Hollow

by Owen Egerton

  A moan comes from the yard next door to my former house. A cry to a yell to a deep, long, almost animal growl. The sound doesn’t end; it tumbles forward into nonsense syllables like a baby’s babbling but in a grown man’s tone. It’s Jeffrey.

  The yard’s fence is tall, tight. Narrow yellow lines of light and the unmelodic song pass through the slits between the planks. I stop and listen.

  Jeffrey must be nineteen now. Big, I imagine. By age fifteen he was over two hundred pounds and taller than me. On occasion, years back, I would sit on my back porch, sipping a beer, pretending to enjoy the dusk light, but staring at the wooden planks of the fence that separated my yard from theirs. He paced, unseen, behind that seven-foot fence, wordlessly calling. I don’t know if he was crying or talking or trying to name clouds.

  Once I came home from work and found Jeffrey standing in our living room—looming and rocking on the heels of his shoes.

  “Jeffrey. Hi. Are you visiting Carrie?” He held a porcelain elephant figurine, the size of a toaster. A heavy, cumbersome thing usually residing on the couch’s end table.

  “Carrie?” I called. Jeffrey stared at the elephant as if he were going to try to solve it like a Rubik’s Cube. “Carrie, you home?”

  I took a step toward the bedroom. Jeffrey barked at me—more of a seal’s bark than a dog’s. I froze.

  “Everything is okay, Jeffrey.” I put my hands up and stepped back. “Now, do you know where my wife is? Where Carrie is?”

  Another bark. Louder. Hoarse.

  We stood in that room unmoving. The air conditioning clicked on. I tried to think.

  Then the front door opened behind me. Carrie came in with a bag of takeout.

  “Hi,” she said, looking from me to Jeffrey. “Hi, Jeffrey. Here for a visit?”

  “Wait,” I turned to her. “You didn’t let him in?”

  “I just got here.”

  “Jeffrey,” I said as calmly as I could. “How did you get in here?”

  Groan.

  “I’ll go get his dad,” Carrie said, and I was alone with him again. He bounced the elephant in his hands as if he were guessing its weight.

  “It was a wedding gift,” I said, stupidly.

  Within a minute his father rushed in with Carrie behind him. He shook his head at me apologetically, a big man with a football player’s build and a kind face.

  “Come on, Jeffrey, let’s go,” he said. “That’s not our elephant. Come on.”

  “He can keep the elephant,” I said.

  “Come on, Jeffrey, come on. Give back the elephant.”

  Jeffrey lifted the elephant above his head. I waved my wife back.

  “Jeffrey. Give that elephant back!” his father said.

  “Really,” I said. “He can have it.”

  His father grabbed the figurine and yanked. Jeffrey bellowed.

  “Let it go,” his father said through clenched teeth. “Now. Let it go.”

  Jeffrey did, and his father stumbled back with the elephant, almost falling. He handed it to me and I felt oddly guilty.

  The father turned back and took Jeffrey’s wrist, leading him to the front door. Jeffrey tried to brace himself at the door and his father pulled. Then Jeffrey went limp like a nonviolent protestor and sat on the floor.

  “Can I help?” I asked, cradling the elephant. The father ignored me. He wrapped his body around his son in a kind of professional wrestling move and maneuvered him through the door. Not violent, not out of control. His father was meticulous, careful, even tender as his muscles visibly strained. It occurred to me he had done this before, that perhaps he had taken classes on how to remove his son physically from situations, that perhaps this was a daily routine. In jerks and yanks, Jeffrey’s father moved him out the door, Jeffrey barking and grinding his teeth.

  “Bye,” I said as Jeffrey and his father limped out of our yard like some four-legged, two-headed mythical beast. It seemed equally rude to shut the door or watch the struggle.

  Carrie stood beside me. She looked pale.

  “There but for the grace of God,” she said quietly, and closed the door.

