The Hole

“Don’t ask me how it works, it just does OK?”

I can see she doesn’t believe me. She’s angry and her anger blocks everything out, other than the accusation she has levelled at me. Her anger is the righteous judge, she is the appalled jury. I can see my execution looming.

“Why can’t you be honest with me!?” she wails this with an anguish that tells me everything I need to know.

I have lost her and there is nothing I can say to change this loss.

I consider the situation. I already know my current odds are so slim that they are skeletal. I look at the woman made ugly by her judgement and her anger, and I feel the towel between my thumb and forefinger. I won’t even throw it into the ring, I’ll drop it like a mic, and I will turn my back on her. Forever.

One thing stops me.

If I turn my back on Melissa and walk away now, will I ever return to this place? I’ll have no reason to. 

To my shame, I try again. I try again, not for her and perhaps not even for me. I try because I don’t want the portal to close. I don’t want to lose the options that the portal affords me.

I barely register a choice I have already made. The other side to the portal is far more important to me than where I am right now. Has Melissa picked up on this? Has she understood that I lack balance in my life? An unhealthy imbalance in my lives. Is she instinctively jealous of the time I spend elsewhere, and how much more rewarding it is for me? 

I make a decision then. The decision is ill considered, as is so often the case when a person is confronted with the possible end of things. I fear that looming change, and so I grab a hold of the possibility that I can keep on going with things the way they are.

“Look,” I say with a deep and sorrowful sigh that denotes my capitulation, “I’ll show you.”

*

I was bored.

I know that is a parlous state of affairs. Boredom is about as lazy and pathetic as it gets. Boredom is the preserve of the ungrateful and the idiotic. Boredom is idleness and the devil sniffed out my disdain for the world I lived in, and my unhappiness with the life I had been gifted, and he came a-calling.

This world was not enough for me.

So I was provided with another world and in that world I discovered a purpose, and I felt fulfilment for the first time in my adult life.

I call it a portal, but that doesn’t quite cut it. Language falls short at times, or maybe it is me who is lacking. I am afraid. To define a miracle is to shackle it and hold it in the waters of normality until its very essence is washed away. We destroy the things we do not understand, and so I pretend I understand it, and that has worked well enough for me.

I indulged myself in my boredom so thoroughly and completely that I wanted to die. I think this is some of what made the portal work.

One day, instead of going to an office to eke out my turgid existence, I called in sick. I didn’t even call. I emailed. Then I tried to go back to sleep. I wanted to sleep away that part of my existence, but my mind would not allow that simple escape. 

I got up and I absently pulled on some joggers and I paced the house. I paced every room of that bloody house as though I were looking for something that held some sort of meaning for me, but there was nothing. Not one thing.

Melissa was out, but that is not to say that she was not there. Even her existence in my world held scant comfort for me. 

I must have wandered listlessly through every room of the house twice or more. Then I found myself at the cellar door. I had omitted this place in my meanderings and now I was going to rectify that omission.

Something happened as I flung the cellar door wide and began taking the steps down into the pool of uninviting darkness. There was a change and I felt an inexorable pull into a darkness where I could lose myself at last. Each step I took was more deliberate and my pace increased until I was running down the cellar steps at a speed that I could not check even if I had tried. A primal scream rammed itself past my lips and I snarled as I lowered my head so it would suffer the full impact as I crashed with a sickening finality into a brick wall that was shrouded in darkness and I could only feel, but not see.

Eyes wide open, but blinded by the impenetrable darkness, I sought to end myself in a violent and visceral manner. Enough was enough. My boredom had drowned any sense of purpose within me, then it had started in on my sense of self.

I did not brace myself as I fired myself at the wall. I gave it everything I had. In this single endeavour I would be successful.

Time swaddled me and space dizzied me. I was caught in a moment of chaos and I do not know when it was that I understood that my intended fate had been stolen from me and in its place I was given a second chance.

There was no impact and yet I stood dazed and confused. 

I was no longer in the cellar of my house. 

I was somewhere altogether different. 

*

“You must be H,” the man in the old fashioned but sharp suit said to me.

I nodded.

I nodded because it was easier than speaking. I nodded because I had no idea of what to say. I nodded because it felt like a good idea at the time. It felt right.

The well-dressed man nodded, “I thought you’d be different,” he looked me up and down, “but then I guess you are.”

He reached into his jacket and pulled out a gun. If I hadn’t been so utterly discombobulated, I would have flinched, even as I saw he was holding the business end of the gun and presenting the handle to me. I’d never seen a gun before, let alone held one. It was heavier than I’d expected even though I’d heard a million actors say that exact same thing. I weighed the firearm in my hand.

“That’ll do,” I said to the man.

