A FEW WEEKS LATER, I'm in one of my small night classes on basic composition at the community college. The college is just one town over, about seven miles from the village, so I know the students have heard about Babe's interview. Her article is out now. I don't expect them to talk about it, though. It's a topic no one really talks about in town—things are whispered, there's some random gossip hinted at more than stated, but that's all. It's kept behind closed doors, and I plan to honor that. Between now and next spring, the Void doesn't need any more attention cast on it.
There are five students there that night, three males, two females; one male student is absent. Most are nontraditional students, as they say, meaning not eighteen and fresh out of high school. More like twenty-five and up, and a product of the school of hard knocks, living on the fringe of purpose and ambition but driven to attend college to find some kind of future.
I'm doing a traditional writing exercise, without really thinking about it. I'm passing around the old cardboard box with a mismatched collection of odds and ends in it for them to choose from. Once they've chosen, they're given ten or twenty minutes in class to write on their object—manufacture a story about it and share it with the class. The box holds an old tube of fire-engine red lipstick, almost completely used up; some keys on a flimsy key chain; a frayed shoelace that could be from a child's shoe; a small battered blue flashlight; a pack of breath-saving gum with a couple of pieces left in it; an old Ray Bradbury paperback; a funeral home hand fan, inscribed with the name of the funeral home and a heavenly host of angels. Fodder for fiction, as one student called it.
As the box is being passed around, a male student named Lonnie in the back calls out, “Can we write about the Void?”
The room gets quiet. They all look up at me, standing by my desk, pen in hand, poised over the grade book open on my desk. I mark Nathan, the missing student, absent. Attendance is 20 percent of their grade. I know why they're asking, but I'm not going to discuss the interview with them.
“Sure.”
“But we haven't experienced it,” Lonnie says “and you always say it has to be our truth. Can we write about something that hasn't happened to us?”
I stop what I'm doing, put my grade book down, and sit back in my chair. I look at them, realizing it's an important point for me to make.
“I had a professor tell me once that my forte is war stories.” I pause and breathe a moment. “Have I ever been to war? No. In fact, I do the opposite. I protest wars, any and all wars. But can I tell a war story? You be the judge. Let me tell you part of one that I heard from one of my older friends who did go to war, in Vietnam.” I pull some typed pages out of the back of my grade book. They've served this duty before.
I'm not really trying to distract them from the Void, I tell myself, and I don't think I could. I'm trying to answer their question about telling others' stories, while making sure I'm being a good example for how it's done. And if I can get them to join hands aboard the love train and forsake war forever, as the old anti-war song says, so much the better. I start to read to them.
“O'Reilly was a young eighteen when he went to war, fresh out of high school and fresh out of ideas of what to do with himself. Every male in his family before him had enlisted. They weren't good at getting educated and didn't have the means for it anyway. There was no family business to go into. Enlisting offered their first chance at picking out a living wherever they could.
“So, scared to the point of throwing up outside the recruitment office but figuring he was due to be drafted anyway, O'Reilly went in and enlisted. He threw up the moment he came out. Vietnam was on, and he knew that's where he'd be going.
“After three months of training at Fort Lewis, Washington, and Fort Polk, Louisiana, and a thirty-day pass home, he was on a twenty-hour flight into Cam Rahn Bay. Once there, his company was assigned to the Central Highlands, the border between North and South Vietnam.
“Around 350 American soldiers were dying every week in Vietnam. And an estimated thousand North and South Vietnamese men, women, and children were dying every week during the worst of it. But O'Reilly didn't know those figures. His days were organized around patrols into the rice paddies and the jungle, to keep the army's hold on the territory secure. The only thing worse than the daytime marches, he learned quickly, was the nighttime ones. It was on these night patrols that most of the original men in his company—men he was there to replace—had been killed or badly injured.
“Their patrols were single file, each soldier keeping a space of ten feet between him and the soldiers in front of and behind him, because of land mines. Soldiers learned all about land mines and what they did to a human body, because they saw it firsthand. It wasn't long before his best friend, Bob Bywater, was killed by a mine. The two had connected during their first days at boot camp when they were assigned as battle buddies, meant to always travel as a pair, having each other's back. Under the circumstances, they'd grown as close as brothers.
