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The God of Nothing

The God of Nothing

“I think my grandmother killed three men.” The young man sat in my office, his fingers laced together in his lap and his head down, his eyes looking anywhere but at me. I didn’t force him to look up from his lap. Some other guidance counselors would have spent hours just getting Vele Bilyk to look up.

And if his hands were nervously lacing and unlacing his fingers, or clenching and unclenching, I might have, too.

I had been his counselor for three years now, and as it stood, with his current state, knew it would have been a losing battle that only made the boy dig his heels in faster and harder than any other student I have ever regularly worked with.

“Okay, Vele.” I said, getting his attention back on me. “Let’s talk about this.”

I tried to not laugh outright at the idea. A good guidance counselor knows when not to laugh and can keep a straight face.

I had met his parents, and his grandmother, Babu Yelena, at past Parent/Teacher nights. Belo Bilyk was a tall, slender man with the blondest hair I have ever seen without albinism being involved, and his mother, Lada, a little porcelain doll of a woman, had hair as dark as a moonless night sky. Her light sprinkling of silver gray hairs could be stars in that dark night sky, if I stretch out and massage this metaphor a bit.

His grandmother, who I honestly couldn’t tell you which of Vele’s parents were her child, was an elderly matron with hair the color of old knives, iron gray with touches of red here and there that hint at rust, or possibly blood. Straight backed, severe, and a stoic expression. The only time I had seen the woman smile one at those Parent/Teacher nights were instances when one of Vele’s teachers would praise the boy.

“She was laughing last night after dinner while my older cousins and I cleaned up the table. She was talking to Uncle Perry.”

Vele had mentioned his many uncles and aunts regularly in these sessions. The very large Bilyk family had emigrated from a Slavic country before Vele’s birth. While I knew Vele had mentioned it once or twice in these last three years, I think it may have been Ukraine.

“She and Uncle Perry were playing the Boast game, and when they had both dared each other to do terrible things today, Uncle Perry told her that to top his boast, she would have to kill a man.” Hands folding and unfolding between the boy’s knees.

“Okay, Vele. And then what happened.” I prompted.

“She laughed at him, and then said, ‘No, I killed three men today, killing a fourth tomorrow would be cold cabbage.’ and then when Uncle Perry yelled and complained, she cackled, and reached out and klatsnuv his nose.” Vele had done the accents and mimicked the voices of his grandmother and uncle, before reaching out a hand to flick the pen on the side of my desk.

That motion put the term “klatsnuv” into context for me. Though he was born here in New Jersey, because of what his family spoke at home, Vele had trouble sticking to English words sometimes. Over the last ten years I had several students referred to my office for being “slow” by faculty when the only thing the kids were suffering from were tragic cases of multilingualism.

“Do you think your grandmother actually killed these men, or do you think it might be,” and I smiled at him now, trying to get him to find the more than likely silliness in the situation rather than dwelling on what I saw as the morbid, but remote possibilities, “more likely an aspect of your family’s Boast game that made her say that to make your uncle slip up? Force him into making a mistake?”

I try to get the students to think things out logically for themselves, but sometimes they need prodding. Not all teen thought processes fire on the same cylinders, it’s why so many teens make decisions that then make their parents scream...

Yesterday I had Dillon Yates in my office to talk about why he felt the need to jump up onto his desk and shriek Bon Jovi lyrics at the top of his lungs.

Teens… whadayagonnado?

Vele looked up nervously at me, then his gaze dropped again, a hawk after a mouse. Or, maybe a mouse scurrying away from a hawk?

“She is the Great Witch, Queen of all Old Witches. And if she said she had done a thing, believe her, because if you doubt her, that’s worse than being certain.” That one took me a minute or two to parse; I’ll give Vele credit here, the kid threw a lot of abstract thinking into that one.

Vele was good at abstract thinking, his math teachers have all had glowing reports of his progress in his studies. His Advanced Calculus teacher, Mister Belvoir, believes that Vele could be headed to M.I.T. someday, and regularly gave Vele extra credit work at an advanced level that his other students wouldn’t even know where to start with. Ol’ Belly and I both agree, Vele is plugged into, if there is such a thing, the base mathematics at the center of the universe.

I hope he gets his shot at M.I.T., though I have my doubts.

