In part one of The Empty Space our narrator has been invited to spend an evening listening to an aprtment manager tell about a strange experience he once had while living in South Minneapolis. Despite being in the center of the city the room, he claimed, was transmitting sounds from some rural source. In seeking an explanation, a friend of his brought an elderly couple over to talk about what he was experiencing. Here's the rest of the story.
The following night, Michael came to my apartment with an older couple who said they once had an empty space behind their house. I don't remember their last names. His name was Ralph, and he called her Flo. "They're very rare," the old man said. "You could hear the ocean. It was smashing on the rocks somewhere. Occasionally we'd hear a fishing boat."
"We were living in Iowa, mind you," Flo announced.
"What causes it?" I asked.
"Reality is ever expanding. It's filling more and more space all the time. Mass doesn't expand as fast as reality and so there are cracks or fissures, empty spaces. Noises enter the empty spaces in the same way sound travels through vents in a house." Flo was nodding as Ralph offered his explanation of the phenomenon.
"But how can sound from the country be this loud in my room here in the city? Sound can't travel that far."
"Here, I brought a book that explains that," Ralph said. He had in his hand Volume III of Alexander Manchester's Tertius Dictum. "Each point of the universe contains all points... Because there is an infinitely small distance between each point in space, all points in space are immediately present to all other points.... Matter creates the illusion of space and distance.... Empty spaces eliminate this distance." The book went on for several pages in that manner.
Flo told how her life was changed by the presence of the empty space behind their house. "The experience shattered all my preconceived notions about the nature of things. I began to realize things can be different from what we expect. My whole understanding of perceptions and the nature of reality shifted. You might say I began to distrust things which other people take for granted."
"In other words," Ralph explained, "she stopped accepting everything she was taught and started thinking for herself."
"It was like an awakening. As if I woke from a deep sleep. I became conscious," Flo explained, "became enthralled by our world. Became, well, infatuated with life."
"Of course, you can go too far, you know," Ralph inserted.
"What do you mean?" I ask.
"I mean, just because some things are different than you expected, not every wacko idea is necessarily true. Take flying saucers, for example. Maybe yes, maybe no. I don't know." My friend Michael frowned because he liked to believe one day he'd see a flying saucer or make contact with aliens.
By evening's end we explored topics as diverse as the Great Pyramids, Atlantis, black holes, werewolves, ouija, the arcana, witches, black cats and the sephiroth.
To be honest with you, I didn't like these people. They were strange to me. I mean, sure, they told some wild stories like you wouldn't believe, and some you don't want to believe, but it's pretty weird stuff and, for me, when they left that night I was glad to close the door behind them.
Then again, where did it leave me. Normal people thought I was the strange one to have this hole in my room that went to the country. And these other people...
A lot of it has to do with the way I grew up. My family was a little different to begin with, and then, too, it seems like we moved every two years so I was always an outsider, always having to prove myself, always the odd man out. You'd think that a kid growing up like that would eventually become skilled at making adjustments, but I never did. Now here I was trying to live a normal life yet I had this bizarre thing going on right in my living space.
The one good thing that happened that night was this. Once I had some kind of explanation for it, I no longer wondered whether I was losing it, if you know what I mean. Up till then I had this knot in my stomach because I harbored a fear that maybe I was cracking up somehow.
You see, when I was growing up I learned that my grandmother had had a nervous breakdown. No one in the family ever talked about it and my mother would change the subject whenever I asked, so it made me scared. The empty space had the same effect, like a vague, dark cloud casting a shadow over a corner of my soul. It made me feel anxious.
After a while the whole experience had an eroding effect on my confidence. I knew that I was living with a secret that I couldn't, or wouldn't, share. As a result, I felt alienated from my peers, from my neighbors, from my friends and especially my family. It's almost unbelievable to me now to think how angry I was with my parents because they were so out of touch with what I was going through. No one understood, though now I see that it was as much my fault because I kept it all in.
You know what I mean, don't you? You'd do the same thing. Anyone would after the strange looks I was getting when I tried to talk about it. I did try to talk about it at first and my mother got worried for me. My sister Lisa was mad at me for getting my mother all upset. I can see now that she was trying to protect her, but what about me? No one seemed concerned about what I was going through.
When my mother died that following spring my sister laid blame at my doorstep. She says mother thought I was going crazy and just couldn't deal with the notion of having her son committed to an asylum. Lisa says mother stopped eating one day and in the nursing home kept pulling the feeding tubes out. After the funeral my sister moved to California. She said she needed to get away from her crazy family and make a new beginning. I haven't seen or heard from her since.
The day my lease was fulfilled I found an apartment in St. Paul where I took on my first caretaker job. I've always been a handyman. That's where I met Linda, a student at Hamline University, who later became my wife. It bothers me though that in the seven years we've been married I never once mentioned the apartment with the empty space. She knows everything else about me, but I'm still afraid to tell her. If she didn't believe me, I don't know what I'd do. Isn't it ironic? I'm afraid the empty space will put a wall between us, so I keep it to myself. The result is a secret I feel I can't share, and so it separates us.
Should I say something, or bury it? I knew if you believed my story I'd feel hopeful that maybe she'll believe it, too. You do believe me, don't you?
THE ENDcopyright 1998 ed newman 
For seven years I belonged to a small group of business professionals called the M5. We would meet to challenge one another, to be a portable, personal board of directors for our careers, and to hold one another accountable to the goals we set for ourselves.
