Whatever Gets You Thru the Night #37
5.
DJ Sotto Voce and Martin dug through the night as Clemons the tapir oversaw them around the rim of the hole like a beach lifeguard. The loose sand and dirt kept sliding back into the hole after a while as the two couldn't heave the grains high enough over their shoulders, slowing their progress. By what felt like midnight they'd made a 12-foot dent in the surface of the dunes.
"I don't mean to mistrust the Gyp-O-Meter," DJ Sotto Voce said, "but at this point if there's a portal here then it'd better drop us on the other side of the earth."
"Be patient," Martin said. "It's my first portal."
"Mine too, as it turns out."
"There you go." Martin pounded away with a small shovel in each hand. DJ Sotto Voce wielded a regulation lawn shovel, annoyed with Martin's stoic blasé.
"Tell me," DJ Sotto Voce said, "have you heard of anyone who's gone through one of these portals? And I don't mean the metaverse or anything like that. I mean an actual, real-world portal.Or is this just your crazy parents' suburban folklord at work here?"
"Yes," Martin said, "a few. They all tend to be socially inept, so they never went into details. But you could kind of tell they were messing around with multi-dimensional travel. They had this -- thing about them, like the kid in The Shining. Strange, almost amphibian complexions. Dilated, hollow eyes. Close-cropped hair. Terrible comic timing. Looking like they try so hard to be thirty minutes late to appointments, when in reality they're fifteen minutes early and nobody knew what to do with them, so they just got irritated by their mere presence. You know the type. My friends and I used to call them 'Time Lizards,' or 'Dimen-Shunned,' or 'Mark Zuckerberg.'"
"And what did they say happened when they went through the portals?"
"Most of them reported a little bit of disorientation, of course," Martin replied. "Par for the course. That made spiritual revelations a bit harder to experience. One of them, my man Gerard, swears he learned Spanish in 15 minutes. Another one became a real neatnik. My friend Lester said he went to a place where everybody wore unsettling hats like Amy Sherman-Palladino."
"So, did any of them come back actually feeling better?"
"Well, they weren't worse. Just a little more impatient. How you gonna keep them down on the farm, you know?"
"So," DJ Sotto Voce reasoned, "we're exerting all this effort for something we don't know exists, and if it does, doesn't produce an out-of-the-normal experience, changes almost nothing in a material or ethereal sense, and generally makes people crankier or forces them to start Facebook?"
"That's about right."
"Well, for crying out loud!" DJ Sotto Voce threw his shovel onto the floor of the sand pit. Then he and Martin stood in awe as the shovel got swallowed up and vanished through the base of the hole, as if it were drowning in quicksand.
Martin scratched his head. "That was a good shovel."
"The hell?" DJ Sotto Voce whispered.
Suddenly Clemons the tapir stood up at the edge of the pit, let out a whistle and a cluck, and jumped into the hole in the space between the two men. Just like the shovel, Clemons got swallowed whole into the deep of the sand and disappeared completely.
"Welp," Martin said, "I guess we jump."
"That appears to be the best plan," DJ Sotto Voce said. "Who goes first?"
"You."
"Why me?"
"I just flipped a coin in my head. You won."
"You're coming up behind me? Promise you're not just gonna leave me there?"
"Of course! You think I lumbered into Chapter 5 without the intention of seeing this through? Get in the pit, for God's sake."
"All right," DJ Sotto Voce said, "but you better land on top of me a couple of seconds later."
"Don't rush this relationship," Martin said, "but fine. Go ahead."
DJ Sotto Voce held his nose and jumped through the sand. He landed face down on a surface that felt curiously like a shag carpet. Martin thudded on top mere seconds later.
To be continued.
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