Hollow

by Owen Egerton

  “Yes, but . . .” I move my head and watch my hands twitch. Something shakes in me. I try to breathe it down but I can’t.

  “Are you all right?” she asks.

  “The two massive holes in our planet, the Symmes Holes, are named for Captain John Cleves Symmes.”

  “Oliver.”

  “When he was a young officer, he was in a duel. A bullet ripped through his gut and out his back. A hole all the way through.” I hear my voice, strange and cracked, and I see her face blench. “He theorized that the Earth must have as thorough a wound.”

  “Oliver, stop,” she says, her tone something like afraid. “The money is gone.”

  “Don’t you see, Carrie, our lives are crust until something cracks them open? Then you can look inside. But you’ve moved as far away from the edge as you can, you won’t even peek.”

  “I’m closing the door,” she says.

  “You won’t even look inside.”

  “You need to leave, Oliver.”

  “I miss you so much, Carrie. I miss you so very much.”

  But the door is already closed.

  The thing that had begun to shake in me continues. Lyle urges me away from Carrie’s door, he ushers me to the car, and drives us into the city. He assures me it will be okay, shooting side-glances at me as I watch the city, the skyline shaking.

  Miles’s money does not exist. There’s no way in. And Carrie is completely gone. She’s been gone for years, but it was only when she was looking at me, blocking her children from me, staring with disgust—how dare I fall when she has propped herself up from every angle—only then did I know how completely I have lost her.

  I’m whispering as we drive and it takes me some minutes before I understand that I’m trying to pray.

  As a boy, I used to pray. As a grown man, I was wiser. I’d sit alone or with Carrie in the pews of St. Christopher’s, bowing my head and reciting the words. But I knew better. I had, I felt, a mind that was able to both believe and not believe. I could say, “Father in Heaven” and know I didn’t believe in any divine Parent in any mythical Heaven. I could enjoy the prayers as metaphors.

  I spent hours thinking how I could say God’s name without believing in God, at least not the simple father-figure, sky-king God of the masses. Every time I said, “Our Father,” I mentally substituted more acceptable, more sophisticated concepts of the Divine. But when I hurt—when my mother died, during Carrie’s labor, and when I clutched Miles’s unmoving body from his crib—I screamed for God. I prayed as if someone were listening.

  I wanted to think of God not as a Person but as a Source. A Force. But you can’t scream at the Ground of All Being. It’s like trying to kiss the ocean. A certain degree of intimacy is easier if all involved have faces.

  Even with faces, you can lose each other. I lost Carrie. I lost her. She was looking at me and I could not understand her.

  I cannot pray. I cannot call out. Even as everything in me shakes.

  Lyle steers us into the Book Spot parking lot.

  “So we don’t have all the money,” Lyle says, more to himself than to me. “We’ve got the Visa check. That’s a good start.”

  Lyle barely has the car parked before he’s leaping from the seat.

  “Remember,” he’s telling me. “You’re blind.”

  He’s pulling me along toward the front doors. I feel weak, uninterested. I’m trying to remember being excited, being thrilled. But there’s nothing.

  As we enter the bookstore, Horner’s face, glossy and annotated, greets us from a poster.

  “Has it started yet?” Lyle breathlessly asks a plump, bearded guy restocking the serial killer shelf in the true crime section.

  “Has what started yet?”

  But Lyle hasn’t waited for an answer. He’s dragging me to the back of the store, zigzagging through aisles of books. We turn a corner into a self-help aisle and standing there—short, with gray around the sideburns, tiny capillaries spidering along his cheeks, a thick mustache and brown felt fedora—is Dr. Jim Horner.

  He’s going through some notes with a bored looking woman in a Book Spot staff shirt. Just beyond him in an open area is a small crowd seated in folding chairs. He looks to us and Lyle freezes, his hand still clutching my arm.

  “Here for the reading?” Horner asks, his voice familiar to me from his podcasts.

  “Dr. Horner,” Lyle seems to hiccup out of his paralysis. “I’m a devotee. It is a true honor to meet you. I’m Lyle Burn—”

  “Lyle Burnside,” Dr. Horner says, gripping Lyle’s free hand and matching his enthusiasm. “You’re joining us on the expedition.”

