The Boy in the Tunnel

by Gardner Linn

8.

“My roommate’s kind of a Jesus freak.”

“Everybody’s gotta be something. I spent most of last year trying to look like Marilyn Manson,” Jordan Levitt told her brother. She was a sophomore at the University of Georgia, a few hours away in Athens, and the only family member Tim was still in contact with.

“Yeah, I remember last Christmas.”

“The look on Mom’s face was almost worth looking retarded for five months. I’m still making up for that shitty first impression.”

“Have you talked to Mom lately?”

“If by ‘lately’ you mean ‘this year,” yes. If you mean since the summer, no.”

“I thought you were her favorite.”

“Please. She actually drove you to campus, right? She hasn’t done anything that nice for me in years.”

“I guess. You going home for Christmas?”

“I think I’m staying here with Sam.”

“Sam?”

“Yeah, Sam.”

“All right.”

“What about you? Any young ladies you need your big sister to approve of?”

“Not really...”

“Not really? What’s her name?”

Tim untwisted a kink in the phone cord. He looked in the mini-fridge, which had been empty for a week.

“Joanie.”

“Joanie. Jooooaaanie.”

“Stop it.”

“Tim and Joanie.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m just kidding. She sounds lovely.”

“She’s a volleyball player.”

“Just like Mom!”

“Mom played volleyball?”

“Just kidding. When do I get to meet Joanie?”

“She’s not my girlfriend or anything.”

“Fine.”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, I’ve got a long weekend coming up. What say I come up to see you?”

Tim wanted his sister to come see him. Tim wanted her to see him in a new habitat where he, not her, was the expert, the pioneer, the one who blazed the trail. He wanted her to see that he was an adult now. Which would be great, if only it were true.

9.

Kenya pushed open the door of Miss R 237 as slowly as she could, trying to avoid the creak of the historic hinges. She took off her shoes and padded across the hardwood floor barefoot. When her knee brushed the side of her mattress, she sat down, took off her jeans, and crawled under the blanket.

“Kenya?”

“You’re awake?”

“Where have you been?”

Kenya turned on the lamp. Across the room, Joanie blinked in the new light.

“Out.”

“Whatever.”

“Exactly.”

Joanie sat up in bed and looked at the door, still ajar. “You weren’t even going to close the door?”

Kenya rolled her eyes and jumped out of bed. She slammed the door and threw the deadbolt. “Happy?”

“Have you been avoiding me?”

“No.”

“I haven’t talked to you in two days.”

“Have you been avoiding me?”

“No.”

“Then great. We’re not avoiding each other.” Now that she’d failed to return to the room undetected, Kenya realized she wasn’t tired at all. She pulled her jeans back on.

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know. I’m not tired.”

“Listen, Kenya, what’s going on? Why weren’t you at practice yesterday?”

Kenya wanted to say something like “Why do you care, now that you’ve got that Tim guy,” but how dumb would that be to get in a fight over some dude when that wasn’t even the problem? And what if Joanie was all jealous of her hanging out with Chet? How lame and obvious would that be, for a couple of dumb guys to break up best friends? Kenya figured she might as well just get this over with now.

“I overslept. I guess nobody thought about waking me up.”

“I tried, but you—“

“Whatever. That’s not even the problem. After I got up, I noticed we were out of gunpowder.”

“So?”

“So? You tell me. We still had plenty last time I checked.”

“I didn’t take it, if that’s what you mean.”

“Okay.”

“I didn’t.”

“Fine.

“I know you think I took it, but I didn’t, because what kind of asshole would I be to take your shit like that? So don’t even accuse me of taking it, because you know I’m not that kind of asshole. I’m insulted you would even think it was me.”

“Well, it wasn’t me.”

“Wasn’t me either.”

“Glad we got that cleared up.” Kenya really wanted to make some crack about Joanie’s tiny-ass boyfriend—not out of spite, but out of curiosity. And it would give her a chance to tell Joanie about Chet. God, she hated that name, Chet. What an awful name.

“But you ordered some more, right?”

Kenya shook her head. “Already got some.”

Fear blanched Joanie’s face. Any ill feelings she had toward Joanie were washed away. “You didn’t—“

“I did.”

