vol. 11 / issue 2: Outer Space VISUAL ART

THE VOID
vol. 11 / issue 2: Outer Space
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THE VOID
vol. 11 / issue 2: Outer Space
Photography by Brent Morley Smith
FICTION
THE ALIEN / LUCY CAMERON / 7
THE NATURAL WAY / SARAH BRUNNING / 8
UNE FEMME ATTEND / BIANCA LALIBERTÉ / 10
SPACES / MARTA BARNES / 13
NONFICTION
EVENT HORIZON / EMMA HEALEY / 15
POETRY
THE GOOD BUILDER / HIROKI TANAKA / 25
PURE DATA / STEPH COLBOURN / 26
PROMISE ME THIS / ALEX MANLEY / 29
VISUAL ART
ARTIST FEATURE: LEVI BRUCE / 18
COVER ARTIST: BRENT MORLEY SMITH / 20
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR / 4
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS / 31
FRONT COVER BY BRENT MORLEY SMITH
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
From a dark field, my friends and I saw some aliens. I’m not lying, either. We were all sitting on a couple
blankets on the centre line of an otherwise empty schoolyard soccer field. The grass was trim or trodden,
and damp with the dark humidity that hangs thick into summer nights. We were sixteen and sober, and
it was a barely perceptible and impossibly silent shale-grey triangle. On each of its rounded corners
shone a dull, unblinking light.
We wrenched our necks back and followed Mark’s finger across the blue-black sky. It flew west toward
light pollution from what was then the biggest Zerhs in Ontario, until its colour and lights were no
longer distinguishable. Minutes later, a V-formation of identical spacecrafts passed by overhead, this
time much higher. They gracefully changed formation into a straight line, and then back again. This
happened once more before we started hearing things: a clicking, inhuman laughter, or something. One
of my friends started crying and we had to take her home. We were all scared. It was that real.
I mean, it seems obvious that they weren’t extraterrestrial, doesn’t it? Even something as improbable as
hyper-advanced planes is still far more probable than aliens, sure, but that’s not the point. That night
turned into something we still talk about, and we all still insist they couldn’t have been anything else.
Outer space and the greater universe, because it’s so essentially vast and unseeable, comes to represent
our lack of reach, both in touching and knowing. It can be debilitating—all those questions—but it can
also be somehow comforting, affirming. For my last week on the Northern Ranger two summers ago, I
was promoted from deckhand to bosun, and moved into the bosun’s cabin. When I turned off the lights
to sleep, I noticed that there were a pack or two of glow-in-the-dark planets and stars stuck all over
the walls and ceiling. I asked around, but nobody knew who had put them there or would admit it if
they did. But he was probably at least middle-aged, and nobody ever took them down. We try to remind
ourselves, now and then.
Once it was conceived, the Outer Space issue seemed to be a long time coming, but it seems fitting to
me now that this would be my last issue. It’s requiring a lot of effort not to dig into the fertile pile of
launch puns or say “godspeed.” I know that for a long time to come, The Void will be doing what
we’re doing now, but always improving. Maybe someday we’ll even nab that fee levy. I really struggled
to put this letter together; I didn’t know how I wanted my last one to go, but I decided that it would
disingenuous, or at least inconstant, to break their running sentimentality now. So I wish you all the
best of luck out there, but I’ll leave you this party trick:
Find the most obviously and freshly stoned person and whisper this into his/her ear: There is as much
space below us as there is above us. Then try not to think about it yourself.
- Michael Chaulk
4
THE VOID
editor-in-chief
MICHAEL CHAULK
poetry editor
JACOB SPECTOR
fiction editor
GLEB WILSON
nonfiction editor
GEORGIA WEBBER
french content editor
SOPHIE BISPING
copy editor/managing editor
AERON MACHATTIE
art director/production manager
AIDAN PONTARINI
CONTRIBUTORS
MARTA BARNES
SIMONE BLAIN
LEVI BRUCE
SARAH BRUNNING
LUCY CAMERON
STEPH COLBOURN
JONO CURRIER
MYLES FAIRHEAD
EMMA HEALEY
BIANCA LALIBERTÉ
AARON LEON
ALEX MANLEY
BRENT MORLEY SMITH
LAURA ROKAS
KATAI ROSE STIENSTRA
HIROKI TANAKA
Photography by Brent Morley Smith
FICTION
6
6
OUTER SPACE / VOLUME 11 / ISSUE 2
THE ALIEN
LUCY CAMERON
Illustration by Jono Currier
and mostly her face looked electric. That’s what I thought at the time.
It’s still what I think, even though lately she spends more time in her
closet under the skylight and wears furs when she’s taking me to Tai
Chi like she’s trying to start a flash funeral. She looks at the calendar
meaningfully. She pets my brothers on the head searching for signs of life.
It won’t be long, she tells me. These pale warnings slip sideways out of
her mouth, sublimate and linger like plastic in the coils of the stove. It is
difficult to say just what she means, but I believe her. Everything in the
fridge is regenerating. The neighbours’ dog ran away the other day, and
the sky was still black on my way to school this morning. Maybe there
were some instructions that we missed. Still no one is speaking about it.
