Hollow

by Owen Egerton

  I won’t scream. I won’t. If I do, the orderlies will strap me down or drug me to sleep and these demons will eat me. I’ll sit and keep watch till morning. They can’t stand the day. The sun is poison.

  “Squirming Herman,” the big man sings to himself.

  I see it now. I understand now. The Earth is not stone. It’s Hell all the way through.

  The dayroom couch sags. Outside, the sky rolls dishwater gray. They’ve let me use the phone twice. I’ve tried to call Lyle and warn him, but no one answers. The pills make everything slower, tamer. The couch could catch fire and I’d only yawn.

  The woman calling for her son is back at the nurses’ station. The nurse on duty keeps her eyes on her paperwork, bureaucracy like gloves. I rise and walk to the woman.

  “I’m Oliver,” I say.

  “I think they’ve kidnapped him,” she says.

  “Your son?”

  “That woman right there.” She points through the glass at the nurse, who is now answering a blinking phone. “My son came to visit and they grabbed him.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “And his wife, too. Or she helped. She might have helped them.”

  “I hope not.”

  “They kidnap people every day. Every day. Then send them to England.”

  “Why England?” I ask. She looks at me as if I’m crazy. Which, in my present condition, makes a lot of sense.

  “For the Queen,” she says. “She’s the one in charge.”

  A small fist knocks from the other side of the window. The nurse stares through.

  “Mr. Bonds,” she says through the glass. “You’re being released.”

  The mother looks at me with suspicion. “I said too much,” she says, backing away.

  An orderly motions to me from a side entrance and I step out of the dayroom, the moans muted as the door clicks closed behind me. I follow the orderly as he saunters down the long, beige hallway, his back bulging against his white uniform. I pad along, my olive-green sandals slapping the linoleum.

  “You got a lady here to pick you up,” he says. “Pretty one, too.”

  “She’s my caseworker.”

  “Nice of her to come get you,” he says. “Plenty people come in for three days, get a slap on the back and a day bus pass.”

  He pushes through the last door and I walk in the admittance lobby. But Ashley isn’t there. My wife is.

  “Hello, Oliver.”

  “Carrie. I . . .”

  I glance at the orderly who smiles at me. “You do your best to stay on out of here, okay?” He turns and walks back out the door.

  “Manuel is talking with your doctor,” Carrie says. “How are you?”

  “Did they call you?”

  “Manuel’s brother-in-law is on the board. Everything is worked out.”

  The door I just came through opens and out walks Manuel and Dr. Bradley laughing. Manuel dips his chin at Carrie, a couple’s code, everything is fine. I hear her breathe out.

  Manuel shakes my hand. “How are you feeling?”

  I nod as an answer.

  Dr. Bradley pats my back. “Take care of yourself, Dr. Bonds.”

  I ride in the back seat. Manuel and Carrie sit up front, sharing glances like concerned parents. Outside my window I see geese in the gray sky.

  “I didn’t know how bad things were, Oliver,” Carrie says, turning in her seat. “You should have said.”

  “I need to find my friend Lyle,” I say. “Could you drop me at his place?”

  “Manuel and I talked,” she says. “We’re sorry about the money in the account. We should have had a conversation with you and not just presumed . . .” She trails off and her brow wrinkles. It’s hard for her to look at me. “I talked to your caseworker. She called and told us where you were.”

  “Ashley? You talked to her?”

  “We want to help you get back on your feet, Oliver,” Manuel says, slowing for a yellow light. “I have a cashier’s check in my wallet for fifty-five hundred dollars. It’s for you.”

  “We want to help,” Carrie says.

  “But we have to agree on some things,” Manuel says, glancing at me in the rearview mirror. “This money is conditional.”

  “Conditional?”

  “Listen, Oliver, I want to give you this check, but you’ve got to make some changes,” Manuel says. “I have a friend who’s a psychiatrist. She goes to St. Christopher’s, too.” The light turns green and the car inches forward. “I made an appointment for tomorr—Jesus, Oliver!”

  I’m stepping out of the car, stumbling on the road.

  “Oh God!” Carrie yelps.

  I walk through the intersection. Cars dodge me.

  “Oliver!” Manuel stands by the open driver’s door. “You’re going to get yourself killed.”

  “Chances are,” I whisper.

  I walk the mile through downtown to the Agape Center. Thick, hot air covers everything in a damp film. Inside, it’s crowded and as humid with human sweat as it is outside with oncoming rain.

  I want to talk to Ashley. Find out what she told Carrie. She’s in her office nodding and listening to a crying mother holding a child.

  I pace the room. They’re talking politics in the back corner. They’re arguing movies near the front. One man tries to play the piano, but a woman using the phones shuts him down. The scrap remains of breakfast—peels and crusts—fill the paper boats. Outside others are waiting to get in.

  At a table near the door, a man sits in his wheelchair, his chin doubled up on itself as he slumps, his face wet with sweat, his eyes glassy and dull. How he survives, I have no idea.

  A spot opens up on the computer and I sit, ready to write Lyle.

