The Boy in the Tunnel

by Gardner Linn

34.

Audrey swallowed the last of her coffee and stared at the door to Alex’s room, as if she could will Renee to come back out. There was no sound from the room, not even the Joy Division that Audrey knew Renee liked to listen to before going out, spinning around the room half-dressed, arms flailing to “Isolation.” The only sound was the blood thumping in Audrey’s ears, the sugar and caffeine and alcohol fighting it out for supremacy.

Audrey had made out a fragment of Renee’s tattoo before she retreated into the bedroom: the game is to learn how. A fragment of something larger. It sounded familiar to Audrey. A lyric from one of the BabyShakers’ songs, maybe. She never paid much attention to the words. It would be just like Renee to get one of Alex’s stupid poems (he insisted on calling them poems) tattooed on her back. All of their songs were probably about Renee anyway.

The clock on the microwave read 4:23. There was no way Audrey had slept that long. She stepped over to the microwave to investigate—somebody had stopped the microwave in the middle of cooking. Audrey pressed Clear, and the clock flashed 12:00.

The only other clock in the house was in Xander’s room. It was Alex’s idea not to have a clock in the living room—“Like a casino,” he said. Alex envisioned the Dollhouse (also his idea) as “a haven outside of time, outside of morality, outside of reality.” What this was supposed to mean, Audrey had no idea. What in meant in practice was lots of drinking.

Audrey climbed the stairs to the second floor, past the photos of Xander and Alex decorating the stairwell, all taken by Renee. The thing Audrey hated most about Renee was the way she strung along Xander, despite having no interest in him—Renee knew that Xander was attracted to her but played dumb, constantly flirted with him, pretending to mistake him for Alex. But those forearm tattoos were relatively new, and one night after a show, before the tattoos, when Alex had passed out and gotten sick (in that order) from his friend Avery’s Dreamsicles, Xander made his move on an oblivious Renee. No one knew except Audrey, and she only knew because Xander had too many Dreamsicles himself at a party and spilled the secret in the middle of an hour-long monologue about the Xander-Renee-Alex triangle, along with copious references to Renee’s lower back, while everyone else was in the living room acting out Top Gun in Neanderthal grunts.

The photo at the top of the stairs was the only one not of the twins. Audrey paused, as she always did, to examine the photo of herself dressed as some GI Joe character whose name she couldn’t even remember—it had been Xander’s idea, and she had gone along with it to make him happy, which now just seemed so fucking stupid. In the photo Audrey was alone, sitting on a concrete porch littered with plastic cups, teary black lines of mascara spilling from beneath black-framed glasses, her hands cupping a flame to a cigarette. She hadn’t known she was being photographed, hadn’t even known Renee at the time. She wouldn’t have even remembered the party if it wasn’t for the costume—there were parties like every weekend at the Dollhouse freshman year (before it was the Dollhouse, when it belonged to Avery and his Republican roommate), and they were all a blur of drunken longing and random groping in dark rooms, except for the Halloween party, the first one, the only one that mattered. Something could only be new once, and then it was just routine.

Xander’s room was at the end of the hall that doglegged back around the stairs. There was a sign on his door that said LIVELY LOUNGE, liberated from a 7^th-floor study lounge in Meadows Tower during a freshman-year late-night expedition that had attained legendary status in Alex and Xander’s reminiscences. Audrey knocked on the door. No reply, not even “Get the fuck out.”

Audrey pushed the door open a crack, enough to see Xander’s hair splayed on the carpet like a black halo around his head. His eyes were open and glassy, staring straight at Audrey. A stream of black fluid had fallen from his open mouth to the carpet and congealed on his cheek. To Audrey it looked like he had managed to cry mascara tears from his mouth.

It took Audrey a second to realize that she was looking at an overdose. A real live OD, just like in the movies, here in the Dollhouse. Audrey didn’t know what to do, so she screamed as loud as she could, loud enough that Renee even considering going upstairs to see what all the commotion was.

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

“He’s barbaric. Savage.”

“Primal sexuality—“

“Is he even aware, do you wonder—I mean does he know what is being captured here and is he putting forth a conscious effort to...you know, to bring forth a...uh...”

“Exactly.”

“Or is he simply being, and he can’t help but be this—this—“

“Savage.”

“Primal, exactly.”

“His tattoos intrigue me.”

“I was about to say the same thing.”

“Tribal markings...”

“There’s a rich history of body art evoked here in the primitive designs. There’s almost something Maori about them...”

The blonde man listened to the couple, two married professors, talk about his photograph for five minutes before he couldn’t take it any longer. He grabbed a tray from the catering table, scattering baby carrots and ranch dressing everywhere, and bashed the male professor in the head with it. The professor fell into his wife, and they both collapsed to the floor, a struggling heap of tweed.

The blonde man stepped over the injured couple and lifted the photograph off its hook on the wall. “I did not give permission!” he said to the stunned patrons, who looked at him with the same mix of pity and revulsion they would feel for any crazy person on the street. The blonde man smashed the photograph on the edge of the table, shattering the glass of the frame. He pulled the photo out, folded it and put it in his pocket. He brandished the crudités tray. “Renee Goldsworthy! We need to have a conversation!”

