by Owen Egerton
Here is travel itinerary for our expedition. The truth awaits us!
JUNE 26-27: Arrive in Moscow. Spend the rest of the day sightseeing Moscow.
JUNE 27: Take a morning flight to Murmansk, Russia. Here we will board the Russian Icebreaker Yamal.
JUNE 28th–JULY 2nd: On the journey to the North Pole, we will compare notes and prepare for the journey within.
JULY 3rd–5th: Reach the North Polar Symmes opening, which we calculate to be in the vicinity of N 84.4° latitude, E 141° longitude. With any luck, we will actually cross into the Hollow Earth on America’s Independence Day!
JULY 6th–8th: We will continue our exploration and video chronicling of our discoveries. It is our hope to reach the theoretical city of Jehu.
JULY 9th–11th: After making diplomatic contact with the people within, we will return via the North Pole Symmes opening.
JULY 12th–16th: We sail back to Murmansk examining and correlating our collected data.
JULY 17th: Return from Murmansk to Moscow.
Please remember that the down payment for your spot on the Yamal is due by this month’s end.
Looking forward to our adventure!
Dr. Jim Horner
(Note. If we are prevented from entering the North Polar Symmes opening by environmental or governmental obstacles, we will return to Murmansk via the New Siberian Islands to visit skeleton remains of exotic animals thought to originate from inside the Earth)
The next email is from [email protected].
Dear Oliver
I dare you to take justice into your own hands. You know what you deserve. Now do it.
God, your Eternal Father
I read it over and over. I think of Ashley urging me to write back, to tell God to fuck off. What do I write? What do I say?
God—
First, that’s all I can manage. I stare at that word and the blank white below.
God—
Maybe that’s all I’ll write. Then Charlie tells me I have only two minutes left on the computer. I type:
God—
I will if You will.
Oliver
I press send.
When I leave an hour later Davis is singing “Heartbreak Hotel” to a cheering few. He’s swinging his hips, spilling his popcorn into their coffee and lemonade.
It was the last official day of the fall semester. I graded the final essays in my university office. Outside, the near-empty campus was gray-dark, the weather turning to a mild winter chill.
Miles was a just over a year old that December. I wanted him to have an ideal Christmas. I wanted him to have a stocking and a tree and sit on Santa’s lap.
But even these thoughts left me tired. I hated how tired I was. I wanted to want my life more than I did. The encroaching three-week vacation sat in my belly like an undigested lunch. A slight dread of the unscheduled days, the sexless bed, and the lack of a job to disappear into.
As I sat, the ungraded essays piled before me and the afternoon darkening out my window, a voice whispered my name: “Dr. Bonds?”
Ashley smiled, her wind-blushed face peeking through my half-open door. She came in carrying two coffees. “Still doing office hours?”
She lowered herself into the chair.
“Ready for graduation?”
“Robed and ready.” She handed me the coffee.
“It’s not necessary,” I said. “You’ve got your 4.0.”
She smiled, blushing. Or maybe that was just the cold. She chewed her cheek. I watched her dimple sink and reappear.
“What’s on your mind, Ashley?”
“Explain God’s answer,” she said quickly, as if the idea had just occurred to her. “Job demands a trial. God shows up in a tornado—”
“A whirlwind, yes.”
“And brags about how big and all-knowing divinity is. How God wrestles sea monsters and controls the stars. What the hell is that all about? It’s nonsensical.”
“Awe, I suppose.”
“Awe.” She stood and walked to my shelves, mindlessly scanning the titles as she spoke.
“God gives Job a glimpse of it all. The massive wonder of creation,” I said. “He doesn’t apologize. He doesn’t comfort. He only points to how awesome the universe is. The incomprehensible complexity and scale of it all.”
“Bragging,” she said, crossing her arms and jutting out her hip. Bored, and angry for being bored.
“That’s an anthropomorphic slant.”
“You’re the one using the masculine pronoun.”
“Okay.” I chuckle. “Let’s say God represents the universe here. Job cries out that the universe is unjust. The universe doesn’t even address the charges. Just blazes. The universe is saying it doesn’t have to explain itself, it’s just awesome. As in inspiring reverence, even terror. I mean, we don’t ask the stars to be good or the Grand Canyon to be just.”
“So God is saying, ‘I am what I am and that’s all that I am.’”
“That’s what He told Moses. ‘I am who I am,’” I said. “Or what She told Moses.”
Ashley laughed through her nose.
“What about love?”
“What about it?”
Her eyes stayed on mine. “Love. Isn’t God supposed to love us?”
“Maybe Job is telling us love looks different than we thought. Perhaps divine love is incomprehensible.”
“That’s horseshit. You know that, right?”
I nod, smiling. But she isn’t. The play seemed to drain from the conversation. And I remembered—Mother was a suicide.
“So in the end, God can’t answer Job. Not really.” Her eyes are dark.
“Job gets no answer,” I say. “But he gets to see God.”
“And that’s enough?”
“For Job it is.”
“I’m not going to grad school, Dr. Bonds.”
I twisted in my chair. “Not going to grad school? But you’re already accepted. You’re—”
“I’m going to Bolivia.”
