And it is not only by external enemies that I am threatened.
There are also enemies in the bowels of the earth.
— Franz Kafka, The Burrow
There’s a hole in the wall—an inexplicable fist-sized hole—right behind where Mr. Phillips is sitting. It wasn’t there yesterday, or the day before, or whenever Lenore was last in the box. There’s a fuzzy shape of what might be insulation inside, or spongy brick. The plaster around the hole’s edge puckers outward.
Lenore stares at the hole, or into it, while Mr. Phillips fidgets with what to say. It’s not so much that the hole draws her gaze as it is that the interrogation room’s maddening beige and the upsettingly blue and swollen and heavily bandaged head of Mr. Phillips rejects it. The hole is a lesser evil. Plus she’s tired, Lenore, having spent the night up and down—in the dungeon, her husband calls it, which means simply in her head…
“…I can’t stop,” Mr. Phillips says finally, cuing Lenore to uncap her pen and unplug her eyes from the hole.
“Can’t stop what?”
Mr. Phillips’ one visible bloodshot eye twitches, and the chain on his handcuff chitters. “I can’t stop thinking about animals. Little animals digging through the dirt. Why can’t I stop thinking about little animals?”
Lenore writes intrusive little animals in Mr. Phillips’ file. “I don’t know,” she says. “Can you tell me when they started? These thoughts about animals?”
“Two weeks ago.” Mr. Phillips is thirty-eight, according to his file, though with the bandages and the swelling he looks somehow both geriatric and premature. “I was in my car driving my daughter home from a friend’s house. She was talking to me about whatever, about her play-date. Everything was normal. Then I looked out the windshield and the sun was in the sky, low above the horizon. A really deep red. And I looked into it. I know you’re not supposed to. Only for a second, two seconds, maybe three. And somewhere in that time, as the light filled up my vision the way it does, it occurred to me that all those little animals that live underground, they don’t see the sun ever, not at all, because they only come out at night. Then I looked away because my eyes started hurting. But the thought about those little animals digging through the dirt, just digging and clawing their way through the cold dirt… hidden in their tunnels…”
Lenore glances at the hole.
“At first it wasn’t a big deal. It was just something I was thinking about. I’m not even sure I really noticed. But the next night, while I was getting into bed, I realized I was still thinking about it. About their little hands clawing the dirt, squeezing their bodies through passageways. And I fell asleep thinking about it, and I dreamed about it. Tunneling through dirt, their little mouths and blind eyes. Carving… And I woke up thinking about it, and feeling like I hadn’t slept at all. And then all day the next day the thoughts got even more vivid, more visceral, until all I could think about was digging and clawing…”
Lenore pretends to write in Mr. Phillips’ file, scribbling out a shape that looks like a tangle of flowers.
“I couldn’t focus at work. I lost my appetite. I tried to help my daughter with her homework, but these thoughts kept pulling my attention away. It was like the little animals were burrowing through my mind itself. And it kept getting worse. Channeling. Wriggling. Their vicious little claws… I started to consider the possibility that they would never go away. That’s when I first thought about killing myself. Mostly as a joke. Like, ‘Could you imagine if these thoughts never go away and I have to kill myself just to get some relief?’ But the days passed and nothing changed, and the joke started to seem less like a joke, more like a plan…”
Lenore taps her pen silently on the table’s edge. “These thoughts. You’re still having them now?”
Mr. Phillips nods, grimaces, his bandages wrinkling.
“Have you ever had intrusive thoughts like these before?”
Mr. Phillips shakes his head.
“Any suicidal ideation? Before last week?”
“Never.”
Lenore closes Mr. Phillips’ file. “So you felt trapped. You felt there was no relief from these sudden thoughts about animals, and the only recourse was to take your own life. That much… I can wrap my head around it. But what I don’t understand—what I need you to explain to me, Mr. Phillips—is your daughter…” Lenore shifts her position just enough to eclipse the hole behind Mr. Phillips’ head. “Why did you kill her, too?”
