The Whole

John Reed

• Publisher: MTV Books
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781416513100
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

From John Reed, author of the controversial Orwell parody, Snowball's Chance, comes a subversive satire of modern culture, the complete lack thereof, and a lost generation that no one even tried to look for.
In the middle of America's heartland, a young boy digs a small hole in the ground...which grows into a big hole in the ground...which then proceeds to drag the boy, his parents, his dog, and most of their house into a deep void.
Then, as abruptly as the hole started growing, it stops.
So begins the first in a series of events that takes the beautiful-if-not-brainy Thing on a quest to uncover the truth behind the mysterious Hole.
Inspired by visions, signs, and an unlimited supply of pink cocktails served by an ever-lurking "Black Rabbit, " Thing and her dogged production crew travel around America, encountering Satanists, an Extraterrestrial/Christian cult group, and a surprisingly helpful phone psychic. Their search for answers could very well decide the fate of the world as they know it.
But the more Thing learns about the Hole, her shocking connection to it, and the mind-boggling destiny that awaits her, the more she realizes that human civilization isn't all it's cracked up to be -- and that it's just about time to start over.

In daylight, mais oui, the Luxor pyramid was impressive—but so was everything else. At the intersection of Tropicana and Las Vegas Boulevard alone, there were four tremendous hotels. The Tropicana, the MGM Grand and the Excalibur, which was next to the Luxor. Everything was wild and inviting. Limousines, red carpets and any fantasy that concrete could shape.

Of course, the Luxor was a little outside the budget of Thing’s producer, Matthew. And, anyway, when Thing asked around, nobody at the Luxor knew anything about Egypt. Then somebody said they thought there was something with Egyptologists at the convention center….

But first, Thing and the crew had to check into the Lady Luck, which Thing thought was appropriate enough, and where a two-fer deal had been worked out. Thing was satisfied with her eighth room and it was arranged that she would link up with her crew in about fifteen minutes, in the lobby, after everyone had freshened up.

Two hours later, when she made it down to the lobby, Thing couldn’t find the team, but eventually located them in the casino, which was bright and airy with huge picture windows, and rows of slot machines that were danged appealing. There was a huge slot machine called Big Bertha, and yet, yet…

“What’s wrong with all of you?” Thing motivated her crew, who, side by side, were taking up an entire row of machines—

“We were supposed to leave two hours ago, and I’ve been ready for five minutes!”

The team then mobilized, and it was into the rental van and off to the steel-and-glass behemoth—that was so typical of the American experience—to kick off the daily broadcast.

“Here we are,” said Thing, “the Las Vegas Conventional Center.”

With the team’s outstanding press credentials, they were led directly to the main lecture hall, where the entomologist conference was already underway.

“Um, that’s not the same as a, um, Egyptologist,” warned Roth.

“Oh,” said Thing, “don’t be a party, uh, sport, uh, sporter, uh, I mean, don’t be a spoil, uh, spoil, uh, don’t be a spoil pooper!”

A small man with bifocals was commanding his audience with a spellbinding address on genetic manipulation. The underappreciated species Drosophilae melanogaster had been bestowed antennas with eyes on the ends of them.

This was exactly the kind of breaking news story Thing was hoping for, until she realized that the slide show had misled her, and that the melanogaster was not seven feet tall, but more like three millimeters long, and that it was not an alien species either, but, rather, a fruit fly.

The talk broke up then, and Thing was soon engaged in conversation by another short, bespectacled man who kept rubbing his foot against the side of her leg. He was a scholarly-looking fellow, however, and seemed to have something incomprehensible to say, which meant that it was probably important.

He kept going on and on about her “erroneous zones,” and how he’d like to attend to them in various fashions, but she wasn’t at all sure what he meant. That is, he went on and she wasn’t at all sure until she asked what fruit flies had to do with pyramids and Egypt. Then the situation was reversed, and a blank gaze was stretching the circumference of his eye sockets—

“There’s been some confusion. I know of no relation between fruit flies and the ancient pyramids in Egypt. But the humanists are down at the other end of the convention center, and, stringent as they are about the scientific method, they may have come up with a correlation. Several people had this entomology talk confused with the etymology talk in room 1511.”

Thing then understood—it was they who were in the erroneous zone, as they were wanting that other talk in room 1511. As a matter of fact, a “humanish” convention sounded extremely promising, for if one were “humanish” it stood to reason that, even if one were very nearly human, one was not human at all!

“Oh,” said Thing, “why thank you,” and she extracted her leg from the rapid-fire motions of the man’s foot. (Although his expression had gone doleful and craven upon learning that Thing was in no way involved in the entomology circles, he had not in the least abandoned his foot on the foreleg approach.)

Thing and her crew then hurried up to room 1511, where the lecture, “Etymology and Mythology of the Omphalos,” was, likewise, already underway. A fellow with a paunch animatedly delivered his nasal discourse—

“The wisdom of the Omphalos, i.e., the wisdom of the World Navel, represents the threshold—the entry into the sacred zone, which is the universal source.”

Thing gasped at the coincidence—erroneous zone, sacred zone—it just seemed that everyone was talking about her zone!

