THE HOLE.

It was on the seventh day that Katy Nin visited The Hole. The air was full of car noises and electric wires and she had trouble making her way through the endless crowds of people. The rain fell in sheets and streaked her pretty eye makeup, though nothing could be done about that and after all... She simply had to see if it was true.

There is nothing like the smell of coffee on a brittle January air. Katy followed the vapors to a dense clot of people dressed in overcoats, gloves, hats. She felt a tightness in her stomach and wondered vaguely why she hadn't eaten that morning. A man swiveled his head to her and ran his eyes down her figure, neolithically, while she shoved past him and worked her way deeper into the knot. And all around, the scent of bodies.

And she found the culprit. He was holding a plastic mug and there were white trails of steam rising from it. The steams meshed into his exhalations and dispersed as it drifted away. Next to him stood a woman consumed by a great maroon parka, hands thrust in her pockets and her face barely visible inside the hood. She stared at her shoes, then briefly at the man, then into the sky with a squint and a mouth twitch of impatience.

"Pardon me." A tall figure brushed past Katy, having seen enough. She slid into the vacant spot he had just occupied. There should have been more idle conversation, she thought, in a crowd of this sort, a spontaneous gathering, but there was a near silence next to jostling sounds and the occasional grunt or sneeze. Maybe it was just all a big disappointment.

"Where is it exactly?" she asked of nobody, really, for she had the habit of doing that these days. And expecting no reply, she got one anyway.

"It's right over there, lil lady - past the guy in the motorcycle jacket. See?" It was an old farmer. She had no way of knowing whether or not he was actually a farmer. He seemed like a grandfather who had come out to see slaughtered cattle. He seemed unfazed.

Katy mumbled her thanks and pushed her slender frame further into the center of the knot of people of people that reminded her of a breeding snake ball and who had gathered on the Wind Terrace apartment grounds, west Santa Rosa. She strained her neck in different directions to see if she could catch a glimpse, but everywhere the someone was in the way. Where exactly was it?

And then Motorcycle Man leaned over to reach the pack he'd let drop, and she could see.

***

Lying on the otherwise-drenched pavement a few yards from where she stood was The Hole. It wasn't a physical hole at all. Rather, it was a patch of dry ground where, apparently, no rain had fallen and thus remained dry - a fist-sized oval with irregular sides that had remained untouched by the intense weeklong storm. It was a hole in the rain.

"It's absurd to think a thing could attract so many people," Katy thought. But at the same time, it was exceedingly easy to understand why it had. No one could explain this phenomenon and sound convincing. It was the talk of the town, it's popularity - notoriety - growing with each passing hour. It defied logic and yet there it was in front of her now: a place where the randomly falling droplets of water simply hadn't yet touched.

"Yet" was the key word here. Katy wondered at the microscopic probability of The Hole lasting more than an hour, and how much exponentially smaller that probability must shrink with each passing minute of its existence. Should it continue to stay dry? Absolutely, overwhelmingly, it should not. It should fill in this very instant, even as she watched. The odds against it surviving even the time she had observed it so far must be astronomical.

Here it was, though.

The guy with the motorcycle jacket had withdrawn a camera from his pack and was aiming it now at the dusty spot on the asphalt.

"Might as well get a shot of it before it finally disappears," he said in a whoa, dude tone of voice.

"Ain't gonna fill up now, not if it's survived all week," chimed a voice from the other side of the inner ring of observers. It belonged to a man perhaps in his fifties, who had a stark physical presence to him, as though he had worked outdoors for a good portion of his life.

The man with the leather jacket snapped a photo. "Why not? Couldn't it just fill up right now, and that's it?"

"Yeah, but if it's lasted this long, a whole week nearly, the chances of it filling in while we're standing here are really small. Why now? The time we spend here watching it is just a small bit of its overall life, right?"

Katy found herself instinctively joining the conversation. "No, that's not true. The odds of it being hit by raindrops are the same during any given minute, now matter how long it's been there. It's basic statistics. Just because it's lasted a week doesn't mean it has special powers against the rain that is falling right now. It's amazing, I agree. But it should fill in any second now."

"Yet it doesn't." This was a new voice, a middle-aged woman standing somewhat near the stark-looking man. "Is it a continuing miracle that this Hole remains, even though every second that ticks by demands, statistically, that it should fill in?"

"It's incredible, I'll grant you that much." Katy was now staring at The Hole mesmerized. There was a brief moment of silence, then the sound of the motorcycle guy putting his camera away.

"I think it's a sign," stated a young blonde woman to Katy's left.

"Of what? The Apocalypse?" answered Motorcycle Man. His tone of voice irked Katy, not because it amounted to some sort of blasphemy, for she had no religious convictions herself, but because, even viewed as a secular phenomenon, this was by any standard a very special event and he seemed to approach it as though he has found a couple of bucks lying on the ground.

