Jackass! the hole says. Very pretty, very stupid! Push the fucking button!
It scares me. I’m tempted.
I put down the firing device and stand and try to shake out the brain waves. I’m capable of atrocity. Lucid, entirely practical, I feel both powerful and powerless, like the stars. I make myself move. I circle the floor of the hole, feeling my way, but also not feeling—which is what scares me—then I sit down and check the safety on the firing device and stare at the walls and look for signs in the darkness. I see myself crawling under barbed wire at Sagua la Grande. Flares and tracers. The terrible things man will do to man. I see the wreck of the Thresher. I see my father dying under yellow spotlights. He won’t stop, he’s a professional, he keeps dying. I hear sonar. I hear Melinda yelling, “Daddy!” I hear Bobbi’s warm blond voice, scanning itself, free verse on the brink of blank. She needs space, she tells me. She pins Space Walk to my pillow. There’s a transworld look in her eyes when she sees my rage, when I take a scissors to her diaphragm, when I burn the poem, when I tell her no one’s leaving. I see her sleeping. It’s after midnight, and I kiss my wife’s cheek and quietly slide out of bed. No lights, no alarm. Blue jeans and a flannel shirt, then out to the backyard, where I pick a spot near the tool shed and begin digging. I won’t permit separation. It’s final. Am I crazy? Maybe, maybe not, but I see black flashes against a chrome sky, scalps in a punch bowl, mass going to energy. And there’s more. Because I also see a white stucco house in the tropics. The roof is burning. It’s live television, all the networks are there, and cops and SWAT teams and smoke and sirens, and Ollie Winkler is shot through the mouth. The front door burns slowly, like charcoal. The diningroom drapes are burning. Ollie moves along the floor, toward Tina, but he’s shot again, in the hip and head. Tina hides in a closet. But the closet burns, and the bedrooms and attic. I can smell the heat and tear gas and burning plaster. Ned Rafferty coughs and smiles. His face is wax. He keeps touching himself, but his face sticks to his hands, he can’t fix the melting. “The gist of the gist,” he says. He raises a hand, as if to point out a lesson, but the hand curls into a claw, and Ned Rafferty burns. The gunfire seems distant and trivial. Holes open up in the walls, and there’s a shower of sparks from the ceiling, and the doorbell rings, and Tina Roebuck cries out from her burning closet. It all seems phony and impossible, except it is possible, it’s real, people truly burn, the skin goes black to gray, the bowels open, the fingernails peel back and the bones glow and there are snappings and splinterings, burning sugars and phosphates, burning enzymes, the body burns. Nethro is shot dead. Ebenezer Keezer topples sideways and burns. The safe house burns. In the attic, a warhead no doubt burns. Everything is combustible. Faith burns. Trust burns. Everything burns to nothing and even nothing burns. There are no footprints—the footprints burn. There are no messages in bottles, because the bottles burn, and there is no posterity, because posterity burns. Cement and steel, it all burns. The state of Kansas, the forests, the Great Lakes, the certificates of birth and death, every written word, every sonnet, every love letter. Graphite burns. Churches burn. Memory burns, and with it the past, all that ever was. The reasons for burning burn. Flags burn. Liberty and sovereignty and the Bill of Rights and the American way. It just burns. And when there is nothing, there is nothing worth dying for, and when there is nothing worth dying for, there is only nothing.
The hole makes a sound of assent.
Nothing.
The night seems to stretch out like elastic. Melinda turns in her sleep and looks at me with half-opened eyes. “Hey, there,” I whisper, and she nods, then tucks her chin down and sleeps.
If I could, I would save her life.
I let myself sway with the night. Bobbi’s breathing. The influences of the moon.
