INTO THE VOID
Image by Adrien Olichon via Unsplash. Edited.
Benjamin Hollo’s story “Into the Void” is the winner of the 2025 River Styx Prize in Fiction. A print version of this story will appear in River Styx 109: Posthuman (March 2025).
The judge, Christopher Castellani, author of Leading Men and many other books, had this to say about the story:
“There is a void at the center of Paula’s long marriage that maybe—just maybe—her trip to Japan will fill. With her husband Gerry beside her fussing over banalities, Paula boards the plane to Tokyo filled with the foolish wonder and optimism of the traveler, but also carrying the same longings and anxieties that have been simmering for many years. On the flight, her chance encounter with Carly, a free spirit who becomes her guide to the strange city, brings her feelings to a boiling point. Will she act on them, or will she continue playing the part of the happy, dutiful wife? Will the vastness of the city save her, or consume her?
I admired the clarity and economy and restraint of the prose in this story, and how the loneliness and grief at its core sneaks up on the reader in much the same way it sneaks up on the main character. "Into the Void" has a haunted quality that, without the modern setting, is akin to nineteenth-century short fiction that dramatized the psychic disturbances of everyday American life. While incorporating supernatural elements, its ultimate resolution—both emotionally satisfying and heartbreaking—is achingly familiar and all too real.”
— Christopher Castellani, December 2024
This story is inspired by Roland Barthes’s essay, “Center-City, Empty Center,” from his book Empire of Signs (1970).
The flight to Tokyo was over an hour late to depart, and Gerry paced back and forth before the gate. On her phone, his wife Paula swiped away at a game of Solitaire. Though she tried, Paula couldn’t entirely ignore her husband’s frenetic rounds, a corner of her mind remaining on alert. The delay was all but guaranteed to put him into one of his bad moods, and once that happened, it was up to Paula to pacify him.
When it was finally time to board, Gerry moved with such speed down the jetway that the couple became separated by a tour group of elderly people. Once inside the plane, Paula scanned the passengers until she caught a glimpse of Gerry’s white hair and mustard sweater.
At their seats, he snapped at her, just as she’d anticipated. “What took you so long?”
“Sorry, Gerry.” After nearly forty years of marriage, the apology flowed out as involuntarily as breath. Paula shoved her carry-on in the overhead bin, while Gerry sat in the window seat and rummaged through his own bag.
“Where’d you put the travellers’ checks?” He removed his toiletry kit, Cold War spy novel, and book light. “Traveller’s checks, Paula,” he said, crisply.
She sat down next to him. “I’m sure they’ll turn up.” Paula hardly noticed her own words. Stupid traveller’s checks, she thought—one of Gerry’s ridiculous precautions against identity theft.
“Here they are! How did they get in here?”
“You found them. Now you can relax.” Paula was deep into another game of Solitaire.
The first few hours of the flight were uneventful, aside from Gerry’s tirade over the airplane food. This is exactly why you shouldn’t travel, she wanted to say. Once you leave the house and that cul-de-sac you putter around, things are no longer in your control. But Paula figured, just as in every other aspect of her life, that putting up with Gerry was worth something. In this case, she was getting a trip to Tokyo. Surely, she couldn’t go alone.
Once the cabin lights were turned down, Gerry brought out his novel and book light. As the flight was half full, Paula moved to the aisle seat, and played game after game of Solitaire. When there was a sudden drop in altitude, Paula’s heartrate picked up pace. The plane steadied off, but soon fell again, and she felt her stomach lurch. Now they seesawed side to side and up and down. The fasten seatbelt sign illuminated. A fierce wind thrashed the fuselage, and the cabin’s plastic interior seemed to crack upon each jolt. An announcement came on, explaining that the plane was experiencing severe turbulence. Flight attendants were instructed to take their seats.
“Gerry, I’m scared.” Paula returned to the middle seat and fastened her seatbelt.
“Relax.” He licked his index finger, trying in vain to turn a page amid the plane’s jostles.
