The Boy in the Tunnel

by Gardner Linn

31.

“Hello?

“Is Chet there?”

“Who is this?”

“Who is this?”

“How did you get this number?”

“Phone book.”

“Which phone book?”

“I don’t know, the campus phone book.”

“You’re lying.”

“Is Chet there?”

“Who is this?”

“Who is this?”

“Nobody.”

“Same here. Is Chet there?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Do you know where Chet is?

“I don’t know anyone named Chet.”

“You’re lying.”

“So?”

“If Chet is there, tell him that Kenya needs to talk to him.”

“Let’s assume, for a moment, that I even know this Chet person, and that I would be willing and able to deliver this message to him, even though if I knew him, I would most certainly not be his secretary or personal assistant. Assuming all this, what makes you think that Chet is going to care about this message, when, let’s also assume, he has never once mentioned a ‘Kenya’ to those he considers his closest friends and confidants, one of which I may or may not be?”

“Tell him Kenya needs to talk to him. Tell him it’s about what happened in the JFK Room, if he really needs to know how fucking important it is.”

The deep smoker’s rumble on the other end of the line didn’t respond. There was only the faint rasp of phone receiver against ear.

“Forty-two sixty-seven,” Kenya added.

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

Sarah, it turned out, could play the hell out of a game of air hockey. She’d won three games in a row with 21 straight goals after Dick scored two to start off the first game. She’d let Dick have those two goals as part of her usual air hockey strategy, which was to observe her opponent as his confidence increased—all his tics, all his feints, all his go-to moves—and then synthesize those observations into a fully-formed plan of counterattack. Sometimes she was able to do this in as little as one goal; trickier opponents could take up to four. Once she let an eleven-year-old score six goals on her before she could counter his unconsciously brilliant offense and eke out a win, and were it not for the age difference she would have proposed on the spot.

Sarah’s air-hockey genius had unfortunately not translated to other arenas of her life, not even ping-pong or foosball, nor, especially, in the realm of romance. She tended to come on strong, which always at first seemed the best plan, particularly with the kind of guys she found herself attracted to. The male population of UNWG, at least as Sarah saw it, could be separated into two types. First, the “bros,” those who projected an aura of frattishness even if not in a frat, the high-school athletes who weren’t fast or strong enough for a scholarship, the Mickey’s-swilling good ol’ boys who drove their pickups to Athens every Saturday to tailgate at Bulldog games—these Sarah had no use for, and actively sought to eradicate (genetics department, “Project Red-17” eugenics research, very hush-hush). Then there were the “boys,” the dreamy souls who had in high school joined the drama club instead of the football team, the lit-mag contributors, the guys who had seen at least one foreign film, those who could play a few R.E.M. songs on their ubiquitous acoustic guitars. Sarah couldn’t help but be drawn to these boys, because the interests that had made her practically a foreigner in high school—Lynch, Salinger, Clowes, the Coens, the Pixies, the Velvets—were common currency among a not-insignificant segment of college students. But these boys were called “boys” for a reason, for in focusing so much of their attention on cultural artifacts—to the point where they became defined by possession and knowledge of such artifacts—they neglected the art of interpersonal relationships (acquisition of which, paradoxically, was the whole point of cultivating such rigid cultural identities in the first place). And so Sarah’s initial aggressiveness helped to overcome the ingrained reticence of her male companions, at least for a little while.

One of the dangers of college for the bright student is the inevitable realization that he or she is not as special as he or she thought he or she was. And by “he or she,” I mean “you” (and, in that case, by “is” I mean “are” and by “was” I mean “were”). You may have been the only student at Bumblefuck High to score above a 1300 on your SAT, you may have been the one member of the Krzysztof Kieslowski Appreciation Society, but even at a provincial institution like UNWG you’ll find plenty of contemporaries who had the exact same high-school experience as you. And though at first you’ll find this thrilling—finally you can have an intelligent discussion about Watchmen—sooner or later you will start to resent the fact that what once made you unique now merely makes you an easily classifiable type. I’m sure throughout your formative years you were told that you were special, that you had a gift that you must share with the world, that one day you would get out of this town and find your true place; but now perhaps you’ve found that your true place is one among identical thousands. High school, like air hockey, came easy to you, but now you’re surrounded by students for whom high school was just as easy. It’s those who put in work who rise above, which you always hated your parents for saying but now hate them even more for being right.

