Hollow Earth

by John Kinsella

  17.

  Ari said to Manfred, This book you’ve rewritten from memory, Totem and Taboo by Freud … you’ve gotta be joking! Zest added: We have had our conflicts here in this world, and there’s nothing you surface people seem to have thought or experienced that we haven’t. Manfred wanted to say, The sun, the stars, the rest of the universe, but he held his tongue. He admitted to himself that it was hard to get around the fact that a people who lived so differently with such a different history, could know what was being talked about. He did say, Foolish it is, but you lack the referents to critique it. More fool you, said Ari, whom Manfred knew was displaying distinct qualities of a jealous personality. He held on to this.

  18.

  Before travelling back to Schull, Manfred admitted to his friends and family that the car accident had changed him in fundamental ways. To have emerged basically unscathed from the wreckage was disturbing in ways he couldn’t explain. Ontologically scarred, was all he could say. He suffered from the effects of shock for weeks. His previous life seemed irrelevant. Obvious to everyone. I am not the first or the last but a symptom. As clichéd as it sounds, he told them, I am an obvious outcome. But there was more than one accident in more than one country. He tried hard to remember to which he was referring.

  19.

  Our bodies function the same way yours do. Skin colour – you object to our skin being the colour of leaves, of grass? Of soil? Of rock? Of water? What is it with you, that you are so out of tune with your surroundings that you differentiate between a person and the world they are part of? Racism, as you describe it, is alien to us. But we have our bigotries, truth be told, and you will become more aware of them as your time here lengthens and stretches, when you understand what it is that makes night and day and the half-light that fills in most of our living life.

  20.

  I will take you both to the surface – there is a way, back through Mount Gabriel, into the ancient copper mine; it used to be one of the routes you sent your people through to influence surface discourse of the underworld. Come with me and see my world. I have made a hot air balloon. We can fly to the chamber in the sky, the coal sack of your glittering phosphorescent night sky. I have worked out a way of getting from basket to opening. I have planned it. Come, look at my sketches. Why have you never flown to the roof? You have? And accepted its limits? Why? Technology here goes against curiosity. Your aeroplaneless world! No, we have the answers, Manfred. We already know. I will talk with Ari and see if she wants to come with us. But I warn you, if people find out they will try to stop us. And maybe Ari will betray us. Betrayal is not unknown here. It is no utopia.

  21.

  Zest, Ari and Manfred emerged from the side of Mount Gabriel and climbed out of the pit and down into Barnancleeve Gap, the sky heavily clouded above them. Doesn’t look much different from home, said Ari, shaking the damp from her clothes. Wait till the clouds clear, said Manfred, filling his lungs with the surface air. And then the sun appeared in the heavens and Ari and Zest felt the bare skin of the face and neck and hands start to burn and they cried out in fear and made their way back to the pit to return to Hollow Earth, to be called back by Manfred, who said, You cannot return that way … the balloon will have been blown away and there is no way from the roof to the surface other than falling, and having survived my first wingless plunge into the ocean-lake and the long swim to the shore, I am not keen to repeat the experience. And, what’s more, the membrane is too thick at this time of the year to get back through from the outside in. We need to go to Australia, to what the colonials called Mount Bakewell – Walwalinj to its people, the Ballardong Noongars – to find a way back. I know this because my mother always said, Go to the extinct volcano to find a way through. She said this in hospital in Perth, as her sickness took her away, opened the doors she’d been searching for. I am sure that’s what she meant. That is an entry close to the surface of Hollow Earth and we can climb down from there. But for now, let’s experience the surface together! For the duration, you will adjust to the sun and learn to love it, I’m sure. But it will make us sick, said Zest, And you can’t know what it will do to our biology. That’s true, said Manfred, but there’s no choice. He did not add, I told you so, because he only half had, really, and it would have been spiteful, wouldn’t it? Ari spoke in one of her languages, and for the first and only time, Manfred, sans the translationese properties of the Hollow Earth atmosphere, didn’t understand what she was saying. So he recited to the mountains to the west and north, to the rocky coastline and the islands and the lighthouse flashing through daylight out on its thrown crag of rock:

  (i) Grotesque Love: Minotaur

  From Euboean Cumae sea-looking people

  watch Crete and shudder: the perfume of Pasiphaë,

  the odour of bull. Blood in its stone veins,

  Minotaur hungry as light in dark corridors.

  (ii) A Hundred Mouths, a Hundred Voices: Sibyl

  Prophesies from her Cavern

  The rocks of the Point recognised boats

  of all sizes. And their sailors. A single oarsman,

  a shipwreck in the making. Rough seas shape

  in their own image. And the wind works

  in tandem, a hundred mouths, a hundred voices.

  (iii) Deconsecrating: Secular Worship

  In the forums of religion they grow heated

  over the right and wrong way to unbless

  a church, a temple. To sell a building

  closes the matter for some, to say a blessing

  for its undoing is enough for others.

