Hollow Read online

  Copyright © 2017 Owen Egerton

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Egerton, Owen, author.

  Title: Hollow : a novel / Owen Egerton.

  Description: New York : Soft Skull Press, [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017004911 | eISBN 9781593766733 (ebook)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Literary.

  Classification: LCC PS3605.G47 H65 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017004911

  Cover design by Matt Dorfman

  Interior design by Sabrina Plomitallo-Gonzaléz

  Soft Skull Press

  an imprint of COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

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  For my brother, Gwyn

  My son, are you willing to go with me and explore—to go far beyond where man has ever ventured?

  —Olaf Jansen

  The strings of my heart have snapped. —Job

  The moment you were born, the room smelled of warm soil and blood.

  The moment you were born, I was so surprised I hiccupped. A dozen what-to-expect books, nine months of pregnancy, seven hours of labor, and still I was surprised.

  The moment you were born, I understood that, biologically, you would take my place, and in the same way you had popped into existence, I would someday pop out.

  The moment you were born, a crying laugh rumbled in my chest and I knew I would do anything for you.

  But I didn’t.

  My name is Oliver Bonds and I believe the Earth to be hollow.

  I understand this is not a widely held belief. Three years ago the idea would have inspired only my contempt but it has become a fundamental conviction of mine.

  I live alone in a shed behind Jenny’s Beauty Salon in south Austin. It’s a single room with a cot, a mini fridge, a camper stove, and a sink that no longer works. Currently the shed is padlocked from the outside.

  This happened late yesterday afternoon. I had just filled a pot of water from the shower when someone knocked on the shed door.

  “Bonds? Bonds, are you in there?” It was Mr. Miller, my landlord. He’s the one who added the plumbing and mini fridge. He charges a hundred dollars a month. It’s not much, I know, but I haven’t paid in two months. “Bonds, I’ve got a padlock. I’m locking her up, so if you’re in there, you best come out.”

  I like Mr. Miller. He has a laurel of gray hair and an Irish accent barely bruised by twenty years in Texas. I would have opened the door, but I had nothing to give him and nothing to tell him. I stood frozen with a pot of water, not daring to breathe.

  “I’m serious, Bonds!”

  I once lived three blocks from here in a two-story brick house with two oaks in the backyard and a custom-built porch. Carrie and I moved in the same year we were married. We decorated and refurbished, on our knees late into the night varnishing the hardwood floors, making our way through a bottle of red wine, and singing along to a David Bowie playlist. We lived there for years. It’s where we conceived. It’s the house we brought our baby Miles home to. It’s where our baby died and it’s where we fell apart.

  Miller was quiet now, listening for me. I was stuck. Open the door and face my guilt or leave it shut and become a prisoner. The question has obvious existential implications, but knowing that didn’t help.

  A minute ticked by as Miller listened for me. I stood watching the water in the pot, concentrating on keeping its surface still. Miller could have opened the door and walked right in, it wasn’t locked. But Miller has an old-world courtesy and a begrudging respect of other people’s privacy. The decision to act or not was mine. But I didn’t make a decision. I just didn’t move and eventually I heard the click of a padlock and Mr. Miller’s receding steps.

  Only after he’d been gone several minutes was I able to place the pot down. I boiled the water and prepared some ramen noodles. I showered and went to bed early.

  Hours later I woke to rain tapping like fingers on the tin roof. And another sound. Steps just outside my door. Then four loud knocks. I lay in my cot, silent. Whoever it was rattled the padlock and grunted. What kept me in was keeping him out, and that was fine by me. Whoever it was stood there for a few minutes before banging on the door once more. Then he left and I lay awake until the dark grayed into morning.

  Small morning birds yip in the pine tree just behind the shed. It’s a tuneless noise. There’s a high window in the shed, a little larger than a laptop. I shove the cot under the window, push it open, and lift myself through. My feet leave the cot and my torso dangles outside. I balance, unsure what to do next, then fall.

  It’s a soft enough landing, but I don’t rush to stand. I lie on the damp, sandy soil and watch the pale sky through the pines. It’s only just morning, that lukewarm hour when the sky comes to be but the sun has yet to rise. Mr. Miller has locked my shed and I have less than twenty dollars to my name. This was inevitable. I haven’t worked in years. I live a life unsustainable.

  When Miles was born, I was sure my income would be too small to cover mortgage, insurance, car payments, college savings, dinners, diapers, vacations, hardback books. I pictured my monthly paycheck stretched over our expenses like a queen sheet on a king-sized bed. I worried and hatched schemes to bring in more cash, real estate and investments that I never quite put into action. I thought we were poor—not impoverished, but poor. But for three years I’ve lived on the remnant of that income.

  I was never able to think about what I will do when the money is gone. I don’t mean I couldn’t bear the thought, I mean I was, am, unable to imagine a month from now. A week. My mind blurs, like looking into lake water at night.

