Matthew Healy

VOID PATTERNS

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2026: VOL. 41.

“I’ll prove it to you.”

This was Ernest, on his hands and knees, scrubbing at the pool of congealed blood on Aisle 11 of the Bashas’ on Camelback.

“You want to see the truth?” Ernest said as he turned the sponge to a less bloody corner. “You really want to know how truly and comprehensively fucked we are?”

It was 1986—several years before that government-shill company Aftermath appeared and “professionalized” crime scene cleanup with fancy biohazard protocols and training and a sweetheart deal with those OSHA (as Ernest put it) fuckers, promptly shutting down our operation.

“Illuminate me,” I said, though I had already been illuminated every day since meeting Ernest in April.

“Why has violent crime jumped 23 percent in just one year? Do you think that people are just suddenly attacking each other for no reason?”

I struggled to pinch a bone sliver from the blood with the blue rubber gloves Ernest brought. “Yeah, but people have been attacking each other since forever.”

“Examine the patterns. Violent crime statistics rise and fall based on identifiable factors.”

“If you say so.”

“Measurable factors. Like air-conditioning. Did you know that only 2 percent of Americans had AC in 1955?”

I did, thanks to Ernest.

“Guess what it is now. Now it’s more than half of the country, pumping their sweet cold air into their homes and malls and offices and cars.”

What I liked about Ernest is that he didn’t wait for answers. I also found that I liked him hitting the same talking points day-in and day-out. Conversing wasn’t my strong suit, but knowing the topics gave me chances to practice my contributions.

He pointed to blood spray that extended beyond the pool. “These void patterns are not consistent. You can’t tell me that’s an accident.”

Void patterns, Ernest had taught me, were empty spaces in blood spray. Imagine a person exploding next to a fire hydrant. Blood everywhere, but the other side of the fire hydrant leaves a void pattern. To me, the blood looked like blood. I didn’t know it was supposed to shoot out of the body in a consistent way.

Ernest went on. “What about the CIA’s drug experiments in the 60s? LSD, barbiturates, amphetamines—dosed out in top secret mind control and behavior modification experiments.”

“I’m not sure LSD is a mind control drug.” I certainly hoped not because my junior year at Carl Hayden High I fell in with some guys transitioning their look from heavy metal to goth. They might have worn mascara, but they were well connected to dealers of ganja, quaaludes, and—of course—some potent acid.

“You say that, but think about 1930s Khabarovsk, Japan. Think about Operation Big Itch, Utah, 1950s. History is a smorgasbord of governments doing the unthinkable to their citizens. The Edgewood Arsenal experiments, 1955-1975, where—big shocker—U.S. Army Chemical Corps tested substances on thousands of human subjects. How would you enjoy a big dose of BZ 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate that makes you hallucinate and lose coordination for four days?”

I didn’t answer. Honestly, it sounded like something I’d try.

“Do you think Freon is inert, like they claim? Oh, my friend. Freon is a delivery agent for synthetic neurochemicals, aerosolized psychotropics. Trace amounts piggybacking on the Freon, compressed and blown through HVAC systems at 500 CFM per ton of cooling. And us, just passively sucking it in all day every day. Why do you think we’re wearing masks?”

It was true. We were both wearing masks. Ernest insisted, though mine was below my nose, and I tugged it into place to show I was listening.

“Why do you think I never use AC?”

Also true. Here it was, July in the hottest city in the known universe, and whenever Ernest picked me up in his Gremlin, the windows were down, the vents doing nothing to earn their inclusion in the vehicle’s design. Still, it was better than my ride, which was the city bus. And his shitty apartment was always sweltering, but I appreciated him letting me crash there because my residence was a plywood stall in an unmarked building downtown, which cost ten dollars a week and was just enough space for a cot, a footlocker, and a couple of wall hooks with hangers. Each night I could hear my five immediate neighbors snoring and farting and jerking off, plus the dozens of other residents who specialized in inventive profanities like, I’ll pull your cunt tonsils out via your ass. One pathetic step above homelessness was how Ernest described my living situation.

He wrung the red sponge into a bucket until parts were yellow again. “How many murders have we cleaned since April?”

I thought about it.

“Eighteen,” he said. “Eighteen murders. And what connects them?”

I knew the right answer but didn’t want to rob him of connecting the dots, so I said, “Blood?”

“Hayduke…” Ernest said.

I was no fan of my name in that tone. My mother used to lure me in with that tone of patient exhaustion before turning her engagement ring around and backhanding me right in the forehead. This was but one reason I avoided my mom for years until she fell through a sub-code floor in her condo and into the great beyond. I had a history of abandoning people for even the slightest mistreatment.

“...the carpenter from Peoria who used a masonry hammer on his client? The Mesa mother who took out her entire family—husband and four kids—with a shotgun? The old Glendale landlady who offed her boarders with poison tamales?”

