Days in the Undertow | 8
...a family man goes deeper into a mysterious building...and the timeline of two parallel lives once entangled, strangely moving into an odd future
Introduction
Hope everyone’s keeping cool! Not much to say this month, just another busy summer here in Philadelphia. Jackson is now done, so if you haven’t read it, feel free to go back through the last few newsletters (conveniently linked below) and follow the serial to its conclusion. As always, thanks for reading. ♡ Luke
Jackson
Part 4, finale | Previous: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
His eyes scanned the walls again, studying all the doors and entryways. He went over to the elevator, but in order to activate it you needed to swipe a card key. He re-pulled the steel doors he had earlier. No luck. Now the nine entries and their arrows on the pillars made more sense to him. He followed the arrows to various places, but the few doors that did open were either small closets or empty break rooms. Back to the pillar again and again. The final two entries listed Basement 1 (B1) and Basement 2 (B2). Sub floors, deeper down than the garage. He studied the B1 and B2 arrows, positioned in such a way that they pointed almost back at the numbers, but just slightly off tilt. Behind him and to the left, he figured.
A small corridor presented itself to him. Easy to miss behind a pillar shading it from the light and a stack of orange traffic cones. He squeezed past the cones, half leaning into the entryway, and went down a dim lit stretch of unpainted concrete block. A door on his right yielded little more than a small maintenance room with mops and buckets and a utility sink. He walked on. As he rounded a corner, a set of steel grated steps greeted him, B1/B2 cleanly painted on the wall above, an arrow pointing down. Not much on B1. A series of pipes and fans and generators. Steel fencing with a locked grated door behind which he could see special equipment with dials and knobs. He was not one for knowing the specifics of such instruments. He was in the building’s bowels, and it was a mystery place to him. Everything was newly painted gray or red or green, and all of it glossy and shimmering in the lighting, so that it gave off the appearance of being wet. Steam came from a few pipes, sucked up by ventilation fans. A half-broken office chair sat at a steel table with an aging computer on it and stacks of papers with numbers and charts and notes all pertaining to the laboratory of maintenance equipment around him. None of it decipherable.
The steps to B2 were right under those of B1. Why not. So he descended into a room, with just one strip of lighting across the ceiling, the room dimmed to gray. A small set up of a few lockers and benches. For maintenance workers and janitors, he figured. In the corner was a shower, the curtain wet with drops of water. The room had its own corridor at the far end with two doors. More tiny hallways and doors. Would the maze ever end? The first one he came to had Maintenance - Employees Only in black sans-serif on the door. He opened it to find a room with flickering light. A candle? The room smelled. Not horribly, but off. Like soured perfume.
The candle sat smushed into a ceramic plate on a stack of yellowing telephone books. In the corner lay a cot with unkempt sheets and a blanket. To his right a small camp stove, a pot sitting on it. To his left a mini fridge, like the kind he’d used in college, and a plastic bin of boxed foods. An ancient chair in the corner, something Victorian-inspired, to his right behind him, a blanket draped across it. Down the room’s center, a pipe ran across the ceiling.
A rustling in the dimness. The sheets moved, the blanket rose and fell again. Someone was there. The old lady, he figured. In the poor lighting he hadn’t noticed. He waited for a second. Silence crept across the room, so that he could hear the candle’s flicker and the deep slow breathing of the form. He sat down in the chair and put the blanket across him. He wasn’t sure exactly why he did this, just that he didn’t want to wake her up. He dozed a little, but never into full sleep. Little else in the room gave him answers. His mind ran off with scenarios about her that trailed up like the curling smoke of the candle.
“Arthur? Is that you?” Her voice was a shining crystal of sound. “Yes,” he said. “Everything all right?” “Of course.” “Be a dear, would you, and get the water boiling.” After several twistings of knobs, he clicked the camp stove’s igniter. The blue flames taloned themselves around the bottom of the pot. He found a gallon of water in the fridge and poured three fingers deep. “And the tea, dear, could you?” He grabbed a white ceramic mug next to the stove and scrounged through the food bin until an aged box of Lipton tea bags appeared at bottom.
