The Place Where Nothing Is Real

By M. A. Katz-Savoy

In these stories, things aren’t what they seem. This is a world where the real reason behind America’s obesity epidemic lies not in ourselves, but in our deadly sins… where your g-mail calendar may know more about you than you think… where acts of vengeance can go unpunished, as long as they are stylishly committed… where t that paw you feel on your neck at night may not be kitty’s… where tattoos cannot be removed with lasers, especially if they lead their wearer to unspeakable acts… where self-proclaimed internet prophets may not be so crazy after all… and where those hisses and noises you hear on wireless headsets may just be voices from another plane…

• Language: English
• Publisher: MLMC Media - Gothic and Main
• Release date: Jan 2, 2015
• ISBN: 9781633280052

Book preview

The Place Where Nothing Is Real

Katz-Savoy invokes the spirits of Serling and Matheson to take you on a trip through a reality unlike any other….

In these stories, things aren’t what they seem.

This is a world where

The real reason behind America’s obesity epidemic lies not in ourselves, but in our deadly sins…

Your g-mail calendar may know more about you than you think…

Acts of vengeance can go unpunished, as long as they are stylishly committed…

That paw you feel on your neck at night may not be kitty’s…

Some tattoos cannot be removed with lasers, especially if they lead their wearer to unspeakable acts…

Self-proclaimed internet prophets may not be so crazy after all…

and

Those hisses and noises you hear on wireless headsets? Perhaps they are voices from another plane…

The Place Where

Nothing

Is Real

M. A. Katz-Savoy

The Place Where Nothing Is Real

MLMC-Gothic and Main

Northampton, MA

Copyright © 2014 by MLMC Media

Published by MLMC-Gothic and Main

Northampton, MA 01060

http://www.mlmc-media.com

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

Cover design Copyright © 2014 by MLMC Media.

All textual artwork Copyright © 2014 by MLMC Media.

Gothic and Main logo Copyright © 2014 by Renetta Hood.

ISBN 978-1-63328-006-9

Dedication

This book is dedicated to all those who have gone before into the realms of the unreal, especially Rod, Richard, and Charles, who laid the groundwork for the vision behind these tales. It is also dedicated to the spirits of our missed loved ones: N.F., M.F., U.G., and E.F. May they forever be at peace and rest undisturbed.

Prelude: Into the Glass

Ah c’mon. It’ll be fun.

You know how I hate these things. It’s not just that they’re all charlatans… You know that, right? Like they can actually see anything in that glass ball. It’s just that…. The woman paused mid-sentence.

It’s just what?

A pause.

C’mon, what are you afraid of?

Well if you must know, when I was a child my mother and I saw one of these fortune tellers along the wharf in San Francisco. She was a palm reader, not a ball reader. Anyway, when we walked up to her she refused to do our reading. She said that she knew we were descended from gypsies or something like that.

The woman paused again.

And?

By this time her male companion was growing a bit perturbed and concerned, and his question showed it.

My mom later told me it was because of what she could see when she looked at us, what she saw in us.

Sounds like she was just trying to scare you. She did like to have people on.

The woman just stood still and more or less hugged herself.

Never mind. If it bothers you that much we just won’t go in.

They started to step away when Madame Twilight—that was what he name read on the sign—came out to greet them.

Come in, come in. She walked right up to the woman and placed her hand on her shoulder. The future is only one of the things I can show you, she taunted. Anyone can tell you what might happen to you, but Madame Twilight can show you other worlds. They look like this one, but there’s always something…. She stopped herself and looked at the man.

But come in and see for yourself. Some things cannot be explained easily.

She looked at the woman. I promise not to try to show you anything about yourself. I know that is your fear.

She turned to face the man and looked him dead in the eye. What I show you will tell you everything you need to know for the rest of your life. It isn’t anything you don’t already half-know.

As she turned to walk she muttered, Or think you know.

Without waiting for an answer she walked to the tent and opened the flap, waving them in.

Seated across from her, both the man and the woman felt silly about having felt any reticence to go into her tent. It was as seedy and dirty as they had expected, filled with stereotypical accoutrements: scarves, veils, velvet curtains, amulets, monkey claws, and crystals. The smell of various types of incense—all mixed so that none was identifiable—was almost stifling.

Madame Twilight began to rub her hands over the ball, at which point it began to mist. She sat back.

Both the man and the woman fought to hold back laughs, remembering their early discussion about going to the carnival rather than a movie because of the bad CGI special effects.

Madame Twilight did not notice. She focused on the crystal.

Place your hands on top of the ball, she said. You can hold hands if you like, or place them on top of one another. It knows there are two of you and it knows what you don’t know.

There was silence for about thirty seconds.

You will spend eternity together.

Both the man and woman looked at one another. She smiled and then grabbed his hand. She then placed their clasped hands on top of the ball.

Immediately the mist began to settle.

Stare hard, Madame Twilight said.