Mr. Phillips’ one eye goes wide, as if this is the first he’s hearing that his daughter is dead. Then it lowers. “I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her alone. She already lost her mother, two years ago. Brain cancer. Without me she would’ve had no one. I couldn’t do that to her. She's such a sweet girl, life would’ve been too hard. But it wasn’t supposed to be like this. We were both supposed to go. Both of us…” Mr. Phillips yanks suddenly against his handcuff. The table shifts.
Lenore stands. “Okay,” she says.
Mr. Phillips lowers his head onto his forearm and is still. Lenore bares her teeth at the top of his bandaged head, then massages the bridge of her nose. Something moans and shudders elsewhere in the hospital. She needs to sleep. She cannot afford another night like the last.
Mr. Phillips sneezes suddenly, violent, then clutches his bandages and whimpers.
***
Lenore finds her husband, Oscar, in the living room with a book on his lap. The lights are off, and the book is closed.
“I should have been a surgeon,” Lenore says, collapsing on the sofa.
Oscar picks at the corner of his book. “The detox called,” he says, tight-jawed, exigent, his teaching voice.
“When?”
“Today. A few hours ago…” Oscar does that thing where he nods in slow motion.
“…And what, Oscar?”
“Greg checked himself out. AMA. Again.”
Lenore pulls out her phone and calls her son—straight to voicemail: “This is Greg. Leave a message.” The phone lowers against Lenore’s belly; it is unclear whether or not she’s hung up, or is leaving a message.
“I won’t do it anymore.” Oscar looks old and feeble in the dark blue light. “I can’t. The last time was the last time.” He sets the book down, curls his arms over his face. “He was such a sweet boy. The world is too hard. Oh god… Sometimes I wish it would end. That it would all just end.”
Lenore watches her husband cry. There was a time when these derisory performances were repellent to her. Now she feels nothing much at all. She goes to the bedroom, undresses, runs the shower, dry-swallows a Flurazepam, a magnesium, and removes her earrings. In the mirror she asks: “What can I do for him?” Then, embarrassed, she smiles at herself.
When Oscar comes in, Lenore is asleep on top of the bedspread, the lights all on, the shower still running. He puts a blanket over her, then stands in the doorway for a long time.
***
Greg wakes up as the car clips briefly onto the rumble strips.
“Sorry,” says the guy driving, glancing in Greg’s direction, though not at him. “I’m gonna be turning west soon.”
The sun is up but not yet over the trees. Greg fishes a vodka bottle from the shopping bag at his feet and takes a long drink. He left without his sneakers, and his socked toes, sticking out from the too-small detox-issued sandals, are numb. “Where are we?”
“Just right at the state line.”
“I can get out whenever.”
The guy driving is effeminate, and though Greg has only seen him seated he must be very tall given that his knees come up almost to where his hands rest on the wheel. “I’ll drop you at the next exit,” he says. “You heading home?”
“I’m going to see a friend.”
“Girlfriend or boyfriend?”
“Just a friend. A childhood friend.”
“That’s nice you’re still in touch with childhood friends.”
One of Greg’s arm hairs snags on the plastic ID bracelet’s adhesive. “I haven’t seen him or talked to him in twenty years.”
The guy driving squints at the space around Greg. “Why now?”
Greg drinks more vodka, picks at the ID bracelet. “I didn’t even know how to find him until a few months ago. Finally tracked down his address and just… went back and forth about it. Then I was talking to a counselor and I realized, like, I’m carrying around a lot for him. About something that happened when we were kids.”
The guy driving nods seriously. “What happened when you were kids?”
Greg holds his hand flat above his lap, forces the shaking to stop. He plants his tongue against the roof of his mouth. In detox they check the tongue for shaking; it’s possible to temporarily will the hands to stop, but the tongue will give you away. “We grew up together,” he says. “A group of us. We used to ride our bikes on the weekends, around town, outside of town. There was this quarry. Abandoned. Limestone or whatever. Like a mile north of town. This huge hole in the earth. You’ve seen them. Enormous.”