  I get to my feet, brush off the sand, and walk around to the front. Sure enough, there’s the padlock. It’s the kind used on a middle-school locker. The cheapness of it makes me feel worse.

  There’s also a folded piece of torn paper stuck to the door. From Mr. Miller, I suspect. An eviction notice or a threat or a note explaining how disappointed he is in me. Then I remember my late-night knocker. I pull the note from the door. It’s been stuck there with a wad of chewed gum. I unfold the paper and recognize the aggressively enthusiastic handwriting. It’s not a threat. It’s an invitation:

  Lyle, of course.

  The note may seem extraordinary—a path into the center of the world, adventure beyond imagination, the deepest of mysteries revealed. But any excitement is tempered by the fact that Lyle is a liar. He’s also my best friend.

  I first met Lyle in a used bookshop a little over two years ago.

  After Miles died I stopped reading. I purchased books, opened them, turned their pages. I still fell asleep with an open book on my chest nearly every night. But I never read a word past the title, and often not even that. Reading lets it in.

  By then, I wasn’t living with Carrie. I had moved into a chain motel off the interstate. At the time, I called it a dump. Today it wo
uld be a resort.

  I no longer went to the university. For a time I had, but it was a charade. Me sitting at my desk doing nothing. Not teaching, not talking. Students walking in and finding me unresponsive. The university never actually fired me. They remained largely silent during the investigation. A university waits for history to decide itself before it speaks. We preach nothing, happily affecting nothing.

  Instead of the campus, I spent my days in a used bookstore built in the shell of an old supermarket, the high ceilings still lined with bright white fluorescents. Shelves of books nearly touching the ceiling formed paths and nooks. Standing before a wall of books, my half-distant look was completely appropriate. I was just another browser.

  I’d pick out a book—something thick with a hardback binding—and I’d sit, staring into the pages and they’d all leave me alone.

  On a warm day in mid-April, I had been at the bookstore for an hour with a mildewing book from the vintage section. I gazed past the typed words, letting them all blur, letting my mind be nowhere—the Buddhists would have celebrated my mindlessness.

  “Breast milk is a lie.”

  I looked up to see this large man looming over me. He was six foot and just on the safe side of three hundred pounds. He wore baggy jeans rolled an inch above his ankles as if he were expecting minor floods.

  “Excuse me?” I asked.

  “Breast milk,” he said, pointing at my book, which turned out to be a scientific treatise on the benefits of breastfeeding. “Never drink it. Didn’t drink it from my mom and I sure as hell don’t drink it from a cow.”

  “Oh.”

  “If you knew a faucet would run dry after nine months or so, would you install it? Would you teach your children to drink from it? Rely on it?”

  “It lasts longer than nine months. I mean, people breastfeed for much longer, years sometimes.”

  Miles was still breastfeeding before he died.

  “That’s why America is so backward. Bunch of citizens addicted to their mom’s teat and wondering why they can’t pass Algebra. ADD, my ass. We’re distracted by our own buried childhoods. Were you breastfed?”

  I nodded.

  “See?”

  I did not nod.

  “Look at me! A head taller than you, easy. No breast milk. That stuff stunts you. In the ’50s, we knew it. We were perfecting formula. Then hippies started shoving their boobs in babies’ mouths again, and look. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “That’s it! Perfectly it! You’re looking to FOLLOW! Because, fuck, you were your mom’s bitch from day one. I’m solo. Stand on my own. I do not follow! Even if I like the direction, I won’t follow. But we’ve got a nation of followers.”

  “I wasn’t really reading it.”

  “Ha!”

  “I don’t read anymore. I just pretend to.” I had never said this to anyone. But this man, even if he did judge, what could it mean to me? This has remained the key to our friendship. He is full of opinions and I don’t value his opinions.

  “Why don’t you read?” he asked.

  “My son died.”

  “Oh,” he said with a nod, as if this made sense. “Maybe you just need a better book. Follow me. Come on.”

  My therapist, when I could afford her, told me it was healthy for people to respond with concern or sympathy. But I hated it. So when this guy only nodded and led me to the esoteric science section of the store, I followed.

  “Hollow Earth: Theory to Fact by Dr. Jim Horner,” he said, shoving the book in my hand and placing my breastfeeding book in the empty spot. “It’s going to blow your fucking mind.”

  I took the book and thanked him.

  He stuck out a large hand. “Lyle,” he said.

  “Oliver,” I said. “Oliver Bonds.”

  “I avoid last names.” He knocked his knuckles against the book. “Get ready. Everything you think you know is wrong.”

  I walk north from the shed toward the river and downtown. New sunrays, just higher than horizontal, filter through the trees, and droplets of rainwater still clinging to oak leaves hold morsels of the light. Morning birds yip. By day’s end they’ll be grackles, coughing calls and rising from the trees as one, a black floating shadow. But for now, they’re just morning birds.

