by Andrew Smith
The couch we sat on was orange.
She said, “No, Arek.”
I didn’t know what to think about that. On the one hand, it saddened me to imagine that I would never have the opportunity to encounter unthreatening strangers—passersby—and let them go on doing their own private things while they let me go on doing mine. All these intersections of privacy and paths without end that would never re-cross. It was impossible to consider. But there was nothing to compare life inside the hole to. Life inside the hole gave me the opportunity to explore nothing of a private existence. I may as well have been sad to know that I would never sprout wings and fly.
This was all there was.
“That’s sad,” I said.
“Your father always said that sadness was a dominant trait in the genetic constitution of Polish boys.”
I knew I was Polish. Dad—Austin—had been teaching me the language from discs he’d scavenged from up above, outside, where there were places with names—like Poland—inside of other places with names, and on and on, without end.
It was impossible to imagine the scale of things.
“But what if I need to fall in love with somebody?” I asked.
My mother didn’t say anything. She kept her hand on my leg, and the music played.
“What if I need to fall in love with someone else? What if there is nobody else, anywhere? What if I need to fall in love with a boy?”
And my mother said, “Well, that would be in your genes too, I suppose.”
I did not understand what she meant, but then again, I was only eight years old at the time.
“What are my ‘genes’?”
My mother thought about it. Then she said, “They kind of make rules for you before you’re born—about what color your eyes will be, and if you will be a boy or not, if your hair will be straight, how tall you will be.”
“And my heart, too?” I said.
“Yes, that too.”
I started to cry.
Why did there have to be all these rules—more and more of them, invisible ones, all piling up without end?
Max Beckmann thought tears were a sign of slavery, but I couldn’t stop them.
The music played and played.
My mother pulled me to her chest. She kissed the top of my head.
Despite my genetic constitution, which tilted toward sadness, it made me feel loved.
She told me not to cry about things, that most things could not be controlled.
The music played.
I said, “I only want to be outside the hole. I only want to be a human.”
Names on a Wall
When we walked around the pool where we’d gone swimming, the trail that went along the water’s edge led Mel and me into the shade beneath the falls.
Here we found the opening to a cave—a hole as big as a house.
The entry looked like an openmouthed frown, wide, low, and curved downward into sharp points. There was a sense the chamber behind the opening was massive, but from where we stood below the overhang of a granite face, all we could see of it was black.
Mel said, “Let me have that flashlight.”
I opened the pack and felt around inside. My hands lingered on the soft things Mel had been wearing before she took them off to come swimming with me. Her clothes were still warm from her skin, or at least I imagined they were.
“You’re not planning on going inside, are you?”
To get into the cave, we would have to crawl on our hands and knees.
She said, “I almost feel like we have to, Arek.”
We had a puzzle of this world to construct, after all; we both knew it.
I took the flashlight from our backpack and switched it on.
Crouching at the cave’s mouth, Mel shined the light inside. From behind her, I could see how big the room was, and where the light hit the granite walls, it revealed figures and writing from another time, possibly from before the hole, I thought.
“There’s a fire ring right up near the entrance,” she said. “Probably to keep things from attempting to come inside.”
Holding the light in one hand, Mel got down on her knees and crawled into the opening.
She said, “I’ll let you know if it’s okay. In fact, I’m pretty certain I’ll let you know if it’s not okay too.”
And I said, “I’m not sure about this, Mel.”
“Nonsense. I’ve got my lucky bracelet on.”
Mel disappeared inside the doorway tunnel.
After a minute she called back, “I think you should come in here, Arek.”
This was crazy, I thought. I crawled in behind her.
On a day of incredible stacking upon incredible, when I could not be certain where we were, but had finally come to accept that it didn’t matter, the things we saw inside the cave behind the falls added new pieces to our model. Those pieces changed everything.
All around the floor outside the black-charred rocks that encircled how many fires we could never guess, we saw the impressions of footprints—human footprints, left behind in the cave’s soft, sandy floor. I did not need to make up a story of explanation as to who’d left the footprints there; this became obvious to us quickly, because the people who’d been here—storytellers as we all are—let us know.
And this story was true.
People had been living inside this cave.
Maybe it was out of reverence for the place, and maybe it was from fear, but Mel and I didn’t say anything for several minutes while we both studied the signs revealed by Mel’s light, taking it in, taking all of it in.
The main room was about twenty feet deep. There was a natural chimney overhead; we could feel the air being sucked inside—inhaled by the doorway we’d crawled through. Against one wall we found what were apparently beds that had been made from tree boughs that were blanketed with old canvas fraying so badly it fell apart in our hands when we touched it.
One of the beds had an actual foam mattress on it. It was wide enough for two or maybe three people to share, and like the canvas beds, it too was crumbling where the cloth seams had separated, spitting out what looked like dry yellow curds of stuffing.
