Construction had me beat like stone-ground maize. I’d been up all last night reinforcing underground walls that were going to be filled and covered with cement anyhow—just like swimming pools.
The walls will then be coated with partially synthetic muddy clay, then dirt, and then used to grow corn. This isn’t ordinary corn, you know, but the new modified corn that can grow with little or no light; something similar to bamboo but with juicy fuel-producing kernels. I don’t know how it works—something with fancy chemosynthetic bacteria—so don’t even ask, but it’s the reason these dang rooms are set up like pressure cookers.
When people ask me how I got started doing this for a living, I shrug and say that it’s been so many years that I can’t even remember anymore. I don’t want to think of whom I’ve become, much less look back to before I started was doing this. That old segment of life was a blank journal with illuminated marginalia: where and when I’d met certain people, gone to certain places, or attended events like weddings and funerals. There are entirely too many new things in this world to hold them all in my gooey mind.
Tonight we were scheduled to do a couple of small rooms beneath a movie theatre owned by a former rockabilly musician turned big band star. It was on the southwest side of town and held regular events in addition to movies. Tonight was the grand re-release of the remastered version of an early 1940s animated classic from a major studio. I had work to do beforehand and afterwards, but my seniority with the company enabled me to have time off to watch the movie and they even tossed me a couple of extra tickets. Bonus! These tickets had gold foil that crunched like a candy wrapper.
I invited my friends Eddi and Dove as I was convinced that they liked animation from that time period. I don’t know if it was the fact that Dove looked like a cartoon, or Eddi’s over-the-top glamour girl appearance, but I was thoroughly convinced that my friends were fans of this particular film. Actually, I didn’t know them well enough to call them friends, but I’d known them too long and liked them too well to call them acquaintances. We agreed to meet in the lobby and they asked if it was okay to bring someone called Keith, as a guest. Since the tickets would actually cover four people, I told them sure, it was fine if they were bringing some guy. I wondered if Keith was anyone I’d met, or possibly a friend of theirs from another city who was staying with them. They hosted a lot of out-of-town guests, or maybe some were couch-surfing starving artists.
An hour later, they arrived with a blanket-covered baby in tow. Neither Dove nor Eddi had ever mentioned having a baby. Was I so daft it never occurred to me? I asked them about it and Eddi shrugged while Dove smiled and scanned the glowing walls covered with even brighter promo posters. His eyes made wavy shapes and blinked with the lights.
“We knew that if we didn’t do something now, there wouldn’t be another chance,” Eddi said.
Sure, it didn’t matter to me, to me as long as they were happy. The baby gurgled in my direction, and I politely nodded back at him as I carried oily popcorn and a six-pack of authentic creamy red birch beer into the theatre. We found a place near the front with four seats together. The baby wiggled and Eddi made shhh noises while patting him on the back. I didn’t hear burping, it was more like a popping sound followed by the scent of cotton candy, but Keith—the baby—calmed down.
The previews finally ended and the title appeared. As the music played, Keith jumped out of his seat and ran to the back of the theatre. I thought babies needed to be at least a year old to run like that, but I’m not a parent (never have been) and so don’t know for sure. The best I’ve raised is corn, which isn’t much for troublemaking or backtalking.
Eddi and Dove exchanged glances, apparently in rock/paper/scissors-like fashion to determine whose turn it was to run after him. Dove jumped up, hung in the air for a few moments, kicking up dust, then ran after Keith.
My eyes followed the insecure giraffe dancing on the screen, but my ears were tuned to the giggling and muffled lecture in the rear of the theatre. Eddi pressed her shoulders and back against the seat while she searched a zippered pocket in the canvas messenger bag which doubled as baby item storage. She pulled out plastic baggies filled with candy. I smelled gelling agents, maple, and vanillin. Thinking that these were treats to be shared, I offered her my popcorn. She took one piece and then waved the bucket away.
