Plunge Headlong into the Abyss with Guns Blazing and Legs Tangled! "It's better when I watch it through the bottomless black fearvoid in all of our hearts than when I watch it on basic cable," he told scientists after being forcibly removed from his home, slated to be leveled hours later. "I think the old thing somehow makes the prizes more exotic. I don't know the physics of it really but it feels 100% right when I say it out loud like this." Trying it, scientists claimed that saying it out loud did in fact make it feel 100% correct, whereas previously it hadn't, but the tenuous theory has yet to be corroborated or disproven primarily because the formal research team brought into lead the investigation of the abyss lost its federal funding after a change in political climate. Before committing suicide, Senator Elison, R-NC, famously spoke to the House about a bill detailing forthcoming research grants: "Was America founded on the emptiness that pervades everything we do everyday all the time everywhere? Ladies and gentleman, not my America. I mean, am I wrong in saying it? In having a proud faith that the America I know and love was founded, or at least more founded, definitely at least more founded if not totally founded, on special boots for digging? No, I am not wrong, I am right: Special boots for digging brought to us by TelCo, which I have proudly invested in, are more American than some immensely infinite hole. I urge you all today to vote with your hearts—but not the part that is clouded in darkness and meaninglessness. Use the other more American parts like the left ventricle or even the tricuspid." The abyss was subsequently sold at federal auction to a startup investment firm intending to sit on the purchase while its value appreciated. "Our analysts," one spokesperson said at the time of purchase, "are reporting that the abyss only increases its emptiness and is everyday comprised of more and more nothinger-ness—a word coined to describe the severity of this new nothing which goes beyond all previous notions of nothing. I don't really get all the math behind it to be quite honest, but really, in our viewpoint, it's not so much an abyss as it is what we around the office are calling a goldmine river—that is, a river flowing with many individual goldmines instead of water—insomuch as it's true that nothing and gold are interchangeable. And according to our advanced business models? It is." After filing for bankruptcy, Zed Exchanges, Ltd. donated the abyss to charity in an attempt at a one-time tax break. The recipient, Planned Parenthood, took offense to their receiving the donation, however, and quickly had their lawyers expunge the unwanted real estate, selling it at extremely low cost to a young entrepreneur by the name of Ted Aplansky—who boasted of plans to open a luxury spa and resort, aptly named The Last Resort, specializing in "religious" retreats. "For too long the atheists of America have waited for a Mecca to call their own," he made clear to the press, "and it goes without saying that the Atheist Mecca will provide the emptiness we've all come to expect in our own lives—only at a much higher intensity than you have ever experienced before—and in addition will also come complete with a complimentary mudbath because, hey what else is there? Certainly not anything to believe in if you think about it long enough so that it becomes true to you personally! And remember: it's complimentary, not insultory!" Killed by wolves, Ted never lived to see his project reach completion. Riddled with bad luck and bad press, the abyss remained untouched, unsold, unpraised, and almost entirely enveloped by the framework of an unfinished resort complex. After years of inactivity and disinterest, the abyss was reabsorbed into Montana state property during a manic rezoning campaign led by a newly elected governor. Prompted by the disappearances of pets, children, and indigenous wildlife, a police investigation suggested that the abyss was a danger to the local community. "All I'm saying is," Chief Rickman elucidated, "we have on our hands a pretty big hole. I'm also saying that, according to my sources, kids can fit in this hole—if they so choose. Now, you put two and two together and you get my point—is what I'm saying if you do the simple math here folks." As it was within walking distance of the local elementary school, it was only a matter of weeks before the local PTA raised enough money to build a barbed wire fence around the abyss—in addition to enlisting a twenty-four hour security force. And so it was that Wilson Bettertone became a security guard of the endless void inside all of us and all around us—though admittedly concentrated most densely here at his post in the fields of Tandahone, Montana. Wilson recalls a famous quote by someone sometime somewhere, he can't quite remember who or when or where: "when you stare into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you." Having more than enough time to stare into it himself, Wilson can and does say with authority that "it doesn't so much stare back as it more often gooses you when you aren't looking—kind of a pinch in the rear—but then also it's kind of only in your mind. You really have to stand on the edge of the nothingness hole to understand the feeling, though. Still, calling it a hole isn't exactly right either. That is, it isn't a hole at all—it's nothing at all. And it's not the type of nothing where there's just a bunch of empty space, like a desert or something or a canyon—no, it's more like the kind where there isn't even any empty space in the spot where there isn't anything to begin with. I mean, you can't see it like you can see a hole. But you also can't not see it, either—it's right not there where it isn't, just as plain as the day. 