The Boy in the Wall

by Roger Vaillancourt

The first thing (no one now remembers what it was, exactly) was tossed down towards the bottom in a fit of rage and so the precedent was set. We, all of us, just followed suit; at first timidly, only when no one was looking, and later there were grand Friday afternoon cross-office free throw tournaments.

The hole was rough-edged and the size of a small bathroom window. Its lower lip was about four feet off the floor. It went through the drywall, and on, even more roughly cut, through the corrugated steel of the true wall two inches later. The left side of the hole was framed by a real-new-york-city-skyscraper steel I-beam and it sank down out of sight, beyond the throw of even the strongest flashlight anyone knew of to borrow or buy. We worked on the third floor, but I suspected that this passage went down to a least one basement if not a sub-basement or two as well. Early on, its depth was sounded with a full cup of coffee, and the bottom was arrived at none too quickly, with a firm smack. Later tests were thwarted by the paper that had accumulated and tended to deny us our only true reference, sound.

For instance, the selectric typewriter with the non-functioning spacebar didn't even make the satisfying crunch I expected it to when it reached bottom, because by that time, we had been furnishing the pit for quite a while, lining it with crumpled sheets of typos, pink "while you were out" messages and many many yellow stickies.

It was into this hole that we lowered the boy.

Now, whatever you might have to say (from your great remove) about the thoughtlessness of this, I just want to say now that if I had been given the chance to do something like this when I was a boy, I'd have jumped at it. Imagine it. Your mom's co-workers, actual adults, turning to you and asking you to do them a favor, an Indiana Jones kind of favor with ropes and darkness and utilitarian steel landscapes and miner's lights and wireless intercoms...he loved it. You know he was a little boy and had to love it. I would have. It was adventure.

We outfitted him like any good explorer, with a headlamp that was my penlight, and with Bernadette's wireless telephone headset. Beth, his Mom, talked to him from her desk phone. Barry made a triangular deskplate from a sheet of paper, and placed on Beth's desk; it read "JPL - Houston." Beth was not visibly anxious.

The examples he'd seen must have been rangers, because he couldn't resist the urge to bounce against the wall and bound all the way down to the bottom in mad staggers. His head kept skimming the outer wall, though, only coming close the first two times, but then finally banging lightly once, then banging hard the last time, before he stopped. He just hung limply from then on, still answering questions dutifully even though his pout progressed as he left he range of our flashlights.

Beth became visibly anxious. Bernadette was assigned the task of keeping her calm. Since nobody else knew the boy from generic street araby, Beth had to be kept on. From the belay position with my leg wrapped around the postscript plotter, I saw Beth listen to her son on the phone, then, dismayed by what she heard, cover the mouthpiece and whimper at Bernadette. Barry felt things somewhere in his anatomy whenever Beth did anything at all, and now, well, his haul labored. The event was turning in an unfortunate direction.

Some geometry of Beth's heaving breasts or Magdalene pieta or most likely a potent combination of the two corrupted the last of Barry's resolve, and the rope began to slip through his grip. My regrip served up a fine burn to my palm, and the boy, from no fault of my own, descended rapidly. Beth screamed. Barry dove for the line and went "AH!" as if he had met his bullet. Bernadette started muttering something about medical coverage. We all three yelled "(Bernadette,) SHUT UP!" from our positions. Beth, now at the hole, was looking in, calling something that was unintelligible against the echo of itself. Then this could be understood:

"What is it honey?" She leaned in. "Say it louder, Baby."

Beth received some reply and stood up, oddly. Taken aback, literally. She walked, with a crinkled brow, back towards the desk. "What is it?" Barry asked limply.

"He said to get back on the phone. He cursed."

As she picked up the receiver, the rope went slack, and then carried a ripple up from the bottom; he'd shaken it. I gave it some tension and it came without resistance. He was unhitched at the bottom, looking, seeing trenches of matter lost to the surface, woven into new lives at the bottom; private, sacred affairs that he intruded upon with weak narrow-spectrum light, hissing headset, and great respect. Or so I imagined. His name was not Beebe, but I resolved then that I would call him Beebe from this point on. After he got himself out.

Roger Vaillancourt is a technical writer in Seattle. His work has been published in Paragraph and the Mississippi Review Web.