The Hole In The Ceiling of The World

Like all things, this begins with an ending.

A man’s ending.

He was a writer, who published some, got a little fame, and died young. Whether it was before his time or not is an argument those left behind would have for years—sometimes over take-out, sometimes over laundry, and every time someone said his name. But before the laundry and the take-out could occur, his family gathered on a small Midwestern field to pay their respects. They were joined by a few friends, a few celebrities, and a local reporting crew. It was the top half of a crisp morning, and the recent drop in temperature had caused the season’s first leaf to fall. The leaf, unfortunately, went unnoticed as everyone focused their attention on a small homemade rocket. The rocket had been built by the deceased’s niece, who had done so in her weekly 4-H meetings. It was an uncle who emptied the writer’s ashes into the rocket’s cockpit and tapped the urn empty. On his nod the countdown began. It was thirty seconds of silence that went quicker than expected and ended with the rocket lifting off like a meager fist determined to punch the bottom out of the ordinary blue sky.

*

Rockets had been on everyone’s mind recently. It all started when a local teacher saw a news excerpt on NASA’s Keo project. Keo, as the teacher explained to his class, using an empty coke bottle and a basketball, is a shuttle that will rocket into space holding messages from the citizens of present day Earth. In 50,000 years the rocket will return and greet Earth’s future inhabitants with news about their past. There will be enough room in the rocket for everyone on the planet to contribute a four-page letter.

It was this that inspired the writer’s last request.

*

Just before the rocket, carrying the writer’s ashes, reached its apex, it exploded and released a dark cloud of ash and paper. It was then that an unexpected pocket of air lifted the ashes higher than the niece’s science had prepared for, and caused them to spread throughout three counties.

*

The first witness, Cal McGuines, resided in Brunswick County. He was a construction worker who couldn’t sleep the night before, had wandered back to the build site, fired up a double-shovel tractor, and batted about the county’s moist darkness. It was well past midnight when he came upon a field from his childhood and began digging holes in the ground. The police report filed the following day, by the confused owner of the field, numbered the holes at forty-three. Cal had definitely been searching for something when a single black ash fell on his arm. His first instinct was to smash it like a bug. He did. And it vanished in the death clap.

*

The second witness was Frank Stanford, a farmer who had woken up early that morning to work his dirt. He had been leaning on his hoe, thinking about how to fix an old pick-up truck he bought for fifty bucks and a ballpoint pen, when he noticed a black speck in the sky. At first it appeared to be a small storm cloud, or a lost crow searching for its murder. It reminded Frank of Sunday School, where they spoke of the Second Coming. How it would begin like this: a single black dot in the sky, descending. But when the remnant was close enough you would see that it was a band of angels with Jesus in the middle. As a child, Frank spent many afternoons leaning back in a swing, staring up at the sky in fear. But this black speck floated so close that he held out his hand and caught it. Not knowing what to make of it, Frank rubbed it between his fingers, smelled it, and then touched it to his tongue.

*

And then there was Sarah Brubeck, as she hung out of her elementary school bus window. She pointed out the falling flakes to her seat-mate Rueben, and Rueben yawned. Later, when Sarah would recount the event, she would describe it as “God emptying his pencil sharpener.” It was at school that day Sarah first learned about her role in NASA’s Keo project. Her homework assignment was to compose a letter. The official deadline was December 31, 2006, but the teacher wanted the letters in by the end of the week.

This news caused Sarah to chew on the top of her pencil.

*

Cal took the rest of the day off and visited the town’s only psychic: Mary Ann George. She was a single mother who had recently moved from San Francisco. She believed in things like karma, chakras, and reincarnation; and other ideas that did not find an easy welcome in this small Christian community. Cal had found her attractive and her beliefs to be cute and child-like, but not child-like in a silly way, but in the way they left room for the wonder that so often defines the childhood we look back on, longingly.

Mary Ann was skeptical of Cal’s intentions, but believed him when he said that he needed help finding something he had lost.

*

Frank looked over his truck. It was primer white with large curves, and a sturdiness that could be felt at a distance. It was the kind of truck people were always offering to buy—the kind of truck that looked you square in the ghost and dared you to keep it running. Frank popped the hood and stared into the greasy metal heart. He knelt beside the truck, reached under, and touched its belly. He wiped his hands and began to hum three notes. Frank couldn’t place the notes, he believed them to be from some childhood hymn, but he wasn’t sure. He had formed a habit of humming them rather randomly throughout the day, just those three notes; he couldn’t remember what came next. He turned on the radio, and listened to the local news. It was then, when he heard about the ashes, that he went in search of a glass of water.

