Jumping Read online

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Standing at the Void, Again

  I HAVE TO GO BACK. I have to go and I have to stay at the edge until I figure this out. For the story, sure, but this is bigger. I know this. It has hold of me, has had hold of me since I was a kid. I managed to stand there for what felt like a quick minute when I first got to town. I fled then, spooked and disoriented knowing time sped by as I stood there, without my knowing. What will happen if I stay at the edge? Will it possess me? I think. I know it's irrational of me to think that, but if a Void isn't irrational, what is? Already most of my waking thoughts are about it, not to mention wherever I go at night, in dreams. Am I rational right now? Probably not. I'm using up too much of my rational energy avoiding the Void. My only hope to get any rational thinking back might be to go to the edge and reclaim it. Or lose it forever.

  From the first time I heard about the Void—I must have been no more than six or seven and heard older kids trying to scare younger kids talking about it—I have been captivated. I knew those older kids were often full of it, but when I asked adults about it they couldn't give me a reasonable answer either. That really pricked up my ears and kept me thinking. “We aren't always meant to know the reasons why,” they said. “Sometimes you just have to accept God's will.” But I thought we were meant to know, which fueled a minor but steady passion about it over the years. But this was different, minor had become major, and passion had become compulsion.

  So I know it's time to go, and one morning, after talking to Henry about what I've got so far, I decide to go. I don't tell him I'm going, I just agree as he tells me he likes what I have, and asks what else I plan to get. “You know, you should talk to all the officials—the police, the mayor—to see if what they say is different. The police always know what the real story is. They will have had some association with the Tribe, too,” he tells me.

  “Yeah,” I say, absent mindedly.

  “Babe,” he says sharply, “are you paying attention to me?”

  “Yeah,” I lie. “I was writing it all down.” We hang up after I reassure him a few more times how smart he is and what a big help he is. Does he really fall for that? I wonder. Well, it might be half true. I pick up my bag and my keys and head for my car out front. I drive north, to the Void. I'm there within ten minutes, walking through the clearing, through the dappled summer sunshine to the Void's edge, feeling a light breeze ruffle my gauze skirt, hearing insects buzz in the grass. I catch sight of a small black fox on the other side of the clearing, darting into the tree line. That makes me smile.

  As I stand at the edge of the Void now, calmly gazing in, I realize, with some surprise, that I have always liked knowing it exists, with all its risks and possibilities. It's like knowing that the Very Large Array exists just outside of Socorro, New Mexico, one of my favorite places. It's a place scientists can listen to space, just in case. Somebody's on that job, ready to establish contact when it comes. I feel that way about the Void. It's pretty essential, in terms of meaning, like those listeners at the Very Large Array. Because some of us believe we're meant to know. And I'd like to write that story.

  Just standing on the edge, I suddenly know some things now about the Void that I didn't know before. Being this close makes a difference in your understanding of things.

  I'm waiting for him, Duncan Robert, to create the truth of the Void for us, I realize, by telling us what he found there. He can't do that because he created it for himself when he jumped. His act of jumping made it what it was. He brought himself to it, yes, but he brought his act of jumping to it, too. Any realizations he had were actualized by his jump. And his jump is his jump.

  I stand there, feeling understanding fill me. I've always been drawn to people who've been through recovery programs successfully, of their own will or through interventions, because they seem to have been through something that transformed them in a really empowering way. They have a new quiet confidence about them, as if they couldn't be pushed. Yet they are humble, too. A jump feels to me like it might do the same thing. It might take you through a process that makes you more than you were, that releases some of the fear you've accumulated.

  I feel, too, the presence of a truth here. I can't deny it. The Void is what it is. It's got its own “normal,” separate from what we do or don't do, believe or don't believe. It doesn't require our belief, as the saying goes. I feel you can trust that, and I almost laugh out loud. I'm talking to myself about trusting a hole in the ground.

