by Owen Egerton
It’s easy to believe in the holy at dawn. I didn’t say words or address God, but I knew sitting with Miles, watching him opening and closing his eyes and hands in the new autumn air, this was prayer.
The two oaks in the yard, the changing morning sky, the slight white steam from my cup. The world was enchanted. The soft hum touched it all. Nothing needed to be evidence of anything. All was as all was, and that was good.
I step off the bus into the downtown crowd. The middle-aged couple on a Segway tour, the hipsters sipping coffee or beer at the sidewalk tables outside the gourmet market, Bluetooths and business suits. The sun sinks and the sky blurs orange.
I move south, away from the towering condos and new business buildings and toward the Congress Avenue Bridge. From the bridge, downtown burns in the last of the sunlight. Below me a lone rower slices through the lake, the water closing behind her like a fast-healing wound. Birds fly low over the waters, their reflections rippling from the wind of their own flight. A dog lumbers into the waters, cheered on by a laughing boy. The dog splashes after some geese too unthreatened to fly. They casually paddle away and the dog barks and the boy laughs and jumps and his mother stands near and the boy’s laughter echoes up to me and over me and across all the waters.
You see? You see? I place my feet down on dead stone, but then beauty seizes me, kidnaps me. This sky. This cooling air filling my lungs. This water clipping sunlight into countless diamond chips.
Something as subtle as scent pushes through me and I drown, for an instant, in the beauty. It’s awe, as thoughtless as joy. Not my joy, but Joy. Joy that is and will be whether I am here to sense it or not. And for a breath, and for only a moment, I believe this Joy to be the true nature of all that is.
I would believe this world has no meaning, no soul. But I see this sky and taste this air and I held my child and I watched him cry his first breath. If the universe is nothing but rock and fire and the rules of physics, why does it hurt up and down and as far as it stretches?
If I am being punished—God, Father, Mother, All—if I am being punished, let me see my sin. Please. Let me see that this somehow makes sense and the world is not just stone and death at its heart.
I walk the few remaining blocks to my shed, make my way behind the darkened salon and stop. A thin line of light glows from under the door and the padlock dangles cut.
I step closer. Someone moves inside. It could be anyone.
I pick up a branch from the scattered debris fallen from the dying pecan tree and creep up the steps. The steps squeak and I pause just before the door, listening. I now see the branch is more of a stick, too thin to do much more than swat. I think about creeping back and grabbing something fiercer, but that would mean more squeaky steps. Instead I decide to act.
I push through the door screaming. Lyle squeals and lunges backward from my open mini fridge, sending a tray of ice up into the air, cubes flying like hail in a whirlwind.
“Jesus, Ollie,” he says, one hand on the top of the mini fridge and the other on his heart. “You scared my colon clean.”
“Lyle. What are you doing?”
“Recovering, now.”
“Sorry.” I lower my stick.
He regains his composure. “Close the door. You’ll get mosquitoes.” He returns to rooting through my fridge. “I snapped the lock for you,” he says, his head in the fridge.
“I noticed that.”
“You don’t want to be crawling in and out of windows. You’ll crack a rib and die.”
“You don’t die from cracked ribs.”
“You do if it hurts to breathe and then you take shallow breaths all the time and you develop pneumonia.” He straightens, clutching a container of cottage cheese. “I had a cousin die that way.”
“Thanks.” I sit on the edge of my bed.
“Got to look out for each other.” He opens the cottage cheese, picks out a wet curdle and pops it in his mouth. “Hey, remember you said you wish you had as much sex as I have?”
“No, I don’t remember saying that, Lyle.”
“You’ve only had three women, right?”
“Yes, but—”
“I’ve got a solution to help you and make us money for The Yamal.” Lyle tosses another curdle, it hits the side of his mouth and falls to the floor. He considers it for a moment, then returns his focus to me. “You, Ollie, will get paid to have sex with beautiful women.”
He waits for my reaction. I have none to give.
“So many lonely, hot ladies, Ollie. We’ll advertise on the net and set you up.”
“For money?”
He drops into my only chair. “Think about it, Ollie. You’re in good shape, got a PhD. We’ll call you Doctor Ram, or something.”
“I don’t want to be a whore.”
“That’s a nasty word, Ollie. Lots of judgment in that word.”
“I know. That’s what I’m doing. I’m judging,” I say. “Why don’t you do it?”
“I can’t. You know that. I’ve got Sue-Lee. She doesn’t want to share unless she’s there, you know what I mean,” he says.
“No.”
“I posted an ad on Craigslist.”
“You did what?”
“We need the money. You need to get laid.”
“Please go home. Please take that post off. Please.”
“Are you frigid?”
“No.”
“That could be something to work through.”
“I’m not frigid. I just don’t want to have sex for money, okay?”
Lyle studies me for a beat, then nods knowingly. “You don’t think you’re worth it.”
“Jesus, Lyle.”
“It’s a self-esteem issue. I get it. Look, I’ve done the research. It’s not a real high bar.”
“Will you leave now?”
“Fine,” he stands. “To the bold go the spoils.”
He walks out, taking my cottage cheese with him.
