Hollow

by Owen Egerton

  For a time I was on the Eleventh Hour Team, awake well past midnight in a hospital room or in an overly warm bedroom beside a mother or father or sister or brother while the family caught a few hours of sleep or a much-needed meal. Just my being there gave the families the chance to step out without fearing their loved one would die alone.

  They warned us in our training that often a person chooses these hours to die, the brief spell when family has left the room, as if the pressure is off and they can get on with it.

  I walk from the bus stop into Martin’s neighborhood. The subdivision had been built forty or so years ago as a suburb for the growing city, quick new houses perfect for the middle-class nuclear family. But poverty and time beat the shit out of the neighborhood and broke its face. Paint peels, roofs sag, windows break and are repaired with strips of duct tape. Broken couches, appliance parts, and uncollected trash tumble from the curb onto the street and the air is ripe with garbage and anger and fear and need. They watch me as I walk, wondering what I might take from them, or what they might take from me.

  When the newspaper ran the stories of Miles’s death and my arrest, hospice stopped calling. Much later, I called them once and asked why. The volunteer manager, a bright-voiced Buddhist woman, told me she thought it best if I take a break from hospice.

  “But I’d like to volunteer. I’m willing.”

  “Quite honestly, Mr. Bonds, we have to question your competence. We have the safety of our clients to consider.”

  “It’s hospice. What’s the worst that could happen?”

  Martin was still my patient at the time. He had been for more than a year, long past the six months his oncologist had given him to live. That’s why he was kicked out.

  Hospice is pretty strict about who gets care. If a doctor gives you more than a year to live, you’re a no-go. Hospice is for the dying.

  At first Martin was dying just fine. Cancer—born in the lungs but expanding all over with its own manifest destiny. His doctor gave him six months to live and recommended hospice care. Six months came and went. As did a year. Martin was still alive. The doctor shrugged and was later convicted for possession of cocaine.

  Martin got a new doctor who prescribed a complete chemo program. To qualify for hospice care, you can’t be seeking treatment. You have to be a lost cause. They’re not trying to be cruel. They have to have standards, or everyone with a sniffle would sign up for care.

  So within four days of the other, Martin and I found our association with Hospice Austin severed. We decided to keep our friendship going outside of hospice jurisdiction. He didn’t mind that I had been accused of homicide and I didn’t mind that he had failed to die on schedule.

  Martin lives in one side of a duplex made from what used to be a family home. The cracked driveway holds a late-model beige Cadillac with two flat, rotting tires and a raised hood. Three or four guys from the neighborhood are staring in. These men are strong and often high. It’s Martin’s car, but it hasn’t run in years.

  “Holy shit! Ollie!” Martin says after swinging the door open. He always acts surprised. But I’m here the same time every week. He hugs me. He’s wet, nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist, yet he still smells of smoke.

  Martin’s thinner. He’s always thinner. I can see the plug where they inject the chemo. It protrudes from his chest like an old-fashioned car cigarette lighter. It grows more prominent as he grows less so.

  He’s a small man to start with, maybe five foot five. He swears he was taller before the cancer. I don’t see how that’s possible.

  “Come on in!” he says. “Hey, Sam. Ollie’s here.”

  A tall man sits shirtless on one of the three leather couches crammed into the living room. Sam is built like a high school athlete ten years past two-a-days. Thick arms, fist-size pecs, with a pooch just above his silver skull belt buckle. His shoulders are wide and inked with cheap tattoos—blurred like a Sharpie sketch on a paper towel. The depiction of some rodent—a rat or opossum—screeches on his chest, its ribbed tail stretching up and around his neck.

  He nods at me. His eyes don’t trust me, never have.

  Sitting in a ball on the couch, her eyes on the screaming television, is a woman I don’t know. She’s thin, pale skin like a threadbare sheet that’s lost its color in the wash. She’s wearing a nightshirt pulled over her knees.

