The Kingdom of Ohio

by Matthew Flaming

  She touches a match to the paper and, after counting sixty seconds, uses a spoon to knock the cork out of the bottle. This produces the desired effect of releasing the combustible reactant, igniting the coals at a high temperature and causing them to burn nicely.

  Shielding her face with the spoon, she nudges the stove door shut. Some scraps of newspaper have fallen to the floor, smoldering from the initial blast of flame, and she carefully stamps them out. Noticing that the fire licking through the grate is beginning to die down, she approaches the stove again. A moment later, as she’d expected, the liquor bottle explodes in the heat, sending glass shrapnel pinging against the iron walls. She crosses her arms and waits for the kettle to be ready.

  Suddenly the mechanic leans in through the doorway, startling her.

  “You all right?” he asks, a strange note of concern in his voice.

  “Of course. Thank you for asking.” She smooths her hair with her fingers, realizing that a few stray curls are singed.

  He stares at her, then shakes his head, grinning. “Guess I’ll have to explain a few things about cooking, one of these days.”

  She looks back at him and feels a sudden, overpowering yearning for a future filled with moments like this one. “I’d like that.” She returns his smile, and they stand silently facing each other.

  Then the front door bangs open again, Paolo entering, and Peter turns away. She remains in the kitchen, listening without really paying attention, as the two men converse in the other room.

  “. . . early?” Peter asks, muffled through the wall.

  “. . . changes. All of us assign to different crews,” she hears the Italian answer. “Tomorrow I start . . .”

  She stares at the dark iron belly of the stove, thinking of how she has always imagined some future greatness for herself. How she has always seen herself as destined for some role that will change the world. But why, she wonders now, is that needed, and for whom? And for myself, shouldn’t happiness be wherever I can find it? And with this thought, abruptly, she experiences an almost giddy sense of relief: like the answer to a problem she has been wrestling with for years, suddenly falling into place, or the lifting of an unseen burden.

  The kettle begins to rattle on the stove and she lifts it off, pouring two mugs full of unexpectedly brackish tea. She carries them out into the living room, handing one to Peter and then, belatedly, offering her own to Paolo, who accepts with a brief smile. “So.” Peter turns to her. “You ready to leave?”

  “Yes,” Paolo adds. “He says you will take the train to Chicago?”

  “I bought two tickets.”

  She takes a breath, looks up at him and nods. “Yes.” She tries to smile. “I am ready.”

  “Well, then,” Peter says.

  He runs a hand through his hair.

  Closing his eyes, the image that comes to Peter is a small log cabin somewhere in the woods. A stream running nearby, the two of them living together, evenings spent in conversation. Some flickering movement and faint laughter among the daffodils growing by the porch that could be the shadow of children to come. With sudden clarity, he sees that beyond his aimless days in New York, this is what he longs for.

  Except that, for no reason he can understand, Tobias’s face returns to him, hanging between himself and this vision. The memory of his friend being dragged away by the drilling company guards, of Tesla and Morgan’s minion smiling together outside the subway-works. Of John Muncie, the sheriff of Kellogg County, staring down at him beyond a gun barrel. And with these images an abrupt, unreasonable anger.

  “It’s a funny thing, though,” Peter finds himself saying, almost against his will. “Seems like that’s what they want too.”

  She frowns. “What do you mean?”

  “Wasn’t anyone watching at the train station.” As he says this, Peter feels the reasonable, cautious part of himself slipping away. “No one stopped me when I bought those tickets, either. But they had more guards at the subway tunnels. They were waiting for us there.”

  He pauses and, when she doesn’t say anything, continues. “That looks like a message to me. ‘Get out of town. That’s fine. But don’t go near the subway-works.’ What it seems like they’re saying.” Peter stares at her. “So what’re they looking for down there?”

  She shakes her head, clinging to the sense of clarity and release she felt in the kitchen, unwilling to answer.

  “It just doesn’t make sense.” He sits down at the living room table.

  “It is true,” Paolo says. “They are looking for something in the tunnels. As well as your picture, there are new men, not workers, who go into the tunnels.” He shrugs. “And we find some strange things down there. Old pipes made out of wood, part of a ship, old bones, some different kinds of rock. But none of these, I think, are what these men look for.”

