Black Hole

It started with a small hole.
There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to its placement. It wasn’t in the centre, nor was it particularly close to any of the walls. It was just sort of there, floating aimlessly in the yellowed-white sea of his apartment ceiling. He had fallen asleep while watching television, head falling limply against the back of the couch. When he awoke and opened his eyes, head still cocked backwards, the hole was staring down at him. He had never noticed it, but he couldn’t be certain that it hadn’t always been there. He didn’t pay much attention to the ceiling.

It was a small hole, almost unnoticeable unless one knew where to look. But it was an open wound, and it festered.
He found that it seemed to be lingering at the edge of his consciousness. It would creep into his thoughts for no apparent reason. Sometimes, he would find himself staring at it. He wasn‘t sure why. There was something about it, the audacity of it. That small hole had somehow become a tangible, invasive presence.. He couldn’t put it out of his mind.
He slid over one of his cheap dining room chairs so that he could climb atop of it to get a closer look. It occurred to him that this was the first time he had ever gotten any use out of them; he never ate at the table, and he had never entertained guests. He stepped onto the seat of the chair and slowly straightened himself out so he wouldn’t topple over, and finally got a closer look at the hole.
That was when it started to get worse.

It was something about the regularity of the hole. The perfection of the circle. A hole that size, and of that precision, was no accident. It was purposeful and deliberate. He would sit there, trying to think back to when he moved in, to the months before he had noticed the hole. Had it been there all along? Had he ever looked?
He could think of no reason for such a hole to exist, such a small hole in such a random spot in the ceiling.
It seemed to serve no purpose.

The thing about the hole was, it was always there. It felt like an eye staring down at him at all times, but worse. The hole never blinked.
He realized that he didn’t know who lived in the apartment above him, if indeed anybody lived there at all. He never really heard any noise coming from above him, never noticed any lights in the window from outside.
And it wasn’t just the apartment above him. He didn’t know anybody in the entire complex. He didn’t leave his own apartment very often. Work, the store. And even then, he made it a point to keep his head down. Avoid contact.
He lived in the basement floor, clear at the end of the hallway. There was a washer and dryer down there, right across from his apartment door, that the entire building used to do their laundry. His peephole allowed him a direct view of both machines. If he was thinking of going somewhere, he could always look out to see if there was anybody doing their laundry first. And since he never went out when he could see somebody out there, he never actually saw where they went when they were done. He had no idea which people lived in which apartments.
He only ever saw them from behind, as they were loading or unloading their clothes from the machines. They were anonymous figures. Faceless.

His apartment was basically just a large open room with a small bathroom attached. The bed was a few feet from the couch and television, shoved against the wall. He could see the hole in the ceiling from where he lay. He couldn’t actually see it in the dark, of course. But he knew it was there, and that was enough. He knew where it was, and he knew that it was staring down into his apartment.
Sleep came only in fits. He would lay there for hours, imagining what was on the other side of that hole.

He told one of his co-workers about the hole.
It had been bothering him more and more lately, and he felt the need to get it off of his chest. To have somebody tell him that he was just being crazy. He had seen a textbook once, years ago, with a drawing meant to illustrate the effects of a black hole. It showed a person being sucked in, and they were stretched out, distorted. Somehow, this tiny black hole was having the same effect on him. The sheer gravity of it was pulling in all of his thoughts. Stretching, distorting.
The problem was, he didn’t actually have anybody to confide in. No close friends, really. But this guy, he had worked with him for a few months now. They would talk a bit during smoke breaks. He seemed like an okay guy. That was about as good as it got these days.
The co-worker heard him out with a strange look on his face. Afterwards, he laughed and joked about it. They make cameras smaller all the time, he said. Tiny cameras, fit in just about anywhere. Plenty small enough to fit in a hole, he said. Then he laughed.
For the next few days, he would see the co-worker talking to other employees, joking with them. He thought he caught them stealing glances at him. It was obvious, what was going on. They were all laughing at him. Mocking him.
He stopped going to work.

One day, while at the store buying cigarettes, he decided to grab a roll of duct tape. When he got back to his apartment, he lit a cigarette and dragged his chair back under the hole, pushing the couch out of the way with his hip to make room. He went to his desk, found a pair of scissors, and cut a small strip of duct tape from the roll. He climbed up and placed it over the hole, taking care to place it as perfectly as he could, for no real reason that he was aware of. He smoothed wrinkles, lifted and re-applied corners. When he was done, he simply stood on the chair staring up at the patch of tape for a while, smoke from the cigarette in his mouth occasionally drifting into his eyes. The smoke caused his eyes to water, and as he stood staring blankly at the tape, it looked as if he were weeping.