  I pause at the Sunflower Daycare, a small, high-priced, downtown daycare, and I watch the blond boy playing in the sandbox. He must be almost three. His head is curls and his laugh is a gurgle. I watch him each morning through the bars separating the sidewalk from the playscape. The young women overseeing the play glance my way uneasily, but I stay. The blond boy pushes a yellow truck through the sand and blubbers the engine. He builds a mountain, a dam, a city of sand. The blond boy destroys it. He builds it again.

  This is my wife’s son. He doesn’t know who I am.

  Among the downtown buildings, people are already making their way into Starbucks and through revolving doors and up escalators to higher floors. I’ve learned that the higher floors are reserved for those who have money. I am no longer asked past the second floor of any building. In fact, I’m heading to a basement. St. Christopher’s Episcopalian Church donates its basement to a homeless resource center—the Agape Center. They usually have food. If nothing else, they’ll have coffee.

  I walk past the church’s off-white steeple, small in the midst of the mirror and metal of the surrounding city. Due to the slant of the hill the church is built on, the basement has street access on the south side. A solid dozen people are already lining up, leaning with their bundles of blankets and coats against the outside wall. I take my place at the end, nodding morning greetings. By eight thirty, the line will wind around the building.

  If you’re in line before seven thirty, you can usually get one of the sixty meal tickets for a breakfast. It’s all the cold boiled eggs and bagels they can afford. I know this because Carrie and I used to volunteer one morning a week. It was part of our adult Bible study.

  Murray waddles up behind me. Murray has spent years perfecting his look—sprawling gray-black beard covering his face nearly all the way to his dark, darting eyes, the yellow-brown skin glossy with grime, and the acidic smell of cheap alcohol filtered through abused sweat glands. He sports a long black trench coat that he endures even in the summer’s heat and a felt hat that looks as if it were picked off the corpse of a Confederate general.

  He mumbles, his words a high-pitched whine muffled by drink and matted facial hair.

  “Morning, Murray,” I say.

  “Why you out here? You’re supposed to be in there?” We have this conversation often.

  “I’m out here.”

  “Who’s making the breakfast?”

  “The volunteers.”

  “You a volunteer.”

  “Nope. Just a neighbor.”

  He laughs.

  Behind him comes Ben. Ben isn’t old. Maybe forty. He has three teeth and bulging, almost comical eyes. I sometimes wonder that he’s able to blink with eyeballs that large. He’s carrying a sleeping bag that is unraveling in his lanky arms. He shakes his head as he gathers the bag into his arms.

  “How goes it, Ben?”

  “Tired,” he says. “Had to move from my camp. Some new guy came and stayed up all night yelling. I tried to talk some sense into him, but he kept on. I don’t want no trouble, so I got my stuff and left.”

  “Where are you going to go?”

  Ben shakes his head, those outrageous eyes threatening to pop right out of his skull. “No jobs. I don’t want to mess up again. I did that, you know. Jail. Thought maybe I had a job at the McDonald’s, but I didn’t.”

  Of course he didn’t. Ben with his three teeth, ping-pong eyes, and a mind that couldn’t quite master middle school. What could he do? These days there’ll be fifty people, at least, going for that one job. All n
eeding it. Why would anyone hire Ben? They won’t. So what’s Ben going to do? How is he going to make it? He won’t. He’ll live in the woods and parks of Austin, Texas, and die out there, too.

  He shakes his head, gathering his ever-unraveling bag.

  “You don’t want a job,” Murray mumbles.

  “I do too,” says Ben.

  “No you don’t. You just want some crack.”

  “I don’t do crack, asshole.”

  “Yep. Crack and whatever you can get.”

  Ben looks at me, his eyes pleading. “I’m clean. Been clean a while now.”

  “That’s just ’cause you can’t get anything.”

  Ben chuckles. “Well, that’s kind of true.”

  At eight thirty the doors open and we shuffle past Chip, the stout security guard who remembers each person’s name and greets them with a strong smile.

  “Oliver,” he says, patting my back. “Good morning.”

  Chip didn’t know me before. That’s good. The other volunteers, the ones I used to show up with at seven forty-five to slice oranges and squeeze single eggs from a plastic bag of twenty, they can’t look at me for long. I feel sorry for them, because they feel sorry for me. Maybe they’re a little afraid they’ll catch a bad case of homelessness themselves.

  But I’m not quite homeless. I have my shed behind the beauty salon with a padlocked door and an open back window. I just come to Agape for the company and coffee.

  It’s a slow line. We sign in and are handed a meal ticket. We move to plastic folding chairs at plastic folding tables set in two long rows. I add my name to a list requesting a bus pass. It requires a ten-minute meeting with a caseworker, usually Linda. I don’t mind. Linda fills me with positive aphorisms and photocopied lists of job resources, then hands me a bus pass and ushers me out. I’m not her most urgent case. I’m surviving.

  “Hey,” Murray pokes me. “If you’re not one of them, who’s gonna give the sermon?”

  “God will provide,” I say. Murray frowns, at least I think he frowns. It’s hard to tell with the beard.