“The country?” I asked, stupidly.
“Volunteering with the Quakers. They’ve got a clean-water initiative. I applied a month ago.”
“Quakers?” All I seemed to be capable of doing was repeating her statements as questions. “You’re a Quaker now?”
“I like them. They don’t talk so much. I’m tired of talking. And grad school would just be more talking.” She walked to the front of my desk, arms still crossed. “You want to know how to answer suffering? Do something. I don’t do anything.” She picked up her backpack and turned to the door.
I stood up. “Have I offended you in some way, Ashley?”
She turned, surprised, then shook her head.
“No,” she said. “It’s not that.”
I started to round my desk, but she was already gone.
That’s when I knew I’d gone too far. I felt stupid, old. What kind of murky fantasies had I been running through? Nothing projected on the forefront of my mind, but in the basement of my thinking: vague ideas of her body, her hands.
Damn it. As if she was thinking of me as anything more than a teacher. I was not even forty and so damn old. A joke.
Was I planning on cheating on Carrie? I had no conscious ambitions. But looking honestly, and at that moment I was looking honestly, I wanted that girl. I wanted it to happen. So it was good that she’d left. That I wouldn’t see her again. Good for me and my marriage and my family. So what was this regret?
I sat for minutes staring into nothing and feeling a clammy shame and embarrassment and, more than anything, frustration. Frustration at my juvenile desires, my water-soup soul.
The door opened again and she came back in, her cheeks pink. In her palms she cradled an ink-black bird. “I wasn’t sure what to do.”
She
placed the thing on my desk. I stood, stepping back and instinctively hiding my hands behind my back.
“It’s a grackle,” I said. “It’s a dead grackle.”
“I was just outside the doors, and it flew straight into the front windows. Can you help it?”
Its neck was bent awkwardly, its wings limp. “It’s dead.”
“Poor thing,” she said. “Poor thing.”
I watched her, watched her eyes shine. Those same eyes that only minutes ago smoldered cold. She stroked the bird’s oily feathers.
“They’re not nice birds, Ashley,” I said, crossing my arms. “One less grackle is no real trage—Jesus!”
A wing flapped.
“It’s alive!” Ashley yelped.
In response the bird cried a single sharp sound filled with as much confusion and panic as one note can hold.
“Help it!” She looked at me wildly.
“Okay. I’ll call—God damn!” It was trying to fly, both wings slapping against the desk, knocking a cup of pens over.
“Maybe it just needs a minute,” Ashley said, reaching out an open palm to the bird. “Poor thing.”
Just before she touched it, the bird took flight, zipping up and slamming against the ceiling of my office. It skittered along the ceiling to a corner, its wings beating furiously.
“Open a window,” Ashley called out.
I turned to the window. I had never once opened it. Never once thought how to open it.
The bird abandoned the corner and searched for some escape. It alternately flapped and fell, making an uneven wave across the room, balancing for a moment on a bookshelf, file cabinet, the frame of my PhD diploma, and scanning the room with twitchy glances for an instant before again launching into a panicked flight. Ashley rushed after it like a child chasing the tail of a kite.
The sound was ghastly, the rustling of wings against walls and panicked caws. Ashley laughed as she hounded the thing—cooing and laughing. But this wasn’t funny. This was horrible.
I climbed onto my desk chair to get to the metal latch halfway up the pane. The grackle buzzed around my head, feathers in my face. “Jesus, fuck!”
I shoved against the window. It gave way and I caught myself against the closed half, glimpsing the two-story fall.
Ashley flapped her hands at the bird, trying to usher it toward the window. The bird flew up and perched on the top of my doorframe. It examined me standing by the open window and Ashley smiling and waving at it. Its black eyes focused on the trees and sky outside, it seemed to nod. It shot toward the window and smacked into the unopened half of the pane.
A thin, single six-inch crack appeared in the glass and the bird fell with a muffled thud on my office floor.
Standing on my chair, I looked down on it. Purple-black, twitching, and so far below me. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father.
Ashley rushed to it, gently cupping her hands under it and lifting it to my desk.
“No, no,” she breathed.
I climbed down and stood beside her. The bird jerked its head about, extended its wings, and crapped on my desk.
“Poor thing,” she said. “It’s dying.”
It was convulsing, its twitching body flapping uselessly, moving like a feathered black crab over my ungraded essays. A dry, frantic sound—the spasm of a paper heart.
I turned from the bird and watched Ashley. Her eyes wide, her cheeks red, her lips full. She did not look as horrified as I felt. Quite the contrary. She looked, for lack of a better word, aroused. That was it. She was thrilled, awake, flushed.
“It’s gone,” she said, looking up at me, her face glowing, her breath fast. With no warning, she leaned across the corner of the desk and kissed my dry lips.
She pulled back, surprised at her actions. Then quickly hugged me, moaning a breath in my ear. She pushed away and stood looking at me for an instant. Grabbing her bag, she rushed from the office, leaving me standing brain-drunk with a broken window and a dead bird.
Sam throws open the door and grins. “Hey, it’s the preacher.” He turns and heads to the kitchen. “Got a new bit in the routine you should hear.”