When I slipped off one of my shoes, I saw that at least one of the people who’d lived here was probably as tall as I was. The other footprints—we could not say how many different sets were here—were smaller. There was at least one young child, too.
Mel whispered, “Where do you think they went?’
I looked at her and shrugged.
We’d both seen what had been left behind on the wall above the beds—a sort of tally-mark calendar with names and ages of the people who’d lived here. The singular date that had been written on the wall was only three years before Mel and I wandered in here.
“There are people,” I said.
And saying it made truth of something that I had always wanted to believe but had never been allowed to: There were other people out here, somewhere. There had to be others.
On the wall above the beds was a picket line of slashes that ended on the bottom with a date, and beside this record had been written:
Henry Martin, 39 yrs
Joanna Martin, 36 yrs
Davis Martin, 14 yrs
Sara Martin, 5 yrs
Elizabethtown, Kentucky
“It’s a family. And if you figure by the date, Sara is younger than we are. She was born after. After the hole,” I said.
Mel counted up the tally marks beside the names.
“They stayed here for more than three months,” she said.
I nodded. “I think the date must have been when they decided to leave, since it’s at the bottom of the scratch marks and the names of the people.”
The date was in April, almost exactly three years before Mel and I found this place.
“What do you think happened to them?” Mel asked.
“I think they got tired of living in a hole.”
I went back to the fire ring to look for a piece
of charcoal. I said, “We need to put our names up here too, and today’s date, so if anybody else finds this place they will know we were here.”
Mel swung the light around to help me see.
And on the wall across from the ring of stones where the family had tended their fire, we saw the reason they’d come into the hole:
There were some small bones in the ashes of the fire—mostly what appeared to come from rabbits and squirrels—and I found some good-size pieces of burnt wood, too. My hands and shoes turned black from raking through the old fire ring, but I found a piece I thought would work.
We were here. April 10, 20XX
Amelie Brees, 16 yrs
Arek Szczerba, 16 yrs
“Why did you put my name first?” Mel asked.
“I would never have come in this hole unless you told me to, Mel.”
When I finished writing, my fingers and wrist were stained charcoal black.
I said, “I’m going to need to jump back in the water.”
I looked at Mel. I imagined us kissing again. I dreamed about taking off all our clothes and going back in the water with her, naked.
Then we heard a buzzing sound that came echoing through the entryway of the cave. It was not the waterfall this time.
This was unmistakably the whirring mechanical drone of an engine.
Mel and I scrambled back out through the narrow entrance to the cave.
As we crawled, the sound of the motor became clearer, rising in pitch with each small distance we managed to cover.
When we stood outside, there was no doubt that somewhere out here an internal combustion engine was running. Although the sound was muted by the steady rush of the waterfall, there was nothing else it could possibly be.
“Where’s it coming from?” Mel asked.
“I can’t tell.”
I tilted my head, trying to angle my ears so as to catch the sound better.
Neither one of us breathed.
Just minutes before, we were amazed to find evidence that someone else had been out here—now we were practically face to face with that reality. We went back along the trail, Mel in the lead, with me carrying our pack and rifle.
She stopped at the top of the pool.
“Oh my God, Arek, look!”
She pointed up above the rim of the bluff we had followed down earlier, and then we both saw it—just a glimpse. Up in the air, at a distance that was impossible for me to gauge, we saw a plane heading southeast.
“Hey!” I screamed as loud as I could.
It was stupid, but I couldn’t control myself. “Hey! Dad! Robby! Hey! HEY!!!”
It was the same plane Robby had shown me in his pilot books.
We saw it for no more than three seconds, and then it disappeared behind the tops of the trees.
I kept screaming, waving my hands frantically and uselessly at nothing, calling for my dads. I only stopped when Mel put her hands on my shoulders and told me it was okay, and that I shouldn’t cry. I didn’t realize I was crying until she told me that, and when she did, I finally attempted to suck in a breath.
I felt so stupid and weak, enslaved to something bigger than I could comprehend.
“It’s okay, Arek. We both saw them. It really was them. It’s okay.”
I was suddenly so tired. I was sick of the hole and what it did to us all. I was sick of the world before the hole and the things my father attempted to bring inside for me, and the hidden before-the-hole things the others carried like pathogens inside themselves. I believe at that precise moment, when I saw the airplane vanish behind the treetops, I finally understood how it was possible to straddle time.
I sat down near the edge of the water and pulled my knees in to my face.
Mel didn’t say anything.
I was dimly aware that her arm was around my shoulders.
We must have sat there like that, saying nothing, for an hour or more.
Self-Portrait with Champagne
One time, my father, Austin, told me this: “Every great poem, and every great novel, is a self-portrait.”
My father taught me how to read. Sometimes we would share a book together and take turns reading it aloud to each other in the library.
