Many people have hit bottom and kept falling.

From Alfred’s journal

Rain all morning, and the man who sits on the bench by the hardware store came back after a long absence looking worse than when he left. I had thought, for most of my life, that the bottom was a floor; that a thing could only get so bad before the badness ran out of room and had to stop. Switch asked me once what happens after that and I told him you climb, because that is what I believed and it sounded true out loud. But many people have hit bottom and kept falling, and I have watched enough of them go by to stop saying otherwise. There is no shortage of branches in this yard and still I have seen birds come down through all of them without catching one. The man bought nothing and went in anyway, and stood in the doorway out of the wet for a while.