14

by Peter Clines

  Nate nodded. “As long as they don’t have a laugh track.”

  “Oh, no laugh track, I assure you.” They walked another yard or so while she juggled things in her mind. “Okay, I loved coloring books when I was little. I mean, I loved them. My mom would buy them by the dozen and I would do every single page. I’d even color the mazes and word problems and stuff. When I got a little older she bought me some colored pencils and the cheap watercolors in the long tray. They could give me a ream of paper and I was good for a week.

  “Anyway, this was all good until I was eight and then it was time to buckle down. My dad’s a doctor and he’d already decided I was going to follow in his footsteps. He was diagnostic, but I was going to be a surgeon. Maybe a cardiologist or a neurologist.”

  “Hold on,” said Roger. “Seriously? Your dad wanted you to be a doctor?”

  She shook her head. “Oh, he didn’t want it. He knew I was going to be a doctor the same way you know you’re wearing shoes. It was just a fact of life.”

  “That’s fucked up.”

  “Told you it was a bad sitcom.”

  The tunnel took another hairpin turn. The bulb there flickered, its filament pulsing but never quite igniting. Nate blew the dust off the glass and gave it a gentle twist with his fingertips. It blossomed, spilling white light across the tunnel. He blinked a few times and shook his fingers out.

  “Hey,” said Roger, “that’s a lot better.” As they walked past the next bulb he leaned over and blew on it. A cloud of dust and grit scattered, and the tunnel brightened a little more. He looked at Xela. “So, your dad’s fucked up?”

  She smirked. “He’s not really a bad guy. He’s just inflexible. If he thinks this is the way things are, that’s how they are. No question, no doubt. Him thinking I was going to be a doctor was like most parents thinking their kid’s going to grow up and get a job.”

  “He have you studying anatomy when you were ten?”

  “Nothing that bad,” said Xela. “But it was all about grades and curriculum and after-school activities. Everything designed to make me the perfect med school candidate. They’d even go in to talk to my guidance counselors and make sure I was taking the best classes. I took violin lessons for two years to show I was well-rounded.”

  “You couldn’t just take art classes?” asked Nate.

  She shook her head. “Art’s too flighty,” she explained. She deepened her voice and straightened her back. “‘Violin is precise and mathematical and involves a measurable quantity of manual dexterity.’”

  Nate puffed dust off another bulb as they went around another turn. “What’s that even mean?”

  Xela shrugged and put on a lopsided grin. “I don’t know, but I heard it once a week for two years. I even started to go along with it. I just figured everyone else’s parents were doing the same thing.

  “Anyway, sophomore year the school got a new guidance counselor. Mr. Woodley. He was maybe ten years older than me. I think he’d just gotten out of school himself, so he was still all excited to shape kids’ lives. He called me into his office, asked if I was happy with my course load, and what I wanted to go to college for. I said medicine and he asked me if I wanted to be a doctor.” She shrugged. “No one had ever actually asked me. Dad said it was true, Mom said it was true, so I just accepted it. So did everyone else.”

  Roger nodded. “What’d you tell him?”

  “I told him, yeah, of course I wanted to be a doctor. I didn’t know what else to say. But I think he got it. He pulled out my schedule, told me some class had been overbooked, and he’d have to stick me in a painting class instead of Russian history. It was just sheer luck. I think he pulled art out of a hat. I might’ve ended up in the marching band or something.”

  Nate looked at her. “You had Russian history class in high school?”

  “Private school,” she said. “Custom-made for churning out little professionals.”

  “Ahhh.”

  “Anyway, once I had a brush in my hand it was like I was six again. All the colors and the textures and the images. I think I went kind of crazy. I tried to keep it secret, but Mom found some paint on my sleeve a few weeks later and that was that. I got dragged into a meeting with my parents and Mr. Woodley and the principal. Dad went nuts and accused Mr. Woodley of sabotaging my future. I found out later he pulled some strings and got him fired.