“This isn’t normal.” She grabbed his arm.
“It’s just turbulence.” He adjusted his book light, thrown off-kilter by the sharp movements of the aircraft.
Paula looked around. None of the other passengers appeared nearly as worried as she felt; most stared into their devices, mesmerized by those glowing screens in the dark cabin. Five more hours, Paula thought. Five more hours until we land.
The plane careened forward, and Paula flung herself onto her husband’s lap. “Gerry!” The novel and book light were knocked onto the floor.
He pushed Paula off his lap and reached down to retrieve his things.
At last, the turbulence eased, and the airplane levelled off.
“Oh, thank god it’s over! I thought we were going to die,” she said.
“How am I supposed to read now?” He rotated the book light’s limp arm. “We’re going to have to look for one of these in Tokyo. And how easy is that going to be?” He stared at her, evidently waiting for an apology.
A laugh. “Who the fuck cares!” Paula grasped now, in the aftermath of the turbulence, how she was hurtling across the sky. They were in a tiny bullet, the great dark abyss of the ocean below them. “Get an e-reader like the rest of the world.”
Gerry widened his eyes. “Is there something wrong with you?” He began a tirade, but Paula got up and walked toward the back of the cabin, even though the seatbelt sign was still illuminated.
Finding an empty row, Paula slid into the window seat. There she sat for a while, dwelling in the dark, astonished to be alive.
From a passing flight attendant, Paula ordered a whiskey, which she swirled around her mouth. Cupping her hands around her eyes, she gazed out the window into the dark. A crescent moon hung in the sky. Despite its razor thinness, it glistened brightly, like a gash in blackout curtains. The plane sailed into a bulbous cloud formation, illuminated by moonlight in deep purples. A nebula, Paula thought. The plane has drifted into space. Overcome by fatigue, she fell asleep.
Sometime later, Paula opened her eyes. A woman was now in the aisle seat. She looked about thirty, though it was hard to tell in the darkness of the cabin. “Mind if I sit here for a bit?” the woman asked Paula. “The guy next to me is snoring like a beast.” The woman’s gravelly voice opposed her petite frame. Something was familiar about this stranger, the dark hair that came over one shoulder, her long thin nose. Paula felt as though she’d seen her in a painting, or perhaps in a dream.
“Be my guest,” Paula said.
“First time?”
“Sorry?”
“To Tokyo?”
“Oh, yes. You?”
“I’ve been going for years,” the woman said.
“What do you like about it?”
“I feel liberated when I’m there,” said the woman. “As though I could be anyone.”
Paula moved to the middle seat, to be closer. She didn’t want to miss a single word.
“When I’m in Tokyo, I feel subsumed by the city, almost like I’ve disappeared.”
“Why do you think that is?” Paula asked.
“I don’t know, maybe it’s the way the city’s laid out. There’s no central hub, no one downtown, nowhere that draws the place together, no central monument or square. Instead, there are multiple hubs surrounding the center, like a circuit of cities.”
“So, there’s nothing in the center of Tokyo?”
“There is a center,” said the woman. “But it’s a void.”
“A void?”
“The imperial palace.” The woman answered. “A massive area, right in the middle of Tokyo, but inaccessible to the public, invisible to them. The city sprawls out in every direction, but no one part of it is more central than the other.”
It sounded familiar, this description of Tokyo, like something she may have read, perhaps. Was this what attracted her to the city, its decentralization? She couldn’t quite put her finger on her reasons for making this trip, and she hoped the woman wouldn’t ask. Her answer wouldn’t be so eloquent, she was sure.
“I live in such a tiny world,” Paula blurted out, almost yelled.
An elderly man sitting across the aisle, peered over.
“A tiny world?” the woman asked.
Paula sketched her life in broad strokes: the cul-de-sac, the strip malls where she shopped, the track in the local park she walked around in the evenings with the other retirees. “The house is paid off, but more and more I feel suffocated.” Paula had never opened up to a stranger like this, her inhibitions eroded by the whiskey, perhaps. Or was it the darkness and the quiet, the cabin’s glowing screens?