They both stared until they both gasped at the same time. In the ball they both saw an image of a man sitting near a table. He had something in his hands. Oddly enough, the ball then did what they could only compare to a camera pan, closing up on a tattoo on the man’s wrist.

The man in the tent whispered I, I can hear what he’s saying. The guy in the ball. He’s mumbling something.

Me too, the woman holding his hand answered.

The ball began to mist again and they saw music notes floating through the air, floating toward a window, then into it, where a woman wearing headphones sat near a large table. She was humming something but she didn’t seem happy. In fact, she seemed to have tears coming down her cheeks, though she wasn’t audibly crying.

Next to her on the table sat a pad and pen, a laptop computer, a butcher knife, and a roll of duct tape.

The woman with the guitar looked up as if she heard something. She placed her guitar in its stand, wiped her eyes, and made herself smile.

The man looked at his partner and whispered, This is weird.

My Guitar Gently Reaps

Hey, this is weird!

Roger replied with a grunt as he placed his laptop case down on the kitchen table. Huh?

I can hear some kind of dumbass right wing radio station through the wireless earphones, Jenny yelled from the living room.

Okay, oh queen of the non-sequiturs, he responded from the room they called The Workroom. When they moved in, the room came with a large wooden work table, which had apparently been designed for a workshop but had been placed inside the apartment. Jerry Junior, the landlord, was a nice guy who had grown up in the house before it had been partitioned into units—one on the second floor and one on the first. When they first met him, he had explained that his dad had built the table himself, and his wife Maureen insisted he preserve it for the memory. When he asked them if they minded, Jenny jokingly replied that of course they didn't; she'd preferred a partially furnished apartment.

That was a great ice-breaker and made them endearing to Jerry Junior.

After a pause, Roger asked the question more directly. Are you saying you can hear things in the wireless earphones?

Yeah, I'm using them to practice. You know, to write some new songs with the Danelectro. There must be a radio tower nearby.

Roger walked into the living room, where Jenny was sitting on one of the plastic cubes they bought in lieu of file cabinets. They liked them because they could be multi-purposed. Once they took the cover off of any of the cubes, which came in two pieces that had to be snapped together and seemed capable of holding the weight of a human after they were connected, you could use the inside as a file drawer of sorts for hanging files of the right length. They had agreed on the cubes because they both hated file cabinets, and the cubes came in oddball colors like chartreuse and cobalt. It also didn’t hurt that they were cheap, since with the move they had gone about ten thousand dollars in the hole, added to all the debt they had already incurred with student loans.

She seemed to be listening intently to the headphones, the guitar sitting on her lap as she absent-mindedly strummed a D-chord. Looking up, she laughed and said, I wonder if I can compose a song with lyrics about the evils of Obamacare. That seems to be what they’re going on about right now.

Yeah, I blame Obamacare for my socks disappearing in the washing machine. And I hear that he broke up the Beatles.

This was his stock joke on the issue, the one he usually used in a room full of right wingers who wouldn’t shut up about their hatred of Barack Obama, so neither cracked a smile.

After about a half hour of sipping coffee and watching her alternate between switching from D to C to E again and again and stopping to cock her head and listen to the voices on the wireless headphones, he broke the silence.

So what is it they’re saying?

She could tell he was genuinely interested, not just humoring her, so she held up her finger to indicate that she needed a moment, listened for a second and then said, Well, they were going on about Obama....

Which answers the question of how you astutely deduced this is a right wing station, he playfully interrupted.

Elementary Watson, or whatever Sherlock Holmes actually said, she answered. But yeah, they were going on about it. Now they seem to be talking about investments and real estate.

For us it’d have to be a voice from the future then, he half-joked. I don’t see that being a concern for us any time soon, with coming up here for just one salary and all.

He realized he’d touched a soft spot and back-pedaled quickly.

Giving up on the lap steel?

Maybe, she answered after mulling for a few seconds. It’s not really my thing, and I just can’t get a good sound from that cheap thing we got second-hand. It’s bad enough our amp sucks—nothing but hissing and distortion unless I turn it down low. No wonder I’m hearing voices now. She winked, and he laughed.

She’d always believed that all speech had a rhythm anyway, so in some ways it fascinated her to play along with the radio broadcasts she was hearing through the wireless headphones. That didn’t mean that sometimes the voices wouldn’t frustrate her to no end, with their constant talk about the poor and how they created their own situation and how they were too lazy to do anything to rectify it. But she found that she could, just by turning her head a little, distort the radio tower signal just enough so that the voices became more background noise, like listening to people talking in a crowded restaurant but not really hearing what they say, unless you stopped what you were doing and concentrated hard.

Generally speaking, she exercised the same restraint that she did in restaurants. She tried not to concentrate on what was being said, listening only for the vocal intonations, hearing more the pitch and rhythm of each voice than the content of the language.