  “Then we got home and I got a whole lecture about not getting distracted and staying focused. But it was too late. I started skipping study hall to audit art classes. I think it scared some of the teachers after what happened to Mr. Woodley, but they figured they were safe since I wasn’t actually in their class.

  “Every now and then my parents would catch me with paint or colored pencils or something and there’d be a lecture. Then the lectures became therapy sessions. And some of those morphed into actual psychologists and psychiatrists. One of them recommended Ritalin or one of those drugs. Thank God, Dad finally put his foot down.

  “I graduated, ended up at Yale, which annoyed Dad because he’d been pushing for Harvard. As soon as I got there I changed my whole schedule to a bunch of art classes. The first semester was just fantastic.”

  Nate gave her a look. “And then Dad saw your course listings?”

  She nodded. “Christmas was awesome, believe me. I thought he was going to have an aneurysm. He just kept going on and on about how all ‘our’ plans were getting screwed up and how art was for lazy people with no goals.” Her voice dropped an octave again. “‘You’re throwing away your life! Do you think this will lead somewhere, Alexis? I can’t believe you’d stab your mother and me in the back like this after all we’ve done for you. You’ve going to have to repeat this whole semester, Alexis, and that’s not going to look good on a grad school appli—’”

  “Wait a minute,” said Roger. “Who’s Alexis?”

  The tunnel floor was clean, but Xela stumbled over something and caught herself. For a moment the only sound was their feet crunching on the dirt.

  “Oh my God,” said Nate. “You are a bad sitcom.”

  “No,” she insisted, “that’s the only non-sitcom part about it. A real artist can’t be carrying around useless baggage.”

  “Thought that was the whole point of being an artist,” said Roger. He managed to say it with a straight face.

  “Comments like that are not going to get you a real date,” Xela warned him. She tipped her head back to swallow some water and gave him an exaggerated glare. “Anyway, Dad said to cut it out or he’d stop paying for medical school. I said fine, I never wanted to go anyway. After that was a very uncomfortable five months when I lived at home and took community college art classes. At the end of the next semester a bunch of us decided we’d move to Los Angeles and get inspired by all the creativity out here.”

  “Didn’t know anything about LA, did you?” said Roger, again with a straight face.

  Xela smirked. “We drove cross country with all this talk about forming an art commune in a big warehouse loft somewhere, like Andy Warhol’s Factory. That lasted for three months, until it was clear the guys both thought ‘commune’ meant ‘harem.’ Plus, it turns out big warehouse lofts are really expensive, even when you’re splitting rent five ways.

  “Mom paid for me to live out of a hotel for two months. I got a waitressing job and one of the bartenders brought up this place. I signed up for some night classes, and haven’t felt inspired since. And so here we are.” She turned in a circle with her arms wide. “Thus comes to a close the sad story of she who was once Alexis Thorne.”

  “It wasn’t that sad,” said Nate.

  “Oh, and my cat died when I was eleven.”

  “Ah, well.”

  She pointed at Roger. “Your turn, wiseass.”

  He tossed out his hands. “Open book. What d’you want to know?”

  “How’d you end up a grip?” asked Nate. “Did you go to film school or something?”

  Roger shook his head. “Just fell into it.
Same way everyone gets in, I guess.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Xela. “I share my birth name and life in the harem to you and ‘I just fell into it’ is the best you can offer back?”

  He shrugged. “Graduated San Diego State with a degree in engineering. Got pissed at the world when I found out the only job I could get was at Target. And to do that I had to lie my ass off on their stupid job application computers.”

  “I hate those things,” said Nate. “I tried to get a part-time job over the holidays and it’s just some stupid multiple-choice quiz to guess what answers they want.”

  Roger nodded in agreement. “Anyway, spent a year wearing a red shirt and being pissed at the world, then a year not caring. Then a friend gave me a call about a film job. There were always a couple TV shows or something shooting down there, and one of ‘em just needed a body for a few days—three days that were going to pay as good as two weeks at Target. Called in sick, worked for two bills a day, and learned everything I could. They asked me to come in the week after that and then hired me on full time for the last week.” He shrugged. “Quit Target, moved up to LA. Did the couch trip for a few months while I got my days. Once I had ‘em my folks loaned me some money and I joined the union. That’s it.”

