D.A. Jenkins

HOLE

“You have to sleep downstairs. I was actually restful last night, you understand? For the first time in two months. And you ruined that for me.”

Josh said he was sorry, again.

“It’s just the way it is,” Kat said. “This isn’t easy on me either, you understand? But it is what it is and you can’t sleep up here if you are going to throw elbows and toss and moan and talk in your sleep.”

“I talk?” Josh asked. “What do I say?”

“It’s not important. You’ll be fine in the basement. I hope you can understand.”

The trouble was that Josh did understand his wife. If Kat couldn’t sleep, then neither could the baby. Poor Mikey, sweet child with the small patch of fuzz along his forehead that showed dark against his bright red face when he cried. When Josh conjured up his son’s face, that is what he saw: globby tears. Kat waited for an answer.

“Are we okay?” Josh asked.

“We’re fine.”

The basement was half-finished, at least. A fold-out couch stood against the far wall, a TV in the corner, the washer and dryer on the concrete side right next to a workout bench and weight set — this last, dust-covered. Maybe he would get buff, Josh thought. He’d laughed at his uncle, who had insisted that a pregnancy meant the husband putting on just as much weight as the wife. It hadn’t been far from the truth — Josh cupped his stomach fat and jiggled it. He flipped on the TV.

His basement-dwelling, at first a temporary proposition, quickly gained the traits of something more permanent. Kat moved his clothes down while Josh was at work. He complained about the wrinkles, so he came home to a coat rack. Once, just as a casual aside, he mentioned the walk upstairs for a drink was a pain in the you-know-what. A mini-fridge. Josh became nervous that he’d let slip about the lack of toilet.

Sometimes, Josh snuck upstairs at night to watch Mikey sleep. His son’s face, tranquil and drool-covered. The room was littered with toys that the child could not enjoy for months and years yet, remnants of the past that Josh’s parents had dug up and handed over: wooden blocks with chipped paint; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figures; stacks and stacks of comic books; the ray gun that cycled through space sounds as you pulled the trigger. Josh picked up this last, thought of times spent lost in imagination, saving the world. What could have been the odds that the batteries still worked?

Mikey opened his eyes, his mouth, and then a sound came out of him like a cat’s mewl that grew and grew until it was a scream; they say night terrors are a throwback to primal roots, when predators had not been subjugated by interstates, suburbs, the loaded gun; still Josh felt that connection to the past, the frailty of life, forgotten in the convenience of modern comforts; alongside the image of his son’s face, Josh felt history’s relentless encroach — deadly and inevitable as the saber-tooth tiger — and it passed through him and on and on and eventually forgot him altogether. He was so small and unimportant. Kat materialized in the doorway wraithlike with her pale skin, shimmering nightgown, and shoved past to comfort Mikey. She raised a long, white finger to point at Josh with hateful accusation.

A few days later, Josh was doing bench presses. Kat left food trays at the top of the stairs accompanied by notes. That day’s meal: defrosted meatloaf. That day’s note: We are fine. Josh refused hunger. His son now slept behind a locked door in the master bedroom. A certainty had taken hold of Josh, a conviction that Kat’s issue was one of trust. How could an overweight tech support nerd protect their family?

Josh finished his reps, grunted, and chugged a bottle of water. He felt manly, strong, and he had to pee. There was no regularity to when Mikey might nap. Josh hesitated, shrugged, and pissed in the empty water bottle. The evidence went into the mini-fridge — he’d throw it away later.

The next day, Josh could barely lift his arms, which meant he overcompensated in his shoulders, which made him slouch, and so on, until he came home exhausted and sore. Kat waited in their living room, Mikey at her breast.

“I’m sorry that I’m crazy,” Kat said.

“You aren’t crazy.” Josh dropped his keys on the table by the door. He craved cookie dough ice cream. “Do we need anything from the store?”

“Are you going to listen or not?”

Josh said sure he would.

“I know that staying in the basement can’t be easy…”

Josh agreed that it wasn’t.

“And it certainly isn’t easy for me either. I miss us…”

Josh said nothing.

“Anyway, I just wanted to say that I appreciate you doing this. We’ve both been sleeping much better and, if you’re worried about me and you, please know that—”

By the next week, the mini fridge was filled with piss bottles. The problem had snowballed into a monstrous conundrum. There was simply no way to dispose of that many piss bottles and avoid suspicion. Kat only left the house during workday hours, so Josh couldn’t sneak out a trash bag under her nose. His presence anymore was a gunshot that froze Kat mid-lullaby; even a creaky step triggered a fight-or-flight response. Another week went by and Josh was at his desk, considering using his lunch break to solve the problem, when his phone rang.

“What the fuck is wrong with you? Are you crazy?” Kat’s voice hissed low; Mikey was asleep.

“What? What’s wrong?”

“You tell me, you Howard Hughes fucking psycho.”