“Kenya, I’m sorry—“

“Don’t worry about it.” Kenya stepped into her flip-flops and opened the door. “I’m going for a walk. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

Kenya left the room. As soon as the door clicked shut, Joanie reached for a ballpoint pen and began disassembling it.

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

The light was on in the JFK Sex Room next door. The lights in the historic rooms were supposed to be on timers that shut them off at 9:00 pm, but here it was two in the morning and the JFK Sex Light was on. Kenya stopped, perplexed, in front of the open door, in which a velevet rope was strung at waist height. The room looked all the other rooms in Mary Rutherford: two plain single beds with thin mattresses, two battered wood desks, two mismatched dressers. A fountain pen and sheaf of Presidential stationery were in disarray on the desk, as if Kennedy had just dashed off a stately address and rushed to deliver it.

Kenya registered the oddness of the light being on and turned to leave when something caught her eye—a glint of light from something under the bed near the closet. It was too small to see what it was from the doorway. Kenya looked both ways down the hall. Everything was empty and still.

Kenya stepped over the velvet rope and crossed the room. She got down on her hands and knees and reached under the bed. She found the object and pulled it out. She laughed when she saw what it was: a condom wrapper.

“They’re gonna have to change the historical marker,” she muttered.

Kenya was about to stand up when she heard footsteps in the hall. They were heavy and solid—the footsteps of a large man in boots, not a girl going to the bathroom in her flip-flops in the middle of the night. They sounded like they were heading right for the JFK room.

Kenya knew she couldn’t get caught in that room. The Handbook made it clear the historic rooms were off-limits at all times; she’d get suspended from the team, at least. She did the only thing she could do: she crawled under the bed.

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

The maps posted all over Wintertree Hall suited the needs of most residents, but there were areas of the dorm that left either intentionally vague or absent altogether. The Department of University Housing offices, for instance, were represented by a large irregular blank area, kind of like an L with blocky polyps growing from it, with no indication of how one would reach these offices. That was just how DUH wanted it.

Chet was not a naïve freshman, however, and he had long ago discovered (via a drunk, highly suggestible RA) the winding path to the DUH offices, which were themselves a maze of interconnected rooms and hallways. While Kenya was walking out on Joanie, Chet and Dick were cutting a sheet of yellow butcher paper from the rack along the north wall of the Craft Room.

“How long?”

“Twelve feet should do it.”

“Go find the big markers.”

If Chet or Dick had known about Drew’s cheerleading career, they might have solicited his help, despite the fact this mission was part of Dick’s grand plan to humiliate him, for this kind of large-scale bannermaking was nearly beyond Dick’s abilities. The markers were more like spongy paintbrushes and dripped ink all over, turning the hoped-for semiprofessional banner into something more like a Jackson Pollock painting. Not to mention Dick’s truly atrocious handwriting, made worse by the thin handles of the markers, designed for more feminine hands.

“This is total bullshit, Chet. We should just pay to get a sign made.”

“’We’ aren’t paying for anything. You can pay if you want.”

Dick grumbled and re-inked a marker.

“What’s a ghurgh?”

“That says ‘church.’”

“Are you sure?”

“You could help, you know, instead of criticizing everything I do.”

“I got you down here. You’re on your own with the arts and crafts.”

Chet hopped off the counter and wandered out of the Craft Room into the main DUH hall. He had been down here a few times before—once with the highly suggestible RA, who as it turned out had a thing for butcher paper. He had also broken into the records room and removed a few of the more incriminating write-ups from his file. It was on that expedition that he had made what was so far the most amazing discovery of his college experience: the Surveillance Room.

At the opposite end of the hall from the Craft Room was a room whose walls were composed entirely of video screens, each one showing a view from a different camera in one of the four dorms. There were probably 300 screens in that room, and 300 corresponding cameras scattered throughout the Family Delmonico. Chet strolled into the room and surveyed the screens. Most of them showed empty tableaux: the various lobbies and common rooms, devoid of residents at this late hour. An I Love Lucy rerun played to an empty TV lounge in Hayes Hall; a lone sock tumbled in a dryer in the Wintertree laundry room. A Sluke security-desk monitor worked on a crossword. The quad was covered from thirty angles, none of which displayed anything but moonlit grass.

