Henry awoke suddenly, startled to consciousness by a nightmare.  The curtains billowed with summer and fragrant memories.  Mourning doves cooed from their garage perch outside his window.  He closed his eyes and breathed it in.  He couldn’t remember a nightmare.  

He slipped to the floor, stretched out his arms and touched his toes.  He felt his neck, winced.  Some violence must have occurred.  His feet, clammy on the wood floor, peeled away as he went to the stairs.  He slid his hand heavily along the rail as his aging limbs attended to the task of descending.  

The house was quiet.  Open windows.  A ceiling fan lazily turning, warm air swirling among the objects: an open book, a curtain cord rapping against the wall, a pair of glasses sitting on an unread newspaper: objects left forgotten until motion fills the empty spaces.  The fan seemed not to cool the house so much as to remind its one sentient occupant that he existed, stirred in a hazy broth.

He opened the front door and stepped onto his porch, picked up the paper.  A column of people moved in sync along the sidewalk in front of his house.  Some talked into compact phones; some talked as if to phantoms, wires spiraling from their ears.  Garbled electronic voices splashed about as a siren streamed through the trees in the murky distance.  

They wore black slacks, khakis, knee-length skirts.  Hard heels click-clacked on the concrete.  They were dressed for work.  They had been driving to work, had abandoned their cars.  This was not a morning jaunt.  Something had diverted them.  An unpleasant gurgle arose in Henry’s belly, the kind associated with change and the mystery of its cause.  The line stretched for two blocks in either direction.  They were headed toward Fenkell Avenue.  

Their presence on his street, he felt, justified an enquiry.  To a young woman in a suit passing before him, Henry said, “Excuse me.  Why are you walking to Fenkell Avenue?”

The woman stopped and turned.  Pedestrians clotted up on the sidewalk and spilled onto neighboring lawns behind her.  

She smiled anxiously.  “The hole.”

“The hole?”

“The big hole in the street.”

“Why?”

She shrugged and walked on.

Henry rubbed his chin.  There are holes everywhere in this city.  What’s another hole?

Henry went in his house and locked the door and sat near an open window.  He turned on the radio and nervously listened to music for a while.  He heard a Rachmaninov concerto and a nice Bach suite.  He heard the crows and chickadees.  He heard the clang of a watering can dropped on the neighbor’s patio.  He turned to the newspapers sitting there.  Newspapers.  He felt it his civic duty to read them, though their crimes and motives echoed dim yesterdays and horrors most unoriginal.

Large potholes do not draw crowds.  Must be some hole, he thought.  The question excited his curiosity, though it bothered him that he was curious at all.  

He opened the door once more to see.  It was still there, the passing crowd.  He held up his arms and looked himself over.  He was still in his pajamas.  He went up the stairs to his bedroom to change.

Henry spotted a large man not much younger than he on the sidewalk.  It wasn’t the pin-striped suit that had caught his eye, nor the shiny silk tie.  It was the fine gray hair that lay like a swirl of cotton candy fibers.  He appeared less confused than the others, like he knew exactly what he was looking for.  He wore a smile packed with bleached teeth, a sharklike smile.  His enthusiasm shined like a starched white shirt.  He nodded at Henry like they knew each other.  His mere presence took possession of everything near him, including the pedestrians and the jumbled words floating among them.  Henry stepped into the line behind the man.  He was invested in this enterprise now.  His imagination had grown the hole into a crater, an embedded meteorite aglow with extraterrestrial mysteries.  He felt a tap on his shoulder.

“What have you heard about the hole?”  A young woman asked.  She was very pretty and also dressed for work.

“I’ve heard nothing.  And you?”

“Did you hear about the boy?”

“No.  I haven’t heard anything.”

“They say a little boy fell into the hole.”

“That’s horrible!”  He turned to the man in the suit.  “What have you heard?”

“I heard about the boy.  I also heard there were witnesses.  I want to talk to them.”

“Was he hurt?”

“How could I know that?  They haven’t found him.”

“Haven’t found him?  What kind of a hole is this that a boy can be lost?”  He thought of collapsed earth, of flooded commercial excavations, but mostly of meteorites.

They arrived at the intersection of Rosemont St. and Fenkell Avenue.  Cars retreated from the blocked roadway; some just parked where they stood.  A line of pedestrians crowded the sidewalk on the other side.  They all marched toward the Southfield Freeway bridge, columns of pedestrians melding into a large crowd in the street.  Henry noticed the pretty young woman now anxiously moving along the fringes of the crowd.  A path opened up in the cluster of bodies and she disappeared.

