by David Bajo
She sent one thing to her aunt: Say my name and scritch behind his ears.
An immediate reply sounded, but she let it go, a first thing for Silva.
She left her cell and key card in the locker. After removing the cash and zipping the bills into a pocket, she left her wallet. She remembered to leave the latch unlocked.
She met Mullich in the cafeteria. He bought her food and juice and made her eat. She passed on the sandwich but enjoyed a melon salad with mint.
“How did you get this?” She motioned toward the honeydew and mint tucked in her cheek.
“The cook’s actually a real chef. If you bring him things, he’ll prepare them for you. Gives him something fun to do.”
“You know this place better than any of us.” She tapped the table with her finger.
He took the opportunity to take hold of her hand. This startled her, but she enjoyed the gentle length of his fingers. He looked at her eyes. He released a tight roll of money, the size of a cigarette, into her palm. He continued to lace his fingers in hers, continued to look.
“Listen,” he said, “you’re being watched. We’re being watched.
What you’re trying to uncover out there they don’t want known.”
He cautioned her with his eyes, kept her from looking away, from scanning. The cafeteria was still noisy and messy, smelling of bleach. With taste and touch, Mullich had separated her from that, found her respite in the crowd.
“Then how can I possibly do it?” she asked.
“I brought you here—to the cafeteria—because this is where you start.”
She gave him a puzzled look.
He told her what to do. He reminded her of the emptiness she would sense down there, down there in the very bottom, in that dead air between earth and building.
46.
Mendenhall left the table. Mullich remained, feigning interest in his salad. She walked toward the swinging doors of the kitchen, veered left at the fire extinguisher, found herself in the dead end of the little hallway that Mullich had described for her. She checked for followers, saw none. The outline of the dumbwaiter was thin as a pencil line where Mullich had cut the paint seal covering the relic. Hands and weight pressed to the panel, Mendenhall pushed in and up. Nothing gave, but there was a cracking noise. She wondered if it came from within her.
A woman—a nurse, of course—appeared at the open end of the hall, looked dumbly at her. Mendenhall pretended to be stretching for a run. She glared sideways at the woman, scared her off.
With another shove, the panel lifted, pulling Mendenhall forward, a drop in her stomach. She hadn’t really believed Mullich until this moment, this little fall of surprise. A musty coolness drifted from the dark cube. Whoever had sealed the relic had left a mason jar, an impromptu time capsule holding a dried rose, a Betty Boop figurine, a Vegas shot glass from the Golden Nugget, and a handful of marbles. When was the last time anyone had shot marbles?
She scooted the jar to a back corner and tried to imagine herself folded inside there. A caf worker slammed through the kitchen doors but could not see her, or made no effort to see her. Mendenhall took a breath, as if readying for a dive, and hurried herself into the cube. She was able to lift her head slightly, to wrap her arms around her knees. The panel fell, and the dark was overwhelming. The flash of phosphenes glided across her vision. She couldn’t tell if her eyes were opened or closed.
A man’s voice—not Mullich’s—sounded from the open end of the hall, the wall muffling the voice. She heard him say the color of her hair. She heard declaration and failure. She held still and breathed through her nose as softly as she could.
And she waited. Time distended with the darkness. She took her pulse. Mullich. Who was he? When she thought about it, who was he, really? What was he? Who would want to know this building the way he knew it, at the level he knew it? All of its bones and ghosts and reasons for existing, reasons for dying. What was she to him? Someone who should be a relic, could be another relic, a piece of time now sealed in this wall. It was easy to imagine her mummy found, sitting just like this, folded away from the place that had become her life, still inside but away, lost, undiagnosed, untreated, unreleased.
She whispered his name, felt it disappear in the utter darkness.
Lack of vision was beginning to disorient her, making it feel as though the cube were yawing.
A thunk echoed from somewhere above her, up at least another floor. A cable squeaked. She thought to bounce herself in the cube, to push herself up, let fall her weight. This sent her into a drop that had too much momentum at first before gliding into descent. It was happening. For the first time in a very long while, she felt a whole part of something happening, something she was doing—as a person, as a body.
