The Crossing

by Jason Mott

  “You live here?” Tommy asked.

  “We do,” Vivian replied. “But don’t get nervous. We don’t eat bats and night crawlers. We’ve got a perfectly normal house.” She paused. “Well, maybe normal isn’t quite the word I should be using, but I think you’ll get the idea once you get there.”

  “Okay,” Tommy said. He took one final look up. “Those can’t be stars,” he said to Vivian.

  “Why not?” Vivian replied.

  * * *

  Tommy followed Vivian and her son into the depths of the cave. The boy walked in silence, now and again looking up at Tommy as if trying to understand how he had come to exist in this place. “My name’s Tommy,” he said to the boy, offering a handshake. The boy reached out and shook his hand with a stoic visage.

  “Jake can’t talk,” Vivian said.

  “Oh.”

  “But don’t worry,” the woman continued. “There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s a smart little troublemaker. Just a silent one is all.”

  “Okay,” Tommy replied.

  “It’s been a long time since we’ve had a visitor, hasn’t it, Jake?” Vivian asked her son. She took his hand and squeezed it. The boy looked up at him and then nodded in affirmation. “As you can imagine,” Vivian continued, speaking to Tommy as they walked, “this isn’t exactly a standard setup, and so it’s not often we get people that stop by unexpectedly.”

  Along the walls of the tunnel through which they walked there were small lights placed along the floor at distant intervals. They did the bare and Spartan job of shining out the path ahead, leading Tommy and Vivian and Jake to where they needed to go. There were no pitfalls or holes in the floor of the path as Tommy has expected. In fact, he could almost go as far as to say that he felt comfortable walking through the hallways. Perhaps he had simply spent too much time on the road, too much time along the blacktop of the highway, always worrying about the exhaustion.

  This was something different. The feeling in this cave was one of cool softness, like a pillow turned over in the middle of the night.

  “They’ll be very excited to see that we have a guest, even if you only stay for a little while.”

  “They?”

  “My husband and daughter.”

  “So there are four of you down here?”

  “Yep,” Vivian replied. “In fact, I imagine that you and my daughter aren’t too far apart in age. At least, from what I can see of you. I’ll be able to see you a little better once we get to the house. I keep telling my husband that we need more lights out here, that someday one of the kids is going to get hurt or that, maybe, just like today, some stranger will show up and find the place and get lost in here.”

  “Is it easy to get lost?”

  “Always,” Vivian replied. “Everything leads somewhere. And it’s not until you’ve been here long enough and stumbled through enough of the wrong ways that you can really find out where anything is. Sure, the lights help, but a person is always curious about the unlit path.”

  As she said the sentence, Tommy became aware of a path opening up to the right. The wall simply seemed to disappear and there was a great mouth of darkness down which the dim lighting that stood along the path did not penetrate. The path seemed to go on forever. “That’s exactly what I mean,” Vivian said. He nodded to the mouth of darkness. “Down that way, it’s okay for the most part. But there are definitely some places where you can make a misstep and have a pretty bad fall. Or even if you don’t take a bad fall, there’s always the possibility of simply getting turned around. That cave goes for a long way, and even though it eventually reconnects back with everything along here and will get you to safety, you wouldn’t know it. You go down that way and, inside of five minutes, it feels like you’re in the center of the earth, in the center of the universe even. Nothing but darkness and stone walls and no way to find your way back out. People panic in places like that.”

  “Then why don’t you close this off?” Tommy asked. “What if Jake went down there?”

  “Jake knows his way out,” Vivian said. “He’s been down there before and came back home, and he can do it again if he needs to.” She looked down at Jake, who looked up at her and smiled.

  “That sounds dangerous,” Tommy replied.

  “Life’s dangerous,” Vivian said. “And not letting children learn to face danger, at least a little bit, doesn’t do anything at all to help them.”

  * * *

  It was not long before the light that Vivian promised began to appear. It began as simply a dull white glow that illuminated a bend in the tunnel ahead. But then the light began to grow as they neared it. Jake bolted ahead with the familiar excitement of children who have finally returned to the world they have left behind.

  “Let your father and sister know we have a guest,” Vivian called out to the boy. He disappeared around the bend.

  The tunnel eventually opened up into a large, sweeping cave strung with lights from one side to the other. The lights gave off a soft, warm hue. The cave was broken up into sections. There was a living room—complete with chairs, tables and a bookcase. There was a kitchen and dining room that did not look much different than those Tommy had seen in every other home he had ever been into.

  He had expected more differences than what he saw. But it was obvious that this family was, indeed, living here.

  “How do you have electricity?” Tommy asked, slightly awestruck by the underground home.

  “Solar panels,” Vivian said. “Up above, of course. If you could go straight up, you’d see about a half an acre of solar panels standing in the middle of the Florida swampland.”

  “Oh,” Tommy said.