  As I stand there, I'm aware that I'm still paralyzed by my fear of falling into it, of it swallowing me up for all eternity, of my no longer existing, no longer mattering, no longer seen or heard. My fear grows as I notice it. I feel I'm quickly losing my own sense of personal agency, and I start to feel helpless. A moment after that, my psychological and emotional sense of myself is reduced to that of a child. I'm overwhelmed by the power of the Void—its depth and darkness—and the powerlessness of me.

  There's no arguing with that kind of presence. Either you have it or you don't. I don't, not in the face of the Void. I have never felt so insignificant, so matter-less. I stand there as a cold realization dawns on me. I've never felt so insignificant except . . . except when I was a small child, and I would feel my father's hands on me. I'm shocked by the emergence of this felt memory, as I always am when it materializes unexpectedly, sparked by something outside of me.

  Such a deep, long-held, closely guarded secret, one that doesn't belong in the daylight, brought out so quickly. But I'm also beginning to understand that this is what the Void is about—the truth, your truth. The truth of whatever dark secrets still hold you in their clutches, whatever secrets your power still serves, leaving you paralyzed, without strength to move or save yourself or protect yourself.

  So, this is what the Void is about for me, I think. This is what I'd be jumping into. I feel myself shrink in stature and feel the wind buffet me. The wind is stronger than I am, too. I don't know if I can hold my footing on the edge, and there's nothing nearby to hold on to. Just the grass at my feet. I drop to my knees, insides quivering, and grab hold of it, twining my fingers deeply into it, feeling its roots hold me back. I anchor myself there, and it feels like the most natural thing in the world, just as jumping almost had a moment ago, to have the grass holding me safe, to feel in partnership with it. I breathe, realizing I haven't been breathing, not deeply, as I do now.

  I've lived with an awareness of my abuse for a long time, managing as best I could. There had been a time when the damaged part of me had more passion for living than I did, directing my choices, determining my course. But I've had years of afternoon therapy and night-time support groups, I remind myself, and multitudes of books that helped me confront and overcome the horror of it to get to its core and remove its poison. I understand the abuse scenario and everyone's roles and responsibilities better, and I'm not entangled in the levels of guilt and shame I used to be. I'm nobody's victim anymore, and proud of it. Maybe I overcompensate for the years of feeling powerless by challenging the men in my life more than I should, but at least I almost always couch those challenges in my version of kindness. My proximity to the Void shows me all this about myself. It shows me the things I can celebrate about myself, and it occurs to me that my healing can move through my heart now, and not just be a head understanding.

  I feel a kind of euphoria at this. It becomes clear to me now that no one jumps into the Void as a victim. It's not about that. If I jumped right now, I wouldn't be jumping still feeling like a victim. I don't! I'd be jumping to experience something else. You jump from a position of strength! It's not like suicide, in which you jump out of a sense of desperation, or because you can't go on. That's why you wouldn't pick the Void for suicide. I'm certain now that Duncan Robert had no intention of suicide whatsoever.

  This kind of jumping is a whole different kind of act, but it's been hard for me, or people in the town, or his mother, or even Miles to see that because the Void seems empty, even nihilisti
c. Yes, you go into it alone, and you're leaving everything beloved behind—people, pets, places, things. But as I stand here, I know I don't feel alone. I've never loved all those people and things more. I'm crouched here at the edge with a sense of wonder and peace. Where has all that paralyzing fear gone?

  And that's how Miles found me. I felt him before I turned on my knees and saw he was there, with a wad of my long, tie-dyed skirt gripped in his hands. I could tell by the look of stark fear on his face that he had been afraid I was going to jump. And, well, I almost did! It had felt like the most natural thing in the world. Miles calls this “the lure of the Void,” he would tell me later. I hadn't known about this, but I certainly believe in it now. It doesn't happen to everyone, Miles says. It's only possible if you've made a kind of peace with your worst fears and they don't rule you.

