What Remains...

People always are asking me why I quit my job and left college to return home. They always phrase it in such a way, as if I made a wrong choice somewhere in my life, but the truth is...hell I don’t know what the truth is. All I know is that I had no real choice in the matter. I couldn’t stay in college after what happened. I always tell them that college life wasn’t how I had imagined it. That’s not quite true either. It wasn’t exactly like the movies, but it did have its moments of delightful depravity and I dabbled a bit in the hedonism of it all. I enjoyed it, and tried to keep everything in moderation.

I wasn’t a social cripple. I formed a small group of friends, but something was always at the back of my mind. Whenever we were hanging out; we would get either high, drunk, or both. We seemed to be friends on the condition that we are under the influence of some chemical means. We never hung out unless it was at a pre-game party, or post-game party. We didn’t talk about anything except times that we were messed up or on our way to getting tore up. I was just dawning on this realization when I met my first true friend in college.

I can only really describe him as a joker. Christopher Rank had one of those smiles that hinted that everything was a joke to him and if you were lucky he would let you in on a few of them. He was my weed connection in college. I bought from him every other week. I always said that Rank always had the best dank, I was kind of a douche in college. I guess I still am, but can now restrain myself with self-awareness. He had his own circle of friends, but we hit it off pretty well except for one thing: he loved to tell extremely dark jokes.

I can only think of a few of the dark jokes he told. “What part of a vegetable can’t you eat??? The wheelchair.” He’d usually follow up a joke like this with a laugh and smile. He told these jokes regardless of the situation and it usually got him into trouble. “I’m truly offended by hearing all of these accounts of battered women, to think, I’d been eating all mine baked!” All that aside, we became pretty good friends and he was helping me through some issues I was having with my sister who had recently refused to talk to me. He unfortunately died before I could thank him for everything he had done for me.

The difficulties with my kid sister, Virginia, began when I invited her up to my apartment for the weekend. I wanted her to experience a little bit of college life. She is a bookish type of girl and is slightly reserved. I talked my parents into it and she came up for the weekend. She was a freshman in high school and had no interest in drinking, so we called Chris up and bought an eighth. He stayed and smoked with us for a bit. He gave Virginia his number in case she should ever feel like buying more from him and left. Two weeks later, he was dead. My sister refused to talk to anybody and became extremely withdrawn shortly after her visit.

Chris was stepping off a street corner; while chatting to one of his friends. The guy insisted that he had said something about needing to catch a bus. It was probably just a dark embellishment to the story. A joke like that would have been right up Chris’ alley. The bus caught Rank two steps into the road. It was a horrible accident. Chris wasn’t paying attention and the bus driver was focused on the car ahead of him. He was killed instantly.

I wouldn’t know that he had died until a day later. A sanitation worker cleaning up the scene found what remained of him. The impact of the bus literally vaporized Christopher Rank into nothing but pulp that stained the street for ten feet. It was the sanitation worker’s job to make sure to erase the existence of Christopher so people could go about their days without knowing that a bus had splattered a man just feet away from where they stood. What was found was stuck in a sewer grating. It was his jaw, grinning at him from the inky blackness of the sewer. That was all that remained.

Christopher was an out-of-state student so his parents had the funeral in their home state. There was nothing to bury of him, so they just shoveled dirt into an empty grave and prayed over it. I didn’t go to the funeral because I had an exam in one of my classes, but I offered to help pack up all the stuff in his apartment. I, of course, had an ulterior motive in offering an entire day of work packing and boxing all of Chris’ things.

Mr. and Mrs. Rank seemed to be very religious when I talked to them on the phone. I wanted to spare his parents some of the truth about their son. I wanted to clean up any porn or drug paraphernalia that he may have had lying around his apartment. I really didn’t want them to see anything that would illustrate what Christopher was getting into at college. I think I did it because I would have wanted the same thing done for me if I unexpectedly died. A part of me secretly feared that one day my dirty laundry might be exposed for all he world to see.

I got his parents permission to help begin packing up his things and got the key from his landlord. As the landlord let me in, he commented, "It’s a real shame… The kid was a good tenant. He always paid his rent on time. Only had a few noise complaints."

