A Lite Too Bright

by Samuel Miller

  “They don’t know about this room,” Jack said, moving dangerously close to me. “Unless I tell them about it.” His eyes roamed the high ceilings. Every few seconds, I glanced at the gun on the table, but Jack hadn’t looked once. “Come with us, Arthur. Let’s go find your grandfather.”

  The thought flickered for a single second before I responded, with all the volume and resolve I could find. “No.”

  “No?”

  “No, absolutely, fuck no.” I looked down. I was closer to the gun than he was. If I made a lunge, I could grab it before he knew what was happening, but I had no plan after that. I’d never fired a gun before, and shooting someone with the police ten feet away would effectively end my life as well.

  “You don’t understand.” I could feel Jack’s temperature rising, spiking and then cooling back to his confident default setting. “This is happening with or without you.” He got louder as he spoke. “We knew this was coming, and now that we’ve found it . . .”

  “Good luck without me.” I barely felt conscious as I spoke. “Looks like it’s working out so far.”

  “You know, it may not mean anything to you, but you’ve got a name that means something,” he said, steering into his rage, winding around the table back toward me. “You were chosen for this. Your grandfather was an extraordinary man, and you owe it to him to continue that. I’m giving you a chance, and I’d recommend you take it, because you do anything short of changing the world, and people are gonna start to wonder if you’re actually an Arthur Louis Pullman.” He stopped, his face hovering three feet in front of mine. “I guess maybe that’s not a problem for you, though, is it? Nobody doubts your relation.”

  “Because my grandpa is actually my grandpa.”

  “Don’t you—” Jack’s evenness slipped, and his right arm shot up toward my neck. Before I could move either arm, he’d thrown me against a chair by the collar. “Trust me. You do not wanna fuck with us.”

  “Who’s us?” I asked. “You’re the only—”

  He drove his hand farther into the base of my throat and I felt the air escape me. “You don’t know shit!” he shouted into my face, and with one final twist of his knuckle, he let go.

  He stumbled back a few steps, shaking his head, a smile returning to his face. I clung to the ground and Jack stared down over me with manufactured pity. “I’m sure you think it’s cute, and safe,” he said. “Being all cynical like that. But you’re not doing shit. All you’re contributing to the world is . . . nothing. The people who matter, who actually deserve their names . . .” He grabbed the gun from the table and dropped it back into his belt without finishing the thought, instead nodding to the clue. “Keep that. You deserve a souvenir. I’ll tell your grandpa you say hi.”

  He propped the door open on his way out.

  As soon as his figure disappeared, I threw my backpack over my shoulder and followed, inching around the frame and into the small hallway.

  The library was chaos. Everyone else on the second floor looked terrified, huddled together out of the way of the officers. Two of them sprinted past at different intervals and I hugged myself to the wall. Lying or not, whatever the police had come to search for, they hadn’t found it.

  “Officers, there’s a back room in that corner.” The voice was Jack’s. “I think I might have seen him go in there.”

  A pair of hands grabbed me from behind and pulled me backward into the closet.

  “Idiot,” Mara whispered, her breath warm against my ear.

  I shook her off me, clattering over a mop bucket. “What—what are you doing? How long have you been waiting?”

  We both held our breath as three officers charged past us and into the Great Purpose room.

  “We don’t have a whole lot of options here,” she said. “Either we try to muscle out the front . . .”

  “Or?”

  “If we can get them out of that room, I can get them out.”

  I watched the officers through the open door of the meeting room, rifling through cupboards. “Why are you doing this?” I asked.

  A flashlight running past threw a single streak of light across her face. She was smiling, the same terrible and impossible smile. “I told you already. This belongs to you, not them.”

  I watched several more officers run past, felt Mara’s body against mine, considering the world in front of me and the world behind me. “Okay.” I nodded.

  “Are you sure that you’re up for this?” she breathed.

  I nodded again.

  “Because you can go home, if you want. You can turn yourself in, and—”

  “No. I’m not going home.”

  Mara swallowed. “I need you to follow me,” she whispered. “And not turn around. Okay?”

  Before I could move, she sprang upward and out the door, grabbing the edge of the display case as she ran, forcing it to come crashing down, glass shattering. I took off after her.

  The colors around me blurred. My eyes focused on the back of Mara’s head, her beanie like a blackened orb guiding me through the maze of books, diving right when she dove right, swimming in and out of displays and shelves. Behind us, there were shouts, and soon, they weren’t just behind us.

  All around, officers lunged for her. As we came flying around one corner, someone managed to grab ahold of her jacket, pulling her backward and slowing her forward momentum, his face focused on where she was attempting to run. Without thinking, I threw my right arm in the air, yanking a hardcover book off a display and slamming it into the back of his head. The pain forced him to recoil. He dropped the back of her jacket. Onward we flew.

  Somewhere in the chaos behind me, I heard Kaitlin shouting, “You’re running from the police! Who even are you anymore?”

  But I was running too fast for her words to catch up. All the chaos was in our wake; the uncontrollable difficulty of the world stayed a step behind me. All that was inside of me was adrenaline and all that was ahead of me was Mara. I felt a near smile creep onto my face.