I step inside. “Is Martin here?”
“He’s sleeping, I think.” As he talks he takes a slice of cheese from the fridge and lays it atop a single serving basket of Sonic tater tots. “So much trash in town. Right? Trash everywhere.”
I nod. I think I’m supposed to. He puts the cheese and tots in the microwave oven.
“So I got a new job picking up trash,” he says with a half shrug. “It’s easy. I stroll Sixth Street with my dick hanging out.”
He grins.
I blink.
He nods.
I tell my mouth to smile, but I can’t say what my mouth does. I doubt it smiles.
Bing. The tater tots are done.
“You get the joke, man. I’m picking up trash. Like, sluts. That kind of trash. And I’m doing it with my dick.”
“Oh, yeah, yeah. I see now.”
He shakes his head, angry.
“It’s fucking funny if you had a sense of humor.” He stabs a cheesy tot with a plastic fork.
“That’s a good joke,” I say.
He’s got a mouthful of tater tots and cheese and he’s chewing past the heat. His brow burrows down into the bridge of his nose. Then he turns and walks to the TV. A history of hurricanes on the Weather Channel.
I take my cue and walk back to Martin’s room. The door is closed, a picture of a yellow Lotus taped to the door. From the other side the Steve Miller Band plays on some alarm clock radio. I knock lightly.
“Yeap,” comes Martin’s drawl.
“It’s Oliver.”
“Hey!” I can hear him smiling through the door. Lots of his words smile. “Open her up. Open her up.”
The smoke in Martin’s room overwhelms the smell of tots. A few strands of sunlight come through the blinds of the small, high window in the room. Martin pushes himself up from his easy chair and takes me into a hug. He’s thinner than even a week ago. His body is unsteady, but his hug is sure. He lowers himself back down. A can of tobacco and a pack of rolling papers lay on the table.
“Hot damn, Ollie! Good to see you.”
Martin has a green-blue bruise on the side of his face.
“What happened?” I ask, touching my own face.
“Oh, you know. Nothing.” He glances over my shoulder toward the living room. I close the door.
“What happened?”
I sit on the edge of his bed as he adjusts himself in the chair. He’s small in the leather recliner, like a boy in his father’s study.
“Nothing, really.” He shakes his head. “We had a barbeque. Had some people over. Things got a little crazy.” He smiles. “I had to have a talk with Sam. Talk it out.”
“Your face and neck are bruised.”
“I bruise pretty easy these days thanks to that goddamn chemo. I told him we got to straighten things up, we have to clean house. Keep things in order. I don’t mind the girls. But no more parties. He got a little mad, but he heard me. Heard that we have to get these folks in line so we can keep this place. They raided two doors down last week. Dragged off a whole crew. He heard me.”
“He hit you?”
“We got into a scuffle.” He begins rolling another cigarette. “You should see him.”
“I did. He looks fine.”
“Well, he’s got all those tats. Hard to see the scars.”
He clears his throat for a full ten seconds, a slow gurgle as though he’s dragging his soul up through his throat. He swishes the load from cheek to cheek, then empties the mouthful into a tissue. I shouldn’t look, but I do. The swampy green through the tissue white, like a wet goblin in a wedding dress.
“How are you feeling, Martin?” I ask.
“Me?” He sniffles and uses the edges of the tissue to dab his nose. “Good. Really good. Better, even. Truth is I think I might beat this shit.”
Taking aim, he tosses the tissue to a small trash can in the corner. It flies heavy, as if he’d coughed pennies into it. It hits the rim and falls to the floor.
“Damn,” he says. Then looks to me. “Can you get that?”
I hesitate a moment, then stand and step toward the trash can.
“Shit, Ollie,” Martin laughs. “I’m joking. God damn.”
“I’ve been told I don’t have much of a sense of humor.”
“You don’t laugh much, that’s true.” He coughs into his fist. “You should try. It’s good for you.”
I nod.
“You miss your boy,” he says.
I nod again and pick up his one golf club.
“You never talk about him.”
“The words don’t work,” I say. “And I don’t like people’s faces when they hear.”
“How’s the whole North Pole trip shaping up?” he asks.
“A little short on money.”
“Expensive?” he asks.
“Very,” I say, swinging the club.
Martin is silent for a beat, half a smile on his thin face. “Ollie, you really believe all that?”
I look at him.
“I mean, enough to take a boat to the coldest place on the planet to look for a hole?”
I shrug.
“Come on, Ollie.”
I stop. I sit back on the edge of his bed and think for a beat.
“Why do you want to get the Cadillac running?” I ask.
He frowns and leans back. “That’s easy, I like to drive.” He smiles a bit. “Used to just drive around west of town, out in the hills. Get a little lost.” He grins fully. “It’s fun.”
“That’s it,” I say, tapping the club to the floor. “Honestly, Martin, Hollow Earth is the only fun I have.”
I leave Martin’s room an hour later. As I close his bedroom door, a lanky man steps from Sam’s room and quickly heads out the front door. He turns as he walks out the front, flipping his chin in commiseration.
“Mr. Oliver,” Laika says from Sam’s room. The door is still ajar. “Can you come here to me?”