Chris Blexrud is a librarian and writer living in New Orleans. Though he doesn’t know how long that will be true: the writer part, or the New Orleans part, or the living part.
It’s been four years since my friend’s disappearance. Some would say it’s been four years since his death. Neither of these statements is exactly true. We know where Nathan went. There’s footage of him leaving his house and later breaking the police cordon. A security camera saw Nathan slip casually under the caution tape; the pixelated clarity of the video captured his muscular build, his thin black shirt tight at the neck and biceps, and his dark hair cropped short and neat. The police found his car parked nearby. It was messy as it always had been. They never found his phone, though. He must have taken it with him. I’ve often wondered about that fact. It’s why I say he disappeared and didn’t die. If he thought he was going to die then why did he bring his phone? The police who interviewed me didn’t care about his phone. They wanted to know about his past and if he had been acting strangely. Any detail could help they said, but none of them did. Nobody close to him could explain it, so they retraced his steps.
At the edge of a scrub forest congested with cabbage palms, a chasm about the size of a public pool ate into the Florida wilderness. It was several miles outside of Sarasota, almost at Myakka State Park, and as far as anyone could tell it opened up one night in early October. We’re accustomed to sinkholes in Florida. My dad used to tell me a story about how once a sinkhole swallowed an entire Porsche dealership. He lamented the loss of those fine vehicles. This was not your bog-standard sinkhole, though. For one thing, it didn’t have a bottom. The pit, as it was called, was just blackness that seemed to go on forever. This sort of thing isn’t unheard of in places with caves and mines, but in Florida this is an impossibility. We’re a brittle limestone shelf sitting just on top of the ocean, and you don’t have to dig very far until you hit water. The pit didn’t have any water. It went straight down.
All attempts to measure its depths failed. Sensors, probes, any measuring device whatsoever seemed to be scrambled by the pit. The readings returned were nonsensical, if there were any readings at all. One bathic survey provided measurements that suggested the pit did not actually exist. A few researchers ran with the idea and wrote a paper on mass hysteria. The notion was debated briefly, but ultimately discounted when the writers were invited to test their theory by descending into the blackness. Their equivocation was proof enough.
That did not mark the end to newsworthy controversies surrounding the pit. Soon thereafter, it garnered the obsession of James Cameron. The filmmaker marshalled his considerable resources in partnership with the government to mount something of a rescue-mission-cum-scientific-foray. On live television, Cameron was lowered into the pit. He wore an overdesigned full body suit that I assumed had been a rejected prop from The Abyss. The video feed that was piped into his helmet went dark after ten minutes; the audio feed was soon to follow. I watched from my desk as scientists and reporters attempted to fill the dead air with speculation and manufactured drama, struggling to imbue significance into what amounted to history’s most expensive spelunking expedition. I doubted they would find Nathan, but I imagined how strange it would be to be rescued by James Cameron. I laughed thinking about Nathan cradled in Mr. Cameron’s arms having a conversation about screenwriting. For thirty minutes, the cameras focused on the tether that sat atop the darkness. A moment of excitement came when the line seemed to bobble. Scientists offered theories as to what could be the cause. However, after all that radio silence, the call was made to bring Mr. Cameron back. The blackness seemed to cling to him like a robe as he was pulled out of the pit. His arms hung by his sides, and his head slumped forward almost lifeless. Emergency crews stripped him out of his suit and rushed him to the awaiting medical team. Twenty minutes later he had regained consciousness and spoke about his experience, if you could call it that. He described essentially what all the instrumentation had already told us. There was nothing there, just black emptiness. Human perception had added nothing to our understanding of the pit but for the note that it was lonely. He would try again in a bathysphere of sorts, but the results were the same.
This all happened within six months of Nathan’s disappearance, and a month after that came his funeral. I don’t know why his mother waited so long. I don’t think it was hope, but she did, and I didn’t go. From friends I was told it was a beautiful service. Moving speeches were made by his family, and old friends reminisced about the person Nathan was. I heard that the service was briefly interrupted by a man who insisted on being called Squid. I knew the guy. He was awful, offensive, narrow-minded, and small in every sense of the word. He had a tiny head which centered around two sharp blue eyes and a mouth that flopped open, producing an affected Southern accent. I don’t think anyone really liked him, not even Nathan, but he kept him around out of some mix of loyalty and pity. Yet, Squid cried when he gave his speech about Nathan. I have no doubt that the feelings they shared were real, even if I didn’t really understand them from Nathan’s perspective. The stories I cobbled together from the funeral were touching but odd, not singularly peculiar but seemingly inconsistent when taken as a whole.