The next day, she discovered that if her body was turned at a 45 degree angle from the second floor bay window, she was able to control how much of the broadcast she heard. She even composed an entire song during the course of the day, well in time to have dinner ready for when Roger got home from work.

While she was chopping onions and peppers, it occurred to her that even though they were the most unconventional couple she knew, the move had forced on them the roles of the traditional household. But she couldn’t be angry at Roger, as much as at the situation itself. It wasn’t as though they weren’t both in agreement on the move. After all, it was a promotion for him, and it moved them to the five college area, getting them out of the red states, where they felt out of touch.

It also happened to drop them in one of her favorite cities, one that held promise for employment for both of them. And of course they agreed up front that she would look for a position right away, and that if she couldn’t find one within a year they’d start looking again. They both knew what it meant for teaching faculty if they had a lapse of two years in their employment records; after a while, you were just unemployable since all the job search committees would red flag any significant time of non-employment, as if it were the person’s fault that she couldn’t find a position when there were none.

They even agreed that it would not be a terrible thing if she couldn’t find work right away, since after all the searches in academia usually took a year anyway. She could work on her books and work on her guitar chops and song writing, something she’d been hoping to find time to do. She’d been toying with song writing as long as she could remember, so this gave her a chance for that creative outlet. All in all, they agreed that they’d made the right move.

But now, finding herself standing in a kitchen and cooking for a man who was due home from work made her feel silly, as if all of her hard work getting a PhD counted for nothing. She was pretty sure that if she’d gone on Facebook to see what her childhood friends who’d gotten married out of high school and had decided to be stay-at-home moms were doing right then, she’d see a mirror image of her day. Preoccupied with her thoughts of the irony of the situation, she didn’t hear Roger come in the door or into the kitchen.

Shaking that garlic a bit hard?

She was using a trick she’d read about where placing cloves of garlic into a small bowl and shaking them really hard against a cover would break them loose of their peels.

She decided to dismiss the comment with humor.

I figured shaking them hard enough would not just peel them, but dice them into tiny little bits. She opened the container and looked inside. Keeping her straightest face to make sure the comment came across as dry wit she joked, Guess I’m going to have the use the knife after all.

Well, you do have a kitchen knife collection that would make Paul Prudhomme jealous, he said walking into the other room. He whistled a sea shanty.

Hey Dexter Morgan, let me know if you want me to help you slice and dice anything, he yelled from the living room.

During dinner she forgot her cares. By bedtime, she was already hearing a new tune in her head.

This week she’d try something different. She had pretty much gotten all she could out of relegating the voices in the ether to a white noise in the background. She’d composed three songs, in pretty much final form, over the course of a month. There wasn’t much else to do but practice, play, read, and work on the manuscript for her first book. She toyed with the ubiquitous two part academic title, settling for It’s a Man’s World: How and Why Women in the Music Industry Get Marginalized.

She decided that she’d try positioning herself in various parts of the apartment to find a spot where the radio broadcast would be blocked completely.

Exhausting pretty much every piece of furniture in the living room, she finally found a spot on one of the chairs near the work table. They often sat at that table to get some writing done, but she’d never used it for practicing. It was the last chair she’d tried, the one she normally didn’t sit in because it had its back to the window and the beautiful view of their pink collar neighborhood. But once she sat there with the earphones, she heard blissful silence—not even a trace of right wing DJ banter.

She went over to the amp, turned it on, and stretched the 25 foot cable all the way into The Workroom. She cursed that only the earphones were wireless, but managed to get herself comfortably in the chair by the work table. She broke out her chord dictionary and started strumming, stretching her fingers in preparation. She worked each day on a new chord switch, as well as sliding chords down and up the fret board. Today she wanted to work on E-flat minor for a new song about a prisoner placed in solitary confinement. She liked the way the absolute silence of the earphones put her in the right mind set. She propped her chord dictionary open and placed her fingers on the fret board according to the text’s suggestion; she tried to avoid cheats unless her hand was too small. She started strumming absent-mindedly, waiting for inspiration to strike.

A slight hiss started in the earphones. Just perfect, she thought. The damn radio broadcast again. She tried switching the angle at which she was sitting but it made no difference. The hiss continued.

She shrugged and kept playing. A few hours later she had the whole song written. She was impressed with her own work; seldom had she managed what she decided was a final draft of song so quickly—she usually didn’t even have the chorus in the first day. But this time she felt divinely inspired, almost as if she had been dictating the lyrics rather than thinking them up. She sat quietly for a minute listening to the low hissing. If she concentrated hard enough, she thought she could almost hear someone talking to her. She had the weird feeling that the voice was trying to tell her that everything would work out, that she would triumph over her problems. Now I’m talking to myself, she mumbled. She had to admit that losing her sanity or not, she felt like she had just had a long conversation with a good friend who understood her.

He came home and found her sitting there with the earphones on, smiling and humming.

Productive day? Songwriting seems to agree with you.

She