The television has been moved to look out the window and the rest of the
blinds are drawn. The world is quiet here. I think and wait. V
A psychic from Los Angeles told my mother over the phone that she was
an alien. It was July, hot, she shut herself in the closet for four hours.
I imagine her lying with her face pressed against the cool drywall, her
cell phone on its umbilical leash, maybe a few bleached tendrils of hair
snaking into the other outlet. This is speculation, of course, none of us
disturbed her. We were smarter than that. We searched to see how long a
person could live without water—three days. After forty-eight hours we
supposed we would send in a probe. Remy and Alistair hurled popsicles
like throwing stars across the living room. From the window, I watched
our neighbours welcome their new refrigerator.
When she finally came out the sun had set. We were watching television
with the volume turned down low and she moved around the kitchen like
her legs were melting into the linoleum. Then she gave us the news that
she was an alien and tried to look sad for us but her face kept falling off
7
FICTION
THE NATURAL WAY
SARAH BRUNNING
Photography by Katai Rose Stienstra
The apartment is white walled. A large framed photograph of lilies hangs
above a beige checkered sofa. The petals are pink and white edged, with
black lines leading out from the stamen. Judith is in the kitchen, sitting
at a glass table in her jogging outfit. The percolator is dripping and hissing on the stove.
In the morning she loves the sliding doors. They open onto the backyard,
a stretch of lawn with a small apple tree and a decorative birdbath. This
morning there are heavy clouds to the west dividing the sky into sunrise
and darkness. The white numbers on the clock radio show 6:03 a.m. The
oven reads 5:58, those numbers square and green.
The coffee is ready and Judith stands up and walks over to the sink.
Inside there is a mug and the dirty dishes from last night’s dinner. She
rinses the mug in warm water, the fork and knife scraping against the
metal basin. Judith wonders if it will rain while she is running. She pours
herself a cup of coffee and stirs in a spoon of sugar.
She turns on the TV, switching the channel to the news. An ad comes on
for a technical college. She watches the screen, waiting for the weather
report, her bare feet on the cold tile floor. There is a gradated patch of
colour moving over Michigan. Its outer edges are pale orange, covering
Lake Huron. The centre of the weather system shows Oakland County
half covered in bright red. Judith tries to imagine her suburb of Royal
Oak on the map as the storm moves west.
Outside the light is meeting with the shadowed sky. The grass is wet
and bright. Half the apple tree is shaded, the other half shining. The wind
is strong, throwing the thin branches up against each other. Through the
sliding doors the scene is silent. Judith pours another cup of coffee.
While she sits and drinks her coffee she is thinking about Florida; how
it is so far away from Michigan, how it is the opposite of Michigan. For
sixty dollars Judith could go to Florida on the Greyhound. Her sister, who
is two years older than Judith, went down last winter with her husband.
She told Judith that while she was there a UFO had been sighted over
the ocean.
The sighting had been in Naples, over a pier. A man at the resort had
shown Judith’s sister a video of the phenomenon: seven small points of
light hovering low over the ocean. They begin to form different shapes in
the night sky, arranging themselves into triangles or curved lines.
A crowd gathers in the dark off the highway and watches them for two
hours before they disappear. The army later announced it was a fleet of
fighter jets. The man told Judith’s sister that no one believed this, that
everyone knew the army was trying to cover up the truth.
The kitchen is filling up with the storm pattern from the weather report.
The colours move slowly off the screen, staining the space around the set.
Judith doesn’t seem to notice. Outside the wind is blowing through the
grass, throwing the blades sideways.
The clock radio now reads 6:46 a.m., the oven 6:31 a.m. Through the
quiet of the kitchen, from the backyard, a dog barks. Her neighbours do
not own dogs. Judith is unaccustomed to the sound, and her head jerks up
to look towards the lawn. She puts down her half empty mug and moves to
stand over by the back window. There is a tan coloured pitbull smelling
the base of the tree. Through his pelt, animal muscle is visible and tense.
The dog looks up at her.
His face is smooth, black around the jowls. An orange shape is now
leaving Judith’s television, covering the walls like a sunspot. Judith is
looking into the pitbull’s eyes. The dog pulls back his lips and bares his
teeth. Judith goes back to the kitchen table and picks up her coffee. The
orange shape is growing, radiating outward from the TV. She drinks her
lukewarm coffee and looks up at the lilies, then down at the couch. One
of the pillows is askew, and Judith walks over to right it. Back at the table
her stomach feels empty in a nervous way. She rests her head on her left
hand, fingers through her hair.
The dog barks again. Judith goes back to the window. She is surrounded by the red centre of the storm pattern. The sofa and lilies are now
obscured by the tint and shape of the weather. She notices the sky is
darker; the storm must be over Royal Oak. She remarks that her fists are
clenched, that her nails are uncomfortable against her palms. The clock
radio is still visible, and she looks over to read the time—7:04.
Staring out at the lawn Judith watches the dog. Her hands unclench and
she wipes them on her jogging shorts. She opens the sliding doors and
walks out into the yard. The dog looks up at her, teeth bared again.