There are some people who so clearly know what or who they want to be. These people we judge less for their choice than how well they actualize their idea. Nathan was not like that. He didn’t know. His styles clashed, his tastes were manifold. In some social settings, Nathan was a chameleon, blending into the circumstances of other personalities, bending himself to fit. Other times, he was brilliantly and brutally unique, and people were drawn to that. It was in this form that he developed a strange following. All different kinds of people loved Nathan, many of whom had nothing in common. He united bros, burnouts, artists, and intellectuals of both sexes in the subconscious worship of his strange but encompassing masculinity. I understood this, too; I was drawn to it. Even from the fourth grade, when we first met, I sensed violence about him, a violence that was attractive and frightening.
I’ve known plenty of other violent men in my life, and I’ve always thought they sucked. They used violence as a crude tool or it came erupting out of them when their masculinity was threatened. These were the kind of aggressive outbursts to which any observer would respond, “Was that really necessary?” These men were uniformly fragile and constantly struggling for their perceived dominance in the invisible hierarchy of assholes that sits atop the world like the ozone layer. Nathan was not party to this. He was raw and righteous. The violence that emanated from him was elegant and natural like that of a predator. I think this is why he was so absorbed in martial arts: wrestling, boxing, jiu jitsu. Nathan was formidable. And yet, as long as I had known him, I never once felt like he would hurt me. I felt safe with him.
I only thought about this after the funeral, and thinking about it, I wondered what he might say. So, I wrote it down, and I addressed it to him, and three years after his disappearance, after I had graduated from law school, at a time when I had thought that I had felt the full length and breadth of my grief, I held in my hand a letter addressed to a man who was impossibly far away from me.
Dear Nathan,
. . .
In the time from Nathan’s disappearance until I wrote my first letter, the pit had gone from a first-rate scientific paradox to a curio. The public had lost interest, and the scientific community around the pit grew smaller and smaller, if more dedicated. Had it appeared on government property, it most likely would have remained a high-security test site dotted with mobile labs and swarmed with scientists. However, the land belonged to the paunchy ruddy-faced owner of several South Florida car dealerships. The Barry behind Barry Toyota rejected the government's admittedly lowball attempts to buy or lease the land from him. Instead, the pit became “The Pit,” a tourist attraction second only in Sarasota to the kissing sailor statue (which was unfortunately named “Unconditional Surrender”). The Pit was nothing more than a small gift shop, a shoddy awning that ran around its circumference, a protective railing, and a plaque explaining its mystery. Admission was ten dollars, which one paid for the privilege of staring into unwavering blackness. For an additional five dollars you could buy a glow stick and toss it into the depths.
My ten dollars entitled me to an afternoon with the pit, but when I came to drop my letter, there was a family there. For some reason, I felt shy with them around, so I waited, thinking that a boy and girl of roughly ten years old could spend no longer than fifteen minutes with what amounted to, and was quite literally, a hole in the ground. How wrong I was. The children chased each other around the pit, in what I can only assume was a reenactment of the Daytona 500. They would occasionally stop and look into the void. Then, without warning, the chase would begin again, as if it had never stopped. The parents sat idly by on their phones. The mother looked especially disinterred and disheveled, her hair volumizing in real time from the ambient humidity. I bought an overpriced seltzer while waiting and drank it far too quickly, taking a tiny sip every other second with mechanical regularity as I had learned to do at parties. The children eventually stopped running and began to beg for glow sticks.