  Now on the sidewalk, all these years later, I listen to Jeffrey’s bellowing. It hovers high, for a moment, wavering like the final note of an opera. It’s a song of sorts. I never heard it like that before. Jeffrey may be crying, but he is singing, too. He’s singing louder than I ever dared.

  I stand and listen and the song continues as the first drops fall on the cement and the back of my hands. Soon I hear the sliding door and Jeffrey’s father calling his son in from the rain. He loves his son. I can hear that in the way he calls. I could see that in the way he restrained him.

  We became pregnant in our fourth year of marriage.

  We read all the books, studied the medical websites, knew what foods to avoid, what vitamins to take, what yogurts to abstain from. Carrie informed the law firm she would be taking a prolonged leave. My students made name suggestions—Pendragon, Hamlet, Fellini. People gifted us car seats and stuffed Muppets. Even before Carrie was showing, our home began transforming with knickknacks and diaper pails.

  We took a six-week class with four other couples to prepare for birth. Our teacher was a wide-smiling hippie whose home smelled of scented candles and faint traces of pot. We sat in her living room on one of three low, cushioned couches sipping noncaffeinated teas and watching videos of babies being born in hospitals, homes, hot tubs, meadows. We studied the anatomy of the womb with a plastic model. We practiced pain moderating, clutching ice cubes and imagining the colors of pain, exploring the waxing and waning of pain.

  One evening our teacher gathered the mothers-to-be on the floor in the center of the room. The fathers-to-be and one “other-mother,” as she called herself, encircled them. The teacher instructed us to howl. To howl like coyotes. She gave us an example, tilting her head, straightening her throat, and releasing a long, harrowing bawl.

  “This is bullshit,” whispered the other-mother beside me.

  A couple of women jumped right in and began howling. One woman howled with more enthusiasm than any coyote or wolf I’ve ever heard. Others offered quiet moans. Carrie gazed around awkwardly.

  “Now the partners,” said the teacher, grinning. “You are the protective circle. Howl!”

  I watched Carrie, ready to follow her lead. She was on her knees, her hands cradling her extended belly. She smiled at me, almost a snicker, a shared understanding. Then she closed her eyes, lifting her chin to the ceiling, and sang out a slow, mournful howl.

  For a moment, I only watched. She was so beautiful. So changing. Her auburn hair long against her back.

  “Come on, partners,” the teacher said. “It’s a family song.”

  I closed my eyes and howled, quietly at first, then louder. The room echoed with howling, a full off-key harmony, strange and good.

  Carrie howled in labor. She squeezed my fist and grunted, sounds so guttural, so nearly sexual at times I found myself aroused. She groaned, red hair sticking to her sweat-wet forehead, her eyes rolling back, contractions shaking her like thunder.

  For an hour of the labor, she and I stood in the shower of the labor room. She rested her arms on my shoulders and we swayed, like teenagers slow dancing. The water warm over my hands on her back. Her breathing long, slow whistles. Me, nodding agreement in the dark.

  Later the contractions grew so intense Carrie lost track of me. I was beside her, bending close, letting her bruise my knuckles with her grip. But she was somewhere alone. On each push, she dove down deep, far from me and that room; she was inside and finding our baby and carrying him to the surface.

  “Now, don’t you go holding your breath,” a nurse said to me. “I get dads passing out left and right. You just keep breathing.”

  “Well, I see his head,” said the doctor, a balding man with bored eyes. “O
ne little cut and he’ll slide right out. You ready for that?” He looked to me and then to Carrie.

  “No,” Carrie said. “No. I don’t want that.”

  “It’ll be over lickety-split,” the doctor said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Okey-dokey,” he said.

  And she pushed again. And again, calling out.

  Carrie hoisting herself up on her elbows and staring down her body, pushing. One last, long push and out you came. And we gasped at you—tiny one, a red tuft of wet hair on your scalp, eyes squeezed against the light. I guffawed tears.

  We knew you immediately. Even then, pink and slick with blood and birth, I knew you. I recognized you, Miles. The nurse placed your wriggling body on Carrie’s chest and you curled into her.

