next to her. She never found out.”

“That was the summer before you died.” It was getting harder for Kyle to stifle his tears.

“Oh . . . and remember that week-long bike trip in the country when you were twelve? The first night, when we pitched camp, a fox cub wandered into our tent, and we fed it some cheese.”

“It's really you, isn't it?”

They reminisced for hours. And then Kyle started asking questions. Lauren had told him some of it the other night at The Small Easy, but he had assumed it was all lies, and he hadn't really pieced it together then, or even fully paid attention.

Kyle's dad explained what he could. “A few weeks ago, Lucifer cut some kind of deal with a telecommunications company — don't ask me the details, these demons aren't exactly the chatty type — and got enough phones to distribute to all of the dead. Well, the human dead, anyway. The animals didn't get phones.”

Kyle still had trouble with some of this. “So . . . You're in Hell. You were a great guy. The best father ever. Why are you in Hell? And what are animals doing in Hell? I don't get it.”

“Hum . . . First off, there's only Hell.”

“What do you mean, only Hell?”

“No Heaven, no Purgatory, no Nirvana, no Valhalla, nothing else. Just Hell. All the dead come here. It's not so bad, really. A bit boring, maybe — and certainly understaffed and disorganized — but not so bad.”

“So you're burning in Hell. No matter what I do, I'll end up burning in Hell.”

“Oh, no. There's no burning.”

“Torture?”

“Nope. No torture. It's just this endless sea, only without the water. It's where all the animals end up when they die. Bears, owls, insects, crocodiles, sharks, whales, dinosaurs, people. It's all the same. You die. You end up here.”

“There's dinosaurs in Hell? Cool.”

“I guess so. They're just part of the scenery, you know.”

“So what do you do all day?”

“Not much. For one thing, you never sleep. You can't sleep, in fact. So, mostly, you just hang around. Wander. Talk to people. The dogs are nice. Plus, here they don't shit all over the place. Actually, nobody shits here. Can't say I miss that.”

“Well that doesn't sound too bad.”

“I guess not. But the demons shit, though. And fart. Stinko, let me tell ya.”

“Maybe it's their diet.”

“Could be. I've never seen them eat, though.”

“But, all in all, are you alright there?”

“Well, you know, there's never any sunlight. No movies, either. No TV. No sports. No food. Lots of noisy bugs. Plus you're kind of insubstantial. You can't really touch anyone. Almost, but not quite. And it's kind of hard to get motivated or excited about anything. Nothing ever happens here.”

“But what about God?”

“I dunno. Haven't seen him. The folk around here don't seem to like to talk about that.”

After the conversation with his dad, Kyle found seven more hang-ups. Kyle had assumed that all the recent hang-ups in his voicemail had been from his father. He'd meant to ask him, but, in the excitement of actually talking to his dead father, he'd forgotten. Anyway, this established that the hang-ups were someone else's doing. Who was calling him like that? Couldn't be Lauren; his mysterious caller had rung several times while they'd had sex. Wasn't like his mother not to leave long, guilt-inducing messages. And it's not as if he had friends or anything. Probably telemarketers, he concluded.

It was 8:50 a.m. He'd spoken with his dad for more than nine hours.
Wow
, he thought.
Dad. Dad!

He called Lauren.

“He's driving me crazy.” Kyle said, while absent-mindedly stroking the hood of Lauren's clit. She squirmed and moaned. “I mean, I love him, and all that. And he really likes you. He likes how you talked to him that night when he first called and I freaked out.” His other hand cupped her breast, lightly fingered her nipple. She gasped.