“One sweltering hot morning they were out on patrol, crossing the rice paddies on the dikes that ran between the flooded areas of the fields. O'Reilly followed Bywater, matching his steps without thinking, when Bywater stepped on a mine.
“The explosion knocked O'Reilly from his feet, ears ringing. He saw that Bywater's legs had been shredded badly by the blast, and he was losing blood quickly. It flowed into the watery field. Bywater was yelling for help, but his fall had set off the gas canister at his waist, releasing a particularly lethal form of tear gas. Everyone who tried to rush into the narrow space on the dike was forced back by the gas. They watched helplessly as Bywater, within the cloud of the poisonous gas, bled to death. O'Reilly never moved from the ground where he dropped. It was as if his own legs were useless, and he sat watching and listening to Bywater call, ‘Help me, O'Reilly. Help me,’ more and more softly, until he called no more.”
I put the pages back into my grade book and then look up at them. They're quiet.
“O'Reilly told me that story forty-three years after it happened, and he still had tears streaming down his cheeks when he told it.” They're quiet.
“So, does that answer your question about telling someone else's story? The idea is that your truth is in the telling, too, not just theirs. Could you hear mine?” I ask.
One of the two girls, Carrie Jean, says, “Yes.”
“What did you hear?”
“That you hate war.”
“How did you hear that?”
“In your description of the stupidity of it, of sending men marching in broad daylight out into an open field, unprotected. Of wearing so much equipment it can turn on them, as if they were the enemy. Of someone needing help, and no one can. It makes me hate war, too. Isn't that how we know it is truth? We feel it as our own?”
I gaze at this tall Native American girl and wonder at her. I like her answer. Her mind works like a writer's mind, clear and straight to the heart of the matter. Obviously, she has a base of experience and wisdom beyond her years. I know that she's part of the Tribe, the loosely affiliated group of Native Americans that live just north of town, between town and the Void, but closer to the Void. That's all I know about her. I've had members of the Tribe in my classes before, but they're not usually talkative.
“Is she right?” I ask the others. “Do you agree with how she describes truth?”
“Yes,” says Donal, from the back row. “You know it when you hear it. It has its own fit.” He nods at Carrie Jean.
“And my truth is different from O'Reilly's truth. He believes his time in the army made a man of him, though he's still confused by his experience and says he wouldn't recommend it to his sons,” I tell them.
Lonnie, the boy who originally asked the question, says, “Yeah, I can see how you can tell someone else's story, but I don't know if I can do it that good.” They all laugh.
“Well, you can't,” Kevin, the third boy in the class, says from the back of the room, and they all laugh again, including Lonnie. Kevin can almost always make us laugh.
“Okay. I'm setting the timer.”
They shuffle their things for writing and get quiet. They look at me expectantly.
I set the timer for twenty minutes. As it starts ticking, their heads go down. Twenty minutes is enough for them to write three or four pages and still allows enough class time for each of them to read their words aloud.
Every single one of them writes about the Void.
I know this before they're even through. I feel as if the Void has taken a seat in the back row with the other malcontents and is ready to speak its piece. Then the time is up.
The first story is read by Donal, who almost always chooses to be first. He is a member of the school's tiny football team and takes the stature this gives him on campus seriously. He goes first as though it is his duty to volunteer. His story is about the continuing nightmares his little six-year-old brother, Brogan, has about the Void. The family is a large, close knit one without a lot of resources, so Donal and his brother share a room.
“I read to Brogan every night, trying to replace the bad stories with good ones so he can fall asleep. Kids at school talk, and Brogan has heard things he doesn't know what to do with. Things that make it sound like the Void could come and get him from his bed, and he'd be gone forever, never to see his family again. They laugh at him when he cries.”
I wonder to myself if Donal is affected by these stories, too. Maybe he's reading them both to sleep.
Kevin, a welding apprentice, steps up to the front of the class next. He reads to us of feeling the call of the Void, like in The Call of the Wild he just read for his English 101 class.
