Hollow

by Owen Egerton

  When I was a volunteer I often led the morning devotions. Simple messages. A Mary Oliver poem or a story of the Chicken Soup for the Soul variety. Nothing that would change a life, just some nice words to accompany the coffee. I think, perhaps, I enjoyed giving the devotions more than the neighbors enjoyed receiving them.

  I enjoyed most everything about the Agape Center in those days. The quiet of the long, clean kitchen before opening, the deep chuckles of Larry who directed the breakfast preparations, and the rush as eight thirty hit and the line rolled in from the cold, or heat, or rain, and on came the hectic hurry of handing out breakfasts and brewing vat after vat of coffee—carrying a new hot vat out just as the last one spurted empty. I enjoyed the thank-yous, the privilege of serving—honestly, the privilege of serving. And at morning’s end, I went home and took a nap.

  We sit and wait in the plastic chairs for the announcements and devotion. It’s crowded today, people eager for a dry spot after last night’s rain. The rain has brought out the stench. I smell better than most, thanks to the shed’s shower. And my clothes are not smeared with street, that smell of stale rainwater and beer.

  Some here are old, broken people whose minds no longer work if they ever did. Some are so gut-sick on alcohol their mouths don’t work, others are clean and well kept—homeless in disguise. There’s the Austrian woman who had a nervous breakdown in Salzburg. She left her family and found herself in America without a work visa. “I had never even slept outside before. Not even camping.” Passing her on the street, you’d never guess she lives in the woods by the railroad tracks. There’s Pete who bartended in Austin’s Bourbon Den for thirty years. When the bar closed, he was in his midfifties and couldn’t find another bartending job. Mac served in Iraq, Liz was pregnant at thirteen, Dale still wears the suit from the job he lost two weeks ago. They don’t all have reasons they are homeless any more than one has a reason they work for this company or that.

  I sit beside Hector, a one-armed Hispanic man buried in an over-sized black coat. He smells awful this morning. Not just the street or the rain or the stink of days on end spent camping. Not even feces or urine. It’s something I don’t recognize.

  “Morning Hector,” I say. He looks at me with small, dark eyes and an angry brow. Hector doesn’t speak much.

  Charlie—a plump, overeager, onetime seminary student—stumbles through a mini sermon, and Miriam, the cropped-haired center director, announces there’ll be free reading glasses given out today. I can’t think for the smell.

  “And now, let’s break bread together,” Miriam says, and we rise and shuffle through another line, handing in our meal tickets for a breakfast served in a red-and-white paper tray—a boiled egg, a bagel (a tortilla for those whose teeth, or lack thereof, can’t handle a bagel), three cubes of bright orange cheese, a dollop of peanut butter, and a slice of fruit. Some days we get day-old pastries donated from Starbucks or Whole Foods.

  I keep my head down, my eyes low. The woman behind me, her mouth a toothless gap, frowns at her tray. “Apples? Apples? I can’t eat apples. I need yogurt.”

  I fill a mug of coffee and return to my seat. Hector is already eating, bits of coffee-wet bagel sticking to the thin hairs of his mustache. A tin of cheap tobacco and papers lay before him. The man rolls his own with one arm, spending much of his time at Agape on the front steps rolling and smoking. I wish they’d let him smoke inside. The burn would cover the smell.

  I stare at my food. I stare at the egg. Hector’s smell is green and encompassing.

  He places his own boiled egg into his mouth in one bite, then maneuvers out of his jacket as he chews. With the jacket off, the stench doubles. Then I see his arm.

  A rag covers the elbow stump of his left arm. Rubber bands strap it tight around the nub. The rag is damp, a wet yellow-red stain squeezed off by the rubber bands. Hector is rotting.

  No one else sees; he’s rotting as he picks at cheese cubes and a bagel. He’s rotting before he’s dead. He’s rotting like Job. I try to breathe and I cannot. I can see the maggots. I know I can’t, but I do.

  “Hector,” I say.

  He turns to me, his face twisting in disgust.

  “Hector, your arm.”