Josh said he could explain.

“I drank your piss!” Kat said. Shrieks erupted in the background. “Oh, that’s just great.”

She hung up before Josh could respond.

In the basement, it became obvious what had happened. The half-finished laundry, the open bottle on its side, the dark stain on the concrete — Josh felt wretched. He thought of ways to explain it as he slammed weights on the bar and started pressing. At twenty reps, he knew what to say, he’d— 

Something gave out in his arm. The bar went lopsided in his grip. Crushed larynx, broken jaw — Josh shoved with his good arm and turned his shoulder to take the impact. The bar hit the concrete floor; the other side swung like a pendulum, arced down and brought all that weight to a conclusion that near shook the house.

Josh held his breath, expecting cries and shouts from upstairs but, strangely, none came. Pins and needles ran down his arm as he got up and one-handedly put away the weights. Gradually, sensation returned and he could have laughed at his lucky break. Or, lack thereof.

In the morning, he noticed the hole. Closer; it was a fissure an inch deep and several long in the exact spot where the weights had hit. Embarrassing, but the concrete was thick. He used the throw rug by the couch to cover the hole. It was hard to say how conspicuous this would look to Kat.

Josh dressed for work and went upstairs. “Why don’t I do the laundry from now on?”

Kat shrugged. Her empty expression made Josh hesitate — he longed for the recent fire, if nothing else could be had — but his urge to flee won out and he did not prod the embers.

Back when Josh met Kat, he had considered himself a broken, jagged thing. Life had chipped away at his uneven edges: his mother’s suffocating codependence; his father’s emotional distance — always a voice of reason, never a shoulder to lean on; his repeated failure and disillusionment with so-called friends, who snapped their beaks to feed on his worms and then abandoned him, the commiserate carcass; the social institutions that helped others, but laughed at his particular misfortunes. Kat’s story mirrored his own and their two misshapen lives joined together like puzzle pieces discovering their corner of the whole. Soul mate. They’d always talked of children. Gone so far as to pick out names for a boy (Michael) and a girl (Phoebe), just in case. One night, not long after Mikey was born, Kat had shaken him awake at three in the morning, her eyes wild but sincere, and said, “Let’s have another. That one can be yours.”

Josh had feigned returning to sleep.

The rug that covered the hole showed a sag. Upon inspection, Josh discovered that the crack had grown. It was two feet long and his whole foot fit in the groove. He’d resumed keeping piss bottles, so he took one out of the fridge and plugged the hole with it, setting the rug back. He did the laundry and left the basket at the top of the stairs, fearful that even the slight noise of the door would cause a calamity.

Even leaving quietly for work became an anxiety, until Josh discovered that he could squeeze through the basement hopper window. At first, coworkers joked about his grass-stained shirts, but Josh flexed to demonstrate his dominance and they left him alone. His boss suggested he work from home.

Josh smuggled cases of water and protein bars into the basement. He pissed in bottle after bottle, overfilling the mini fridge and soon conquering a valuable corner of the basement, right next to the Christmas decorations. It occurred to him that there must be some way to affix a hook to the bottles for a folksy, homemade ornament. When he wasn’t tech supporting, Josh lifted. Once, the clomping, ridiculous steps of the mailperson shook him from a midday nap. The doorbell rang, and Mikey screamed.

From then on, Josh made it a point to crawl out the window and wait in the bushes at the regular mail delivery time. On the first encounter with the balding, bug-eyed mailman, Josh made such an impression that the doorbell was never rung again by that man, nor his successor. Josh triumphantly pissed in a bottle. He wondered how hard it would be to filter his own urine.

The hole grew.

Josh observed day after day as the hole encroached on the washer and dryer, his weights, his living area. Its depth became such that Josh could no longer see a bottom. He tossed all his piss bottles into it, listening for their impact, but no sound came. Josh remorsefully heaved his weights into the hole. Still, nothing. Over time, the hole took up more of the basement floor than the concrete. Josh unhooked the washer and dryer, pushing them each into the hole, but no evidence reached him of their fate. It was like they vanished into the void, as if the darkness ate up substance and sound without preference, failing to even allow a belch of satisfaction, the echo of digestion.

Josh continued to piss in bottles and throw them into the hole and it, in turn, continued to grow. The hole underestimated his capacity for urination. Josh hated the hole, especially when it took the TV. On top of that, he was losing muscle mass and Kat ceased leaving meals. 

Once, Josh woke in the middle of the night, overwhelmed by a nightmare about Mikey. The house was quite silent, but impossibly so — the absence of even the absence of sound — in the direction of the hole, which had grown until the end of the fold-out sofa hung precarious over the edge, so that a sleeping Josh dangled over death like a lion toying with its prey. A moment of clarity rattled Josh and he wondered at what had gone wrong. Life wasn’t like this before the baby. He never threatened mailmen, attacked coworkers, or pissed in water bottles. Holes didn’t appear and grow and grow and grow and —

It seemed to Josh that all of this was Kat’s fault. Mikey was a baby, and thus blameless. Kat had carried the baby, given birth, been so overcome with emotion that she wouldn’t hold Mikey for the first few days of his life. And it was Kat that had banished him to this basement life. No longer.

