Bill Christophersen

HOLE

I

When the toddler disappeared (the septic tank’scountersunk manhole cover not quite centeredand so become a revolving door), the Maysun was drying the grass of the bed-and-breakfast’smanicured front lawn. A gardenerwas coaxing a power mower up the property’sstreet-side incline, one hand on the throttle,the other on the driving wheel’s black dish.When the father disappeared (down the same hole,self-preservation trumped by something elsemore limbic still, some gut-level imperativeor sense that hell had got him by the balls,no matter how he played it), the mother, aloneand shaking, screamed with her whole body.The gardener jammed the stick in park and hovehis lumbering, sweating self from the metal seat.Then the mother disappeared (belayedby the gardener’s sausage fingers round her ankles,arms flailing the stinking darkness; flailingand groping, the acrid stench suffocatingas her terror of the epiphany that life,into which we bring these ones we love,can snatch them by the toe and eat them whole;can leach their little hides, do what we will).Then the child reappeared (hauled up bodily,the mother, arms extended like a midwife’s,seizing it in midair from the father,who, plunging deep, had gone to work, feelingpast turds till hand touched skull, then tuggedthe curled-up infant from the pissy muckand raised it above his head, a living trophy―delivered to its mother, then babe and mom deliveredby the puffing gardener, whose yells of “Help! Baby!”brought a passing mom-and-stroller, hence cleanwater, disinfectant wipes, cell phone and the steadyvoice required to summon 911).Below, the father, treading bilious sludge,barked knuckles on cement, then struck a rung―egress from that twilight zone of filth;chimney to pure light, sun-drenched salvation.And so the father reappeared (climbingout of deeper shit than I or anyoneI know has ever been encompassed by).One doesn’t think, they say, at times like this;one reacts. One thinks all sorts of things: How deep?Well? Cesspool? Caustic chemicals? Will Iland on him? Break his back? My back? Is hedead already? Am I committing suicide?The ambulance arrived in a minute-thirty.Son and father had stomachs pumped, got meds,caught colds, got better. All three wake up screamingmore often than most of us. The parents showerway more than they need to. The two-year-oldclimbs the walls at the mention of bath time butotherwise is doing fine. Turns out babieshold their breath instinctively under water.II

One wants the tale to end there, and perhapsit does, a centerpiece of family lore, amiracle of love, bravery, a specialdispensation all three share going forward.But perhaps the enormity of the episode,like a dark star, warps the space around it,and the debt of love incurred toward the fathersmothers the wife, and later the child, in guilt.Perhaps the father, a dozen or more years later,watching his teenage son do reckless things,thinks, “What right’s he got to pull this kindof shit on me?” Or, seething at the wife’sobiter dicta and bickering retorts,thinks, “Why was it up to me to take the plunge?Was my life more expendable than yours?”Perhaps the boy, unable at last to abidethe horror of that day, its happy endingnotwithstanding, loses the knack for trust,without which nothing much is ever ventured,fought for, wrestled with, maintained in spiteof obstacles? Perhaps no foothold everfully persuades; no morning sun on greenlawn but signifies some nightmare’s mise-en-scène; no darkness seems negotiable.III

A miracle is deceptive. Isolated,it can make all history seem foreordained,as if the jeweled part stands for the wholebloody mess, that far less scintillatingprospect. There’s the chance, of course, that life’sa latticework, a series of intersectingmiracles or miracle plays whose charactersappear/disappear within the larger structure,a glimpse of which we’re occasionally afforded:no clockwork universe but one ably directedby the playwright himself, who, understandablyperhaps, bends over backward to retainhis privacy, anonymity, invisibility,though peering, now and then, from a wing to nodor appearing, like Alfred Hitchcock, in a cameo―as grandfather, gardener, deus ex machina.A tempting proposition, this invisiblescript, this hidden teleologyin which each of us plays an unwitting part.But over and against it is the hole―unspeakable; mephitic; defiling;predatory, one almost wants to say;lying there beneath resplendent grasson which young couples and their babies play.—from Rattle #40, Summer 2013

__________

Bill Christophersen: “‘Crossing the Bar’ and ‘Ozymandias’ floored me in ninth grade, and hearing Bill Zavatsky and Gregory Orr read when I was in college helped me realize poems weren’t made by gray-bearded deities. When I turned 23, the country band I was playing in dissolved, the girl I was seeing walked, and I was alone in eastern Long Island with winter coming on. It was write or start drinking, and I’m not a drinking man.”

Related* “Neighbor” by Bill Christophersen * “Scientists Panicked by Vanished Star” by Jennifer Reeser * “Dream of the Disappeared” by Cecil L. Sayre