Chapter 27
1776
Yes, but a week after that painful scene in the Common Room, draw all the zeros she likes in the dust, Louis comes back from the depths with a grimy triumphant face. He stares at Helen in silence. Of course when someone doesn’t hide being in possession of a tremendous secret and waits in silence to be asked about it, you have to do the polite thing and ask about it.
“You’ll see,” he says. He says that to all of them.
The next morning Louis, still great with his tremendous secret, guides Max and Seymour into black twists and turns, down more unexplored staircases, down and down, never so deep before.
Just one little problem, he says.
Half a day later they labor through a zone of great destruction. They’re forced to halt at the brink of a collapsed corridor. Their flashlight beams poke into blackness in all directions, overhead, below, on all sides. Their spared corridor is like a spur of rock overhanging dark void.
Louis points at a door with a faint number on the far side of the chasm where their corridor resumes intact. Incredibly, ceiling bulbs illuminate the door despite the nearby devastation. How had the wiring survived?
“What do you see?” Louis asks in understated triumph.
“Another goddam big hole,” says Max.
“Watch your language. Who gives a hang about the hole? The room on the other side of the hole, I mean, the room, the door, the number on the door. What’s the number on the door on the other side of the hole?”
Seymour squints hard. By this time he’s learned to be wary of hope. The idea is slowly crystallizing in his mind that too much hope puts a hex on things. It must be Helen’s influence. She’s contagious. He decides to avoid her as best he can. In the meantime he says what he thinks he sees, not what he wants to see.
“I see 7776.”
“Get new specs, perfessor. All them books. That ain’t 7776 you see. That’s 1776 you see. Independence Day. Tell the perfessor what you see, Pilsudski.”
Max squints hard. “Might be 1776 like you say. I make it 1770 though. Or, wait, maybe 7776, like he says.”
It’s not that Max is suspicious of hope. It’s just that he’s forgotten the tremendous private non-historical significance of 1776 and has become a little nearsighted as well.
“Blind as a pickled bat, you too. No wonder you had that there truck accident of yours that landed you here, Pilsudski.”
The three of them argue about it for a while. Finally Seymour says: “OK, have it your way, 1776.” He says that casually but oh how he wants it to be Louis’ way, Louis’ way out to way out there. “How do we cross over, though?”
“That’s the little problem. We’ll find a way.”
“Hope it won’t take more than ten years.”
Of course when they return they tell the women about it.
Helen says: “Oh, that’s interesting.” After a politely interested interval she returns to her parliamentary debates or statistics or whatever it is.
Margaret hugs Louis and wants to go down immediately. A tunnel out is surer than dancing for a way out. It’s been a long long time since she last encountered the Prefect, even in dreams.
“Got to solve a little problem first,” says Louis, breaking free of her.
“Technical problem,” says Seymour. He’s tempted to add: “Won’t take more than ten years to solve it.” But he doesn’t dare do that to Margaret. Why doesn’t she ever hug him? He’d take more time breaking free than Louis did.
Anyhow, Seymour’s wrong. It takes no more than an estimated month for Louis to whirl an iron-weighted rope over the chasm, finally catching it on a bit of solid-looking rubble and then repeat the operation a dozen times. He firmly attaches the free ends to doorknobs on their side.
“Well, all set to go,” he finally declares, clapping his hands free of dust. Max and Seymour stare at the result in silence. It looks like a gigantic crazy hammock. No, more like a try at a web by a giant stoned spider. No harder than climbing up the rigging of a sailing ship, Louis assures them. Seymour and Max had never climbed up the rigging of a sailing ship.
The moment has come. Louis grabs the sledgehammer, pivots on his heel like an Olympic contender and lets fly. The sledgehammer thumps down on the far side of the chasm, yards to spare. He does the same thing to the shovel. Hurled like a javelin, the crowbar follows, clattering, yards to spare.
Then Louis himself follows. Belly-down on the swaying bucking network, he grabs and pulls himself forward. In the gloom he resembles a wounded insect struggling in a web. He’s half way across the chasm when one of the ropes snaps. The net lurches and nearly shoots Louis into the void. He catches hold of a rope. Dangling over the chasm and rising and falling like a yoyo, he yells “No problem!” to the terrorized duo on the other side.
As he hoists himself back to relative safety, his saucepan miner’s lamp slips off his head. “Damnation!” he exclaims in a rare outburst of profanity. He’d been proud of that artfully tinkered lamp which is now plunging into the abyss. It takes ten seconds before they hear the faint crash below.
Louis makes it to the far shore with no further incident. He pulls out his spare flashlight and trains the beam on the net. He barks orders to Max and Seymour to follow. They are very reluctant. He barks and barks till they do follow, first Max, inch-worming his way to the other side, moaning and sweating like a horse and concentrating his thoughts not on the void below but on Bess.
Then Seymour, faint with fright at the sway of the giant hammock above that ten-second drop, like the ten-story drop that had ended his first life long ago. Midway across he has a violent urge to urinate. But with both hands clutching the ropes, how can he? When he reaches the other side the urge vanishes.
Louis leads them solemnly to the door. He blows the number free of dust.
The number of the door, no possible doubt now, is 1776. The door, which looks very solid, is locked.
Louis goes over to pick up the tools. The private non-historical significance of 1776 dawns on Max now. He can’t wait. He backs up, takes a deep rasping breath and charges shoulder-first against the door. It proves to be no more resistant than moldy balsa. In an explosion of fragments Max bursts through and hurtles headlong into the dark room.