  Everything was new. Everything.

  The rain is falling in earnest by the time I get back to the shed, those same tapping fingers on my roof. I heave myself through the window and out of the downpour. Wrapping myself in a blanket as the wind whistles through the paneled floor, I sit on my cot and open Dr. Horner’s Our Journey In.

  Horner describes the nuclear icebreaker, a Russian vessel called The Yamal. He imagines boarding her and setting our course for the northern Symmes Hole. The rain picks up as I picture the journey.

  Northward, toward the pole.

  Ice, a wall of it circling the arctic seas.

  Beyond the ice where the sea grows calm and warm.

  A whirlpool at the top of the world where the ocean flows into the globe.

  Then the inner world warmed by a small red sun.

  Horner expects enormous cities of singing giants with technology a millennium beyond our own. He describes how he and his fellow explorers will make diplomatic contact and receive the wisdom of these towering ancients.

  “Secrets,” he promises.

  All the hidden secrets will be discovered. For this is where we came from. The Hollow Earth is Eden. We on the surface are descendants of all who were cast out. Our journey in is a journey home.

  They know we are coming.

  In my research I’ve uncovered interviews with Tibetan lamas and testimonies that now leave me convinced that in the heart of the Hollow Earth is a massive mirror or screen on which our enlightened inner-world cousins monitor our progress. The lamas describe this device as a “magic mirror” and promise that it can reveal the future, show the past, or unveil the most unfathomable of mysteries. Is it a colossal computer? Or a peephole into the workings of reality? Or is it simply looking into the mind of God?

  Imagine staring into this “mirror” and whispering your questions. We will conclusively know the truth about the Kennedy assassination, the Roswell cover-up, and the submerged U.S. military bases. And, of course, we may ask spiritual questions, too. The questions that have plagued humankind throughout history. This mirror holds the answers to our deepest whys.

  I close the book. It’s raining harder, palms slapping more than finger tapping, water dripping down the wall, and the wind pushing under the padlocked door. This place, this life, it is unsustainable.

  Manuel had used that very word. Unsustainable. He told me I had a choice.

  Manuel Cruz had been a friend. He led our adult Bible study at St. Christopher’s Episcopalian Church. A little older than me with a round face and metal-rimmed glasses. Kind eyes, willing smile. I’m not sure if he liked me in the class. I doubt it’s fun having a history of religion professor in your Sunday school. I never corrected him or argued. Though perhaps I allowed a smug expression or two to cross my face.

  Manuel was, in a very real way, there for Carrie and me in the aftermath. Organizing cooked meals dropped off by church members, phone calls and visits, always available with an open ear and assuring eyes. And when I left and hid away in a cheap hotel room that smelled of mold and heat, he came and found me. He sat on the edge of the bed. I sat in the one chair. It rolled on wheels, a squeak muted by the thin carpet.

  “I know it’s been hard since Miles passed,” he said, looking to my draped window.

  I told him I detested the word passed. It implies passing on to something. It tries to pretty up death. Whatever death is, it is not, as the Dalai Lama likes to say, simply a change of clothing.

  He asked how I was getting along, had I talked to Carrie, was I getting any help? My answers didn’t give him much to go on. I told him I didn’t want help.

  “You know how you’re living, here in this place, you know it’s unsustainable?”

  I rolled my chair a little to the side.

  “I want you to know, Oliver. You’re not alone. We’re there for you. God is there for you.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “He holds our pain,” Manuel said. “He suffers with us.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Oliver,” he said, talking off his glasses. “When my wife died, I felt lost.”

  I remembered his wife. A serious woman with a small face. She had died in a car accident years before.

  “I hated God. Hated that He’d made me a widower, that He’d left my daughter without a mother. Honestly, I was ready to give up.”

  “You wanted to die.”

  He squeezed his knees. “I was going to drive into the barrier of the I-35 upper deck split. Built up speed a few times. Got up to over a hundred miles per hour and knew I could do it. Just a turn of the wheel.”

