The
Boy in the Tunnel
by
i.
The thing I hate most about movies is how whenever the
hero does something awful, like kill a guy, or especially get some innocent guy
killed, there's always a scene where the hero's best friend or girlfriend or
whatever says something like "You're doing the right thing. There was
nothing you could do." And then the hero realizes that his mission or
whatever is the right one, and he goes out and finishes the job, and he doesn't
think about the awful thing again. It's like telling the audience that this
fucking asshole who just got some poor guy killed is actually the sweetest guy
in the world, and he'd sure be sorry about it if he didn't have to save the
world again now. And I gotta call bullshit on that, because if all we see is
that the hero does horrible shit, and if the only way we know he's a hero is if
his best friend or girlfriend keeps telling him he's a great guy, then maybe he
isn't really such a great guy. You know what I'm saying? I mean, I'd love it if
all the things I've done could get wiped away just because I'm supposed to be
the hero and you're supposed to like me. That'd be great. That'd be just about
the best thing ever. If I just had Charlize Theron or
somebody to say "Tim, you can't let this get you down. You're doing
the right thing. There was nothing you could do," then that might even be
better than killing my brother-in-law in the first place.
ii.
The light on a Sunday is the worst part. You wake
up in the afternoon and already it’s too bright in the apartment, too bright
and too hot. Everything’s clearer in that light. Every particle in the air is
tangible. Even though you wake up late, the light lasts longer than it does any
other day. You stumble around the apartment, fumbling for something to do.
There’s no reason to leave.
A silverfish skitters around in the bowl of the
sink. You turn on the faucet to drown it. It floats, still, on the surface of
the water, but once the water drains away it finds its legs again. You turn on
the water again. Got him this time.
Everything wants your attention at once, but you
can’t seem to care about any of it. You know there’s stuff you should be doing,
but you can’t think of what it is. You go to check the mail, but halfway down
the stairs you remember there’s no mail on Sunday. What did you used to do on
Sundays? There used to be papers to finish, surely, tests to study for. You had
to prepare for the week. Now there’s no point in preparing. Every week is the
same.
What else? You went to church on Sundays, once.
Church wasn’t so bad, now that you think about it. Maybe you should go again.
Maybe that’d be a good way to meet somebody. Maybe it wouldn’t matter so much
that you’re an atheist. Or agnostic. You can never
remember which. You used to like the hymns, anyway. That’s why you stopped
going in college, you remember. Everybody wanted to drag you to youth-oriented
worship services with names like “
You want to punch the wall but you’re afraid of
breaking your hand. You hate Joanie for making you feel like that. You hated
her for staying. Now you hate her for leaving.
iii.
“You don’t want to do that” says the guy with three
eyes and no lips but I’ve already pressed the button. He folds his face into
its hard outer shell like an armadillo until I can just barely see the glimmer
of one eye down somewhere near his chin. “You fucked up now” comes
the voice out of the shell.
I look on the viewfinder. The missile’s still about
four hundred yards from the factory. “What are they gonna do about it?” I ask
the shell, and he just points at a flotilla of skirmish craft heading our way.
“That’s what you get for fucking with somebody with a time machine,” he says.
“They saw this coming years ago.”
1.
The campus of the
Wintertree Hall was the patriarch of The Family Delmonico,
as the dorms were known, as it housed the Department of University Housing
administrative offices, as well as a small auditorium and a smaller gym. It was
also the largest of the four dormitories, a massive grey concrete cube pocked
with tiny orange windows. It was the ugliest building on campus; informal polls
of visiting sports teams suggested it was the ugliest collegiate building east
of the
Tim Levitt arrived in the lobby of Wintertree Hall
on the morning of
In the lobby Tim signed his paperwork and received
his room key, his mailbox key and his Student Handbook, a small, thick book
bound in purple cloth, with the motto “LIFE MEANS NOTHING TO THE DEAD” stamped
in gold foil on the spine. Tim ran his hands across the embossed foil. This was
by far the fanciest book he had ever owned.
“You’re on Tier 3, Inner Arm 5, Room
79A.” Tim looked up at the toothy redhead that had given him the keys and book.
“What does that mean?”
“Follow the signs.”
A persistent urban legend held that in 1967, the
year Wintertree Hall opened its doors, a freshman
named Milo Kirby had gotten lost trying to find his room in the spiraling halls
and dead ends of Wintertree, and had never emerged. His prospective roommate, a
Warren Pullman, was discreetly paid a large sum to keep Kirby’s disappearance
quiet, and Kirby’s parents were told he died at sea during a maritime
commencement ceremony. Different strands of the legend posited different conclusions
to the story: some said Kirby, now an elderly man,
lived in the secret innermost room of Wintertree and every year recruited two
new residents to join his secret society, The Nine Dead Men; others, that
Kirby’s ghost haunted the stairways of Tier 4. A common element of all
versions, however, was that Kirby wrote UNWG’s Byzantine, purple-covered
Student Handbook. This, of course, was a complete fiction, as the Handbook was
in fact written by the school’s first president, Anthony Delmonico, under the
influence of several controlled substances, and amended over the years by his
successors.
