Poetry by Poem

The Third Conversation About Myself
(A Soul Hole)

In a coffee shop near my apartment I was, very gradually and without inspiration, chipping away at the first bits of this piece. During one of my frequent pauses to stare out the window and imagine what sort of praise and eventual broad exposure my pseudo-work would bring me, I heard my name from an unfamiliar voice. My full name, first, middle and last. My head twisted itself toward the sound. My neck cracked loudly.
I saw a clump of people in their late twenties, two couples, leaning in and staring at each other intently through faces alight with amazement. None of them looked up. Clearly they weren’t trying to find me or get my attention. None of them were familiar. I loosened my neck and strained to hear what they were saying. Music in the room – turned up much too loud, I suddenly thought – obscured all but snatches of their conversation. I heard the phrases: just graduated; going out; told his wife; new wife.
I leaned towards them indiscreetly. I tried to stop breathing. Then I heard: Colorado; all night; TV hasn’t even been turned on. There was a murmur from one of the women and I clearly heard the response – he said: he lives in Chicago; then my name again. I stood up, apparently not as loudly or obviously as I had intended – none of them noticed. I strode quickly to their table. The usual lump rocketed into my esophagus. I tapped the speaker’s shoulder.
A clearing of my throat – the lump had reached its destination and stuck firmly. Then I was asking them in a dry voice what they were talking about – I was thinking I shouldn’t have got up so quickly, should have stayed in my seat and eavesdropped. The speaker turned around to look at me. An addled expression on his face. It lingered for a moment as he opened his mouth to say something; and then it froze rigid and began to melt. His eyes burrowed into mine. A moment passed.
Then he popped. Exclaimed that I was him. He looked frantically to one of the women who was staring at me with wide eyes – wide face. He asked her if he wasn’t right. She confirmed that he was. My cheeks burned. The other couple was looking at their friends. I glanced over and saw two faces twisted obliviously into questions – embarrassed questions.
The first woman suddenly stood up and stretched out her hand. Her name was Sophie – but friends called her Pudge – not that I would want to know. I brokenly told her my name – she knew. The man grabbed my hand almost before she had let it go – Mark, and these were their friends, Chris and Rochelle. I nodded awkwardly. I apologized – I asked them how they knew me.
The first couple looked at each other, breathed in, and told me they had seen my…the thing I’d put in the ground.
There was an extended, expectant silence. I just looked at them. I was utterly bewildered. Hesitantly, I told them so.
The thing I buried, they repeated, out in Joliet – they lived in that cul de sac. I asked them what cul de sac. I had only been to Joliet once I told them – didn’t think I’d visited any special cul de sac – and I had never buried anything anywhere.
There was an extended, blink-less silence. Every second of it awkward. Chris kept looking around underneath the table and scratching the back of his neck.
Then the woman told me that they had found something in a pothole in the tarmac on their street. The road was built on an old building foundation, or something, and it was all moving and cracking and everything and little potholes were sinking all over the place, a nightmare for their suspension, she could tell me. Mark – she nervously grabbed her husband’s hand when she mentioned him – had been filling them all in, just as a kind of service to the community, I know? And that’s when he saw, um, me, sort of, in the hole. She bit her lip. Mark broke in. Explained that I was the hole – sort of – not that I’m a hole or anything, of course.
They all looked at me – a circle of screwed up expressions, holding their breath.
Pudge timidly whispered she knew it sounded weird – and then her eyes and her voice trailed off. Everyone sighed tensely and at once.
I told them it actually didn’t sound that weird, that I’d heard of something like this before – never expected it would happen to me – I wasn’t upset or anything – a little surprised.
A gale of relieved puffing. Some little explosions of awkward laughter.
I bit my lip.
Mark and Pudge began jabbering over one another – gushing with a garrulous, red-faced relief. They had kind of expected me to say that, they said, since the hole and everything was kind of like something I’d been thinking about for a story lately. I scratched the back of my neck uncomfortably. They didn’t pause, only assured me I was a big hit on their street: no one was watching TV anymore even. I forced a smile. They told me the fight with my wife last Thursday had been really popular, everyone was still talking about it. Apparently, Sandy Thullen had cried like a baby.
Here I stopped them with alarm, my tone accusatory: What about my privacy? Had they seen anything…?
Two sets of eyes jumped out at me. Chris and Rochelle had already crawled under the table by the time I finished the sentence.
No, no, they were both shouting together and fairly jumping up and down. Pudge told me it wasn’t like that, and then Mark stumbled over her that it wasn’t like watching me, or watching through my eyes or anything, it was like – and then Pudge said, my feelings, it sort of showed them my feelings – my understanding of the world. Her eyes pleaded with me to understand.
I looked at them both skeptically. Then we all turned as Chris said he and Rochelle needed to get going. I nodded distractedly, turned back suspiciously for a better answer. The other two seemed to have suddenly remembered their friends and were visibly melting with anxiety in front of me. They knew I still wasn’t convinced – they realized their friends were on the brink of never speaking to them again. They hovered in painful indecision for a moment and then gingerly trotted after Chris and Rochelle who had already made it as far as the door. Their stretched lips apologized to me over and over – with worried glances thrown in my direction every few seconds – until the door beeped shrilly and closed behind them. There was much to explain outside. I felt a little sorry for them.
But the door beeped again. Burst open. A seemingly enlightened Pudge exploded through it and scuttled towards me with her head buried in her purse. She rummaged until she found a pen and a torn movie ticket – wrote their phone number on the ticket and gingerly handed it to me.
She said I ought to let them know what to do – they could give me directions if I wanted to…you know. She added awkwardly that I was much “nicer” in person. And then she scampered out.
I hate being told I’m nice.
I stuffed the ticket in my back pocket. Then I remembered I had left my computer unwatched – my half-finished story visible and beckoning, I thought, to the unscrupulous public for general viewing – and I rushed to close it.