  “Your fears are your fears, hard won, every one of them” he would explain to me after, “but you have to get to the place where you no longer self-medicate against them, or lose whole days to them, or where you take them out and use them as weapons to wound or maim anyone around you. You know them, they know you, and everyone peacefully co-exists. They no longer assume they are in control. They just come out now and then to show you they still live there, and maybe always will.”

  “Sometimes you bring them out yourself, to remind yourself where you've found your strength. If you don't develop this kind of relationship with them, you just remain scared of them, and that's what you'd feel at the edge of the Void, scared. Because the Void strips you of all pretense, of anything that isn't the bare-bones, unadorned you. Titles, degrees, the color of your skin, the size of your bank account, how much you've suffered or how many you've made suffer—none of these things influence its accounting of you. Clearly, you can't fool it. And it doesn't want to fool you.”

  But now, as the immediate emotions of the moment start to even out, Miles and I sit there in the grass, on my skirt, catching our breath. The Void is more to me now, I think, and less. More in the sense that it seems to be a thinking, feeling entity capable of recognizing the authentic when it sees it. It's on the side of the good because it's on the side of truth. And it's less in the sense that, while no less formidable—in its presence, its depth, its darkness—it's less fearsome. It seems, well, reasonable taking whoever stands at its edge into consideration. In this way, the Void takes on a personality of its own—different from and far beyond the limited one assigned to it by current media influences, trends, hearsay and speculation, and so on. It's too big for a name, I realize with a laugh. I can't think of one that could encompass it.

  Miles, brought out of his own reverie by my laugh, tells me my editor, Henry, called him. That's why he came.

  “Henry? What did he say?” I ask, startled at this news.

  “It went something like this,” he says, trying to do a Henry Boston accent, “Holy Toledo! All of the talk of the Void—I knew where Babe was going to go. Yes, I suggested she hadda visit the Void, but I hadn't thought about her and jumping. Not right away. But it started to gnaw at me. So I had to call ya. I knew if I was thinking she might jump, the thought had crossed her mind. And I knew it would cross your mind, too, though maybe not soon enough. That meant it would cross the reader's mind, so we have a story to tell here!”

  We're both laughing now—me, at his accent and his running of all the words together, in Henry's way. I think he's laughing because he's still feeling the relief of getting here and finding I hadn't jumped.

  Miles says, “Henry said he knew you thought what you had so far was a non-story—so he thought you might jump, to find the rest of the story or create a story, like war correspondents wanting to go to Afghanistan or something.”

  Miles looks at me. “I thought you might jump, too.” He smiles wryly. “So I come running over, to find you wobbling, hunched over on the edge.” He pauses and looks down a moment. “I felt a bit responsible, you know, since I know that talking about the Void for a period of time can unleash a kind of physical fascination with it. And I knew you already had an intense interest in it, to build on.” He looks up at me and smiles again, sheepishly this time. “That's why I grabbed a handful of your skirt, spread out behind there in the grass. It was the first thing I could reach.” He pauses again, smoothing my skirt, and I let him organize his feelings, knowing this has all been kind of traumatic for him, certainly triggering memories of that other jump.

  “When you turned to look at me,” he says, and I remember looking directly into his eyes, and we were only inches apart, “the peace in your eyes released my fears, and that peace flooded me, and I felt at one with that peace and you.” He pauses again, a bit choked up. I am, too.

  “I instantly knew you'd thought about jumping but had decided against it. I knew you had had the same realizations about the Void I've had. It isn't a place for that kind of jumping.” He studies my face. I calmly let him, not looking away from his gaze. It feels good to know him this way, through our knowing of the Void.

  “That Henry's quite a talker,” he says, after a moment, looking at me with a smile.

  “Yeah, and all the while, I might have been jumping!” I say with a laugh, poking his arm. Miles laughs, too, catching at my hand, but then says, “He really cares about you.”

  “I know,” I say, letting him hold my hand. “He has daughters, and he seems to forget I'm not one of them.”

