The
Boy in the Tunnel
by
12.
To get from the Family Delmonico
to downtown, one only needed to follow the spiral arm known as the
Tim and Joanie heard
nothing as they passed the magnolia tree. Five minutes into the walk, Tim had
been forced to remove the sweater, but luckily Joanie
(who had conditioned herself to overcompensate for her naturally long strides,
thanks to years of always being ten steps ahead of everyone else) walked
slowly, and for the most part he was able to keep the sweating under control.
Tim, as Joanie had
feared, had no plan. She was forced to go with her own Plan B—and so they were
walking downtown. Tim’s conversational skills, rudimentary at best, completely
failed him in ambulatory situations. He was too intensely aware of words whose
meanings he only pretended to know: ersatz, erstwhile, pedantic, peripatetic. They walked the arc around Thorn in silence.
Tim wanted to take Joanie’s hand, or put his arm
around her shoulders, or something, but he kept his hands jammed in his
pockets.
As they rounded the corner of Thorn Hall, the
Founders’ Garden slid into view. Joanie, using
nothing but the suggestion of her physical presence, steered Tim toward the
Garden entrance. “Let’s go in there,” she said, but they were already walking
through the gate.
As noted earlier, the flowers in the Garden formed
a giant King Milo when viewed from above; the bark-covered paths between the flowers
delineated the circular face and nine-pointed crown. Joanie
led Tim around the massed sunflowers that formed
The Garden was higher than everything east of it,
including the Family Delmonico, and the bench made a
natural vantage point for a spectacular view of campus. The whole thing seemed
to be spread out in a valley below them, with their dorms and quad at the
center. Out here in semi-rural
But there was something else, something troubling,
and as Joanie’s hand touched his shoulder, it came to
him: he had seen this before. The mural in the Thorn Hall
men’s room, the exploded shield with pictures of Sluke,
Hayes and Mary Rutherford, but a black square where Wintertree
should be. That’s what the Family Delmonico
looked like from the Garden. Sluke, Hayes and Miss R
were lit somehow, maybe by concealed floodlights, but Wintertree
was in darkness. You could just barely tell that it was there. From the bench,
the dorms were in the same position as they were on the mural; if there were
wild animals on the quad, it might have been a near-exact copy.
Tim could feel the borders of his world expand.
There was something here that he needed to be a part of.
Joanie took her hand from Tim’s shoulder. He didn’t
notice.
*******************
Chet and
Chet laced the fingers of his left hand with the
fingers of her right. He squeezed gently but firmly, pushing her fingers back
at the knuckles, and she pushed back, matching him in this imitation of a
contest of strength. He unlaced his fingers and briefly circled her knotty,
thin wrist with his thumb and middle finger, then brushed his hand across her
long, muscular forearm.
“If we arm wrestled, you would totally beat me,” he
said at last.
“Probably,” she said.
She turned her face to his and kissed him on the
nose. She had done that the last three times, and it drove him completely up
the wall. He loved it, for one thing, thought it was the most adorable thing in
the world, he was a big fan of kissing body parts other than the mouth in
general, etc., but it also had a kind of brisk finality to it—the physical
equivalent of saying “Are we all done here?” Completely up the fucking wall.
“We should probably go before somebody finds us,”
he said.
“Probably,” she said.
Neither one of them moved. He continued to snake
his arm up and down and around hers, not wanting to lose contact just yet. He
couldn’t tell what she thought of him, whether she liked this or only tolerated
it. Something fell, clattering, through the branches of the tree—a nut or a bud
or something, Chet didn’t know shit about trees. It landed a foot to the left
of Chet’s head.
“I guess that’s probably a sign,” he said.
“Probably,” she said.
Chet sat up and zipped his jeans. He found his
shirt, just within arm’s reach, and buttoned it over his T-shirt, which hadn’t
had time to leave his body. He stood up and offered a hand to
“What?” he said.
*******************
Julian pulled himself up to the lip of what was
some kind of duct or tunnel leading west from the closet. He tried to look down
the duct, to see where it led, but it was too dark to see more than a few feet
in front of him. Stupid, not bringing a flashlight. There
was an official DUH triple-function flashlight (w/ your standard high beam plus
a flashing orange emergency light and soft white reading light) just sitting
there on his desk, waiting for exactly this kind of DUH emergency. Too late for that now.
He clambered into the duct and started to crawl,
waving a hand in front to feel for any sudden upcoming obstacles. This was hell
on his knees, which were what kept him out of the pros in the first place, but
the duct was too narrow for him to stand. He kept crawling.
The duct was cramped but not stifling; there was a
breeze coming from somewhere. After fifteen yards or so, Julian began to notice
a slight downhill slant to the duct. Another twenty yards, and the breeze
became stronger, the slant more pronounced. He was able to sit down and slide a
few yards at a time.
After five minutes of sliding, the duct leveled off
and emptied into a small room. Julian couldn’t see anything in the dark, but he
felt around the walls and found a light switch. He flipped it, and weak bulb
flickered into life, illuminating a square room with a small round opening on
each wall, including the one he had just tumbled out of. It was some kind of
junction room, Julian guessed. He picked the hole that he thought was in the
direction of Wintertree, and climbed in.