  The word ‘curse’ might surface if consecration

  is undone by the opposition. The church,

  the temple: theatre, restaurant, community

  hall. As long as souls are safe. Safe as houses.1

  22.

  York by E.Y. Hendersen – ‘from an original sketch, 1857’. The sublime dislocation of reality. It came to Manfred’s mind as they made inroads into the Cork City underworld, where Manfred had a few tenuous connections. Passports. Irish–EU, and Australian. Oh, and American. Costly. Dangerous.

  23.

  Zest took a liking to codeine, Ari to ephedrine.

  24.

  Talk to the wrong people and we’ll be suspected of a folie à trois. Saturated in the imagery of the surface – though with Manfred still affected by the subpar lighting (from his point of view) and the mannerisms of the geography, topography and demography of Hollow Earth – they made a frightening crew to some encountering their dysphoric reactions to stimuli, and an amusing crew to others ... Either manifestation carrying the potential of personally catastrophic outcomes, of misunderstandings and eruptive interactions. Don’t let the systems of the surface get hold of you, Manfred warned. They will chew you up and not spit you out. Never. The joke of permanent records should be taken seriously. The what?

  25.

  It’s a version of Georgism you have operating in sections of Hollow Earth, and as Marx – one of our political philosophers of the surface, whose work I can clearly see now was infiltrated textually by one of your Hollow Earth missionaries – said, to paraphrase in the context of a socialism with an underpinning capitalism: Georgism is ‘the last ditch of capitalism’, or something like that.

  26.

  Manfred tells them he was attracted to confined spaces as a child. He feared and loved them at once. He’d been locked in cupboards among broad bean seedlings nestled in cotton wool and starved of light, pale sprouts reaching through the airless dark and into his bare arms and legs, where they took root. He’d always considered himself part plant, carrying the ghosts of dead seedlings in his flesh. He hungered for broad beans, which he would swallow raw in the hope they’d take root in his gut, sprout, Jack and the Bean Stalk–like, and take him to a higher power. Instead, he went down to Hollow Earth. He went where the roots went. He went to the realm where broad beans had never grown, though he went with seed in his pockets, as always. He planted them in Z
est and Ari’s allotment, and they grew into stunted but vigorous bushes that yielded no seed. He paid no thought to possible pathogens on his shoes, clothes, skin, hair, or on the broad bean seeds. He should have. The plunge into the ocean-lake had washed nothing away.

  27.

  Crossing the River Lee, which had been in flood only a few weeks earlier, mute swans loud in their whiteness, an enforcer at his side, an enforcer whose grandfather had been part of the first moments of the civil war, hurling a policeman from a cliff, Manfred thought back to the coming out of the hole on Mount Gabriel. But now he noticed the price of diesel, he wondered about the ornate facade of the madhouse, the Victorian edifice that exploited the gift of the gab, made it ghostly mad. The loop in his head, their emergence, their birth. Hollow Earth was a world of algae, the building blocks of human life. Climbing down the sheep- and horse-manured slopes of Mount Gabriel, over the old red sandstone, over dry walls that were wet and enmossed, through the whitegoods rubbish pit in the scoop out of the peat from which a stream began, through bogs and over bog cotton wisping late as if seasons had been entirely disregarded, he’d thought of the world of meat he was entering. Those animals, he said, pointing to the sheep and cows that Zest and Ari were standing watching in awe. They are bred to be eaten or to give milk and then be slaughtered when they’re old and ‘unproductive’. This is a world of war against all life. And the English ate swans. In the here and now, doing the deal, obtaining the clutch of passports, always climbing down the muddy slopes to Schull where they’d temporarily base themselves (again and again, temporarily, just for the time being, a temporary measure ... ), plotting their expedition to Australia, to the entry point back into Hollow Earth, plotting while looking up to the exit point on Mount Gabriel, looking out over Roaring Water Bay, fixating on Cape Clear Island, thinking about seabirds. Up to Cork City to do more deals, then back to Schull (temporarily a temporary measure ... a step and a step again on the way on the way home) via the Michael Collins ambush point. Mouth of flowers, not far beyond the bend of the river, where the bluebells delight. And that’s what we have. That’s why we sell you these gifts of travel, this diaspora for The Others.

  28.