  As we walk back to my car and his truck, Miles still has hold of my hand. I'm surprised Henry didn't ask about love interest, too, for the story, I think. He's asked me before, sure that women and men can't be in the close contact a good interview creates without some kind of spark being kindled. If Henry thought readers would want to follow a good love story—me pining after Duncan Robert, or Reggie and Duncan Robert, or Miles and me—well, Henry would be all for me taking that angle for the story. Maybe I'm a little in love with the Void, I think, laughing out loud. Hey, we can't ignore it. After all, it's what got us all together. Because I'm laughing, Miles laughs, too, and we swing our joined hands all the way back to the road.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Return

  ONE NIGHT, ONLY A few days later, I get a call.

  I've just been working at typing up a summary of my experience with the Void. I'd spent half the evening on the phone with Henry, who still wants reassurance that I won't go anywhere near the Void again without telling him, and who is intensely curious about what I'm writing. After our years of working together, he knows better than to ask. I never know what I'm writing until I'm through. I've had more contact from Henry in the last few days than I've had in a month, so I know the calls are really his means of expressing his affection and concern for me. So, I'm distracted by Henry and trying to get back into my Void experience, when a voice reaches out from the Void itself. On the telephone.

  “Hello? Is this Babe Bennett? This is Duncan Robert. I'm not disturbing you, am I?”

  I drop the phone, then scrabble to pick it up.

  “What?” I say, wondering if any of the town folk are engaged enough for a gag like this. The voice is calm, serious without being cold, and respectful, I think, after groping for the right word to capture what comes across the line.

  “It's Duncan Robert,” he repeats. “I'd like to talk to you about your recent experience with the Void and about my experience.”

  “What?” I say again, like an idiot, taken off guard by what he says. “How do you know about that?”

  “Would you like an interview?” he asks, not answering my question. “There are some things I'd like to say, and I think you and Miles are ready to hear them now.”

  “Miles?” I say, seemingly only capable of monosyllables at the moment.

  “Yes. We were waiting for you. Now that you're here, we can talk about it.”

  “It?” I say, continuing true to my new concise form of interacting, unable to break out of it.

  “I don't want to become anybody's idol or guru, or even their reason. I don't want to be the re
ason anybody jumps,” he says. “As you know, it's such a personal decision, a person has to arrive at it on his or her own. It's complicated, depending on what you're carrying.” He pauses, waiting to see if I'll actually join the conversation. When I don't, he says, “The Void is always there. People will feel its call or not. They will make themselves ready or not. They cannot do it through me. I want to make that clear. But we can talk about that when you two get here.”

  That last part gets through to me, and I'm finally able to ask where and when he would like to meet. We agree that I'm to go to a place that's not far, the next day. Yes, I'm to bring Miles with me, he says, before I can double check. He seems to know that Miles doesn't have classes that day.

  “What about Silvia?” I ask, suddenly remembering his mother and not wanting to leave her out of this.

  “You don't need to worry about my mother,” he tells me gently when I ask. “I've always been in touch with her.” So that's why Silvia was able to talk about him with some ease and light heartedness, I think. She's known this whole time that he is okay. He gives a little chuckle. “I know, like any mother, she wants me to come back to life as it was, with her, and she hopes talking about me to others will help keep that possibility alive. She's saving my place. I don't begrudge her that.”

  Clearly, he's ready for the call to end, so I make sure he has my cell phone number and verify the time again, and we hang up, having wished each other a good evening.

  I sit there, at my little desk in front of the window, staring out at the night street in front of the bank. Not a soul in sight. I feel completely alone with this news, and just about bursting with it. But before I can call Miles, I need to sort myself out and get centered. This call will have much more effect on him. Miles doesn't need hysterical babbling. He needs someone who can do for him what Duncan Robert just did for me—provide an anchor and a calm focus. I make myself a cup of peppermint tea, am calmed by the process, and sit down to make the call.