“To truly feel the endlessness of Tokyo, you have to walk through it,” said the woman. “Walk and walk.”
“I’d love that!” Yet Paula’s excitement tempered as she remembered that Gerry did not like to walk. He especially hated to wander as wandering was antithetical to having an itinerary. Getting lost was perhaps his greatest nightmare.
“So where is he?” the woman asked.
“Who?”
“Your husband.”
“I don’t know. Up there somewhere.”
The woman laughed. “I guess you’ve been married for a long time?”
“You have no idea.”
The cabin lights turned on, and the woman’s face sharpened, her dark eyes and long lashes. Now she looked even more familiar.
“The snoring man should be awake,” she said, and got up to leave.
“Stay here, if you like,” Paula said.
“Thanks, but all my things are there,” she said. “I hope you take that walk.” She set off toward the back of the cabin.
Now alone, Paula’s smile dropped. Wouldn’t it be nice to visit Tokyo with this woman, Paula caught herself thinking, instead of her own husband. But she tamped down her fantasies, as she often did, and told herself to be grateful for the things she had.
Gerry gave Paula the silent treatment on the way to their hotel. Normally, she would have found this silence so intolerable, his rage festering beneath, but now as the Tokyo suburbs passed by in a blur from the train, the city drew Paula away from thoughts of appeasing her husband.
Built up around every train station they passed was a city in itself, as the woman on the plane had described, each a buzzing hub of lights, each a jumble of buildings. Paula felt as though she could disappear into this metropolis. She’d walk into it like a thicket of trees, and never be seen or heard from again.
The hotel was in a tall, thin building, nestled in a street of other tall, thin buildings, all lined up tightly like a shelf of books. Their room was impeccable, the edges of everything sharp and clean, but Paula found the room too stuffy. She paced in the small strip of floor in front of the closet, the room’s only open space. She gazed out their seventh-floor window at the city beyond, now falling into dusk. Rooftop signs pulsed in neon reds and blues, and though Paula could not understand what they advertised, the lights beckoned her to come outside.
“It’s something, isn’t it?” Paula said about the view.
Gerry unpacked his suitcase, hanging his shirts in the closet, putting his socks in this drawer and that one.
This trip was for her, she reminded herself. Gerry disliked going anywhere. He complained for days when their local bank branch relocated to the strip mall that was an extra five-minute drive from home. Perhaps this majestic place, glimmering in the window, would startle something in Gerry, and he’d see his little life for the speck of dust that it was.
“Come on, Gerry. Let’s go for dinner,” Paula said. “Let’s get out there!” She gestured to the window.
“Do you know what time it is in Canada?”
“We’re here now.” Paula put on her shoes. “I’m going out.”
“We have things to do in the morning. We’ve got to sleep.”
“Suit yourself.” She slung her purse over her shoulder.
“You can’t be serious,” she heard Gerry say as she pulled closed the door.
She walked down the long thin hall to the single elevator.
Paula had rarely been so defiant, as the price of violating Gerry’s expectations had always been high. The dread of returning home to her miffed husband would normally have tightened her neck muscles and cloyed at her stomach. She realized, now more acutely than ever before, how the two of them were fused, the way she felt his displeasure within her own body. And Gerry understood this cruel symbiosis; he was aware of the state he could put her in, the power his moodiness held over her. But that night, as she stepped onto the street, into the balmy, mid-May night, she felt no such anguish at having crossed Gerry.
Paula traversed the buzzing soundscape, the chimes and jingles, and wafts of cigarette smoke and sizzling meat. Establishments rose up the floors of the narrow buildings, their lit-up signs stacked one atop the other. On the sidewalks, men congregated, suit-clad and inebriated, and girls dressed as French maids beckoned them. “I hope this place is safe,” Paula muttered to herself. “Oh, stop being like Gerry!” she said out loud. “You can’t control every last thing!”