Three days passed. I couldn’t sleep. I could barely eat. I couldn’t write. Work was torment.
I had almost thrown away the phone number. But it dawned on me that I might not want a hole-in-the-ground to go on broadcasting my deepest, darkest self to the suburban world in general. So I held on to the ticket self-surreptitiously and agonized over whether or not to use it.
At first it was all fear and self-consciousness – I lived in my head, I thrived on my emotions, on what was mine alone. Now, it seemed, what was mine alone had become property of the public domain – the indiscriminate, gabby public. Sandy Thullen – who sounded unemployed, thoroughly hair-sprayed and sweat-pant-clad with a string of ex-husbands all over the country – knew more about me than my own wife. And besides, I had always, on principle, despised emotional voyeurs.
But then there came, incongruously, a gradual, guilty pleasure at the idea of my sudden popularity – that my thoughts proved better entertainment than TV for a whole neighborhood of middle class Americans.
Of course, this idea gave way to a gnawing suspicion that cheap entertainment was never what I had had in mind for my sacred, secret, inner life. What if I had always planned to have my demons taken seriously? An artist is not an entertainer – surely. An artist is certainly not entertainment.
Then I realized they were watching – or hearing or tasting or whatever they did at that unholy cosmic anomaly – the whole infernal conflict with myself.
I dug out the ticket. I called the number.
I would put a stop to this. Even if my intentions were already known to the whole voyeuristic world before I arrived – even if they came with knives and machine guns to stop me – I would cover up that hole with my mangled, lifeless body if I had to.
It wasn’t until I was half-way to Joliet that it occurred to me to look into the thing myself.
It was, I suddenly thought, for all practical purposes, my soul hovering beneath that tarmac. My soul made somehow sensible – tangible. Providing hours of riveting drama for a shameless street-load of suburbanites. I almost veered off the road.
All my life had been one long pursuit of insight into that soul. I had wrestled with it and caressed it. I had sweated blood over it. What was it? Who was I? Why did I fail? What was good in me? Did I truly know God – did God know me?
And now, at the end of a Joliet street, only an hour from the prosaic hum-drum of my daily haunts, was my chance to peer, as an objective, outside observer, into the depths of what had always eluded me.
I noticed the back of my shirt was wet with my sweating. The exit loomed suddenly close.
What would I see? A fearless man, brilliant, loving, satisfied? Would I see godliness? God himself? My stomach tightened. I knew I would see dishonesty and pettiness and conceit. But, oh how I prayed that I wouldn’t. That I would ecstatically, resoundingly surprise myself. I willed my very being to surprise itself.

Then I was turning into the street – my car wading gradually through the thick suburban thoughtlessness. It seemed everyone was out. Dressed like garnished fish for the warm weather – smiling expectantly. Most were schooling around one spot at the right-hand edge of the cul de sac. A small tumult erupted when my car came into view. Some kids ran alongside me. Great – children had been looking into my hole.
I climbed out slowly from behind the steering wheel and slipped into a sea of good will. Handshakes all around. One little boy wanted my autograph. Did I know how much I had done to help someone’s grandmother? Why couldn’t I have been single? A father pressed me for that autograph for his son. I seemed much nicer in person – didn’t I seem much nicer in person? My name was flying around like a wiffle ball.
I spotted my friends from the café and made a bee-line toward them. The edges of their mouths curled up happily, fashionably it seemed – but their eyes were apprehensive. Mark pointed to a little stack of black-top patch bags, a shovel and a tamper, lying in the street. I eyed them conspicuously. Then I saw the hole.
It was about the size of a dessert plate on the surface but was, clearly, sub-terrainially larger – the edges sagged a little as though they were waiting wearily for their turn to fall in. I wondered how everyone on the street had enjoyed me so universally in such a tiny lacuna. I ignored the obvious stares – the encompassing, welling expectation as I eyed the opening and that bag of patch – and then began walking methodically towards it.
Each step lasted forever. It seemed the hole, itself, was moving away from me – taunting me to catch it. I quickened my step.
Then it suddenly, cheekily stopped moving and slipped itself under my toes so that I tottered foolishly on its edge. An involuntary, nervous cough racked my throat.
I dropped slowly to my knees and stretched my head over it. I had to open my eyes because I had shut them. I sensed nothing at all around me.

What I saw was like what someone must see when two mirrors are positioned to face each other – and the someone is one of the mirrors: an endless series of reflections of reflections. A nothing that only gets smaller. What I heard was like muffled feedback, endless ringing. What I felt was bitter, vacuous futility. A soul peering into itself.
I must have sat in the same position for some time. My thighs, my knees and the arches of my feet were cramping. My eyes hurt with their frantic search for a focal point – any point.
Gradually, I became aware again of murmuring and giggling and moving and breathing all around me. Apparently, the suspense was too much for one thirteen year-old because she came up behind me and peered intrusively over my shoulder.
Oh, was her casual exclamation, it goes all blank like that sometimes – it’s really annoying.
I looked up and everyone was blinking back at me. I was reflected in a hundred glistening eyeballs.
And that’s when I decided not to use the patch. I made a mental note never to finish this piece.
When I got into my car again and had my hands firmly on the wheel, everyone cheered. I admit, it felt pretty good.