The outer edge of the storm pattern follows her. Judith steps towards
the growling dog and looks up at the sky. She is almost certain that it will
rain while she is running. V
8
OUTER SPACE / VOLUME 11 / ISSUE 2
9
FICTION
UNE FEMME ATTEND
BIANCA LALIBERTÉ
Photography by Myles Fairhead
Elle attendait là, assise depuis dix minutes,
dans un petit café qui se trouve à des annéeslumière de chez elle. Elle aurait pu choisir
celui d’à côté, mais elle savait que nul autre
lieu ne lui aurait assuré l’impossibilité qu’une
connaissance tombe sur elle par hasard. Elle
s’y était rendue d’avance, cela lui donnerait
tout le temps du monde pour se préparer,
songeait-elle.
Au matin, elle avait pris un bain à la lavande
et savonné son corps entier avec un produit
de même parfum. Elle s’était assuré ainsi
de ne point imprégner ses pores d’odeurs
dysharmoniques, ce qui aurait risqué de la
confondre quant à son identité, à laquelle
elle se devait de maintenir un rapport intact.
Elle avait gardé ses cheveux secs, afin de
conserver le lustre procuré par les quelques
jours d’accumulation de gras capillaire. Elle
avait aspergé son visage d’huile d’olive et de
citron pour une peau de soie, retiré les poils
des parties visibles de son corps, crémé la
peau qui couvre ses muscles finement allongés,
maquillé son visage et poli ses ongles d’un rose
éclatant. Elle avait choisi de porter une robe
noire, le ton classique. Au moment d’enfiler
son bas de nylon, elle fut prise d’une pensée
qui dura un certain temps. Elle contempla
l’accélération du rythme de ses gestes effectués
au cours de la matinée. Elle renonça à cette
rêverie, considéra l’heure qu’il était : 10h40.
Elle embrassa l’homme qui partage son lit,
puis ils se souhaitèrent tous deux une bonne
journée. Ils s’aiment à mourir. Son cœur se
pinça. Elle engagea vite un geste conscient et
mesuré de rationalisation qui fit se dissoudre au
fond d’elle ses sentiments jusqu’à ce qu’elle ne
les entende plus. Elle sortit en une enjambée
assurée et se mit en chemin du dit café.
Sur place, alors qu’elle attendait, elle sentit
naître en elle une nostalgie de l’élégance des
dames d’autrefois. Elle jeta un coup d’œil
discret sur sa tenue et se redressa. Elle réalisa
ce qu’elle n’était pas. Elle blâma la production
mercantile et le marché de la mode et n’y songea
plus. Elle ne pouvait se permettre de réfléchir
aux bonnes manières des temps perdus.
Quelque chose en elle avait changé et
c’était pour ça qu’elle était là. Elle ignorait
précisément ce qui lui avait rendu acceptable
son nouveau mode de vie. Elle doutait de son
jugement taché de blessures, de jouissances.
Elle pensa encore. Elle vit se profiler devant
elle un avenir incertain, qu’elle prit plaisir à
configurer. Cet avenir ne pouvait pas dépendre
strictement d’elle et elle le savait. Elle pensa à
10
l’amour, aux enfants, à la carrière. Toutes ces
possibilités lui semblaient si loin d’elle. Sa vie
était composée d’une manière telle qu’elle ne
lui permettait pas d’emprunter un tel modèle,
même en imagination. Elle ne pouvait pas
dire qu’elle le désirait avidement, ni qu’elle
le dédaignait intégralement. Elle choisissait
chaque jour de se maintenir dans un certain
état de doute, où elle retrouvait une véritable
certitude. Elle espéra tout de même que la
taille du doute s’amoindrisse. Patiente, elle lui
laissait le temps de se former.
Il faisait magnifiquement beau ce jour-là, et
elle avait choisi le coin du café qui, à midi,
devait atteindre l’apogée de son ensoleillement.
Un puits de lumière surplombait la table où elle
siégeait. Elle regarda sa montre. Il était 11h52.
Elle se força à se concentrer intégralement.
Sa posture changea. Droite, elle regarda devant
elle. Un miroir, une horloge, appuyés contre le
mur et des gens, des tables qui l’en séparaient.
Elle se remit à réfléchir. Quelque chose du
monde lui déplaisait tout à fait. Elle en avait
après les voleurs de vie et les monstres humains
et les menteurs qui travaillaient ensemble au
maintien d’un système qu’elle savait pourri.
Elle était habitée par la peur immense de
devenir elle-même monstrueuse, au nom
OUTER SPACE / VOLUME 11 / ISSUE 2
d’une soi-disante nécessité financière ou d’une
fausse moralité. Prendre place au milieu des
vendus, cafards, larbins; jamais! Elle brouilla
ce cauchemar parmi des pensées d’avenir et
sentit remonter à sa gorge le quart de croissant
qu’elle venait tout juste d’avaler. Elle respira
délicatement et chercha de nouveau un train de
pensées satisfaisant.
