Knock!

There is no concept quite as hard for a human tocomprehend as nothingness. When confronted with void, minds fall back in horror, gooseflesh forming on the very nerve endings that are struggling to convey to us this message: there is nothing there. While some people may believe nothing, it is impossible to believe in nothing.Mari woke up at the first cry crackling through the baby monitor. It was 1:07 a.m.Tuesday night. Stephen would not be back from his route for three days. She was theonly one who would hear the baby cry, the only one who would pull herself out of bed –as she did now – and walk down the short hallway to the second of three bedrooms,three bedrooms optimistically purchased in the hopes that they would be occupied.Three years later, two of the bedrooms had full-time residents. She hoped there would be a third. Austin, the baby, lay in his crib sniffling at her as she looked down at him in the dimglow of the nightlight. He had woken crying, gone from a sound sleep to a full cry andthen dropping back to nothing in the few seconds it took her to get there. In the first few days of his existence, she had thought that his silence, the pattern (cry, silence) meantthat he’d gone right back to sleep but she’d quickly learned by the time he was a week old that the silence was him gathering his breath and that there was a second roundcoming if she did not move quickly.So she did move quickly. It was day nine of his existence and she’d learned, and she’dtell Stephen about it when he got back, in three days. She picked Austin up now, andheld him in her arms. He was tiny and too small to even wiggle much, laying in herforearm like nothing so much as a snuffly rolled-up blanket.She walked back down the hall to her room, sat down on the bed, picked up one of the

premade formula bottles that she’d splurged on. Stephen was going to be gone so long, but at least he was earning extra money, and if she was going to have sole responsibility for the baby she was going to cut some corners and they had the extra money becauseStephen was out on the road for 7 days straight, riding “team” – he and another driverheading straight through, taking turns driving and sleeping and never stopping the truck for longer than it took to gas up and use a restroom.She shook the formula, screwed the nipple on, and began feeding Austin. He fussed andpulled at it and shook his head. In the dark, she fumbled on the nightstand for theremote control, wanting to turn on the television, to watch whatever it was might beshowing at 1:11 a.m.Before she reached it, before her fingers closed on the remote, she heard it:

Knock!

She paused. She looked around the dark room. “What?” she muttered to herself. It hadsounded like nothing so much as a rap on the door, maybe by a hard knuckle, maybe by a door knocker. Not on her door, not on the front door of their house, because that wasmetal.The room was pitch black. She could not see anything. There was only one window inthe room, and it was on the other wall across from her. It looked at the wall of pine treesthat formed their backyard and let in no light. While she knew the layout of the bedroom, she could not have sworn in that moment that any of it was there except forher, and the bed, and Austin, the things she could touch. She would not have been ableto confirm for you, if you could have asked her in that moment, that her dresser wasthere, ahead of her and slightly to her right, with the television on top of it. That hernightstand was to her left, just below her hand, she knew it was there a moment ago buther hand had lifted when she’d heard the sound and she did not move now and couldnot tell if the nightstand was still there. She would not have bet that the mirror in theother corner, the oval mirror with Stephen’s Braves windbreaker hanging on it, was stillthere. As she sat there in the dark, the memory of the sound reverberating in her mind, pullingat her nerves, she felt as though none of that was there, that the floor and the walls andher clothes and everything but her and Austin and the bed was gone, gone away,disappeared, wafted away or simply discorporated.She sucked in her breath and felt cold.

Knock!

It came again. She pulled Austin closer to her and dropped the bottle. The baby,surprisingly, did not make a cry. They both sat there. Mari was holding her breath. Shecould not tell if Austin was. She tried in vain to see into the darkness.