The Knife Thrower

by Steven Millhauser

  4

  As small children we are brought down to the passageways by our parents, who hold us tightly by the hand and point at the dim-shining globed lamps, the soaring walls, the sharply turning paths. It’s as if we were being introduced to the movie theater, or the library, or the nature trails in the north woods, but we’re aware of a difference, for we sense in our parents both a gravity and a quickening that we haven’t sensed before. Some of us are frightened, and pull away, toward the stairway and the sunlight. Others are enchanted, as if they have stepped into a picture in a storybook. Children are forbidden to wander the passageways alone, and it is only in adolescence that we begin to wander freely, seeing in the dark and turning distances images of our secret rapture or despair. As we grow older we tend to spend less time in the passageways, for the cares of life pull us away, and it may happen that some of us recall the winding pathways beneath our town as one recalls some half-forgotten journey far back in the depths of childhood. Often in old age we find ourselves spending more and more hours in the cool passageways, which are believed to be healthful, though a small number of our older citizens avoid them altogether. But even those whose lives are largely passed above are never forgetful of the world below, which seems to tug at the soles of our shoes as we stroll along the clean, sun-sparkling streets.

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  Some say that we descend in order to lose our way. And yet it remains true that never once in the long history of our town has anyone failed to find the way back. For not only do our citizens descend whenever they like through widely scattered openings, but lamplighters in peaked caps move from place to place, to say nothing of the watchmen who quietly make their rounds, resting their thumbs in their broad belts, or the workers in their hard hats and green uniforms, who set up wooden sawhorses and orange safety cones as they clear fallen rocks into wheelbarrows, prop up decaying ceilings, or widen a path with sharp blows of their picks. And even if, as often happens, we wander for hours, or perhaps days, without meeting a soul in the turning dark, there’s always the likelihood of a sudden arch in the wall, leading to a stairway going up. But this once granted, it must be admitted that there is never a sense, in the passageways, of knowing where you are. The pattern of twisting and interconnecting paths, on several levels, is far too complex for anyone to master, and in addition the pattern is always changing, for old passageways become suddenly or gradually impassable, and new wall-openings and small connecting corridors are continually being formed by the fall of rock fragments or the gradual loosening of rock along fault lines—a process regularly enhanced by the workers with their busy picks. One should also keep in mind the frequent burning out of the lamps, despite the vigilance of the lamplighters, and the consequent long stretches of unilluminated darkness. For all these reasons it isn’t too much to say that after the first few twists and turns at the bottom of a familiar stairway we enter uncertain ground. But this is by no means the same thing as losing our way, so that if indeed we descend for that reason, then we continually fail. Perhaps it would be better, for those who hold this theory of descent, to say that we descend in order to have before us the perpetual possibility of losing our way.

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  A further objection presents itself. To say that we descend in order to lose our way, or in order to have before us the perpetual possibility of losing our way, implies that our lives aboveground are simple, orderly, and calm. This is certainly not the case. Although ours is a relatively quiet town, we suffer disease, disappointment, and death as all men and women do, and if we choose to descend into our passageways and wander the branching paths, who dares to say what passion draws us into our dark?

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  Flint and jasper arrowheads, stone axheads, bone fishhooks, ear pendants of stone and shell, an earthenware pot with a circular lip curving outward, a mortar for grinding maize, fire-blackened stones—such are the evidences of Indian life that have been discovered in the dirt paths and rock walls of our passageways, and that today are displayed in a basement room of our historical society. Experts have identified the artifacts as belonging to the Quinnepaug tribe of the Algonquian linguistic stock. We know that the Quinnepaugs had a word for the passageways, meaning either “tunnel” or “channel,” as well as several obscure words apparently referring to particular openings or stairways. What we don’t know is what use the Indians made of the passageways. Some of our historians believe that the Quinnepaugs hid from enemies in the underground dark, while others suggest that rituals of propitiation or prayer may have been conducted below. One school insists that early in their history the Quinnepaugs abandoned the upper world to dwell in the passageways, from which they emerged only to hunt at night and to bury their dead; a dubious offshoot of this school argues that pale, wraith-like descendants of the tribe still live in secret hollows of the walls, dreaming of past glory, and slipping out from time to time to move silently along unfrequented paths. We ourselves, who would like nothing better than to believe in silent Indians haunting our passageways, sometimes try to imagine stern warriors and black-haired squaws moving stealthily behind us in the always branching dark, but when we turn suddenly we see only a shadowy path, a fissured wall, a tremor of blackness.

