“I went with Jenny to that new coffee shop on the south side of town today.”
Brad made a noncommittal sound.
“It’s over by that hole that opened up and swallowed the nail salon. It was on the news.”
Brad looked up from his phone.
“You should see it,” Megan said. “It’s different in person.”
“It’s just a hole,” Brad said.
Megan’s lips grew tight. “It’s not. Come with me Saturday.”
“Really? That’s what you want to do?”
“Yes. I need you to come see it.”
“OK.” This wasn’t a fight worth having, he decided.
***
Brad was already grumpy when they parked because of the traffic. Just looking at the crowd of people gathered around the hole irritated him. “Let’s come back later.”
“You promised me.”
He had not, but he unbuckled his seat belt and got out of the car.
The hole was wide enough for a semi to fall into. The city had set up orange and white portable barriers around the perimeter, and men and women leaned over them to gaze into the hole. Though the area near the hole was crowded, the space around the perimeter wasn’t. Onlookers stood apart from each other, in ones and twos, not talking, just leaning over, looking into the pit.
Megan stood at his side. “Go on,” she urged.
He wanted to resist. His first instinct always was to rebel. She did not prod him physically, but his wife’s expression pushed him forward. In her eyes and mouth were a vulnerability or a weakness he did not often see. He wanted, in that moment, to protect her somehow. He steeled himself against his own stubbornness.
He stood for a minute just outside the ring of observers, waiting for a place to step to the edge. He did not want to press, to force himself forward. The air weighed warm and humid on him. The voices around him seemed muddled and low, as if heard from down a long hall. Megan hovered at his shoulder.
A space opened up and he stepped forward to the barrier. He gripped it, uncertain of his footing. He leaned over and looked into the darkness. The hole opened wider and wider below him, seeming to fill his vision, fill his thoughts.
He steadied himself, anchored his feet to the ground, and held his body down by the force of his hands. The darkness did not recede. His eyes pierced the darkness and beneath was deeper darkness. He seemed to tumble into the emptiness, and the darkness filled his eyes and mouth and ears.
He could look away if he wanted. He thought he could. He sensed in his soul–not in his mind, not in his emotion, not even quite in his will–that he could, still, at this time, look away.
Beneath the darkness was deeper darkness.
In the darkness he sensed his collection of classic motorcycles, his tools, his years as a mechanic. He sensed not them, but the space where they had been, the contours of experience ground into darkness.
Megan was there, her hands, her voice, the presence that hovered over his waking hours. She withered and hollowed and dissipated in the absence of light.
He looked into the darkness that opened before him, and within was deeper darkness.
He groped for his two children like figures unremembered from a dream. Like a wisp of smoke, like a phantom figure in the corner of the eye, his sense of place, of time, or being in and among, drifted away, and he found himself lost and falling–and beneath the darkness was deeper darkness.
He stepped away from the hole.
“What caused this?” he asked, his voice somehow normal. He still faced the hole, his eyes skimming its surface.
“It just opened up,” Megan answered.
“Is it getting bigger?”
“I don’t know.” She gripped his hand. He broke his gaze. “Do you want to look at it again?”
“Yes.”
“I do, too. Why do I want to?”
“Let’s go,” Brad said, pulling her away.
“I want to look. Just once.”
“No.” He pulled her away. If he didn’t, he would look again. “There’s nothing there.”
“It has to be something.” She pawed at him, trying to make him look at her. He kept his eyes fixed on their car, sitting so false and purposeless in the lot, a sign of man’s futile striving.
He made sure she got in the car, then he sat in the driver’s seat beside her.
“Why did you bring me here?” he asked.
“I wanted to share it. I don’t know why.”
“You didn’t want to be alone with it.” He understood. If he had been alone with the darkness, if they didn’t share the revelation…
“I…guess so.”
He wanted to hold her hand, but it seemed such a petty gesture, a flicker in the abyss.
“But we’re still alone with it, aren’t we?” she asked. “I wonder if we brought the whole world, whether we wouldn’t still be alone with it.”
Brad was not a man who felt deeply, but he felt now that he would cry if he could, but he could not. He felt desiccated and lonely beyond expression.
He did take her hand. It was warm and real; he still felt as if he were unmoored. Memories or imaginings–he wasn’t sure which–kept drifted through his brain: a second grade classmate telling everyone about his crush, the customer who took swings at him for scratching his motorcycle, his teenage daughter’s look of disgust when he picked her up early from a sleepover, a driver who screamed obscenities at him on a road trip…. They kept coming. He couldn’t stop them.
“We need light,” she said, “so we can see.”
Brad started the car. As he waited to pull out into the road, more cars turned in. Others were parking across the street and walking over. “This will be a holy site by next week,” he muttered.
“What did you say?”
He pulled out, watching the crowd in his rearview mirror. His old stubbornness burned. “I said we’re going to church, tomorrow, all right? Whether we like it or not.”
He slammed on the gas.