And later Sarah appears. She does a cartwheel on the wall. Then she giggles and says, “I’m dead! You know what dead is? You get this malaise. You forget to wash your hair. You’re bored stiff. I’m dead.” How much, I wonder, is real? Like those phone calls back in high school, I can still dial and break the connection and hear that husky voice of hers. It’s not unreal. Right now, as she goes up into a handstand, it’s neither real nor unreal, it’s just dazzling. “Love you,” I say, and Sarah smiles and says, “Oh, well—better late than never. Except I’m dead. Too bad about Rio, though. Would’ve been a gas.” She sighs. She pecks my cheek and sits cross-legged on the wall. “But don’t apologize. No problem, I’m dead. What’s new with you?” So I tell her about the hole and the dynamite and the implausibility of happy endings. The bombs, I say, are real, and Bobbi wants to leave me. Sarah listens carefully. When I feel sorrow, she comes off the wall and goes inside me for a time, then hovers near Bobbi, frowning. “Well,” she says, “if I weren’t so dead I’d say hit the switch. We’ll run away together. That island I told you about.” She kisses Bobbi’s lips. “So then. The fantasies didn’t pan out?”
Then she takes the firing device from my lap.
“Hold me,” she says.
Along the rim of the hole, the Christmas lights are soft and mysterious, and Sarah takes her place in my arms. I don’t know what to tell her, except it wasn’t our universe.
She seems to stiffen.
“Such bullshit,” she snarls. “I’m in the other universe. Nothing here! Washout—colossal fucking drag. You should’ve loved me. You know that, don’t you? We could’ve been happy. All those places we could’ve seen, Paris and East Berlin. That honeymoon I never had. Oh Christ, we could’ve had it. Diapers and rattles and all those nights together. Is that too sentimental? I don’t mean to sound morbid, but I’m dead, and there’s only one universe that counts. You should’ve loved me. That’s all I mean, we should’ve made promises to each other and kept them, like vows, and we should’ve unzipped each other and crawled inside and been honest and true and loving, just loving, all the time, and we should’ve done everything we didn’t do. We should’ve taught each other things. We should’ve had Christmas together—is that silly? Eat lobster and open the presents and make love and go to church and believe in God and make love again and light candles on the tree and listen to records and have oyster stew at midnight and go to bed and smell the pine needles and sleep and wake up and still be together. It’s a little sad, isn’t it? It’s sad that we could’ve been so happy.”
Later, in the dark, she says, “Why did I die?”
I don’t have the answer.
Sarah nods and says, “I thought so.”
And later she reads my thoughts: “Doesn’t seem real, does it? I don’t feel dead. Maybe I’m not. Maybe it’s something we dream up to make our stories better. Maybe so?”
Then comes a long silence.
“Sarah?” I say, but she doesn’t speak.
She’s dead.
Like my father, like all of them, she died and dies and keeps on dying, again and again, as if repetition might disclose a new combination of possibilities.
“Oh, Lord,” I say, but I don’t know what to ask for.
I smell daylight coming.
The hole says, Now and never.
I lift the firing device. It’s light in my hands, or seems light, box-shaped, an aluminum casing with a small plastic safety catch and a yellow button. The copper wires wind off toward the north wall. All it takes is a touch. Not even courage, bare volition. It occurs to me that I’m not immune to curiosity—so easy. I think about Ned and Ollie and Tina, my father, my mother, and it’s the simple desire to discover if the dead are ever truly dead.
In the absence of hope, what can we hope for?
Does love last forever?
Are there any absolutes?
I want to know what the hole knows. The hole is where faith should be. The hole is what we have when imagination fails.
“Hey,” Melinda says.
Something moves inside me.
“Hey—”
She makes a languid, woozy motion with her arm. After a moment she sits up in the hammock, rubs her nose, tu
rns her head slightly to one side, and looks at me without recognition.
I feel unsteady.
There’s a sudden compression when she says, “Daddy?” Enormous pressure, it’s too much for me. I place the firing device at my feet and get down on my hands and knees and practice deep breathing. The hole, it seems, is in my heart.
“Daddy?” Melinda says.
“Here, angel.”
“Where? How’d I get down in this … God, it’s dark. Where’s Mommy?”
“Mommy’s fine.”
“Yeah, but—” She stops and touches her flannel nightgown. Her eyes wander. She looks at the granite walls, then up at the Christmas lights, then down at me, then at the firing device. There isn’t enough light to make out her expression, but I can easily imagine it. “Man oh man,” she says, “what’s going on?”
