Hallowed Hollow
Chapter 5
Columbus Circle was a whirl of headlights and horns, a vortex of traffic that spun endlessly around the monument. K. was looking for the advertised mega store sale, but before getting very far in his search, he felt a tug from across the plaza, a magnetic attraction to the dark, pallid entrance of Central Park. It was late, a night when no one in his right mind is on the street.
He glanced warily at the entrance. A sign warned of closing hours, but the entrance was wide open, an irresistible temptation to skip common sense. He thought to turn back, to come back another day, in the bright sunshine. Immediate satisfaction overcame deferred reward. The emptiness of the park drew him in like a vortex. He was stepping across a threshold, a border between worlds, so he thought.
The rain had stopped at day's end, leaving the pavement slick and shiny. The trees still dripped rain water at random intervals, producing a distinctive echo effect, as if in a cavern. K. noticed that he no longer heard the noise of the city beyond the walls of the park. The roar of the avenue was muted, replaced by a stillness that was not quite silence, but suspenseful, as if holding its breath.
The air smelled of wet earth and decaying leaves, a raw, invigorating scent that filled his nostrils, exciting and elemental. It smelled wild—unlike the polluted streets—an untamed wilderness that had escaped its cage. The streetlights at the park's edge appeared distant, like a shimmering mirage. Here, in Central Park, the path arced into fathomless darkness.
As K. ventured forth, the crunch of his shoes on the wet gravel was the only distinct sound. He somehow knew he was not alone. The empty park was no longer empty. As he moved deeper into the darkness, a sensation prickled the back of his neck. He felt watched, not by a person—not by any living thing—but by a presence, one not touching the ground, a shadow that had detached itself from the landscape, stalking him, a silent predator.
K's remembrance of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow washed over him unbidden, making his scalp crawl, a tale he had not thought of since childhood. He imagined how Ichabod Crane must have felt, trotting through the mist, the Headless Horseman pacing his every move. He looked over his shoulder, but there was no horse there; nothing in his blind spot, where he expected to see the phantom of legend. Only the feeling of being pushed-and-pulled at once by a heavy, unseen force, a spirit that had long awaited his arrival, and now followed, a doppelganger in the old, Pennsylvania Dutch tradition, remnant of the Faustian pacts made in the twilight of the old world.
He thought he felt the spirit’s breath on his neck, a cold draft that had nothing to do with the wind. It was a premonition of the hollowed-out, the un-hallowed, an emptiness made to measure. The park was designed to be such a hollow, a clearing in the city where the people could find sanctuary from the chaos of civilization, or, at least, an empty bench where one might lose oneself in thought.
Along with the city’s noise, his ego—his fear—were being drained away, leaving him empty, void of purpose, motionless as the stillness surrounding him. Shuddering, K. returned to the path that led back to the street, retreating from the bramble wilderness to the familiar subway. He hurried, the sensation of being followed intensifying. The spirit was no longer chasing him; he was drawing it, a passenger riding free.
He ran down the stairs to the subway station, feeling again secure in its familiar warmth. The platform was deserted, a precarious ledge of yellow tread and ghostly fluorescent lights. “Good,” he muttered under his breath, “there's safety in solitude.” After a short wait, he boarded the local train, its doors hissing shut behind him. He paced from one end to the other. The car was empty, with no sign of life, and no sleepers. It was his.
As the train lurched from stop to stop, his mind began to drift, the paranoia of the park giving way to strange, dialectical speculations. The Lord’s Prayer came to mind, another relic of childhood, but twisted, distorted by faulty memory, as if evolving apart.
Hollowed be thy name, he thought. No, it's not hollowed; it's hallowed.
His tired mind was playing tricks on him. The forgotten words twisted in his thinking, a stream of consciousness that joined phonetic cousins of the English language: Hollow was Holy. Wholeness was hallowed.
To be hollowed was to be made empty, to be evacuated, to be a vessel cleared of its contents, he reasoned. To be hallowed was to be made whole, to be sanctified, filled with the grace of God. But in the dark, as in the hollows of the park, now in the hollow of the subway, the two seemed to merge.
Hollow implied a void, an absence. Holy implied a presence, a fullness. But what if the presence was only admissible by virtue of absence? What if the hollow was the prerequisite for the holy?
Hollowness was space defined by emptiness. Holiness was space defined by presence. No matter which way you looked at it, in the subway, as in the park, in the mind of K. they were inseparable. It was a space occupied by an unseen spirit, a ghost in the hollow, a remnant of a previous occupant, prerequisite to being hallowed.
From the depths, a memory from his childhood emerged, that of a kid's phonograph which had been a present. It was made for children, sturdy, simple, with built-in speakers, and a closing lid. One of his first records was a recording of readings from Washington Irving's Legends of Sleepy Hollow. After much play, the record suffered a scratch by the child's clumsy handling.
Fortuitously, the needle became stuck at a suspenseful moment in the story, that of hearing his name called by a stranger in the mountains: “...Rip Van Winkle, Hey! ...Rip Van Winkle, Hey!”, a refrain the record repeated endlessly with every revolution. Despondent at ruining the record, the refrain stuck long after in K's memory, rising at random from the depths of K's unconscious mind, the return of youthful anguish.
The train stopped. The doors opened silently on an empty platform. No conductor announcement would be needed for an empty subway car. Rousing himself from his tendency to nod-off, K. stepped out, stretching, with the faint feeling of being followed still with him. He ran up the stairs, emerging onto the streets of the Lower East Side. The city was back, its lights harsh, its shadows familiar.
He felt different. He made it. He felt like he'd been to a place that time forgot, and to which he would never return. He could go back, but it would never be the same. It was a place that had moved into himself. The nagging fear of a spirit was gone, or perhaps he had imagined it. In the hollow of his chest, a tenant had taken occupancy.