The parents caved immediately. At first, the boy was given one. He cracked it the moment it was in his hands, rushed over to the pit, and hurled it down. The light sped into the blackness and vanished. Then the girl asked for hers. The father shelled out another five dollars and placed it in her hands. She held the stick at both ends with her thumbs bracing it and touching at the center. It bent until it gave that familiar and disconcerting crunch that heralded the arrival of chemical light. She held the green glowing plastic for a moment, dangling it over the edge before letting it fall. In contrast, this glow stick seemed to float down, buoyed by the darkness, but it, too, sank into obscurity. The boy then turned to his father and demanded another. He reasoned that his glowstick had been pink, and he wanted a green one. Sighing, the father gave five dollars and asked the cashier for a green one specifically. The boy took it greedily, cracked it, and admired the light. Imitating his sister’s technique this time, he held it out over the pit and let it alight from his hand. Lambent and viridescent, it tumbled slowly down. The girl watched and as soon as the glow stick disappeared, she whipped around to her father. It would be unfair for him to have two and she only one. Knowing this logic was unassailable, the father turned for the last time to the cashier and purchased a glow stick. This time the daughter seemed less interested, cracking it without the intention of the first time. Perhaps she was more motivated by justice than pleasure. Awash in the artificial orange light of fairness, the girl flipped it up over the railing and into the pit. It spun and spun and was gone. With this final throw, the family had extracted all the fun they could from this hole in the ground, and so they left, the parents urging the children to thank the cashier as they went. I thought that Nathan might be huddled underneath something trying to avoid all this falling debris, but at the very least he would have plenty of light to read by.
After the family had gone, I pulled the letter from my back pocket. The moisture in the Florida air had lessened its stiffness. It felt almost floppy in my hand when before it had been quite crisp. I dangled it over the edge and let it slip from my fingers. As it floated down, I felt stupid for having written a return address on the envelope. Nathan would have mocked me for this punctilio. That thought occupied me as I left.
I dreamed that night, of what I don’t remember, but I remember that I dreamed, and I would dream every night thereafter when I delivered a letter. I can’t tell you why, but I assume it’s because it sparked a conversation in my head. I imagined Nathan sitting in some black hole surrounded by nothing but the detritus of our world, which was mostly glow sticks. As the only resource available to him, he would learn to use them in ingenious ways, building vast structures out of their plastic casings or filling giant pools with their spent chemical effluvient. One day, as he busied himself in expanding his plastic kingdom, my letter would reach him, and by the light of these glow sticks he would read it. Nathan was so intelligent that he would quickly find some way to communicate with me. Perhaps he would write on the ground in neon colors, letting the light filter up to our world, or maybe he would contrive a kind of paper out of the plastic tubing, hammering the sticks flat and overlapping their edges like papyrus. These he could toss back up or convey them by some kind of pulley system. In any event, I imagined how he would respond, and then I would write my answer. That first night I wrote the second letter entirely in my head but waited until the next morning to write it down. Four days after that I delivered the second letter, still hoping for his response.
Dear Nathan,
. . .
I didn’t get an answer from Nathan, but that did not stop me from writing him letters. Over the course of a year, I wrote almost weekly to him. I made apologies for any delays or irregularities in my missives and kept him informed about the events in my life. He was kept apprised of my romantic foibles, and he alone knows the real reason why my relationship with Marta fell apart (besides her, of course). I also began to include drugs with my letters: weed, Xanax, Tramadol, and occasionally cocaine. I knew he would appreciate anything to dull the boredom of the pit. He and I had bonded from a fairly early age over drugs. He was the first person I smoked weed with and the first to introduce me to Oxycontin. Out of our small troop of friends, Nathan was always the most daring, first in almost every experience that young boys boast about without ever actually having done. He had done it, and when he told you about it he wasn’t boasting. The stories he told about these experiences (alcohol, blowjobs, fights) were told with the cold insouciance of a John Wayne and inspired just as much reverence, if not more. Despite his small stature, he was the kind of person that could walk into a gas station at sixteen years old and buy alcohol, which he did on numerous occasions.