A second later Louis and Seymour hear a resounding hollow sound from inside the room, the marvelous hollow sound they’d been knocking for on a million solid walls all these years. They click on their flashlights, step over Max’s body and train their beams on the wall. They see the rough plaster job, cracked from the impact of Max’s head, that poorly conceals the mouth of the tunnel. They dance in front of it, knocking and knocking their knuckles sore and getting the precious confirming hollow sounds.
Max sits up unsteadily, groans and rubs his bleeding head. He hears the sound of what’s behind the wall, forgets his head, gets up and grabs the sledgehammer.
Louis hesitates and then disarms him. They can’t leave now, he explains. The women don’t even know where the tunnel is. We got to go back and tell them. Then we’ll all leave together.
But there’s no authority to what Louis says, no iron ring to his voice, no Marine jaw-thrust to it. It sounds more like a plea than a command.
Max bellows in protest. Seymour sides with Max. He argues that of course they’ll return to the women but first they have to know if the tunnel isn’t a dead-end, a few yards excavated and then abandoned. No use raising false hopes. If it’s the genuine tunnel they’ll stop at the final wall. There has to be another wall at the other end. The tunnel can’t be open on the real world for real people to wander in and wind up here like us poor unreal bastards.
Seymour breaks off, bothered by something. To emerge, their predecessors had had to smash that final wall. Wouldn’t the outside world, the real world, have noticed the gaping hole?
Louis stands there expressionless for a second. He scowls, shakes his head and sharply orders them to follow him. Leaving the tools on the ground,
he squares his shoulders and turns his back to the wall with military briskness. He’s taken a couple of strides toward the women when he hears the smashing of masonry. Even before he halts and turns about he knows that Max has grabbed the sledgehammer and finished the job his head had begun.
Louis stares at the jagged opening of the tunnel entrance, like a black star, lit up by Seymour’s flashlight. Max crouches and passes through the black star. Seymour follows. Louis hears the long babble of their shouts, multiplied into a joyous insubordinate crowd by the echo. Louis goes up to the black star. Their wagging beams dimly light up a man-high brick vaulted tunnel.
Louis orders them to return. They continue down the tunnel, trotting now. They break into a run. They shout again. Had they sighted the final wall between Paris and here?
“Hey, wait up for me!” Louis yells. His echo repeats the order or plea a dozen times.
Louis passes through the black star, runs hard and finally joins them. He takes command. He makes Max hand over the sledgehammer. “Okay, but like what Stein said, explore the tunnel and then go back to the women. We don’t touch that there second wall if it turns out there really is a second wall. Hey, did you fellers see it?”
No, they hadn’t seen it yet, but expect to any moment. They run on, all three of them. Just beyond the feeble range of their flashlight beams they expect the ultimate wall to loom any moment. Panting, they run on.
The moment becomes a minute.
The minute becomes an hour.
The tunnel goes on and on. They reduce their pace from a run to a trot, then to a trudge, then stop and collapse on the cold concrete and gasp until strength returns. When they get up they don’t run. They begin a dogged long-distance jog. They strain their eyes for scrawled messages of encouragement on the walls but see nothing but bricks.
Bricks and bricks. The tunnel goes on and on, an identical vista of dimly illuminated concrete ground and dingy brick vault bearing no messages. They end by losing all sense of progress. They seem to be marking time on a treadmill, the unchanging tunnel jerking by. Louis orders the other two men to switch off their flashlights. Way things are going, there’s no telling how many batteries they’ll need till they get to the final wall. Then they’ll need juice to light up the return to the women.
“Longest fucking tunnel I ever been in in my life,” Max gasps, hours later. “And boy you can bet I been in plenty of fucking tunnels in my life.”
Probably the longest fucking tunnel in the whole world, Seymour reflects. Of course this tunnel isn’t in the world, just the far mouth of it is but Seymour begins comparing it to real tunnels. Longer, much longer, than the mile-long Lincoln and Holland Tunnels or the Queens-Midtown Tunnel or the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. Longer even than the Simplon Tunnel between Switzerland and Italy, easily ten miles long, that one. What kind of a tunnel is it, though? In the real world there are railroad tunnels, subway tunnels, highway-traffic tunnels, tunnels to transport water or gas or oil. This seems to be a tunnel tunnel, a tunnel for the sake of a tunnel, no sense to it, like everything else here.
Their only guides to the passage of time are the diminishing vitality of Louis’ flashlight batteries, their own diminishing vitality, hunger pangs, the growing stubble on their faces, sleep and defecation. When Louis’ beam illuminates no more than a few feet of brick ahead he changes his batteries, trying to remember the lifespan of batteries. He does it three times. Their stomachs sadistically force them to eat four times. With their bottles of chlorinated water they wash down their elephant balls. At irregular intervals one of them lags behind to defecate in privacy. They sleep twice, huddled together for warmth. When they awaken they have no idea of how long they’ve slept. Hours? Days?
Occasionally they try to guess at the time they’ve spent in the tunnel. Max says a month. That’s an exaggeration says Seymour. He hazards a week, hoping it’s an exaggeration too. Louis, going by the number of elephant balls they’ve gagged on, makes it no more than three days. And during all that time, whatever time was the right time, no sign that earlier generations of Administratively Suspended Americans had ever been here to work on Independence Day.
They go on jogging.
Much later, maybe days later, Louis, in the fore, halts. He waits for Max and Seymour to stumble bleary-eyed to where he stands, lighting up a nearby bit of wall.
They read in the trembling circle of his beam, inscribed in heavy chalked characters: CONROY WAS HERE!
For long seconds the three stand there motionless, wet faces uplifted to the testimony that this is no dead end for the dead, that Independence Day is finally at hand.
They break into a run, singing, each one singing something different, raucous and off-key.
The echo amplifies and corrects the discord into something like a joyous angelic choir in the space ahead.
Good Americans Go to Paris when they Die Page 28