The water came to boil. He turned off the stove and poured the water into the cup, the tea bag writhing as he poured until it floated to the top. Kneeling down by the bed, he lifted the cup toward the form turned away from him. “Here,” he said. The old woman turned herself like a rusted gear in a machine. “Oh, Arthur, thank you.” He helped her up to sit on the cot’s edge, the blanket draped around her head, cinched tight at her chest by her one hand and the other with the mug. “Such a dear,” she said, sipping and looking at the ground.
“So you found Jackson? It was a street,” he said. She continued sipping. “Jackson? You found it?” he said. She studied her wool socks. “You’re a gentle ghost, Arthur, but the shouting, you were always shouting,” she said, lifting her head. “You do certainly make the best tea, always have.”
Her eyes seemed to go right through him. He turned to check if there was something behind him that she might be looking at. Concrete walls and no more, glowing a soft orange in the candle’s dwindling light.
“Are you hungry, Arthur? Like me? Perhaps not. Not with your body like it is. Spirit. Like Thomas touching the wounds with you.” She reached out and touched his arm, patted it. “You’re here, yes. But not really in a manner I understand. Do you understand?”
But, of course, he understood nothing. “Let me see what I can make you.” He dove through the plastic bin and smiled to himself when he found a box of pasta near the bottom. In the fridge were American cheese slices and a half stick of butter. He boiled more water, made the noodles, drained the water in the locker room’s shower, melted some butter and slices into the pot and put the stove on low. When it was finished, he found a bowl and a fork next to the microwave.
“It’s the best I could do.” He took the mug from her and set the warm bowl in her lap. “But I can’t eat without you eating. Even if you’re not hungry, traveling so far.” He agreed to eat, if only so the old woman would eat, because it seemed she needed it. He got his own warm bowl, just a small dollop of the stuff, and sat in the Victorian chair. “Cheers” he said, gesturing his first forked noodle to her. They ate in silence.
They finished and he took her bowl and his and washed them in the shower. When he returned she was up, standing there wearing a gray work coat and pants, boots on her feet. “Well, as long as you’re here.” He followed her down the hall to the door at the end. She scrounged a key from a jacket pocket and unlocked the door and went down a short flight of stairs into darkness. He stepped on the first step. The air smelled of soil. Dank. She disappeared below somewhere.
“Hello?” he said. He felt his way down the next few steps until his feet landed on dirt. Pure earth below him, maybe, but his feet felt planted. His eyes adjusted. Cavernous. Several steel pillars grounded in concrete. Some sort of deep sub-basement that made up the foundation. A flash of light at his left. “Hello?” He walked toward the light. The woman steadied her knees to the ground to get to a small waist-high door. He ran to her and helped her down. A flashlight lay in the dirt, casting a diffuse glow across the surface, so that he felt as if they were working in the early morning and sunlight had just broken above the horizon. Her hands, brittle and pale and wrinkled in the light, fidgeted with a padlock. He grabbed the flashlight and held it closer to her work. She moved the dial back and forth, whispering to herself.
She lay the opened padlock in the dirt next to her. “My dear, a little help.” She tugged at the door, but it was slow to move until he was there, fingers wrapped at its cold steel edge, and they were both able to pry the thing wide open. She crawled into the small concrete passageway. He hesitated at first, but seeing her scurry through, strangely with ease, made him feel okay enough to try it.
Several minutes, it seemed, of them crawling. He bumped his head against the concrete ceiling. His hands moved along the passage’s cold and unforgiving floor. Smooth to the touch. Light began to form at the seams of the woman’s silhouette. Reaching an end, he thought. Some place to get out and breathe. He had not realized, until he was conscious of it, how stuffy the air was, and yet how cool it felt at the same time. A confusing sensation that reminded him of breathing warm air on a cold winter day.
Her body slowed down. Light now filled the space all around her. But it wasn’t sunlight, of course, since he had entered the building in the evening. And surely it hadn’t been that long that he was here. And how would he get back? Would he remember the path they took to get here when it was all said and done? But, no, he could remember it, he thought. It didn’t seem too difficult. He traced the way they’d come in his mind. Traced it, tried picturing it. Then the memory of the path grew fuzzy, as if it was a long ago thing that had happened, and not something from minutes before. The path had seemed logical and straightforward at first. Now, he wasn’t so sure. To think about the way they had come felt much different than traversing it. Everything was an intuition for her, something she somehow imparted to him, though he couldn’t quite explain it. Thinking would prove no use in his return. He would just have to feel his way back.