********************
Ron Marston knew about
Ron pressed the intercom button on his desk and
called in Dragan, an RA who was an abject failure
when it came to assisting residents, but exactly the type of hulking, silent,
loyal agent required for this type of job. Ron outlined the assignment to Dragan, and Dragan nodded with a
smile and eagerly left the room, because if there was one thing Dragan liked it was sneaking around the women’s dorms.
*********************
The BabyShakers were a
crappy band, just awful—they wanted to sound like the Ramones
covering Led Zeppelin, but they really just sounded like every terrible teenage
garage band you’ve ever heard covering the Ramones at
incompetent half-speed. But The Underground was packed, because The BabyShakers had lots of friends.
Tim was not one of those friends, but Joanie went way back with the bassist, and that’s why Tim
found himself in the middle of a sweaty, fidgety mass of flesh encased in
ironic t-shirts. A whole line of kids with the bad luck to get stuck behind Joanie grumbled at their inability to see the ‘Shakers’
stage antics, which consisted of the bassist and both guitarists standing
statue-still with their heads down while the drummer flailed octopinely in the background. The sweet, sort of
rotten-fruit smell of what Tim figured must be pot wafted from nowhere. The guy
next to Tim, a thirtyish slice of cheese with gelled
hair and an incongruous suit, kept bumping Tim’s shoulder as he skanked. The bassist played one note per song, just
pounding the same string over and over at a narcotizing pace. One of the
guitarists did the same thing an octave or two higher, and the other laid down
a sparky, skittery sheet of
feedback. Both guitarists were dressed in all black, with chin-length black
hair covering their faces; they might have been twins. The bassist had the same
hair as the guitarists, but she was tiny, and it seemed almost impossible for
her to hold up the bass, which was nearly the same size as her. She was wearing
an R.E.M. Fables of the Reconstruction
tour t-shirt, which set off a couple of deja-vuey
sparks in Tim’s mind.
There was no point in trying to talk to Joanie in this din. It was like being inside a factory that
only made headaches. Every once in a while guitarist in the center of the stage
would scream something wordless and primordial into the microphone, and the
bassist would counter with a couple breathy “ahh”s. The
drummer seemed like he was in a completely different band altogether. He never
stopped playing, not even between songs—if in fact there were breaks between
songs, which Tim wasn’t quite sure there were.
Except for the asshole in the suit, who was this close to getting a stern looking-at from Tim,
everybody was doing a kind of disaffected non-dance, where their feet didn’t
move but their heads and shoulders bobbed and weaved complicatedly. Half the
people were trying and failing to match their head movements to the insane
speed-zombie beat of the drummer—he hit the kickdrum
so fast it just sounded like one continuous earthquakey
rumble—while the rest timed their gestures to the bassist, which made it look
like they were headbanging in the slow-motion portion
of a heavy metal video.
Though Tim recognized a majority of the people at
the show as fellow freshmen, i.e. not of legal age, the low-ceilinged room had
an atmosphere of potential drunken hedonism—everybody ready to “cut loose,”
just waiting for a signal. They wanted to move their feet, but were unsure
whether it was acceptable. Every once in a while one of the kids would break
into some full-body spasms, but it wouldn’t catch on with his neighbors, and he
would go back to slow-mo headbanging. Claustrophobia
settled on Tim, and not just from being in this hot, tiny room. He was aware of
the limits everybody here placed on themselves, that for whatever reason they
weren’t allowing themselves to do what they wanted to do. Everybody wanted this
show to be something else, something more; they wanted an event. They wanted to
let go, to surrender, but the release they wanted was as programmed as the
self-conscious hipster non-dance. They wanted to be like the ecstatic crowds in
a music video, one many-limbed, many-headed body writhing to the pervasive,
penetrative music; they wanted the music to enter them and fill them, to unite
them as an Audience, to make this an Experience. There was a promise in music
like this, in a night like this, in the whole idea of being eighteen and in
college and together with other people who were eighteen and in college, a
promise that had never been kept. They wanted, more than anything, not to be
lied to.
The BabyShakers wanted to
be adored, except for the drummer, who just wanted more speed.
The problem was, this band
was not good. They could not keep the promise, no matter how much they tried,
no matter how much the audience willed it of them. Tim could feel this as
pressure on his skull, this collective longing for something that could not be.
You let this longing go on too long, Tim knew, and it set in at the base of
your skull and became a knot, gnawing at your brain, saying Could Have Been.
You had to release the pressure somehow. You couldn’t let every night go by,
the same as the one before. If it wasn’t what you wanted it to be, you had to
make it that yourself. Tim had seen Dead
Poets Society in 11th-grade English and knew Robin Williams was
a hack and “carpe diem” was bumper-sticker bullshit, but if you let this disappointment
accumulate it would kill you. You had to take action, once, at least.
Tim reached up and put a hand on Joanie’s shoulder. She looked at him, down at him, a
question on her face. He raised himself on his toes, as high as he could go,
and she leaned down to meet him.
He kissed her, and the feedback rang in and between
their ears, a loop, as their heartbeats raced to keep up with the drums.
© 2005 Gardner Linn