  The front door closes and the room is darker. Heavy curtains cover the windows. Besides the television, a single bulb in the open kitchen is the only light. The space is thick with smoke that has no room to float. It hangs static in the air.

  “I’ll get dressed. Hold on here. You want a beer?”

  I don’t drink. Martin knows this, but he offers to be polite.

  “Okay, okay. I’ll be right back. I am starving,” he says as he heads down the hall to his room in the rear of the house.

  Sam sometimes rents a room from Martin. He sometimes disappears. He spent a month in jail last year for hitting a girlfriend.

  “Lying bitch,” he had said. “Hit herself with a bat and said it was my fist. Judge didn’t even ask. Look at my right hand. I can’t even make a fist. The bones never healed right.”

  The woman’s face changes with the light of the television. It’s a divorce-court reality show—a couple yelling, a judge frowning. She watches intently, her mouth slightly ajar.

  “Met a college kid doing stand-up,” Sam says, not looking up from the pink pills he’s lining on the coffee table. “Asked him if he knew you. He didn’t. But I don’t know your last name.”

  “Bonds.”

  “He didn’t know you,” he says. “Funny guy.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m doing some stand-up now. Kind of a career change.”

  The woman turns her head and looks at him, the television flickering against her face like malformed ghosts.

  “Don’t you worry,” he says without looking at her. “I’m not retiring yet.”

  Sam smirks at me as if we’re sharing a joke. I look to her, but she’s returned her gaze to the fighting couple on the television.

  “You teach history?” Sam asks, opening a new bottle of pills and beginning a fresh line.

  “Religion,” I say. “History of religion. I used to.”

  “Shit. I’m a history buff.” He smiles. “You know the Civil War?”

  “I’m aware of it.”

  “Aware of it. Shit.” He shakes his head. “I’ve read a dozen books on it. A dozen easy. Read two biographies of Lee. One on Lincoln. You know what was the craziest? The prisons. I found this book in the prison library all about the POW camps. You know, for the captured soldiers. I swear we’ve never treated foreigners as bad as we treated our own. Both sides, too. Concentration camp stuff. Starved corpses stacked like wood, you know. No food, no room. All the water clean as piss.”

  I’m watching her. In her twenties, I guess. As the images on the screen grow more frantic, she grins. One tooth is coffee, the others are small and off-white.

  “How the fuck did that book end up in a Texas prison library? You think they wanted us to feel better about Del Valle?” Sam chuckles, recounting the pills with his fingers. “Over fifty thousand died just in the prisons. One place, Camp Sumter, killed off nearly every soldier who went there. Starved them, froze them, let them rot in the mud. When it was all over, the guy who ran it got charged with war crimes. He was the only person in the whole Civil War who got charged for war crimes. They hanged him.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  The show has gone to commercial and the pale woman turns to listen to Sam. I try not to look at her. I concentrate on Sam’s tattoos, that ribbed tail snaking up his neck.

  “The guy was a doctor. From Switzerland or something. I love that. The worst villain of the Civil War was some Swiss doctor. Had a gift for torture. Didn’t know he had it, then the opportuni
ty came and he knew just what to do to make it hurt bad.” He nods to himself.

  I turn my head and see that the woman is staring at me. I look away, then back. She’s still staring, unsmiling and unmoving in the agitated light of the television. I stare back. Her eyes are cloud gray.

  Sam finishes counting and jumps a little in his seat. I break my stare and shove my hands in my pocket. Sam flicks his chin back to Martin’s room. “How’s he doing? Better?”

  “Worse, I think.”

  “He’s gonna beat this. I know that.”

  A used tissue lies on the carpet at my feet. I step on it.

  “All right.” Martin walks in wearing ironed denim jeans and his old motorcycle jacket. He used to fill it, I imagine. “Let’s go.”

  “How much you thinking, Martin?” Sam asks.

  “Ah, shit. Same as last time.” Martin looks to me, embarrassed. He sells his meds, I know. We never talk about it.

  I glance back at the woman. She’s flipping through channels, her head bent as if she’s trying to decipher the images.