There’s something Lyle doesn’t know. There is money, enough to pay both our ways. But I won’t touch it. It might as well be ash.
The blond boy at Sunflower Daycare laughs as he kicks over a pile of blocks. He falls and laughs.
As a baby Miles was, like all infants, a narcissist. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about the needs of others, he just couldn’t comprehend them. The world outside his skin was emotionally zilch. In those first months, he cared for my wants or pains as much as I care for the pebbles of Pluto.
At fifteen months, Miles saw Carrie splash a ladle of boiling water on her chest. She cried out and placed a wet rag to the scald while I darted around looking for ointment. Miles watched our mayhem from the kitchen floor. Then, as I applied aloe vera to her blistering chest, Miles abandoned his toys, waddled to her side, and touched her back. His eyes carried new empathy—heavy and lifelong. My God, his eyes said, it hurts to see you hurt.
This blond boy must shoulder that same weight for Carrie.
He leaps from the top of the Sunflower Daycare slide with a wild, holy cry.
“Archer,” they call. “No jumping, Archer.”
But he’s already climbing back up.
“Free T-shirts, everyone,” Charlie announces to the Agape Center crowd, pulling bright aqua-blue shirts from a box. They read: “No Means No. Spring Break, Austin, Texas.”
John, a homeless man with the airs of a college professor, swears the police feed these kind of T-shirts into the homeless community. He calls them “targets.” “Now they know who to harass. We’re in uniform, for God’s sake.”
I sign a waiting list for the computers and take a seat beside John. He takes notes in the margins of his Ken Wilber book. I’m rereading Our Journey In.
At the same table sits a thin, mumbling man, his body worn and bruised. He’s surrounded by people I don’t see and is in a cons
tant argument with them. What are they telling him? Horrible things. Every so often he screams back, sometimes throwing fists or chairs at his tormentors. Cops are called and he’s dragged off to the Austin State Hospital. In three days, without fail, he’s released back to the street, drugged into a temporary compliance.
Shelly walks by. She’s pregnant again. She’ll lose the baby—always does—either in pregnancy or days after it’s born. Her mind is a child’s; her body is raped on the street weekly. Even now.
In the corner Ashley sits with Joan. Joan, small and aged, shakes her head, her face wrinkling into itself. Most mornings she sits in her plastic chair, her eyes wide. She tells me her husband’s body is laid out on the sidewalk. She tells me the city refuses to take his body. She tells me this nearly every day.
“Do you know how many people died on the streets last year?” John has placed his book down and has me fixed me in his gaze, his bushy gray eyebrows twitching. “Just in Austin,” he continues. “On the streets and in the shelters. One hundred and forty-three.”
“That’s more than I thought,” I say.
“Memorial service down by Lady Bird Lake. They read off all the names. Say a prayer or two. It’s good.” He knocks on his book as if it’s a door. “Truth is they want us dead. Can’t blame them. Clogging up the sidewalks and doorways. Look at her.” He nods at the mumbling woman. “Be a lot easier just to sprinkle some rat poison in a soup kitchen Thanksgiving dinner. Clean the streets in one night.” He runs a tongue over his teeth. “Be a helluva lot faster than the way they kill us now. Maybe kinder.”
“How do they do it now?”
“Same way the Romans did with unwanted babies.” He grins. “Leave them to the elements. Find a spot outside of town, leave the baby and walk away fast so you don’t have to hear the crying.” His eyebrows do a little jig. “Actually, we’re worse. That baby dies in a day. It has to, all alone outside the city wall. But our babies are on the corners at traffic lights. We keep them barely alive with spare change. Minimum wage, same thing. Just enough to survive, not enough to live.”
“Still got a bed at the Arch?”
“Nope. Staying in a friend’s storage unit.” He smiles. “Four walls and a roof.”
I have two new emails. The first is a forward from Lyle. A note from none other than Dr. Jim Horner.
Dear Fellow Explorer,
Welcome and congratulations!
You are one of an elite group of men and women who will venture forth into unexplored lands in the Yamal. Great adventures await us.
The entire itinerary is forthcoming plus a full list of all needed supplies.
Please note that a deposit of half your expedition is due as a down payment within six weeks of receiving this note.
Onward and Inward!
Dr. Jim Horner
The second email is from God:
Dear Oliver Bonds
I have your son here with me. He has some words for you. Being that I’m a loving God, I won’t share them. But you can probably imagine.
Your Eternal Father,
God
“What are you up to?” Ashley stands behind me.
“An email from God,” I say. “He writes me every few months. Been doing it for a few years now.”
She nods, reading the address. “[email protected]. Cute.”
“How’s Joan?” I ask.
“Crazy,” she says with a shrug. “And off her meds.”
“She’s been here for years.”
“Not surprised. She’s not crazy enough to hurt people, so she won’t go to jail, and she’s not sane enough to seek help. She’s stuck.”
“Sometimes she sings,” I say. “Quietly, under her breath.”
She looks at me quizzically, then back at my screen. “So what does God say?”
“Threats, mainly.”
She purses her lips and leans over my shoulder and reads the note. Her hair touches my shoulder.