  I have one unread email. It’s a response from God.

  Dear Oliver

  I dare you to take justice into your own hands. You know what you deserve. Now do it.

  God, your Eternal Father

  God­—

  I will if You will.

  Oliver

  And finally God’s reply. One word:

  Deal.

  I stand, grab the monitor, and drop it on the floor. It makes a satisfying crunch. Chip the security guard is moving toward me but I stomp to Charlie.

  “Tell me your theology, Charlie,” I say.

  “Oliver . . .” he says, stepping back.

  “You build it around the blazing son of God. A perfect man and his perfect suffering. Build it around him.” I point to the drooling man in the wheelchair. “Build a theology around him, Charlie. What does that creation tell us about the Creator, Charlie?”

  “Oliver, you have to calm down, or—”

  “He does not care, so I say. He murders both the pure and the wicked.”

  Chip’s hand grips my shoulder. “Come on, now. Oliver.” He pushes me to the door. People stare: Murray beside the coffee, Joan glancing and twitching from the corner, and Ashley standing at her office door.

  “Charlie. I’m quoting scripture, Charlie!” I yell. “You smear my wounds with ignorance.”

  And then I’m outside. The rain dripping slow and the air too warm and thick.

  “I have to ban you for a week,” Chip says. He places his hands just above his security guard utility belt with pepper spray and an empty gun holster. “One week. Okay, Oliver?”

  I move back and my foot slips on the first steps. I stumble, falling down three steps and landing on my back.

  I’m sitting on the curb when Ashley comes out. She sits beside me and for a long time neither of us says a word. The sky shifts and the rain hesitates, unsure if it wants to continue falling or not.

  “You talked to my wife,” I say.

  “I told her where you were.”

  “What if she’d recognized you? She’s seen pictures.�
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  “It was on the phone and I was fully dressed.” She smiles. I can’t bring myself to smile back.

  “You freaked some people out in there,” she says. “Gave quite the sermon.”

  I nod.

  “You know, Mr. Osbon, the man in the wheelchair? The one you were yelling about? Someone pushes him in nearly every day. Someone else brings him his breakfast. Different people, just being kind, looking out for him.”

  “It’s a wonderful life.”

  “I’m just saying that maybe suffering makes room for kindness.”

  “It doesn’t explain it. Doesn’t excuse it,” I say.

  “It’s something.”

  “Would you like to know the key verse in Job?” I ask. “The lynchpin.”

  She hums.

  “Job 13:15. Though He slay me, yet I will trust in Him,” I say.

  “I know that one.”

  “The language is ambiguous. Perhaps intentionally. The same verse can just as likely be translated as He kills me. I have no hope.”

  “Which one is it?” she asks.

  I shake my head. “Either way, we’re dead.”

  “You know, Oliver, you should have just fucked me,” she says. “Then you’d have something to feel guilty about.”

  I look at her.

  “People here have all kinds of problems. Handicaps, addiction, poverty. You’re just sad. Not clinically depressed or chemically unbalanced. Just very sad.” She meets my eyes. “You need to move on.”

  She blows out a breath and looks back at the street.

  “You were a good teacher, you know that?” she asks. “Now I’m going to teach you something. You’re banned from Agape.”

  “I know. For a week.”

  “For life,” she says. “You’re not allowed to come back here.” She keeps her eyes on the passing cars. “I’ve already cleared it with the staff. Chip has been told. If you show up, the police will be called.”

  “I’m sorry I broke the computer,” I say.

  She smiles and stands, brushing her pants. “I should get back to work.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  She turns and looks at me.

  “Because I think I love you very much and I never want to see you again.”

  She walks through the center door and it closes behind her.

  It rains on Austin. Hot rain that turns to steam as it hits the blacktop and tin roofs and fills the gutters with oak leaves and pollen.

  I make my way back to my shed and find a new padlock gleaming on the door. The back window is clamped shut. He’s left a note.

  I want to burn the whole place down. I want to watch it burn. He has no choice.

  I hole up in the Whataburger on South First sipping coffee and watching the parking lot puddles join and separate like continents of water.

  They say the young Earth’s surface was all land once. Then came rivers and shallow seas, but no oceans. But as the Earth expanded, the hollow within growing like a bubble, the land cracked apart and water filled the chasms. If we were able to deflate the globe, the continents would fit together like a sphere-shaped jigsaw.

  At a payphone, I call Lyle’s number again and again. A full voicemail.

  It’s hours later and a short man in an orange Whataburger uniform is asking me to leave.

  “Why?” I ask.

  “You’re sleeping.”

  “I’m praying.”

  “Then find a church.”

  “Can I have more coffee?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “The sign says bottomless.”

  “You’ve hit the bottom of a bottomless cup.”

  “That’s discrimination.”

  “Just leave before I call the cops.”

  I step outside, into the rain, and head downtown, searching for Lyle. I haven’t seen him since the bookstore, since I saw that hurt in his eyes. He’ll be working tonight, pedicabbing drunks from bar to bar to car.