She crawled out of the tunnel onto a concrete floor. Her legs were his guiding pillars, and he crawled toward them until he too was out of the tunnel, his hands on more cold concrete, pulling his legs out, like he was being born. He stood and brushed himself off. Another small room of concrete block, a little smaller than the one that she lived in. A bright fluorescent light hung overhead. In the corner there was, to his surprise, another small cot with a white sheet, like the one she had in her room, and next to it a chair like the ones in doctor’s waiting rooms. The walls were plain block and completely blank, except for one end of the room where there was a normal-sized red door. It had been painted quite poorly, evident by the multitude of drips on the ground and the uneven paint drips on its surface, as if it was crying. He touched it with his fingertips and quickly peeled them away. Tacky still. Recently painted then. A stark smell, too. Oil paint. The door’s main oddity was that it was a wooden door, the standard kind you’d find in a home, not an industrial steel door or anything resembling what one might expect in the depths of an office building.
He sat on the chair. “Did you paint it?” She looked at him, for once, as if he was there. “Why, yes, Arthur, I did...Forgive me if I lay down.” He got up to help her, but she waved him off and said she was fine. The cot was nice, though, she said, because sometimes going back was a pain for her old bones. She had just enough energy to get here, but sometimes after she was here it would take her a long time to return if she didn’t rest.
“Where are we?” he asked. There was no answer. He lay his head against the concrete block. He was himself a little tired, all this moving around, all this exploring. She shuffled underneath the sheet and lay down for a little while. He stood and went over to the door again and turned the knob but it wouldn’t budge.
“Do you remember, Arthur, telling me about this job?”
“I don’t remember,” he said. “Remind me.”
“Of course, you do, dear. Your small house on Alma Drive. I used to peek from my front window and see you in your living room. A few houses down. Never kept your blinds closed. My husband and you were friendly. After he passed, I had little savings. Always in debt, my husband. So you got me something here. Cleaning the place. Not anything I’d imagined doing. I’d been a teacher for a while, I taught. It hadn’t worked out. A new building at the time, though. Jobs to be had all along this road. I was grateful for it. What was that? ‘91, ‘92. Fifty, almost, I was. I think. Funny, time works like that. Can get so far down it you forget your age, forget everything. The more time we’re here, the more of it we forget. Funny.”
She pulled the sheet up to her ears, appeared asleep, nothing but a lump under the white fabric. He turned the doorknob again and pulled. Nothing moved. He wanted to kick at the door, but he didn’t want to startle her. He looked down the access pipe they’d come from. Smell of the soily sub-basement emanating from the concrete tube, mingling with that of the stinging smell of oil paint. A wire ran from the light above, up into the concrete ceiling and out a small hole at the corner. He ran his hand along the concrete brick. It was just the same cool sensation he felt everywhere down here, a sensation that worked into his body, until he realized the bumps on his skin and shivered a little.
He pulled the sheet back from her sleeping face. She slept on her side. Her short white curly hair was thin and her face’s wrinkles had relaxed so that her cheeks sagged toward the pillow. He sat back down in the waiting room chair and put his head against the wall. His foot was tapping. He checked his wrist, in habit, thinking he had a watch on. No time here, and he couldn’t tell by his body’s weariness how late it was, how long they had been exploring.
In a flash, he marched toward the door and kicked and pounded at it. It did not seem to rouse her, so he kept kicking and pounding and turning the knob. Nothing, nothing. Out of breath, he sat back down in the chair. His hands were red on their sides, and on the toes of his shoes, scuffs of red. The door had taken his beating rather soundly, and despite a few scuffs of paint little suggested he had just harangued it with a series of kicks and pounds. Minutes went by, and he wanted to stand up and try again, pounding at the door, but even the thought of it felt futile now. Thinking, in fact, felt beyond his reach so that his senses overfilled him, the door’s red presence looming at his periphery. He turned to it again and studied the brass knob, scratched and worn. A desire to turn the knob again, to open it, yank it from the casing. Maybe she had the key.