The Bilyk family has the feel of one where nobody ever strays too far from home. From what Vele has told me in these sessions, all members of the family living here in New Jersey all live in and around our bustling little town of Manville, and all of them work for his grandfather, Didi Rod.

Didi Rod owned a local junkyard and scrap metal refinery. Those family members who didn’t work for Rod worked for one or the other of his Great Aunts, Rozhanitsy, Sudenitsy, or Narechnitsy.

The three elder Kombayny sisters ran (respectively) a midwifery clinic, a temp job service, and a butcher shop specializing in sausages, but also did local catering. Between his grandfather and his great aunts, everyone in the Bilyk family,three generations of grandparents, aunts and uncles and a slew of odd cousins, were all local. And they all worked at jobs they generally thought of as below their station. In the Old World they had been, as Vele often put it, “they were more important there than they can really be here in the states.”

It was a common problem with families who have had to emigrate to the states. I had seen so many examples of it here in New Jersey, and read about even more cases in the psychology and professional counseling journals I regularly received in the mail and through email.

It often played out that a doctor, a lawyer, a politician, scientist …what have you, in their own country has to take work as a janitor, a salesman, a lowly teacher, and they cannot get back to their former, “higher” positions until, or if, they can transfer their accreditation from their former homeland to the US.

More often than not, it doesn’t happen. And they spend a long time mourning the good old days. Newer generations raised here, whether born here or not, don’t remember those days and as such they don’t understand the family’s feelings of despair and loss. And the family often looks down on the younger generation as… lacking.

And this was all part and parcel of Vele’s anxiety issues. He had a raft of cousins, aunts, and uncles who teased him relentlessly about being “the American” in the family. Not really one of “Them.”

Kids are cruel, as the saying goes, but once you’ve passed fourteen and you still choose to be horrible, honestly that’s your own personal failure. And from my humble perspective, most of the Bilyk Clan had all, in one way or another, failed that simple test.

“So, Vele, how can we work through this revelation that your grandmother killed three men.” I will admit that I wasn’t taking his claims, or at least the claims made by Babu Yelena too seriously. “I know you say it’s better to believe her than to not, but let’s break this down a little. How did she kill them?”

Vele figited a little and shifted in his seat. Then he looked up at me, and said, “She told Uncle Perry that she made each man stop his own heart for her. They each had insulted her in some way, and she made them each have a heart attack. She laughed, because she said they all lived in the same place, so it was a ‘One stop shopping for old men’s hearts! Like a big, red, sloppy K-Mart!’” He copied his Babu’s accent and voice perfectly, and followed it up with a cackle then, it was loud. Like a Halloween witch in an old movie.

I’ll admit, it made me shiver a little. The kid’s granny was a creepy old woman, and Vele’s imitation of her voice was… accurate.

“Uncle Perry was mad, and when I came back in to collect their coffee cups he turned to me and said “Oh, look! In a house filled with gods, we now have a god of… What? Of Nothing!’”

He looked defeated.

“His son, Biy, who was helping me with the dishes laughed, and repeated what he said back to all the others in the kitchen. They all laughed at me as I brought the last of the dishes in.”

“I’m so sorry, Vele.” I told him. “If I could make it stop, I would. But, since I can’t, let’s work on what you can do to not be affected by their words…”

A half an hour’s worth of discussion, and I thought we had made some progress. We worked on strategies to ignore the criticisms of his family, and spent some time on affirmation exercises.

Vele liked some of the little mantras we had come up with. “The things my family say to me mean nothing.” was a particular favorite. As was “Words are just vibrations in the air that pass through me and cannot affect me.”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

“The only person I need to impress is myself,” wasn’t one he was ready to process yet. But we were working on that.

Then he packed up his bookbag, a small leather affair that some days I would swear held every book the kid had ever read despite its compact size, and then shrugged into his jacket before hoisting the pack onto his shoulders.

As I walked him out of my small office, we were met in the front of the main office, a formidable looking blond woman stood by the reception desk tapping her foot in agitation.

It was one of Vele’s aunts, Zorya. I had met her several times before, and she had always been polite. It was a brittle friendliness that barely covered some very strong emotions on her part. I didn’t know if she loathed picking her nephew up, or loathed the school, or just hated me, but she was always exactly as polite as she thought she could get away with, and not a jot more than that.

We all know people like that, and all of us just have to put up with their attitudes for the sake of not living in a world with constant screaming arguments. Humanity… meh.