He wasn’t sure when the second hole appeared. It may well have been there for days or even weeks before he finally noticed it. There was no way to be certain. He hadn’t paid much attention to the ceiling once he had covered the first hole.
Even then, however, sleep had come no easier to him. He had given up actively trying to go to bed at night. He would simply lie on his couch and watch TV until he finally passed out from exhaustion. Nights and mornings were a sludgy blur, confusion. After a few weeks of this, he began to lose all sense of time. He may fall asleep in the late morning and wake up in the early evening, a whole day having vanished without his realizing that it had ever come in the first place. He felt completely detached from the world outside of his apartment. What’s more, he had begun to feel foolish about sleeping on the couch. Because of a hole, a tiny hole, a hole that may well have been there when he first moved in.
One night, he finally resolved to get himself back on track. He turned off the television at 2am and forced himself to lie in bed until he fell asleep.
When he awoke the next morning, there was another hole staring down at him.

He took to staring out of his peephole much more than usual. He would often turn the volume on his television all the way down, so he could hear if anybody came into the hallway. Whenever he heard somebody he would sit silently in a chair next to the door, leaning over with his eye pressed against the peephole. He wasn’t even sure what he was looking for. He thought that maybe, if one of his neighbors were behind this, they would give themselves away, but he wasn’t sure how. Maybe they would look over at his door in a certain fashion, unaware that he was watching them just as they had probably been watching him, and that look would give them away and he would know. But he never caught anything. Nobody ever seemed to so much as glance in his direction.

The third and fourth holes appeared in rapid succession.
The former he had noticed late one night while he was sitting on his couch eating cereal. When he stood up to take his bowl to the sink, it suddenly appeared in his peripheral vision. It was only a few inches from the original hole, looming slightly in front of the couch. The perfect place, he thought, to watch him throughout the day. He covered it up immediately, and the fourth hole was already there the next day.

He couldn’t even be sure when exactly the next few holes had appeared, or even when he had first noticed them. He was no longer thinking clearly by that time. His sleep had been erratic, at best. He would often lay there all night with the television on, staring at it in a sort of disassociate stupor, never falling into a full slumber. He had covered the windows with thick blankets to block out the light, hoping that it would allow him to fall asleep throughout the day. It no longer seemed possible to relax. He felt as if he were on display, as if the holes in his ceiling were so many eyes.
He phoned through the doctors listed in his outdated phone book until he found one that could see him that same day. The waiting room, when he arrived, was small and cramped, with thick air that seemed almost viscous. It gave him the impression that these same patients had been sitting here breathing the same stale air for many years. He took a seat in the corner, trying to put as much space between himself and the others as he could, although the room was too small to allow for much.
When he was finally called back and asked him what he had come in for, he became nervous, He wasn’t sure why. He shifted nervously on the paper atop of the exam table, it crinkling loudly with every slight movement, while he explained shakily that he had been suffering from anxiety as of late. Couldn’t sleep, couldn’t relax, couldn’t eat. He didn’t go into detail about the specifics, the cause. The doctor called him over to his small office and wrote him a prescription for anti-anxiety medication. He got it filled immediately upon leaving the office.

For the first few days, he did okay. But as the days wore on, he realized that the recommended dosage wasn’t enough for him. He would take two at a time, he would wait a little less time before taking more. Before long, he wasn’t even sure how many he was taking in any given day. They started to affect his memory. Entire days would pass without his recollection. Even the simplest of details escaped him. What had he had for dinner the day before? Why was his car on Empty? Once, he was shocked to wake up and look in the mirror to discover that his head had been shaved. There was a brief but overwhelming sensation of being lost, as if he suddenly didn’t know who was looking back at him from the mirror. He had no idea who had shaved his head, or when or why. Later that day, when he was gathering laundry, he found a towel covered in loose hair, with his clippers sitting atop of it, and he realized that he had actually done it himself.
Meanwhile, he had completely lost track of the holes. They still bothered him. No less so, really, then they had before he had started taking the medication. But his memory had grown too confused to know how many of them were new, or when they had appeared. He realized, however, that they had grown into quite a multitude.