'There's the abyss,' you'd say if you saw it. Though, like I said, you kind of have to not see it up close and personal to really see what I'm talking about here. Or not talking about, for that matter." Wilson is thirty years old and unmarried. Women complain of him: "he talks too much. He starts saying something about dinner and then all the sudden three months later he's still talking and you're driving drunk in a corn field because you hate your parents." On a typical day, Wilson shows up at work, sits at his booth doing, as he puts it, "next to nothing." Now, he likes to say "next to nothing" specifically because doing nothing "kind of loses its meaning when you're sitting next to the abyss—which is quite literally doing nothing. Or, perhaps more precisely, not doing something. You can't tell which really, I've tried. In fact, I usually try to tell the difference between doing nothing and not doing something every day before lunch. It's exhausting." Wilson is slightly cross-eyed. For the most part, no one comes and no one goes. "I see the night shift guard when I come in and he heads home to his wife. Otherwise it's usually just me." The kids don't come anymore, and the invisible fence keeps the dogs out. Occasionally, though, an old man or drunk shows up shouting obscenities and tries to hop into the abyss "crying or smiling or both or neither—or one and then the other or all of them kind of mixed together so it looks more like constipation. Most of the time, their wives died or left them or don't love them or never met or married them in the first place." The night guard at the nothinghole is a drunk, his name is Ted Bancouver, and—to his credit—more people know the former than the latter. Apparently he falls asleep on the job: security cameras caught a homeless man hopping the fence unmolested, and on Ted's watch, then hurling himself naked into the endless nothing holding the mayor's baby and a bagful of staplers reported missing earlier that day. Ted had no explanation for this, so he was docked three weeks pay. In addition, he received a nasty phone call from the office supply store owner, Mr. McGombathe. As Ted tells it, "McGombathe used the word 'truncate' in a fashion that was both threatening and very creative. He moonlights as a poet when he's not managing the store, but he writes mostly with his penis and not so much on paper as on women." More importantly, though, it is because of the mayor-baby-homeless-man-stapler incident that Wilson received the following letter:
Accompanying the letter was a shovel. "At first, I was a little unsure of how to build a fake existential abyss," Wilson recalls. Over the course of two days, though, he managed to dig one—six feet wide and three feet deep. "I was pretty impressed with myself, to tell you the truth. Still, it wasn't complete until I added the sign—it's the icing on the cake." A piece of cardboard leaning on a rock reads: Plunge Headlong Into the Abyss With Guns Blazing and Legs Tangled! An arrow points down toward the ditch below, "just to make sure" Wilson says. As most of the time no one comes and no one goes, the pretend endless nothingness sat almost useless for months. And then things—as they tend to do—changed.
Mrs. Frambrot killed her husband with a can of green-beans to the head. Their marriage had been on the rocks for years due to different work schedules and the tribulations of child rearing. Sex had become a childhood memory and dinner an almost religious routine, masochistic and depressing. Yet, after her husband's heart attack, they managed to find a sort of peace. They remembered “what it means to be naked, vulnerable. The rocks slid away and the ice melted and we held each other for the first time, one carrying the other to nowhere in particular without moving, without breathing or thinking, just holding." Reenacting their lives together, Mrs. Frambrot tossed the beans to her husband, just as she had the night she got pregnant for the first time, and her husband tried, smiling, to relive the same memory at the same time in the same place, but he was too slow, his arms too weak. The can knocked him off his feet and his head into the kitchen counter. "He died before he hit the ground," an EMT said. She arrived at the abyss carrying an empty fifth of tequila at 9 am on a Tuesday in May. Weighing over three hundred pounds, limber from her nakedness, and strong from her drunkenness, she barreled through the fence at what Wilson claims was "over fifty miles per hour." The fence went down and so did she—straight into the Protective Hole, screaming and wiggling. Once in the hole, she proceeded to roll around, eating dirt and beating her face, until she passed out in her own vomit. She sat there for almost two weeks, licking dew from rocks, until she abruptly got up and walked toward the highway. She was picked up two exits down and is now reportedly a salesclerk at a lamp store in western Pennsylvania. Soon afterward, Mr. Fuller, an unmarried fourth grade teacher at the elementary school, woke up one morning missing a leg—no explanation. "It's not there anymore," Chief Rickman made clear, "and that's what's most important here really if you follow a certain train of thought." There was no sign of forced entry and no disturbance in the house other than the missing leg. "Sometimes," the Chief went on to say, "people