“You don’t know who it is?” she asks, her eyes on the screen.
I shake my head. She smells like flowers. Flowers and cut grass.
She stands straight and frowns.
“Write him back and tell him to fuck off.”
“That’s what they taught you in grad school?”
She smiles, turning. “Oklahoma can change a girl.”
I face my screen and stare at the email. Honestly, writing back had never occurred to me. She’s right, I could tell God to fuck off, to stop writing. I put my fingers to the keys. I want to write. But my fingers don’t move. They won’t move.
Someone calls my name and I turn to see Lyle striding through the crowded room toward me.
“Thought I’d find you here. Did you get my email?” he asks. “Oh, thank God. Coffee.”
He redirects himself to the vat of coffee and grabs a mug.
“Shouldn’t you be asleep?” I ask.
He sips and speaks over the lip of the mug. “Crew boss called. They’re short so I’m working a double. Going to pull some convention fat-asses till sundown, then do the Sixth Street crowd. We’ve got to make some scratch.”
“Right. Scratch.”
“Sir.” Charlie waddles up, trying to smile through a frown. “We need all neighbors to sign in.”
“Oh, I’m not homeless,” Lyle says. “I’m just underdressed.”
“Charlie, this is a friend of mine.”
“This coffee is outstanding,” Lyle says as he refills his mug. “And it’s free?”
“The grounds are donated,” Charlie says. “We brew it here. But sir—”
“You should be charging for this,” he says.
“That would kind of defeat the purpose,” I say.
“Not to them,” he gestures to the room. “But guys like me. Sell it for a buck.” As he speaks, Lyle pulls a bike water bottle from his back pocket. “You’d make a hundred in an hour and you could get some decent creamer instead of this powder shit.”
Lyle places the bottle under the spout and lets the coffee pour.
“Sir,” Charlie says. “We need to save the coffee for the neighbors.”
“You don’t have brown sugar, do you?” Lyle asks.
“Sir, we need to ration the supplies for the neighbors. We operate on a small bu—”
“That’s cool. Trying to cut back anyway.” He sips from the open water bottle and glances at Charlie’s name tag. “Hey, thanks for the help, Charlie, but I need to chat with Ollie here and it’s kind of private. So . . .”
Charlie frowns at me. I shrug.
“If he stays, he has to sign in, okay?” Charlie says, and walks away flustered.
“I did some research on selling body fluids,” Lyle says, pulling a folded piece of paper from his pocket. “Lists all the places in town you can sell blood, plasma, and semen.”
“Ten thousand dollars’ worth?”
“Inch by inch, Ollie.”
“Lyle,” I say, reading through the lists of clinics and donation centers. “I don’t think I can give blood. I was in jail.”
“For like a day.” Lyle squirts the coffee into his mouth, then smiles. “Man, I’ve got to stop in here more often.”
The sky is clear as I walk from Agape. Sixth Street is a harsh sight in the daylight. Deserted and strange, the bar signs and drink specials as gaudy as a Christmas tree come January. There’s something corpse-like about the block—or perhaps mannequin-like. It was only a trick of light that made this place seem alive.
“Buy me a drink?” Ashley asks. She’s walking beside me, pulling on her jacket.
“Hi,” I say, blinking too many times. “Done for the day?”
“Nothing but paperwork. I cut out a little early. Miriam was out, so I told Charlie I had a doctor’s appointment. Said it was a lady issue. He has a paralyzing fear of fallop
ian tubes and related body parts.” She maneuvers her back, whipping the jacket into place over her shoulders. “So, buy me a drink?”
“I don’t drink.”
“I do,” she says, keeping pace with me. “Buy me one?”
“I don’t have any money.”
“I’ll lend you some.”
“Why don’t you just buy your own drink?” I ask.
“It’s eleven in the morning. If I’m buying drinks at this hour, I’ve got a problem.” She touches my elbow and smiles. “So, buy me a drink?”
We find a beer-stink bar that looks surprised to be awake. She drinks whiskey on the rocks. I order water.
“I thought you’d write.”
“I thought it best not to.” I sip my water. And for a moment it is quiet. But it’s a quiet I recognize and I know what she will say before she says it.
“Can I ask you what happened?”
“I think you know.”
Quiet.
“I thought you’d rather tell me,” she says.
“Why did you think that?”
“We used to talk.”
“Sure,” I say.
“So, tell me.”
“Mother said if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”
“Do you talk to anybody?” she asks.
“I have two friends,” I say. “One is dying and the other is a liar.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers.”
“Mother said that, too.”
She smiles and lifts her glass. “You could have written me. Talked to me.” She takes a sip. “The police called me. They called me in Bolivia.”
I nod. I figured they would have.
“My father was so mad. He made me come home. Hired this crazy lawyer . . .” She takes a swallow of her drink and looks at me. “You don’t want to tell me what happened?”
“I’m taking a trip to the center of the planet,” I say. “Into the Hollow Earth.”
She pauses, trying to read me. “What’s the Hollow Earth?”
“It’s the theory that the Earth is hollow and possibly inhabited.”
“But it’s not.”