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  It often happens that citizens of other towns ridicule our passageways, or subject them to sharp attack. The lower air, they say, is unhealthy, and gives to our citizens a certain characteristic and unpleasant pallor. Noxious effluvia, rising from cracks in the ceilings of passageways, seep into our soil, penetrate the roots of vegetables in our gardens, soak into our cellars, and taint the very air breathed by babies in the cradles of our homes. As if such charges weren’t enough to sting us into reply, our passageways are also said to weaken the foundations of our homes, and even to undermine the stability of the entire town, which at any moment is liable to collapse. Although there is no slightest evidence to support such assertions, we carefully refute every charge, conducting extensive tests, hiring outside engineers, studying soil samples, comparing shades of pallor in twenty-six towns. But no sooner have we finished defending ourselves than we find ourselves under attack again. Our passageways, we are told, are useless, or frivolous, or wasteful, or worse. For what purpose can they be said to serve except to distract us from the serious conduct of our lives, and to tempt us toward a kind of childish dreaminess? These are the most dangerous attacks of all, the ones intended to crush our spirit and discredit us in our own eyes. In response to such charges we have learned, over time, the value of silence.

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  Sometimes, when we travel to other towns, we experience a sense of liberation from our passageways. The sidewalks, streets, and parks of alien towns have for us a peculiar charm, a kind of sunny innocence, uninterrupted as they are by stone stairways plunging below. Citizens of these towns, who spend their lives on the surface of the earth, seem to us to have a storybook quaintness about them. But soon the flat streets and sidewalks, stretching levelly away, fill us with unease. We long for our under-paths, which perhaps we haven’t entered for weeks, nor can we rest until we have fled the rigid towns and entered voluptuously our dark, yielding passageways.

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  Although we defend our passageways relentlessly against the lies and misrepresentations of outsiders, it remains true that we ourselves are not without our disagreements. One source of contention is the sheer bareness of the passageways, which strikes some of our more practical citizens as disturbing. From time to time a motion is presented before the town council requesting permission for a soft-drink or hot-dog concession in the empty spaces stretching away below, or for more imaginative enterprises—stationary pushcarts displaying kitchenware or leather boots, a sidewalk café, bookstalls, a new kind of microwave vending machine offering hot roast chicken legs and steaming bagels. The business managers and small merchants who favor such ventures are in no sense fanatics or lunatics intent on betraying the history of our passageways by vulgar acts of commerce. In fact they can and do point to historical precedent
s. Our records show clearly that in the early eighteenth century, young boys hired by merchants and known as hawkers were permitted to roam the passageways with sacks containing biscuits and small raisin cakes called “snappers.” There is also evidence that toward the middle of the century small stalls were set up in certain passageways, a practice that seems to have disappeared after the Revolutionary War. But it was only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that the passageways were suddenly freed from all constraints and opened to the full fury of merchant ambition. On both sides of the wider paths stood stalls and booths with striped awnings selling Panama hats, shirtwaists, cigars in cedarwood boxes, hot peanuts in paper twists, ivory-headed walking sticks, majolica vases, horse blankets, plowshares, spools of thread. Period engravings show mustached men in bowlers and tight-corseted women under broad hats heaped with fruit standing in a crush between long lanes of merchandise piled high on stands, in the glare and sharp shadows cast by lamps hanging from the booths and stalls. An atmosphere of the Oriental bazaar haunts these images. One disturbing sketch shows a horse half-rearing in a narrow passageway that seems to press on both sides as a man in a top hat tries to pull him forward and the horse-dealer stands huddled in a corner holding a fistful of ten-dollar bills. These heady days of business ended abruptly with the great fire of 1901, in which twenty-six people died; in a new law passed the following year, the land beneath our town was declared exempt from business transactions of any kind.