“I feel the call,” he tells us. “I'm drawn to jump, and it scares me. I think the Void is like the wild in the book, something bigger than all of us that we all have to eventually surrender to, because it's in our nature to do so.” He looks sincere and worried as he reads.
“For Buck, the dog who is the lead character in The Call of the Wild, surrendering to the wild is ultimately a good thing—he lives happily ever after, a legend in his own time.” He stops and goes back to his seat.
“Kevin isn't quite sure how to reconcile that successful surrendering that Buck did with his view of the Void as a scary place. How do you surrender to that? So he stays uneasy about it, and we hear that in his writing, don't we? He writes on a descriptive rather than an interpretive level. Do you know what that means?” I ask them.
Monica, the other girl in the class, says tentatively, “I think so. He's doing what you always call coloring within the lines. You want us to color outside of them.”
“Exactly,” I say, and Kevin nods. “We want his truth.” He knows he's struggling with this, but it's a worthwhile struggle.
The boys are sticking together, it seems, and Lonnie, a full-time student living at home, reads next. He writes of knowing Duncan Robert, of them working on cars together, how much fun that was, and now he's gone, and there's no one else like him to work with, to learn from.
“Why did this have to happen? Where did he really go?” His tone is belligerent. “My girlfriend says there's a lesson in everything. Just what was I supposed to have learned from this?”
He looks challengingly at me, sure I'm willfully withholding the answer, as I sit in the front of the room over my grade book.
“I've got no answers,” I tell him. “I'm just hoping to cure you of run-on sentences before the term is over.” They laugh.
“But I'm still moved by what he has read,” I tell all of them. “I can hear the honest expression of the anger at this unexpected loss behind his words—no chance to ask why, or say good bye, or are you coming back. He's captured real loss.”
They look at Lonnie with respect. He blushes, confused. Usually his anger gets him in trouble, especially in a classroom.
Monica is the first girl to step up to the front of the room. She tugs at her short skirt on the way up, making sure it covers what it needs to. She tells the story of her friend, who went out with Duncan Robert in high school once or twice, who still has a crush on him.
“They drifted apart, and my friend never understood why. She always felt it was some shortcoming on her part.” She looks up at us for a moment, pain in her eyes. “Now she's left wondering if she had any part in his jumping, because we don't really know why he jumped.” She closes her notebook, gives one last tug to her skirt and goes back to her seat.
“This is the stuff of good stories, isn't it?” I ask them. “The friend has made an emotional investment in someone and it hasn't paid off. What other stories does it make you think of?”
“Romeo and Juliet,” Carrie Jean says, “or West Side Story. They all loved each other, but it still didn't pay off.”
“Great Gatsby,” Kevin, our resident reader, calls out.
“Carrie,” says Lonnie, and they all laugh, but I can't disagree. The literature classes here all talk about the stories of Stephen King, since he's a fixture in these parts.
I notice that their stories are confessional, as if they were compelled to write about the Void, but they feel guilty doing so, as if they've betrayed a common code. I don't know what to do with that. I can't absolve them. I don't have even the imaginary power to do so. But I know they think I do.
So I ask them, “What do you want, by writing and sharing these stories of the Void?”
“I think we need to know,” Lonnie says.
“Know what?”
“What we're talking about,” Monica says honestly.
“What do you mean?”
And then Donal, their self-appointed leader, says, “We need a trip to the Void.”
They all look at me in agreement, in defiance, expecting me to say the things adults in authority say to them—parents, law enforcement, pastors—who say it directly and indirectly. Stay away from it. You'd have to be crazy or have a death wish to do otherwise. We forbid you. No one ever takes into account just normal, natural curiosity—or the fact that forbidding it, trying to make if off limits, just energizes curiosity into action. This is where they are now—energized by all the communal forbidding. Ready to take action.
I suggest we talk about it, hoping to defuse some of the energy. They're disturbed by it all—the existence of the Void, Duncan Robert's jump, his return. They know that Duncan Robert is alive, and yet that somehow makes the Void more disturbing to them, the return having generated an on-going story that lives rather than one that ended and could be forgotten.