Ce n’était plus le temps de songer à la valeur
de ce choix, qui, elle le savait, allait la marquer
au fer chaud. Il lui fallait maintenant focaliser
une immense portion d’énergie à se faire de
glace. Elle remarqua alors la lourdeur du
maquillage sur ses paupières. Elle était belle
sans lui, mais, à ce moment-là, ça n’avait pas
d’importance. Elle prit le temps de…
- Françoise?
- Vous devez être Pierre.
- Oui c’est moi.
- Assoyez-vous, je vous en prie.
Il prit place à sa table avec un sourire un peu
pervers.
- Tu sens bon jusqu’ici
- C’est de la bougainvillée, une fleur. Il en pousse
dans les régions du nord de Bali, les jours frais
d’été. Elle supporte très mal le froid de l’hiver.
- Ah bon? Tu en connais des choses. Tu aimes
les fleurs?
- Eh bien oui.
- Toutes les fleurs?
- Je pense bien. J’ai remarqué que j’apprécie
lorsqu’elles sont fermées. Elles sont à leur
meilleur; promesses de devenir, de couleurs et
d’odeurs, mais n’en donnent encore rien.
- Ah! Tu aimes la poésie?
- Peut-être, embêtée. Et vous?
- Pas particulièrement.
- Peut-être que moi non plus.
Un serveur s’arrête à leur table avec un sourire
ambigu. Il demande à Monsieur s’il désire
manger, en écartant les bras pour refermer
aussitôt ses mains contre le menu qu’il tenait
depuis son arrivée.
- Ce sera un café latté pour moi, dans une
tasse, avec deux sucres et une crème.
- Tout de suite, monsieur.
Le serveur les quitta et Pierre se retourna avec
un grand sourire, plus pervers que le premier,
vers la femme, qui prit quelques millièmes de
secondes à se ressaisir. Elle sourit elle aussi,
en regardant vers le sol. Elle releva la tête
vers l’homme, vers la gauche. Vers l’homme
encore puis elle braqua ses yeux sur le miroir,
où elle pouvait apercevoir le dehors à travers
une fenêtre. Elle réalisa qu’elle ne pouvait pas
garder son regard fixé dans les yeux de son
11
prédateur. Il était plutôt laid, mais ce n’est pas
ce qui la dérangeait le plus. C’était cette manie
qu’il avait à feindre sa vie, comme s’il pouvait
la dissimuler derrière un masque de théâtre
pauvre.
- Peut-être qu’on devrait parler de notre affaire.
Qu’est-ce que vous avez en tête exactement?
C’est que je ne voudrais pas vous décevoir.
- Je veux te faire plaisir, ma petite fille. Je
veux te gâter. Tout ce que tu voudras. Je vais te
donner des fleurs, t’acheter des parfums, des
bijoux. En plus tu es à l’université, toi, non?
Ça me plaît. Tu vas faire carrière comme moi,
un jour. Il faut bien que tu pailles tes études.
- Et de moi, qu’est-ce que vous attendez en
échange de toutes ces belles choses? demandat-elle en constatant le dédain que lui inspirait
la proposition de son nouveau complice.
- Qu’est-ce tu es prête à me donner?
Elle eut envie de lui dire, en serrant les dents,
qu’elle désirait lui donner tout ce qui rendrait
impossible qu’elle soit dévorée par un loup et
sa meute. V
FICTION
12
OUTER SPACE / VOLUME 11 / ISSUE 2
SPACES
MARTA BARNES
Tri-Colour Photography by Aaron Leon
“Commander Murphy, can you see anything?”
At the moment we’re drifting in shadow over the night side of Mars.
Its surface is all but invisible—the blind, depthless dark of a void. Dark
as an empty womb. Around it shine the stars, their light bright and steady.
They are as distant as Earth, as silent as Brona, as cold as our home.
“Negative,” I say.
“You should be seeing something soon.”
Even as the words drop out, a yellow glow appears on the horizon. It
lengthens in a faint crescent shape.
“Dawn in ten seconds,” says Latunsky, our pilot.
The other two in my crew have just woken up from their Somnials,
and they nudge themselves through the zero gravity to get a better look.
All eyes transfixed on the window.
“Three, two, one…”
Dawn: the black shrinks. The sun ignites the rim of the planet as we
orbit into daybreak. Red fills my eyes, and it’s as if I’ve been starving for
this colour. I can’t look away. It’s the red of embers, the auburn fire of
Brona’s hair. A bubble of water floats through the air in front of me and I
realize I’m crying.
The crew is silent. Stunned, in awe. Huber, the Chief Data Collector,
laughs behind me and the trance is broken. All at once, everyone snaps
awake and starts hugging each other. I’m pulled into the middle. I blink
the red out of my eyes and smile. Here we are, an eclectic crew of kids in
adult bodies who have dreamt of this day since we stuck glow-in-the-dark
stars on our ceilings and memorized the density and mass of every planet
in our solar system. Now isn’t the time to be thinking about home. Now is
the moment of victory.
