We woke to no running water. Not even a drop fell from our showerheads that morning. The little water we did have drizzled from the faucets. We assumed myopically this was an issue specific to our home, that we would have to call a plumber from our desks at work. It was only on our commute that we realized what had happened. A water main had burst and flooded Tremont Square. Police had closed the road. Men in neon vests and hard hats milled about the ankle-high water. Tremont Square was by the adult language school, in a part of town where most of the tenants were students—renters, not owners. The flooded street ran in front of the liquor store. Across the street, the YMCA. On the town’s flagpole, the old, tattered, thin and translucent American flag snapped. It was fortunate for us because we lived at the top of the hill about a mile away. We didn’t have to worry about our home flooding; we were relieved we wouldn’t need to pay a plumber after all.
When we came home that night, the men in vests were still working and the water had not returned. We were understandably upset. We had grown accustomed to water always springing from our taps, our lights never failing, our supermarkets always being stocked. These conveniences were our birthright. On the news, they explained that the water break had created a small sinkhole, and a young man had (presumably) died that morning when the ground underneath him suddenly fell away. The station had obtained footage of the incident, which, they warned, might not be suitable for young children and the sensitive.
The moment had been captured on the liquor store’s security camera. The time stamp in the bottom right hand corner read 5:47 a.m. The footage was gray and grainy. A dark figure shuffled down the sidewalk across the empty street. The earth opened up. It was almost grotesque, how quickly the man could go from being there to not being there. Even when the station slowed the video down frame by frame, it was almost impossible to process.
More details about the missing man would come out over the following days. He had immigrated from Syria on a temporary visa, he was studying English at the language school, and that morning he had been on his way to the Washington Street Dunkin’ Donuts for his 6 a.m. shift. Some people online were very alarmed. Others posted jokes, such as the clip paired with the caption: “Me when I get overstimulated at the party.” The Christians claimed that this was a sign of Armageddon, that soon, as the Bible predicted, “the heavens will disappear with a roar.” On our own community webpage, faceless usernames confessed that while they didn’t necessarily want anyone to die, they wouldn’t mind there being less foreigners in the neighborhood.
We gave fifty dollars to the victim’s family’s GoFundMe. It wasn’t immediately obvious what else we could do.
In the meantime, they had diverted water from another main; our house was back to normal. We trusted the infrastructure, trusted that the competent people we had elected would fix the sinkhole problem. After all, we paid taxes for precisely this reason. So, we avoided that part of the neighborhood, drove around the commotion on our way to work, adding so much as five to ten minutes to our morning commute.
But the sinkhole kept expanding. The perplexed city officials assured us that they were attempting every measure and tactic to resolve the problem. Yet every day there was a new story of someone who had strayed too close to the sinkhole and had plummeted into its earthy maw. At first, it was mostly other students from the language school, but then we started hearing stories of other homeowners, people that we knew from softball leagues and the farmers’ market, vanishing into the hole as well. Soon businesses shuttered, either because their building or all of their minimum-wage workers had vanished.
At dinner parties, inevitably someone would announce, exasperated, “Somebody should do something about that sinkhole! This is no way to live,” and we’d all nod our heads in solemn agreement.
As the hole chewed closer and closer toward us, shutting down more and more roads, we assured ourselves that if it was really a problem, then people—people more capable, more educated than us—would surely say something. We weren’t engineers. We weren’t public servants. What were we supposed to do? We had debts to pay, cars to wash, meals to cook, parent-teacher conferences to attend, family to pick up from the airport.
The population of our town had rapidly declined. When we went for walks around the surviving half of the neighborhood, there was no longer the sense that we were moving through a town, or a community, or even a civilized country, but rather a raw, sinister feeling that we were exploring the ruins of something.
Last week, the hole began ascending our street. We lost our water again, then the power. We could have left this place, once, but there was no longer a way off of our big hill. For supplies, we had only the reserves in our cupboards, the gallons of water we bought in bulk for such emergencies.
Sitting on the balcony last night, we huddled underneath our blankets and stirred the last of our hot chocolate powder into bottled water boiled over a fire. The sky seemed so low that we thought our heads might scrape against it. If we looked out over the railing, we could stare down directly into the heart of the sinkhole. We had never seen it from up close before. Our voices echoed down the pitch-black cavity. And it was only then, when it was right outside our doorstep, that we realized how wrong we had been to assume that the hole must have a bottom.