Or maybe it didn’t matter whether he opened the door. He half-wanted there to be a frightening pound from the other side of it, someone trapped in there, and that he could let out. There were many scenarios and images that ran in his mind, none of them without a wordy thought, but like a series of paintings, of places and names, just images radiating inside his head, some that looked familiar to him, like his partner or his child, and some of the old lady’s car, the way it smelled musty but clean, the way everything about her was musty and yet clean, and he remembered his house and the job and strange that Doug from work hadn’t called him in awhile, and was he on vacation yet, when could he be, was there anything that actually needed doing right now, and what was he doing.
As his eyes began to close, a click, the door creaked open. The old woman was still under the sheets, sleeping now. After all, it was late. She was tired and he couldn’t blame her. His eyes sprung open, wide awake, renewed energy. He stood and walked toward the door and opened it. Dark inside. A small cavernous space, he was thinking, but not sure. He took a few more steps in. The door behind him closed, and he turned to open it but couldn’t. He pounded hard, hoping the old lady might wake up and let him out. He turned and felt his way along the cool concrete, in some sort of long tunnel maybe, water up ahead maybe, or the sound of something like rushing water or static. An underground river or a television. He heard a voice now, the old woman speaking, sounding far away and echoey.
...Always there, Arthur, helping me with whatever I needed. For a long time just the two of us sweeping up these halls. I kept working, ‘til you were gone. Onto somewhere else. Like you died but you got another job, rather. And then I heard you really died and that was that…
The voice stopped, but he thought he could hear her still, coughing and clearing her throat like she might speak again but never did. He stumbled through the dark and felt for a wall but couldn’t feel one, and not wanting to trip or not knowing if there was an edge, he stopped for a moment, and felt the dark over his skin, and imagined his way out, that up ahead might be a boat bobbing on an underground river, and on that boat was the old lady with a lantern and he would get in the boat and she would launch it off, and they would travel the long dark river into the center of the earth. That was silly, he thought. Ridiculous. Yet it seemed his hope somehow that at any moment the staticky hissing sound would be the river he was thinking in his mind was real, and the old woman would be there to lead him. Ridiculous, he thought. Unrealistic. He kept walking forward in the dark, feeling with both his hands in front of him. Of course, it was static maybe, and it wasn’t a boat but her car, sitting idle, the radio on, waiting for him to get in, and this passage was leading him to a road, to Jackson, and they would be on their way out of here. That seemed the right idea, but there were many scenarios in his head. His mind reeled. He kept moving, just a little further now, he could feel it, the space of his hand almost about to touch the end of something. Every once in a while the graying image of the lady in the white sheet would come to him, and that of his partner, yes he was married he remembered, and of her under the white sheet, and of how much it was like a dead person beneath the sheet. The sheet, so white and crisp, like a way to hide the dying. ▨
The Timeline of Doug and Elaine
Part 3 of an ongoing series | Previous: Part 1, Part 2
Age 32 - 2017 - Elaine lives by herself in a small apartment. The catering company has been more than successful, and she’s moved up to a division manager. The company has expanded to multiple regions along the East Coast. She works over fifty hours a week, and has been saving her vacation days for a beach trip to Mexico. She bears no wedding band. She is not separated legally from Doug yet. The paperwork, the overall red tape, the final relational breakdown in the form of legalities and business-like transactions, the lawyer expenses. All of it moves forward in that sticky, tacky way that syrup slides from a bottle. It is a slow and brooding and tiring process. She has not seen Doug since 2016 when they moved out of their apartment, and he moved back in with his parents. It’s usually catering, hanging with friends, going to the bar, adventures on the weekends, occasional dates from apps.
Though she’s not overly excited about the prospect of dating. It’s stressful to have to explain her situation to people. It confuses them. And for those who don’t care, she wonders why and if they can be trusted at all. Her friends encourage her more toward the casual, to go into it loose, free, without the overburdening of analysis. She might be able to muster it, she thinks. Random strangers and one night stands, though, seem beyond her reach, during a time when she constantly feels a relationship’s explosion, still exploding, still falling around her in ashes and burning heaps of scrap.