  “Yes, yes, that’s right,” Lyle says, nodding like a puppy.

  “And this must be Professor Bonds.” He reaches for my hand hanging at my side and takes it in both of his. I look toward him and blink. He smiles. “I’m hoping the audio version of this book will be complete before we set sail.”

  “I’ll read it to him!” Lyle nearly squeals. “It’s my job.”

  I feel confused by all this, on stage with the wrong script.

  “By the way, sir,” Lyle digs into his back pocket and retrieves a folded Visa check. “It’s only five thousand, but the rest is coming.”

  Horner pockets the check without glancing at the number. “Excellent. It’s our pooled talents, money, and faith that fuel this expedition.”

  Lyle grins and turns to the chairs, nearly forgetting me. He quickly catches himself and takes hold of my arm again. I stumble a little as he pulls me away, knocking my leg against one of the dozen folding chairs set out for the event.

  “Don’t overdo it,” Lyle whispers.

  Ten or so people sit scattered among the chairs. Belinda, Bentley, and the others from the Hollow Earth Society are out in full force. The bored employee steps behind the podium and begins reading into the unnecessary microphone.

  “This evening we are honored to have with us notable scientist and writer of several world-rattling books . . .” She pauses and glances to the side where Horner stands, grinning, nodding for her to continue. “He’s an adventurer, internet radio host, and critically acclaimed poet . . .” She stops again and looks up at us, deadpan, questioning if we are actually serious. Seeing that we are, she sighs and continues. “Here to read from his new book Our Journey In is Dr. Jim Horner.”

  People clap. Lyle hoots. Dr. Horner swaggers up to the podium. What are we doing here? My foot taps the linoleum floor.

  “Thank you for that kind introduction, ma’am. You must have read my FBI file,” Dr. Horner says to the retreating back of the employee. The crowd laughs. “It’s good to be back in Texas. Texas, I get. Texas, I like. Hell, you were your own country. Who knows, maybe you will be again.”

  I tap, tap, tap. I see Lyle, his face shining. I see Belinda, her hands folded neatly in her lap, swaying to these words. And I imagine Carrie looking at me. My God, look at me.

  “There’s a honeycomb of deception our country has constructed to hide the truth. Secret expeditions, censoring of Admiral Byrd, and the true mission of NASA. I’ll give you a hint. It ain’t space . . .”

  He opens his book and reads and we sit enraptured. And I tap, tap.

  “. . . in the heart of the Hollow Earth is a massive mirror or screen on which our enlightened inner-world cousins monitor our progress . . .”

  It’s just another narrative. Just another story that’s easier than the obvious.

  “This mirror holds the answers to our deepest whys.”

  Tap. Tap. I can’t stop.

  Every other moment, I’m not sure the world is still below me and my foot reaches out to touch. The same way I woke every ten minutes that first night in the hospital to check on Miles in his crib. To touch and believe. To touch and assure.

  Tapping. Always tapping. Not only to affirm that the world is th
ere, but that I am there. I spent my adult life acquiring accolades to try to convince myself I existed. Degrees, relationships, jobs. Tapping. From orgasms to tenure—all so I could tap the world and believe I existed. Everything I have ever done accumulates to nothing more than tapping.

  “People,” Horner reads. “We are on the verge of the next Copernican Revolution. Every history, science, and philosophy textbook will have to be rewritten. Heroes will be exposed as liars. And the disenfranchised will be honored as extraordinary.”

  I still feel Carrie’s eyes condemning me. Maybe she’s as lost as I am, but she lives in a real house, and she cares for children. My child.

  Why did I believe there was some place to journey to? The ground is cold beneath my feet. Maybe God was once there, maybe the Earth held secrets and wisdom, but it’s all frozen now.

  “It’s stone.” I say it under my breath. Lyle glances at me.

  “And we, we here today,” Dr. Horner says, his eyes touching each of us, “we will have helped to deliver humanity through a new birth into a new era.”

  “It is stone,” I say loudly. Bentley and a few others turn in their seats.

  “We are the midwives,” Horner continues. “We are—”

  “It is stone!” I yell.

