I Didn't Put That There

Few things are as inspiring as an empty apartment. The eradication of the previous tenant’s belongings, damages, and (let’s be honest) scents makes this space feel exclusively yours. For 7 days I experienced an autonomy I never knew, picturing endless possibilities of furnitures, placements, organization, all with the time and means to attempt nearly all of them. I didn’t need to show up at my new job for two weeks, and I had saved up more than enough freelance photography from home to finally get some distance between me and my hometown.

The first thing I did was open my single window and test the natural lighting. If my hobby ever granted me anything personally, it was the ability to more accurately document my life via photograph. A 2pm sun seemed to give the best unaided light for my needs. I set up my tripod, took my ‘before’ picture, and marked the floor where it stood. In a week, I’d take my ‘after’ picture, and I wanted the exact same perspective, as if comparing the two photos revealed my setup magically.

Ceremoniously, I began my first sauntering drive around town scoping out garage sales and thrift stores. Before I knew it, I had a couch, bed, several side tables, a place to put my TV and video games. Food, drink (of course), and enough in between to sustain my appetite. This town was surprisingly accommodating. You’d think people were moving in and out all the time, with so many items coming and going. My closet was full, my outlets fully occupied, my bathroom stocked with linens. All the while, my markings on the floor sat undisturbed. A nearby area became my home studio: just a laptop and my gear bags. Eventually, with less money but more to show for it, I prepared for my after shot. 

Like a rehearsed routine, the tripod inserted cleanly onto the markers. I screwed on my camera at 1:55 pm. I’m never usually this punctual. I just felt so relaxed, so free. I could've danced I was so unsupervised. After five minutes of checking the view with the old photo, I took my first true exhale. There truly wasn’t any going back. To make the event more cosmic, I set the camera timer so I didn’t have to press the trigger. I closed my eyes like a child blowing out his birthday candles. 3...2...1…

SNAP… but also a ring. I lurched to, hunching over my camera. Was it broken? Did my shot fail? Do I really have to do this again? The magic of a perfectly synchronized time code was already gone, as my mind started formulating explanations to the few friends I shared this goal with. Maybe my tripod slipped. No, it’s on carpet. Maybe my camera battery ran out. Nobody who knew me would believe I’d do such personal work that it wasn’t plugged in. 

After a second ring (two seconds apart), I realized my phone was ringing. I didn’t have to reach far from the living room area into the kitchen. It’s vibrations shifting it slightly away from my hand across the counter. The caller ID read ‘DAD’. I breathed, I answered, I looked out the window.   

“Hey Timmy, how did your picture go?” The genuine curiosity was frustrating due to the circumstances. 

“I don’t know, you called just as I took it.” It had no external viewfinder, no digital screen. I had to wait until it was sent to my laptop to view. 

“Oh, how does it look?”

“It doesn’t work like that dad.” I was speaking with the deadpan tone of somebody who had this conversation enough times a parrot could memorize the proper responses five times over. 

“Well, you know that’s all voodoo to me.” The answer he always gives, never the answer I hope for. “Can you please remember to send the pictures to me once they’re done? I’m sure they’re perfect.” There's endless proof that he’s used cameras his whole life. Our house has plenty of pictures he took of me. I remember, I was there. He’s not that old, and digital is much more accommodating than he thinks. Whatever.

“I’ll try, but I can’t make any promises.” 

“... Ok. And hey, either way I’ll be out there, checking on you any day now. I’ll be able to see it for myself.” 

“Dad you really don’t have to. The next few days I’ll be in and out of work. We’ll be lucky to have dinner.” I had no idea if this was true. “Why not just wait until I save up a few vacation days?”

“Oh, you know how your dad is,” he said, and boy do I. “I just want to make sure this is legitimate, and give you any last minute help you might need.” 

“I really am done,” trying to point out the subtle detail that “I took the ‘after’ photo for a reason.” 

“... well… don’t remove those markers quite yet. You never know Timmy, you might want to take another picture when I’m done there.” Guess you were right dad. I never know, not once. Even then, there was always a perceived deficit of some kind.

“We’ll see,” I was used to his self-insertion, “anything else?”

Dad changed his tone to an expression of playful defense, “Well, I didn’t know you were in such a rush.”“I just want to get the pictures done.” And enjoy myself in peace.

“Well, just don’t forget to look for places to eat.” It’s the second thing he’s told me not to forget. “I was hungry tonight, it made me think ahead. Try not to leave it for the last minute.” Good suggestion. He’ll have a much more relaxing time if he knows there’s places he’ll like.