She remains locked in her head, her mind ragged from all the thinking and mindful navigation of her old relationship. Ragged, too, from the memories that peek out at off times like mirrors catching sun, suddenly shining in your face, so that your eyes burn at their edges and you can’t look away because that would be to carry some manner of shame or weakness. How does one descend from such stratospheric levels of thinking, habit-forming neuroses, where they both together melted from candles into formless nubs? And then to enter into spaces, still feeling like a nub, where the casual presides, where everything can be re-set, the slate clean, or at least shoved to the dark corners, where one can stave off the past for a few moments. Can the nub grow back into a tall smooth candle? Can the burning flame take back its oxygen and heat? Can the wick ever return to a white untarnished fleck, like a grain of rice new and untouched, for that first flare of fire to its surface, the catching hiss, the smooth clean burning? But casual dating is a return, her friends tell her. To live for moments that are like hollowed-out spaces of rest, where memory is erased, where the brain is reduced to its basic functions, as if putting the body on a form of life support, your body untangling from vines and branches and bushes through which you’ve walked a long time, and arriving at a field, your body in the sun, the tall plain grass touching you but never holding on.
From the house runs an orange extension cord out to the television that sits on a rickety tilting wooden stand. The neighbors see it, and are puzzled, but they’re not to that point where they’re going to knock on the door or call the police. They’ve known the Lombards for years, so it’s best to give them the benefit of the doubt. Young Dougie is back at the house, they’ve noticed. He’s older now, so not young anymore, but every once in awhile when they see him on the back porch, smoking a cigarette, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses, they can distinguish in his cheeks that rosy sunburn glow he had as a kid when he ran through the sprinkler with his sister and the other kids from the block. All those kids, grown up now, live in other places. Many have children. And when the young families return to visit, their kids run along the same grass and streets, small avatars of their parents. The neighbors, older now, look out their windows and see these children, sent back in their minds twenty or thirty years, see all of it happening over again. They begin to confuse memories, ones far in the past and those of now. But Dougie has no children, and so there is no confusing their memories with him. They know him as he was and as he is now. He is a man who represents a straight line. He has a definitive start and end to his time, and he looks like a man who knows this.
Apparently, they hear, he has no wife. Rumor is divorce. A bad son begets a curse on a family. Secretly, they do not say this. It’s rather disguised under tisking and clucking, statements of sympathy towards the parents, as if Dougie was dead completely. They begin to critique small things: the lawn looks a little uncut ever since Dougie’s been back; there’s a crack in the Lombard’s foundation wall; the roof sags near its middle; Mrs. Lombard has a limp now and no one’s helping her out to her car or to get the mail. Each comment is a personal affirmation, a bearing banner of their own successes, the comment holds the comparison so easy, and their children are their medal of honor. These children, who went off and return to visit, and to whom they give money and presents despite never asking for it, because they don’t need it and that’s all the more reason to give it, as if a reward for them not asking. Because their sons and daughters traveled proper paths and will get their due.
He sits there with his cigarette and his dark sunglasses, dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, sometimes sweats, sometimes in a real suit. When night comes he picks up the remote by the ashtray and turns on the television. For a few moments he watches it. The lawn and the house flicker in the television light, as if they are themselves images on a broken television screen. What doesn’t flicker, strangely, seems to be his sunglasses that he wears despite the darkness. The glasses tend to gather the light, and bring it to two small shimmering stars glowing in his face. His skin has become pale like a skull, his mouth and cheeks sunken in. Or perhaps it is the night that makes it this way, the darkness pressing against his face. Like a used-up match, gray and ashy, the darkness has consumed a fire he feels he used to be able to summon.
He mutes the television which has been on a low murmur. Still looking at it, his body barely moving, he lifts the camera and begins taking a few photos, snapping very still from the place he sits. Then he stands, shoots more pictures. Off the porch, in the yard. Snapping photos of the television from every angle, like he’s working a model for a magazine. Then he’s at the television’s backside taking photos, then snapping the house and the porch. Finally, a roll done, he winds up the camera and pops the roll out, loads another one in, does the same process all over again. When he’s finished with a few rolls, he sits in the lawn staring at the television, bathing in the light for a few moments. He grabs the remote, he shuts it off. He sits on the back patio chair smoking in the darkness. ▨
Coming Up…
Next Release: August 26
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