by Hickey, Greg
“Turn it back,” Samuel said, and they lifted the platform to balance halfway, the table and chairs hanging off one side like some wild host of giant alien insects clinging to a tree in a storm. Samuel knelt to study the obstructing bar and found that it slid easily under the floor. They resumed their positions on the sides of the platform and rotated it back into place, returning the first set of furniture to its natural position in the meal hall.
Samuel had never before witnessed mechanical precision of this scale and his mind trembled at the slightest thought of the effort that must take place, unnoticed, behind the smooth veneer of the colony at every single moment of every single day. But he grasped enough. The entirety of each hall—furniture and floors—was cleaned periodically in the manner they had just witnessed. The hall doors would close and lock of their own accord. The tables and chairs were washed beneath the floor, the floor was mopped, and then the furniture was flipped right-side-up and the main door reopened. But during this most recent incident, a bolt under each floor panel had been slipped into place to ensure the panels could not complete their full rotation and return the furniture to the upper surface. The result was an empty meal hall with conspicuous seams surrounding clusters of protrusions in the floor. The presence of these bolts under the floor meant the doors could be opened from the surface only by lifting them from the bolted end. But once they had been removed, the doors could rotate as usual, and the meal halls could function as normal.
Samuel and Penny spent the rest of the afternoon turning over all the hidden doors in all the meal halls of the colony and releasing the bolts that blocked their rotation. The underground ocean remained calm as they worked. The hall door stayed open and the mop remained in the wall. And when the last bolt was removed, the last door turned, the colony’s untroubling façade was restored once more.
* * *
Samuel did not see Penny for several days after that. He came across her as she exited a meal hall one evening, meal cake in hand. Her face flickered to life when she saw him, but the light there seemed just a bit fainter.
“Wait for me?” he said, and she nodded.
He took his food and met her outside and they sat atop a low, rolling hill from where they could see the sunset. The shadows of the halls overtook them as they ate.
“Those doors…” Samuel began, after they had finished their cakes.
“Yes,” Penny said, staring at her hands in her lap. “But you fixed them.”
“We fixed them,” he said, hoping to draw her out. She looked down and said nothing. “But the holes, the water, the… the…” He mushroomed his hands to demonstrate the foam rising out of the hole. “The lock…” He turned to her helplessly.
Her stammer returned. “I… I… do not know.”
The sun dipped halfway below the mountains. Samuel struggled against the thoughts that surged up inside him, growing and collapsing all at once, fought to crystallize them into a single, solid idea.
“The lock,” he said. “Someone put it there. But wh—”
“I do not know,” she repeated, and her voice had the same stale quality as the colony’s bells. She was gone now, dissolving in the softly waning sunlight. When she turned back to him, calmly and without intention, her old smile had returned, creeping blindly across her lips, melting her face into an empty mask. The softness threatened to embalm him, but he fought it now, his mind hardening to a single point, his emotions close behind.
“But you were there.” He wanted to shake her. “You saw what I did. Don’t you…”
He seemed almost to reach her, for her brow began to wrinkle. But then the mask slid into place once more. The words died in his throat. He stared at her for some time, refusing to believe this was the same woman who had turned open the secret doors of the colony with him just a few days ago. He said “good night” then. He could not bear to look at that face one moment longer. Feeling as though the strength had been sapped from his legs, he stood up and walked away. The sun set. The colony grew dark.
XI
The sun rose the next morning and brought light back to the colony. In the early morning rays, the edges of things shimmered, mirage-like, and it was not until the sun was high in the sky, its sharp beams pounding down upon the meadow, that the lines would harden again and become distinct. Shortly before the morning meal, a colonist endeavoring to cross the river in the center of the colony noticed the bridge he was about to use had been shattered straight down the middle. The colonist did not bother to see if the other bridges might still be passable. Though he had spent much of his life frolicking in the cool currents and could easily stand in the center of the stream without his head dipping below the surface, he did not attempt to swim or ford the river. Instead, he withdrew from the bank with a few stumbling steps backward, tripped over his own feet and fell to a seat on the ground. The morning breeze tiptoed through the high grass along the river bank. The colonist sat with his knees hugged to his chest as he stared blindly at the broken bridge and rocked back and forth, trembling like a frail leaf in the wind.
Samuel did not notice the broken bridge until that afternoon. He had spent the morning as he had spent the previous few days, walking aimless and alone about the colony. When the sun waned in the afternoon sky, he climbed the tallest tree he could find and gazed out over the meadow. He noticed the crowds along the river at once. Just beyond them he could see the bridge cracked neatly down the middle with its two broken ends dipping into the stream. Farther down the river he could just make out the fracture in the center of the next bridge. He shimmied down the tree and set off, jogging toward the river.
The crowd had dissipated by the time he arrived, so there was no one to disturb Samuel’s study of the broken bridge. It was a modest construction, yet remarkably sturdy. Two arced wooden planks spanned the river with more planks laid across them to form the walkway. But this bridge had been completely shattered, much of the wood ripped free altogether and long since borne away by the lazy current, leaving only the two ends stretching out hopelessly from opposite shores.
