Notes from the Abyss was the notebook my grandfather left me and so I put the abyss in it and closed the cover, happy for no one to open it in passing and fall in, like opening a piece of mail from the water company claiming the sewer line is a risk. You open the letter and put it down quickly and straighten your shirt and go on with your day. It’s already over. You know this because the street lights came on. The sewer line running from the crawlspace to the street was the problem. You don’t make a habit of reading the fine print.
If you did, you would know you can’t negotiate your release without an abyss in the notebook your grandfather left you, which is dangerous when opened. Your son put down the almond milk and opened the notebook. You left it beside the espresso machine as you prepared your lunch for the day and in he went. Now there’s a problem.
Another letter from the water company arrives, telling you about repairs needed two streets over. You put the notebook in your pocket and go upstairs to put socks on because the light can’t escape and now Matt’s in there too wondering when you might come in looking for him. There’s a lot of laundry left over from the weekend piled in two gray baskets by the bedroom door. They have that curve in them so they’re easy to carry up and down the stairs. You have nothing to read in the bathroom, but this isn’t a repeatable feature of modern life, to have a notebook with an abyss in it, and nothing to say if you opened it, as you cross a busy street without a light or an intersection or white lines or a button to approve your crossing that does nothing when you push it.
You spend a lot of time breathing.
You forget that you had a son who had a glass of almond milk and a banana every morning before school. He keeps his room cold at night and it’s cold in there, you assume. It could be in the 90s and humid. There could be something in the naming of a tree, the same one outside your bedroom window, not squirrels though because they’re ordinary, but two overfed bluejays who seem to love each other.
If you put the notebook on the dining room table, nothing would alert you to the fact that the day has ended, so place it instead under a pair of tan beach sandals on the brown shoe bench in the beige foyer. There are no more beaches. But the sandals have a use. The sun is going down. You saw it and confirmed it was going down. You looked through the bay window with the see-through white curtains. The sun is going down. The flowers in the vase enjoy their colors. When Marie gets home, she finds the flowers in the vase have turned gray. Where’s Matt? In my notebook, the one my grandfather left me, in the abyss I put in there. I closed the cover to stop anything else from falling in. I considered not doing it. I forgot what I did. I got a glass of iced tea instead. And of course she’ll want to open it and go in after him and who am I to stop her.
A third letter from the water company arrives. They’ve turned our water off as a precaution and say they’ve notified the electric company. I say to myself what I’ve always said. I don’t think they can do that. There is an abyss in the notebook and you shouldn’t do anything to disturb or encourage the darkness to take the place of our running water, or turn it on again after a grace period because of a technicality.
There have been 22 abysses, maybe 23, throughout recorded history based on a careful cartography of the present moment, each with “deep” attached as a postscript—Challenger Deep, Horizon Deep, Sirena Deep, Brownson Deep, Litke Deep. They prefer to be discovered rather than written about.
It’s July now and there are fireworks.
I hold my notebook out under the blues and whites and purples and greens, under the pinwheels and confetti of light. I tip back the cover at one point so it can hear the explosions and see the lights against the backdrop of it until they propose a different kind of life, but before they do, they fall in and the display ends early and we never know what it would have become.
One morning I place it on the floor and dangle my legs in, to deny sleep its purpose and then I have no legs and never had them. I’ve made another problem for myself. I have to crawl. I was never 9 months old. Do I cradle it, do I rock it to sleep, do I place it on the top shelf of a bookcase and hope it’s satisfied where it is. Do I angle it so it’s not so self-centered. Do I get some experts in to have a look at it and determine it’s not such a substantial thing after all. Do I place 100 thin rubber bands around it. Do I offer it a prayer from a lesser-known book to delight the walls, which were fine being walls until yesterday when the clock in the kitchen broke.
I yell at it on Friday nights.
I never apologize, even though I want to.
I put it on the deck out back as a reward.
I drink a little until there’s a warm fuzz around my eyes. I ask it who the hell it thinks it is. I know what it will say and what it said. I make love to it and wake up the next day crying. I drive my last remaining oar into the silt of the Guadalquivir. I couldn’t find that river either. I get another notebook from the book store, of the same variety, but with a black elastic strap around the spine. I move into the Chalmers’ house next door because they moved out. I don’t tell them about the abyss or the second notebook.
The Chalmers never moved out.
They spend their days watching Animal Planet in their carpeted living room. I don’t try to pet their Labradoodle Noem, even though he seems friendly. I tell them about the abyss in my notebook, the one my grandfather left me. I offer them the new one I just bought in case they would like to do the same with it. I can’t remember what they said. I stop thinking about it and watch Animal Planet.
One day I will be a tree that only grows at night because it has become enamored with its branches and the privacy of darkness. You won’t be able to tell us apart. Become what you cannot find. Share nothing. Drink a lot of water. Learn how to sew a mitten, then wear it to the supermarket in August. Carry the notebook as I do, under one arm. There’s an abyss now in aisle 5 by the bread crumbs where I tipped open the cover. There’s no way to prove I was in the supermarket looking for bread crumbs. August is over. Forget the alphabet. The notebook’s pages are filled with uhs and ums. You know what it’s like because you’ve lived with the Chalmers too and pet their Labradoodle Noem and laughed at what you were seeing on Animal Planet. One day you will get a letter in the mail about the sewer line. It’s failing. There’s nothing I can say. My grandfather knew what he was doing.