It isn’t a question, though. She knows.
Her eyes, if I could see them, would be blue and full of wisdom. Drawing conclusions, perhaps. Maybe a little frightened.
I’m still on my hands and knees. The squeeze is on.
No dignity in it, but I don’t trust myself to stand.
Melinda stares at me.
“Daddy,” she says, “what’s happening?”
I keep smiling. I want to go to her but I can’t manage it; I make a queer crabbing motion, knees and knuckles. It’s a balance problem. I’m embarrassed when I feel myself slipping—I can’t get traction.
The hole cackles.
Dynamite!
Melinda seems startled. I’m smiling at her—it’s all love—but she recoils and hugs herself and says, “What?”
“Nothing, baby.”
“I heard you.”
“Nothing.”
“That word,” she says, “I heard it. You said it, I heard you! I can’t believe this.”
She’s wide awake now.
Quickly, she gets out of the hammock and takes a step toward me and stops and glances at Bobbi and then steps backward. All I can do is smile. She takes another step backward.
There’s silence while she makes the connections.
“Get up,” she says sternly.
“In a second.”
“Daddy.”
“One second, princess.”
She puts a thumb against the edge of her mouth.
“No,” she says, “I don’t want a second. I want out. This hole, God, it smells like … Let me out!”
“Melinda—”
“Out!” she shouts.
I can see her eyes now. She glares at me, then spins around and moves to a wall and hits it with her fist. “Now,” she screams, “I want out!” The Christmas lights give her face a splotchy blue and red tint. She kicks the wall. “Now!” she screams. Her eyes keep roving—quick, jerky movements of the head, up and down.
When she spots the dynamite, I pretend it’s not what it is. It’s not evil, I think. Not murder, not sorrow.
“Oh, wow,” she grunts.
With her left hand, gingerly, she reaches out and nudges one of the copper blasting caps.
Reality impinges.
“Baby, don’t,” I say.
It’s a discovery for both of us. Melinda wipes her hand and turns and looks at me. I can’t explain it. Just the sadness of discovery, the dynamite and the wiring and the blasting caps, and when she looks at me—not accusing, only knowing—there is nothing that can be said or done. She bites down on her lip. She wants to cry, I know. Her tongue makes a light clicking noise against her teeth.
I’m helpless. I’m aware of the night’s pure harmonics, but I can’t make myself move.
I watch her trace the wires back to the firing device. Stooping, she inspects the plastic safety catch; she clutches her nightgown at the throat. Not murder, I remind myself. There is no evil in it, no rancor or shame, and we are all innocent and unsullied and sane. Even so, I suck in my breath when she finds the yellow button.
“God,” she says.
And she knows.
Now, at this instant, we share the knowledge that there is no mercy between fathers and daughters. We will kill for our children. Our children will kill for us. We will kill for families. And above all we will kill for love, as men have always killed. Crimes of passion. As terrorists kill. As soldiers kill for love of honor and love of country. Just love. And when there is no love, there is nothing worth dying for, only nothing, and Melinda knows this.
She picks up the firing device.
“I don’t care what,” she says, “I’m not afraid of you. I’m just not.”
“I know that.”
“I’m not.”
“Fine, then,” I tell her. “But be careful, okay? Be extra careful.”
“Don’t move, Daddy.”
“I won’t.”
“Stay right there,” she says. “You better not even move, because … You better not.”
“Careful, baby. Extra super careful.”
“I mean it. You better not.”
She carries the firing device to the far side of the hole, near Bobbi’s hammock. I do the calculations. Five or six paces between us, maybe four seconds. Hard to be sure. Would my legs work? What about the shock? All the imponderables.
“Sweetheart,” I say, very softly, “I wish you’d—”
“Don’t move.”
“No, I’m not moving.”
“If you do, though, I might—you know—I might. Just stay there. Just be nice, don’t scare me.”
A gallant little girl. And smart. She keeps her eyes on me. We both know. She reaches out and shakes Bobbi’s arm.