  A silence. Dust filtering slowly downward, in the late-afternoon sunlight. She sinks into a chair beside Peter.

  “I know what they are looking for,” she hears herself murmur, wondering at the same time why she doesn’t simply remain silent—these words coming from some part of her that still clamors for vindication, despite what she has decided. “They are looking for the mass anchor.”

  “The what?” Peter frowns at her.

  “The mass anchor,” she repeats, speaking half to herself. “The device we built used a large block of mass to connect its origin and destination points. An object that would exist in both places at once, creating a conduit for travel between them.”

  “And . . . ?” Peter prompts.

  “It did not have to be very large since, as we built it, the mass anchor formed the apex of a conic projection. But”—she looks up at him—“it had to be embedded in the earth itself, underground.”

  She stares down at the table. How will I ever be free, she thinks, how can I escape this history?

  “When you first came to New York,” Peter is asking, “when you first woke up, what’s the first thing you remember? You see this mass-anchor thing?”

  “I woke up in the Battery Park.” She remembers her initial wheeling disorientation, the terror of being unable to assemble a chronology. “But I did not see the anchor. Still, it should have been nearby.

  “You see”—her words start to come more quickly as the excitement of the equations overtakes her—“the anchor marked the center of a spherical magnetic field, within which objects could be translocated. A region perhaps”—she closes her eyes—“perhaps fifty feet in diameter.”

  “But what—” Peter gropes for the right question. “What would it be? What would it look like?”

  “Like nothing special. A wooden door, about four feet wide. It was a door in the basement of my father’s house. Although—if it did exist, it would have been there for seven years now. It might have been destroyed.”

  Paolo shakes his head. “I haven’t heard something about a door in the tunnels.”

  “Nothing near the Battery Park?” Peter glances at the other man.

  “As I said, only some different kinds of rock.”

  All three are silent for a time.

  And then it’s over, Peter thinks. His relief strangely edged with disappointment, as he starts mentally assembling a list of supplies they’ll need for the trip to Chicago and whatever lies beyond. An ax and a compass, blankets and a change of clothes—

  “In the South Ferry tunnel,” Paolo continues, “at first it was only granite. But now there are lots of little holes in the rock. Holes and cracks.”

  In a long-disused part of Peter’s memory, something clicks with these words. “Little holes in the rock?”

  Paolo nods.

  “Round holes, like bubbles in water?”

  “Just like that. They make the drilling hard. The bits twist and break.”

  “Why do you ask?” she asks.

  “It’s just that . . .” He hesitates, remembering long-ago nights spent in the Idaho mountains. Sitting crouched by a campfire in the dark immensity of that wil
derness, listening to his father talk about geology and the language of the earth. The days spent exploring old mine shafts with his father, so many hours underground that he’d learned how to traverse those caverns almost by intuition alone.

  “It’s just that those kind of bubbles usually mean a fissure or cave nearby.” He pauses. “Aren’t many caves under Manhattan, least not around there.”

  “I see.” She fails to hide the tremor in her voice.

  “That tunnel is almost under the Battery,” Peter says.

  They turn to each other.

  Peter feels, all at once, a sense of both sinking and rising. The downward pull of peril and conspiracy he has struggled to escape—but also, a beam of improbable hope. Because—the sudden, glittering possibility strikes him—what if everything she has said is true? An overwhelming vertigo of new choices. Because maybe, he thinks, even if the past can’t be escaped, it can still be set right.

  Abruptly then, reaching the end of the caution and reserve he has clung to and fought against his entire life, he looks at her and decides.

  “We’ll go down there,” he says. “Tonight. We’ll find a way.”

  “Tonight?” She stares at him.

  After everything else—the dread, uncertainty, and hope of the previous days, and all the decisions and reversals—I still can’t really guess what passed through your mind at that moment. But finally, you looked up at me and nodded.

  “Very well. Tonight.”

  THEY WAIT in the early darkness, beside the high fence of rough boards surrounding the subway construction site, their breath steaming in the leaden winter evening. The last of the men from the excavation crew are filing out of the tunnels, each slack-faced with fatigue, glancing in puzzlement up at the sky before dispersing to wander away through the streets.

