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By Root 1119 0

allow yourself to rest for a moment, aware of the way your heart is thumping in your chest—from effort this time, rather than from anxiety—and then you resume your efforts, raising the ax and smashing it so hard into the timbers that you wonder if this is what the retort from a rifle feels like against your shoulder. But you continue to slam the ax into the barnboard over and over and over, until you have reduced a sizable section of it to kindling. You pull apart the remnants of the lumber with your bare hands as if you are parting the leaves in the trees at the edge of a great forest. It’s that simple. And then you drop the ax and pick the flashlight up off the dirt floor. You bow down just enough to twist your body through the passage you have created, careful as you step not to tear your jeans or catch your sweatshirt on the sharp points of the shredded wood.

And before you know it, you are in. The thirty-nine carriage bolts are still surrounding the frame like the bulbs on a movie marquee, but you are in. It took no more than an hour and a half, including the time you spent shoveling the coal like a stoker on a steamer.

You run the flashlight over the walls and the ceiling, aware that somewhere very far away the phone is ringing. (Later you will learn it is the principal at your daughters’ elementary school; you will be told that Garnet had brought a cigarette lighter into the classroom and reduced to ashes a drawing another student had made. Only after nearly ten minutes of obfuscation on the part of the principal will you discover that the drawing had been of a plane crashing into a lake.) No matter. The answering machine upstairs will get it. And with the flashlight you study the walls made of horizontal beams ten inches thick and easily two inches—two legitimate inches, not the two inches of the modern two-by-four—wide. If, long ago, this really had been a coal chute, the sluice has been boarded up solidly. You tap on the wood behind which the chute most likely would have existed, and it sounds pretty solid on the other side. Earth solid. No hollowness at all. And so you sit down in the dirt, your back to a wooden wall, and contemplate—now, where does this memory come from?—the pit of despair. That’s what it was called, when the researchers weren’t using its technical name: vertical chamber apparatus. You learned about it in college. In a psychology course. Harry Harlow designed it for baby monkeys to see what he could learn about depression. It was a stainless-steel trough in which he isolated the animals alone for months at a time. Even a year, in some cases. And, you recall, he learned only what one would expect from isolating a sentient creature for months in a box. The monkeys were wrecked when they emerged. Depressed. Psychotic. Really couldn’t be salvaged once they were set free. Rarely recovered. Well, this cubicle could be a pit of despair, too. You recall the sensation of lying in bed under the sheets this past autumn. After the accident. There were days, your children at school, thirty-nine dead in the water, your career over and done, when you didn’t get up until three in the afternoon, when the girls got home. Some days you didn’t get dressed at all. After all, what was the point? Really? What … was … the … point?

You pull your knees into your chest, if only because you believe this is the posture that behooves one in the midst of a stint in the pit of despair. You think of Poe and amontillado. A cask. Building stone and mortar. A trowel. Or, in this case, barnboard and thirty-nine six-inch-long carriage bolts. You bow your head against your drawn knees and breathe in the aroma of cold, cold dirt and mold. The air is a little stale.

In the unlikely event the cabin loses pressure, an oxygen mask will descend …

How many times had you heard that—or some version of that—in the cabin behind you while you were waiting to leave the gate? You always will miss that. The calm before … not the storm. The calm before the serenity of flying. How you loved flying.

You feel a sharp spike in your lower back,