  Martin and I walk the three blocks to Burger King. We take our time.

  “Oh, man, Ollie. I am ready for this. A big meal. Yes, sir.”

  “Who’s the woman?” I ask.

  “Who? Laika? Really interesting girl. She’s from Russia.”

  “Is she a spy?”

  Martin laughs until he coughs. “She’s a good working girl,” he explains with a wink. “Sam does a little organizing on the side. He’s like her agent, if you get my meaning. She’s super interesting.”

  I pay for his burger. A habit left over from wealthier days.

  “It’s good to get out,” he tells me. “Just good to be out in the world.”

  Watching Martin eat is hard. He wants food, but his body doesn’t. He keeps trying to trick himself into eating. He takes half an hour building up the burger, adding ketchup, salt, pepper, a few well-placed dabs of mustard, Thousand Island dressing until the bread limps soggy. The whole time he’s smacking his lips, “This is going to be good. Oh, I’ve been needing this.”

  I pace myself, eating slowly, careful to make the fries last. But I’m still nearly finished by the time he’s ready to take his first bite.

  When he finally lifts the burger, the bread is falling away in sad, damp clumps. He shoves the burger into his mouth, but his body immediately fights him. Even as he chews, his tongue works against him, pushing the food out. He smiles. He swallows. He gags. More than once he’s thrown up on the tray. He doesn’t today and I’m grateful.

  “How was chemo?”

  “Missed it. My ride never came.”

  “Again?”

  “I know. I know.” He puts the burger down. “Hate that chemo. Hate it. Makes me sick. Makes me worse. When I was just dying I got better. Now I’m trying to get better and it’s killing me.”

  “Still smoking?”

  “Yeah, yeah. But I roll my own now, so that’s a step.”

  “Isn’t that worse?”

  “No way. It’s the filters that give you cancer. That and all the chemicals. Menthol, that’ll kill you quick.”

  He picks up the burger, letting it hover heavy and wet. He takes a nibble, then places it back down.

  “I think I can get that Caddy rolling. I really do. Sam knows his engines. Used to work on cars. He promised to lend a hand.” He nods down at the burger and picks it up again. “Yeah, get it running and take a road trip west. I got a buddy in California always saying I should stay with him for a while. Take the Caddy out west then up the coast on Route 1.” He smacks his lips. “That’s the plan.”

  I know that car will never run. Martin may know this, too. But like that burger in his hands, he has a knack for believing the best of a situation.

  He puts the burger down, picks up a fry, and takes a bite. “Man, that is good.” He puts the other half of the fry back on the tray.

  Back at his home, Martin places a Burger King bag of uneaten food in his fridge and I follow him to his room in the back of the duplex.

  Martin keeps his room immaculate. A tightly tucked NASCAR blanket covers his double bed. A worn-out leather recliner, too big for the room. Several Motor Trend magazines are perfectly stacked on a table beside a frequently emptied ashtray. A collection of miniature die-cast automobiles preserved in their boxes are carefully arranged on a shelf. Beside them are three framed photos: a nephew, an infant niece with her parents and Martin’s mother, and one of him as a younger man on a motorcycle. In this last photo he’s healthy and nearly unrecognizable.

  He sits in his recliner and coughs.

  “I’ve got some news, Martin. I’ve been invited to join an expedition into the North Pole.”

  “Is this that Middle Earth shit?”

  “Hollow Earth.” I clutch a golf club leaning in the corner.

  “There’s a door up there or something, right?” he asks.

  “A hole,” I say, gently swinging the club. “Big enough to sail into.”

  “It’s butt cold up at the North Pole, you know that, right?” He leans back, popping up the recliner’s footrest. I sit on the edge of his bed and tap the club against the carpet.

  “They say there’s this porthole or screen inside,” I say. “A magic mirror that can answer any question.”

  “A magic mirror?”

  “Like looking into the mind of God,” I say. “You could ask God any question, any at all.”

