ACT I - THE QUIET

The factory closed on a Tuesday. They didn't even give us a party or a cake or nothing. Just a letter in the mail, thick envelope, and inside a piece of paper that said 'due to financial restructuring' in words that sounded like they came from a lawyer's mouth and tasted like sawdust.

I worked there eighteen years. Eighteen years of hot metal and greasy hands and lunch breaks where I sat on the tailgate of my truck and ate sandwiches that tasted like machine oil. My back hurts now. Every morning I wake up and the first thing I feel is the pain in my lower spine, like someone put a rusted nail through it and forgot to pull it out.

Bonnie said we should look for a better place. I said better costs money, and we had exactly two hundred dollars between us and a month of unemployment checks that wouldn't cover the rent on a room with a leaky roof.

So we found the cheapest thing we could afford, which was an apartment in a building on Main Street in a town so small it had only one traffic light and that traffic light had been broken for six months and nobody cared.

Three bedrooms. A kitchen that had been renovated at some point in the seventies and never touched since. A living room big enough to park a sedan. All for a price that made me suspicious until the suspicion wore off, which for me usually takes about a week.

The first thing I noticed was the quiet. Not the good kind of quiet, like a church or a library. The bad kind, like the kind that exists inside a machine that's running but you can't see because it's all sealed up.

The second thing I noticed was Earl.

Earl was the caretaker. He lived in the basement, which I knew because he came up once to fix a light in the hallway, and he came up again two days later to check something in the boiler room that didn't need checking.

He was a small man, thin as a rail, with a face that I couldn't read because he didn't give me anything to read. No smile, no frown, no expression at all. Just a flat blank surface, like a mirror that's been polished too clean.

His walk was weird too. Too quiet. A man that size should sound heavier on the stairs. His boots should clomp. But he made no noise, like a cat or a ghost or something that didn't quite weigh what he looked like he weighed.

ACT II - THE EYE

I don't believe in ghosts. I don't believe in aliens. I don't believe in any of that crap that people use to explain things they don't understand so they can feel smart about not understanding them.

I believe in things you can touch. I believe in a hammer, a wrench, a paycheck that clears. I believe in the factory whistle and the taste of coffee that's been sitting too long on a hot plate.

But I believe in what I see too, and what I saw on a night in November when I went down to the basement looking for a flashlight I'd lost, is something I can't explain using any language I know.

Earl was in the boiler room, standing in front of the furnace, facing the wall. His back was to me, and he was just standing there, still as a statue, and I was about to call out to him and ask him if he'd seen my flashlight, when I saw it.

On the back of his neck, below the collar of his work shirt, there was a shape. Round, dark, maybe an inch across. I thought it was a mole at first. A big mole. But then it moved. It shifted slightly, like a pupil dilating, and I realized it wasn't a mole.

It was an eye. A second eye, set into the back of his head, below his real eyes, and it was looking in the opposite direction from his face.

I stood there for a long time. The flashlight was at my feet, its plastic casing cracked from a fall I don't remember taking. Earl didn't turn around. He didn't make a sound. He just stood there, facing the wall, with three eyes watching three different directions at once.

I didn't run. I picked up the flashlight, I went back upstairs, and I sat at the kitchen table and I thought.

I thought about money. Not the usual kind of thinking, like 'how much do I need for groceries?' But a different kind, sharp and quick and dangerous. What if I knew something? What if I knew something that somebody didn't want anybody to know? What could that be worth?

I've been a factory worker for eighteen years. I've watched things get cheaper and wages stay the same and the men in suits get richer and the men in coveralls get laid off. If there was one thing I'd learned, it was that information is worth something. Maybe the most valuable thing in the world.

So I went downstairs again. I found Earl in the same spot, facing the wall, three eyes watching three different directions.

'Earl,' I said. 'I want to talk to you.'

He didn't turn. He didn't blink. All three of his eyes stayed fixed on whatever they were fixed on, and I noticed that they weren't blinking at all. Not the top two. Not the bottom one.

'Let's talk,' I said again.

Nothing. Just the hum. The deep low hum from somewhere below the basement, from wherever the furnace was, or whatever the furnace had been replaced by.

I went back upstairs. I sat at the table. I drank coffee that tasted like machine oil. I waited.

ACT III - THE WALL

The building shook at three in the morning.

Not a vibration. Not the pipes knocking. A real shake, like someone had grabbed the foundation and was rocking it back and forth, gently, like a mother rocking a baby to sleep.

Bonnie woke up screaming. I woke up from a light doze, the kind of sleep that isn't really sleep, and I sat on the edge of the bed with my heart beating fast and my hands shaking.

Then I heard it. The hum. From the basement. Louder than ever. Deeper. Like it was accelerating, like something was building up energy, like a--

No. Not a word. Not that word. I wouldn't say that word. I wouldn't give it the satisfaction of being named.

I got up. I got the hammer. The big one, the one with the twelve-ounce head and the hickory handle that Bonnie's brother had given me for Christmas ten years ago and I'd never really used because there's always someone else to do the heavy stuff.

I went downstairs. I went to the basement door. I went down the stairs.

Earl was still there, still facing the wall, three eyes unblinking, and I could see now, in the dim light of the basement bulb, that the wall behind him was not brick. It was metal. Smooth, grey metal that reflected the bulb's light in a way that brick never could.

I put my hand on the wall. It was warm. Not hot. Warm, like skin.

I swung the hammer.

The first blow cracked the surface. Not brick, not concrete. Metal, thin-gauge and surprisingly weak, and underneath it was more metal, thicker, and underneath that, something that glowed with a faint blue light.

I swung again. And again. The holes got bigger. The light got brighter. The hum got louder.

Bonnie was screaming now. From upstairs. I could hear her through the floor, her voice sharp and thin, like a wire pulled too tight.

I didn't stop. I swung until my arms hurt, until my hands blistered, until the hole was big enough to see through.

Through the hole, I could see the sky. But the sky was wrong. It was moving downward, not upward, like we were going up or it was going down and I couldn't tell which. The stars were streaking, not stationary points of light but long thin lines of white, like the earth was a movie and the projector had jammed and the film was burning.

ACT IV - THE NOTHING

I was tired. I sat on the floor, the hammer lying next to my leg, my hands raw and bleeding, the hole in the wall a circle of blue light no bigger than my fist.

The building was still shaking. Still rising. I could feel it in my teeth, in my bones, in the space behind my eyes where pain usually lives but wasn't, because nothing had enough weight anymore to qualify as pain.

Bonnie came downstairs. She found me sitting on the cold concrete floor, my back against the metal wall, the hammer on the ground, and the hole.

She sat next to me. She didn't speak. She put her hand on my hand, and I didn't pull away, which, for the record, is significant, because I pull away from most things, most people, most attempts at comfort that come wrapped in the hands of other people.

'Well,' I said. My voice was flat and tired and honest. 'Well.'

We sat there. We looked at the hole. We looked at the sky through the hole. We listened to the hum, which was louder now, or we were quieter now, or both.

I don't know where we are. I don't know where we're going. I don't know if this is the end or if it's just a place I haven't been yet.

I know that my hands are hurt. I know that Bonnie is holding my hand. I know that the building is moving, up or down or sideways, in a direction that has no name.

I know that Earl is still standing at the wall, three eyes open, watching whatever he watches, doing whatever he does.

And I know, for the first time in forty-two years, that I have no idea what is real and what isn't, and the funny thing is, I'm not afraid.

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