“Normal people,” I said.

“Exactly correct, Hayduke. Normal people who just happened to commit heinous murders out of the clear blue.” Ernest sat on his haunches and ran a sleeved wrist across his forehead to wipe away the sweat without getting any blood on himself. It didn’t work. We were always washing other people’s blood off. “And this one?”

We were in the cereal aisle, surrounded on all sides by cartoon captains and leprechauns and a bird driven insane by Cocoa Puffs. Detectives had taken boxes caught in the blood spray but missed a couple that only had a drop or two. Those brand characters caught in the splatter looked homicidally happy.

“Officer Redacted over there”—Ernest nodded at a cop standing sentry at the end of the aisle—“won’t talk with me, of course, but I overheard him saying the perp was a house painter and the victim was a minister.”

“Sorry. I don’t see a connection.”

“Don’t be sorry, Hayduke. There’s no connection whatsoever. Signal-to-noise ratio: zero. Today was the first time they ever met. So what motivates a happy house painter to kill a mild-mannered minister with a family-sized can of SpaghettiOs?”

Officer Redacted—whose chinless pouty face did not match his athletic body—leaned across the yellow X of police tape that specifically said DO NOT CROSS and said, “What are the chances of you guys not going as slow as possible?”

“Hayduke,” Ernest said, ignoring the cop. “Do you know that the Phoenix PD budget grew by 10% last year to a staggering $111.3 million dollars? They hired hundreds of additional officers in a single year.”

“And I can’t even afford cereal.”

This wasn’t exactly true. Since Ernest brought me on, I could afford cereal. But I couldn’t afford a lot of other things. Like an apartment, or an air conditioner, even if Ernest would let me buy one.

“Jesus, Hayduke. Take this cereal.” He handed me a box of Fruity Pebbles from the closest shelf. The box had been clean, but Ernest left a bloody thumbprint on Fred Flintstone’s forehead. “It’s not like they’re taking stock right now. Somebody just died in aisle 11 for fuck’s sake. Just be careful which bag you put it in.”

Into the clean bag went the cereal. I pointed to the section of missing cereal boxes that had been collected into evidence.

“Check it out,” I said. “A void pattern.”

I thought Ernest might laugh, or at least chuckle. But instead he stared at the shelves so long that I did too. Behind the missing boxes were identical boxes, a line of replacement products that for all we knew stretched on for infinity. Ernest’s eyes went shimmery as though he saw something no one else could, but all he said was, “It’s nothing.”

We went back to our work erasing the graffiti of violence, and Ernest resumed his train of thought as though he had never left it.

“And yes, Hayduke. Blood also connects the murders, but not the way you’re thinking.”

He gestured to two intersecting blood smears just outside the blood pool.

I said, “X marks the spot.”

“Remember the other crime scenes?”

I did. Gnarly stuff. We usually arrived after the bodies and evidence had been collected, though sometimes we got to see body bags being loaded into ambulances.

Ernest wanted to know if I had noticed similar blood smears. I had seen some disturbing shit, no doubt. Remnants of people’s insides decorating the most mundane parts of the outside world. One of the dead family members in Mesa had been blown away in the hallway, and their blood on their own photos seemed significant somehow. Ernest shook his head and told me it was sad for sure but not part of the pattern.

“Same cross,” he said, “every crime scene.”

I wasn’t so sure about his logic. Pretty much every crime scene had blood smears this way and that. Random would be how I’d describe it. And with victims fighting back or crawling away or trying to scribble out some final message, there were X’s galore to be found, or at least shapes that could be interpreted as X’s. Could I say this to Ernest, a man I’d known for only a few months, who saved me from the corner of Van Buren and Central to buy me a Big Mac meal and later offer me this job? I’m not crazy.

Ernest went on. “Does any of this sound like a coincidence to you?”

“Which part?”

“All the parts: An entire population breathing in psychoaffective aerosols, normal people killing each other, increased funding for law enforcement. East Berlin, man. Maoist China. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin. How many examples do you need? And we, the willing enablers, saunter like lemmings into the trap, buying our AC units and voting for increased police spending.”

“Sauntering lemmings?” I said.

“Don’t pester a good point by quibbling over phrasing.”

“Sorry.”

Ernest often said things that showed how smart he was, even when he didn’t sound smart. He looked over his shoulder to confirm Officer Redacted’s back was turned, then he took a Polaroid of the X-shaped blood smears. Once the photo was shaken into existence, he slid it into the same bag as the Fruity Pebbles.

“Why an X?” I asked, because my role was feeding quarters into the machine.

Ernest poured Lysol and it smelled like we had used chemicals to conjure the world’s largest invisible lemon. We scrubbed until the pink tile returned to white with decorative gray and black specks. The grout was the only remaining clue that something awful had happened here, but you really had to be looking hard to see how it transitioned from gray to a rusty brown.