He excused himself and left me to the task at hand. The first thing that struck me was how clean his apartment was. Everything had its place and there was nothing littering the floor. I wish I could say the same of my apartment. I began to arrange things in accordance to their room. I piled everything in the bathroom together and everything in the kitchen. I then moved onto the bedroom.

This was where I expected if Chris Rank had anything he didn’t want his parents to see, I would find it here. In his closet, I found a couple of bongs. One was shaped like a wizard’s staff and the other was a mushroom. They were pretty standard stoner paraphenalia. I threw it into the box I brought with me to take out before his parents would arrive. They were set to arrive the next day so I had to be thorough today.

I flipped his mattress and found nothing of interest. His drawer had an inordinate amount of condoms. Chris was either a ladies man or he had high hopes. I stashed them in the box. I rifled through his drawers, desk, and chest without finding anything. I was about to search the rest of the apartment when something caught my eye. There was something in the closet.

I approached the closet and found that there was a metal box on top of the closet space, tucked away from prying eyes. It was pretty well camouflaged and covered with clothes, but a small shine from an exposed bit of metal drew my eye to it. I pulled it down and saw that it belonged to C. Rank. The box was two feet high and three feet in length. There was a lock with numbers on it, but he had carelessly left the code on the lock. I popped the lock off and opened the metal box.

I wasn’t sure what I was looking at when I first pulled the rubbery latex thing out from the box, but as it unfurled in my hands; I realized that it was some sort of bondage gear. I am a firm believer of a “to each their own” mentality, but something unnerved me just by touching the latex suit. I set it aside and focused on what remained in the metal safe box. The box was filled with Polaroid photos from one of those types of cameras that didn’t need to get developed. I sat down on the bed and began to cycle through the hundreds of photos that were in the box.

The first dozen or so were old vintage stuff of women in well lit rooms being tied up, spanked, and gagged. I never really did see the point of tying someone up and restricting their movement. From my limited experience, it’s better with a wide range of motion. I felt some kind of voyeuristic shame creep over me. I felt like I was prying into someone’s fantasies. Most of the women looked like they were enjoying themselves or at least faking it. As I flipped through the photos and got twenty or so photos in; they changed drastically.

The quality dropped drastically and I was now looking at a girl my age. She was smiling at the camera, but it was more of an uncertain smile than anything. She had just been cuffed to a radiator. I looked over and saw the same radiator in the room. In the next photo, she had a gag in her mouth and it looked like she was clearly not enjoying herself. The photos continued to get worse as I flipped through them. I refuse to go into detail about what I saw. If you really want to know, you can look at the police report. I knew that thinking about what Chris Rank did in this room would drive me mad. The next pile was another girl and the story seemed to be the same. The girl would pose for a few photos and then he handcuffs, gags them and continues on with his twisted fantasy. The landlord said there were only a few noise complaints. I flipped quickly through pictures of bruises, bite marks, and cigarette burns. I threw that pile aside and was greeted by the face of another girl smiling uncertainly at the camera. How many women had he lured here and done this to? I tore through shots of clawed, beaten, and broken stares. He wasn’t so much raping them as he was ravaging them with a sadistic fury.

I squirmed through three more piles each getting progressively more violent and brutal before I was close to the bottom of the pile. Was it shame or threats that kept the girls from reporting him to the police? Three more piles of broken, bleeding, and bereft faces passed before my eyes before I reached the last pile, tied with a band and waiting for my trembling hands and terrorized heart. It was there at the bottom of the box that I found Chris Rank’s last, darkest joke.

A man tries to open his sister’s eyes to the world only to-

Smiling uncertainly at me from the bottom of the pile was the face of my sister.

I left the box sitting on top of his bed for his parents to find when they arrived tomorrow. He may have been the psychotic prankster, but I was the one who had the last laugh. The only thing I took from the apartment that day was the photos of my sister and my traumatized psyche. I dropped out of my college shortly after that and moved back home. That is the real reason why I had to leave. I had to go home and take care of my now semi-catatonic and socially withdrawn sister, at least what remains.

…Of her. EmpyrealInvective