The dumbwaiter crunched and scraped to a halt, ended up cockeyed, with Mendenhall keeled hard against one wall. The time capsule spilled, the marbles crawling around her. She couldn’t slide the panel. Mullich had warned her that she wouldn’t be able to. As he had advised, she spun, braced her back against the wall opposite the panel, and kicked both feet outward. Think through the punch, he had told her. Your feet not at the wall but through the wall. The panel flapped open, and she found herself in a little dead-end hall that mirrored the one she had come from.
It was quite dim down here, the subbasement just above the dead space. No light shone in the hall. The faint glow at the open end appeared spent and singular and without color. She crept out headfirst, hands braced to a grimy floor.
A shadow moved across the feathery end of light. Boots scraped the dusty linoleum. She knew it wasn’t Mullich. He never made noise. He had told her he would not be there. Definitely boots.
Probably one of those guards from the outside. Hospital people, even security, always learned to just wear running shoes.
Mendenhall pressed herself to the wall, into a wedge of pure darkness. Her sound was echoed by his sound, a hiss over the grime. She released a sigh, a near-surrender. A similar response from him startled her, unnerved her. He was frightened—perhaps more than she. She slid quietly along the wall. Let herself appear from the edge. What was the point of hiding? He knew someone—
something—was there.
Her form appeared to shock him. He was young, big, almost a twin of the guard from the caf, though softer and somehow reddish.
He gave himself no time to really see her, register her. He turned and hurried into the darkness behind the one light, a bare bulb hanging on a wire. The bulb swung in the wind of his exit. She looked down at herself. The reflector stripes of her tracksuit drew bone lines on her black form, angled and ready. God. He must have thought her the plague. He must have thought he had stumbled upon the source in the depths of this building.
She wished Mullich could have seen it.
Mendenhall returned to the dumbwaiter and peeled away the broken panel. This was the last stop for the little cubicle. Beneath it, according to Mullich, was a narrow shaft for repairs and ventilation.
Mendenhall shouldered herself into the box and pushed with her legs. Again like a punch, he had told her, starting low and following through to the other side. When the dumbwaiter lifted, she was quick to slide her fingers into the opening and pull upward. She used the mason jar to keep the whole thing wedged open.
Tepid air rose from the shaft and sifted around her ankles. She readied herself, emptied her lungs, stretched herself thin, went in feet first, lowered herself with toes pointing, exploring. Above was gray. Below was black. He had told her she would have to just let go, to trust him, his sense of the building. The landing would be okay, he had said.
She opened her hands. The drop was longer than she had anticipated, became a sucking thing. She felt swallowed.
47.
She crashed through the ventilation grill at the very bottom of the shaft, at the base of everything. Her knees buckled and thrust her forward, headfirst, her forearms up just in time. The sheet metal gave, the corroded screws snapping into the dar
kness, pinging against concrete. She lay fully emerged, shot out, the side of her face against the cool floor, arms boxed around her head.
Mullich had told her it would be safe to use a light down here, that there would be nobody. He had also told her she might want to keep it all dark, to just crouch her way to the opposite wall and then feel for the submarine door.
With raised hands, she tested the ceiling. Metal girders, cold and blistered, grazed her fingertips. As she crept across the darkness, she lost confidence in her direction. Cloth brushed her cheek and neck. She stifled a cry and swung her arm. Something wrapped around it, pulled and cinched her elbow.
“No,” she cried.
She snapped on her penlight, a light she had fired down a thousand throats. She saw the man who had dragged himself to her on his elbows, his dead legs behind him, his eyes pleading, Don’t let me die alone, don’t leave me down here. She saw the patient who had been filed into a half body, planed over the asphalt of a night highway, brought to her. To do what? See the clean side of the brain that still remained, still pulsing and thinking, seeing? Seeing her? His half-mouth grimace failing to lip words to her. Die, she had told him. It’s okay to die. She had held his wrist, regretting her gloves, her formal tone.