  “Not quite what you expected?”

  “I can’t imagine it is,” a man’s voice replied.

  Tommy turned to see the boy racing back through a tunnel on the far side of the room, followed by a man and a girl. The man, who was obviously the father, smiled and waved as he came into view. He was tall and thin, like a reed that someone had given clothes and taught how to walk. He did not look like the insane save-my-family-from-the-end-of-the-world type that he obviously was.

  No one is who they seem to be in this world.

  “My name’s Michael,” the man said. He reached out and shook Tommy’s hand. “I can see that you’ve already met Vivian and Jake.” He turned and took the hand of his daughter—who seemed too shy to step forward on her own and say hello. “And this one here is Helen. Don’t let her calm demeanor fool you. She’s just as much of a troublemaker as Jake is.” He grinned at his daughter. “In fact, I’d probably be willing to make an argument that she’s even more of a headache.” Tommy smiled. Helen only waved hello and seemed to be more interested in the book she was carrying with her. As soon as the work of greeting Tommy was over, Helen went back to reading her book.

  “I can imagine that this is all a bit strange to you,” Michael said, and the entire family looked at Tommy, waiting for him to make a comment about how they were being perceived.

  “It’s definitely different,” Tommy said, trying to be cautious with his words.

  “Don’t worry,” Michael said. “You’re welcome to take a break from all of that and stay here for dinner.”

  * * *

  Dinner was more normal than Tommy had expected. The family was like any other family he had met. They laughed, they made fun of each other. The food was delicious and not nearly as strange as Tommy had anticipated. Vivian was a wonderful cook and an entertaining hostess. She was a geologist and spent a lot of time talking about the history of the rocks and the land surrounding where the family lived.

  For his part, Michael seemed excited by the future. He was an engineer. Anytime Tommy saw something in the family’s home that looked as though it might be on the higher end of the technology spectrum, he could be sure that Michael had created or purchased it. He was stil
l employed by a college up in Jacksonville, where he went a few times a week to teach classes.

  Tommy wondered how many people knew what kind of a house he lived in.

  “Why do you live like this?” Tommy asked after dinner. The question had been burning inside of him from the very beginning and now the flame was too great to be held at bay any longer.

  The immediate reaction from the family was simply laughter.

  “You made it longer than we thought you would before asking,” Michael said, grinning. “We actually have a little game where, whenever someone new comes to visit, we try to see just how long they can make it before asking why.”

  “I’m sorry,” Tommy said.

  “Don’t be,” Vivian replied. “We’re not so obtuse that we can’t understand just how strange all of this is.”

  “We’re doing something different here,” Michael said. “And we go to great lengths to make sure that our children understand just how different it is as well. We don’t want them to grow up being so far removed from normal life that they don’t fit in. After all, they’re not going to be living with us forever.”

  Tommy was surprised by just how sensible everything sounded. “Then why are you living down here?” he asked.

  “Because it’s what feels like home,” Michael said. He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms in front of his chest. He looked perplexed. “Actually,” he said, “that doesn’t sound like quite as good an answer as it always seems to sound in my head.”

  Vivian laughed. “We’ve tried to come up with better ways to explain it to people,” she said to Tommy. “People always thought we were some kind of doomsday preppers—those people who think the whole world is about to end and so they move underground or into those insane bunkers and start stockpiling food and weapons to wait for some inevitable catastrophe.”

  Michael smiled. “Nut jobs,” he said.

  “There’s a little pot calling the kettle black action right there,” Vivian said.

  “But we’re not nut jobs,” Michael said playfully. “We’re eccentric. There’s a difference.”

  “Shenanigans,” Vivian said.

  In spite of his curiosity, in spite of the strangeness of it all, Tommy could not help but smile at the family’s dynamics. They loved each other. More than that, they were happy. Even living down here beneath everything, as if they were trying to run away from it all, they were happy. More than that, they truly believed that everything was going to be okay. The Disease...the war...all of it would end eventually and the family would reemerge into a normal world, a world where their children would be loved and live long, healthy lives.

  “We just wanted a different life,” Michael began. “We used to live in Boston. I never could get used to the winters up there and Vivian always wanted to move out here for her field of study. More of the geological history of the world is on display out here. Back there, everything interesting has a building stacked on top of it.”

  “Settle down,” Vivian said to her husband.

  He smiled. “Sorry,” Michael said. “Can you tell I never much cared for city living?”

  Tommy nodded politely.