Cameras were mounted in a few dozen residential rooms, unbeknownst to the residents, as far as Chet knew. In Hayes 145, a pimply freshman masturbated in the top bunk while his lower-bunk roommate gritted his teeth and pretended to sleep. All of the RAs had cameras in their rooms; Chet’s RA Dragan was awake, drinking vodka from a mason jar and staring directly at the camera.

An anguished groan came from the other room. “Fuck, now I’ve gotta start over again.”

Chet rolled his eyes and continued watching the screens. When he had found the Surveillance Room, last year, he had checked each and every screen to make sure that no cameras were pointed at the DUH offices. He didn’t want these excursions recorded. Luckily, DUH didn’t seem to enjoy spying on itself, though, Chet theorized, there could be another super-secret Double-Surveillance Room he didn’t know about. But he’d been coming down here for nearly a year, and so far no DUH stormtroopers had dragged him away to their underground detention facility or anything, so he felt pretty safe.

The most interesting thing going on in the Family tonight was the little scene unfolding on Mary Rutherford 2-North. A man in a dark suit—who had apparently materialized out of nowhere, as Chet had not seen him enter the building (or perhaps emerged from a female student’s room, in direct violation of the Handbook’s No Post-Midnight Mixed-Gender Fraternization rule)—walked down the second-floor hall in the direction of the JFK Historic Room. He stepped over the velvet rope into the room, flashed the lights on and off three times, and sat on the bed nearest the closet. On the grainy black & white video, the man could be anybody, but Chet thought he looked familiar.

Movement on a screen to his left caught Chet’s eye. A pale woman with dark hair was walking up the stairs to the cupola on the roof of Sluke Hall. She looked to be in her late twenties—definitely not a student—and was carrying a serious-looking flashlight, the kind that’s like a big aluminum truncheon.

The woman ascended into the cupola and flashed the flashlight three times. The man in the JFK room rose from the bed and flashed the lamp again. The woman took out a cell phone and dialed. The security cameras didn’t have audio, but the phone in the JFK room must have rung, because the man answered.

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

One thing they don’t teach you in college about hiding under the bed, particularly a dorm-room bed, is that there isn’t much separating you from anyone sleeping or, just for example, sitting on the bed. Particularly if that person is a man well above the 200-pound mark. When he sat down on the thin mattress, he drove the pointed springs straight into Kenya’s back, and it was all she could do to keep from screaming out in pain. She had never known such relief as when he rose to answer the ringing phone.

“Glad to see we’re in agreement. As of now, the wheels are in motion.” The man hung up the phone and sighed, a deep, resigned exhalation that turned into a smoker’s cough. He turned off the lamp and left the room.

Kenya waited another ten minutes before she felt sure the man wasn’t coming back.

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

Though the light in the JFK room was off, the camera’s night-vision captured everything in grainy, ghostly green. Chet kept that screen in his peripheral vision as he tracked the man down the hall. He jumped from screen to screen—the different angles on the Miss R second-floor hallway—and then, all of a sudden, he disappeared. Chet was annoyed, but not surprised. Miss R surely had her fair share of hidden passageways. The pale woman had already disappeared from the Sluke cupola.

Chet pondered this bizarre little long-distance tête-à-tête. If two people wanted to have a telephone conversation, surely there were easier ways. There was no need to go through all that clock & dagger bullshit—

Unless, of course, they wanted to be seen. If they wanted this meeting to be recorded on DUH’s surveillance tapes, which (Chet had learned, long story) were edited into a thirty-minute highlight tape every morning for review by DUH Head Ron Marston and the four Residence Life Coordinators. Whoever they were, they were trying to send a message, one that Chet had intercepted early.

That’s when Chet realized who the man reminded him of. It was Avery Barlow, the Secretary of the Exterior, the presiding officer of the Nine Dead Men.

But before Chet could process this information, he was distracted by movement in the JFK Room. A long, lean figure scuttled out from under the bed, stood up and brushed herself off. She looked around the dark room, then turned toward the camera mounted in the closet’s doorknob, and even in the hazy green night-vision, Chet could not help but recognize the face of his girlfriend. Or the girl he was dating. Or whatever.

© 2005 Gardner Linn