Organ Void

Jon Padgett, "Organ Void" in The Secret of Ventriloquism (Dunhams Manor Press: 2016).

"Organ Void" brings together philosophical pessimism, gross body horror, Padgett's notion of borrowed realities, and a symbol that triggers gnosis reminiscent of Robert W. Chambers' Yellow Sign. Padgett’s story packs a heavy punch and is ripe for giving a reader’s subconscious free rein.  

The story starts with Rose, driving her VW Bug on an interstate exit while listening to a recording of a self-help guru. She stops to help a presumably homeless person who is carrying a cardboard sign that reads "ORGAN  -VOID." But the narrative facts are constantly shifting, and what is really going on is far from being that straightforward. Throughout, Rose's reality morphs seamlessly between her being a kind and compassionate commuter, to being a homeless person herself living under a freeway, to being a confused patient in a hospital treated by a Dr. Gord Onavi (an anagram of “ORGAN VOID.”) 

The story's power lies in the fact that it doesn't resolve or lend itself to any one preferred interpretation. Is Rose living under a freeway? Is she confined to an institution after suffering a mental break? Or is she just temporarily confused, drugged, or dreaming? This kind of ambiguity is not uncommon within weird fiction, but here it serves a different purpose than is typical.  The ambiguity doesn't function as the usual weird-fiction puzzle for the reader to solve, rather it is the in-story state of affairs. So, it isn’t the story that is ambiguous, it is the reality within the story itself that is ambiguous. All of the various interpretations are both true and false at the same time; none is more real than another.

Throughout the collection of short stories that “Organ Void” is part of, Padgett often returns to the idea that reality is an interpretation at best borrowed. In this story, it is a mask over the raw rot, decay, filth, and emptiness that underlies everything. Enter, the body horror. The one honest thing in the story, the one constant that carries through all the borrowed realities (or interpretations), is the filth: the blood, phlegm, shit, and pus. Once you strip away the façade and void the organ, you are left with a container of leaking meat, but otherwise it is empty and void.

There is a suggestion that Rose’s contact with the cardboard sign at the beginning of the story triggers all this revelatory madness that strips away the illusion. She has, as another character puts it, “come down with the void.” She has seen the sign, got a glimpse of the void underneath it all, and, by the end, feels compelled to spread the word.  And it is these bits that feel a lot like things from Robert W. Chambers' “The Repairer of Reputations,” and “The Yellow Sign.” Hildred Castaigne, like Rose, seems to experience a fractured reality. Both Hildred and Rose are being treated by a mysterious doctor; Archer in the case of Hildred and Onavi in the case of Rose. And like Rose’s ORGAN  -VOID sign, Hildred is centrally concerned with the Yellow Sign that likely triggers a kind of revelatory nihilistic gnosis. “Are you down with the void?” is the new “Have you seen the Yellow Sign?” 

The fact that the main character is named Rose and she drives a VW Bug suggests another connection that feels at one with this reading of the short story. Orson Welles’ film Citizen Kane (1941) is about the emptiness of Kane’s life and how all the illusions of success couldn’t fill the void left by what was lost when, as a child, he lived a simpler, innocent life before power and wealth corrupted everything. For Kane, his childhood “Rosebud” symbolizes that lost innocence. Likewise, in “Organ Void,” the VW feels like Rose's Rosebud (Rosebug). It is the place of innocence; a place where she listens to a self-help guru assuring her that nothing is missing at the moment. 

By the end of the story she is back in her VW Bug (Rosebug), but things have changed. The steering wheel and gas pedal have begun to grow pale, segmented tendrils that hook into her hands and feet.  The boundary between the self and world begins to dissolve. Strip away every borrowed reality, every performance of self, and what remains is the void that has always been waiting underneath. The empty self has voided into an even larger empty container. 

Are you down with the void?