From the sky it looked cadaverous. Botched.
“This one had tunnels dug out from its bottom, into the mountainside. We went up there one day in the fall. Left our bikes at the top and hiked down. We wanted to explore the tunnels. I don’t know what we thought we were gonna find, but I remember we had it in our heads that we were gonna find something. We had talked about it for weeks. Anyway. We finally went in.”
The tunnel was a black hole in the white earth.
“There were five of us. It was dark. This was before phones and shit, so we just had a single flashlight. It hardly did anything. Damp. Colder and colder the further we went. The smell of dirt… But we were determined. We just kept going…”
They walked in a line, the walls mealy.
“And we did find something. Deep in the tunnel. A half a mile, more.”
A smell…
“ Andrew was in the front, with the flashlight. I was somewhere near the back.”
…ferric, of urine.
“I only saw it for a second…”
Cadaverous. Botched…
“…before the light went out.” Greg tears his ID bracelet free. “Then everyone was screaming and running. Falling over each other in the dark. We ran and ran. It felt like forever. I thought the tunnel was never going to end. But then it did, and we were back in the quarry. The daylight. All of us except Andrew.”
The guy driving guides the car into the right lane.
“None of us wanted to go back in. So we waited for him. We were afraid to get help, because we thought we would get in trouble. Maybe if we’d… But he finally came out. An hour later. He limped out. Covered in dirt. Stooped over like he was carrying something. His clothes were gone… He didn’t say anything. He didn’t look at any of us. We threw a coat over him and he lurched off. Even left his bike.” Greg drinks. “He didn’t show up at school on Monday, and the next week we heard he and his mom had moved away. Didn’t tell anyone where they were going. And that was it. We never heard from him again.”
The guy driving shrugs his eyebrows. He is not as effeminate as Greg initially construed. His arms are so long that his elbow prods Greg’s. “Shit, bro,” he says, hitting the exit ramp a bit fast. “Mind if I roll the windows down?”
Without waiting for an answer the car’s windows slide open, and wind piles in. The ID bracelet, crumpled in Greg’s lap, whips out of the car.
***
A small yellow house nestled against the woods. The lawn is ankle-high and ridden with dandelions. There’s a flower garden catty-corner to the house, crowded with a tangle of gray flowers, and a bird feeder on a post, unfilled.
Greg stands on the front porch, eyeing the blanched curtains layered within the window beside the door. He checks his hands, which are still for now. His socks are soaking wet for some reason. This whole thing is insane. But it’s this, he thinks, then knocks.
Something scutters beneath the porch, from one side to the other.
The door unbolts and opens. A waft of hot wood and disinfectant precedes a face, a woman’s face, only as familiar as any other human face, entombed in shadow.
Greg shields his eyes. “Ms. Davis?”
“Yes?”
“Abigail Davis?”
“Yes.”
“My name is Greg. Greg Hoffman.”
Abigail’s face floats.
“I grew up with your son, with Andrew.” Greg points back the way he came. “In Woodlawn. We were friends.”
The door wavers. “What do you want?”
“Is he here?”
Abigail closes the door partly, so that only one eye is visible. “It’s not a good time.”
“Please. If he’s here, if I could just talk to him for a minute… I came a long way.”
From within the house, a girl’s voice: “Who is it?”
The door closes. Greg pushes air through his pursed lips and turns away. The sun peeks below the eave, cutting directly into his eyes, filling his vision with fiery water. The vodka bottle is half empty. He left the detox without his sneakers, without his phone…
The door reopens and Greg turns around.
“Okay, then,” Abigail says, standing aside for Greg to enter, which he does, quickly, as if to escape inclement weather. The door shuts behind him and he stands in darkness as his pupils yawn. There is music, soft guitar. It is hot. Curtains are heaped over the windows. There are vases filled with colorless flowers on every surface, conspicuous. Prisoners. The smell of wood and disinfectant are complicated by other, unidentifiable smells.