steal limbs. You don't hear about it so much because you wouldn't really believe it if you did. I mean do you believe it right now? When I'm telling you at this moment? Here at this time? I know I don't. It's ridiculous. But still it's true." After three weeks, the leg showed up in Mr. Fuller's mailbox, stuffed in haphazardly. Hanging around the ankle was a note that read: "Sorry, wrong leg." It was only two days later that his other leg was stolen just before breakfast. On the following Monday, drunk and giggling in his wheelchair, Mr. Fuller made his way across the field between the school and the abyss, a line of skipping, hopping fourth graders trailing behind him. Mr. Fuller brandished a large American flag on a pole in one hand and a prosthetic leg in another. "High ho!" he yelled as he approached the still-broken fence of the nothingnessfearvoidhole. Wheeling about wildly, he began to toss children into the Protective Hole, screaming with each toss, "Sorry, wrong leg!" The hole filled up pretty quickly, only a few children managing to escape, and then Mr. Fuller tossed himself in as well. "I don't really guard things so much as I just watch bad things happen," Wilson noted. "As a guard, it makes me feel pretty impotent. I mean, what can I do?" Behind him, Mr. Fuller dragged children by their feet into the hole as they attempted to claw their way up and out. "I don't even have a gun. Sure, I could yell and scream or say very forcefully, 'stop that!' but that doesn't make things change so much really." Wilson sipped his soda through a straw and continued, "It's pretty pointless. All of it. I mean, I only make $7.50 an hour." Perhaps out of duty, Wilson turned to the Protective Hole and said firmly, "Stop it!" No one did, of course. With a shrug, Wilson turned back to his soda. "That's the beauty of the Protective Hole, I guess. I know it's a lie, but it's a lie that helps people, right?" One by one the children slipped away, leaving Mr. Fuller crying in the Protective Hole, pulling himself around on his belly and waving his flag. As the children escaped, however, they made a beeline for the real abyss—because it looked like a clever place to hide. And that's how the fourth grade class of Tandahone Elementary fell into the endless nothingness inside all of our souls. In most any other town, this might have been the end of Jimmy, Allison, Stewart, José, Kristy, Donald, William, Cara, Brenda, Frank, Carl, Stacey, and Ed, but the PTA of Tandahone is a force of nature. "It is a constitutional right that our children are educated," demanded one parent. "Just because they now live in a bottomless hole that extends in all directions in time and space, doesn't mean that they are to be denied the rights of any other child. By the very nature of this thing, they are in our school's jurisdiction." Another parent continued, "When I moved to my new house on Tall Bush Lane, no one made a stink about my child going to school—but now that Jimmy lives in the endless abyss of fear and meaninglessness? Now he's not good enough to get an education? What country is this?" It was decided that a full time tutor would be dispatched into the abyss to educate the "relocated" students. A long rope was wrapped around a Ms. Anselar's waist, tied to a tree, and labeled, "Do not sever: property of Tandahone Board of Education." With a quiet dignity and silent acceptance, the newly hired tutor screamed loudly while a "special committee" of PTA chairpeople forced her into the abyss. "Mostly, it's something to trip over," Wilson said of the rope. "It's also made my job a little harder. I've got more responsibilities now. Like every other Friday? I have to throw in Ms. Anselar's salary. And every day I toss in the lunches that the kids' parents make. On Christmas? I'm going to have to toss all their presents in there. Which means—you guessed it—I'm not getting the day off. What's the use, right?" So when, on a Thursday afternoon, the abyss dragged the tree anchoring the rope up from the ground and into the gaping black maw, Wilson was relieved, assuming that the children were gone now and that his day to day work would simplify. However, his relief was exchanged for grief upon receipt of the following letter:
Accompanying the letter was a steel chain, an industrial-grade electric crank and pulley system, one enormous stone pillar, and a hand-crafted broadsword. "I can't afford to not have this job right now. What's the use fighting it? Ya know what I mean here? Sure, I could just up and quit because I'm afraid of jumping into this black and unending meaninglessness, but I think I'd be doing that anyway if I quit. It's all the same thing really, but the way I see it? In one scenario I've got a job and in the other I don't—so you see, even though it's the same it's also kind of different in an important way." And with that, he proceeded to maneuver with a forklift the giant stone pillar, twenty feet tall and ten feet around, into a hole in the ground. He wrapped the chain around it, threading it through the pulley system, and placed the sword in the dirt beneath. He stood up, grabbing his bag, so that he could go say his goodbyes to the important people in his life who cared about him. He sat back down, though, upon remembering that "there are no important people in my life that care about me. I kind of forgot to make that happen I guess," he went on. "I mean, I've been busy here with the abyss and all and well, I don't know, just forget it okay?" So, without any guns blazing, and with legs entirely untangled, Wilson didn't so much