  The sins of Hollow Earth were psychological but devastating. He realised that only a few days after arriving. There are no utopias possible, he told himself. They quizzed him about the concept of day and night, the impossibility of orbit, of solar systems, galaxies and the universe. The Big Bang they found believable, but laughable. That was the difficulty – they didn’t refuse to accept other possible truths, not at all; rather, they just found them amusing. A closed cosmology was in evidence, and the steady-state theory appealed greatly. All things can be translated, he found, and Manfred’s misery increased with their acceptance of things they had few reference points for. But they tormented each other with the possibility that there was no purpose for existence, and played elaborate games of stirring up feelings of hope and then trashing them. An ontological horror. They so craved purpose, and with no sense of ever leaving the world they were part of in a physical sense, this was purely conceptual — they believed in the ‘mole soul’, but had no aspirations for what Manfred imposed as a ‘cosmology’, of a stratified movement of spirit ... but was this something Manfred was imposing on them, misinterpreting? He wasn’t sure — maybe he couldn’t see beyond his star sign? He clung to that — having a star sign, and this brooded as arrogance. Though there were Hollow Earthers who believed in the caverns below ground (and underworld?), where gravity was devastating, other dimensional possibilities lurked. There were surely parallel Hollow Earths, and much more, they were convinced. But they refused to allow the ground to be penetrated beyond a depth of one kilometre, and none thought of violating that law. For if you do, Hollow Earth will collapse, came the warning. There were ancient tales of what amounted to a singularity opening and a great lake being lost – just gone. Ari climbed stone walls and hugged cows, if they would let her. I will tell you about The Táin, said Manfred. And he did.

  29.

  The Underworlders were particularly interested in hearing the accounts of Zest and Ari’s first contact with the villagers of Schull – somehow legends are made in the horror. Of course, these came via digital communications and later interviews, and had to be retrieved from shadow backups of the old-world World Wide Web, and it was accepted there was much scope for corruption of data over the decades before the ‘bizarre’ stories had become useful, but fortunately, conspiracy sites had logged a lot of it and they had persisted since the switch to telekinetic means of communication and data storage in the contemporary era, and were more readily retrieved from the memory cores of the zealots. Brain-mining was commonplace and cheap, and the conspiracists were mostly incarcerated by the time of the Underworlders.

  30.

  This is called Ardmanagh Road, he told the others. High place of the priests. Priests? They were walking three abreast, having broached a gate and been barked at by a dog, when a tractor with a slurry tanker burst around the corner and bore down upon them. The wind was blowing from behind the beast, with dark clouds gathering again, swallowing the sun, and the stench reached them at the same time as the sound of the machine. Woooo! cried Ari, always sensitive to smells. What on Hollow Earth is that? That, dear Ari, is shit of cows and pigs being used to feed the grass to grow cows so they can shit.

  31.

  What does the expression They don’t care what you do behind closed doors mean, Manfred? asked Ari, rubbing at skin already raw from the brief flashes of sun she’d been exposed to. It means Don’t rub your business in our faces – keep it to yourselves. Is it implying deviant sexual acts? she continued, both amused and bothered. Something like that, Ari. So they are uncomfortable with us all sharing the same hotel room? Yes, I think so. This hotel reopened only a few weeks before I climbed down and splashed into Hollow Earth, reopened after years in the financial doldrums – a husk of a building battered by the Atlantic and Celtic sea winds. Its opening was new hope after the country’s economy crashed, and now it’s been, well … I was down in Hollow Earth for, looking at dates now, almost a year and a half of surface time – one orbit of the sun around the earth plus some months – and I guess they’re still feeling delicate as they’re located near the church. Not that this community is as bothered by the church as some. The sun, said Ari, is vicious and not to be trusted. Ari, you rely on it as much as the surface dwellers do. Though unseen, it is the force your scientists conjecture is ‘beyond’, and it creates your seasons and tides and weather and life as much as it does on the surface. It’s just different. After all, our biologies are essentially the same, though for you having male or female body parts is acceptable while up here it’s a slow process of understanding and acceptance. That is disturbing, isn’t it, Zest? Do we have anything to fear? A little, answered Manfred as honestly as he could, a little but so do all surface dwellers. Surface dwellers obsess over their own bodies, and others’ bodies even more. It’s deep-seated.

  32.

  Zest and Ari enjoyed hearing Manfred’s childhood stories. They often asked him to repeat ones they’d heard before and to augment them with any missed details, hoping he might remember a lost smell or taste or sound. Their senses were alive to narrative. For the fifth or sixth time he recounted his first clear memories. Sitting on the hotel double bed, with the single bed pressed alongside so Ari’s leg didn’t hang out, and looking down onto the park and the cordylines waving sharply at the few boats moored in the harbour, and the snub brutal fishing boats pretending to be benign by the pier, Manfred, an arm around the shoulders of each of his companions, told his tale again, adding a few extra details but losing a few as well – quickly augmented by Ari or Zest so nothing was lost, but rather only gained in the retelling.

  33.

  Alcohol, not manufactured but manifested through natural processes of fermentation, was not part of Hollow Earth’s sensual register, for it had no effect beyond poisoning if taken in excess and
was only used as a preservative. Manfred had warned them that consuming alcohol on the surface would affect them, and would have consequences. So when they found the minibar, the temptation proved too much and Ari and Zest swallowed three miniature bottles of scotch and vodka (he wasn’t sure who ended up with which) in rapid succession, which set off a chain reaction that had farreaching consequences for their sense of self-worth and their understanding of their own ontologies. They didn’t act drunk, in a surface sense, but had deep crises of purpose, belonging and identity. There was nothing uplifting and then depressing about it – it was all depressing and depression.