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  But why, we are asked, should commerce be banished from our passageways? What sense does it make? It isn’t a matter of developers harming a lush environment, or destroying valuable wildlife; the only life ever seen below is a thin growth of moss in the artificial light of our oil lamps. Surely a discreet form of commerce, it is suggested, such as an occasional stylish mannequin modeling a dark blue suit or tan trench coat, would not be out of place. Against all such proposals we argue that commerce introduces a distraction into our quiet passageways; that it goes against the spirit of our under-town, which invites solitary and meditative wandering; that in any case it’s unnecessary for merchants to seek space underground, since we continue to invite new businesses into our upper-town and energetically encourage business growth in every way. All such arguments are nothing but variations of a single argument that is never made but always understood: the lower world must at all costs be kept distinct from the upper. The selling of goods is an invasion of the lower world by the upper, an expansion of the town downward. By banishing commerce we assert the absolute separateness of the lower realm, its radical difference, even if we can’t agree, even if we scarcely understand, why that difference matters.

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  Repeated measurements of our passageways have led to conflicting results, in part because very few of the paths end in a clear and decisive way. Some say that all passageways once came to an end at the precise boundaries of our town. Others argue that the passageways, though limited in space, are in effect endless, winding in and out of each other in an intricate design that represents the boundless; a minor and much-ridiculed school claim that the paths wind beneath towns and hills and ocean floors in a great underworld circle of passageways. We who have wandered beneath our town from earliest childhood know that many paths grow narrower and narrower until, without ending, they become impassable. In the shadowy half-dark we peer into the narrow crevices, which vanish in blackness.

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  Now and then it comes about that our passageways are closed for repairs. Blue velvet ropes are stretched across the tops of stairways, or across the lower arches that open onto the passageways. Even though we know that the repairs will last for only a few days, a restlessness comes over us. In the hot summer days we find ourselves retreating to our cool cellars, where we sweep up flakes of plaster that have fallen from the walls, examine the water pipes for signs of rust or leakage, assemble piles of things to be thrown away: old coils of garden hose grown stiff as pipes, dusty damp gift catalogues. Sometimes at night, when we wake and cannot fall back to sleep, we go down to our cellars and walk about in the dark, smelling the familiar damp. In the stillness of the night we hear or imagine we hear a scratching or scraping: the secret digging of tunnels, in the cellars of our town.

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  At times we experience a violent craving for heights, we tunnel wanderers, we under-creepers and travelers in the dark. Then we climb into our attics or onto our sloping roofs, ascend to the belfry of our tallest church and look out past the great iron bell at our streets and rooftops, ride to the top of Indian Hill with a picnic lunch, gaze up with envy at workers at the tops of telephone poles or at the top of the high water tank with its S-shaped stairway. In the sunny offices of travel agencies we find ourselves lingering over glossy brochures showing high white hotels, white-capped blue mountains, wondrous skyscrapers that seem to reach all the way to the sun. We brood over the virtues of sunlight and the upper view, reproach ourselves for our underground lives, our blind burrowing in the dark. But the time comes when the heights displease us; the brightness hurts our eyes and prevents us from seeing; the blue skies beat against our skulls like hammerblows. Puzzled by the failure of the high view, we return with relief to our dark and branching passageways. Sometimes it seems to us that only there, under the ground, do we experience the true exhilaration of height: the town itself, imagined from below.