  “So,” said Xela, “where do you go from being a grip?”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “Are there, I don’t know, grip ranks? Promotions?”

  He shrugged. “You can work up to being a best boy for someone. Some guys specialize on the camera dolly or rigging.” He shrugged again. “Eventually you get a job keying a show.”

  “Is that what you’re going for?”

  “Don’t know,” said Roger. “A lot of the guys who’ve been doing this for twenty or thirty years, they’re all just...tired, y’know? Great guys, really smart, getting good money, but they all seem...” He struggled for the right word and gave up. “Tired.”

  Nate nodded. “Not for you?”

  “No. Don’t know what I want to be doing in ten years, but I want to at least be happy doing it. Just figured I’d do it for eight or nine years and sock away a ton of money. When I heard about this place, figured it was perfect, y’know?”

  Nate stopped. They were at yet another turn in the tunnel. “What?”

  “What what?”

  “You heard about this place from someone?” He glanced between Xela and Roger. “You didn’t see an ad on Westside Rentals or something?”

  Roger shook his head. “Why? That how you found it?”

  “No,” said Nate, “it was recommended to me, too. Some guy at a bar I barely knew. I mentioned I was looking for an apartment, he told me about this place.”

  “So?”

  Nate shrugged. “It’s just kind of odd, don’t you think? None of us found this place on our own. It was recommended to all of us.”

  They made it to the next turn and Xela stretched her arms back. “How long have we been walking?”

  Nate flipped his phone into his hand. “Two hours. Want to take a break?”

  “Seconded,” said Roger.

  “The ayes have it,” Xela said. She slumped against the nearest arch and lowered herself to the floor.

  Packs came off and water bottles came out. Nate wiped his brow and propped the thermometer up against his pack. Roger kicked off his boots and flexed his toes. “Calves are killing me,” he said. He reached down and kneaded his foot.

  “All the downhill walking,” said Nate. “We’re only working our muscles one way. Don’t worry, we’ll use a whole different set on the way back.”

  “Awesome.”

  Xela eyed the pedometer. “How far have we gone?”

  He popped the device off his belt. “A little over five miles,” he said. “So I think we’re like...two thousand feet down.”

  “Two thousand?”

  Nate shrugged. “That’s if this thing’s dead on and Tim’s guesstimate on the slope of the tunnel is right.”

  “What’s the deepest cave in the world?” asked Roger.

  “Seven thousand feet,” Xela said. “It’s in Georgia. Asia-Georgia, not down south.”

  Roger grinned. “Smart women are damn sexy.”

  She blew him a kiss. “I looked it up this morning before we started. And you’re still in the shithouse for the art comment.”

  “Temperature’s gone up to ninety-nine,” said Nate.

  “That’s weird,” said Xela. “When I was researching caves it sounded like most of them got cooler once you were away from the entrance, like fifties and sixties, because all the heat went into the ground.” She slapped her backpack. “I brought another shirt and a sweatshirt.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” said Roger. “Getting closer to the core with all the lava and stuff. It should get hotter.”

  “We’re nowhere near the core,” said Nate with a wry smile. “That’s like saying North Hollywood should be cooler because it’s closer to the Arctic Circle.”

  Xela stared down the next leg of the tunnel. “So what’s going on?”

  Nate shrugged. “Beats me.”

  Forty Five

  The sloping tunnel stretched on and on. The trio would walk in one direction for a hundred yards, then the tunnel would twist back on itself and drop them even lower. On one leg all the lights had burnt out and they inched through the darkness with two flashlights making circles of light on the floor of the tunnel. The scattered bulbs resumed after they rounded the next turn.

  “How’d they do this?” Nate wondered aloud. His current estimate had them about three thousand feet below ground. “I mean, they would’ve had to move hundreds of tons of rock to make these tunnels.”