The few times I had ever seen her smile, it had been like seeing the sun come out from behind the clouds, or rising after a stormy night. The woman was simply stunning when she bothered to smile. That is, when she wasn’t looking at you like she had stepped in cleaner messes left by ill dogs, or when she might be actively plotting your death.

In her light yellow business suit, matching jacket and skirt she should look pleasant and happy, with little splashes of orange and red to visually pop, but the stern look on her face communicated nothing so much as a bare tolerance for me, the school, the state of New Jersey, and possibly even her nephew.

“Have a good night Vele,” I said. “Remember what we practiced. And I’ll see you here again on Friday.”

He smiled back at me and then turned to his aunt, addressing her in… Russian? Ukrainian? I didn’t really know, but Vele sounded stoically calm and respectful as he addressed his aunt.

But whatever it was he said, must not have been too respectful, because her face hardened like three feet of ice on the surface of a very shallow lake. She stared at her nephew, anger crawling its slow path across her mouth and steadily making its way up to her eyes.

It’s amazing how quickly the beauty of the rising sun can turn to the viscous anger of the inside of a furnace.

She spat several slavic words at Vele, who just sighed. Turning back to me he smiled, and said, “Friday. Yes, sir.”

By Friday afternoon I had completely forgotten that Vele had told me his grandmother had boasted of killing three men on Tuesday. At least, I had until lunch when I was listening to the local pop radio station while I ate lunch in my office.

“...local police remain confused and without leads regarding a multiple murder scene from earlier this week, though Somerset County Sheriff, James Russell, says inquiries are ongoing, and if any residents have tips they would like to share concerning the triple murder of three elderly men perpetrated this last Tuesday at the Somerset Senior Living Center…” the voice droned on, listing the tip-line number to call and maybe a website to visit, but I had stopped actively listening by that point as I remembered my appointment with Vele Bilyk.

Thinking about it logically, as I would tell my students to do, I worked through the idea that his Babu Yelena HAD killed three men. And had then bragged about it.

Then I worked at it from the opposite end of the equation, and thought “If she had heard about the murders from a friend, or work contact, if she had such. As an elderly woman, as a part of a large local family with lots of social connections Babu Yelena probably has people in her social circles who live at the Somerset Senior Living Center. She heard about it, most likely, and used it in her game with Vele’s uncle.

This was the kind of thinking that I tried to teach to the kids here at the middle school.

But, For the next two hours after lunch, it preyed on my mind, and the thoughts just kept circling back to the idea of a Jersey teen’s elderly grandmother being “the Queen of All Old Witches.” My mind just wouldn’t let that other half, that darker half of those ideas Vele told me about.

And if A, then…B…? Was not knowing for sure, doubting, worse than knowing for certain? It was starting to feel exactly like that.

I stumbled through my other appointments and various “paperwork” responsibilities until three o’clock rolled around, clumsily trying to not think about Vele Bilyk’s steel haired grandmother, and failing miserably.

As the bell rang through the school on the intercom system, I stood from my desk and went out to the reception desk, waiting for Vele to show up for our end of the week appointment. I was thinking of how and if I should mention the murders to Vele in our appointment, and had just decided to not mention it, no need to reinforce his negative thought processes where his grandmother is concerned, when the front door opens, and in steps Babu Yelene herself.

The old woman, her face stern but suddenly shifting and turning giddy, happy even as she saw me standing by the desk, walked through the doors with a purpose.

Striding toward me, Babu Yelena said, her heavily accented voice light but cracking slightly, “Ah, you are the Mister Rizzo…” She was next to me, touching shoulder to shoulder with me and had a hand around my waist, in the blink of an eye.

Behind her, in the little courtyard in front of the building, I could just catch a glimpse of several other members of Vele’s extended family that I had seen at various school functions over these last three years. I must have been counting them, unconsciously I guess, and must have been staring, distracted, because then Babu Yelena startled me by snapping her fingers next to my left ear with the loudest CRACK I had ever heard a human make. It sounded more like ice cracking on a lake in the early Spring, or even like a cue ball hitting concrete, than anything that should be produced by the hand of a slender, birdlike old besom.

“You have been teaching my grandson how to not be a weak boy! To him you teach to not cry!” Her voice was bouncy in its apparent joy that I had been helping Vele deal with his feelings of distress over the actions of his horrible family.

I’d take that win, but...

