by Dave Eggers
Soon we at the compound were working with the national police and the Red Cross, and had contracted an outfit to assemble heavy equipment toward facilitating Killacky’s rescue: a crane—an industrial block and tackle pulley really—generator, lights, and seismic listening devices. Ten hours went by, then nightfall. Soon it had been twenty-four hours, when arrived the second tragedy.
An over-eager rescue dog put to work sniffing for Killacky’s scent jumped into the hole, or fell, and soon Jo-Jo, a German shepherd from Wyoming, became the second subject of the search and rescue operation, her photograph appearing below Killacky’s on the television screen and in the newspapers.
This continued for some days, all of it of course profoundly disrupting life and study in TempleLand, not to mention the nearby village, so that we were soon forced to send the other resident scholars home. I chartered a small jet and handed them envelopes as they departed, a check for each, thanking them for their good faith effort and inviting them to visit again. Yes, I assured them, they would receive credit for days in their hole so far and could pick up at a time convenient to them. Each expressed their various concerns for Killacky, some angrily, insisting that he had been kidnapped, even murdered, most likely by us, by me or by Sir John, speculating, as these scientists will, that what now appeared to be a seemingly perfect, symmetrically-bored vertical chasm, a tunnel really, must certainly have been there before Killacky had been installed in foxhole number 139.
As for Killacky, facts soon emerged painting an alternately gratifying and unflattering portrait, and pointing to motives that led to jokes about his handiness with a shovel or his need to disappear, and fast. Yet the notes and diagrams, scribblings and mathematical equations left in his hole suggested that his reason for being at TempleLand went well beyond the grant. There were calculations and a timeline, and rough sketches, all of which seemed to point to serious scholarship regarding the actual age of the planet and examining the record of a pre-scientific history which likely corresponded to that story outlined in, yes, holy texts.
But, disappointingly, it also emerged that Dr. Killacky had needed cash to pay off a student blackmailing him after he had done things to her in his office, nasty and wrong things that she’d memorialized on her cell phone’s camera feature, and that she’d threatened to share with his wife and then with the world, to spin on her website, like straw into gold. In my immediate post-disappearance discussions with Sir James, we agreed that Dr. Killacky perhaps had not been the very best choice among applicants and that the staff and I might have vetted him more thoroughly. Sir James was, naturally, disappointed, but he was never angry, and I value even now that moment when he took me aside one afternoon and explained that God worked in mysterious ways and that we might be witnesses to a phenomenon right here on the grounds that was well beyond the reckoning of mere man, and that Killacky himself was perhaps playing a role important to the moment, which might be a kind of revelation—about what he could only speculate, but would not—a revelation that would no doubt point further to the connectedness of spirit and science.
“And so,” he promised, “ultimately contribute to the success of our endeavors here.”
Killacky’s wife, Mrs. Judith Killacky of Rancho Santa Margarita in Orange County, felt otherwise. She arrived on a special flight we chartered. Mrs. Killacky resembled a well-known blonde movie ac tress who’d once been young and sexy but who now, middle-aged and fat, appeared on late-night television commercials pleading on behalf of starving and dying African children.
She’d recently filed for divorce and had not even known her missing soon-to-be ex-husband was staying with us at TempleLand. Mrs. Killacky—“Jude” she called herself—was of little use to the authorities, had long suspected her husband’s infidelity, and so was the subject of plenty of media attention. There were the couple’s small children at home, four of them, and a suspiciously large life insurance policy, all of these reliably tawdry details assembled to provoke curiosity and inspire contempt. Even more attention was paid, most of it speculation, to those available details of Dr. Killacky’s work in the area of the geological record of the earth and, surprisingly, the New Testament stories of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. This was an unexpected development, at least to me, but Sir James seemed unsurprised, and was encouraged. “The direction of Dr. Killacky’s scientific work,” he said, “will redeem him, and will vindicate our own.”
Meanwhile, after just two weeks, the young woman student in possession of the sex video shared it with a British tabloid, which printed stills, for which she was compensated, it was widely believed, quite generously. Then she herself disappeared, on the same day the whole thing appeared on a porn site online.
