Into the Pit

by Isaac Fox

Between the ceremony and the reception, Noah and Claire try to sneak off and change. Claire likes the idea of getting margarita stains on her wedding dress, but only in theory. Noah, meanwhile, has never spent so long in a suit before and never wants to again. 

They see Claire’s parents striding toward them from one direction and Noah’s grandma pacing from the other. Noah and Claire know what’s coming: her parents, Kim and Rob, will tell her exactly when to arrive at the reception to be fashionably late without being unfashionably late. They’ll show her a detailed list of songs—complete with artists and release dates—for the DJ. They won’t forget to mention how much of the wedding they paid for. They won’t so much as look at Noah. 

His grandma, Ruth, will arrive in the middle of that, and she’ll have “a few ideas” for cutting costs on the honeymoon, or maybe even the reception starting in five minutes. Claire’s parents will interrupt, offering to pay for both events. And is Scotland really the best place for a honeymoon? We can get you last-minute tickets to the Seychelles, and— 

They sigh in unison and wait.

Towards the end of the afterparty—when some of their friends and family are drunk out of their minds, and the rest are waiting for their loved ones to get tired of being drunk out of their minds—Noah and Claire have a quick, mouthed conversation and decide to stop delaying the inevitable. Noah walks to the front of the room, asks the DJ to quiet the music, and picks up a mic. His new wife skirts the dance floor and stops beside him, wrapping an arm around his waist. 

He feels dozens of drunk and bored eyes. “One last toast!” he shouts across the dance floor and into the rafters. “I know that part of the night has come and gone, but this one’s important.” He raises a glass. “To the rest of our lives.”

Applause stumbles across the room. He shouts over it, “In the Pit!”

The applause stops. In the silver and purple darkness, he can only make out a few blank faces. 

Someone issues a small, questioning chuckle, and a few other people do the same. From somewhere near the back, his grandma belly laughs and then stops when no one joins in. 

They leave almost immediately. Kim gives Claire a quick, mechanical hug, and Rob squeezes her so hard she thinks she’ll be flattened. Claire tells them that yes, they’re going to the Pit, and no, they never planned on going to Scotland, and no, they still don’t want tickets to the Seychelles, and yes, right now, and yes, she has thought about her choice, and no, she hasn’t doubted any of it at all. 

They find Noah’s grandma, who starts raising her arms to hug him, lowers them, shakes his hand instead, and says, “I hope this is right for you.” 

Later, under quiet 1 am streetlights, Claire tightens her grip on the wheel and says, “I wish you wouldn’t have said it like that.”

“Me too.”

She glances over and sees him trying to understand that handshake. Part of her wishes her own reaction could look more like his. I’ll never see my parents again, she reminds herself. I’ve made that choice. And she tries to convince herself that she’s upset.

“I can’t wait,” Claire says. “For the Pit.”

“Yeah.”

A few moments of silence, and then Claire turns the radio up.

They both sit quietly and watch the road for the next few songs. But then a favorite comes on, and they exchange glances and grin. Claire starts belting out the bubblegum lyrics, and soon, Noah is wailing along with the guitar part in his best imitation of an electric. They both sound dreadful, and Claire—who had to take a decade of after-school vocal lessons—is very much doing it on purpose. 

Noah does his worst imitation of Claire’s singing, and Claire does her worst imitation of Noah’s guitar imitation, and then they do their worst imitations of each other’s worst imitations and laugh so hard they almost swerve into the other lane. 

Noah stops laughing, and then Claire stops laughing, and once again they silently watch the road.

At the reception hall, drunk faces try to decide on appropriate expressions for the situation. Sober ones wonder when it might be socially acceptable to leave and who they can get away without saying goodbye to. 

Claire’s parents find Ruth near the door, her jacket halfway on. Kim does all the talking. Rob’s an equal part in what’s said—or what’s meant, or something like that—but she’s a better diplomat in these situations. She doesn’t say, “I want my daughter away from this hippie shit,” or, “Maybe there are better matches for our children.” Those are things Rob might say in this moment, which is why he isn’t talking. 

Instead, she meets Ruth’s vague threat of a glare and says, “We don’t want our daughter to go through with this, and I think you feel the same way about Noah.”

Ruth stares Rob in the face. He realizes he must look every bit as pissed as she does, so he tries to change his expression to something warmer, more empathetic, hopefully at least a little more comforting. 

Kim keeps her eyes on Ruth. “We’re flying out to stop this, tonight. We would appreciate your help.”