“What’s wrong?” she says. “How come Mommy won’t wake up?”
Again, I smile. “Just can’t, I guess. Maybe—I don’t know—maybe Mommy forgot how.”
“Forgot?” Melinda says. She makes a motion with her shoulders. “That’s stupid. Not even funny. It’s almost … How’d I get down here in the first place? Just dumped me in, I suppose.”
“I carried you, baby. Both of you.”
“You could’ve dropped me, though.”
“I didn’t.”
“Yeah, but I mean—” Suddenly, almost falling, she sits down and clamps her arms around the firing device. “I don’t mean that!” she yells. But she doesn’t cry; she doesn’t dare. She measures the distance between us. One hand flutters up to her ear, as if to brush away an irritation, then she flicks her thumb against the safety catch. “I mean this thing. I mean, why? I always thought you sort of loved me.”
“I do,” I say. “I do love you.”
“Okay, but I mean, how come you almost tried to blow me up? You did, didn’t you?”
“Never.”
“You did!”
“No way. Never. Careful, now.”
For a moment she’s on the verge of crying. She puts a finger near the button.
“Scared?” she asks.
“You bet I am.”
“Don’t move, then. Better be real scared.”
“I am,” I say. “I’m scared.”
She runs a hand across her forehead. I know what she’s going through, I’ve been there myself.
“Don’t think I’m chicken,” Melinda says, “because I’m not. And if something bad happened, I bet you’d be so goddamn sorry you couldn’t believe it.”
She makes a small, incongruous fist and holds it over the firing device and screams, “Goddamn!”
There is nothing I can do.
“Goddamn!” she cries, and the hole laughs and says, No survivors! and Melinda yells, “Stop it!”
We sit facing each other from opposite sides of the hole. She’s crying now; I can see her shoulders shaking. “Daddy, please!” she says. “Let’s get out of here!” And if I could, I would do it. I would take her in my arms and be calm and gentle and find safety by saving. God, yes, I would. “A joke,” I’d say, “just a big silly joke,” then I’d carry her up the ladder, and Bobbi, too, both of them, one in each arm, and I’d laugh and say, “What a joke.” I’d be a hero. I’d do ma
gic. I’d lead them into the house and brew up some hot chocolate and talk about the different kinds of spin you can put on a Ping-Pong ball. And the world would be stable. The balance of power would hold. A believer, a man of whole cloth, I would believe what cannot be believed. The power of love, the continuing creation—it cannot be believed—and I would therefore believe. If you’re sane, the world cannot end, the dead do not die, the bombs are not real.
Am I crazy?
I am not.
To live is to lose everything, which is crazy, but I choose it anyway, which is sane. It’s the force of passion. It’s what we have.
When I get to my feet, Melinda whimpers and says, “Stay away from me.” But I’m willing to risk it. I’m a believer. The first step is absolute. “Daddy,” she says, “you better not!” But I have to. I cross the hole and kneel down and lift the firing device from her lap and hold her tight while she cries. I touch her skin. It’s only love, I know, but it’s a kind of miracle.
In the dark, Sarah’s smile seems hopeful.
“Another universe,” she says. “A nice little miracle, that’s all I want. You, William. I’ll never stop wanting.”
But it isn’t real.
Not Sarah, not the Bomb. Nuclear war: just a fault line in the imagination. If you’re sane, you accept this. It’s easy. Sarah winks at me, still flirting, and I nod and embrace my daughter.
At daylight we climb the ladder.
And that, too, is easy.
I hustle Melinda into the house, turn on the shower, test the temperature, and tell her to hop in.
She looks at me through the steam.
She nearly smiles, but doesn’t.
“I’m a grown-up girl,” she says. “You can’t just stand there and watch.”
“No, I guess I can’t.”
“God. What a father.”
“Right,” I say.
I close the bathroom door, listen for a moment, then return to the hole. It’s a fine summer morning. I take Bobbi from the hammock, holding her as if we’re dancing, and when she opens her eyes, the hole seems to laugh and whisper, One more clown in the screwy cavalcade. Hickory dickory hope.
It doesn’t matter.