  Hector reaches onto my tray, taking my egg and shoving it into his already full mouth.

  “They’re eating your arm, Hector.”

  His eyes flick so angry I find them confusing. He opens his mouth and spits chewed egg over my face. I cough backward, standing and tipping my chair.

  Hector returns to his breakfast, but Chip is there in seconds, a heavy hand on Hector’s shoulder, pulling him to his feet and escorting him toward the door.

  “Hector, you can’t be doing that,” he says. “I have to ban you for a week, okay? You can’t come back for one week, understand?”

  I take my seat. I fail to remove the egg and spit on my face. Instead I watch pieces of egg float in my coffee like tiny icebergs. People chatter about me, grackles void of melody, loud and pointless and terrifying. And I feel a horrible tickle.

  It’s my only warning. A wave is coming.

  Miles’s not-being seeps through me like veinless blood. It is the color of everything, the taste of everything. But at least once a day, often more, Miles’s death strikes present and new. Not mourning, not the throb of grief. This is scalding panic. The water retreats, giving me just enough warning to do nothing, and then the wave hits, drowning everything.

  People snicker, cough, a phone rings, a coffee cup spills, I grip the table and hold my breath.

  Like a sledgehammer moving through my chest. Any healing is crushed, the scar tissue ripped away, and the wound gapes fresh.

  I remember his smell.

  I’m still gripping the table when they call my name to see the caseworker.

  I step inside Linda’s office. It’s a small room smelling of wool and Lysol. Linda isn’t here yet, so I sit before her desk and listen to the tiny coffeemaker burble in the corner.

  “Sorry I’m late,” a voice says behind me. “Not used to this traffic.”

  It’s not Linda.

  She rounds the desk, her eyes on a stack of paper in her hands, and I see her before she sees me. She looks older, but still very young. Her hair, black and long, gathers in a tail that slinks over her shoulder.

  Ashley.

  She sits down behind her desk, still not fully seeing me. “Now, let’s see what we can do for you.” She looks up and stops. Her eyes a dark hazel, like polished wood.

  “Dr. Bonds?” she says cautiously. Her face has grown sharper, her gaze more stern.

  “Where’s Linda?” I ask.

  “Took a job in Dallas, I think. I just started yesterday.” Her voice is the same, light with the slightest scratch.

  I nod. I nod for longer than I should. “Bolivia?” I manage.

  “Yeah,” she says with a slight smile. “For a bit. Then grad school after all. Social work, University of Oklahoma.”

  I nod, but that’s it. I can’t seem to talk. Not to her.

  “It’s good to be back. Tulsa is no Austin.”

  Her smile tilts, closed and knowing, sliding up her cheek and into the dimple of her heart-shaped face. Perplexing. I find her perplexing.

  “One of the clients here told me it’s better to be homeless in Austin than rich in Tulsa.” She laughs. I can’t even do that. My silence is brittle.

  “Didn’t expect to run into you,” she says. “But I guess coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.” She shrugs. “You said that once in class.”

  “Einstein said it.” It snaps out of me.

  “I never had him,” she says. “Would you like some coffee?” She stands, moving to the small coffeemaker. She’d bring coffee to my office. Two cups from a local shop on the Drag.

  “Black with a pinch of sugar, right? Got to have the sweet to appreciate the
bitter. You said that, too.”

  “My father used to say it. I stole it from him.”

  She hands me a napkin. “You have a little something on your face.”

  She stands before me as I wipe the egg away and crumple the napkin into my pocket. She holds out the mug. I take it in both hands and stare down into the black. She moves back to her chair. This is her office. Her office hours.

  “So . . . how are you?” The question strikes us both as ridiculous and we smile. Me first, then her.

  “I need a bus pass.”

  “Dr. Bonds,” she says, quietly.

  “You can call me Oliver.”

  “Are you all right?”

  I look up. She’s sterner, yes. Last time I saw her, her naked body was ogled by a room of unsmiling people.

  “Just a bus pass,” I say, looking back into my coffee. “That’s all I need.”