  Mara led the chase expertly. She wound us up a far staircase to the third floor, then back down two flights into the enormous main room of the library. She ducked us through the giant mass of library patrons, shedding her hat and exploding out the other end where no officers expected her to be.

  There were moments when I thought they had given up, that no one was chasing us anymore, but every time, another officer would leap out in front of us, out of the vast openness of the library, forcing us down aisle after aisle of books.

  Mara wound our way back around to the “Great Surplus” door, the exact spot where the chase had begun, and froze. There were no officers in sight. Leaping over the glass, she dove into the meeting room, and I turned, searching for officers in pursuit. I couldn’t see any, but I could hear them, everywhere.

  “Anybody have a visual?”

  “He’s gotta be around here somewhere.”

  “Both of them, some girl was running, too.”

  Mara was kneeling in front of the door of the stove, her hands inside of it, and I stayed at the door.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” I shouted across the room. “A fire?”

  “You think she’s some sort of accomplice?”

  “Gotta be. You know how these people work.”

  I tried to sink into the door frame, away from where two officers went sprinting past, their boots crunching against the glass. The case—my grandfather’s display—had shattered in front of where I was standing, and his Tribune obituary had slid toward me. The logo caught my eye, a crescent moon cupping the T, the same one that had been at the top of the article that led me to Omaha. My eyes fell to the bottom—Lou Thurman, political writer and contributor to this newspaper—

  “Holy shit. Mara—”

  I turned to her as she yanked the door off the stove. “In,” she barked, gesturing to the invisibly black interior.

  “What?”

  She jumped in front of me, clutching a bar above the door and lowering her legs
slowly into the open front grate. I watched her legs, her torso, and finally her head disappear.

  “Did we get everybody evacuated yet?”

  “Yep, the place is clear. Just be careful with your shot; this kid’s not worth wounding an officer.”

  My stomach flipped—your shot? Wounding an officer? Who did they think I was?

  I pulled myself up and lowered my legs into the hatch. Sure enough, there was a solid concrete step a foot below where the bottom of the stove should have been. Past it, another step, leading down into complete darkness. I lay there for ten seconds, stunned. It was an escape hatch. Great Purpose had built themselves stairs.

  “Where’d that noise come from?”

  “I think they went back in here!”

  It was all I needed. I edged myself down the stairs, feeling with my heel for each next step, the top of Mara’s head in front of me.

  I counted steps as we went . . . five, six, seven . . . the world was now in total darkness; the only sound was Mara breathing behind me.

  “I know where we’re going,” I whispered to her. “Chicago. I know where to go.”

  “We can’t take the Zephyr tomorrow,” she whispered. “Jack will know we’re going east, and we’ll be sitting ducks all the way to Chicago.”

  “We have to,” I whispered back, twelve, thirteen, fourteen stairs deep, feeling upward, my hand slamming into mildew-covered concrete two feet above our heads. There was no room to stand up, only to slide. “That was the train my grandfather would have—”

  “They know that!” she spat back.

  Up the stairwell, we heard shouting. “There are stairs in here!”

  “Then what?” I asked, and my heel connected with solid ground.

  I put my hand on her waist as she felt her way through the dark. The ceiling overhead must have been five feet, just tall enough for us to rush through, heads down, hands outstretched to keep us from running into anything ahead of us.

  “Then we leave tonight,” she said. “A different train. One he wouldn’t have taken.” She stopped abruptly in front of me. “Tell me that’s okay.”

  Before I could respond, my hand slammed into something wooden. There were boards, up and down the hatch, preventing us from moving forward. We could hear the police sliding down behind us.

  “Does Jack know about this escape?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  My head pulsed with every amplified heartbeat. “So why wouldn’t he be here waiting for us?”

  “Because he doesn’t know you know about it.” She threw open the hatch, and crisp, fresh air from the outside world rushed in. Behind the library was a wide patch of grass, flowing directly into the backyards of neighboring houses. Over all of it, the sun was beginning to set burnt yellow. The horizon burned orange in front of us. “He doesn’t know about me.”

  She blew past me, and I followed, away from the library, away from the police, away from Great Purpose, and back to the train.

  7.

  THE BACK OF the 7:55 p.m. Mid-State Cruiser from Omaha’s downtown station to Chicago Union was empty.

  It was a different model of train, smaller, with no observation or dining car, just a small desk for snacks at the front of the coach section. The train only ran between Omaha and Chicago, and made the trip twice every day. The station at boarding had been so quiet, with one attendant at one door taking tickets, it was as if the train snuck into Omaha itself and stole us away in the darkness.

  “Looks like we’re in the clear.” Mara collapsed into the seat next to me and dropped a postcard with a photo of downtown Omaha in front of her, sizing it up and clicking a pen with conviction. “Just one couple, about fifteen rows ahead, and they don’t look like they’d give us much of a fight.”

  I watched her carefully trace a British address into the “Deliver To” section and begin to doodle around the edges of the card, small stars and hearts and wavy lines connecting them. I wasn’t sure how to feel about her now that she’d left and come back again, inadvertently showing me the best and worst of her.