Samuel inspected the other bridges in the colony and found that all five had indeed been broken in much the same manner. But on the fourth bridge he visited, he discovered a small scrap of paper caught between two of the broken planks. There was a picture drawn on it by some rough black implement, and it was torn on one side.
Samuel picked up the scrap of paper, studied it for a moment, then folded it and placed it in the pocket of his tunic. He did not see how it could help him solve the problem at hand, but he resolved to examine it more closely later. He went to bed that night looking forward to the next morning when he would find a way to repair the bridges.
* * *
When the sun rose, Samuel scampered out of bed and waded into the center of the river. He managed to lift the fractured ends of one bridge over his head, but the two halves no longer even met in the middle. He would need to replace the missing middle section entirely. He climbed back ashore and examined one of the broken halves from the river bank. He had never noticed the well-worn nail heads that lined the edges of the cross planks before now. Samuel turned one of the little metal spikes over in his hand. Many of them had been ripped out when the bridge was destroyed and he had no idea where to find more of them, nor how to affix them to the bridge. As such, the task before him was more than daunting, but no more so than the problem of the missing meal hall furniture. And in this instance, he at least had some idea of how to proceed. He decided to ignore his lack of nails and tools for the time being and focus on finding wood.
He was drawn immediately to the few trees in the meadow, noting the similarities between their stubby, twisted limbs and the material that made up the bridges right away. But he was not strong enough on his own to break off any branches of sufficient size to both connect the two ends of the bridge and withstand any substantial weight.
A handful of colonists drifted about nearby. “Hello,” Samuel called to them. “Can you help me?”
> They returned his words with blank stares. He gestured to a nearby tree and made a breaking motion with his hands. They turned their backs and shied away. Samuel started to go after them but stopped, knowing he could never reach them.
He resigned himself to looking for other sources of wood. Starting along the river, Samuel moved outward through the colony, searching along a path of concentric circles. By the time the bells sounded for the evening meal, he had come to the fence that marked the outer boundary of the colony. The fence consisted of rough cylindrical poles driven into the ground a meter or so apart. Two cylindrical cross poles joined adjacent fence posts and were fitted into holes on each support post. This fence surrounded the entire colony. Beyond it, several kilometers in the distance, the dark mountains rudely interrupted the verdant landscape. As far as Samuel knew, no colonist had ever crossed beyond this border.
He had found the wood supply to repair the bridges. Yet Samuel hesitated for a moment before disassembling the fence and harvesting the poles. Someone must have built the fence for a reason. The thought of so callously tearing it down inspired some faint tug in his stomach. He wondered if he should not frustrate that mysterious purpose, whatever it was. But what use could such a fence possibly serve? Anything it was meant to keep in or out could surely pass over, under or through such a basic construction. He rested a hand on one of the support posts and gave it a tentative push. The post shifted sideways. The top cross pole began to ease out of its hole.
The meadow around him was empty. The mountains loomed closer than they had ever seemed before, powerful and timeless across a short expanse of lush green field. Samuel put both hands on the post and pushed hard. The pole leaned sideways under his weight. He pushed until it tilted far enough to remove the top cross pole from its hole. The other end of the cross pole slid easily out of its place in the opposite post. The upper cross pole in the other direction came out with even less effort, and then the lower cross poles after that. Samuel worked methodically for the rest of the day, neglecting his evening meal. When the sun set, he lay down next to the fence and slept. He awoke with the sunrise and continued his task. Soon he had removed more than two dozen poles from the fence. The morning bells reminded him he was hungry, and he set off for the nearest meal hall. As he walked, he estimated that he must have enough wood to at least make a start on repairing the bridges, even if he could not complete all of them. He now needed to move all that wood from the fence at the very edge of the colony to the river in the middle, and once there, attach it to the remaining framework of the bridges.
Despite the time it would take, there seemed no alternative to carrying the poles by hand from the fence to the river. Samuel knew there was no hope of enlisting the aid of the other colonists, and after their last conversation he was not sure whether to ask Penny for help. He resolved to do the job himself, so he devoured his morning meal and returned to the fence to begin the task.
He found he could carry two poles at a time by cradling them horizontally against his chest. It took him about ten minutes to move the poles from the fence to the nearest bridge and then walk back to the fence again, so it was almost time for the midday meal once he had completed the job. He ate under a tree by the river and rested.
Having brought the wood to the river, Samuel still faced the problem of how to fit and attach it to the bridge’s now-dilapidated framework. The fence poles were too long to neatly fit the width of the bridge and much heavier than the planks which currently spanned the walkway. He would have to cut them down somehow. He recalled the broken piece of the meal hall window latch he had stored in the pocket of his tunic. He took it out and struck the broken end against the nearest fencepost. The sharpened edge sunk a few centimeters into the wood. It was an imperfect tool, but it was all he could find. There still remained the problem of affixing the wood to the bridges, but given that he was already limited by available materials, Samuel decided some of the bridges would have to be sacrificed, at least for now. He scouted the five bridges in the colony and estimated he could salvage enough nails from three of the bridges to repair the other two. He promised himself he would mend the other three as soon as he could acquire the necessary materials.