I find myself talking to them about Voids in general, the things I know, because I do know a lot now. I do it because I hope it will help. It helped me some, after Duncan Robert jumped, as I thought back on our talks before the jump. Then, it had helped me to think generally about the Void, when everything in me had said to follow Duncan Robert, to help him, or save him somehow. How could I possibly let him jump alone? What kind of uncle was I?
But my feelings about it had remained mixed, like theirs now, and Duncan Robert had known it. I hadn't been sure. I worried if it was the right time. I felt the tug of responsibility here, in this world. Clearly, I didn't feel the call. We both knew that meant there could be no jumping for me.
Jumping is for clear feelings, clear purpose only. It's like unconditional love. You had to have that kind of clarity, that kind of certainty, to jump. And I didn't have it. Duncan Robert told me I had to respect my own humanness, my own instinct on this, and not feel guilt. Funny, I thought at the time, that's just what I would have told him, had the situation been reversed.
So, I worked at that. I could tell them what I'd learned. It didn't mean anyone had to do any jumping. I look at them a moment, not entirely sure I should proceed. It's one thing for them to write about it, another for their authority figure to talk about it, without seeming to encourage it.
“The Void is always there,” I tell them. “We seem to continually create the idea of it, tell the stories of it, include it in our philosophy and religion. We need it. It's the collection place—the dump—for everything we don't want. We create it, and we fill it—tossing our deepest fears together in one place, under one name, and then treating it like a real place. It's been around too long to just be imaginary. We know that better than anyone, because we've got one right here in our woods.
“And jumping? I see jumping as an act of life—jumping rope, jumping into water, jumping into someone's arms, jumping for joy, even jumping out of a plane. Jumping is natural to us. We like it because it brings us into an immediate and intense awareness of ourselves at a moment in which we're at our best—a moment of choice, of courage or joy or just plain fun. It can be empowering. We forget that, by the way, as we get older.” I'm into it now, excited to be telling it. It definitely feels like coloring outside of the lines.
“But a jump into the Void is a different story. We don't do it for fun, or on a dare, or because of a random urge. That's what bungee jumping or sky diving are for. It's not a place for suicide, either. The Void calls for a jump into life, not out of it. You've seen that, with Duncan Robert's return.”
“Like Dante's Inferno?” Kevin asks, and while taken aback by his question, I'm reminded again that I always know where they are in their survey of literature classes by their associations.
“Well maybe. ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,’ I say wryly, remembering the poem. “Sure, or Captain Ahab being dragged to the bottom of the ocean,” I continue.
But I get blank stares on that one and remember they won't get to Moby Dick until next semester. “The Void provides an opportunity for a transformative journey.”
“Why would we need Voids?” Donal asks.
“Why would you think?” I need to answer that question with a question.
“Are we supposed to jump to find out?” Kevin asks apprehensively.
“Are you going to jump?” Monica asks accusingly.
“What you're feeling, in part, is the lure of the Void, which talking about it can trigger. It doesn't mean anybody will be doing anything.” I look at their upturned, unconvinced faces. “It's like talking about food.” I try turning to something more familiar, less scary. “Pretty soon everybody's hungry.”
“Or sex,” Kevin says, and we all laugh. Almost nothing works as well as laughing to break the hold of the lure.
Towards the end of class it's clear that they want to take a field trip to the Void and have class there. They remain unwavering in this. I know they will go, with or without me, and I now feel responsible for having led them in conversation on this. So I opt to go with them, and they spend the last of their class time planning the trip.
It doesn't fully sink in until after class, when I have time to process what has happened. I am aghast. This is the last thing Babe and I want—to bring more people to the Void, to generate more attention. They'll tell friends and family! Word will get out, even though they've all sworn secrecy about the trip. I know there's no such thing as secrecy in a small community. I'll be called by irate family, the police, my own school's administration. True, people have their classes meet all kinds of places—the library, the museum, outside on nice spring days, even coffee shops or private homes. It's not a big deal. But still, I might be in some serious trouble here, doing something that engages liability issues and that suggests—or confirms—a serious lack of judgment on my part.
I decide to confess it all to Babe, steeling myself for her response. She needs to know. Besides, I want her input.