  Horner stops. Now everyone is looking and I stand.

  “There is nothing but rock and ice and graves below us. Ice and stone.”

  Belinda opens her mouth but says nothing.

  “Professor?” Dr. Horner says.

  I jump up and land hard, slamming my feet against the floor.

  “See?”

  I do it again. Jumping as high as I can and slamming my legs down.

  “No echo,” I say. “Nothing but solid nothing.”

  “Jesus, Ollie, what are you doing?” Lyle asks, reaching out to me.

  I swipe away his hand. “This guy is lying to you, Lyle. There’s no hole. There’s no window into the mind of god. There’s nothing. He’s a liar and you as a liar should know that.”

  “Professor Bonds, please,” Horner says. I turn and step straight toward him. He cowers a little behind the podium, but holds his ground.

  “And you!” I say, pointing. “There will be no new birth. There will be no discovery.” I turn to the small crowd. “You want something new, but there’s nothing new. Nothing is going to change.”

  The big guy from true crime grabs my shoulder. I shake him off and leap on to a folding chair, which immediately collapses. I tumble forward, entangled in a mesh of metal and plastic.

  I lay there twisting, swatting at anyone who comes close to me. Standing at a distance, I see Lyle with an expression I’ve never seen on his face before. I’ve hurt him. I didn’t know I could.

  The true crime guy hauls me to my feet.

  “Be careful,” Horner calls out as I’m pulled away. “He’s blind.”

  The tremendous swells would heave us up to the very peaks of mountainous waves, then plunge us down into the depths of the sea’s trough as if our fishing-sloop were a fragile shell.

  —Olaf Jansen

  The dayroom is a slow hell, piss-scented and fluorescent, furnished like a cheap university study room. This is the Austin State Hospital. Known as ASH or Ash. They brought me here yesterday. The admitting lobby smelled dank and singed; an overtaxed heater wheezed somewhere above us.

  Paperwork was filed, passed through plastic-glass windows to unsmiling admittance staff. Then waiting. More papers. Waiting, feet tapping linoleum floors. I recognized this dance—the police station, hospitals, courtrooms.

  They took my shoes, afraid I’d use the laces to kill myself, and I was given a pair of olive-green plastic sandals. Almost immediately I was medicated, a jelly bean–size pill that turned the storm into clouds, rain into fog, and left me dull and lost. I slept without dreams and without true rest, like floating on top of water, unable to sink beneath the surface.

  This morning they lead me to the dayroom. Two dozen or so patients fill the space, some sit bent and staring like bad-posture Buddhas. Others conspire in corners, argue over board games, hide in year-old magazines. Still others scream. A woman stands by the water fountain crying, a puddle of pee forming at her feet. An older man with fiery eyes keeps calling the name of a nurse and rubbing his crotch. No one pays any attention till the cock pops free and nurses step from their station, warning him to “Put it away, Mr. Bilton.”

  A television plays a ceaseless line of crime and cops, the dialogue echoing off the walls and blurring into nonsense. A woman keeps knocking on the nurses’ window yelling that her son is supposed to pick her up. “He’s supposed to be here. Can you check? Can you see if he’s here? Can I just peek outside and see?”

  I’ve seen one doctor. Dr. Bradley, a balding man who kept his eyes on my file. “So, had a little brouhaha at the bookstore. Why was that?”

  “I realized the Earth is solid.”

  He hummed. “Is that so bad, Mr. Bonds?”

  I shook my head. “It means that what you see is what you get.”

  “I’m going to recommend lorazepam and set you up for observation. We’ll have you here for a week or two.”

  “I don’t need to be here.”

  He pulled a stapled stack of papers from my file. “What do you think about signing yourself in?” He shrugged. “Or I can sign, either way.”

  “Contact Ashley Briggers. She’s a caseworker at the Agape Resource Center. I don’t need to be here.”

  “Oh, now, Mr. Bonds.” He scribbled a signature on the papers. “No one is here by accident.”

  In the dayroom a girl hollers into a corner so endlessly I can taste the blood in the air from her excoriated throat. A big man with forehead veins says I can wear his watch—a faux-gold wristwatch. I can wear it for one hour. I refuse the offer. The veins pulse, he shakes his head.