  “Money,” said Roger. “Got enough money, you can do anything.”

  Xela had gotten ahead of them. She glanced back. “How do you know they had money?”

  He pointed at the bundle of cable on the floor. “All that,” he said. “Cable’s expensive ‘cause of all the copper. That’s why people steal it out of houses and stuff. This is all one piece of cable. All the way from the spiral staircase to here. No connectors, no splices, nothing.” He gestured at Nate’s belt. “How far we been walking now?”

  He checked. “About seven miles.”

  “Nine pieces of cable,” said Roger. “Each one more’n seven miles long. That’s some serious money, even a hundred years ago.”

  They turned another corner and walked in silence for a few minutes. Xela stopped to brush the dust from one of the bulbs. Nate and Roger walked past her and she puffed away a few last bits of accumulated grit.

  They reached the corner and Nate glanced back. Xela was examining one of the burnt-out bulbs. She looked up and met his eyes. “You guys go ahead,” she said. “I’ll catch up in a minute.”

  “Something wrong?”

  She shook her head. “No, nothing,” she said. “I’ll catch up in a minute or two.”

  “We shouldn’t split up.”

  Xela raised an eyebrow. “It’s not like I can get lost and accidentally start walking the other way. I’ll be right with you.”

  “Why? What’s the problem?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So let’s stick together.”

  She sighed. “I have to piss, okay?”

  Nate smirked. “So there are some things you’re shy about.”

  “Look, just walk around the bend and I’ll be there in two minutes, okay?”

  “You sure you’re okay with us just leaving you here?”

  “Yes. Will you please go? I’ve been holding it for an hour now.”

  “Go away from the cables,” said Roger. “Rubber’s pretty crumbly in places. You don’t want to get a shock.”

  “Important safety tip,” she said. “Thanks, Egon.” When he gave her a blank look, she just smiled and waved him around the corner. “Talk amongst yourselves,” she called to them.

  Roger looked at Nate. “That’s a movie quote, right?”

  “Yeah, Ghostbusters, I think,” sai
d Nate

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, it’s Ghostbusters, you philistines,” Xela shouted around the corner. “How can you not immediately know that?”

  “I think I was four when Ghostbusters came out,” Roger called back.

  “It’s an American classic!”

  “You always talk this much when you’re taking a piss?”

  She laughed. “What if I do? That a real turn-off for you?”

  Nate cleared his throat. “Y’know, I’d leave you two alone but there’s nowhere for me to go.”

  * * *

  They stopped for another break at the four-hour mark. All three of them were sweating. Roger’s face looked pink. Nate broke out the thermometer again. Roger gestured at it as he kicked his shoes off. “How hot is it now?”

  “One hundred and two,” Nate said. He angled the thermometer towards the light. “Maybe a hundred and three. It’s flickering.”

  “Okay,” said Roger. His pack slid off his shoulders. He reached up, grabbed a handful of t-shirt, and yanked it over his broad shoulders. “Too damned hot.”

  Nate nodded. “Yeah, I think so, too.” He pulled his shirt off and tucked it through one of the straps of his backpack.

  They glanced at Xela. “Don’t get your hopes up,” she smirked.

  Roger shook his head. “Just wanted to make sure you were cool with—”

  She peeled her shirt off, baring her tattoos. Her bra was bright green—

  cockroach green

  —with little white skulls on it. “I meant, don’t get your hopes up, I’m not going topless,” she said. “But thanks for the display of manly nipples and chest hair.” She used the t-shirt to wipe her forehead.

  “Any time,” said Roger.

  They slid out water bottles and drank. Roger splashed some in his hand and plastered his hair with it.

  “Don’t go crazy,” said Nate. “Remember, this might have to last us another two and a half days.”

  Roger shook his head. “Gets much hotter, we’ll have to turn back anyway.”

  “Good point,” said Xela. She raised her bottle and poured a few drops on her head. Nate shrugged and did the same.