   Henry learned that many in the crowd had no real desire to see the hole.  Huddled groups formed.  Vendor stands were erected, goods displayed.  Men pulled coolers and talked on phones.  They circled and crossed the open spaces, texting and making facetime connections with photos and snippets of video and geographic coordinates.  They talked excitedly about the hole, whether they had seen it, and their predictions about the missing boy.  Henry approached one of the stands (there were many).  A man leaned against a card table and a pile of folded t-shirts.  He had one draped over his arm.  This is what it said:

I saw the sinkhole on Fenkell Avenue!

“How much do you sell these for?”  Henry said.

He was dressed in one of his own.  This is what it said:

I found Christian on Fenkell Avenue!

A big, wet smile.  “I’ll give you a deal.  A senior discount, eh?”  He sidled up to Henry with a chummy grin and lightly slapped his shoulder.  “I’ll give you the Christian and the Sinkhole for fifteen.  Usually they go for ten apiece.”

Henry pulled away.  “No.  No thank you.”

    The vendor’s eyes tightened to a squint.  “Okay, old man, get outta my space, I’m doing business.”

    “Is Christian the boy’s name?”  

    “How the hell do I know?”  He said, as he slinked over to a man pulling a cooler.

    “Did you see where she went?”  The suited man’s voice came like a sucker punch to the face.  “By the way, I’m Jack.”  He offered his hand.

    “Henry.  See where who went?  Can you believe this?”  Henry pointed at the t-shirt stand.

    “The woman we saw before.”  He glanced over.  “How much?”

    “Never mind,” Henry said, shaking his head.  “In there.”  He pointed to the frenzied swarm.  They had by now arranged folding chairs and tables.  A couple euchre games had gotten underway.  Portable flat screen TVs flashed aerial footage of the event.  Heavily doused charcoal smoldered in a scatter of hibachis.  Cocktail glasses clinked.  People were settling in.    

    Henry followed Jack but quickly lost sight of him.  He maneuvered through the crowd.  He craned his neck, seeking a glimpse of Jack’s hair.

    It took a good ten minutes, but Henry made it to the bridge.  Not more than three feet lay between himself and a rank of soldiers, each with the same far away gaze.  It was an invisible wall, like solid glass.  No one dared reach out and touch it.  Though the soldiers stood shoulder to shoulder, you could still peek through.  Everyone tried to see past the soldiers.  Some stood on their toes to see what there was to see.  Henry turned and found Jack standing next to him.  Jack did not seem aware of this.  He stood frozen at ninety degrees in the sun.  

There were no words to conceptualize what lay before them.  Conceptualization, for example of an animal, might begin with a simple question.  Has it legs?  Then, what kind of legs?  Spindly like a spider’s?  Furry like a dog’s?  You get the idea.  The concept begins to take form, sharpens.  Eventually, it snugly fits into family, genus, species.  But they could neither absorb nor process this, except black, spanning the width of the overpass.  

Descriptions of the stasis around the hole, of the cars jammed-up on the Southfield Freeway below: these came easy.  But it should have sent rubble down.  There should be broken concrete and smashed-up cars.  It was like one of those rubbery black spots of the Saturday-morning cartoons (for quick, easy hole-making, just throw it against the wall and voilá!).  It did not possess depth.  The very definition of black, the absence of color.  You see, even crude oil becomes iridescent in the sun.  The scales of a black snake emit an indigo sheen as it rests coiled on a sun-warmed boulder.  There is always the reassurance that even black is not absolute, not absolute nothingness.  But here it was.  A big fat nada.  

Driven by curiosity alone, Henry pushed through the invisible wall.  Jack made no effort to stop him.  Maybe because he himself was stupefied.  Maybe because he just wanted to see what would happen.  What happened was something both he and Henry should have foreseen.  The soldiers, of course, did as they had been trained.  One lifted the butt of his rifle and cracked Henry on the head.  Another brought down his nightstick onto Henry’s back with a dreadful grin.  He did not sense any pain at first.  The crack on his head was a bright flash, the stick a sack of sand dropped from great heights.  Quickly came a mosaic of blue sky, dingy gray asphalt, and bright red, a nightmare fragment heaved up from all the hells of solitary night.  As he lay on the ground, his hands and face bloodied, that’s when the pain came.  Red-hot pain.  

The momentary smirk of one soldier confirmed some violence had occurred.  The soldiers resumed their former positions and their vacant stares.  The moment and its consequences, having passed, no longer existed.