  “You should really wear the watch, man.”

  I say no and he walks away, glancing back at me again and again.

  Two orderlies with wrestling-thick arms and shiny eyes talk near the nurses’ station.

  “They’ve got their own cemetery here, did you know that?” says one. “It’s over on North Loop between the condos.”

  “People buried there?”

  “Hundreds, maybe thousands. But no one knows about it. No gravestones. A few have patient numbers, but most are just dumped, buried one on top of the other.”

  “Shit,” says the other. “I’d hate to be buried there.”

  “What would you care? You’d be dead.”

  “I’d care.”

  Meals are saltless and lukewarm, followed by more jellybean pills. Then more waiting, more funk and whine. All these people—groaning and speechless and near-nameless. All these shuffling med-heads in a fog so thick they’re drowning on their feet.

  The nurses say little. “Less chatter, people. More eating.” “Big swig of water. Swallow it all.” They keep to their glass shark cage, stepping out only to order Mr. Bilton’s cock back in his pants again.

  This was here. These people were always here. I lived my life—restaurants and movies and cocktails and books and all the while these people were here. How could I have been happy? How can any life be good when this hell is here?

  We sleep four to a room. My bed is the bottom bunk in the corner. Lights-out brings a murmur of whimpering and masturbating like the horrid hum of overgrown insects. And that singed heater rattles from the ceiling. I cling to a pillow stinking of bleach and not quite dry laundry.

  I turn to the wall, my eyes unclosing. The paint on the concrete peels back a little. I touch the wall, it’s cool. I pick at the paint, peeling it back. It crumbles under my finger like dry clay. I peel more away, making a dark hole.

  “Hey.” Someone’s kneeling by my bed. “Hey, let me crawl in with you.”

  “No,” I say.
<
br />   “Come on. Let me crawl in with you.”

  “Get off my bunk.”

  It’s the big man with the watch.

  “Don’t be like that,” he says. “You don’t have to do anything. I’ll do it all. Come on.”

  “No.”

  “I’m going to put my hand over your mouth, but I don’t want you to be scared.”

  His hand covers my mouth. I kick. I bite. He lets out a snicker.

  “Squirming!” He sings. “Squirming Herman!”

  The door swings open, the lights flicker on and an orderly barks.

  “Back in your bunk, Cline. You leave him alone.”

  The orderly shakes his head and turns off the light.

  I sit in the dark, my legs tense and ready to kick, my hands ready to scratch. I look back at the hole I’ve made in the wall and an eye—round and albino—stares back. It blinks at me and I want to scream, but I can’t seem to make a sound.

  I hear the scratching from behind the wall. One long, slow scratch. The eye, translucent and piercing, stares. Now there’s more scratching coming from the floor under my bunk. A slow chorus of a dozen claws scrapping beneath the floorboards. I look back at the eye. It’s not human.

  Are these the nameless corpses? Have they wormed their way from their stoneless graves to here? I called the Earth solid, but listen to the scratching. Listen to gurgled cries just below the floor.

  The eye moves from the hole and for a moment there’s only black. Then a long, trollish finger with loose, gray skin extends from the darkness. It comes slowly, but I cannot move. The jagged, white nail at the tip of the finger scratches along my arm and even now, I cannot move.

  “Squirming Herman,” the big man whispers from across the room. “Squirming Herman. Don’t go to sleep.”

  There are those who teach that the creatures inhabiting the Hollow Earth are demonic, devolved things moving blindly beneath us, stealing the nameless, the homeless, the ones no one will miss. They pull them beneath and feed their young.

  The gray finger runs down to my wrist. I try to pull away, but I’m frozen. They will take me if I don’t move. They will wrap me in this urine-soaked mattress and pull me below the floor, through the dirt, and into the cave-riddled crust. I strain, urging my body to act. Finally, like breaking from a dream that holds just past waking, I move. I jerk away and the finger retreats into the hole. The eye returns, blinking at me. I jab my finger at it, feeling the soft, wet give way. Behind the wall I hear the muffled, trollish cry, and I stuff my pillow into the hole.