Determined to give herself over to the city, she let herself be pulled down the busy street by the great current of people, as though she was a blood cell pulsing through an artery.
When that street became a bridge, she leaned over the stone barrier to gaze at the water below, its surface reflecting the glint of neon signs in ripples.
“It’s you!”
Turning to her right, she saw the woman from the plane, dressed in a long white dress, whose thin straps revealed sloping shoulders.
“I don’t believe it.”
“Believe it.” The neon lights glistened in her dark eyes.
“What are the chances in a city of 14 million people?” Paula said.
The woman shrugged, grinning.
“Are you staying around here?” Paula asked.
“No, I’m just out walking.” She invited Paula to come along, and the two set off.
“What’s your name?” Paula felt strange asking this, given the closeness she already felt towards her.
“Carly.”
“I’m Paula.” She considered how her own name, by comparison, was drab and quiet. “I have no idea where we are,” she said.
“That’s the idea,” Carly answered, and Paula took this point to heart, the desire to disappear into the immensity of the place.
Carly led her away from the wide avenue into a nondescript neighbourhood of small streets. The foreground of grey, sombre buildings cowered beneath two shimmering towers edged in blue neon strips. There was the warm glow of a little bar down this and that street. Each a glowing ember, Paula thought. She caught whiffs of simmering soy sauce, of grilling fish, now and again. “You were right,” said Paula. “It’s endless, this city.”
“Imagine all the strangers,” Carly said. “How they assemble in this place and that place, in infinite combinations, only to disperse once again.”
Paula stopped walking and began to cry. “Sorry.” She wiped away a tear.
“What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know where to begin,” Paula said.
Entering a small bar, the two women took a table by the window.
“You don’t speak Japanese, do you?” Paula asked, but Carly shook her head.
There were two servers inside—a young woman who stood behind the bar and a young man who went around to the few tables. They both wore long white aprons.
In English, Paula ordered two glasses of whiskey from the waiter.
He cocked his head and held up two fingers to confirm.
“One for each of us.” Paula gestured to Carly.
He nodded politely, and rushed behind the bar, whispering something to the young woman. They both stared at Paula.
“Maybe he had a hard time understanding me,” Paula said. “I wish I knew some Japanese.”
Carly shrugged.
They sat in silence until the waiter brought over the two glasses of whiskey.
“So, you screwed up your life?” Carly smoothed her hands along her long dark hair.
“Did I say that?”
“You didn’t have to.”
Carly had such a soothing presence that Paula felt as though she could say anything. So, she continued the story she’d begun on the plane. Paula and Gerry’s two adult sons barely visited any more. They were both successful and self-sufficient, and Paula doubted that either would ever have a child. Since retiring, Paula’s life shrank down to the cul-de-sac and the house she shared with Gerry, in which the days stretched on in silence. “You go out at night where I live, and the streets are dead,” she said. “Everyone locks themselves inside.”
“Why do you stay with him?”
“Who, Gerry? I wasn’t talking about Gerry,” Paula said.
“Yes, you were.”
“I don’t follow.”
“It sounds to me like you’re living the way he wants to live.”
Paula did not refute this. “I’ll never leave him,” she said.
“Why not?”
There were all the reasons Paula had told herself over the years, and then there was the truth. “I’d have to acknowledge what I’ve wasted.” When Paula’s voice cracked, she looked around, noticing that the other patrons, mostly young couples, were casting her glances.
“They’re all watching us,” Paula whispered.
“We’re foreigners,” said Carly. “They’re probably just curious.”
“It’s making me uncomfortable.”
“Who cares what other people think.”
Paula noticed that Carly hadn’t touched her whiskey. “Why…” Paula began, but stopped once she noticed how the customers were watching her, now more intensely than before. Paula placed several thousand yen on the table—more, she was sure, than she owed.