Abigail leads Greg down a hall into another dark room. There’s a young woman in a large chair, a blanket pulled up to her chin. Only it isn’t… It’s a man, without facial hair, with a soft jaw, his hair long and oily, eyes sunken, pale. Cancer maybe, or something. He could be anyone.
The floorboards beneath his bare, tumescent feet are stained and frayed.
Greg stands in the room’s doorway while Abigail goes to the man, adjusts the pillow behind his head. The music issues from a radio on the floor.
“Andrew?” Greg asks, and when the man does not respond: “Do you remember me?”
Andrew stares. “Yes.” His voice is tinny, pubescent.
“Good, good.” Greg takes a small step forward, changes his mind, shifts his weight. “I’ve thought about you a lot. Over the last twenty years. I can’t believe… sorry…” He sneezes, sniffles. “The flowers.”
Abigail kneels beside Andrew. They watch Greg.
“So everyone’s good,” Greg says. “Chris lives in Chicago with his wife and kids. Will is still in Woodlawn, running his dad’s shop. Alex I think is doing insurance or something. Kind of lost touch… But we’re good. We’re all good.”
A radiator tsks.
Greg wipes his nose. “And you?” he asks.
Andrew and Abigail are a two-headed creature in the dinge, silent.
Greg commits to a step forward. “Well I’ve been going through some stuff for a while. For years, actually. It’s for a lot of reasons. I mean, you remember my mom, right? She basically psycho-analyzed me into mental illness. And my dad… I never had a strong male role model. But lately I’ve been trying to get better. And in that process I’ve been thinking about you. Specifically about when you left…”
The song ends, then starts over.
“So I guess I just wanted to hear from you,” Greg says. “You know, that you’re doing okay, and that everything’s…” He sneezes into his hands, wipes them on his shirt. “Just a little closure. It would help me a lot.”
The radiator scritches—or something behind the wall.
“What is it you want me to say?” Andrew asks.
“No, nothing,” Greg says. “I don’t want you to say anything. I just want to hear about, you know… What have you been doing? Twenty years. How have you spent your days?”
“Seven thousand six hundred and four.”
Greg pinches at his nose. “I’m sorry?”
“It’s been seven thousand six hundred and four days.”
“Okay.”
Andrew takes a long breath. “I’ve spent every single one of them here. Recovering.”
“Recovering from what?”
“The night before.”
Greg sniffles, snorts. “I don’t understand.”
Abigail rises. “I think you should go.”
“He came all this way,” Andrew says. “He wants closure.” Andrew sits forward, a pair of thin, hairless arms finding the chair’s armrests. His eyes find Greg’s. “Look.” He stands with effort, and the blanket falls away.
It takes Greg a moment in the dark room.
Andrew is nude save for his groin, which is wrapped in dark red bandages, the skin on his thighs and waist deep blue and pitted. Despite his general boniness, his belly protrudes enormously, discolored veins distended like roots. Pregnant—though of course he cannot be. And as if to mock or confirm this observation he clasps his hands over his prolapsed navel, to guard or support the weight, the way an expectant mother might.
Greg’s tongue panics around his teeth. “…I’m confused,” he says.
Andrew strokes his engorged belly. “It’s simple: When the sun goes down, it comes out. Before the sun comes up, it goes back in. Every night. For twenty years. Seven thousand six hundred and four times.”
Greg tries not to eye the bloody bandages.“What comes out?”
Abigail has had enough. “You need to rest.” She helps Andrew sit, readjusts the blanket and the pillow behind his neck and kisses his greasy hair.
Greg sneezes. “What comes out?” he asks again.
“Stay,” Andrew says, winded. “See for yourself.”
Another sneeze, this one ejecting a hunk of phlegm onto the back of Greg’s hand. Greg back-steps, as if the sneeze has propelled him, out of the room, back down the hall, through the door and across the yard, the vodka bottle at his lips.