  The rain slows to a drizzle as the day ends. On Sixth Street, bartenders and waiters and busboys arrive as bar lights pop to life. They come sipping coffee, passing the architects and attorneys finishing their day’s work. Happy hour and open doors and early family eaters at the rooftop Mexican restaurant.

  Already music roars, shaking floors in still empty bars.

  I circle past the bars looking for Lyle, then a block north past the church and Agape and the Salvation Army. Crowds hover around the edges of the Arch and Salvation Army hoping to score a bed or a slice of floor. It’s a lottery. Some don’t even hope, they unroll their bags and sleep against the outside wall. Some are waving cars into empty parking spaces, collecting tips and promising to keep an eye on the Volvos and Nissans.

  I circle back to the bars on Sixth. A circle, a swirl. Soon the bars are brighter than the dying sky. Soon those who didn’t win the bed lottery are building makeshift camps on the sidewalk or disappearing under the highway or down into scrub by the shallow city creeks. And I know their faces. People I eat with, people I sit with. But I don’t sit and I don’t stop and I find myself circling again, looking for Lyle.

  The crowds grow, and they circle Sixth Street too. Walking east on the south-side sidewalk and west on the north side. Barkers and vendors yell out. Bark bark—not at me, I have nothing to buy with and they know it. They bark at the girls and boys and solo sick men offering shots and music and live comedy and cheaper drinks and louder music and possibility.

  “Lyle!”

  Now the street is late-night screams and laughter and I’m caught again in the swirl and I’m circling and spinning and screaming for Lyle.

  I am catching faces and scanning crowds. I am spinning, and I need Lyle, who will stop me.

  I step fast to each pedicab driver hoping it’s him. Some shirtless, one pantless, men and women each with calves like stone and faces long suffering, calling jokes to each other as they pass.

  “Lyle?”

  They spin past me, some with Christmas lights and portable stereos, some with Rasputin beards and long-distance cackles.

  It is the same path, again and again. The same circle—only deeper, tighter each time, burrowing down, narrowing as I descend from the top of the tornado down to the point where wind hits stone.

  Job called it God. Job cowered before the winds and heard poetry.

  On to the street where the people swerve and bounce against one another. The police have blocked the road from car traffic to allow the drunk and will-be drunk to hop and lope and fall and laugh at the broken heel in the grate and the cut chin.

  “Lyle?”

  Vendors call out order numbers from the safe boxes, handing out food to the pay-drunks and the skirts-fucks who reach out and grab their food as they swirl by, like a child reaching from a merry-go-round—only faster. They manage to grasp beer and tequila and tacos and pizza. And the cover bands play and teenagers rub and everything that should be glory and laughter is sick and doggish. And it’s growing more hellish as two a.m. approaches and the cops on their shitting horses know this. They stare down at the swirl, waiting and knowing they’ll have to step in and chances are their horses will drown and be stripped of flesh and cooked on small fires under the embankments and between grease Dumpsters and perhaps the smell of cooking horse will rise and offend the senses of the condo owners above.

  The bar that sold nothing that night stares out angry and lonely and a woman with her face painted like an angel stands on a crate perfectly still and waits for tips and the beggars beg matter-of-factly, saving their better stories for daylight. A man pushes himself by his heels backward in a wheelchair. Not Mr. Osbon, he’s not here. There are two wheelchairs in this swirl. One belongs to a man who needs it. It’s operated by his fingers, his only moving parts, and I can’t fathom how he gets here each night or who laces the plastic crown o
n his head or who scribbled his note asking for dimes or who told him to smile smile smile. And the other wheelchair belongs to everyone and the homeless take turns snagging it from each other and spending an hour sitting and patrolling with an open hand and a piece of cardboard reading Anything Helps.

  Anything helps.

  Some are trying to sleep in the swirl, curled figures in doorways, pushed against steps, heads covered, hands clinging, even in sleep, to a plastic bag of belongings—an extra shirt, perhaps an ID, a pay-as-you-go cell phone. And those spinning and dancing are clinging even as they spin. Clinging to bodies and cash and highs. Clinging and trotting, all in the same waters, the same spinning waters, and we are all going down and it makes no difference the shape of the scrapwood you cling to.

  A family of four, in yellow sweaters, stands on the corner singing hymns and handing out tracts and their madness is as drunk and sad as those passing.

  This girl’s skirt is ripped and she doesn’t know.

  This man hoots anger, locking eyes with anyone and hooting, daring them, wanting a fist like it’s food.

  They spin, and the street spins.

  There are ghosts too—howling and screaming and bleeding spirit up and down the road—but no one can hear them over the cover band or the wailing plump girl who spills her purse or the fire truck sirens a half mile away.

  “Lyle!”

  The back of the pedicab catches my ribs and knocks me down.

  “Fucking drunk,” the girl passenger says. Even as she passes I can smell her perfume like a burning field of roses.

  The music plays from every door and roof and mixes like grease smoke in the streets. People cough from the sound.

  I circle again, further in. Faces, pale and pool ball–eyed, stare up from storm drains, watching up as we circle, not yet risking to grab us. Waiting.