The crowd watched dumbly as Jack put his arm around Henry’s shoulder and stumbled past.  Henry blurrily recalled his rising from bed and the echo of mysterious pain without apparent cause.  Jack set him down on a strip of grass along the curb and took a couple big breaths.  Henry had been a heavy load.  Beads of sweat streamed onto his now dappled lapel.  He tugged at his tie.  The heat was testing Jack’s mettle.

    “You shouldn’t have pushed them.  It’s exactly what they were waiting for.”

    Henry rubbed his head.  There was blood on his hand.

    “That soldier got you pretty good.”

    “I didn’t mean to push.  I only wanted a better look.”

    “Did you see?”

    “You were there.”

    “I didn’t see anything.”

    “You saw what I saw.  We both saw it.”

    “I didn’t see anything.”

    “You’re saying you didn’t see the black hole?  It was right there in front of us.”

    “I didn’t see anything at all.”

    Henry scrutinized Jack’s face.  No irony there.  Could it be that his brain, upon receiving the unintelligible visual data, had rejected it?

    “I’m telling you I don’t remember seeing anything.”

    “That’s different than saying you didn’t see anything.”

    “Is it?  Could the boy have fallen in?”

    “I suppose so.”

    “We must find his mother.”

    “Why?”

    “I’m going to represent her.”

    “You’re a lawyer?”

   Jack took a business card out of his pocket and handed it to Henry.  It said:

JACK LAWRENCE

Fighting for You

“I could represent you in your case against those soldiers.”

    Henry touched his head.  There was more blood and a big welt.  “No.  I’m not going to sue anyone.”

    “If you change your mind, just call me.”

    Henry nodded and stuck the card into his shirt pocket.  He didn’t want get embroiled in a complicated legal matter.  He just wanted to be left alone.

    A scream rose up from the crowd.  It was the pretty woman, escorted by a toadish man flanked by two sheriff’s deputies.  This was the mayor of the town.  He and Jack were dressed alike but dissimilar in almost every other way.  The mayor was short, quite fat, and bald.  He whispered something into her ear. 

A circle of bystanders formed.  Speculations passed among them.  “Is it her?”  “It must be her.”  “The boy’s mother.”  “Yes.”

    No one had seen Christian fall into the hole.  It had been presumed.  At first it was just someone’s notion.  With much reporting, it germinated among members of the crowd and soon grew into an indisputable fact with a name.  Now, the authorities, including the mayor and his entourage, they possessed it.  It was an unprecedented tragedy warranting more policemen, broadcast news agencies, and a company of overzealous National Guardsman.  It would fill the despairing mother’s head with terror.  But to the crowd it offered new-found enthusiasm.

    The mayor placed his arm on her shoulder and led her to the hole.  She had not seen it and lived a considerable distance of five blocks.  How the child could have travelled that far on foot in the foggy, early morning light was anyone’s guess.  But this wasn’t considered in the calculation.  Jack nudged Henry, and they followed them into the crowd.  

When they reached the National Guardsmen, the two sheriff’s deputies shouted, “Police!  Clear the way!”

Four of the soldiers moved aside.  Several people were permitted passage.  They were: the mayor, the mother of Christian, the two sheriff’s deputies, a blonde newswoman and her cameraman, and Jack and Henry.

A cacophony of voices settled to a steady drone as eyes tracked her.  They had developed theories dramatizing the boy’s final moments, presuming that which the woman must have expected.  These theories were, of course, entirely untrue, built upon ghoulish imaginings that thickened the veneer of their most profound conceptions of life and death.  It was right here in their neighborhood, on Fenkell Avenue, a terribleness to be fondled, hovering near their faces in the thick soup of July.

 And there it was.  It lay in two dimensions, coaxing the mother closer.  The blackness.  If he had fallen in.  If he had fallen in.  Obliteration.

The mayor took the woman’s hand.  He mopped his face with a stained handkerchief.  The cameraman switched on a bright light attached to his camera.  The newswoman nodded, inched closer, and thrust out her microphone.  The distraught mother, who by this time had developed a perplexed twist of the mouth, felt the mayor’s arm tighten around her shoulder.  Other cameras shot up out of nowhere.  His words oozed.  

“I’m so sorry,” he said, looking deeply into the camera lens, his mouth drooping sadly.  He extended his free arm and spoke into the microphone.  “It’s a naturally occurring sinkhole,” he said, his voice now booming.  “A natural, random collapse of carbonate bedrock.  An unpredictable catastrophe for which I am truly sorry.  So tragic.”  Head shaking.  “I promise this, though!” Erect index finger accentuating sincerity.  “We will do everything in our power to find Christian.”