***
Later, crumpled on the grass, the vodka bottle empty, his back arched forward and his neck craned back, eyes closed at the sky, the roaring sunlight, Greg will think—to whatever degree thinking is available to him—of a day long ago, with his mother and father, digging holes at the beach, looking for the little animals that live under the sand, and how every time they would find one—a crab, a sand flea, a jointy worm—his father would gasp, and pull him back, and tell him to leave it alone, that it was dangerous, or could be dangerous, and they would stand and watch it burrow back underground, every time, until Greg asked why they were doing this at all if these animals were so dangerous, and shouldn’t they stop, and his father said yes, they should stop, and his mother tented a hand over her eyes and looked hard at some angle away from them, and for the rest of the day she was lost in her head the way she got all the time, not there at all, and Greg thinks: Maybe it’s this.
***
And later still, as the red sun trembles behind the earth, Greg reenters the small yellow house. He stands in the room’s doorway, dizzy, filled with vodka fumes, as Andrew sweats in his chair.
Abigail turns up the music just a little, the same dreamy guitar, and clicks on a single lamp in the corner. She folds the blankets off Andrew’s body and gets down on her knees in front of him. With a sponge and a rag she laps water on his feet, washes his toes’ crevices, his heels and swollen ankles, his calves and thighs. She scrubs gingerly, kisses the damp parts of his skin, hums softly some different but consonant melody. When she’s done, the bowl of water is brownish with whatever she’s cleaned from her son’s skin. She sets it aside.
Andrew’s breath labors.
Abigail unfolds the bandages from his groin, her body blocking Greg’s view, and places them in a garbage bag. When she steps aside, Greg moans. It looks less of flesh than stone, or gaping clay. Mealy. Cadaverous.
Andrew’s hands clutch the armrests, and he vomits on himself. His eyes find Greg’s. “I hope this helps you.”
Abigail goes to the corner, faces the light.
Dark fluid patters on the floorboards. The room fills with a ferric odor, with the chemical stench of urine. Greg left detox without his shoes, without his phone, with forty dollars in cash. He has twenty left, enough for another bottle, or a bus ride back to Woodlawn. His father used to follow him everywhere. His mother keeps a journal in a safe, and showers compulsively. Andrew screams like a child.
Greg turns away as a shadow rises up behind his, spread open across the doorway.
***
The sun returns red, as it left. A terrace of pink clouds moves north. A pair of birds collide; one falls, the other cants leftward, toward the woods.
Abigail opens the door just enough to squeeze out, closes it quietly behind her. She carries a weaved basket and a pair of flower cutters, and kneels at the edge of the garden. Her fingers feel along the stems for the secondary joints, the best place to cut, she’s found. She places clumps of flowers in her basket. One slips from her hands. She clears her throat, folds the others aside to retrieve it.
There she finds a hole in the soil. An animal burrow, big enough for a hand to rummage into. No matter what she does they keep appearing, these little holes. They are terrible for the integrity of the garden. The flowers are not growing as they should.
Greg emerges from the house and closes the door too roughly. He spent the night in Andrew’s old bed—in his clothes, it would seem. He comes off the porch and shields his eyes against the sunlight. When he notices Abigail he wipes his nose.
“Did you sleep?” Abigail asks.
“I was up and down.” Greg switches his plastic shopping bag from one hand to the other. “Will you stay with him forever?” he asks.
Abigail frowns; the question does not make sense. She stands on whining, popping knees, dusts her pants. “Go home,” she says, and then, as if she had been speaking to herself, she walks back into her house.
Greg looks out at the tousled lawn. Something like a dead bird lies amongst the ashy clumps of dandelions. There’s a tree by the lawn’s edge so enormous that Greg can’t understand why he hasn’t noticed it until just now. The smell of flowers tingles his sinuses. He looks everywhere except at the red sun, which is everywhere.
-- Max Halper is the author of the novels Lamella and The Meadow and the Misread. His work explores systems of intimacy and violence. His next novel, Year of the Mountain, is forthcoming from APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL PRESS. You can find more at max-halper.com.