After four full weeks of searching and waiting, after using sonar and radar, after taking X-rays and employing a psychic and bringing in medical forensics experts from around the world, after lowering a camera and losing not one but two mini robotic units, we still had not found the actual bottom of the hole, or established the existence of a bottom, or located either Killacky or the dog. Neither had any evidence at all been discovered of either, not in the hole or on the steep walls of the chasm or anywhere else. There was no shovel, no disturbed earth. There were no footprints.
Bit by bit the press corps abandoned the story and left the island. Embarrassed, frustrated, the authorities seemed to give up too, the local police and military, Interpol, the FBI, the army of private investigators we’d hired, all of them packing up, defeated, and likely convinced that, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, TempleLand, Sir James and I, somebody on the plantation, Killacky himself, had somehow contrived to make him disappear, perhaps for the insurance money, or arranged a hoax.
With the departure of the media and the police, the area around the hole was cordoned off, a round-the-clock pair of guards posted, and a single klieg light left to illuminate the site at night.
We at TempleLand held a small commemorative service in the chapel, where Sir James himself paid tribute to the lost man, offering generously that he believed in his own true heart that Dr. Simon Killacky might indeed have become number four on our roster of scholar converts, and might yet. Our Lazarus, Sir James called Killacky, someday to be revived, resurrected, and reborn.
He further lamented the cruel attacks on poor Dr. Killacky, who had been revealed not only, it seemed, as a philanderer and sexual predator, but as a poor scholar too, having done little research or writing, it turned out, in his field prior to his brief stay with us. The newspapers reported that he’d actually published only one paper, not in a juried scientific journal, and had in fact never completed his doctoral work, so that he was not a PhD after all. None of this mattered to us, said Sir James, or to an island, a nation, a world that cared so deeply for his journey, ongoing, or to those who loved him, and certainly not to the Creator who directed the lives of us all.
The miraculous had occurred, Sir James insisted, although we had at first not seen it, not recognized it, this marvel, not at all an “accident,” he assured us, no, not in the mechanistic way of our secular world. The mystery would still teach the world somehow. God had chosen His servant Simon, as he’d chosen Saul and Simon Peter, on whose name and shoulders He had once built his own church, the rock on whom was anchored the faith of millions. That Killacky was, he pointed out, a teacher whose subject was the history of rocks, was further promise and assurance of His plan.
Geologists and seismologists, geophysicists and earth scientists of all stripe responded predictably to Sir James’s remarks and to his interview on 60 Minutes with anger, skepticism, speculation, with theories and more questions, suggesting the unlikelihood of an anomalous fissure. They pointed to what they called the “obviously sculpted” shape of the hole, its perfect, precise route straight down, the centerline of a cylindrical crevasse, the smoothness of the walls. They mocked us, and others, suggesting that maybe, yes, something or someone had reached up from the earth’s center, maybe a giant or demon with a machine
or device as yet unbuilt had drilled up to the surface. This image appeared in an editorial cartoon, as did many others, ridiculous and yet tapping into something exciting and appealing, which Sir James chose to celebrate.
Indeed, there was always an artist’s rendering, a sketch or a digitally assembled cutaway of the earth, on television or printed alongside the newspaper articles. There was an illustration of the shaft with Killacky and Jo-Jo falling, and mathematical equations of velocity, speculating how long it would have taken them to fall, minutes or hours or days. There was the color-coded journey, always with a tiny cartoon dog and cartoon man, through the crust to the upper mantle, then the outer core, and finally to the inner core where the man and the dog would reach the impossible heat and be melted, as if to engage the problem and the premise, and the impossibility of each at the same time.
There were interviews and commentaries by oil-drilling experts and spelunkers, hydrologists—including our own born-again prizewinner—survivors of underground and underwater falls and cave-ins. The constant printing and airing of that image, of the tiny man in free fall and the faithful dog above him, must have caused many, as it did me, to see them as eternally falling, and to understand falling as a journey and not an end, and to begin to appreciate that journey as somehow infinite despite, of course, being reminded, over and over, that science was working hard to find an ending—in their deaths.