But, wonder of wonders, when I tell her, she doesn't agree at all. I sit quietly at her kitchen table in her tiny apartment above the bank as she explains. She is glad to see me, having been working alone at her computer all day. She fixes us her favorite chai tea with some cinnamonraisin scones she made that morning, and I drink and eat gratefully, exhausted by the drama I've created in my head around this incident. It's tiring to play all the imaginary parts, I think with a laugh.
“Now think about this a minute,” she says. “The Void has existed longer than this community. What are we doing? Still trying to pretend it doesn't exist? Or that we can keep people from it, like in a police state, by ordering them not to go near it? We think we can rule it off limits, without ever saying why? Treat people like children? What would Duncan Robert say?”
I think her question is probably rhetorical, but feeling better now in her warm kitchen I say, “Is that like what would Jesus say?” I smile, but she's on a tear now.
“We forget that people can and will do what they want, right or wrong. They're supposed to! We cannot, and have no right to, try to control them, to prevent them the exercise of their own will, as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. We seem to have an endless supply of rules, whether or not rules have ever really worked. Oh, it's true, they can work for lots of things, like traffic or education or work, but . . . wait a minute. Wait a minute. I sound like him, don't I?” She looks at me with wide eyes.
“I am ready to jump, aren't I,” she whispers.
I look at her with a question on my face.
“I think we live our lives waiting for, looking for the rules, to tell us what to do. And Duncan Robert was trying to say look how we've become our own jailers!” She looks at me again, really alive now. It's quite a turn on.
“There are no rules for any of this Void stuff, Miles. Your students are making their own as they go. And I think it's good.” She brushes off the scone crumbs that have fallen, in her excitement, on the front of her flannel shirt.
I look at her with the unadulterated admiration that I'm feeling. The sun has come out in my world. There are no places for secrets to hide any more. In her presence, I feel good again.
And that makes me remember Carrie Jean's story. I tell Babe about Carrie Jean, and I dig her paper out of my bag to read it to her:
I have lots of Void stories. I live with the Tribe, north of town, and they watch over the Void. I don't know if I belong to the Tribe or not. I do know I belong to my Granny, and anything I know about the Void comes from her. She visits it almost every day, and I go with her to ceremonies, to call on the ancestors and natural forces. I got my medicine bag at the end of my coming of age ceremony there, when I was about twelve.
(I tell Babe that at this point, she reached into her shirt and pulled out a small, worn, beaded buckskin bag on a leather tie to show us.)
That night, I stood at the Void and watched it breathe. We had no fire. We used the stars and waxing quarter moon for light. Me and the other twelve-year old girls stood near the edge of the Void, in our new, women's ceremonial dresses, to receive a blessing. I'd been to these ceremonies before, but never observed the breathing of the Void before.
The ground swelled as the Void drew breath, and I felt myself lifted. It sank when that breath was expelled in a shower of colorful living sparks that shot far up into the night sky, not returning to Earth. I looked at the girls next to me, but they were staring straight ahead, as if they weren't seeing anything. As the breathing continued, I looked out into the crowd of observers. They weren't looking up at the sparks either. But they had been joined by a crowd of colorful, glowing others, who were pointing to the sparks and laughing and dancing. These people were looking at me, too.
They were telling me that I'm part of a larger tribe now, and my job is to carry that tribe's messages to the world. People need to be able to find those messages in the world now. People who are looking for them and don't find them can go badly astray, losing all that's deep in their hearts. Then their hearts become empty shelters for anyone's messages.
Some of them didn't glow but were like ragged dark tears in the dark, without features. They stood at the edge with me. I knew they were people who hadn't found those messages in the world and in their turmoil, had jumped into the Void in search of them. The Void had allowed it, for its own reasons, but not because it has the answers. The Void doesn't have them. Only people do.
I stood at the edge of the Void and watched the dancing and the lights for a long time. My Granny came to me and said, “They're going now.” And I knew she had seen them, too. I turned to ask her and saw that everyone else had gone and we were alone at the Void.
“The Void is looking for those things, too. Especially now,” she said. “You will help to find them.”