“Ehem,” the lecturer resumed, “the World Navel is the all-that-is-everywhere. It is the ‘maybe.’ It is victory and defeat. A place of infinite risk, and the ultimate sanctum sanctorum. It is ubiquitous, and the origin, as well as the conclusion, of all existence. Ugliness and beauty, sin and virtue, pleasure and pain, are, to the Omphalos, not only of the utmost importance, but of the utmost irrelevance. A human object of worship, or, for that matter, disdain, might represent magnificence or goodness, or repulsiveness or evil—or, they might transcend any scale of human value. Likewise, a place may simultaneously encompass and preserve opposites. A good example of a man-made location that bears such a burden of the horror and the sublime is a Mayan sacrificial temple. A naturally occurring example might be an earthquake, or, simply, the ocean. Neither are these inherent self-contradictions and similitudes strange to the arts. To quote Heraclitus, ‘The unlike is joined together, and from differences results the most beautiful harmony, and all things take place by strife.’ And to quote Blake, ‘The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea and the destructive sword are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man.’ ”

Thing, who assumed the presentation was, as impossible as it was to follow word to word, addressing the subject of herself and the hole, got the general gist of it. Yes, the hole was scary, but thrilling too. And yes, she was lovely, and loving, and all the world should love her—but surely, everyone also knew that she could be terrible, and terrifying, and all the world should be in terror.

Then the man droned on some more and Thing began to think there had been another goof-up. She perused a program, and, after several minutes, discovered that the conference was for “humanists,” not “the Humanish.” This, Thing immediately deduced, was not so exciting.

“Humans?” she blurted out. “Is that all you’re studying?”

The professor, mistaking Thing for a student with a questioning mind, deployed his speech on why the humanist education was important—i.e., the classics and stuff.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Thing, annoyed that she had been challenged on camera, “I know what a classic is. It’s a great book. But if I already know it’s great, why do I have to read it?”

The professor, interpreting this as a critique on reading as an outmoded method of communication, tried to impress on his audience, and on Thing in particular, the importance of the age-old practice.

“My winsome girl,” he was saying, giving her the once- and twice-over through his glasses—

“Ehem, yes,” he cleared his throat, “You see, what I was—”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Thing, “I know. I know all the arguments. You couldn’t read, you couldn’t make sense of the TV guide. Blah, blah, blah.”

The professor then suggested a few plays and novels to Thing, so that she might judge for herself their value.

“Listen,” said Thing, “I don’t have to read Hamlets or Moby Duck or Great Expectorations to tell you whether or not it’s great. Just gimme a name. I heard of them—they’re famous. They’re famous—they’re a genius. They’re a genius—they write great books. So, like I said, you know, like, it’s a classic, or, like, whoever wrote it’s famous, you know it’s great, and that’s all you’ve got to say, because nobody else read it either.”

Thing, glancing over to her producer (Matthew, now onsite, as Vegas required him) realized that she had gone too far, that she was revealing, maybe, a national secret—but thanks to thick quinking she was able to discharge an incontrovertible recant.

“Oh, but, thank you, Professor, I’ll make it my very first priority to lose no time reading those books.”

The team withdrew. Thing believed it was likely they’d find something relevant out on the Strip. At the Circus Circus, or the Mirage, or Caesars Palace, or the show at the Riviera, or one of those feasts at the Excalibur—at a feast, there had to be plenty of vegetarian food. And maybe some crispy roasted pork too.

The rest of the crew, on the other hand, was exhausted by their travels—and all they wanted to do was go to Wimpy’s to pick up a chili dog and a milkshake and possibly a banana split, and to advance from there to the hotel pool, and from the pool to the hot tub, and certainly, in the end, to initiate a direct link-up with the cable television that was so prominently featured in every one of their rooms.

Thing was encouraged to continue her investigation without them, however, and she did. She lost almost a thousand dollars in almost seven minutes at the Wheel of Fortune in Vegas World—and then happened into the Black Rabbit, who had a few pink cocktails waiting on the bar. Thing, still focused on the lost dough, was desponding.

“The problem with you,” said a sympathetic Rabbit, edging a martini glass in her direction, “is that when you’re not drunk, you’re sober.”

“Yeah,” said Thing, “gimme that. Reality is for people who can’t handle a drink.”

Three pink cocktails later, Thing was, not drunk, but, as she said, overserved. The Rabbit had left Thing alone at the bar, as he had, he was sorry to inform her, several investments that needed looking into. She went out onto the floor and gambled until some guy wouldn’t let her anymore. Then there were pink cocktails, from somewhere, and not sure exactly how many she’d had, or how much she’d lost, she slumped over her stool at the roulette table and wondered if she could stand up straight enough to get laid.

Thus did Tim and Tina approach, for Thing, they recognized, was depressed, desperate and, well, overserved—which was everything they were looking for in a companion.

Tina, a hairspray Q-tip of a girl, was often unliked by others of her own sex. But Thing, who didn’t mind that Tina and Tim were a package deal, immediately took a shine to her, and managed to lift her overserved hand to stroke the gal’s cheek.

“Oh,” said Tina, “you’re like an angel with a halo.” And after it was explained what a halo was, Thing agreed—

“Oh yeah, like, held up over my head with my horns.”

Then they told Thing how gorgeous and brilliant she was and how they had been watching her on television for years—not that she looked any older—and that, talking turkey, Thing was the foremost wonder of the world.

Of course, Thing knew all that. But it was nice of them to say, anyway. And she accepted graciously—

“I have nothing to say except I’m famous.”

As it turned out, Tim and Tina weren’t famous. But Tim was a Getty, and his pockets were bulging with the s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Foreword
• It happened in the heartland
• Now, several years ago, the lass
• Like many artists, great and slight
• I don’t think I
• Though she was no longer on TV
• She knew there was a simple answer
• Oh yeah? said Matthew
• In daylight, mais oui, the Luxor
• Thing knew she wouldn’t be talking
• She slept restlessly. The tent was warm
• The mud took her. She pushed. It pulled
• So, Thing got her pullover award for investigative journalism
• About the Author