The chin dipped on cue.  Cameras flashed.  He released the woman and disappeared into the crowd.  His guard, the newswoman and her cameraman, they followed closely behind.  Christian’s mother stood at the edge and looked in.  She saw nothing.  She tried to sense it, to breathe nothing, to smell nothing, to feel its aura, some trace of familiarity.  She dropped to her knees.  Petals of light danced across her tear-streaked complexion as they closed in.  They encircled her and waited to see what would happen next.  

“Move aside!  Move aside!”  Henry offered his hand and pulled her to standing.  “Did they hurt you?”

She shook her head and offered a terminal smile.  They moved back through the crowd, through the stifling heat, the sweat and reeking breaths.  On the other side Henry found Jack standing near the vendor stand studying his phone.  

“What is that?”  Henry said.

Jack tugged his lapel.  “You mean this?”  He wore one of the t-shirts.  “I’m supporting the community.”

“You’re taking advantage.  Help me, please.”  

They led the woman to the curb.  She sat down.  She dropped her head to her knees.

“Are you okay?”  Jack said.

“Of course she’s not okay.  Her son is still missing.”  He knelt to meet the woman’s face.  More softly he said, “And there’s no proof he fell into the hole.”

“Hole?”  She said.  “Did you see a hole?  I saw nothing.  It was nothing.”  She pressed her hands to her face.

They learned her name was Mary.  

Jack stuck his phone into his jacket.  “Now they’re calling it a black hole.”

Henry and Mary looked up.

“A black hole!”  He snorted.

“What do you call it?”  Henry said.

“A sinkhole caused by a city in disrepair.”  He declared it, like it needed an identity tagged with culpability.

“I thought you didn’t see anything.”

“I’m calling it that because we need a point of reference.”

“But it’s not a reference to anything if it’s not true.”

Jack waved a dismissive hand.  “Call it what you like.  I don’t care.  It’s a sinkhole.  The city is responsible for the negligent maintenance of a public thoroughfare!  This city will pay!”

Henry turned to Mary.  “When did you last see your son?”

Mary wiped away tears and sweat and turned up her hands.  “I don’t have a son.”

“What?”

“I don’t have a son.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m as confused as you are.”  She grimaced, forcing back the tears.

“But you stood next to the mayor.  He consoled you.  You’re crying!”

“Because I saw nothing.  I have never seen nothing.  Now I will always see it.  It will always be inside me.  Nothing!”  Tears streamed.  “I tried to tell them, but they didn’t listen.”

The crowd grew in size, a pulsating shadow awaiting some new entertainment.  

A helicopter, military aircraft, swept in from the east.  Passing swiftly overhead, it caused a lapse of silence in the crowd.  New theories formed.  Indecipherable mutterings cohered.  The machine sent down a gush of hot air; a cyclone of debris arose.  Turning slowly on its axis above the hole, the helicopter descended.  A door opened.  A man emerged wearing a body harness and combat gear.  The pilot slowly released a cable attached to the man’s harness.  Mary watched as the man dropped down and disappeared into the crowd.  Suddenly, she bolted.  

Up near the trees, a fifty-foot-wide theater screen and a pair of mammoth loud speakers stood, hastily erected in the middle of a distant parking lot.  Henry watched as he coursed his way through the mob.  A biographic portrait of Mary in cutting edge digital color played on the screen.  A sad piano accompanied the dramatic recounting of her day.

. . . and she left him for a brief moment this very summer morning, the sun rising, a soft mist veiling freshly-mowed lawns.  What child doesn’t want to explore the horizon suddenly become black?  What adult among us would not be drawn to this peculiar sight?

Mary saw her own gigantic portrait, recognizing it as her driver’s license photo.  She hated that photo and shielded her face, yet the eyes fell upon her.  

The helicopter came into her view.  She must see a man descend into nothing.  She was certain this would confirm without question there couldn’t be nothing.  There must always be something.

The suspended man signaled to the pilot as he approached the hungry maw.  A camera light on his helmet flicked on.  The brave man went down, down.  He disappeared.  Not a splash, not a voice.  The steel cable glistened in the sun.  The fictitious biography played on.  To have the story of the lost boy and the rescue taking place right there before their thumping hearts, their wide eyes and pricked ears, it was almost too much to bear.  