They stepped out of the bar and lingered for a moment on the street.
“I’m sorry,” Paula said. “I talked your ear off in there. I never complain like that, not even to my friends.”
“Sometimes you need a stranger to say these things to,” Carly said. Although to Paula she was far from a stranger.
“You haven’t told me a single thing about yourself,” Paula said.
“If it’s all the same, I’d rather not talk about me.” Carly didn’t look sad when she said this, more like resigned, maybe even serene. This woman, like this city, would always be a mystery to Paula.
One of the servers emerged from the bar in her white apron. She approached Paula hesitantly. “Your change,” she said in a barely audible voice, her head hung.
“It’s alright. You keep it,” said Paula.
“You’d better take it,” Carly whispered to Paula. “People don’t really tip here.”
“Oh, ok. I see.” Paula opened her palm, and the woman handed over the change, her own hands trembling.
When Paula returned to the hotel, Gerry was standing, staring out the window at the city, which from the silence of their room looked like an alien being held captive in a lab—buzzing and blinking and incomprehensible. “Where were you?”
“Walking.”
“Walking?” He huffed. Now he turned to look at Paula and opened his mouth to speak, but nothing emerged. He was stumped, perhaps.
“We’re going to do things differently from now on,” Paula said.
He cringed but had no retort.
“I’m not going to placate you anymore,” she said.
Gerry’s face went red, and he rushed into the bathroom, slamming the door.
“I’m doing this as much for you as for me,” she called after him.
Paula laid on the bed and ran her hands through her short grey hair, thinking of Carly’s long dark locks and walking with her in the soft night breeze. The bed was supposedly a queen but felt more like a double. She nestled herself tightly against the wall, trying to take up as little space as possible.
Paula could not remember where she and Carly had gone after leaving the bar, but she recalled her impressions. The shiny wood of a temple, reflecting red lanterns. The waxy leaves of bushes glistening under streetlamps. Wafts of incense. The chirping crosswalks. The passing buzz of a delivery scooter. Reliving these, Paula drifted off, unaware when Gerry joined her in the night.
She was jolted awake by a lurch, then a rhythmic shake. The walls produced a crackling, the same sound the airplane’s cabin had made under the pressure of the turbulence.
“Paula!” Gerry called out from his side of the bed. “What are you doing?”
She burst out laughing.
Bleary eyed, he sat up.
“You just blamed me for an earthquake. Seriously, Gerry!”
“What the hell is wrong with you? Why are you so argumentative?” Gerry reached over to the nightstand and switched on the lamp.
There was a knock at the hotel door, and Paula had to crawl over Gerry to get out of bed.
“What are you doing Paula? What is wrong with you? You’re hurting me!”
“Someone’s knocking,” she said.
“I didn’t hear anything.”
She went to the door. Opening it a crack, she saw Carly standing there in her white dress. “What are you doing here?” Paula whispered.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
She rubbed her eyes. “How did you know where to find me?”
“You told me where you were staying.”
“I did?”
“Want to go for another walk?” she grinned.
“Yes,” Paula said, not even checking to see what time it was.
“Give me a second.” Paula closed the door.
“Who on earth were you talking to?” Gerry, still sitting in bed, put on his glasses.
“Just the hotel staff,” Paula said. “Making sure we were alright—you know, after the earthquake.”
Gerry squinted at her.
“I’m going out,” she added, and began to brush her hair.
“It’s the middle of the night.” Gerry crossed his arms.
“So?”
“We’re supposed to go to Senso-ji in the morning.” Gerry turned his face, his glasses reflecting the lamp. Paula couldn’t make out his expression.
How this trip across the ocean must have rattled him, yet he summoned the resolve, despite his attachments to his crabby routine, to bring her here. Gerry was floundering in empty space, Paula being his only bit of ground to hang onto.
“I’m sorry,” Paula said, and Gerry exhaled, perhaps anticipating some return to order, a restoration of his control over her. “It’s my fault, too, that you’ve become like this.”