Dove walked back to his seat with Keith curled under his arm like a football. Eddi whispered not-quite-swear-words in their general direction as her eyebrows rose so high they almost flew off of her face. Dove took a handful of popcorn and tried to find room for his elongated legs, which flopped about like linguini. Things were quiet for a few minutes, until my supervisor motioned me out of the theatre.
I had just been getting back into the feature, but apparently the new guy couldn’t handle the concept of muddy clay first, dirt next. As I was second-in-command and my supervisor was terrified of confrontation, bringing me in was the obvious decision. The new guy hadn’t been properly trained, so I performed a little song and dance demo highlighting the importance of applying substances in sequence. My wobbly heels and knees stung from the tap dancing, but our safety was worth the effort.
The crew cheered. The older team members joined in for the chorus and a few of them even threw roses. My work was done for the moment, so now I could return to enjoying fabulous historical cinema.
The bouquet of roses brushed my nostrils while my foot tapped in tempo to the movie. Those giraffes sure knew how to sing and fly, though I suppose it was just the title character who was capable of staying airborne for more than the typical few seconds. I used to have problems with the exact same thing—moving while hanging in the air could be tricky—but I found that good orange-leather shoes could make all the difference in hovering.
Sticky little hands tried to grab the roses, so I hid them beneath the seat. Keith made a coughing, gasping sound that babies often use as prep before launching into full-blown temper tantrums. Eddi fed him glossy, primary-colored candy from the bags and he became silent, engrossed in stuffing his face.
I’d heard bad things about kids and junk food. I said, “Is it even safe to feed sugar to babies? Won’t he wind up like those kids on talk shows?”
Eddi shook her head and her eyes bulged slightly, irises reflecting a ring of candy pieces.
“It’s totally okay, it’s all he can ever eat without getting sick,” she said.
I shrugged while Dove interrupted. “It’s all Keith can handle. He’s truly a sweet baby, but has a weird medical condition that’s so rare most doctors don’t even know about it,” Dove said.
Anyhow, the movie was entertaining. I didn’t want to be interrupted by someone’s ill-behaved baby, work stuff, or the people behind me who couldn’t remember what other movies one of the voice actors had done. I think people should either shut up or look it up. Something brushed against my legs and even lifted my left foot. I looked down and saw the baby. Keith’s blankets were on the ground and he was wearing overly precious bunny-covered footsie pajamas. In his ruddy, translucent hands was a rose.
Catching his stare caused arcs of violet static to leap from the back of my neck to my wrists; I’d have to call my manager to fix that. Blasted intelligent concrete side effects. . . .
If Keith had been miniaturized, multiplied, and held near a police box in Tom Baker’s hands . . . well, what he was couldn’t have been more obvious. Not to overstate, but Keith was a Jelly Baby. The room suddenly seemed as humid as a corn pool.
“Dove, Eddi—you know that he’s a Brilliant Jelly Baby, right? He’s a piece of candy! Why are the two of you raising a giant Jelly Baby?”
“You know . . .” Dove said.
“Yeah, you know? We figured it was now or never. I just had another birthday,” Eddi said.
I couldn’t look Eddi in the eyes. I avoided this kind of touchy-feely conversation whenever possible. But now she moved closer; slung an arm around my bristle-covered shoulders. She squeezed me into a hug as Doug g
ave me a sympathetic look.
“You’re a big part of the reason why we were open to adopting a manufactured child. These past few years since we met you, well, they really changed our outlook on your kind—” Eddi said.
Dove interrupted to add, “We’re not manufacturist bigots, we never were, please don’t think she means that. We just . . . we just didn’t know what to believe about your sort. Thank you for everything you’ve done.”
I jumped on my seat and tap-danced for a minute, much to the consternation of the people behind me. It was the best I could do to make Eddi and Dove stop jabbering all that mumbo jumbo. I supposed they meant to say the right thing. They were still good people.
I sat back down and looked at Eddi as she smiled at me. Her eyes overflowed with glittering fuchsia tears, like she suddenly understood Keith through my improvisational tap dancing. No big deal, it sometimes has that effect.