Mendenhall untangled herself from the insulation that had coiled around her arm. She flapped its dust from her sleeve and doused the light as soon as she had gained her bearings. She crouched lower, fingering the concrete of the floor. Rolls formed on the surface, everything becoming too smooth, a familiar smoothness, the smoothness of skin. Enry Dozier, his beard, the sad backtilt of his head, exposing his throat for her, dead for her.
She could not make it past all six. She would not.
She dropped to her knees, palmed the floor.
“Not this.”
She reached into one zippered pocket and found a trick passed down from her mentor. A fresh-cut lime often does the trick, he had taught her, snaps you back to the moment, the moment you must be in for your patient to survive, to have a chance. There is so much precedent and history in medicine, so many cases, it’s too easy to fall into the past, to see helpless eyes, hear desperate words.
On extreme days, when she knew she was going in drained, torn open, she would carry a slice of ginger.
The lime cooled her lips, the scent sharp in her throat, her lungs.
Thoughts cleared. She moved through the darkness, stayed low and straight. When she did not reach the wall, found herself again in dark vertigo, she tucked the lime slice between her teeth and cheek, crushed and sucked. She moved forward. Would there be a floor?
Or an abyss? Who crawled behind her? All of them? Or just the last six?
Finally her hands found the wall. You’ll be fine once you palm the cinder block, he’d told her. I’m not like you, she had replied. I don’t find solace in archaeology.
The wall gave way. An impression dropped her forward, and there it was, the submarine door. It stood much shorter than she had anticipated, just above waist-high, more hatch than door. Still blind in the dark, she turned the wheel. The smooth spin calmed her. Mullich had unfrozen it, his words true.
The bomb shelter itself will be okay, he’d said. You might even like it. Again, she had said, not like you. Still, he had replied, turn on your light. You’ll need it.
The penlight showed the shelter in fragments. The room had recently been wiped down, maybe vacuumed. He had prepared the place. Shelves lined the walls, most filled with ancient rations. The refuge was square, with a Japanese feel that surprised her at first, then made spatial sense: one low table in the middle, rolled mats stacked on a low shelf, block-shaped candles, a teapot next to a mess kit, botanical prints on each wall, one shoji screen for privacy.
Mullich could live here. She considered the image, him kneeling on a mat, reading blueprints by candlelight.
Her watch read one forty-three. She found the vent, pried off the screen with the penknife, and began her ascent—a long, dark crawl that took her beneath the south parking lot toward the scrubby hillside, the sundial relic. The slope was more lateral than upward, but she sensed the rise in her effort, sweat. Remember to leave the shelter door open, he had advised. To provide you draft in the tunnel.
There was no draft. Ben-Curtis was not there. Was late. Was not coming. In full darkness, she reached the final upcurl and felt for the concave steel of the hatch. She pulled hard on the wheel and was able to squeak it free, crank it to its unlocked position. This did nothing. She had to wait for Ben-Curtis.
She fitted herself into the cusp beneath the hatch, checked her watch, rested in the darkness. Give him time, Mullich had said. He might have to wait for his chance, his opening. Or, she had replied, he might be stupid.
A rumbling passed overhead, a van somewhere on the parking lot. This discouraged her, erased all her waiting time, made it all start anew. The dark tube began to feel warm toward the top, damp and tepid toward the bottom, pulling her in two. Then something crunched overhead, traveling a line about the length of her body.
Silence followed. Her pulse kept time.
“Anna.”
It was a whisper. An only child, she used to imagine for herself a brother, sometimes younger, sometimes older. She gave him looks, a sense of humor, an interest in poetry, a voice to match. That was the voice she heard. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had called her by her first name.
“Anna,” she heard again. The voice didn’t seem to come from anywhere. It was just there in the darkness around her. “Are you in there?”
THREE
48.