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  It’s possible, for those who know nothing about our passageways, to imagine them as monotonous, empty, and devoid of surprise. In a superficial sense this is certainly true. The dirt paths are only dirt paths; no decorations or furnishings divert the eye. From behind the next bend, no startling sight (a crystal cave, a minotaur) shocks us into wonder. One might argue that the aisles of a supermarket, bursting with color, are far more exciting than our dull world below. But for those of us who know our passageways, the very thought of monotony is preposterous. For one thing, the passageways are continually widening and narrowing, so that you experience distinct and always changing sections. For another, the rocky walls are rough and irregular, marked by fissures, recesses, ledges, cracks, bulges, nooks, and cave-like openings; and the paths, though smooth in a general way, are pitted here and there, littered with small stones, and spotted with dampness or small puddles. In addition, our passageways are repeatedly intersected by other passageways, which lead off in other directions, so that very quickly you lose a sense of familiarity and feel that you’ve embarked on a new journey; and new passageways are always being discovered by workers as they repair older passageways, which themselves are continually changing as a result of natural forces and the picks of workers. And when you keep in mind that these always changing paths don’t move on a single level, but from time to time dip downward and pass under other passageways; and when you also keep in mind that this vertical system of passageways is so tangled and complex that there is no agreement on the number of levels, some maintaining that there are three distinct levels, others four, or five, or two, and still others—a minority, to be sure—insisting that under the lowest level there is always another level, awaiting discovery; then it ought to be clear why we never experience monotony in our passageways, but on the contrary a sensation of pleasurable uncertainty, of surprise and adventure. When all is said and done, what we feel, when we go down among our passageways, is a sensation of expansion—as if some inner constriction were suddenly bursting.

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  Some years ago a town meeting was held to consider this proposal: that we leave our homes and move permanently into the passageways. Arguments of all kinds were advanced by the advocates of the proposal, who claimed that our repeated descents were proof of our deepest desires. It was even said by some that the town itself served no purpose other than to make descent possible. Such intemperate arguments were easy to ridicule but difficult to refute, for all of us feel the deep attraction of the passageways and can, at a pinch, imagine a world without our town, but not without our passageways. The strongest count
erargument was therefore not a defense of the town, or praise of the virtues of life in the upper world, or a meticulous explanation of the impracticability of living below the ground, but rather this: our absolute certainty that, should we actually leave the upper world and move into our passageways, not a week would pass before, in the blackness beneath the dark paths, we began digging new, deeper passageways.

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  Sometimes, rounding the bend of a passageway, you come upon a lamplighter. The event is so rare that it’s accounted a piece of good luck, like seeing a praying mantis on a weedstalk in a field. In their dark green uniforms and peaked caps the lamplighters look very much alike, an effect exaggerated by their silence—they nod, but never speak—and by the fact that they are all slow-moving elderly men, of approximately the same size. The tradition of the lamplighter is as old as our town, though their duties have changed: the earliest lamplighters placed flaming torches (pinewood dipped in tar) in iron supports driven into the rock walls. Not until the first years of the nineteenth century do oil lamps begin to replace the crude but striking torches, which were said to cast dramatic shadows as the torches crackled and the flames rose and fell high in the dark. Our modern lamplighters carry long aluminum poles with two separate attachments at the top: a small metal box that emits a flame for lighting extinguished wicks, and a larger container, shaped like a bowl and provided with a spout, containing kerosene. Sometimes, perhaps once in a lifetime, like a vision in the dark, you see a lamplighter at the top of a tall and very narrow ladder, adjusting or replacing a lamp. Proposals for a system of underground wiring and electric light have been made since the early years of the twentieth century, but they are regularly voted down. Our enemies accuse us of a debilitating nostalgia, a refusal to enter the modern world, but we know that the real reason, the secret reason, is that we would not willingly do without our dreamlike lamplighters, whose slow and silent movements beneath our town soothe us like tides.