That was one of my favorite things to do. The books did not bring anything into the hole from the outside world; they pulled things out from our hearts and allowed us to examine them.
This is me.
It took us two months to read Moby-Dick this way.
. . . that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.
I read the last pages of the novel to my father. I said, “It’s one of the saddest stories I’ve ever read.”
And it was after I read that final line and closed the book that we sat there for a moment in silence, thinking about what had been pulled out and shown to us, when my father told me his conclusion about books being self-portraits.
“Do you mean it’s a self-portrait of Melville?” I said.
“All self-portraits examine the identity of the painter, as well as that of the viewer.”
I looked at the swirling blue painting of the sinking ship, the people in the icy water, and the lifeboats.
And my father, watching me, said, “ ‘In landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God.’ ”
“Are we shoreless here in the hole?” I asked.
My father smoked a cigarette and nodded.
“Some of us are,” he said.
This is me.
• • •
Max Beckmann wrote this: The self is the great veiled mystery of the world.
Max Beckmann was probably obsessed with exploring his identity, with stripping away the function of model and replacing it with the substance of pure data. He painted more than eighty self-portraits in what must have been an exhausting effort to veer away from re-presentation and, in doing so, come face to face, artist to canvas, with an immutable and wordless truth.
This is me.
I am a story.
All stories are true.
Among Beckmann’s self-portraits were works in which he depicted himself as a nurse, as a clown, wearing suits with ties, in a tuxedo, as a sculptor, drinking champagne, with white hats and black hats, in a red scarf, holding a crystal ball, carrying horns and saxophones, on a staircase, with his wife—and most of them included the inevitable smoldering cigarette, too.
The thing I find most compelling about Max Beckmann’s self-portraits is they all seem to be a little off balance, as though staring at one for too long a time would make the viewer feel dizzy, or that the painting had been hung in such a way that it was crooked. And there’s almost always something pushing Beckmann away from center, as though his intent was to make the viewer look beyond Beckmann’s sometimes menacing expression and away from his eyes, which seem like insatiable black holes—sucking in all that had ever passed before them—and focus on just a sliver of something that doesn’t quite seem to belong in the picture, even if it’s an object as mundane as a bit of purple drapery or a potted plant.
My favorite—if such a word could appropriately be used for Beckmann’s work—was painted in 1919, when the artist was struggling to recover from his wartime experiences, from going through Max Beckmann’s shoreless hole. It is called Self-Portrait with Champagne.
The painting shows Beckmann in what is likely an upper-class nightclub, seated alone at a table with a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket, a filled glass in his left hand, and a cigarette in his right. The image is all out of skew, distorted, and claustrophobic to the point where it makes me feel like I can’t catch my breath. Beckmann is wearing a suit, with a wing-tip collared shirt and tie, and he is turned, looking over his right shoulder as though either something in the room has caught his attention, or he’s trying to ignore what we see in the background. I believe he’s trying to ignore what’s behind him, even though, or more likely because, it is very unsettling. In back of Beckmann we see
a kind of demon standing behind a doorway. Although the demonic figure is nicely dressed, he has a pointed ear and a deranged expression, openmouthed like a crocodile, baring teeth, an enormous white eye magnified in the lens of his spectacles. And Beckmann is smiling. It is a very tired smile from someone who has already seen all the horrors in the world before the hole and is therefore resigned to temper his reaction to the immediate present.
This is an image of someone who can straddle time.
Nothing is a surprise.
This is me.
A Familiar Reaction
“I suppose we should get up and go,” I said.
I had no idea how long Mel and I had been sitting at the water’s edge after seeing the plane in the sky. The shadows stretched across the pool; I could feel the cooling of the shade as it extended its canopy over us.
“You know what I think?” Mel said. “I think maybe your dads went back to Independence and saw the note and the picture you left for them. And now they’re coming back to where they said they’d go. Maybe they even flew over the van and saw it.”
“Maybe.”
Of the two of us, Mel was the braver. And along with her bravery, she was an unwavering optimist, too.
I think optimism requires the highest degree of bravery.
I nodded. “I’m sorry if I ruined your birthday.”
Mel put her hand on my arm. It felt cool and loving.
She said, “This has been the best birthday of my entire life. And now, I’m hungry. We should go back and have dinner. A birthday dinner. Maybe we could watch a movie.”
“I’ll let you pick it out. I’m no good at doing that.”
“It’s a deal, then. Let’s go.”
So we followed the trail back to where it rose upward along the forested bluff that would lead us again to the tunnel we’d walked through that morning, when we discovered this part of our expanding universe.
“Hang on,” I said.
Something was wrong with the tunnel. I could not see through to the other side where we’d left the van.
Mel noticed it too. “Did it collapse?”
“There’s something inside the tunnel, and it’s big.”