“I checked while I was out. Mostly fast food, a few Mexican places.” I'll save you the boredom of the remaining conversation. He likes some Mexican, but not all Mexican. He trusts me to find a place, but I should look for American food and diner places. He’ll settle for fast food if he has to. 

Relieved, I plugged my laptop into my camera. Just as I had worried, the shot was messed up. There was a giant black spot in the middle of the picture. It must’ve been a bug in front of the frame, something large in front of the lens. Great. Either there’s bugs, which will be a pain in the ass to take care of, or something is wrong with my lens.

I sighed, stood up, and all of a sudden I wasn’t alone.

Surprised, and fallen on the ground, I tried to comprehend what I was looking at. It was pure black, so dark it felt like a hole to nowhere. It was perfectly round, but seemed 2 dimensional. I stared for a long time while my perception tried to figure out if it was really there, or it went on forever. I didn’t move until I realized it completely took up the space of my coffee table. It appeared as if my coffee table was gone. 

My rationale came back to me. Where did it go? Obviously it’s behind this mysterious object. Walking around to the opposite side challenged my object permanence, for my heart skipped a beat. No, it still wasn’t there. 

Behind me was my TV stand. The nearest object I could reach was a picture I’d framed and posted there. It was me as a toddler, my dad, and my grandfather. Whether I was the toddler in the picture, or the young hand in front of the void, this picture reminded me how different I looked from them both. Dad and Grandpa looked like the same person at different stages of life. I looked like I was from another family. 

I lobbed the picture like a heavy frisbee into the black Sphere. I heard it hit the wood of the coffee table, bounce off, and hit the carpet near the tripod. This time when I crossed to the other side I saw the picture on the floor. The glass was cracked. My table was in there somewhere.

This is worse than Bugs. Far worse.

One week later, Dad is knocking on the door. As he waits, there is a glare in the window preventing him from seeing inside, but he looks anyway. I heard him, but I was not answering. I cannot see, I’m scared and ashamed. I don’t know what happened, I don’t know what’s going to happen. His efforts to reach me inside progressed from knocking harder, louder, calling my phone, eventually trying to force the door down. 

I don’t know how he got in, but he opened the door. I only know because I can hear this happening. There were black spheres everywhere, like polka dots of various sizes, taking up space in my apartment. I’m nowhere to be seen.

“Timmy!” My dad shouted for me. Eventually I saw a hand reach towards me, the first thing I’ve seen in what feels like hours, maybe a day. He grabs my arm and pulls me up, and eventually I can see. He pulled me out of one of those spheres.

“Oh god,” Dad looks like he’s having a hard time processing my apartment’s condition, “What happened?”

I didn’t speak for a while. I was worried if I spoke I’d start crying before words formed. “I don’t know,” was all I could croak out. My voice was too shaky. 

He walked me over to the kitchen table and hoisted me up so I was sitting on top of it. Looking around, clusters of stationary black voids made travel to any other portion of the apartment impossible. He pulled a backpack I hadn't noticed off of his back. After quickly rummaging around, he pulled out a wrapped up cloth and unfurled it. It was a rather long knife. 

I began backing away from him. My flight response was active. He tried to tell me not to worry, but I was in no state to comprehend direction. Instead I just kept my eyes on him, ready to fight if I had to. 

Instead, he began unbuttoning his shirt. With the knife in one hand, he was struggling to open it as fast as he wanted. He tried to split open the last few with the knife, but gave up and lifted it up above his belly. “Don’t look!” he shouted. As if I had a say in where I was looking at this point.

Without preparation, Dad starts positioning the blade parallel to his belly. He begins hyperventilating and bracing himself. It was all too slow, and too bizarre to believe, but he lodges the blade into the top of his gut -- the type of gut that comes to a typical man in his post-mid-life condition-- and starts slicing. I hear a noise, but i’m not sure what it is. As he continued to slice I realized I was hearing my own scream. 

Before we knew it, Dad was holding a thin piece of flesh in his hand, the knife in the other. He’s breathing heavily, still heaving as he turns around. As his eyes locate the closest black sphere, he lobs the flesh into it. The sphere shrinks to about half its size, revealing the edges of my new couch. It was the spot he pulled me from. 

“Damn it,” my dad is preparing to cut himself again. I wordlessly get up to stop him. I don’t want him to help me if it hurts.

“Timmy, it’s ok, look,” he speaks quickly and looks down at his belly. There is no blood. At the spot where he sliced is a perfectly smooth, rubber-like flat surface. It looks more like he cut into flesh colored cheese, or a bar of flesh-colored soap. “It doesn’t hurt Timmy, it just feels strange. Let your daddy help you.” He started slicing in the same spot again before giving me time to back away.