The next morning, Samuel began his work in earnest. It was the first time in his life he had performed any manual labor for an extended period of time, and the small muscles of his hands and wrists quickly grew knotted and tired from hours of holding, manipulating and cutting the wooden poles. By the end of the first day, several blisters had formed on his hands and most of them had torn open. His back ached from stooping over the poles, his shoulders and forearms from chopping at the wood with the broken latch. Yet there was a part of him that reveled in this physical discomfort, a part of him that saw beyond the slow and painstaking work and envisioned the end products of his labor and all the tiny steps in between, all the pieces of himself he thrust greedily, feverishly, into his work, so that each single solitary moment during his time by the river was transformed into something that was entirely his, that belonged solely to his mind and body, nourished by his sweat and blood. He felt neither sleeping nor eating had ever been so rewarding. He savored each meal, each collapse into bed, but looked forward even more to the point when these mere physical needs would be satisfied and he could resume his labor.
Penny visited occasionally, though she kept her distance. She sat on the river bank and watched the easy way he worked, a body operating in perfect synchronization with an alert and active mind, reminiscent of those first heroes they had once admired together.
It took Samuel nearly six days to repair the two bridges. Cutting the fence poles into planks alone took almost five. Once the planks were ready, he raised each half from where it dangled in the water to align the walkways. On more than one occasion, a half-bridge collapsed back into the river and he had to raise it up once more. He used the edge of the broken latch to pry up nails from the first, third and fifth bridges, doing his best to take only those nails which held broken planks, so the basic structures of these bridges would remain more or less intact. With these recovered nails, Samuel affixed his hand-cut planks to the bridges using a large rock as a rudimentary hammer.
The repaired bridges were imperfect at best, yet quite impressive given Samuel’s relative lack of tools and building experience. The new planks stuck out haphazardly on either side of the bridges, and though he had tried to chisel away most of the splinters with the broken latch, they were still considerably rougher than the originals. Yet the bridges held. Samuel walked over them several times, rolled and carried fence poles across, even jumped up and down in the middles, and still they remained intact. Late one morning, more than a week since the day he had started this project, the bridges were complete. Samuel leaned against a tree along the river bank and rested. He tried to remain as inconspicuous as possible, knowing the other colonists had grown wary of his presence, yet he felt almost giddy with excitement as he waited for the first person to cross his bridge.
After about an hour, a middle-aged woman approached, leading a child by the hand. She stopped at the edge of the river, as if suddenly recalling the bridges had been broken. But the child, not sensing anything was amiss, slipped from his caretaker’s grasp and continued straight onto the bridge. The woman returned to her senses and let out a short, choked yelp. She glanced around, then stepped forward cautiously. By now, the child was halfway across and had scampered well beyond the newly repaired middle section by the time the woman caught up with him. She lifted the child in her arms, and only once she had reassured herself of his safety did she dare look around her and observe that the bridge was intact, that she had crossed beyond the halfway point of the river and could continue safely to the other side. She did so now, bearing the child in her arms, and looking furtively about her once she reached the other side before disappearing behind the nearest hall. The bells sounded and Samuel realized he was starving. His legs felt light and fresh as he stood and set off toward the nearest hall for the
midday meal.
XII
Samuel forgot about the piece of paper he had discovered at the broken bridge until a few days later. He had carried it with him in the pocket of his tunic ever since he found it, along with the broken window latch that was now a bit duller from so much use. It was raining. He sat cross-legged on the bed he had slept in the night before as the thick drops streaked the windows of the sleeping hall. Feeling rather bored, he reached into his pocket and dug out the now-crumpled scrap.
The paper—the first sample he had ever encountered of such a material—was tough and fibrous, similar to papyrus, but not as crisp. The picture was scratched on one side in broad, mottled, black lines. The other side was blank. Two of the edges were perfectly even and came together at a square corner while the other two edges were ragged and appeared to have been torn or roughly cut. On the longer, torn edge, Samuel could just make out another short black stroke that disappeared beyond the tear, as though this drawing were part of a larger picture which had been ripped away.
He was studying this scrap when Penny approached his bedside. He did not notice her until she stood right next to him, and his stomach flip-flopped when he sensed her presence.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello,” Samuel answered. “How are you?”
“Finethankshow—” she began, then, “I’m just fine, thank you.” She forced her lips wider as she repeated her old joke. “And how are you?”
“Very well, thank you,” said Samuel. He recalled the first time she had spoken those words. It was good to see her again, to hear her voice. And yet the same questions bubbled up inside him once more. He wanted to provoke her, drag her from the shadowy cave into which she had retreated the last time they spoke. But he did not know how to begin. He looked back down at the scrap of paper and rotated it mechanically in his hands. She took a cautious step forward to stand by his shoulder.