The words surprised me, but they fit the man entirely. He reached into his jacket and handed me a slip of paper. Upon it was a name.

“He’ll be in Prince’s Deli,” he told me, “you know what to do.”

And I did.

I left the back room without another word. There was nothing left to say. This transaction was over. Leaving the man behind, I entered a bar. I should have walked right on out of there, but something compelled me to approach the barman and order a bourbon.

“It’s on the house,” said a gruff voice from over my shoulder, “but leave it at the one, OK?”

There was sufficient warning in the words to leave me in no doubt that I would be stepping over a red line were I to order a second drink. I didn’t turn towards the owner of the voice. I downed the proffered drink in one go, and I nodded thanks and recognition curtly and almost imperceptibly as I turned from the bar and left.

I walked down the street and took a right, cutting through an alleyway that I would have avoided in another life. Five minutes later I was in a very different part of town. A part of town where money belonged, but had the taste to dress itself up a little and hide its vulgarity.

Prince’s Deli was the kind of place I wanted to be a patron of, but I was smart enough to know my place in the world, and today of all days, I fit even less.

Norm looked up from this side of the counter and my presence transformed him. If I hadn’t known what to do, Norm provided me with an autocue. The effect I had on Norm was the biggest thrill I have ever experienced. I was a god in that moment.

Norm was my first.

You always remember your first.

Every single detail.

Norm was the gateway to a fix I would never be able to get enough of.

Afterwards, I walked casually from that place. I had ended worlds. I had a power few would ever wield. I walked away and in no time at all, I found myself standing in the dark of my cellar. A total darkness that bathed me from head to toe, thanks to the door at the top of the steps being inexplicably closed.

I stood there for what felt like a long while, but was probably only a matter of minutes. Tentatively, I made my way to the steps and carefully made my way upwards, but when I opened the door something of what I experienced with Norm welled up inside me and I strode back into my house with a confidence and purpose that I had never felt before in the entirety of my life.

When I saw the clock on the oven I realised Melissa would be home in the next half hour. I made a mug of tea and took a seat. My mobile was in my hand before I had consciously attended to it and when I did, something made me check my banking app.

I had been paid for the job I had done on Norm, and I had been paid handsomely.

How they knew my banking details was a mystery to me, but also of precious little consequence to me. How I knew they would transfer the money into my bank should have been the bigger question, but I accepted it all and left it at that.

After all, I’d accepted the contract and I’d offed Norm like I was spreading jam on toast.

I’ve been back every working day since.

*

I could show Melissa my bank account. 

I don’t.

We’ve always had separate bank accounts. That’s the way it was on day one and neither of us saw fit to change it. 

No, showing Melissa all those transfers and the obscenely large balance will throw up more questions than I want to answer.

I have something better to show her.

We stand at the top of the cellar doors. I have flung the door wide. I always fling the door wide, but Melissa has never seen me do this. She has never seen this side of me.

“I…” she says, then she looks at me. Looks at me properly like it’s for the very first time, and this causes her words to drain down the plughole of her mind.

I take her hand, “come with me,” I say as I step forth.

I feel her exhaled breath more than hear it, as I accelerate down and down, pulling her along behind me like a threadbare ragdoll.

Only as we reach the pool of darkness where the wall should be do I wonder whether this portal is only for me. Only at the point of potential impact do I consider her crashing into the wall in such a way that will alter the quality of her life forever.

*

I’m in that back room again.

It’s not always that first back room, in fact, I can count on my hand the number of times I have been back here. But I’m here and I know the deal. In a way, it is fitting. 

It fits.

The sharply dressed man is not in the same suit, but he may as well be. These suits are of a sort and they are his trademark.

He reaches into his jacket and he hands me not a gun, but cheese wire.

We both nod.

This is the sort of assignment it’s going to be. 

“It’s her,” he tells me.

There is no piece of paper. There are no more words.

I already knew.

If it wasn’t cheese wire, I’d have found a way. I’d have used my bare hands if needs be. Maybe I still will.

I leave the back room.

At the bar, I ask for a bourbon, “make it a double,” I tell the bar tender.

I feel a pat on my shoulder and I hear the same gruff voice, “these are on me, Harry.”

I nod and I look into the mirror across the bar from me. I don’t know that face. The face that owns the gruff voice, but I know it well. I would know it anywhere.

It’s not human, you see.

I am drinking with the devil, and I am in hell.

I down the first bourbon in one go and I go through the motions anyway, “another,” I tell the bar tender.

He eyes me with pity as he pours, we both know I won’t get drunk. That I can’t get drunk. I wonder what personal hell he is in, and then I don’t. It’s of no consequence. It doesn’t matter to me.

I leave the bar and I walk across town to find Melissa.

I go in search of my wife.

Then I kill her.

Again.