For a few minutes I watched him repeat the process. Slice after slice, fed to the black Spheres like a cost-less sacrifice. My mind no longer knew who, or what, my dad was, but I trusted him. My hatred for the black spheres planted a grudge that overcame any fear I had of my father's biology, and worse, what it meant for me. Eventually I joined him, transporting his non-flesh into the various Spheres of various sizes that surrounded the room.

As they shrunk, they revealed crumpled up outfits, miscellaneous trash, a broken TV, bed sheets that were on the floor, empty bottles of alcohol, uneaten food, all which my Dad surprisingly didn’t address. Normally he was a stickler about cleanliness. Today he just kept cutting until it was all gone, only stopping for the occasional “Here!” as he passed himself to me, or to ask if more were left. 

After the last shrunken void disappeared to nothing, we sat down and collected our breath. I took the floor, he took the couch. Dad had cut out as strategically as possible. You could tell his secondary goal was to retain as much of his original shape as possible in order to hide his losses underneath his outfit. The lower part of his belly looked chewed out like an apple core was eaten by hand. The upper part stuck out like an umbrella. I spoke first.

“What are you?” I didn’t feel like being anything other than direct.

“... eh, look,” he said. In a matter-of-fact way, he cut a tiny slit into the tip of his middle finger. It bled like anybody else's finger would. “It’s just the fat: the layers that grew on me as I got older. I don’t know exactly, but to me and my doctor’s knowledge, I'm normal.” The fluctuating pitch of his speech reflected somebody who didn’t believe what he was saying, but had to, because it was absolutely true. 

“And you’re normal too. Don’t let anybody tell you you are different.” Even after all this he’s shoehorning in life lessons.

“And what were those?”

“... I don’t know.” He sounded disappointed in himself because he didn’t know, “All I know is that I was about your age when the same thing happened to me. I was still living at home though, and your grandfather did the same for me.” 

“Of course, mine didn’t get as bad,” he said, looking at me with raised eyebrows. The same eyebrows you’d give somebody who forgot to take out the trash. “There was one thing, and my grandpa only had to cut himself up once. I had noticed it, but I thought it was just my retinas burned from looking at the sun or something. He asked me if I saw it too, and I was like.. ‘yes’. Be thankful I got here when I did.”

Ultimately he was right, I was thankful. But if he knew this would happen, why didn’t he do anything sooner? I got my answer in a question.

“What was it like?” He asked me. “What exactly do they do?”

“They come out of nowhere. They cover everything until you can’t see anything inside them. They follow you everywhere you go. I don’t exactly know what they do, I just know that they like me, and other people can’t see them.” It was the best explanation I could give.

“Did you end up going to work?” Dad asked. He seemed genuinely curious. A departure from his typical emphasis on punctuality that read as condescending to any scenario or excuse that prevented employment from the workplace. This time he cared.

“No. People at the store thought I was half blind. I just kept trying to get rid of them on my own. Nothing worked.” I could feel empathy for my disappointment.

“Look,” Dad’s tone became more serious, “I love you Timmy. I don’t want to get in the way of your dreams, but I think you should move home.” He just expressed two contradictions in one sentence, and somehow I agreed before he could explain. 

“This will happen again. The only thing that ever helped me, was my father. Nothing else worked. I’ve never known anybody else who ever had this problem. Doctors almost admitted Grandpa to the looney bin, according to him. You coming home is the only way I can help you.” The more he spoke, the more his parental directive sounded like a pleading bargain. He sounded like he didn’t want to lose me. It scared me. 

I didn’t really need to think about it, but I sat for a while anyway. Before agreeing, I got up, and walked over to my camera. 

My dad stood up after me and turned in place.“What are you doing?” my dad asked. Again, I was so unfamiliar with his sincerest voice. It felt so soothing to hear it without annoyance, concern, expectation, or the other laundry list of fatherly tones men his age speak to children with. 

I snapped a photo. No timer, no waiting, no additional setup. It was still on it’s marker from my first photo. It was also somehow 2pm. 

Every mess was now documented, featuring my father’s worried expression in the middle of it all. I saw it pop up on my laptop, entering a long queue of previous photos, clear attempts to track the progression of the invading spheres. The progression of the forming and materializing of the voids was captured in photos. If you were to look, as opposed to me, you’d see nothing.  

“Just that second ‘after; photo you talked about,’ I said, with a depressed relief, “Now I’m ready to go.”