That morning, Kat came into the kitchen and found Josh, flipping pancakes in a skillet. She pulled Mikey tighter to her breast.

“What are you doing?” Kat asked.

“Making breakfast,” Josh said. “Do you want chocolate chips? Blueberries?”

“Why are you naked?”

“I’ve been working out.”

Josh plated the cakes and consulted the fridge for syrup and butter, set the table and then himself. He looked at Kat, noting her bloodshot eyes with dark bags underneath, frazzled hair, the irritating way she kept licking her lips as if to speak, but said nothing.

“Here,” Josh said. “Let me hold him. You need a break.”

Kat did not resist as he took the baby (sweet boy — Michael was her father’s name) from her and cradled him in his arms. They both felt a shared moment of relief — maybe it could all work out. Then, Mikey erupted into tears and thrashed in Josh’s arms.

“Stop it,” Josh said. “Come on, Mikey. Knock it off. Please? Will you please shut up, won’t you? STOP IT.”

Kat took Mikey back and shook her head, as if to say the moment of peace had been too good to be true. She gestured toward the basement and left the room to soothe Mikey. The pancakes went uneaten into the trash.

Josh returned to the basement, shimmied along the wall at the edge of the hole, and wondered at his own capacity for fatherhood. Even in the hospital, with Kat emotionally checked out, Josh had been unable to feel a connection to the little, wriggling baby-thing with its swollen eyes and the purple, alienlike cord end protruding from its belly button. He knew he loved this creature, in theory, but a pang of guilt and self-hate filled him from the lack of immediate bond. Josh had paced the hospital room, holding the cloth bundle containing the amalgamation of his and Kat’s DNA, staring at his son’s face, thinking over and over: Come on, feel something. Anything.

Josh had felt things before the baby.

A plan formed in Josh’s mind. He would make a descent into the hole, which whispered the promise of answers when he peered into its inky depths. He needed some rope. He would dig out his old college backpack and fill it with water bottles and pancakes. With a hammer and pitons, he could scale the side of the hole and find out where all his excrement — he’d started defecating over the side of the hole, but still found comfort in bottle-pissing before tossing them over — ended up and why the hole gladly took it. Josh sweated as he planned. How deep did it really go?

When Kat came into the basement, ready to discuss terms for marital reformation, she didn’t notice the hole. She’d left Mikey in the bath. Part of her worried that she’d left the water running, but what sort of mother would do such a thing? She was fine. She was fine. Josh still acted strangely.

“Can we please talk?” Kat asked. “It’s like we don’t know how to talk anymore. I think there’s something wrong with me.”

Josh seized her by the shoulders and pinned her arms to her sides. He had grown so strong. “I need your help I don’t want to do this but I have no choice do you understand I need to know how deep it goes and you can tell me do you understand I’ll come after for you after and we’ll be fine we’ll be fine we’ll be fine I hope you understand.”

Josh shoved her into the hole and watched as she vanished from sight, then he bent down and turned to listen. He waited patiently for some sound or signal. He felt strong. He had to pee.

Kat was broken, wailing without a voice. She remembered laying in the dark when her father came home, drunk and eager to fight her mother. If she stayed still, he’d let her alone. It was easy; fear paralyzed. She wanted to force her useless body to move. Mikey needed her. Even with his self-pity and refusal to acknowledge her horror, Josh needed her. A mother was supposed to be the glue that held a family together; strong, sticky, and insoluble. There were so many ways to fail. You were a bad mother if you didn’t breast feed. You were a bad mother if they cried. You were a bad mother if you didn’t let them cry. You were a bad mother if you couldn’t sleep. You were an especially bad mother if you left your child unattended in a bath while confronting your husband about how you felt alone, couldn’t cut it as a mother, maybe it had been a mistake. And if you felt like two crossword puzzle answers, with an invented, tiny word shoved in the middle, and you didn’t know if this section had always been missing from the formulation or sometimes you suspected the puzzle-maker had gone mad, lunatic-cruciverbalist, and that the sanctity of life was a lie and nothing was safe nor ever could be, well, forget it.

As the hole swallowed her up, Kat wondered: How long had she been falling? When would it end? Why did everything reek of urine and shit and sweat?

__________

D.A. JENKINS RESIDES IN THE MIDWEST AND HAS A MASTER OF FINE ARTS IN CREATIVE WRITING. HE IS PRONE TO DREAMING TOO MUCH OR TOO LITTLE, DEPENDING ON WHO YOU ASK.