She tapped the hatch, one-two, one-two. Metal snapped and sprang; sunlight and wind fell over her, the scent of brush, warm. Ben-Curtis appeared in silhouette across the circle, then dropped beside her, pressed to her within the tube. She had two impressions: hovering above her, his body appeared small against the light, sheared, slivered, able to soar; cleaved to her in the narrow vent, chin over her shoulder, he was forced to hug her. His body felt wiry, jittery. She couldn’t help but take his pulse, which was slow despite the effort and pace of things, indicating athleticism and confidence. But there was something insubstantial about him, or unwrought, his body too inside itself. She couldn’t really hug back.
To speak, he tried to draw his face away, but this made things even more intimate, nose to cheek. He relaxed over her shoulder.
He wore a ball cap and smelled of whiskey and cocaine.
“In two minutes,” he whispered, “it should be clear.”
“You’re high.”
“You’re not my doctor.”
“But I’m relying on you.”
“Have I ever let you down?” He drew back, looked at her face, their breath mixing. He returned to the over-the-shoulder position.
“What can I say? I function like this.”
“You have enough on you?”
“I think I’m in love.”
“I don’t care about your health. I care about you blending in.”
“It’s what I do.”
“Okay,” she said. “So?”
He removed his cap and put it on her, pulled it low over her eyes.
“When I say, go.” He wrapped his arm around her neck to look at his watch.
She tapped the bill of the ball cap. “Is this supposed to make me look like you?”
“We’re dealing with blips and impressions. Too much and you’re noticed. That hat and its colors, the wrong team for this city, has been registered.”
She started to say more.
“A few more seconds,” he whispered into the side of her neck.
He crouched and fashioned a stirrup with his hands, lacing his fingers together. The side of his face was pressed to her stomach, his breath beneath her waistband.
“Good luck, Anna.”
She fitted her shoe into his hand stirrup, and he flung her into the warm light. She did one shoulder roll into a crouch and peered into the vent. He was looking up, but she could tell he co
uld only see her outline. His eyes were blue and glassy, coked-up with empty sympathy. She flipped shut the lid.
It was easy for her to run.
One of her most common and gruesome cases, right up there with motorcycles and the DTs, was fishhook removal. Impaled in simple flesh, nothing deeper than epidural, the approach was to continue the puncture, to curl the hook along its natural curve until the barb came clear, then snip off the barb and point and reverse the curl, minimizing damage. But when more was involved—tendons, eye sockets, ear cartilage, scrotal sacs, lips, cheeks—the approach became counterintuitive. She would go in to get out. “Like a funhouse maze,” her mentor had said. “In, then back; in, then back.”
Some fishhooks were as big as silverware. But the tiny ones that came in clusters were the most stressful extractions, required intricacy, patience, willingness to hurt. She sometimes just wanted to yank these out.
She felt the same way as she began her run, her far aim to the canyon bottom, her near aim Mercy General. Five strides up the slope, through scrub, she was on the running trail. Two white vans were visible, one at each end of the building. Against all desire, she circled nearer the hospital, pacing a hard five, eyes on the track, with outward glances from beneath her lowered bill. Her ponytail struck an even rhythm on her nape.
Something atop the nearest van slowly spun, a kind of metal cup or ladle. In case they had sound, she began a song under her breath, a drinking tune, the refrain “I’m a man/you don’t meet/
every day.”
The van appeared to rock, though it may have been sunlight tricks on the white surface. She curved toward it. It was clearly pitching with inside movement. She smiled and waved her arms, still keeping her bill low as possible.
“Hey,” she called, “can you tell me? Do you know?” She pointed toward the path ahead as she jogged in place, just a fighter’s dance.
“Does this loop around, or should I turn back?”
The driver’s-side window, black, slid down, revealing a guy in a plain black cap. He raised his chin for a better look. Somebody from the back of the van got his attention for a moment, said something Mendenhall could not discern. The soldier glanced into the back, then returned to her.
