The Man With the Hole In the Middle of His Floor

Cafe Locked Out

`Apart from the hole in the middle of his floor, about the size of a Persian rug, there was nothing remarkable about his living room. The sofa was comfortable, the side table had a lamp, and an iPad, like an umbilical cord, waited on the arm of the couch. To the right of the television, a flat, framed tropical beach kept its setting sun cold. The room had only one other picture: a black-and-white photograph of his grandfather sat in its frame in the center of the mantle. In it, his grandfather was a young man, in his army uniform. It was taken a week before he set off for Europe and war.

Neither seen as handsome nor repulsive, he rarely stood out. Catalogued by his neighbors as a polite man who kept to himself, he did not incur curiosity. No one had entered this room, and no one was aware of the hole. It was his job to ensure they never found out. Despite the secret crevasse, it was a quiet, uneventful life. Long divorced, with children grown up, he had been made redundant a decade ago and hadn’t worked since. His family sensed, but had never seen the hole.

At home, which had been his mother’s, she too had passed, his entire world entered through a wide-screen TV in the lounge and a 36cm one on a shelf in the kitchen. They were never switched off. At night, he carried his iPad into his bedroom and fell asleep in its presence. The screens were his binoculars through which he had come to know everything about the modern world, despite the world knowing nothing about him. He had never investigated the shaft. He had never run a hand against its cliffs or dropped an object in to measure the time to its break. He had never shone a torch down its throat or played “speak to me, my echo.”

It, in turn, had never emitted a sound. Never coughed up an article or expanded an edge. It was simply a hole—dark, consistent, symmetrical, and deep. Sometimes, prior to waking, he dreamt of places other than here. Places where frozen sunsets melted, and as he woke, he wondered whether these dreams were the songs of sirens tempting him, with palm-trees and sun, into remaining asleep forever.

In March, in Turkey, an earthquake killed seven hundred people. In China, in June, a flood killed two thousand more. Disease was rife. The rice crop failed. In September, without warning, a black-and-white picture of a World War One soldier tumbled from a mantle piece and fell into a hole. Whether it was the slightest of tremors or a finger flick from God, the picture was gone.

Cup of tea in hand, he’d entered the room as it was toppling. Instinctively, he leapt for it, collapsing to the floor as he did. The saucer smashed, the cup spilt, and his arm lunged, with a desperate grasp, fell a finger width too short as he watched his grandfather’s young face vanish into the dark. Funny thing… Shock. A natural sedative dulling the senses. Its valium withdrew his hand slowly and sat him eventually on the edge of the abyss as the spilt tea, in a tan waterfall, dripped into the hole.

He sat there for hours. A full-length movie, unwatched on two televisions, finished as the flies flew off to wherever they go and left the house to the mosquitoes. Somewhere beneath their blood-drilling rigs, it came to him. He rose from the floor with purpose, strode into the kitchen, switched off the TV, and began to list lists and draw diagrams. He was at it for hours. It was two am before he crawled into bed. Awake before morning, he flew out the door. At an auto teller, he withdrew a thousand dollars. On two shopping expeditions, requiring four taxis, he perused one adventure shop, two hardware stores, and a salvage yard. List in hand, fire in his belly, the day unfolded as though lubricated.

It took an evening to erect. Precious in sweat, he stood insulated in his mountaineering clothes like a plump yellow bear. A hard-hat, with a torch in the brow, wore his head askew, while an abseiling harness dug into his hips. The enormous tripod he’d built from salvage yard wood straddled the hole. Reaching to the ceiling, it had been a prick to assemble. From its apex, an impressive pulley accepted the brand-new purple rope. Winding it through the wheels, before descending to re-thread the clasp dangling from the front of his harness. From there, it dropped to a tidy violet coil coiled on the edge of the hole, and in the center of this coil, an enormous “brake knot” sealed them all.

It was time to go. Like a suicidal anaconda, he kicked the rope, and it fell into the black’s appetite. Undaunted by its swing, he gulped a sharp breath, closed his eyes, and swung out. For a long, horrific moment, he dangled above the mouth that appeared without stomach. Upright, as though sitting on a stool, he voluntarily descended. His torch illuminated the four cliffs. Smooth and black on three sides, on the fourth there were handholds cut into the sheer, and next to each, a date was scrawled. The one nearest read “ten years two months,” the one below “ten years three.”

Unsettled, he continued to drop as the tripod creaked to the constant strain. At “fifteen years and ten,” he was tired. At “twenty even,” he stopped. Despite only dropping, he was beginning to cook in his bright yellow suit. He was too deep. Another month and he would not get back. He looked down to try and see his mother, then after he was sick of the black, he began to climb.

Warning: If you ever intend to climb out of a hole, learn to climb first. With one hand removed, his other hand gave. The rope slid drastically, and all the wrong way. Like a bucket in a well, he fell. It would be a decade before he’d re-clutched the rope. Thudding to a halt, he gulped for air as gravity banged him against the walls. Heart racing, vision blurred, he found he’d reached thirty-five and five.

Then, far above and above to the rim, the tripod he’d constructed from wood cracked—gave—dropped a foot—and then another. Instinctively, he groped for a handhold. Scraping, he reached “thirty-five and four months,” and shoved his fingers in. The rope slackened a moment longer and then, after collapsing together the tripod’s legs, now united, fell into the hole. As he clutched to the wall, they all tore past: a bad marriage of rope, pulley, and wood. If only he hadn’t tied the brake knot.

Inevitably, the rope ran full length and once it had, obediently it ripped him from the wall. Backwards, he flew down the swallowing shaft. Entranced that with one outstretched and groping hand, he could completely obscure the shrinking view. He had no idea how long he had been lying at the bottom, but when he finally woke, he knew he was broken. The wood of the tripod was shattered and splintered, and he was shattered and splintered upon it. Bones were broken in his legs and back, and other things, softer than bones, had ruptured and were bleeding from an assortment of tears. There was pain too, of course, and the nightmare of darkness, perfect but for a small rectangle of light, far, far above.

It took time to get his helmet to work, and when it did, its illumination was dim. Able still to use one arm, he searched. The picture was below all his rubble, but the glass was broken, so the photograph was free. He turned it over to smile at his grandfather, but the picture was white. His grandfather’s portrait was gone. And in its place, a handwritten quote, “Lest we Forget.”

After a moment of shock, he looked up to the light and then roared at himself before he noticed a lever on the wall, below a sign that said, “Pull down.” To the narrow “dust silhouette” on the mantle, the ghost of where a framed picture had long remained, it was a quiet affair: A seamless closing, marred only by the distant artillery of traffic and two televisions that discreetly ignored the wheels’ squeak as this quiet hole’s secretive roof rolled out of its slot with such perfect precision that it locked him in tighter than one of his mother’s Tupperware bowls.

Michael.