*

The first night Sarah wrote eight pages for the Keo project, although that was twice the allowance. She wrote about Hannah Montana, iPods, and bubblegum. The next day, after school, Sarah sat down with her teacher and asked his opinion on what she had written. After he read it, under Sarah’s watchful eyes, he politely folded it up and handed it back to her. He told her that he had read a number of students’ letters throughout the day, and that they had all been so similar that they could easily just do one letter from the entire school, summing up Hannah Montana, iPods, and bubblegum. Sarah slowly clinched her fist until the paper became a wad and stomped out of the classroom. She didn’t care for the idea that, more than likely, Rueben had written the same thing she had. She always fancied herself better than Rueben, and immediately went to work on another draft.

*

At Cal’s house, Mary Ann had him draw a picture of what was supposed to be lost. Cal got discouraged a couple of times, but Mary Ann kept him on track. Cal was not an artist, but reluctantly rendered a small portrait of his elementary school lunchbox. When Mary Ann asked Cal what was inside the box, his only reply was, “You know, stuff.”

Mary Ann found Cal’s secrecy to be boyish and cute, and the first assignment she gave him was to find a “Y” shaped branch that could be used as a divining rod. “You mean a stick?” Cal asked. Cal found the whole thing to be ridiculous, but was later convinced that he had to hold the stick out in front of him with both hands while focusing on the badly drawn picture of the lunch box. Mary Ann called this “tuning.”

Together, they spent their afternoons combing the field that Cal had poked holes in earlier that week. Part of Cal’s punishment, after having confessed to being the digger of the holes, was to fill them back up. While Cal shoveled his sentence, Mary Ann wandered the field with the “tuned” stick, stopping on occasion to make new perforations for Cal to plug. The perturbed owner of the field would arrive in the mornings and watch from a distance.

During breaks, Mary Ann and Cal talked about themselves and the choices they made with their lives. They talked about the Keo project, and what they would write for it. Mary Ann told Cal that all these holes in the ground reminded her of a creation myth about a tribe of people who lived underground. “The tribe didn’t know they lived underground,” she explained, “Their sky was just the ground, the way our sky is...just our sky. Then one day there was a hole in their ceiling. Everyone in the tribe was frightened, and only one member was brave enough to climb through. When they never returned, the rest of the tribe was banned from going near it. But every year a few members would turn up missing, and it was rumored that they climbed through the hole. Then stories began to spread that there was another world on the other side. The tribe began to split into two factions: those who were going, and those who were staying… And that is how we all became above ground dwellers. We were the brave ones.” Cal watched the way Mary Ann’s hair caught the day’s last light, then he turned away and kicked a small wad of dirt.

The distance that the field’s owner watched from began to shrink.

By the end of the week, Mary Ann had taken to wiping sandwich crumbs from Cal’s stubble and Cal had taken to letting her. It was the owner of the field, who began his own burrowing, that struck something in the ground. It was Cal’s hands that brushed back the dirt that revealed his wayward treasure. Time had not been kind to the poor thing, as it closely resembled Cal’s misshapen drawing. When opened, the lunch box showed itself to be a primitive time capsule: an eight-year old’s attempt at permanence. Inside Cal found: an invitation to a birthday party for a girl whose toe he had once stepped on, a list of his stuffed animals ranked in the order of his liking, a bone from a carcass that he and his father had once happened upon in the woods, vacation photos, a small vial of sand, and a self portrait proving Cal’s artistic abilities had not improved. The last thing Cal removed from the lunch box was a letter addressed to his future self. Cal read this letter to Mary Ann and the owner of the field as they ate peaches; later they sat in silence and watched as insects came to feed on the pits.

***

Frank was able to get the truck running, and began taking long drives out into the surrounding counties. Everywhere he went people were talking about the Keo project and asked him what he intended on writing. Frank refused to be a part of it. Secretly, however, he had scribbled a couple of things down, but became discouraged and scratched them out. He simply did not care about earthlings 50,000 years in the future. He was sure they would have no use for a message from him. He wasn’t even sure if they would understand English. In spite of this, Frank found himself absently looking up at the night sky for long periods of time. After a while, each star began to resemble the burning end of a cigarette, which, Frank assumed, meant all the gods were on a smoke break. He imagined a rocket from 50,000 years in the past crashing through the sky. He began to dream about what would be inside, and what he would like to find. But he quickly shook such nonsense out of his head and whispered to the present darkness, “Get back to work.”

On the third day of his driving, Frank came across an estate sell. It was the Writer’s old house and belongings. It turns out that the writer had been an amateur philanthropist and wanted everything redistributed for a reasonable fee. The proceeds would go to some foundation in Los Angeles. Frank could never pass up a good deal, and as he browsed the home and tables of junk he began to notice pictures of the writer and found his face familiar, but unplaceable. It wasn’t until Frank was rummaging through a used toolbox that he understood the vague feeling. It all clicked when, jumbled in with the screwdrivers and wrenches, he found an old ballpoint pen. Frank recognized the pen, because it once belonged to him.