plunge headlong into the abyss as he kind of slid in quietly, his sword reluctantly and awkwardly in hand, feet shuffling. "It's hard not to explain what it isn't like in there. The first thing you don't see is nothing, and then you don't float everywhere and nowhere in the same moment," Wilson recalls after returning a week later, kids in tow. "Or maybe you do all of those things backwards or inside out—I don't really know." At an official meeting of the PTA, Wilson explains what happened while he journeyed through the emptiness. "It's strange to think that I was somewhere inside of each one of you and myself and also nowhere at all in the same instant. It's a funny feeling you get when that happens, kind of a buzzing or tickling sensation. Well, anyway, that kind of thing went on for some time, days, weeks, years, I can't say really—and then things took shape. It was still a huge unending nothingness all around forever and everywhere, but if you looked at it a certain way, it was also maybe like a field or plain or some quiet place. "In fact, it was the same darn field where the abyss and my booth sit, but none of that was there really, just the empty field. And your kids, they were there, too, suddenly. And also they weren't at the same time, but the important thing in the end is that whether or not they were also not there, in some way they were there just as much as they weren't. I tried to hold onto that. "And so, I see these kids, your kids, and I think, great, now all I've got to do is get the hell out of here, but then I don't really know how to do that so much, so it was a dilemma. The strangest thing, though, was just a short stroll across the field, me and these children of yours, we found a big sign that said 'help, please' right on it, and beneath it there was like this little button, and in need of help we went right on ahead and we pushed the button. There was a kind of crack noise, or bang, or whip or something, and then we looked back to where we had started and there we were standing down the field, a whole 'nother set of us. Me, the kids, it was all the same. We were there at the help button and we were also over there down the field. You get a kind of funny feeling when that happens, when you see yourself in front of yourself, and I'll tell you what, we were kind of scared, you see, about the whole thing really, and we figured it had to be a bad idea to meet up with yourself like that so me and the kids just kind of up and got the heck out of there. We started moving across the field, trying to keep our distance, to get away from them. The thing was, though, pretty soon they were following us just as fast as we were leaving them. And off down the way there, we could kind of make out a whole other set of us following them. Far as I could tell, they weren't following us so much as they were trying to get away from the third set of us that was following them, which got us to thinking that maybe we were making a chase, that maybe we weren't just running away from ourselves, but that we were also without even knowing it, chasing our selves. The proof was in the pudding on that one, you see, because we thought, hey when we get up to that hill over there we'll stop running, but before we could even do that, well we saw that we already had. That is, up on top of the hill, lighting a little campfire, was another set of us, the one's we had unknowingly been chasing. So, we sat down there on top of our hill, lit our own little campfire, and then down back behind us, lo and behold, another little campfire lit up atop a hill we had passed earlier, and then it was all pretty clear that stretching forever in front and back of us, there was us huddled up and afraid to go forwards or backwards. We were surrounded by ourselves and paralyzed by it. The funniest thing, though, was that a little while later, one kid says, 'Hey, you wanna get out of here?' And we all kind of agreed on that, yes we did want to get out of there, and who knows how, we kind of just did. Zipped right out of there. And that's how I saved your children from the bottomless abyss of nothingness." "And Ms. Anselar?" a parent asked. "Yeah, couldn't find her so much." Wilson admitted. The PTA thanked Wilson for his time, gave him one fruit basket instead of two, "on account of you didn't really do the whole job without bringing back Ms. Anselar, now did you?" and sent him home. The next day, everything went pretty much back to normal. The kids were back in school and Wilson sat in his booth doing next to nothing. Once, the abyss made a kind of farting noise and a dead cat fell out of it, but other than that, things remained quiet. "It's okay really," Wilson says of the abyss, "I mean, I look back on my life and I think, well that sucked, and I look forward and think, well that's gonna suck, but then I sit here staring into the nothingness making $7.50 an hour and it's alright. Sometimes," he whispers, "it gets scrambled porn. You know, like on TV? You can only see it for like twenty seconds at a time, and you gotta watch it all day to see it, but you know? What else is there? Scrambled porn or nothing, right? Get it?" He laughs.
Dolan Morgan's stories have been published with Armchair/Shotgun and Underground Voices. He received an honorary mention for the 2008 Italo Calvino Prize. He has published poetry in The Apocalypse Anthology and Other Rooms Press and worked undercover for Brooklyn newspapers. For fun, he makes elaborate PowerPoint presentations about you, among others.
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