Ruth’s stare loses most of its threat, and Rob thinks, She’s losing her kid, too. She can glare at me if she needs to. 

He smiles. “We’ll pay for the flight, your room, whatever you need.”

“I’ll pay for myself.” Her coat is still tangled around her shoulder, and she fumbles with it until it’s on and zipped. She bought her ticket online fifteen minutes ago. 

Noah and Claire wade through lines and metal detectors and into stale plane light. For a very long time, they stare out into the darkness and try to snuggle up to each other without touching the armrests, and then it’s more lines, revolving belongings, their choice of rental car, headlights bouncing off dunes whenever they turn, buildings and lights rising in the distance. Darkness shades into predawn gray. 

In the city, they find their hotel easily enough but decide they need to see everything before they sleep. Excitement keeps Claire’s eyes open just enough to crawl along behind many-wheeled trucks, surely stuffed with huge steel plates and hardwood flooring and curved, gleaming metal fins. Noah mashes his face against the window and cranes his neck to read billboards offering products like “Man’s greatest novels—so small you can keep 50 in the tiniest drawer!” and “Family planning for your new life: the one pill that lasts forever! (not FDA approved).” The roads are lined with hotels, some long ceded to the roaches, others looking like someone crane-lifted them from a city full of stretch limos and dropped them here in the desert. But mostly, Noah and Claire see four lanes of semi-trucks. There are a few cars packed in between–some luxurious, others functional at best–and the people in them zone out or bounce their heads to music or read the billboards. Noah and Claire try to guess who lives and works here, who’s a tourist, and who’s headed into the Pit. 

“Do you need to sleep?” Claire asks, blinking. 

“Nope.” Noah wonders when his eyes last focused. 

“To the Pit?”

“I’m too delirious to say no to that, and also, I love you.”

“Yes you are, and yes you do. I love you too. A quick look, and then to bed.”

Ruth ends up on the same flight as Kim and Rob, probably because it’s the only one selling tickets this last-minute. They embark separately and keep their distance on the plane. At baggage claim, Ruth scans the room for pantsuits, spots Kim, and asks, “How are we doing this?”

Kim is the only one of the three who doesn’t look like she tried to sleep in some mangy raccoon’s dumpster, but Ruth senses that she doesn’t quite have that usual polish. For once, the poor woman isn’t in total control of herself and everything around her, and Ruth scolds herself for enjoying it so much.

Kim says, “Rob and I weren’t always the best parents for Claire, so we’re going to show her we care and want to do better. But you’re the only person in the world who could know how to parent Noah.”

Ruth takes a deep breath and tries to hold on to her pokerface. “We need to show up together. They can see we’re not exactly in love with each other. No need to share a car or anything, but if they see us agree on this, they’ll see we care.”

Kim nods. “That might work even better if we share a car.”

Rob decides to think of it as a bonding experience.

Claire and Noah can see the Pit from the road now. They see construction workers and forklifts and half-built structures here and more construction workers and forklifts and half-built structures half a mile over there. In between, there’s only heat distortion and a thin haze of blowing sand. 

The road turns to form a ring around the Pit. Short driveways stretch from the road to the Pit-side construction sites, and semi-trucks constantly turn off onto those. Traffic moves at a lurching crawl. 

Claire and Noah know that their eyes should be on the road, but they just can’t resist the urge to look every construction site up and down. They pass homes in various stages, one half-painted, the next waiting to be assembled. One looks finished, but the nearest crane is on the other side of the Pit, so it must not be quite ready. Both the Pit and the construction sites are hidden behind low sand hills in a lot of places, and every time Claire and Noah get stuck in traffic without a view of anything other than sand and semi-trucks, they almost quiver with impatience. 

To reach their little plot, they turn off the main road and follow a driveway up one of those hills. It’s not much more than a lump of dirt, really, but it’s enough to block their view of the Pit from the bottom, and enough that when they’re on top, they can see just the tiniest hint of those bottomless (or, well, possibly bottomless) stone walls. 

A moveable-letters sign along the driveway says, “The home of Mr. and Mrs. Noah Wessell.” But the thing standing in the construction site just past the hill isn’t a home, not yet. It’s half-built, and the built half isn’t the wood-paneled, warmly painted interior; it’s the gunmetal frame, the part designed to make the home—when it is a home—fall without tumbling or smashing into the Pit’s walls. It looks both militant and ridiculous, like a rocket somebody squashed and then flipped upside down. 