The more I wrote to Nathan, the more I learned about him, things I have never known in his pre-pit existence. I recalled things, too, or, more accurately, realized them, and the image of the man I had known for almost twenty years began to change. At first, these were small details. A mutual friend posted a picture on Instagram, a sad memorial with a smiling Nathan holding his balled-up fists at the camera in mock pugilism. His hands had never been soft, but here you could see stark detail. The swarthiness of his hands darkened at the knuckles, which were criss-crossed with wounds of various depths and lengths and ages while the inside of his hands were uniformly calloused from the knurling of weights. They were a fighter’s hands, swollen from constant impact and never given time to recover. The swelling was not limited to his hands, though. All throughout high school he had wrestled, and Nathan took pride in that slim muscular build of a wrestler, always seeking the perfect balance between power and speed. A soft bloat began to take hold after college, and the baby fat he had worked so hard to rid himself of returned. At twenty-seven, he looked (at least in the face) more like his twelve-year-old self with cherubic cheeks but ruddier more-textured skin. As with many former athletes, though, the departed speed and stamina made his still considerable strength all the more evident.
The changes in his body betokened changes in his behavior. The passionate are rarely imperturbable, but the righteousness that guided Nathan became tinged with a soft paranoia somewhere along the way. Longing marked his new absence from the social world we shared, and strange comments began to pepper our conversations. He was still charming, still brilliant, but distant and adrift in something I had learned not to ask about. He wouldn’t have told me anyway, or at least that’s what I told myself.
Over a sad lunch, his ex-girlfriend informed me about his drug use that could no longer be characterized as breezy and recreational; he lost that detached posture to inebriation I thought we had so carefully cultivated, and which set us apart from the people who dealt us those substances. Apparently, he would go on benders, say accusatory things, and disappear for days, and then return as if nothing had happened. I was once the cover for one of these vanishings. He told me to tell anyone that asked that he and I had gone to the beach. It was odd, but I didn’t think much of it until days later when his girlfriend called me in a panic. He had been missing for days. I tried to stick to the lie, but I couldn’t hold up under her fevered scrutiny. I told her I didn’t know where he was, which was true. Later, after he had returned, I apologized that I couldn’t keep his cover. He said he was sorry, too, that he wouldn’t ask me again. To his credit, he never did.
Dear Nathan,
. . .
The closer I got to the darkness within Nathan, the shabbier the pit became. Visiting hours were reduced, expired items on the shelves were not replaced, and I don’t want to tell you about the bathroom. Teens even broke in one night and trashed the place. They tagged the clear protective railing around with obscenities and inscrutable messages. I didn’t mind so much, if anything it added to the ambience. This all caused or coincided with a loss of foot traffic. More and more frequently, I was the only visitor there, and the tourists that did come were less savory. The solitude was not unwelcome, but the cashiers suffered at the hands of this new clientele. Creepy older men with leathery skin spent more time leaning on the checkout counter than on the railing over the pit. Once I even intervened with a well-placed cough. My quixotic meddling bought me some favor with Darla, the desk girl, who started to not charge me for my visits. I never asked what she was reading, and she never asked what was in the envelopes I dropped into the pit. We were both thankful for the silent company.
This unspoken alliance lasted a few months and spanned many letters until Darla broke the silence in mid-January. It was still winter or what counted for it in South Florida. An extremely light jacket might be appropriate for the evenings, and the sun still set earlier than you would think. I only remember because I disliked going there after dark. That night Darla was not her usual blasé self. Her eyes were trained on me and not buried in a book as I sent Nathan another letter. I watched the envelope sink down into the darkness before I turned to leave. That’s when she stopped me.
Coming out from around her counter, I was surprised by how petite she was as she stood in front of me. Her dark eyes were sharp with cunning, and I understood then more than ever how beneath her this job really was. Darla told me that the land had been sold, that, after the tourist season had ended and all the snowbirds had left, they would tear down this chintzy place and use it as a landfill. It was both ingenious and sad. The pit would take on the ever-growing quantity of garbage that our society made, things deemed valueless not by their inherent worth but by their inconvenience, their brokenness, or their complexity. Some asshole was going to make a fortune off of it, too, profiting off our collective laziness and our inability to care. I shook my head, thanked her, and left.