"Maybe," said the blonde woman earnestly, but delicately. "Maybe not. But how can you deny it's a sign, since science obviously has no way of explaining it."

Katy spoke up. How can you assert that it is a sign, when you have no proof that it is?

"If you needed proof for everything, dear, there would be no need for faith"

Exactly, thought Katy, but she kept the thought to herself.

Someone else, however, took up the matter. A balding man wearing a green hunting vest and jeans with only a few white strings where the knees must have been said, to the inner crowd in general apparently, "Let's not get carried away just yet. It's certainly possible that it could be a sign, but we have no way of knowing that. Whoever wishes to adopt that view is free to do so, and none of us here can prove him wrong. Katy was struck with the sense that this man must be or once have been a school teacher. His grammar gave him away.

"However," he continued, "those of us who would feel more comfortable with a nonreligious experience can take comfort from the fact that just because science can't currently explain something, doesn't mean it can't be explained.

"In fact, that is the purpose of science, to keep searching for answers. How much do we really know about this Hole? I'm assuming none of us has been watching it for more than a few hours, at most. How do we know it's really been here as long as is claimed? Have we observed it firsthand?

The blonde woman said, "Yes, but why would a huge crowd have gathered here several days ago if there was nothing remarkable then, maybe some pranksters shielding some spot with an umbrella? Was it all a huge hoax which has only now, that we're here, come true? Because there's no umbrella, and it's still dry. That's even more miraculous than it having been there all along!"

"Michelle," said the balding man, who obviously knew the woman, "I'm not suggesting it's a hoax. I'm trying to point out that anything that can't be ruled out is at least possible. What do we know to be facts? What are we only assuming? In most normal situations, you assume a vast amount of information based on previous occurrences of similar situations. But here... well, this most certainly is not a normal situation, and I think it would be dangerous to assume anything at all concerning it."

Katy heard the man but was awash in her own thoughts. "The author of a book I read," she said out loud, "said something like: The funny thing about coincidences is, they do happen."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Asked the middle-aged woman rather rudely.

"I think it means that unlikely, even extremely unlikely events do occur from time to time. They are not impossible, mere unlikely. Just how unlikely they are is sometimes calculable, and usually determines whether we'll see it happen in our lifetime, but even the most extraordinary things do, from time to time, actually happen.

"Imagine the person getting struck by lightning twice and living to tell. He may think, "I must be cursed" or some such thing, because the chance of that happening to an individual are tiny, but it you ran a simulation of the whole thing on a powerful computer, including all the billions of people on earth and all the storms that generate lightning, and let it run for long enough, eventually some individual person would get struck twice. Maybe one or two every generation, I don't know.

"But you see, things are still happening on the overall scale according to the laws of chance, and of physics, it's just that when you actually witness them, when they happen in the tiny scale of your world, they seem impossible or miraculous."

"That seems like a pretty good analysis, Ms..." The man with the hunting vest beamed at her, obviously pleased that someone had taken up what he perceived to be his cause.

"Katy," she replied.

"Mr. Stevens," interjected the blonde woman, "I see your point, and I know what you are saying is technically correct, or theoretically correct, or whatever, but just look at what is before you! Open your eyes - this isn't a scientific oddity like the elephant man was or... or the face on Mars is. This is a near impossibility. Have you, any of you, ever seen so much as a quarter-sized area of ground not with soaked after five minutes of hard rain, given it was out in the open? Why is it easier for you to accept the indescribably small probability that this occurred naturally than it is to believe that is was caused supernaturally?

"I mean, who's actually being obstinate here? Scientists like to paint religious people as closed-minded, accepting on faith, but now you stand here and pledge blind allegiance to your theories even in the face of outlandish, obviously unexplainable events!"

"It seems to me," said the older, stark-looking man, "that we're getting nowhere by talking about it. You, sir, cannot convince this woman that random nature could be the cause of it, and you, ma'am, aren't making much of a dent in this guy's academic skull. So let's just drop it."

A practical man.

The motorcycle jacket guy piped up. "Maybe it's, like, some special area in the pavement that stays dry, you know - sucks up water like that shit you put on your driveway to lift out the oil."

Katy, again inexplicably annoyed at this man, replied, "I thought of that for a few seconds too, but look - no droplets of water are even hitting The Hole. Even if the water were drying up quickly, like on asphalt on a hot day, we'd be able to see drops of water hitting the area occasionally."

The downpour continued, neither intensifying not showing any signs of letting up. The crowd of people remained, shifting and twisting about as bored spectators pushed their way toward the fringe and new, eager faces wormed their way in.

The Hole continue to remain dry.

***

An hour later, Katy found herself still entranced by The Hole, even though her teeth has begun to chatter a bit from the cold. A few of the faces in the inner circle had changed. The older man and woman had left, as had the guy with the leather jacket. An oriental man wearing a Levi's jacket over a black hooded sweatshirt had pushed to the fore and was now standing next to Katy, silently observing the ground.