Henry found Mary.  He placed his hand on her shoulder.  Together they watched.  The helicopter spun faster, spinning like a top as it came down.  The pilot’s face contorted with fear like he knew he wasn’t getting out of this one.  A bond formed that is seldom seen but sometimes occurs between a doomed man and a crowd gawking from a safe distance.  Mouths hung open.  Gasps filled the air.  Then the helicopter disappeared.  Everything: cockpit, rotor blades, and the face of one man, all consumed by the blackness.  If there was an explosion, it was an explosion of silence.  It clutched the throats of every living man, woman, and child witness, as though this final moment on earth were theirs.  Some staggered in retreat.  Others took flight, shoving and pushing madly.  In the sudden chaos, Henry and Mary became separated.

Nothing near the hole lay in evidence of the crash.  Not a ripple.  The plummeting helicopter had been anticlimactic.  There had been no crushing metal, no carnage.  Two men instantaneously devoured by nothing had themselves become nothing.  It seemed there must be more to establish it as a thing beyond fiction: petrifying violence, blood-curdling screams.  But there was nothing.  A memory of nothing cannot survive for long; it drifts away with the changing winds.

   The crowd shifted its focus back to the screen.  A photo of a little boy appeared.  The photo was grainy.  Henry could not make out any identifying characteristics.  A grainy-faced boy who could have been any boy.  The narrator retold the story of his disappearance.

Commit this child’s face to memory!  A community working together can make miracles!  Together we can find this little boy!  Together we can find Christian!  Let’s find Christian!

Fists jutted into the air.  A communal chant arose.  “Let’s find Christian!”  Groups coalesced, circles formed, hands reached out and clasped hands.  They bowed in prayer.  “Let’s find Christian,” they said again and again.

The screen briefly went black, then a bright blue image of earth from miles in the sky.  The camera zoomed.  At first the green of outlying pastures and corn fields.  City streets came into view.  Then a single broad road, Fenkell Avenue.  Then the crowd, a sprawling black mass winding down streets.  The camera glided along the earth’s surface until it reached a small boy climbing over the western edge of the Fenkell overpass.  Strangely, the little boy’s face was grainy just like the photo, the vague idea of a boy on Fenkell Avenue.

A boy resembling Christian has been located!  Let’s save Christian!

Below the grainy face came the following words, emblazoned in black and white:

I Helped Rescue Christian from the Sinkhole on Fenkell Avenue!

The voice-over commanded, Get your t-shirt and support the search-efforts of this great community!

The crowd swelled with hope.  More chanting reverberated along the avenue.

The figure of Mary appeared on the screen, hiking down the embankment into the Southfield Freeway in a mad rush through stalled traffic.  She clambered up the western embankment.  No one tried to stop her.  The crowd cheered.  She made it to the street and the film cut out.  Someone shouted, “Hey!” and something else, but the sound was swallowed up by the agitated crowd.  With a flash, a high-definition pink horizon and a helicopter hurtling over treetops appeared.  The crowd cheered again.  It was the helicopter of the attempted rescue.  Though most had not witnessed it, dramatic retellings had circulated.  Gaps could best be filled by a televised broadcast of the event.  Rotor blades blurrily slashed blue sky.  A thunderous rumble filled the air.  The images, like a finger-curl, invited curiosity and established a palpable unity within the crowd.  All eyes instantly shifted from card games, bourbon samplings, and I-phones to the gigantic screen.  

The camera pans across the crowd.  The machine slows to a hover, shooting twirling winds, flipping hats and shifting sunglasses of those within close range.  The helicopter lowers a man, closer, closer to the hole.  Black claws reach up from the depths, first the cable in their grip, then the man.  The sharp claws pincer grasp his limbs, one at a time, like a child pulling the legs off an insect.  Blood spurts out in heart-fluttering bursts.  High-pitched screams send convulsions over the street.

Henry had not seen this.  This had not happened.  

The helicopter loses altitude.  A disembodied voice shouts, “Oh Christ almighty!”  Up from within the hole, claws reach up and grab the machine’s main rotor blades; they break to pieces.  Black plumes rise.  The engine lets out an agonized wail.  Metal shards shoot in wide arcs.  Glass shatters in a cloudburst.  A spattering of oil and hydraulic fluids fan across the black surface.  

The slaughter reshaped memories and engendered new ones from this, the now official record, the one broadcasted at six and eleven, the one Associated Press sent across oceans.

The screen went black.  A phalanx of soldiers marched in.  

Henry cut through backyards to avoid the crowd.  He pulled himself up his porch steps.  Panting, he went in and locked the door.  He sat down to the open pages of the book that lay on his desk.  He felt the welt on his head and pulled the card from his pocket.  He found his page, slipped it in, and closed the book.  He leaned back and watched the fan blades turn round and round in the dark ceiling.  He saw a mother and son reunited.  He saw a grainy-faced boy embrace a mother’s shadow in a phantasmagoric rapture.