  Martin thinks for a long beat, then sniffs. “I wouldn’t ask a thing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “I figure He’s got a plan. I don’t need to know it. It’ll all work out,” he says.

  “That’s not true. Not even a little.”

  “Sure it is.”

  “You think there’s going to be some third-act twist that makes all the horrible things in this world seem okay?” I say.

  Martin stares silently. Then grins. “Hell, Ollie. No wonder you got fired from hospice. You’re depressing as shit.”

  I stay until Martin falls asleep in his leather chair, his breath raspy and strained. I slip through his bedroom door, quietly closing it behind me.

  “He’s sick?”

  The Russian prostitute is waiting in the hall by the door to Sam’s room. She stares at me with her gray eyes and I wonder how long she’s been waiting.

  “No more than usual,” I say.

  “He’ll get better. He’s strong.”

  Did she learn that kind of lie in the States, or is it universal to pretend we don’t die?

  “You’re Oliver, yes?”

  Why am I nervous? Sex, I guess. The twitch in my belly in the ninth grade while talking to a girl who it was rumored had given three football players a blowjob. Someone unrestrained in the face of my restraint. They always seemed somehow magical, enchanted. This gray enchanted thing.

  “Yes. Martin told me,” she nods, her brown tooth flashing as she speaks. “I’m Laika.”

  We’re still in the hall, her body close, though she is in no way trying to seduce me. Her shirt is loose. I can smell her, sour sweat and tobacco.

  “How do you like America?” I say because I have nothing to say. “Do you like the food?”

  “Yes,” she says with all sincerity. “I do like the hamburger. And the taco. Not the pizza. But yes, the hamburger.” She nods for a moment and lights a cigarette.

  “Do you have family back in Russia?”

  “No,” she says. “Why did you ask me that?”

  I pause. “I don’t know.”

  She frowns.

  “I should get going.”

  I move past her, that same sour smell simultaneously revolting and arousing me. She follows.

  “I don’t always do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “Fuck. Fuck for the money,�
� she says. Speaking it out loud is strange. Like a one-legged man referring to his limp.

  “There’s no shame in it.”

  “If there is no shame you would not say ‘no shame,’” she says. “You’re a priest? Martin says you’re a priest.”

  “No. I’m not.”

  “You studied . . .”

  “I taught college.”

  “Not now?”

  “No. I don’t work.”

  “No shame in it,” She smiles, that brown tooth, a gray-brown like a muddy ice puddle. There’s a part of me that knows if she offers me a hand job right now, I’ll say yes.

  I turn to leave. The living room is empty, but the television whines.

  The bus home slogs through traffic. I sit with my head against the glass, watching the city pass.

  Why did I choose to volunteer with hospice? I told Carrie that it was a desire to serve. I told myself this, too. And it’s not completely untrue. But there was more. There was curiosity. A truly morbid curiosity. I wanted to know what death looks like. What the smells and sounds of dying are.

  The moment Miles was born, I was struck by the fact of my own mortality. His new body wriggling pink on Carrie’s chest—and I knew with an odd joy that he was here to eventually take my place on this planet. His birth clearly communicated my death. It was part of the miracle of that moment. I understand billions of babies have been born. I understand there is little as biologically mundane as birth. But can’t the mundane be miraculous?

  We brought our baby home. So small and real. I spent hours staring at his mewling mouth and the soft white fur that covered his pink skin and the red hairs on his oval head, his face moving through expressions, his limbs twitching out from his body.

  Our house seemed different with him in it. Not just the toys and music boxes and onesies. It was the new scents and sounds and life. It was now home to a baby. Home to a family.

  One morning, Miles woke with a cry just before dawn. I cradled him—small, warm body, less than a month in the world. I sang him Muppet songs while pouring myself a cup of coffee.

  On our back porch his cries cooed away. I sat on our wooden rocking chair and he lay in the crook of my arm, his eyes moving through all kinds of mixed focus on trees and clouds and my face. It was autumn and the sharp air carried a soft humming.