Ernest stood and studied the scene. “In ancient texts, X marked the condemned. The universal symbol for erasure. I think the people infected by the laced Freon are still in there, even when they’re doing these horrific things. They’re signaling us.”

We were packing up now, stuffing bloody rags and sponges and finally our gloves into a black Hefty bag. The aisle was spotless—no one could tell that a minister had been plucked from this mortal realm before reaching the check-out lane with his Grape Nuts or whatever men of God ate for breakfast.

“But Ernest,” I said, “cop cars have air conditioning. Police stations have air conditioning.”

How many times had I wanted to offer this counterpoint before? Plenty. And now that it was clear our conversational rhythms would depend on the same beats, I thought the opportunity might help Ernest to defend this point.

He stopped loading the Lysol and Clorox into his plastic caddy. “Hayduke. Why in the good fuck would the government use laced Freon on police when they’re creating a police state?”

“But malls have air conditioning. Don’t cops go to malls?”

“We’re talking about long-term exposure. Hours every day.”

“Then why do we need masks?”

Ernest sighed and his mask puffed into a turtleshell shape. “One day, they’ll re-open Chernobyl and say there’s not enough radiation to harm you for short visits. Would you go?”

“Why would I go to Chernobyl?”

“Hypothetically.”

“Is there anything to do in Chernobyl?”

“What kinds of things do you like to do, other than drink?”

Ernest knew my soft spot for cocktails and bars so dark you thought you were passing into the afterlife.

“Rollercoasters,” was all I could think of. I guess the only danger I liked was wrapped in the safety of roll bars and equipment inspections.

“Imagine Chernobyl has your dream roller coaster. Would you go then?”

“Probably not.”

“What if you could wear a radiation suit?”

I pictured myself wearing a big yellow radiation suit, riding a rollercoaster in the Soviet Union.

“Maybe then.”

“Exactly so.” Satisfied a consensus had been reached, he said, “How about I buy you a Sazerac cocktail at Chez Nous?”

Sazerac is what Ernest treated me to after a job and therefore it had become my favorite cocktail. Only bartenders and God and probably Ernest knew the ingredients and proportions.

On our way out of aisle 11, Officer Redacted put a big pink authoritarian hand out and told us to stop right there.

“What’s in the bag?” he said. In my many encounters with law enforcement, I knew that they always wanted to know what was inside things.

Ernest glanced at the bag in his hand like he was inspecting it with X-Ray vision. “Eight sponges, four brillo pads, two old bath towels, and I would estimate three pints of the victim’s blood.”

“Not what I meant, Fuckwit,” the cop said and snatched the other bag. He removed the Fruity Pebbles. The Polaroid was sticking to the box. “Seriously? Stealing from a crime scene? And taking photographs? You guys kleptomaniacs and perverts?”

“We are very sorry,” I said. Apologizing was a reflex for me as I had made a life of avoiding trouble only to find it anyway. I once earned trespassing charges for hiding in a Macy’s utility closet just to avoid my ex-wife.

But unlike me, Ernest wasn’t the kind to back down. He squared off with Officer Redacted and spoke with big pauses between each word. “We know what you’re up to.”

Right then I worried for my employer’s safety. He wasn’t exactly old, but he had taken more of life’s licks than most and it showed. This cop wasn’t the slow and dumpy variety. He looked like he spent his off-hours training for foot pursuits. He looked like he got angry at treadmills for not keeping up.

“And what am I up to?”

“The same thing every foot soldier is up to—following orders. Orders to conceal the truth about the emerging police state. The more you oppress, the more you multiply. You have your uniform, but we have our masks.”

To me, Officer Redacted said, “What the hell is he talking about?”

But Ernest defied interruption. “You think you can turn us against each other with impunity, but we recognize the patterns of fascism. Soon the temperature is going to rise and, in that heat, you’ll be held to account.”

The officer’s brow furrowed. “Well, you can count on this being your last job.” He slid the Polaroid photograph into his pocket. “And I’m confiscating this.”

“It doesn’t matter. I have others.”

“No, you don’t. I’ve been watching.” To me, he held up the box of cereal with Fred Flintstone’s bloodied Cro-Magnon face. “And you, I'm writing a misdemeanor citation.”

“You’re provoking us,” Ernest said. “Hoping we’ll resist and supply the justification to use force. But we don’t use air conditioning, and we’re wearing masks, so you’re fuck out of luck.”

Officer Redacted’s furrowed brow spawned angry lines. “Keep it up and earn yourself an evidence tampering charge.”

But Ernest wasn’t listening. He was digging in his tote bag until he came out with the Polaroid camera, which he aimed at Officer Redacted and fired. What happened next was a flash, the cop squinting, and the whirring sound of the camera sticking out its white tongue.