He looks at that piece of metal and sees his future. A life lived at terminal velocity, he thinks. What a corny phrase, and I love it. He imagines visiting neighbors above and below by diving or spreading his arms to fall faster or slower than his home. He wonders what sunlight might mean when he feels one shrinking sliver of it each day, and what he might see on the walls of the Pit in those tiny illuminated moments. He imagines fifty years, or seventy, or even more with his wife, free of—

This has nothing to do with our parents.

He and Claire step out into the sun-heavy air. On the dusty hill above the construction site, they take each other's hands and kiss. Their shirts whip-flutter around them. Grain by grain, sand settles in every bag and crevice of their clothes and then slips between their lips. 

Kim and Rob choose the most expensive rental car in the lot. “It’ll be reliable,” Rob says, and Ruth reminds herself that arguing would only slow things down. 

Kim takes the driver's seat. “Rob, I’d like you to navigate, please. Ruth, I know you’ll need a nap by now, so you can have the backseat.”

Ruth takes the passenger seat and opens a GPS app on her phone. Rob climbs in the back, ignoring Kim’s frown. He’s asleep as soon as his seatbelt’s on. 

For over an hour, Kim and Ruth only speak when they need to, and only about exit ramps and center lanes. At every traffic light, Kim scrolls and types on her phone for as long as they’re stopped, her screen angled away from Ruth. Ruth catches a few glimpses anyway. Actually, she catches more than a few glimpses—she’s intrigued now, and Kim isn’t very good at hiding her screen, at least not when she’s this tired. Ruth reads enough to see that she’s on a forum devoted to model-sailboat making, debating any and all comers about her favorite brand of wood varnish. 

Ruth wants to make fun of her—she wants to, so badly. But she realizes that when Kim has that forum open, she looks happier—she even smiles sometimes. If arguing with strangers about tiny boats makes her less pissy, Ruth decides, I’m not messing with that.

Rob wakes up, and eventually, he convinces Kim to pull over and switch places with him. She manages to position herself so that she falls asleep upright, in the most dignified position possible. 

For close to two hours, Rob, too, only talks about directions. But then, Ruth sees him scrunch up his face and realizes that he’s just holding back tears, and he sees that she sees. Once he’s steadied his voice, he tells her about Claire’s childhood treehouse, the one in that squat little oak. The carpenter he hired built it without windows, so Claire horrified her parents by adding windows herself with scissors and a hammer. 

Kim stirs, and he goes silent. 

Soon, they’ll reach the Pit. 

Five years ago, when Claire and Noah still measured their relationship in months, they came here to visit the Pit’s tourist overlook.

Claire remembers that trip—she remembers being only a tourist in this place. She remembers the glass elevator that took them a hundred yards down into the Pit, the ragged, weather-torn stone wall on one side of her, the gaping space on the other. She remembers looking through the elevator’s floor and tracing the textures of the stone with her eyes, down and down until the textures faded into featureless brown, and then black. 

She remembers how Noah gaped—how she told him, “You look like you’re gonna puke.” How she almost puked herself when they got back to ground level. And how she gaped with him, and the gape became a smile.

Ruth expected the Pit to be wilder. She expected crowds that criminals could disappear in, neon motels that don’t ask questions, emerald casinos dangling corners out over the edge. Maybe not anything quite so dramatic, but that feel. The real thing is mostly hidden behind sandy little hills, and where those flatten out, she can hardly see anything behind metal frameworks, heaped steel plates, beeping machines, blowing sand, and the blinding white sunglare on all of it. 

She looks over at Kim, who's busy trying to hide her surprise. She expected something fifty feet wide, at most, and from the little glimpses she’s getting, it’s… it’s a little larger than that. 

Rob isn’t even trying to hide his surprise. He imagines some enormous hand dropping football stadiums into the Pit, marching bands and all. He wonders how long he’d be able to see the bleachers and turf fields falling if he stood at the Pit’s rim and looked down. 

They spot the “Mr. and Mrs. Noah Wessell” sign and follow it. They haven’t called. Earlier, Kim decided that showing up unannounced would have more of an impact, and the other two reluctantly agreed. 

Noah and Claire have slept a whole three hours and are back at the Pit, watching construction from the top of the hill. They hear someone coming up their driveway and turn to see Kim, Rob, and Ruth together in the same car. Noah has questions, but some part of him is relieved; what Claire feels is more of a thin, nagging dread. 