The ship orbits for about an hour or so more while we set up
arrangements with ground control. In the meantime the facecalls are
transmitted so we can talk to our loved ones. I’m not surprised when no
one passes me the com. Since her last message after she gave birth, two
weeks into the expedition, there’s no one waiting for me down there. I try
not to think about it as I log the system’s final orbit readings.
Finally, we receive clearance to take the ship down. Atmospheric
entry is smooth, and we descend. The landing gears touch down and sink
into the surface where they’ll stay for the next few months until we blast
back home. Power and radiation gauges return to normal and solar panels
read full capacity. The control panel calculates the conditions of the
planet’s surface. We’ve landed on the sunny side of Mars so it’s a toasty
fourteen degrees Fahrenheit. Gravity at thirty-eight percent, by Earth’s
standards. Minimal air disturbances. Dust settling from the engines.
We set about installing the digicommand, downlinking telemetry
readings, and uploading measurement subsystems via several data buses.
Everyone is patient and thorough.
When we transmit the last of the data handling, I know it’s time.
I put a hand on the back of Latunsky’s chair. “Permission to explore
the planet?”
“Surface readings received aaand…approved.” He gives me the
thumbs up.
I turn to the crew. “Let’s suit up.”
So, this is the moment. The defining point in the history of spatial
expeditions. I watch the others take deep breaths as we make our way to
the exit. We’ve trained for just over three years, and are now pioneers of
interplanetary exploration, the first to leave our footprints on Mars. The
honour is sobering.
I pull on exposure gear for my space suit: padded thermovest,
pressurized gloves, a waist seal with an emergency cord attaching me to
the vessel. Last, I fasten my helmet into place.
“My rocket man,” Brona would always say, “I know you’ll make it
there someday.”
Breathe in, breathe out.
I walk towards the exit, the others following me to the antechamber
13
FICTION
when their gear is ready. The compression door seals and locks behind us
leaving us to face the door to the outside. We clap each other’s shoulders.
I decompress the door and heat escapes from our shuttle in
shimmering waves. Everything is silent. The hatch widens fully and the
doorway gapes onto an alien landscape, the auburn planet. A rebirth of
humankind into a barren world.
Breathe in, breathe out.
I move forward, hovering on the rim of the ship to prolong the footstep
that will change history. I open a com channel direct to ground control.
“Preparing to step onto Mars,” I announce.
“The world is watching,” comes their reply. There’s only one person
I hope is looking.
I step outside.
Dust billows from under my foot and clouds around my boot in red.
Outside the sky is pink; cold as a stillborn.
I take another step until I’m outside the ship completely and let the
others follow. The stun of awe is replaced with exhilaration. Cheers blow
the speakers of the open channel linking us. They bound out in slow
motion behind me.
“Another small step,” says Latunsky and everyone’s laughter fills the
channel.
I walk a few yards from the ship towards the sun, looking in the
direction of Earth, imagining how small she is.
Without warning, my muscles seize as if they can sense it—the full
distance of the Earth. I feel myself stagger. Fifty-four point six million miles
of emptiness. It presses in on me. Black coalesces around my field of vision.
No, this is not how I wanted this moment to go, not now.
I feel the space between Earth and Mars, and my knees buckle, as
if the space is weighted. The space where our daughter should be. It
stretches away, possible futures pulled, snapping from the tension so I’m
left to bob in the dark, helpless, untethered. Brona exists on the other
side of the chasm, cutting the umbilical cord between us with silence.
Two months of silence. If there was just a way to have her hear me say I
love you, this is going to be okay, we still have time, this is hard but—
I get an impatient transmission from ground control. “Commander
Murphy, come in. What do you see?”
My vision returns, and I realize I’m gripping the emergency cord
convulsively. I relax my fists and straighten from the hunch I’ve folded
into. It occurs to me that now’s the time to say my own One Small Step for
Man to live as my eternal words, to be passed down to generations for
everyone to hear. Except that every line I’ve thought of in the past two
months has vanished.
What do I see? The others smiling behind me, turned in my direction,
waiting. The emptiness, still pressing against my helmet. The figure of
54 600 000, constricting itself in a claustrophobic knot. Red dust
settling on my imagined life with a daughter. The world repositioning
itself.
What can I see, despite this?
I think of Brona and when I will hold her again and the promise I will
breathe into her ear with her hair against my face.
“A future.” V
14
NONFICTION
OUTER SPACE / VOLUME 11 / ISSUE 2
EVENT HORIZON
EMMA HEALEY
Photography by Laura Rokas
If you’ve ever spent time in downtown Toronto,
chances are you’ve walked past my high school.
It’s a small independent institution for “gifted”
kids that began its life as a branch of one of the
city’s larger universities. You’d recognize the
building if I showed you a picture. The place
takes up a whole city block and gives off kind of
a prison-y vibe; crumbling brick exterior, bars
over the windows, hunchbacked kids, more like
a Dickensian workhouse than a shining beacon
of academic excellence.