  She opens a drawer and pulls out a blue–and–white Metro bus pass. She pauses, looking at it, then hands it over.

  “Are you researching a book or something?”

  I take the pass. “A lot has happened,” I say.

  “Okay,” she says, as if I’m beginning the conversation. But I stand to leave.

  “I work here now,” she says as I open the door. “I’m here every day.”

  I close the door behind me.

  “Mother was a suicide.” That was Ashley’s wording on her first visit to my office.

  No my before mother. Suicide used to denote the person, not the act. Ashley spoke the phrase as if she were a Faulknerian heroine and not simply a senior religious studies major.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. This happened. Students coming by office hours to discuss a grade or upcoming assignment then slipping into confessions and life stories. I didn’t mind. I could play secular priest.

  “She believed in the Bible,” Ashley said.

  “Many people do.”

  “I don’t.” She sat up straight, as if only now she was ready to address the business at hand even though we’d been talking for fifteen minutes. “Today in class you said the book of Job wasn’t true.”

  “I said it was a fiction, not that it wasn’t true.” I sat straight, too, pleased to be back in the subject I taught. “It wasn’t intended to be a history like Chronicles or Exodus or even the Gospels. It’s a poem built around a question.”

  “Why do people suffer. Got that,” she said. “And it’s because God and Satan make a gentleman’s wager, right?”

  “That’s the folktale,” I said with a chuckle. It was an arrogant chuckle. An I’m-about-to-lay-down-some-teaching chuckle. “The folktale of Job is much older than the poem. It acts as the framework for the debate. Imagine taking a story everyone knows, Cinderella for example, and sandwiching in the middle of the story a long, philosophical discussion between Cinderella and her stepsisters on the nature of happiness and privilege. The author of Job did the same thing. Took a well-known story about a good man made to suffer but who maintains his faith in God. He’s eventually restored and God gives everything back.”

  “That’s the part I hate.”

  “Which part?”

  “The ending.” When she frowned, one thin line stretched across her young forehead like a fault line, narrow and unalarming, but promising some distant future quake. “God kills Job’s kids, or lets Satan kill them, then says, ‘Hey, here’s some new kids. No harm done.’ It’s like some drunk dad buying his kid a candy bar after slapping him around.”

  “You could read it like that,” I said, smiling.

  “And Job is fine with it.”

  “That seems to be the implication.”

  “So?” she asked.

  “So?”

  “So what’s the answer? Why do people suffer?”

  “Well, the book is more extraordinary for the question than the answer.”

  She frowned again.

  “Job was written to a people who understood that God rewards the good and punishes the evil. We suffer because we’ve done something wrong.”

  “We’ve sinned.” She said it with a near sneer.

  “But Job knows he has not sinned. He’s a faultless man. And it terrifies him.”

  “He’s terrified because he’s innocent?”

  “Because he’s being made to suffer for no reason. He begs God to show him his sin. ‘Make me to know my transgression and my sin!’ If he’s guilty, at least the universe still makes sense. But he knows he’s innocent. So God isn’t rewarding the good and punishing the evil, after all. Suffering is much more random. For Job this is more horrifying than boils and grief. Everything he thought he knew about how the universe operates is smashed.”

  “And his friends?”

  “Job is being punished, that’s clear to them. Therefore he must be guilty. They spend pages urging him to come clean and confess.”

  “And his wife?”

  “She’s more practical,” I said. “She gets one great line in the whole book. Then basically disappears. While everyone else is clearing their throats preparing for thirty-nine chapters of theological debate, she sums it all up with one piece of advice. ‘Curse God and die.’”

  Ashley nodded, that same one-line forehead frown. “That’s the advice my mom took.”

  Several things are happening.

  Bentley gives a talk about the major entrances into the Hollow Earth—he stands narrow and nervous.

  Next to me, Lyle whispers a near-constant commentary. “Jesus, this guy’s a dicknut.”

  From down the court a voice yells, “Take the shot!”