But not Sir James, who insisted on the infinite. He offered that this was all God’s plan, for He has a plan for us all. For He is not done with us here, and neither is His work complete. He is in control, He has used His servant Dr. Killacky, and He will reveal in His time the meaning and purpose of this phenomenon, this miraculous moment, this scientific experiment, this bringing together of the nations, of his disciples, to witness the power, glory, love, and caring of a Creator who can do whatever pleases Him. Remember, said Sir James, that He has counted the sparrows and numbered the hairs on our heads and created this very world, seen and unseen, so that our job, our duty, is to marvel and to wait for Him to further make real a revelation.
“Dr. Killacky is with God, and with us, somewhere,” offered Sir James. “As is Jo-Jo. Because God is everywhere, on the earth and inside it as well.” And that place, he insisted, is forever, is infinite.
Yet soon Sir James was forced to direct me to terminate the foxhole program altogether, in part on orders from the authorities, and to have the remaining holes filled in. I sent letters to those scholars whose research we’d been forced to interrupt, apologizing again and including a second check and the requisite legal paperwork removing from TempleLand any further liability or responsibility.
The two security guards remained, even as the holes were filled in, every landscaped berm razed and squares of new grass laid in. Life as we’d known it resumed, if tentatively, with Sir James steadfast and confident, even happy. This is the Sir James I knew, who again greeted with smiles and a wave those remaining on the grounds. The disciples, we called them, those faithful hundreds who’d arrived at the site almost immediately and who still camped on the perimeter. They cooked meals on small camp stoves and built jolly fires at night, sang and prayed and held vigil. Most seemed to have chosen to wear white, often with a skein of gauze wrapped around their heads. They decorated the great lawn with crosses, candles, cans of dog food.
The earth had swallowed up a sinner, some said. He was testing a man, and mankind. Like Jonah in the belly of the whale, or Daniel in the lion’s den. Some argued that a prophet, heretofore unknown, unrecognized, had been taken from us. Either way, it was a test. God had expressed His will and would not be mocked or questioned, would only be worshipped. The disciples were there to witness the awesome power when Dr. Killacky, God’s servant, reappeared or that awesome if immeasurable authority revealed.
It was a surprise then even to me, a challenge to my own understanding of His power and requirement of faith, when the first disciple leapt into the hole and the others quickly followed her. Apparently nobody else had expected this either, stupid in retrospect, a failing, a misunderstanding for which I blame myself.
The woman who jumped did not even bother to distract the two guards, who sat eating their suppers at sunset just a few meters from the edge of the short wall around the hole and the yellow warning tape. Eating plates of red beans and white rice, yams, roast pork, and plantains, they observed her approaching from the darkness, walking into the splay of the artificial white light, thinking perhaps that she might be heading to the portable facilities we’d organized or adding another candle to the hundreds of votive lights that flickered and waned, the smell of their wax and the heat of their flames suggesting an outdoor cathedral under the palms.
They continued eating as she approached and, as they later reported, heard only the gentlest ruffle of air in between forkfuls of dinner. They looked up, surprised to see the tape broken. A note lay on the ground, its message written in bold, elegant, and clearly female handwriting on a sheet of blue-lined notebook paper: “Follow me.” And the small space that had briefly been occupied—by a young woman, was all they could say, veiled, slight—was left a vacuum now somehow larger than anything that surrounded it, the lawn, the palms, and the night itself.
These were local men, island men, untrained, unarmed. They called out for help, then screamed into their walkie-talkies. One ran to the main house to summon Sir James and me, leaving the other guard alone at the hole. The man could offer little resistance when the rest of them, the dozen other devotees who’d hid at the perimeter of the light until they’d seen Sister Alpha, as she’d called herself, leap into the hole, then rushed forward themselves, running together past the lone guard and disappearing one after the other, one onto another, down the redemptive oblivion of faith and mystery, a narrow, deep hole in the ground wherein, it was assumed, they meant to find not only evidence of their faith but perhaps, in their action, faith itself.