15
It isn’t much better inside. All my adolescent
memories are backlit like a horror movie—
flickery compact fluorescents, dull clanking
of century-old pipes. I remember wildly
dysfunctional heating, slipshod fire drills
conducted without bells or PA. Once upon a
time there had been a real swimming pool in the
basement, but by the time I got there it was just
an unmarked door that opened into a cold, tiled
room with a long echo, air that tasted like antique
chlorine and an empty, pool-ish depression in
the centre. Nobody really did much in the pool
room because it was sad and creepy and breathing
in there made you feel a thin sting around your
eyeballs, except for the Young Physicists’ Society,
who met there three times a week.
Clubs and societies were a big thing, mostly
because they kept students firmly trapped inside
the bubble of school life—you’d spend all day
in classes, and then all night in the computer
lab with the Multi-Player Gaming Club, or
sewing togas for the Classics Competition.
The school took great pride in its long history
of extracurricular activities, and the walls of
the hallway that lead from the front entrance
to the principal’s office were decorated with
framed black-and-white photos of some of the
school’s earliest presidents and captains. From
its foundation in 1915 until late ’72, the school
was boys-only, so all the portraits from that era
are pretty much what you’d expect—hockey
team, Cadet Corps, Hunting Club, fresh-faced
future Old Boys in long socks and suspenders.
There’s one face, though, that stands out.
Reginald Speers was the founder and first
president of the Young Physicists’ Society (c.
1932), a club that didn’t manage to clear the
three-member mark until ’60-something. His
portrait, which hangs off-centre, away from the
others, was taken way too close up—his haircut
is out of fashion even for the ’30s, and his skin
is so pale that even in black-and-white he seems
translucent, like he’s about to phosphoresce.
NONFICTION
In Reginald’s day the Young Physicists' Society
was a joke to everyone except him, but by
2009 the tide had turned. Sports had all but
disappeared from the extracurricular horizon
(one year we had a killer wrestling team, but
aside from that our mascot was a tree and our
main cheer entirely in Latin), and the Society
had become the most popular club in school,
ahead of even the Model UN. It was the only
administratively sanctioned club whose
meetings were held without an academic
supervisor; new members were invited by
those with seniority and sworn to secrecy once
inducted. The whole thing glowed with mystery;
even the kids who joked that the meetings
were probably just all of them jerking off while
watching Cosmos on VHS felt a queasy mix
of respect and fear. There were rumours that
Arnold Kim (president the year I graduated)
already had a job at CERN once he was done
fast-tracking through Harvard. The Society were
our school’s Illuminati; they moved through
our ranks all secret and flagrantly brilliant,
bending theoretical light in the locked rooms
underneath us, doing stuff whose complexity
and sheer genius we couldn’t even begin to
fathom, probably.
At this point, if you recognize some of the
finer details, you may already know where
this is going. It’s unclear how the rumours
got started. There were stirrings in late
November, when Arnold gave a presentation
at the International Physics Olympiad about
black holes and gravitational fluctuations on
Earth, in the present day—competitors came
away wide-eyed, saying he’d spoken with a
fire they’d never seen. Around that time the
Society started upping their meetings to four
times a week instead of three, and getting
their burlier younger members to guard the
door to the pool during school days.
The first time I felt it I was just walking through
the basement on my way to class. At first it was
like someone sucking the air out of my lungs.
Then something raked down my spine, hard.
A bright buzz in my back teeth. This slow,
brilliant shiver, a tuning fork, a baritone drag
in my torso’s left half. I don’t know how long I
stopped for; I don’t know how long I stood with
my hand on the pool room’s locked door before
this doofy seventh-grade Society kid named
Winston appeared in my peripheral vision,
glaring at me through his haircut and telling me
to get back to class.
Everyone has different versions of the same
story. Within a few weeks we’d all felt it, and all
anyone could talk about were theories. It was a
simulation, superconductive magnets and a few
tricks of the light; it was Arnold Kim developing
secret military technology for a private firm; it
was nothing and anyone who said they could
feel it was being retarded. The Society pretty
much all stopped coming to class, spent most
of their time guarding the door to the pool in
packs and shifts.
Of course it’s impossible for a real black hole to
exist on Earth. We weren’t stupid. If you followed
the news back then, or subscribed to certain
publications, you know now what happened to
us, eventually, to the whole school. But knowing
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what something isn’t doesn’t do much to quiet
the rush of radio-noises running down the pipes
in the walls, doesn’t piece the lightbulbs that
all shattered in rapid succession, left to right,
all the way from one end of the school to the
other on each floor one Tuesday back together.
Knowing what something isn’t gets you pretty
much fuck-all, in the grand scheme.