The three of them park on the hilltop and step out. Ruth badly, badly wants to say something like, “Come on Noah, we’re leaving.” But she’s agreed to let Kim do all the talking, at least for now.

Kim says, “It’ll be a beautiful house, amazingly beautiful. I can see that it will.” And she tries to read her daughter and son-in-law like instruction manuals.

There on the hilltop, Claire and Noah sit in the dirt, blasted constantly by the sand-stung wind. Ruth sits down beside them. Kim and Rob choose to stand. 

“They’re saying it’ll be done in three days,” Noah says, his eyes on the construction site. Men in hardhats move in and out of the house, filling out the metal frame with hardwood floors and walls and beginning to paint it all. 

Kim says nothing for hours on end, her eyes stern. The others don’t exactly try to drag her into a conversation. Rob and Ruth are both silent because they’re confused and unsettled by Kim’s silence, and also because they just don’t know what to say. Small talk seems somehow inappropriate right now, and talking about what’s on their minds would be much worse. 

Noah and Claire, meanwhile, are trying not to think about what their parents are up to. They’re happy to sit a little away from the others, watch construction, and whisper and giggle in each other’s ears like teenagers. 

Kim is sure she sees guilt, building and building under their whispers and grins. She’s waiting for Claire to break down and cry and apologize. Either member of the couple can knock the other off course, but she’d like her daughter to see reason first. She knows that for this tactic to work, it’ll take time, and she gives it time. She gives it all day. But as the waves of heat distortion shrink and the sun begins to set, she scolds herself for wasting so many hours. 

Her presence, she realizes, won’t be enough.

Just before they all head back to their hotels for the night, Rob catches Claire alone for a moment. “Our realtor told your mom and I about a property in Oregon, and we wondered if you and Noah might be interested. It’s a small place like you two like, but the architecture’s beautiful. And there’s a rainforest right out the back door, and this little live music venue half a mile—”

“Dad, that sounds amazing, but you can’t stop us from doing this.” Claire walks to the car, where Noah’s waiting. 

The second day comes, and Ruth tries to dream her grandson’s dreams. She tries to imagine the self-sufficiency of his new life. He and Claire will grow their own food without anyone’s help and drink water reclaimed from their own bodies. They won’t rely on one person, who sells to another, who sells to another, and they also won’t rely on the field of grass that feeds the cows that feed the people. Just him and a few easy-to-maintain machines, and the love of his life. Ruth can see him living that way—she can see him falling. And she sees his parents, broken and bent in a broken and bent car. She sees her own husband, shriveled up in a cold, antiseptic bed. 

“Just imagine it,” he says, “angling your body to slow down or speed up your fall. Out in the open air. I’ll fly like a bird every time I wanna visit the neighbors.”

She nods and tries to seem engaged, but she can’t look at the Pit and see anything but a desert with a hole in it. 

After Claire and Noah head back to their hotel for the night, Kim and Rob walk down into the construction site and find someone who looks like a foreman. Rob does the talking. He says, “I’ll sue every last one of you if I find out my daughter splattered on the ground down there.” He goes from one site to the next to the next, finding foremen, making eye contact, and reciting those words. He blocks away the little pang he feels for these people. Kim stands beside him and gives a thin, corporate smile.

Claire and Noah both see what their parents are trying to do, and they’ve silently agreed that it’s not worth discussing—not even with each other. In the car, Claire almost complains, but she reminds herself, Talking about what they’re doing can only legitimize it.

She and Noah head up to their room, slip under faux-linen sheets in their dust-drenched clothes, and turn on a singing competition show. There won’t be any cell, internet, or TV reception in the Pit.

Some of the contestants are dreadful (maybe intentionally dreadful—it’s hard to tell), but Claire and Noah are too exhausted to find it all that funny. A few of the non-dreadful ones sound excellent, and they check out some of their favorites on Spotify while they still can. 

Neither of them turns the TV off. They fall asleep holding each other, serenaded by pitchy pop songs. 

By the third day, the house is more or less finished. Once the inspectors seem satisfied that the wind turbine attached to the bottom will extend when they start falling, and the array of test tubes in the kitchen will grow non-toxic food, and the flight suit for those trips between houses doesn’t have any holes in it, they move in. 

Their new home can’t contain much of their old life. It’s just one room, with an oven in one corner and a toilet in the other. All the furniture is built into the walls and folds down. They bring a few sets of clothes for each of them, as many tiny books as they can fit, a pot, and a pan. 