Nobody said anything. They all knew Renee wasn’t there. But nobody wanted to get hit in the head with a vegetable platter for being the one to tell the guy the bad news.

The blonde man winged the tray at a bespectacled girl in the corner anyway. The tray hit her square in the nose, breaking her glasses and sending blood streaming over her mouth. She stumbled backwards into the photo of Alex and Xander, then lost her footing and joined the married professors on the floor. “Renee!” the blonde man shouted.

Next door at the arcade, Sarah was systematically destroying a hapless freshman at air hockey when she heard the shouts from the gallery. She looked around the arcade to see if anyone else had heard, but everyone was either pretending not to hear or just ignoring it, figuring that someone shouting “Renee!” had nothing to do with them. Sarah slammed her last goal home and walked out into the Union’s common area to see of what use she could be.

In her haste she left her white box sitting on the lip of the air hockey table.

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

Peter Kirkland woke up with his hands tied for the second time tonight. In a way, he was relieved—he’d much rather be a prisoner of the incompetent Dragan, whose personnel file he had reviewed and laughed at, than an unpredictable psycho like this Andrew kid. However dumb the kid may be, he had a nasty violent streak, and Kirkland liked to avoid getting hit as much as possible.

The floor crinkled as Kirkland shifted, and he realized that he was laid out on a sheet of butcher paper. He let his eyes adjust to the darkness of the room, and saw rolls of the stuff on racks against the walls. Idiot had put him in the DUH offices. Like Kirkland didn’t know how to escape from there.

Kirkland’s tongue felt something soft and thick, and his brain finally registered that there was a gag in his mouth. He tried to stand up, but his feet were tied. This might turn out to be a little more difficult than he imagined.

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

“Is he talking?”

“Not about anything important. But here’s this.” Alex offered Tim’s Handbook to Avery Barlow.

Barlow refused to take it. “If we wanted that, we would have taken it already.”

“Well Jesus Christ, Avery, what the fuck did you send me in there for? You’ve got to let me in on your plans when you ask me to do this shit.”

“I believe we made a reasonable request of you.”

“Real reasonable, yeah.”

“You need to find out what he knows about that.” Barlow pointed to a corner of the room, where Taddlington Taft sat in a chair, clutching his bandaged hand, his eyes glazed over from painkillers. “There’s a new tactic we want to try. Quartermaster?”

Chet stepped to Barlow’s side. “Secretary?”

“Do it.”

Before Alex knew what was happening, Chet grabbed his wrist with his left hand and his first two fingers with his right hand. Chet pushed with his left and pulled with his right, bending the fingers back. Chet let go, and Alex dropped, sobbing, to his knees.

“Take him back,” said Barlow.

“Maybe we should keep the Handbook,” said Chet. Chet felt kind of bad about what was happening to Tim—not Alex so much, Chet had never liked Alex—but Chet never had a problem with Tim, and didn’t really want this incident to adversely affect the situation in 79 Wintertree, which was strained enough as it was with all the shit between Dick and Drew. Chet was pretty sure Tim had nothing to do with Taft’s injuries (it seemed clear that Kirkland was responsible, and Barlow had to know that), and had offered to talk to him, but Barlow insisted on sending Alex in, for reasons that Chet now saw probably had nothing to do with Tim or Taft.

“Whatever,” said Barlow. “Take him back down first.”

Chet picked up Tim’s Handbook and put it in his pocket, then grabbed a fistful of Alex’s hair and pulled him to his feet. Alex tried to form words of protest through his sobs. “Stop complaining,” said Chet.

Chet led Alex down a staircase to the second floor of Yarrow Hall, to a small library where one bookcase held nothing but purple volumes—the retired Handbooks of Resurrected Dead Men. Chet tugged at one of the books (third from the right on the top shelf, EUGENE TAFT), and the bookcase swung out, revealing another staircase behind the wall. Chet dragged Alex down these stairs to the basement, and the steel door of the holding cell. He unlocked the door and shoved Alex inside. He closed and relocked the door, then took a seat on the concrete floor next to the door and opened Tim’s Handbook.

Fluorescent lights are an unfortunate inevitability in any institution, and doubly so in the modern university. The learning process requires brightly lit environs, but not just any kind of bright light—it needs flat, shadowless light, light that comes from nowhere but simply is. Shadows are a distraction. The light must not mimic natural light; it must give no indication of the time of day. The light must contain no information. The cheapest way to achieve this is with fluorescent tubes. Fluorescent lights have the added benefit of giving the rooms they light a sterile green cast, which students will naturally associate with hospitals, which association will encourage them to remain quiet and docile, open to the unquestioned receipt of information.

The fluorescent tubes used at UNWG are supplied by Barlow Bulb & Tube Co., the CEO of which is a UNWG alumnus and generous contributor. Mr. Barlow, however, is a notorious pennypincher, and has outfitted his fluorescent tubes with both cheap magnetic ballasts and a low-quality cathode emission coating, which results in a noticeable flicker in the light. The flicker becomes even more pronounced at the end of the tube’s life, and has been known to induce trance-like states in students subjected to prolonged exposure to the flickering bulbs.

Chet closed the book and let his head fall back against the wall. He didn’t want to go back upstairs, not yet.aHandbook Hand

© 2006 Gardner Linn