“Like what?” Gerry grimaced as Paula put on her shoes. “What on earth is happening to you?” he asked.
“It’s this place,” she said. “It’s consuming me.”
“What?” Gerry gawked at Paula from the bed, but she exited the hotel room and proceeded down the narrow hall to the elevator.
The city streets were dead at this hour. The route they took, a mostly residential road, was lined with concrete apartment buildings, their outdoor stairwells lit up by dim lights, which stretched on as far as she could see. The odd convenience store glowed like a television in a dark room.
“Are you any closer to making up your mind?”
“About what?”
“Leaving your husband.”
“Oh, I’m not really thinking about that.”
“You sure?”
“What would I do?” Paula said. “Who would I become?”
Carly pointed up to the buildings, their windows illuminated here and there. “You could disappear,” she said. “You could just never go back.”
“What?” Paula laughed.
“Why not?” she said. “Why go back? You’ve only just escaped.”
“I can’t simply run away!”
Carly smirked. “Just imagine how liberating it would feel to be someone else.”
The thought was at first exhilarating, until they arrived at what seemed to be the end of the city, and Paula began to feel afraid, afraid of losing herself, losing her mind, forgetting who she was. They ambled through a grove, the traffic behind them getting ever quieter. The tree trunks were curved this way and that way, and in the darkness, they looked as though they were in motion.
“Where are we?” Paula’s voice trembled.
“We’re almost at the imperial palace.”
Paula had the feeling they were on the edge of a black hole, the city swirling around them. Through the grove, they emerged at the moat. On the opposite side was a massive wall of stones. Atop that wall stood a white structure, one of the palace’s gates presumably, lit up in the dark.
“Come on.” Carly pulled Paula towards the moat. The two women stood side by side at the edge, the water below reflecting the moon.
“Let’s jump in.” Carly grabbed Paula’s hand.
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“You sound like Gerry,” said Carly. “Don’t you want him out of you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do,” Carly said. “It’s time to dislodge him.” Paula started to object, but Carly yelled, “You need to jump.”
“No,” Paula said. “I can’t.”
But then Carly pushed her, and down Paula went, screaming along the way, into the moat. “Gerry!” she cried out. “Gerry!”
Paula flailed her arms in the water, feeling pulled downwards by her heavy clothes. “Help!” she called out. Treading water, she looked up, but saw no sign of Carly. Paula swam back to the wall she’d come over but was unable to climb up the steep and slippery walls. “Gerry!” She cried.
A small boat approached, and two policemen lifted her aboard. “Please,” she said to them. “Take me back to my husband.”
Paula was breathless when she burst into the hotel room.
Gerry jumped off the bed. “Where have … you’re wet. Why?”
She clung to him, sobbing.
“It’s Spain all over again,” he said, squeezing her firmly. “Isn’t it?”
“Yes, yes!” As she cried, she pressed her face hard against his chest, as if trying to meld with him. “I’ll never leave again,” she said.
At the airport the next day, Paula asked, “Now, you’ve tried out your new booklight, yes?”
Gerry nodded.
“And you’ve got the remaining traveller’s checks in your carry-on?”
Gerry folded his hands, a little smile across his face.
“Now, let’s go and get you your coffee.” Paula patted his shoulder.
“I need to use the washroom first,” Gerry said.
“Let me go with you.” Paula looked around, scanning the passengers.
“Alright, dear. If you must.” Gerry puttered to the washroom, Paula holding onto his arm, looking now and again over her shoulder. Carly is gone, she assured herself.
“I’ll be right back,” he said.
Paula stayed outside the men’s toilet. She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes, vowing not to open them again until her husband returned.
Benjamin Hollo is a Canadian writer based in Vancouver B.C. His fiction appears in Meniscus and The Write Launch. He studied creative writing at Humber College and the University of British Columbia, and he holds a PhD in religious studies from the University of Toronto. To learn more, please visit www.benjaminhollo.com.