Ultimately, there were a few things we all agreed
on: that the black hole was there, and that we
didn’t know what it was but it wasn’t a black
hole, unless it was one. That the pull felt kind of
like someone had wrapped a rope around your
wrists or your waist and was tugging, not hard
enough to hurt you, but hard enough that people
passing the event horizon—our nickname for the
four-foot radius around the door—looked like
they were walking against a high wind. Some
other things nobody talked about. When James
Rose took me out by the loading dock after the
holiday dance, I didn’t ask. When Alex Wang
snuck back into the building the night before
our biology class was due to dissect a bunch of
frogs and released the whole live shipment into
the heating ducts, everyone acted like it was
no big deal. It was difficult to tell what force
was actually pinning our school in place. You
find yourself wondering, all the time, whether
it’s love or the black hole you’re feeling, and
even years later it turns out that’s maybe not the
worst question to ask yourself, sometimes. Car
crashes within a five-mile radius of the nearest
major intersection hit an all-time high in the
last two months of the spring term. Arnold Kim
didn’t come to the prom. V
VISUAL ART
As an up-and-coming artist who works with
new media practice, Levi Bruce engages with
the ways in which we have been altered by
our digital existences. He uses a variety of
media to express his characteristic brand of
URL humour. Bruce’s creative process mirrors
the endlessly disposable and rapidly mutable
flux of information available on the Internet.
His recent installation at the VAV Gallery,
SLEEPnDREAM Internet Café, consisted of
four recycled, jerry-rigged PCs on which he
curated an interactive gallery of reconfigured,
found cyber objects, which the audience could
engage with while enjoying complimentary
Hype energy drinks right out of a mini-fridge.
Despite a debilitating virus on one of the installation’s computers, SLEEPnDREAM successfully prompted its audience to engage with
their URL identities in an IRL art gallery,
blurring the boundaries between self and the
technological extensions of self. Bruce sees the
Internet as an alternate universe, one that is
inextricably linked to our own but complicated
by its creation and consumption of images, relationships, and communication.
Go and find more of his work at levibruce.com
and levirl.com.
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ARTIST FEATURE
LEVI BRUCE
OUTER SPACE / VOLUME 11 / ISSUE 2
http://700gallery.tumblr.com/
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VISUAL ART
COVER ARTIST
BRENT MORLEY SMITH
Brent Morley Smith’s images beg the audience to scrutinize photography’s ability to
document our world objectively. They call into question what is really occurring in
front of the camera’s lens by playing off of the medium’s inherent flaws. An anonymous
black blob turns a desertscape into a black hole. A pink walk-in closet that contains
nothing but some empty hangers, a transparent plastic bag filled with unidentifiable
contents, and a white shirt begins to look like an ominous scene of abduction. Despite
being visually familiar, these intimate moments and documents of daily life are
skewed into imagined realities. He chooses not to portray the world as it is, but
rather, as it could be.
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OUTER SPACE / VOLUME 11 / ISSUE 2
21
VISUAL ART
22
OUTER SPACE / VOLUME 11 / ISSUE 2
23
POETRY
THE GOOD BUILDER
HIROKI TANAKA
Illustration by Simone Blain
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OUTER SPACE / VOLUME 11 / ISSUE 2
PRE:
"L’esthétique ne fut plus
inspirée par la nature, mais formée de rencontres purement
cérébrales, ou chaotiques, incapable de s’accorder avec la
réalité extérieure, et n’ayant de prise que sur les concepts
intérieures, c’est-à-dire avec des idéologies dont le plus grand
danger est qu’elles se trouvent sous la coupe despotique du
désir au lieu de ne chercher que le beau par le vrai et le bien."
~ Dom Paul Bellot
transcend into mines
or drift into nebulae
Whether it is heliogeo- whether travel
is time or rhythm
A slow moving body
must first nourish itself on things,
which it transforms in order to make
a form grasped in them
shine on a bit of matter
Pleiades
a large hand colliding
over Montreal
I, myself
just a leaning smoker
the terrace underneath
shaped within Bellot’s eyes
ANOMALY:
Copernicus saw without sound
and... gestalt(!)
To see a universe shaped by desire
an atlas shaped by hunger
and constant colliding lack
a rubber band taut
a full body to burst into
It is no longer a question of
prefix-centric,
“my fantasy to yours”
but incommensurability
How much my mind keens
shakes against his "frozen music"
his basilica still standing taut
I wanted trillions of little "i"
spread up past the sun
I wanted to be little grey ears
I wanted you lost too
I move ash around an ashtray
"Just as light invades the shade
and vice-versa, our vision is
extended and balanced at the same time."
~ Bellot
CRISIS:
"A machine is meant to aid not
dominate us and that the work of man,
his constructions and perceptions, are geometric."
~ Le Corbusier
Into the shade that fills
from the vantage points of night
each of us first
without parallax
Potelemy sat slumped
against terrace
desire-less
in front of a gleaming Basilica
All things taken by
the better builder
Back then we just swam in black
knowledge like water
like small eyes into my eyes
like orbs of horror vacui
All memory appearing equally distant
the gasping and the clutching of
anxious lungs
REVOLUTION:
If we place all faith into
an architect of night
or deeper into ourselves
is this a gradual declining
or some inner monument
NOW PUZZLE SOLVING:
Ptolemy saw the earth, its
circumference so full; vibrating, writhing
all objects move around me
and I, alone
I don’t know how I choose what I see
if what I see is even starlight
There is a teasing sound
and that’s all.