Tim, as of yet, knew none of this. He did not know
that the omnipresent “YOU ARE HERE” signs were put up to prevent a real Milo
Kirby-esque incident; he only knew that, according to these signs, getting to
Tier 3, Inner Arm 5, Room 79A looked like it would take most of the day. A
stair led directly from the lobby up to Tier 3, but getting to Inner Arm 5
required circumnavigating three quarters of the building on Outer Arm 1, taking
another stairway down to Tier 2, backtracking a bit on Inner Arm 7, taking a
shortcut through the laundry room, then going back upstairs to Tier 3, where a
security guard (sometimes an RA, usually a student on a work-study scholarship)
would check his ID and ask one of 377 random questions, which each had
ridiculously complex answers, before allowing admittance to Inner Arm 5. Then
it was simply a matter of using the ladder in Room 79B to get to 79A, assuming,
of course, that the residents of 79B were home.
(Actually, Tim did not learn all of that
information from the sign; the part about the questions and Room 79B he found
in the Handbook on page 163, to which he was referred by the index subject
“Your Room, Getting To.” Page 164 contained a handy list of all 377 questions
and answers.)
It took Tim forty-five minutes to find Room 79A,
twenty-two of which were spent waiting for Chet and Dick, the sophomore
residents of Room 79B, to return from the dining hall. Promises were made to
make copies of keys to avoid such a situation in the future--promises which
were never kept, by the way, and Chet always felt bad about it when he could
remember Tim’s name.
Upon entering 79A, Tim discovered that his roommate
had already found the room (not to mention claimed the best bed). This roommate
stood up as soon as Tim entered the room, grabbed Tim’s hand with such
surprising force that Tim actually whimpered a bit, stared Tim directly in the
eye, and said:
“I’m Drew. You must be Tim. I took the good bed,
but if you want it all you have to do is ask.” Tim did want the good bed, but
so powerful was the good nature evident in Drew’s fluorescent smile and wide
blue eyes that Tim could offer nothing but a weak “What are you talking about?”
Drew released his grip on Tim’s hand and flipped
open his Student Handbook. “’Each room in the Residence Halls contains two beds
of varying quality—one a thin, hard, soiled mattress, the kind one would expect
to find in a second-rate prison or a summer camp with an unpronounceable
faux-Indian name (i.e. Camp Massaquappapegamaha), the other a feather bed of
such quality as to make the Pope or even a cinema star jealous—so as to
encourage healthy competition between roommates.’ Right there on page 58.”
“Huh.”
“You said it. You been to the dining hall yet? I’m
starving.”
Weston Hall, allegedly the best dining hall on
campus, was located a short walk northeast of Wintertree, along one of the
curving sidewalks that spiraled out from the Family Delmonico. Along the way
Tim learned about Drew’s father (prostate cancer, died), his mother (breast
cancer, beating it), sister (high school, flag corps) and brother (estranged,
probably in
“What about you?” said Drew when he was done with
this obviously rehearsed litany.
“What about me?”
“Where you from?”
“Resaca.” A small town not far from the
University, best-known (if at all) for a minor Civil War battle.
“What are you going to major in?”
“I don’t know yet. Maybe
English.”
Drew exhaled what couldn’t possibly have been the
slightest dismissive sigh. “My dad majored in English. He’s dead now.”
“Yeah, the—“
“Prostate cancer. Didn’t want to go to the doctor.
Didn’t want to get checked. Didn’t
want some guy sticking his finger up his ass. Well, if it means I live
to see my son go to college, I’ll let anybody who wants to stick his finger up
my ass.”
“That’s a healthy attitude.”
They stopped at an intersection to let one of the
purple-and-white campus buses pass. There was a girl on the bus, the only
passenger, with short blonde hair and the broad shoulders of a swimmer or
volleyball player. Tim didn’t get the best look through the window of the bus
as it trundled past, but he thought she looked at least 6’3”. On a hunch, he
consulted the index of the Handbook:
That girl,
the one at
the security desk...137
the one in
your bio class....246
the one on
the bus...149
the one wearing
the R.E.M. T-shirt...68, 318
the one who
looks like your sister...293
the one you
will love...188-203
Tim turned to page 149. There he read: “Her name is
Joanie.”
© 2005 Gardner Linn