“That’s it,” said Officer Redacted. His cuffs had to almost click the entire way to fit Ernest’s bony wrists. They spoke their different speeches together, one reciting Miranda rights and the other a history of unjust arrests. A second officer approached, as well as the store manager and a couple of employees holding each other from the earlier trauma, all of them sucked into the gravitational pull of conflict.

I was terrified. I pictured the months-long monologue Ernest would deliver to every cop on his way to Madison Street Jail and to his court-appointed attorney and to the judge. He had a thousand sermons at the ready for such injustice, a million historical precedents of state oppression. I pictured a future in which Ernest being sentenced to prison for taking a photograph was not far-fetched. Not at all.

“He’s crazy,” I said. I don’t know where these words came from or how my mouth made them. I had an audience now. The two cops and Bashas’ employees waiting for what I’d say next. My vision constricted. My pulse pounded way too fast in my neck. “Like, he’s really crazy. He thinks air conditioning makes people kill people. The doctor gave him meds but he doesn’t take them. He’s harmless, though. We’re both completely harmless.”

Everyone seemed relieved, like I had just solved the riddle that would allow us past the looming bridge troll. Everyone except Ernest, whose expression reminded me of my ex-wife’s when she found me hiding in her sister’s tool shed with her sister, the both of us in our skivvies.

The second cop said, “Give these poor guys a break. We’ve got enough to deal with.” Which worked, because Officer Redacted removed the cuffs, and the Bashas’ employees drifted away. The whole time, Ernest argued that he wasn’t crazy. He would rather be imprisoned and heard than free and ignored. I thought for a second the cops would change their minds and arrest us both, but they said, “Get the fuck out of here.”

And we did.

*          *          *

Chez Nous at 2 pm was every bit as dark as 2 am. This joint was a regular stop for us with its cheap drinks and the fact it favored oscillating fans over AC. A shadowy bartender served us draft beers since sazeracs were the drinks of the employed. Like the blind, we groped for open seats, where we then waited for our eyes to adjust, which would never happen because whenever the door opened, the place became a blinding white fuzz slowly fading in the natural cycle.

By this point, I had worked an apology into every sentence like essential punctuation. I was sorry for stealing the box of cereal. I was sorry for getting us caught. I was sorry most of all for calling Ernest the one thing that could silence him.

He didn’t accept my many sorry offerings, and he certainly made no apologies for his part in costing us a lucrative future in the crime scene cleanup industry. To him, apologies were a kind of death. He wanted a world where no one said sorry. But I couldn’t help myself. Sorry was the only language I spoke.

Three or four beers in, the door opened and closed and we restarted the cycle of healing from retinal burn. A minute later a voice next to Ernest said, “Great Christ, can you turn on the air?”

That simple request was enough for Ernest to revoke his vow of silence.

“Do you know,” Ernest said, “anything about Freon?”

He wasn’t talking to me, but at least he was talking. And in a few minutes he was on one doozy of a rant, spiraling around the usual topics at rollercoaster speed, a slow ratcheting of righteous anger and hope, the sudden plummet into despair for our future. I delighted in hearing the fantastical loop de loops of logic, grinning openly when he said, “You need to open your eyes.”

Ernest really did care about the truth, and he really was tortured about being the only person to know it. As we sat there, he connected the dots for the stranger. And as the bar filled up—long past counting the empty pint glasses—he connected the dots for anyone in earshot, strangers with invisible faces. Strangers who called their friends over for a good laugh or a heated debate. How many people cycled into Ernest’s lecture I couldn’t say. I heard a rotation of men’s and women’s voices, old and young, kind and cruel. But mostly I heard Ernest doing his thing, hurling rhetorical questions and leaping great lengths to link this point to that. He cried out and cursed as he sometimes did when he was rolling. I listened as a raspy-voiced singer named Roscoe took the stage (a parquet space near the bathrooms) and croaked R&B songs loud enough to smother every sound except Ernest.

I was satisfied to let my friend hold court, and too drunk to know if anyone was sitting with us anymore. I hoped that we were alone and that he was ranting to me now as a sign of forgiveness. Then, in one of those moments of cosmic coincidence—the kind that allowed you to believe a connection existed between two unrelated events—the music stopped just as the front door swung open. It was nighttime and the streetlights gave just enough glow for me to see that the seats around us were empty though the rest of the bar was full. It was just me and Ernest.

“Do you see it?” he asked.

Poor Ernest. On his cheek was an enormous goose egg where someone in the dark must have clocked him. I think he might have been crying. At that moment, I wasn’t sure any connections were possible but the ones we imagined.

“Yes,” I told him. “I see it now.”

Matthew Scott Healy is a writer and artist whose work has appeared in Blackbird, CutBank, and Fresh Air. His fiction explores the world of people living on the fringe. He teaches English and Creative Writing in Scottsdale, Arizona.