Whether we build for power
or build for release
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POETRY
PURE DATA
STEPH COLBOURN
Stills from .gif by Levi Bruce
warning: delay: multiply defined
warning: delay: multiply defined
warning: delay: multiply defined
warning: delay: multiply defined
warning: delay: multiply defined
warning: delay: multiply defined
warning: delay: multiply defined
warning: delay: multiply defined
expr divide by zero detected
expr divide by zero detected
warning: recordR: multiply defined
warning: recordL: multiply defined
error: readsf: start requested with no prior ‘open’
warning: recordR: multiply defined
warning: recordL: multiply defined
warning: recordR: multiply defined
warning: recordL: multiply defined
error: #hcs_cursor_class_receive: no such object
error: readsf: start requested with no prior ‘open’
error: readsf: start requested with no prior ‘open’
error: readsf: start requested with no prior ‘open’
warning: recordR: multiply defined
warning: recordL: multiply defined
error: stack overflow
error: multiply defined
This poem is composed of the transcribed errors and warnings that were
relayed by a computer during one hour of programming a synthesizer on
Pure Data Software.
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OUTER SPACE / VOLUME 11 / ISSUE 2
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POETRY
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OUTER SPACE / VOLUME 11 / ISSUE 2
PROMISE ME THIS
ALEX MANLEY
Photography by Brent Morley Smith
After some Ridley Scott movies
i
A prequel of a sci-fi movie is a time paradox,
unless you believe in the devolution of technology.
ii
There is a hum for you growing in my gut, like a xenomorph,
or the garlic at the bottom of my fridge, which is sprouting
bright green explosions, unearthly little child-things I
crush flat beneath a knife. Would you stop running
into me, pretending you want to talk to me
at a party, it’s not healthy, I am losing
my head all over again in a mutual friend’s backyard,
it’s dark and I am floating. That’s worth drinking to, I’d imagine.
iii
I am watching the many films of us backwards and forwards;
some of the moments seem non-canonical.
One of these days I’ll fix the pacing
with a new cut that’ll explain what I really am.
iv
You are with me at the South Pole,
you are with me in the escape pod,
you are moving your body to the songs I say I like,
you are keeping me alive, for your own selfish purposes.
You are from another planet, like a white cobra,
can I pet you, big things have small beginnings.
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Stills from .gif by Levi Bruce
OUTER SPACE / VOLUME 11 / ISSUE 2
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
TELEVISION
Maybe you were raised to think of television as a moral fallacy,
or maybe you were raised not to think of it at all. It melts your
brain, makes you boring, gives you a vitamin D deficiency. Still,
you watched it anyway, carpet prints blotched on your elbows. TV
was happiness on Saturday morning, autonomy when you finally
took control of the remote, escape when you couldn’t sleep, down
in your otherwise dark basement, watching the flickering colours
of The Simpsons once-removed on your walls.
You might not have cable anymore, or even a television set, but
that doesn’t mean you don’t watch TV. The same people who tell
you not to waste time on it go home at night and buffer Girls and
The Wire, claiming it’s not the same thing, not even close. In
2013, screens are ubiquitous; you control the content and the
commercials, when to watch and where, on what device.
It’s clear that your old friend is growing up, changing. What do
you want to say before you don’t recognize it anymore? What
memories do you two share? Can you be critical? Were you never
really friends at all? Your television can’t hear you, but we can.
The Void is talking TV.
Peut-être t’a-t-on appris à voir la télévision comme une faute
morale, ou peut-être as-tu été élevé pour ne pas y penser du
tout. Ça fait fondre ton cerveau, ça te rend plate, ça te donne
une déficience de vitamine D. Tu la regardais quand même, les
motifs de ta moquette imprimés sur tes coudes. La télé était le
bonheur du samedi matin, l’autonomie lorsque tu pus finalement
contrôler la manette, une fuite lorsque tu ne pouvais pas dormir,
en bas dans ton sous-sol sombre sans elle, regardant les couleurs
tremblotantes des Simpsons sur tes murs.
Tu n’as peut-être plus le câble, ou même plus de téléviseur, mais
ça ne veut pas dire que tu ne regardes pas la télé. Ceux-là mêmes
qui t’on dit de ne pas perdre ton temps en regardant la télé, rentre
à la maison le soir et téléchargent Girls ou The Wire, revendiquant
que ce n’est pas la même chose, pas du tout. En 2013, les écrans
sont omniprésents, tu contrôles leur contenu et les publicités, où
et quand les regarder, à partir de quel dispositif.
C’est clair, ta vieille amie est en train de grandir et de changer.
Que veux-tu dire avant que tu ne la reconnaisses plus? Quelles
souvenirs partagez-vous tous les deux? Peux-tu être critique?
N’étiez-vous jamais vraiment des amis? Ta télévision ne peut
t’entendre, mais nous, on peut. Le Void parle TV.
GUIDELINES
Poetry: maximum 5 poems
Fiction and Nonfiction: 1200 words
Visual art: 3-5 samples
Send us your submissions by September 30, 2013
www.thevoidmagazine.com
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All submissions read and viewed anonymously
GOODBYE MICHAEL, JACOB, GLEB AND AERON