There had been snippets of conversation, but on the whole the "inner" crowd had seemed reluctant to start any more holy wars. In a way, it was just an event, like Woodstock or the Bed-In, something to be part of.

The balding teacher at last could contain himself no more. "Look at it! It's fantastic! An ongoing probability buster, a dark horse bucking all the odds. A once in a universe occurrence!"

"Or an indication from Jesus to strengthen your faith." The blonde.

The oriental man said in a bit of a monotone, "Sometimes you find what you look for."

After a moment Katy said, "I suppose that's true enough. But if this is a real phenomenon, if there's really no religious explanation for it, then it is the single most fantastic event science has ever seen. It would be like all the planets in all the solar systems in our galaxy lining up at the same time."

The oriental man, nonplussed, said "Well, what makes that fantastic? Just the low probability? Does that make it more meaningful than a normal, soaked patch of ground?"

"Does the rarity of gold justify it's price, in other words?" asked the balding man. "After all, it's a crummy building material. It's too soft. People just like the looks of it."

Levi's jacket: "It seems that people like the looks of The Hole, too, or at least the idea of it. They're witnessing what they consider to be either a miracle, or something on the extreme edge of science, and exception to the rule."

"And you suggest otherwise?" said Katy.

"We must ask ourselves: What is the nature of chance? We define the mathematics that we use to predict behaviors. If we start off by assuming all planets have life on them, we won't be shocked if the first one we land on does. But if the first one thousand planets we explore have no life whatsoever, then we deem it extremely unlikely that the thousand-and-first will. Yet that thousand-and-first planet would be the same one with life on it from the first example, which seem to be remarkable in its hosting of life when it was the first one explored. We define the probabilities. They aren't inherent to the universe. As long as I've lived, no cosmic voice has told me that the universe operates under such-and-such set of rules. I just assume it must.

"What if the universe operated across the board under the physical laws that we know today, all except for in this one spot, and only when it rained, and only for a week. What if, at this precise point for some reason unknown to us, things were different? Everything we are, as human being whose brains must categorize what they see in order to make sense of it, tell us that is impossible, but why? What if it simply is that way and there's no reason?

"But why here? Why this special place? Why us?" asked the teacher.

"Why not? If you were living in Romania, you wouldn't think this Hole had occurred in a special place. Somebody's got to be near it, no matter where it occurs."

The blonde woman spoke again. "Yeah, but it didn't occur anywhere, it occurred here. You can believe all you want about indifferent universes and chance, but to me, this means something. I'm not saying you all should think precisely how I think. But to me, there's no question this is a miracle, a sign. Everything inside me tells me so. Somehow within me I just know it's not random.

"Sometimes I wish I 'just knew' things like that," said Katy, and she wasn't being facetious at all. She was staring at The Hole, still, transfixed, not even aware of the frigid rain infiltrating her down jacket. Her nose caught a trace of something like bacon in the air and her stomach began to grumble. She knew she should leave but knew there was no was she could. She was caught like the magician's apprentice.

Just then a scary feeling hit her heart, making her question her desire to want to "just know." She had the feeling that The Hole would never fill, that it would it keep right on being dry until the rain stopped, or if the rain didn't stop, until the end of time. And even then she wondered: Is it natural? Supernatural? How does one tell? What's even the difference?

If it were natural it could possibly exist forever. The balding teacher would claim that path would require nature selecting increasingly more improbably, but still technically possible events. Maybe the oriental man would claim that whatever happened happened, and that there were no such things as odds because when some event did occur, the odds of that event having occurred would have been 100%, since it did happen. What was the use of predicting?

If it were supernatural it could last forever also, for the works of gods were beyond the realms of science, of human speculations. They were indistinguishable from magic.

This made Katy Nin feel no better as she stood in bleary silence over The Hole. The ring of people seemed, for all their pushing and shoving, to maintain a respectful distance from it, not wanting to let the water on their own coats and bodies drip onto it and ruin it. It was beautiful, fantastic. It was the most horrible thing Katy had ever seem in her entire life.

The oriental man button up his jacket and pulled his hood over his head, shrinking away from the storm's onslaught. The aroma of bacon once again perforated the air.

And then, suddenly, it was gone. The Hole was gone. It didn't happen all at once, but took perhaps ten seconds. First, a fat glob of raindrops struck the center of The Hole, then a second or two later a dozen finer drops obliterated the edges, and soon no trace of it remained. No mark left any indication that the ground where The Hole had existed was any different from all the square feet of asphalt around it. None whatsoever.

And now Katy heard the sound of her grumbling stomach. It had been gnawing at her with growing instance over the hours. This time, she thought as she turned to leave amidst the listlessly milling crowd, she'd listen.