The Boy in the Tunnel Part 15

The Boy in the Tunnel

by Gardner Linn

15.

Tim rode the bus from Salley Hall, a white lozenge sliding down the curving throat of the road toward Wintertree. The trees outside were mixed yellow and bare limbs, prime and decay in one. Since Saturday night Tim had been a ghost, floating through walls. He was invisible in the back of the bus, watching these weighty, wet-eyed mortals from his vantage of perfect light and air and happiness. When they got on the bus, it rocked with their heft, groaning.

The bus turned light and dark and light as it thrundled down the wooded street, and when a window caught the low, late-afternoon sun it went blindingly opaque. The light threw Tim’s shadow on the passenger next to him, making him a part of Tim, bringing him into the Tim-ness of this moment, and Tim thought How lucky for you.

The road-adjacent trees dropped out as the bus approached Wintertree, and the light filled all the windows on the left side of the bus, making them all white screens. No one could see inside, no one could see out. Everyone was invisible in the bus, everyone was part of now with Tim, the bus the passengers were one thing, they were the guts of one animal with Tim as its brain, Tim as its heart. Tim the brain heart stood, anticipating the return to Wintertree. He stood and held the rail and swayed with the bus as it took the curves, he steered the bus with his body, taking the rail, the spine, and leaning and making it go where it should go. The people on the bus knew what Tim was doing though they could not see it and they were thanking Tim though they did not know it. Tim let his body go slack and he hung, weightless, his feet floating behind him, floating toward the ceiling, Tim floating on the thanks and good will of the people on the bus, all the people on the bus united in their gratitude toward Tim and their desire that Tim have what Tim deserved. And Tim in turn made them ghosts, made them like Tim, and they all floated inside this bus, this animal, hurtling toward a future that Tim could see was right and good.

*********************

Dragan was very good at his secret second job, and so Joanie and Kenya never noticed the camera that he had placed in the base of the lamp. From this vantage the camera gave Ron Marston a comprehensive, if fisheyed, view of room 237. The camera didn’t feed into the Surveillance Room, but to a monitor in Marston’s personal office. And before you accuse Ron of abusing his position to spy on two teenage girls for prurient reasons, let’s just state right now that Ron was happily married and wouldn’t even dream of watching the feed between the hours of say 10 pm and 8 am, unless of course he deemed it necessary for university security reasons. Though when it came to university security, you could never be too careful.

In addition to planting the camera, Dragan had also put together a little photo essay on the subject of Room 237 and Its Contents. Lots of arty abstract shots of sports bras and whatnot, about which Ron would have to have a little talk with Dragan, but the shots of the girls’ Student Handbooks proved to be of great interest. Each was backed with a little plate mirror, flecked with almost imperceptible grains of a black powder. That just made things a whole lot more interesting.

For the past half-hour, all that had been going on in the room was Miss Cassidy’s brobdingnagian ostrich of a roommate sitting on the bed highlighting passages in a textbook. Not exactly the most scintillating viewing. Ron wanted to see those little mirrors in use, just so he could have solid evidence of what he was already pretty sure was true. If these girls were what he though they were, then it was mighty suspicious that one of them just happened to be under the bed when Barlow and St. James were putting on their little routine. Mighty, mighty suspicious.

On the screen, the hypertrophic roommate put down her book and picked up the phone. Ron cursed for the thousandth time the inability of these surveillance cameras to record audio. The scarecrow said a few words into the phone, then hung up. She ran her hand through the Gehry-esque spires and swoops of her hair, then reached for her Handbook.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

She picked up a plush bulldog from Cassidy’s bed and unzipped the dog’s belly. Out came a plastic bag and a silver box. She opened the box and dumped out what was inside on the mirror, and sure enough, there it was, the gunpowder. She disassembled a ballpoint pen and snorted the powder into her nose. As the powder took effect, she grabbed the edge of her nightstand so hard it looked like it was warped.

As soon as the fit subsided she whipped around. Someone must have knocked on the door. She hurriedly stuffed the box back into the dog, stowed the book and pen and wiped her nose, then opened the door. A short, nervous boy, clearly a freshman, walked into the room. He said a few words to her, and she to him. His hands looked like they had a nervous tic, like they weren’t sure where to land. It looked like he was hopping a little, trying to see her eye to eye. She took his hand in hers and leaned down to him.

Ron turned the monitor off. He pressed the intercom button on his desk.

“Rowena? Get me Kirkland.”