That night I dreamed again about Nathan, but the dream this time was a memory. Not long before he left, Nathan and I had spent a weekday afternoon at a local spring. I remember we were late because we missed a poorly demarcated intertube shack and had to double back several miles. With our hands reaching out of the windows of his car, we held the tubes precariously to the roof and arrived with only a few hours of sunlight left. It was a lazy river situation. The clear waters of the spring bubbled up from the earth and strayed deeper into the wilderness. The course was short, maybe twenty minutes in total, but we went again, and again, and again. Our racing back to the source and fumbling in the water to get into our tubes brought back our shared childhood, how we dove off rickety docks or hunted in the woods for air potatoes to throw at our enemies. But the timeless spring brought us back farther still. In its one large bend, we were lost in primeval Florida, caught between elephant ears and cypress knees, a single great blue heron standing tall in the reeds. The spring was just wide enough here to allow a crack in the canopy; the strands of light filtered down to the eye of the heron, which in turn beheld us in our sunshot eternity. In the memory, Nathan lied as we floated along and told me he was happy, but in the dream he smiled and said nothing.
Dear Nathan,
. . .
The next letter took longer to write than any of the others. Months went by, the four-year anniversary of Nathan’s disappearance in them. The season was coming to a close in Sarasota, and I started to worry that the pit would be under new management. Maybe they would turn me away, or I would have to evade junk yard dogs to get to him. I didn’t know, but I thought about everything that had happened in the last four years, all the fragments of Nathan I had collected. The night I decided to deliver the letter, I was surer than ever that he had not died. He hadn’t even disappeared. One Nathan had simply replaced another.
With the missive in hand, I took Tamiami instead of the faster route along I-75. For a state road, it’s not really different from all the other arteries that cross Florida, but for a small stretch on the north side of Sarasota before you reach downtown. For a mile or more, the road is overgrown with neon, choked with the history of Florida beach towns that boomed and busted in the seventies and eighties. Gaudy motels and crusty dive bars beckon drivers to join them in coastal debauchery. These places were peopled with a gradient of deathly complexions, what only a lifetime of sun exposure and daily chlorine ablutions can do to the skin. We passed around legends about these spots and people, about drinks strong enough to strip paint, about mob ties, about jacuzzis that would give you chlamydia. We made our own, too.
Nathan was part of so many of those stories. He propelled us through the night and into the hazy mornings that followed. Without him, though, that history had stopped. Nothing moved forward and going back felt only like a pale reenactment. So, I stopped going and avoided that stretch of Tamiami altogether. Eventually, I wasn’t even tempted anymore. Enough friends had moved away, and my head hurt too much from more than a few drinks and all the memories that came bubbling up. The neon now reminded me more and more of the glow sticks tossed into the pit, and as I drove that light blurred against the night.
I arrived just as Darla was closing, her hand hovering over the interior lock of the glass doors. She was not pleased to see me, her shoulders slumping in tired dejection. With a sigh she let me in and said breathlessly, “Five minutes.” I nodded and walked over to the pit as she locked the door behind me. The fluorescent lights that lined the awning around the pit crackled above me. I withdrew the letter, dropped it in, and I waited as I always had. I stood there staring down for a few minutes, letting my eyes lose focus in the undifferentiated darkness. But when I turned to leave, I saw something, a soft pulsing light at some indeterminable depth. It didn’t seem strange or unnatural but was like a bedroom light that you’d turned on every night for years. It blinked three times, maybe four, and was accompanied by a gestalt rushing sound and a ruffle of hot fluttering air. It reminded me of a group of small birds all taking flight at once, their collective consciousness guiding them to the nearest telephone wire or bush. The sensation enveloped me. For a moment, it felt like it was all the responses Nathan had written over the last year finally arriving—Dear Ryan, Dear Ryan, Dear Ryan, Dear Ryan, Dear Ryan. They landed and settled on me, fluffing their feathers, the first stop in a migratory plan that spanned thousands of miles and was held in common between their bodies.
I closed my eyes and drew a deep breath. The air burned my throat. It was so hot I thought I might faint. But just as this overwhelming feeling crested, it left; the birds were gone, silently taking flight to their next destination. Then the light flickered and went out. I looked to Darla, whose head was buried in the register. It occurred to me to tell her, to take this story to a leading scientist or as far as it could go. It might have generated a new round of scientific inquiry. Maybe it could have led to a breakthrough in our understanding of the pit and to Nathan’s rescue. But I didn’t. I just watched the light, and I watched the light fade.