One day, he was shocked to look out of his peephole and see nothing but blackness.
He didn’t understand. For quite some time, he simply stared into it. There was nothing. It was as if his peephole opened into the void. He had a vision of his apartment floating square in an endless sea of blackness.
He felt lost. He had a strange sensation as if he were falling, his stomach lurching violently.
Somebody must have covered it with something, he finally thought to himself, and the mere act of thinking surprised him. He had been in a stupor, staring into that blackness. For how long, he had no idea.
The darkness on the other side of the door consumed him for most of the day. It wasn’t until quite some time later that he realized there were no new holes in his ceiling.

He didn’t leave his apartment. Had never so much as checked to see what was covering his peephole. From time to time, he would sit and look out of it, and always staring back was sheer blackness.
The absence of new holes caused no relief. If anything, he felt more distraught. He was no longer able to look outside, and there was no longer anybody looking in. He was sealed off, existed in a vacuum. Again, the vision of his apartment, floating in the void.
This persisted for what must have been days. It was as if he had died and been preserved in that small, cramped square. Aside from the occasional look out of his peephole, still into darkness, he did almost nothing. Even thinking, sleeping, he did these only in a vague sense.

Finally, the void on the other side of his peephole became unbearable. On one of his many occasional glances into it, he suddenly became furious. Rather than becoming lost in it, as it often did, his gaze seemed to crash against it, repelled. The void had become a solid black mass, an obstruction.
A severe claustrophobia began to suffocate him. No longer the apartment floating in a void, but rather encased in an impossibly dense obsidian mass. It suddenly seemed as if all of the air in his apartment grew stale and sour, trapped inside since the sealing of the holes. The light had grown dimmer, duller, no longer able to spill into or out of the peephole, the holes, the windows. It had grown stale and withered, as well. And everything, everything had been building up, the stale light, the sour air, his own breath, everything had been slowly filling the room, and he suddenly realized that he was drowning.
Couldn’t breathe. He stepped towards the door. His legs suddenly felt like lead. So heavy, unwieldy. He fell against the door, twisted the knob, pushed. Nothing happened. He tried to undo the lock, hands shaking violently, gasping and choking for breath. Hurry, hurry. Finally he got it, the door burst open against his weight, and he fell into the hallway. The light from the hall stabbed him in the eyes. The stale, dull air from the apartment spilled into the hallway, slowly dissipating in the harsh light.
He stood with his arm against the wall, dizzy, gasping for air. He felt on the verge of fainting. The edges of his vision had grown dark. There was nobody else in the hallway. Looking down the hallway and out the door, he saw darkness. Night.
Slowly, he stopped leaning against the wall, turned, and looked at his door. Covering his peephole on the outside of his door was a small square of duct tape. The exact same type that he himself had been using, down to the color. He reached down to rip it off of the doorway, but stopped short. No. Let them continue to think, for now, that he was sealed inside.
Leaving the duct tape on the door, he stepped back into the apartment, closing and locking the door behind him.

Waiting until deep in the night, he drove to the 24-hour store. He was unshaven, clothes dirty, face dirty. He didn’t care. His hands shook violently on the steering wheel. The drive was surreal. Like he had stepped out of his apartment and into a dreamworld. The lights along the road seemed to leave long, flowing trails in his peripheral vision.
Returning home and locking the door behind him, peephole still covered by tape, he laid down a plastic bag and removed from it a small electric drill.
He waited until the next day, late morning. He didn’t sleep throughout the night. He would occasionally walk over to one of his walls and set his ear against it, listening carefully. Eventually he grew quite certain that nobody was home in the apartment beside him.
He drilled a small, perfect hole that peered discreetly into the apartment beside him. They would almost certainly notice it eventually. Probably cover it up somehow. But that wouldn’t stop him. He could always make more.
Taking his chair from beside the door and setting it in front of the wall, he sat down, leaned forward, and pressed his eye against the newly drilled hole.

About Timothy Davenport

I am a single father of a beautiful and amazing 7-year old girl. My influences range from Borges and Kafka to Dr. Seuss. I have degrees in Writing and Philosophy, and love music, literature, cartoons, and comic books. I like to study ancient history, religions, and the occult. I am incredibly terrible at writing biographical statements. Close