Jumping (18 page)

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.”

T
HE STUDENTS AND
I go out to the Void late Sunday afternoon, when everybody is off work and it's still light. We thought about going at night, but there are no lights out there and it's a new moon. Auspicious time for new beginnings, Babe had said to me portentously over the phone before I left. Plus I'm thinking that at night it might be more patrolled out there since Duncan Robert's jump and all the talk generated by Babe's article. Soon it might be prohibited. No one can get rid of the Void, but they could fence the area, which is exactly what Police Chief Nguyen is considering.

Half a dozen high-schoolers went out there to party one night about a week ago. This is unheard of. No one knows what all happened for sure. A fight. Some dares. Things got thrown into the Void, like lit cigarettes and beer cans. Maybe some girl's underwear. They were freaked by strange globes of light that came out of the Void, and the air felt strange to them, they said, as if electrically laden. Some heard low sounds coming from the Void. Of course they were drunk, but none of them will go anywhere near the Void now. And they're strangely quiet about it, even though they know it could get them lots of attention and maybe even admiration, which high school kids are usually pretty big on.

My students want to show me they're serious about this trip, not like the high-schoolers, so they make an inordinate amount of preparation, bringing enough gear for a weekend camping trip. I know, from their side talk, that they have spent time talking about what to wear, jackets, lucky caps, what kind of shoes. They come with water and blankets, flashlights, lanterns, snacks, because they know they'll be out there for a while, maybe even ‘til it's dark, and they will get hungry. Some have brought a locket, emblem, charm, for luck, a favorite photo. All have brought pens and paper, and some have clipboards to steady their writing. They're quiet, subdued, as they create a cozy little encampment with all of their stuff.

They have surprised me by keeping the trip a secret. I haven't received a single call. This level of secret keeping is unprecedented in all my life, especially by students, who so often feel like cogs in a big machine, under someone else's power. That kind of situation can make a secret really valuable currency on the climb to wherever you might be trying to get to. I'm a little in awe of their seriousness, wondering what purpose it serves for them.

What have they come for? To look into the Void? To feel it? To find out if they can conquer their fear of it? Most have never been this close to it—too scared, even as daredevil kids. There were just too many other places to go for fun or excitement, they told themselves. All this was, of course, before Duncan Robert's jump.

A couple have brought their digital cameras or phones and are checking each other's out, taking test pictures of each other and gathering around each other's little screens to look at them and laugh. They start to relax a little. Nathan has brought his sound equipment. He's the youngest in the class and works as a part-time amateur music producer, occasionally missing class because of his late-night work in the school's recording studio. Though he missed last week, someone informed him about tonight's field trip. He had heard about the sounds the high-schoolers heard, too, and has come prepared to record the sounds of the Void, as an experiment.

He's usually pretty quiet in class, around his older classmates, but he seems in his element here at the Void. Nathan tells us he plans to listen to the recordings he makes later, maybe speeding them up or playing them backwards to see if there's anything to be learned from them.

The picture takers have noticed that small multi-colored orbs have appeared in their pictures, usually just a couple around the people in the pictures.

“That's classic around places with supernatural energy,” Monica tells them. “I saw this on some of the shows on cable about the paranormal.”

They get me to take a picture of all of them sitting on the edge of the Void, legs dangling in. Monica is certain that having all of them at the Void together will produce lots of globes. They station me on the opposite side of the Void, crouched in the grass, to be at their level.

As I look through the lens, their legs seem to disappear into the Void, and I'm a little spooked. I take several pictures with each of the three cameras, and they all gather to view them. Sure enough, there are globes and other light effects in the pictures, whether attributable to the fading light now augmented by lantern light, or the effects of being this close to the Void, they don't know and neither do I.

Someone throws a lit match in to see what it does, and someone else takes a picture of it before it goes out. They look at the view of the match on the digital camera, and I can see the spectrum of colors around the flame. It's a beautiful picture, the little light in the Void.

Someone makes a joke, comparing the Void to the old cardboard box I use in class as a writing prompt.

“Except it looks more empty,” Donal says, laughing.

“Does it?” I'm thinking about the people Duncan Robert ran into down there.

The students are quiet, maybe thinking about the same thing.

Their voices in the semi-darkness remind me of all of the camping trips Duncan Robert and I took, and I'm comforted by their sounds. I let them do all these things with cameras and sound equipment and gear before they settle down to write, knowing they can't write until they feel they've come to know the Void a bit, gotten comfortable with themselves around it.

The light is starting to fade as the sun sinks through the surrounding trees towards the horizon. They seem excited, but excited like at a school dance just before it starts or at the car races or a Halloween party. That kind of energy. Even though they seem to like being near the Void, they still have a healthy respect for it, not getting too close to its edge, not dis-respecting it in any way—no jokes at the Void's expense, no throwing trash in or anything like that.

The Void is a keeper of something ancient—of something we don't know or don't remember or almost remember. I ask them if they feel a sense of history here with the Void.

Kevin says, “I feel the portal-ness of it.”

He looks around to see if there are any other sci-fi fans. “It's a
Star Trek
term, having to do with an opening to somewhere bigger, like the place that holds the secrets of the origins of everything.”

Nathan gives him the old Vulcan, split-fingered salute. The two of them then knock fists in tribute to each other's knowledge.

Most of them agree that the Void has a knowingness of some kind.

Nathan, who's definitely more talkative tonight, says it has a strong, all-knowing presence, but benign, non-reactive. “It just is. And it wants us to just be, too. Live and let live.”

So I say, to begin to move them towards writing, “Think about this. You're doing all the things you'd do when visiting a monument or point of interest on holiday—you're looking at it, photographing it, photographing yourselves, talking about it. Eating and resting beside it. You feel safe enough to do these things. And you're learning something about yourselves, too, in relation to this monument and what we know about what it commemorates.” I'm picking words they don't usually use, trying to reframe the scary Void of their childhoods.