  I watched him for a minute. Then spoke. “I thought about stepping in front of a train.”

  He nodded.

  “But it seemed unfair . . .” I said. “To the engineer.”

  “Sure.” He paused, then put his glasses back on. “There came a day I saw I had a choice,” he said. “I could give up. I could believe Jenny’s death was random and meaningless, or I could believe God had a plan.”

  “You believe God killed your wife?”

  “I believe God orchestrates our lives. There’s so much we don’t see. So much we won’t understand until we’re in heaven.”

  “You believe God killed your wife,” I said.

  “I believe life has meaning,” he said.

  “You’re telling me to believe God killed my son.”

  “I’m telling you to choose meaning,” he said. “I looked down both paths, Oliver. The one you’re on just leads to madness.”

  If the rain keeps up, the water dripping down the walls will pool across the floor and warp the panels. Everything here is used up. Even the camping stove is running low on propane. Everything is worn out, except this book in my hand. Our Journey In is new. There’s still a slight resistance in the binding. It’s filled with dry, unstained pages promising a path to a mirror and answers.

  Manuel told me I could go mad or go God. But there’s another option. I’ll carry my complaints to center of the world and ask why the world is the way the world is.

  In April of 1829, Norwegian fisherman Olaf Jansen and his father’s small fishing sloop were blown off course by a tremendous storm. A north wind drove them beyond their maps through green-ice seas of lifeless islands and icebergs the size of London.

  They came to a wall of ice stretching across the ocean like the coast of a white-blue continent. As the current drove them hurtling forward, the father spotted a narrow crack in the wall and the two managed to steer into the passage.

  The translucent walls strained the yellow from the sun and left the day blue and ethereal. Their boat cut through ice water thick as sludge and into a cathedral of ice with walls reaching higher than the clouds. Their only light was the flat, gray strip of sky above them and the blue-green sunglow of the ice walls. At night the constellations were truncated and strange. The walls, Olaf says, contained hunks of diamonds and garnet and the frozen open-eyed corpses of animals unknown. The ice blurred the bodies so that as the sloop passed, the animals seemed to move, to gesture
.

  After several days, the walls grew closer. The current pushed the small boat into a narrowing alley. They argued direction, Olaf wanting to row back against the current, his father urging them on even as the passage shrank. Night fell and the two still fought. Their raised voices echoed back to them, moving through the circles and paths and returning to them foreign as if there were a hundred men, a thousand, lost in these passages.

  But at first light came hope. In the near distance they saw an opening in the frozen labyrinth. Before them lay a calm and iceless sea. They breathed in and the air was warm. Pulling water from the sea to wash their faces, they found the water fresh, saltless. And still their compass read north.

  In front of us, girding the horizon from left to right, was a vaporish fog or mist. Whether it covered a treacherous iceberg, or some other hidden obstacle against which our little sloop would dash and send us to a watery grave, or was merely the phenomenon of an Arctic fog, there was no way to determine.

  —Olaf Jansen

  Martin and I were kicked out of Austin Hospice the same week. I as a volunteer, he as a low-income patient. Both of us were a little embarrassed.

  He lives, for now, up north of 183. It takes two buses and an hour’s travel to reach his neighborhood. This is not the Austin you see on postcards. This is second-rate grocery stores, fast-food boxes, same-day loan banks, and rented squalor.

  Martin was my fifth assignment as a hospice volunteer.

  Shortly before Miles was born, I went through the two weekends of volunteer training on end-of-life etiquette and was placed on a hospice team. A team consists of a doctor, a nurse, a chaplain, a counselor, and a volunteer. The volunteer’s job was the most vague and most varied. I sat with an old yellowing woman in a nursing home as she complained about her sister, ten years dead. I gave a shy man with a bloated belly and hardly any words rides to and from his doctor appointments. For the last three weeks of his life, I took a mentally retarded man who didn’t understand he was dying for milk shakes and malt balls.