Moving everything in takes maybe ten minutes. Afterward, the five of them unfold the chairs, which look a little like the ones flight attendants use, and sit inside. Noah and Claire try to enjoy their parents’ company, surrounded by earthy reds and yellows that barely hide industrial-grade steel. 

Ruth wishes she could’ve known when she’d see her husband for the last time. She feels the same way about her daughter and son-in-law. So she ignores Rob’s thousand-yard stares and Kim’s half-hidden sulking and carries a conversation with Noah and Claire. She talks to them about anything and everything, whatever she can think of to hold off that constant silence—her retirement plans, gossip back home, the pressing heat, a dozen other topics she’ll forget almost before she’s done talking about them. Inevitably, they cycle back to the newlyweds’ dreams and plans for their future in the Pit.

When Noah starts talking about “a life lived at terminal velocity” again, Ruth lets the silence creep in. But only for a few moments, and then she steers the conversation back to the weather. 

All day, Kim and Rob have been keeping an eye on the crane a few sites down. Late in the afternoon, they see activity around that area, and then an operator climbing into the crane. The two of them quietly leave Claire and Noah’s house and drive down to that site. Watching from beside the road, they see the house’s owners—two men in their sixties or seventies—make their way inside. 

“Imagine a couple who makes this choice,” Kim says, “and then after a decade, or a year, or a month, they realize they don’t work, as a couple. Imagine how trapped that pair of people would feel.”

Rob’s eyes stay fixed on the house below the crane. 

Kim says, “I may have to remind Claire of that possibility.” 

“Hon, are we really here to stop her? Or did we come to see her off?”

The crane lifts, and ever so slowly, the house rises from the ground, and then swings out over the Pit.

Kim’s eyes are on Rob. “I came to stop her.”

The crane releases, and the house falls out of sight.

Kim and Rob drive back to Claire and Noah’s house. Claire eyes the two of them as they walk through the door, but she doesn’t interrupt her conversation with Noah and Ruth to ask where they’ve been. 

Kim sits with Rob for a few minutes and then moves over beside Claire. She thinks about asking something like, “So what happens if you two break up in the Pit?” But she almost squirms when she imagines herself saying the words. 

She slips out of the house again—if she can even call it a house—to walk, to think. But before she’s even thirty feet from the door, she spots the man she thinks is the site’s foreman strolling away from Claire and Noah’s plot of land. She follows him over the hill, down the short driveway, up the road a ways, and into a men’s bathroom. He stares and starts to open his mouth to speak. She squares her shoulders and says, “Does it have a bottom?” 

The foreman tears a paper towel from the dispenser. “Most physici—”

“No. An answer! Give me a fucking answer!”

“We don’t know.” 

The next morning, when it’s time for Noah and Claire to go, security guards stop Kim, Rob, and Ruth’s car in the driveway. The hill blocks everything but the crane from their view, and Ruth realizes that no matter what Kim and Rob say, security isn’t going to let them in. She realizes that she’ll have to watch the crane swing and imagine her grandson and his wife, dropped, shrinking into darkness—

She glances over at Rob, and then Kim. They know it, too. All three of them burst out of the car, slam their doors, and shout across the hill until Noah and Claire come back. 

Rob crushes both newlyweds, and then his wife, and then Ruth, who stiffens for a moment before slumping into him. 

Kim gives Claire something like a real hug. Claire thinks she feels sort of sad this time. 

Ruth hugs Noah, and then Claire. She badly, badly wants to give them some words of guidance, or at least some words they’ll remember. She can’t think of any, so she says, “Goodbye. I love you both.”

Noah walks to his new home slowly, grasping his wife’s hand in his own. He steps in after her, trying not to hesitate at the door. He forgets that his grandma is hidden behind the hill, and he tries to glance back at her.

They unfold their seats and strap in for the fall. Claire buckles up in one jerking motion, and from the corner of her eye, she sees Noah cringe at the nails-on-a-chalkboard zip of her seatbelt. 

She looks at the flight suit, crumpled on a coat hook. “Shouldn’t this feel like, I don’t know, more?”

And then there’s a jolt, and they’re falling.

Isaac Fox plays the clarinet and guitar, makes weird little books, and spends as much time as possible outside. His work has previously appeared in Bending Genres, Tiny Molecules, and A Velvet Giant. You can find more of his stories and poems at https://isaacfox280.wixsite.com/writing or on his Twitter account, @isaac_k_fox.