  “Dear Dad.” She spoke as she wrote. “In Omaha, and I’ve taken up work with . . . a library conservation unit.”

  She smiled to herself. I was confused by her motivations, confused by her patterns and mannerisms, confused by her convictions, certain only of the mystery that surrounded her. It was a mystery she chose and reveled in, but the pieces I had discovered felt altogether incomplete and inconsistent. Why leave and then come back? Why throw something away, then risk everything to save it?

  “You’d love Omaha; it’s cold and wide and exceptionally American, but just dreary enough for your depressing British heart.”

  Looking at her, the Mara I knew felt like a postcard herself: a carefully selected image, representing a much more complicated thing; a thing so overwhelming that it preferred to be understood only by carefully edited still frames, observed at a distance.

  “I’ve made a friend. I think you’d like him. Love, your daughter.”

  “Why did you come back?” I asked as she signed her name in swooping cursive. “Why help me, instead of them?”

  “I told you, because you want this for your grandfather, and they want it for themselves.”

  “Yeah, but—you know them. You are them, remember? You had a future with them. And you decided to throw that away, for . . . what? Honor, or something?”

  Mara turned the postcard over in her hands. “I don’t know. I don’t like questions like that.”

  I waited.

  She shifted uncomfortably. “I’ve been with them for three years. Because of Leila, of course. I grew up with all of her ideas, and her anger, and her love of American protest culture and your grandpa and . . . she didn’t fit in Somerset, neither of us did, so we were always scheming these ways to get out, or things we would do if we were in the real world. ‘If you want to do something important, you’ve got to do something for everyone,’ that was what she said. Actually I think your grandpa might have said that.

  “So it seemed so obvious, three years ago, that this is what I was meant to do. Follow her to America, follow her into this big, beautiful, righteous, communal, revolutionary . . . thing. And I’ve stuck it out, through all of the shitty jobs, and grunt work, and relegations to Nevada, and—still, I don’t think anyone ever looked at me seriously enough to think I was a real part of it.

  “So when I found you, and the journals, I thought—I guess I figured it was some kind of magic that would inspire everyone again, and give us this new purpose, and it would all make sense, and I’d be the one—I know it’s selfish to say out loud, but I thought I’d be the one who would be in charge of it, and get to feel good about it. Like I’d actually done something, rather than just . . . been there. But I guess I didn’t really think that all the way through.”

  “What happened?”

  “It wasn’t like that.” She shrugged. “Jack took them, and immediately began acting as though they were his, and they were some kind of sign to him. I told him I thought that I should be the one holding on to them, for safekeeping, and he said that my sister would be disgusted if she could see how selfish I was being.”

  “Where is your sister, anyway?” I interrupted. “Couldn’t she just . . .”

  Mara looked up at me, small and questioning and almost smiling.

  “Oh . . . oh, right.”

  “Yeah.” She fidgeted. “Two years ago. She tried to drive her car drunk.”

  I nodded for a long time, afraid to look up. “I’m sorry.”

  Mara shrugged, fiddling with the corners of the postcard in her hands. “It’s okay. That place doesn’t even feel like her anymore.

  “That’s the other thing. I thought your grandpa’s journals might remind Jack of what we were doing this for, but they just did the opposite. Leila only wanted to inspire people to advocacy, building something for everyone, you know? Jack wants to make noise. He puts his friends’ lives at risk for basically no reason, just to make people pay at
tention. He’ll say he doesn’t have anything personal to gain, and that he’s just answering the call or whatever. I think he just wants to be famous.”

  I watched her continue to trace circles on the postcard in front of her, far away from where we were. “What do you want?”

  She didn’t respond right away. “I want to do something important,” she said, settling on staring out the window.

  I nodded again. It all made sense, the best and worst parts of her, and it made it impossible to find the animosity I felt toward her.

  “Your turn,” she said, turning back to me. “Kaitlin Lewis.”

  “Mara—”

  “Did you see me save you from that library?”

  I sighed. “She cheated on me. With my best friend since like kindergarten. We all worked together, I told him everything about her, and then one day—bam. She said she’d slept with somebody else, and I didn’t even have to ask who it was. Turns out, it was a bunch of people, and he was just one of them. And when she told me, I lost it. I hit a wall in her room, and she said I was trying to hit her, and I guess I might as well have been, for all that I could control myself. If I couldn’t stop her from fucking Mason, I couldn’t really control anything.”

  Mara smiled, strangely satisfied. “You can’t,” she said. “But at least we’re all gonna burn up and die someday, right?”

  I pushed it—all of it, the journals and the purpose and the gun on the table—as far from my brain as possible, counting streetlights as they passed, and when tunnels came, counting graffiti. I’d always wondered about the people who drew it; was it some kind of rush, knowing you were doing something illegal? Or was it a desperate attempt at making something permanent, so they could be remembered, however faintly?

  “Why does he spell words wrong?”

  Mara was looking over the first clue under the narrow beam of the reading light. “See, sometimes he uses an ‘a’ where there shouldn’t be an ‘a,’” she continued, as if noticing it for the first time. “‘Dask’ . . . oh, look here, ‘angals.’ Why is that?”