“Oh . . .” I said, not knowing what more I could add as Keith ran to the back of the theatre and, again, Dove chased after him.
“Oh . . . Happy Birthday,” I said.
Three Rights Make a Left
Rhonda Eikamp
I went to see the writer in his cave pelican, just to bring him bar food, but he had a manuscript ready for me. I told him how I’d run into a flock of tourists again, lost and wandering the top levels, and had piloted them away from him, to one of the more remote exits.
“Were they among them?” he asked.
“How would I know?”
“You’d know. They have too many fingers.”
The writer’s name is Gregor. His voice is deep, resonant with sex, though I had never told him that. He has eyes the blue of church-window skies and thinning black hair. I was used to his paranoia, it was part of what he did. I glanced through the sheets of paper in my hand. In the ruby nights, stars gushing past the window, he would wake from these dreams, his tiny wife curled beside him like the personification of a heartbeat, and he would realize that his dreams, inklings of another life in which she did not exist, were nightmares.
“The tourists are root tubers,” I told him. “Brain-dead. Someone up there’s selling excursions, but they’ve haven’t got a map.”
“They’re doing more than that.” Gregor led me to the edge of the room, where the low glistening ceiling was free of stalactites. Gregor’s chamber was spartan: an iron bed, one chair, a pumpkin-pine desk just large enough to hold the ancient Quietriter typewriter on which he quietly banged out his manuscripts. His pelican, he called the room, because of the way it hid itself from the greater tunnel system, the crawlspace that sloped upward at an angle from the main passage outside easily overlooked, seeming to dead-end in shadows, only to drop into this small chamber, much the way an alembic distills vapors. He clambered onto the chair and motioned me up beside him. We had to hug as we pressed our ears to the ceiling. Gregor’s fear is his religion and his eyes as we listened shone with holy light. In the rock, somewhere above my ear, I could hear a buzzing, as faint as insects in soil or the scream of distant machines. It was coming our way.
I discovered the caves one Friday night when we were all celebrating the start of the weekend down at Nic’s. The place was jumping. I’d lost my job that afternoon, a downer I hadn’t gone public with, and when Mark and Janine asked why so glum, I told them it just hadn’t been my week.
“It hasn’t been your year, babe,” Stephen offered. I thanked him.
“Just not her decade.”
“Not her century.”
The logical conclusion to this was It hasn’t been my life. The moment I thought it a draft coiled around my shoulders, not from the front door, which stood open to the August heat, but from the hall behind us leading to the restrooms. On some excuse I left the crowd and followed the draft down the hall to a beige curtain I’d never noticed, a storage nook, I assumed, but when I drew the veil back darkness gaped, an entrance that echoed with vast unseen space and a sliceable reek of cold soil. The glow from the hall revealed a packed-earth landing that angled left and down and became a switchback trail descending into the void. I wondered if Nic knew there was a hole in his establishment. With a glance back at the bar I started down the trail. The writer lay huddled in the middle of the path just beyond the light. Naked, covered in scratches so recent they still oozed blood, intricate madman lines as dark as tattoos all across his torso. He lay with his head pointing down the path, as though he had crawled downward from the landing. When I touched his arm he started up with a cut-off scream that echoed off the chamber below, then he seemed to recognize me though I knew I’d never seen him before. He stared back up the trail. “Did they follow you?” he whispered. I thought of Stephen and the bar crowd, Nic at the counter slapping down beers. “They’re still up there,” I said. It made him try to scoot further down the trail and I saw then that both his ankles were black with bruises, as though he had been gripped hard by something larger than human hands and dragged backward up the trail. “Deeper,” he moaned.
I got him to his feet and to the floor of the cavern, where the rocks’ phosphorescence showed tunnels branching in a thousand directions. I hitched his arm over my shoulder, took the third entrance from the right and then the second left and that’s when I understood that I knew the caves. That I had a map of them in my brain.