Her hand at the edge of my belt was an iron bar when I tested, trying to turn back toward the hallway where my office hid. I couldn’t have pulled away from the old woman with anything less than a crowbar wedged between us.

“Are you here to pick up Vele?” I asked, nervous. “He should have come in a few minutes ago now, though he’s usually early.” I smiled at Babu Yelene awkwardly, though I was attempting placid calm.

“Oh, no, Mister Rizzo!” And now she… cackled. That’s all I could call it, as she turned me back the way I had tried to turn a moment before. I didn’t quite like the way she turned the Zs in my name into the dry, slithering, spilling, squirm of S’es.

Was it accent or artifice?

The message was clear. She would lead me. This was all her show, that unbreakable grip told me.

Guiding me gracefully back into my own domain, “Mister Rizzo, my grandson has not been in the school today. He has had… some changes.”

Her voice was pitched toward a happy banter, but the way in which she was pulling me along spoke of darker things. Had she not been a skinny, rake of an octogenarian, I might have thought I was a step away from being dragged to prison.

Back into my little, cheerily lit office, she let me go and then sat herself in the “guest seat” usually reserved for my students to sit in. Slowly, I walked back around my desk, and sat. I took a moment to gather my wits, and a calming breath before I looked up at Babu Yelena. She was not looking back at me, but rather her gaze drifted to various decorations I had on my walls, and the double set of bookshelves that lined the wall on either side of my single window.

I attempted to regain her attention. “Miss Yelena…”

“No.” She said, and the word, no louder than needed to reach my ears, fell down upon me like the doors of some great tomb. Her attention, black eyes unwavering, pinning me where I sat.

Trying again, confused, “Miss…”

“No.” Again, abrupt but if anything this was softly spoken.

She sighed then, and stretched her back and arms. Finally her neck and jaw. “My grandson. He came to you because he was afraid. Scared. And you have helped him with that.”

I nodded slowly, not knowing if I would be allowed to speak yet.

“You have helped to push him. Make him walk with his head up when we all tried so hard to get him to stride like a member of our family and not walk…” Here she slumped her shoulders and mimed a slouch. “Like an American teen. You have helped our little Vele feel like he is more than just another ‘kid’ to go out and get french fries and play in the in-tar-webs.”

I had no idea what to make of that last bit, but figured she was making an attempt to use the right terms, and so let it pass.

“But now he stands up to us. Even to my bully of a son, Perun. Last night he yelled at the boy, and do you know what Vele said to him?”

I shook my head.

That cackle came again. “Vele said ‘The things my Family say to me… They mean NOTHING!”

“Yes…” I whispered. It was getting hard to breathe now, and the air in the little office felt hot and heavy around me. I think I had started to sweat as those mad, too dark little eyes bored their way into my head.

“So, I wanted to thank you. Myself.” She leaned in now, her voice too sweet, her smile widening further than I thought might be healthy for the mouth. Its edges now almost at their limit as she said to me in a hushed whisper. “He was the first of Us to be born in this new land. Vele will be the newest God amongst Us.” And then she giggled. And that giggle rose, and tore itself from her too wide mouth as a mad cackle any crow or raven would have been proud of.

Pain exploded in my chest. Her hand had struck out lightning quick, impaling me in my chair. I could feel her fingers exploring around… something. A squeeze from somewhere red and wet sent my head rocking back. Trying not to be distracted by the unholy cracking noises her hand and wrist were now making in my chest, I tried to scream.

No breath had entered, and would not be drawn in now, either. No air in that hot, feted room would suffer itself to come to me to allow it.

Flecks of red on her face, some small. Some larger, and sliding as gravity drew them in little red lines that flowed and followed the wrinkles of her face.

“And you, Mister Rizzo… Thomassss,” She amended, drawing out the sibilance of my name. Her face close enough to mine now to kiss me had she wanted to. “You will be the first heart fed to my little Vele.”

The room was getting dark now.

And I desperately wanted to take a breath. I couldn’t even feel the air in the room anymore.

As my eyes closed, I felt the pull of something in my chest. A cracking noise, and a popping release, before a collapse as things… inside me jockeyed and jostled for space in this new chaotic arrangement.

And then my head spun as I was finally released to fall to the floor.

The very last thing I heard in this life was that old woman, that Goddess of Winter Witches, saying to me, her voice barely a whisper, “Even the God of Nothing needs sacrifices.”

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