  “Anyhow,” Vivian picked up, “we moved out here for me to do some doctoral research. And we didn’t move straight out here,” he said. “We used to live in Phoenix. We had a pretty nice house on the outskirts of the city and, well, we were living a perfectly normal and functional life. This was back before the war and everybody falling asleep and not waking up.” He leaned back in his chair and took a long look around at the cavern in which they now lived, as if moving back through the many veils of memory that he carried within him. “And then I was doing some research and I found out about this old military installation that was built out here in the sixties. It was a deep-drilling installation, a place where they were doing geological research. They hollowed out this section of rock and built this small network of caverns that ties back into the natural caverns. So I came out here to see it, just out of curiosity. Most people didn’t even know it existed. It’s one of those things that the government built and forgot about, and everyone who used to work here and who really knew about it, well, they were too old to care about it or they’d forgotten about it too. It was just a piece of the forgotten world.”

  Michael sat forward in his chair. “Can you believe that they could build something this terrific and forget about it?” he asked. “I mean, how is that even possible? This place is amazing!” Michael’s eyes sparkled in the glow of the lamplight around the room.

  “Down, boy,” Vivian said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Michael said playfully.

  “Anyhow,” Vivian continued, “we came here and found this place. I won’t say we fell in love with it immediately—well, maybe Michael did. But it definitely had its charm. There was a quiet nature to it. And I don’t just mean that in the literal sense. Yeah, we were away from all of the sounds of cars and cities and everything else. But there was something else. There was this overarching sense of patience, this impression of timelessness that came from standing beneath all of these rocks, these pieces of the earth that are older than our brain can really process. The whole world, in essence, began in places very much like this.” She sat back in her chair and looked around admiringly. “It’s a notion that sneaks up on you after you’ve been down here a little while. And once it does, well, everything else just feels cheap and tawdry compared to this. Even the biggest and most expensive mansion can’t hold a candle to this place—in our opinion, at least.”

  Tommy followed the lead of his hosts and took a moment to admire the room. He still couldn’t quite say that he fully understood their fascination with living beneath so much rock. After all, wasn’t it just the same as living beneath the shadow of all those billions of tons of steel in the cities that Michael had mentioned? But Tommy had to admit that he was calmer than he had been in a very long time.

  Perhaps it was the stones and their immemorial nature. The sempiternal way that they seemed to exist: seeing everything change around them and yet still being able to endure.

  “They’re just rocks,” Tommy said to himself.

  “What was that?” Vivian asked.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  * * *

  The rest of the evening was enjoyable enough. The small family who lived beneath the earth turned out to be much more normal than Tommy had expected. The husband and wife loved their children, the children loved their parents. The children seemed to know just as much about the world as children their age should and their views were not particularly skewed one way or the other. Tommy had heard and read about the children of people who live “eccentric” lives. The children are oftentimes brought up to believe that the world exists in a very specific way, they are taught to be a certain flavor of conservative or liberal. They are taught that one version of God is more correct than all others. They are indoctrinated in a dozen different ways.

  But Michael and Vivian’s children were just like all the other children Tommy had ever met except that they didn’t seem worried about today and they weren’t scared of tomorrow. It was as if everything in the world was only a dream down here, something to be shaken off at the coming of the dawn in favor of something more real.

  As far back as he could remember—and even farther—Tommy always had trouble making friends, finding connections with people. Largely it was due to the fact that he was consistently moved around throughout his life. When he was very young and didn’t understand how life in foster homes worked, he tried to make friends when he moved to a new town to live with a new foster family. He would go to school and smile and be friendly and, in general, he was very capable of finding people who liked him and who he liked back.

  But then he would have to move. After the third time he moved, he began to recognize the signs of a foster family that was ready to let him go to someone else. It would begin
with a subtle distancing of affections.

  One couple would always come and sit on the edge of Tommy’s bed and read to him until he fell asleep. Then they would place a bookmark in the pages of the book and switch off the lamps and, perhaps, lean in to kiss him gently on the brow. In his dreams, there was a perfumed wind that fell across his face and he knew, without being aware of it, that his foster parents had given him those small, affectionate kisses. Another family would always sit with him and ask him what he had learned that day. Whatever his answer, they would try to transform the answer into some life lesson. He would fall asleep thinking of what they had told him about the nature of people or about the nature of the world. They were always optimistic lessons, things that said that kindness and polite behavior were how to make your way in the world. They created a picture of life that made sense, an image of the world in which everything was capable of working out if a person simply tried hard enough and was patient enough. Karma was the word that they used to describe the notion of the world being just and fair.

  But eventually it always happened that, in the weeks before he would be told that the family did not want him anymore and were sending him to another foster home, the nightly attention would stop. All of the small moments, whatever they were, would begin to lessen.

  It always came to pass that one foster parent was less willing to get rid of Tommy than the other. It was just the nature of how things worked. This would be the person who worked too hard in the last days of Tommy’s time with them to be kind to him, to make sure he understood that the reason he was leaving was not his fault. “You didn’t do anything wrong” is what they would always say to him. Each and every family said it on the day when they told him that he was being sent away. They would recite it like a mantra, something that absolved both them and him of any guilt. Something that liberated everyone at the cost of no one.