******************

Julian had lost track of how long he had been in the tunnel. A day, at least. Maybe two or three. His pants were looser now, that was for sure, and his chin sandpaper-rough. And “tunnel” wasn’t exactly the right word; this was definitely tunnels plural, a whole mycelium of ducts and passages underneath the fungal growths of the Family Delmonico. Or maybe they extended under the entire campus. For all Julian knew, he was halfway to Dalton by now.

Once it had become clear (three days ago?) that the tunnel wasn’t going to take him to Wintertree, Julian had tried to backtrack to the little junction room and back up to the Pi Floor, but in the process he had only gotten himself more lost. He really wished he had brought his flashlight. And a walkie-talkie. He wondered if Marston was sending someone after him. He could only hope.

Julian heard someone calling his name. Or, if not his name, then something he recognized, a word that meant something. There was a voice coming from somewhere. He heard the voice and walked toward the voice, but as long as he walked toward it, the voice remained as far away as it had been at first. The voice was that of a child; whether a boy or girl it was hard to tell, but it called to him in a voice plangent and therianthropic. It was a voice that warned him away, but he advanced toward it, his only hope that this child could guide him to the surface.

Julian walked, crawled sometimes. The tunnels had been, the tunnels were. The feral voice was until it was not, but the tunnels still were. Julian’s tongue a dry thing dead in his mouth. This started yesterday, if yesterday that was. It continued. His shoes somewhere behind him—too tight, too stiff, blistered his feet. His shirt next, then the pants.

And so he arrived, gaunt and near-naked, in a white nonagonal room with two entrances, concealed fluorescent tubes uplighting a desk, a chair, a telephone, a water fountain. He fell to the spigot, suckling at it, till his tongue came alive again. He sank into the chair, picked up the phone’s receiver. No dial tone. He replaced it.

Then it rang.

**********************

Chet didn’t know how to ask Kenya about the incident in the JFK Room. Girls tended to take it the wrong way when you told them you had seen them on a surveillance camera, because even when you were careful not to use the word “spying,” “spying” was just about all they heard.

Girls didn’t like to be spied on. You can write that one down if you like.

Since the magnolia tree they had progressed rapidly down Chet’s Handbook’s list to the McHolden House widow’s walk again. This was a great place, and Chet was glad his Handbook said they’d be here more than once. It was out in the open, which they both seemed to enjoy, but relatively concealed and little-known, as opposed to say the Garden Tunnel, which though exciting was also just totally nerve-wracking and Chet would have called it off had Kenya not been so, you know, Kenya. But this little balcony-type area off the ghost-townish third floor of the admissions building was just about perfect.

Chet and Kenya lay cocooned in a blanket on the cool wood floor of the widow’s walk, looking across the magnolia-studded West Campus quad through the rotted, white-painted slats of the railing. Strands of her hair, thick and black, were splayed across his face, but he made no effort to brush them off. Between the hair and the slats he saw the world as a zoetropic image, frames of frozen action between bands of darkness. He could see his time with Kenya like this, the moments when they were together like movie stills, the dark bands the times they were apart. Spin it fast enough and the stills became one long continuous moment, with no beginning or end, just perpetual middle.

Chet knew that if he asked about the JFK Room the end would come sooner than he wanted. He didn’t know how he knew it, but he knew it all the same. It wouldn’t split them up initially, but it would plant the seeds, it would make the dark bands wider and wider until the pictures stopped and it was all black. He would have to ask soon because he had to know what she heard, and if she pretended not to know what he was talking about, he’d have to tell her about the Surveillance Room, and if she wanted to know why he cared he’d have to tell her that too.

Down on the quad a group of frat boys were returning from downtown, their barking voices clanging harsh and thick in Chet’s ears. Chet pulled Kenya closer, she grasped his encircling arm tighter. A squirrel skittered along the oak branch that overhung the widow’s walk. It looked down, working its mouth around an arboreal morsel, at the two bodies wrapped in the blanket like a two-headed chrysalis. If the squirrel wondered what might emerge, there was no way of knowing.

*****************

In the middle of it all Tim opened his eyes and saw that Joanie’s eyes were open too, too close to focus, just wet viscous orbs, outposts of fragile interior to let the exterior in. Lips numb and slick with the interior of another. A suction, a grappling, a mutual opening to each other, an invitation to one another. Another. The interior of the other, another exterior. Another. Joanie closed her eyes but Tim kept his open another.