Sarah lived in Hayes, but spent most of her free time avoiding her roommate (a needy math major who reminded Sarah so much of herself as a high-school sophomore she couldn’t bear to look her in the eye), studying on the quad or watching movies (the Evil Dead trilogy, The Never-Ending Story, Edward Scissorhands) with a group of like-minded nerds in the Wintertree lobby. It was there that she first saw Dick, who occasionally would come down to the lobby to watch the movies, though not as part of the group; he would sit across the lobby, pretending to read a Sports Illustrated, but Sarah caught him totally misting up near the end of Scissorhands. Dick looked like a bro, but Sarah’s observations indicated that he was really a closeted boy, one who probably wrote secret poetry in the locker room, about which he was teased mercilessly by the true bros when discovered. As the credits rolled on Edward Scissorhands, Dick had risen from his seat and walked by the movie group on his way to the security door. As he passed, he muttered “Fags” loud enough for all assembled to hear, loud enough for them to know he had intended them to hear it, and though all her friends were appalled, Sarah swore she had detected a hint of wistfulness in his slur.

“Go again?” she asked Dick, who had developed a slick of sweat on his forehead. He wiped at it with his sleeve.

“I don’t know. You want to play some Area 51 or something?”

“I don’t really like video games.”

“Ping pong?” Sarah hesitated. “Oh shit, I totally forgot what I came down here for,” said Dick. “I need to find somebody.”

“One more game of this, then we’ll play ping pong.”

“Listen, I’ll be right back,” said Dick. “I need to go see about something.”

Dick dropped his mallet on the table. Sarah floated hers across the table to ricochet lightly off his. The jets turned off, and they both fell.

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

The fat man was too fat for the tunnel. He heaved and squeezed and inched closer to Joanie, who sat, watching with passive bemusement. The fat man’s wig fell off, exposing a bulbous red cranium. He stepped on it with a buckled shoe, leaving a dark blotch on the silver-white hair.

“You could help, you know,” the fat man said.

“I don’t know of what use I could be,” said Joanie.

“You might fetch a cloth and wipe the perspiration from my forehead, so as to keep the salty fluid from blinding me.”

“No thanks,” said Joanie.

“Then perhaps you could find a length of wood with which to lever me out of this most uncomfortable confinement. I fear I have indulged overmuch on sweetmeats.”

“Sweetmeats were like cake and stuff, right? And sweetbreads are like innards?”

“We’ve been over this.”

“It still sounds weird to me.”

The fat man strained and twisted, held his stomach in, reached his left arm forward to search for a handhold to pull himself out, to no avail. He sighed, and his expanding belly groaned against the wall.

“Could you at least hand me my wig?”

“In a minute.” Joanie closed the silver box’s lid and replaced it in her pocket. She tapped a few stray black grains from the pen tube onto her tongue, then reassembled the pen. The room she was in was a larger junction between three narrow tunnels, in one of which Mr. Delmonico was currently lodged. “Tell me about the tunnels.”

“Are we not playing the game tonight?”

“We don’t have time for the game.”

“There’s always time for the game,” said Mr. Delmonico. A breathy grunt escaped his throat as he tried to shift to a more comfortable position.

“The game doesn’t mean anything, Mr. Delmonico. We’re in an emergency situation here. No time for formalities.”

“The game doesn’t mean anything?” Gas, forced upward by the tunnel’s wall’s pressure on his stomach, erupted from Mr. Delmonico’s mouth. “Have you not been paying any attention at all?”

© 2006 Gardner Linn