I left Gregor with his ear pressed to the ceiling and went to see the women. Leila and the knight in white rags look out for Gregor when I can persuade them to, which isn’t often. They think he’s boring.
“He’s in his paranoid phase.” I didn’t want to get whiney. I thought of Gregor’s thin hair, how I always wanted to stroke it. Leila sighed. “Just keep an eye on him, will you?” I asked.
Leila’s a topless Brazilian samba dancer who negotiates the tunnels (when she’s of a mood to change position at all) in her passista bikini bottom and colossal chartreuse backpiece that’s always catching on stalactites. I’ve never seen her dance. She had her feet propped on the stone shelf that served as their table and was eating a quince. Juice ran down between her breasts. The knight in white rags frowned disapproval. “He hates me,” Leila said around the quince. “It’s that Freudian slip I made last time I took him one of your care packages.” Leila doesn’t give a crap what Gregor thinks. Freudian slip, my foot. She was trying to get out of helping. “When I handed him the bag I meant to say ‘Here’s some food,’ and instead I said ‘You’re such a little prick’. Now I can’t look him in the eye.”
“He’s not writing you, you know,” the knight told me. The knight in white rags had wriggled one day out of a fissure only a flatworm could have negotiated, having made her way from the surface by some mysterious route I would never understand. Her medieval get-up means you can’t tell whether she’s a man or a woman, which apparently didn’t fly well upstairs. I’d picked a pronoun and was sticking with it. She was gazing at the manuscript in my hand.
“None of this is about me,” I assured them.
They had a glance-fest. I’m the link to the up; if I ever fall to delusions of irreality, their raison d’être will be gone. If Gregor’s making me up, then he’s making them up by proxy. Their antipathy toward him became a little clearer.
I rattled the manuscript. “I know he’s not writing me. He just—explains things for me.” I wasn’t sure it wasn’t the same thing.
Alarmed by the conversation, Leila had lifted one of her perfect breasts and was tonguing the nipple. Erotic defense mechanisms are her specialty. I touched her arm to reassure her and she gasped and jerked back. For all her must-see exhibitionism Leila can’t stand to be touched. Write about that, Gregor.
With an air of gravitas the knight pulled a thin metal object from the crevice they used for storage and handed it to me. It was a jab saw. The tip had broken off, but it was still shiny. The look on her pasty face might have been reproach or just sadness.
“Go left past the pool in the antechamber,” she instructed. “Third tunnel.” I could see it as she spoke, though I
’d never been there. Another empty cavern like the antechamber, not far from the bar entrance, with a colossal domed ceiling like a cathedral. “I found this at the tunnel mouth. We think the writer may be on to something.”
You never know when the crazies will turn out to be right. I went back and took the tunnel I’d never paid attention to. My backbrain started to race when I caught the whiff of electrical burn, and then I stared for a long time at the raw concrete shell of a building rising three stories within the cavern, honeycombed with unfinished apartments, a smattering of cranes and backhoes deserted because it was Sunday upstairs, all the excrement and rubble of a major construction site only yards from the bar entrance, hidden by one small bend I’d never taken.
I cried a little.
The caves are not an obsession. Days go by when I don’t think of them, much less get down there. It’s a comfort, that’s all, to know a place so well you can let your feet do the thinking. Geography’s a drug to our mammal brains. Scope the territory, know your exits and you feel safe. Until you discover someone’s building condos in your private labyrinth.
“You can’t just let people in!” I’d gone straight to Nic. I’ve known this for a while. Nic was the one who’d been setting up tours. He’s a buckmeister and he’d seen a way to make a couple.
“That’s unclaimed territory,” he replied. The bar was closed, but it’s always open for us. Stephen was supposed to meet me. We were going to pick out rings. Nic was wiping down the counter so he wouldn’t have to look at me, a small concession to shame. “Look, I got backing.”
“The tourists were bad enough, Nic. All they do is get lost. You think permanent residents will be any better? Think anyone will want to live there?”
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