And so the police and the news crews returned. A handwriting expert quickly confirmed the woman’s identity not as an island local but as Sarah Melissa Jean Hoolihan, age twenty, Killacky’s former community college student who’d gone missing after selling the dirty photographs and the video taken on her cell phone.
Her parents were flown to the island and spent some days with us, living in a guest cottage adjacent to the house in which Mrs. Killacky stayed. They were longtime practitioners of Transcendental Meditation and each morning and evening sat cross-legged near the hole for fifteen minutes, humming and being still. They otherwise cooperated with the authorities, showed little anger toward us or toward Killacky, and were concerned that their daughter, a “good girl,” a “shy girl,” had somehow inspired or convinced others to jump.
The Hoolihans were still there a week later when the authorities, confounded again after renewing and then abandoning the exploration of the hole, accepted Sir James’s proposal to construct a viewing platform and a small amphitheater, with a thick Plexiglas barrier around the hole. Men in hard hats poured cement pilings and trimmed lumber, built steps and a turnstile.
It was important, Sir James insisted, that the hole itself be left open. “They might be anywhere. They might be here, with us even now.”
We sat together in the rose garden, he in his wheelchair. I had been taking Paxil for a week, prescribed by Sir James’s own personal physician, and yet I was still not sleeping well. I was not myself. My own faith, in the divine, in the unknowable, in Sir James, had been shaken, I don’t mind telling you, and there was also the matter of a civil suit filed against us by Judith Killacky and her four orphaned children, who appeared every morning at breakfast but otherwise stayed in her quarters.
Sir James tried to comfort, to reassure me. “These children of God,” he reminded me, “they also are scientists in their way. They are astronauts, explorers. Of another realm perhaps, but on an adventure we can only dream of, and envy.” Sir James, aged eighty, did not hesitate. His hands did not tremble. He spoke softly but firmly: “I only
wish that I could join them.”
“Do you really, sir?” I asked. “Do you?”
He looked at me, this man of faith, his pale blue eyes searching my face. And where I had always imagined he’d found something deep, had encouraged and affirmed it in me, his mouthpiece, his servant, his friend and fellow worshipper, I saw that now he looked quickly away. I was, I felt, no longer the receptive pool, the reflection, the loving gaze. And, not finding in me the reciprocity of understanding and faith and wisdom, the pool into which this great man-prophet might drop a pebble of his knowledge, I saw that he glanced away, out the window, and I knew then that I risked losing him.
And so I got up from the roses and left him there in the garden and walked slowly but deliberately in the direction of whatever he might have been seeing, summoning, that element no one had proven, the dimension unseen, the realm into which I had invited myself to dwell, had been invited by Sir James, a place that for me had been as real as the plantation, the sea, the orchids in the solarium, the roses in the garden, the palms, the very stars above. Needing to know myself whether I might be reclaimed, whether I could live there again and always, I walked across the lawn, greeted the two guards and a dozen workers in boots and hard hats, passed under the frame of the platform under construction, considered not one moment further that I would do this, removed the plastic tarpaulin that covered the hole, and leapt.
I fell and fell and fell, and must also, in my falling, have fallen asleep. I had no sense of time, which was to me a relief, and I found it easy enough to hold my arms tightly at my sides so as not to limit my progress or hurt myself. I had time to think, to remember. As a child I was taken to Disneyland, not far from Professor Killacky’s former home, and to a ride sponsored by the Monsanto Corporation in which visitors to the Magic Kingdom entered what appeared to be a giant microscope, ostensibly to be shrunken to microscopic size in order to visit the internal workings of the human body, the molecules and cells, or to explore the atom, the universe, I could not recall exactly now. Such, however, was my vision of myself descending, as of a grown man reduced to the size of a small one or a child, even as it seemed to me the diameter of the hole itself also narrowed, gradually.