  The Hollow Earth Society of Central Texas usually meets in a reserved classroom at the downtown Austin YMCA. But a glitch double-booked the room, so we sit in six metal folding chairs centered in the south–end free throw lane of YMCA’s basketball court. This would be fine if it weren’t for the three-on-three pickup game on the north end of the court.

  “Just ignore them, everyone,” Belinda, our heavy and motherly president, says. She closes her eyes and breathes. Then she smiles at Bentley and nods for him to continue.

  “Now, as I was saying, there’s more than one way inside, we know that. The question I pose to you is how many ways?” As Bentley speaks, his eyes dart and his jaw clenches between the words. His shyness is stringent as onions, but he insists on giving a lecture at least once a month. He plucks out certainty as if it’s a tune he’s learning but will never master. I admire him.

  “Take the shot, Brad! Take it!”

  “But after researching—”

  “Go! Go! Go! Shoot!”

  “—researching several webpages and a scientific journal, I’ve come to the disturbing conclusion—”

  A basketball from the north end slams into Bentley’s head.

  “Ball help,” a twentysomething in a headband calls. His friends chuckle. Bentley trots after the ball.

  From beside me, Lyle sighs loudly and crosses his arms across his bulk. “Don’t get it for them, Bentley.”

  But Bentley continues. The twentysomething opens his arms and Bentley hurls the ball. The ball travels five feet before bouncing awkwardly and rolling past the twentysomething who stares at Bentley with contempt.

  “Keep going, Bentley,” Belinda says. “You’re doing fine.”

  “I’d like to propose that many of the smaller entrances to the Hollow Earth are closing. Some naturally and some by order of the world government. It’s common knowledge that Egypt’s walled up the entrance in the subterranean levels of the Giza pyramid. I propose soon the only available entrance will be the Symmes Holes. And even those are in danger of being obstructed—”

  “It would kill the planet,” Gilly says. She’s thin with a tight face and wide eyes.

  “It would kill the planet! Like clogging an artery,” Bentley says. He picks up a pile of ph
otocopied pages. “I’ve made a list of the dwindling suspected entry points across—”

  Smack. The basketball hits his shoulder and sends the papers flying.

  “Ball help.”

  Again, Bentley trots after the ball.

  “Bentley,” Lyle says. “They’re doing it on purpose.”

  “Kindness breeds kindness,” Bentley says quietly as he rolls the ball to the twentysomething.

  “Maybe you could meet somewhere else, dude,” says the twentysomething, who I assume is Brad. “Less danger of getting hit.”

  “Sir” —Belinda twists, her chair squeaking under her— “we have as much right to be here as you do. We have reserved this spot.”

  The twentysomething grunts and turns back to his game. Belinda smiles and nods at Bentley. Moments like this are exactly why we voted her president.

  “So the question is whether our window into the Hollow Earth is shrinking.” Bentley picks up the papers carpeting the court. “Could it be that we only have decades left to contact our brothers below?”

  “I’ve had psychic contact twice,” Gilly says.

  “I’m referring to physical contact.”

  “That’s small thinking,” Glenn, Gilly’s equally thin husband, says.

  “That was a fucking foul, Brad! Watch the elbow!”

  “I don’t mean to dismiss psychic contact. It’s just—”

  “Well, you kind of did dismiss it,” Gilly says. “You kind of called it stupid.”

  “I didn’t say it was stupid.”

  “You implied it.”

  “You did kind of imply it,” Glenn says. “You kind of made that face.”

  “What face?”

  “That face a person makes when something is stupid.”

  “I’m sorry if I made that face, Gilly. Really.”

  After first meeting Lyle in the used bookstore, I didn’t see him for several days. But I did take the book he handed me: Hollow Earth: Theory to Fact by Dr. Jim Horner. That same night, in the low light of my damp motel room, I opened the book.

  “There is no greater threat to the continued evolution of humankind than unquestioned beliefs,” Horner begins. “The most insidious of these beliefs is that our planet is a solid ball and we its sole sentient residents. If you believe that, then nearly everything you think you know is wrong.”