It was years ago and he was running a vegetable stand on the side of the road, when a memorable white pick-up truck slid to a stop. The owner appeared distraught as he jumped from the cab. Frank noticed that he was shaking a pen above his head as if it were some sort of Pentecostal snake. The man, that Frank now placed as The Writer, seemed oblivious to Frank’s presence, until he turned and suddenly spotted him. The first words out of the man’s mouth were “I will give you that truck for a pen that can write.” Frank was so startled by the suggestion that he gave the writer the pen from his front pocket; it was his crossword pen. The writer took the pen, smoothed out a piece of paper on Frank’s stand, and positioned himself to write. Frank watched how the pen danced slightly above the paper. It was as if the writer was carving the words in the air, before committing them to ink. The writer’s eyes narrowed, then widened, his lips silently formed words, and his tongue tapped secret syllables against his teeth. Suddenly the pen ran across the paper leaving a trail of words behind it. When he finished writing, the man handed the truck keys to Frank. Frank refused them, of course, but the writer claimed to be a man of his word and, pointing to the scrap of paper, that he needed a long walk to test these ones out. After a tiny argument, Frank suggested that the writer take the fifty dollars he had accumulated that day. In a hurry to go, the writer agreed. When Frank inquired into the cause of this “hassle,” the writer held up the paper and showed Frank the single sentence he had written. Frank didn’t know much about writing, but he liked the way the words felt when he mouthed them. They had a rhythm. It was the kind of sentence that had a melody. In short, it was the kind of sentence you remember the music of, long after you have forgotten the words.

Those were the event’s that caused Frank to buy the pen. By the end of the week, Frank refused to contribute to the Keo project, but in his own way participated in the future. He wrapped the pen inside of a rag, stuffed it all into an old coffee can, and dug a deep hole in his backyard. Satisfied with the depth, he placed the small bundle inside and buried it. It might not last 50,000 years, but if it did, Frank figured, people could always use something to write with, no matter what language they spoke.

*

Sarah’s next draft was sixteen pages, but at least, now, she had something to work with. On loose leaf Sarah had written about everything she saw and thought of that day. She wrote about the buildings in town. She wrote about the trees and the street signs. She wrote about Rueben. She wrote about being raised by her single father. She described the time he had to make her a chicken themed dress for the local festival. She wrote about the button she had to hold in place while he stitched it in. She wrote about the time she took all the paper off her crayons and gave them new names. She wrote and wrote and wrote. And then, after a long hard objective look at what she had written, she began to cross-out, and write above sentences. She was making sentence sandwiches, sentence road maps, and soon everything became illegible. She hunted for dictionaries and thesauruses. She fell asleep and then woke up suddenly in the middle of the night. She stayed up into the morning surfing the internet. She read Hemingway, O’connor, Kafka, and Mark Twain. She read famous speeches and letters between writers. The pressure of writing something that would last forever began to take its toll on her. She stopped washing her hair. The lines in her face deepened. She shut herself in her room and refused to come out. Her father could see the light on under her door and thought he smelled whiskey. She read Faulkner, Hughes, and the Koran. She became a recluse. She broke her own heart. She laid face down on the floor for hours. She gave herself a black eye, and her first scar. She grew depressed and tried to drown herself in the bathtub. She went out back and dug her own grave. She cried and laughed hysterically. She slept in her clothes, and then refused to wear clothes, and then to only wear jeans and a t-shirt. She started listening to jazz and classical music. She needed vinyl; mp3’s were no good to her. She needed more pencils. Her fingers were blistered and ink smeared. She began biting the inside of her cheek. She read Whitman, Dickinson, and Neruda. She pulled an old typewriter out of the attic. She hammered away. It sounded like a small war. It was a war. Sarah was fighting a battle, a battle against mediocrity, against herself, against beauty, against youth, against mankind, against the moon in her window, against the darkness beyond it, against her stuffed animals, against her dolls, against that man who was telling her it was time to eat supper, against god and the devil and this dammed thing called life. The week was almost over.

On her way to school the other children covered their noses and sat away from her, except Rueben, and by that Sarah knew one day they would be married. She held in her lap a box of papers. It was her manuscript, each page a prisoner of war. There was no way she could give anything to the Keo project; she simply was not worthy. Before class she took the box of paper out into the playground and lit it on fire. She was already beginning to feel better.

In class the teacher had the students come up and turn in their message to future earth. Everyone went up, except Sarah, who turned away and stared out the window. When the fire alarm rang everyone dispersed. Sarah lagged behind, slowed by the weight of all the people she had failed. But when she finally stood up, it was as if a safe—inside her—had suddenly been cracked. Somewhere in the awful rhythm of the klaxon was something waiting to be said, something that needed to be written down. She grabbed a pen and a torn sheet of paper. Sarah wrote. She studied what she had written and then handed it to the teacher. The teacher looked down at the scrap of paper and tilted his head to one side.

On her way home that day, Sarah hung her head out of the school bus window and looked up at the sky. She liked the idea that a part of her would blast off into outer space. As the bus picked up speed she imagined that little piece of her on the rocket, looking back at the earth, and noticing how the trees resembled the hands of people climbing out of some underground world and into a new one.