  “Now?” she asks. Her teeth are chattering.

  “Almost.” He peers into the burlap sack he’s carrying, which contains the simple machine on which their plan hinges. “Not long.”

  After spending the evening gathering supplies, the device that Peter inspects is mainly a product of her ingenuity. It is, as she’d explained, a crude smoke bomb: a candle with saltpeter and sugar mixed into the wax, it should smoke profusely for a few minutes after being lit. That is, he reminds himself, if it doesn’t explode or go out first. If I haven’t lost my mind completely here.

  More minutes pass. The streets begin to empty and the sky darkens further. Trying to ignore his second thoughts, Peter peers through a chink in the fence and sees a small light go on inside the night watchman’s shack, the dim silhouette of the watchman as he bars the construction-site gate.

  He draws a shaky breath. “Now.”

  The placement of the candle, he thinks, should be just across the fence from the shed where the dynamite and blasting caps are stored. From the watchman’s position, it will look like the shed itself is on fire—at least that’s what he’s hoping, and what he’s told her.

  He passes her the box of matches. “Wait until—”

  “Until you are in position,” she interrupts. “Then light the device, and signal when I see the guard coming. I remember. Then we meet at the gate.”

  He nods. They look at each other, a conspiratorial glance. Peter starts to speak and then stops himself—too much, he thinks, everything and nothing, and it’s not the time for words anyway. He hands her the sack of supplies and walks away.

  Around the corner and halfway down the block, he stops outside the barred entrance to the subway-works. The gate is twelve feet tall, built from massive planks that loom over his head. Still, he thinks, it’s not so much taller than boulders he’s leapt over while scaling crags in the Idaho mountains. But it has to be done all at once, he knows, without any second thoughts or doubt. All at once, or not at all. Heart pounding, he clenches and unclenches his fists, and waits.

  Nothing happens. Silence, the cloosh-cloosh of horses’ hooves through icy slush somewhere in the distance. Maybe the device didn’t work, he thinks. Then he sees the cloud of black smoke rising in the evening air, hears her whistle.

  Before he can reconsider, Peter hurls himself up onto the gate. Straining his entire body upward, he catches the rough top edge of the boards. For a moment he hangs there. Then, with an impossible effort, heaves himself up and over.

  He lands hard, twisting his ankle. Ignoring the pain, he fumbles with the bar across the gate. It sticks at first but then gives under his weight. The gate swings open with a metallic screech. A moment later, she slips through.

  “Which way?” she whispers.

  Peter fumbles to re-bar the entrance, scanning the piles of rubble for the mouth of the tunnel. “There.” He points.

  Somewhere across the construction site he hears mumbled curses and running footsteps. Ignoring this, he limps as fast as he can toward the pit.

  Unlike most subway sites, here the tunnel starts abruptly. From the surface, a hole descends vertically for twenty feet to the excavation proper, spanned by a wooden ladder. Peter climbs down first, moving awkwardly on his injured ankle. She tumbles down the ladder behind him, falling over the last rungs into his arms so that they both collapse onto the rocky floor. Painfully, they climb to their feet.

  The place they have entered is far different from the lamp-lit chaos of the tunnels where Peter worked on the digging crews before. Here, after hours, the darkness and silence of the underground passageway are final and absolute. Even directly below the entrance Peter can hardly see his hands in front of his face, and ahead of them the excavation is a rough corridor leading to utter blackness.

  They move slowly into the dark, supporting each other and tripping over outcroppings of rubble. Within minutes both of them are bruised and bloodied from banging against the unfinished walls. Groping their way around the first bend in the tunnel, they stop, clinging to each other.

  Gradually they catch their breath. Still they remain pressed together, eyes closed.

  Some unknown span of time passes. She breathes in the scent of his body, the universe shrinking briefly to the diameter of his arms. Finally, feeling him shift nervously, she forces herself to step away.

  “Here,” Peter whispers. “I’ll light the lantern.”

  “Are you sure it won’t be seen?” A hissing echo of her words coming back to them from unseen rock walls in the distance below.

  In response, he takes the burlap sack from her and fumbles inside, pulling out the small paraffin lamp purchased that afternoon—along with a compass and a few other supplies—by Paolo’s wife, with Peter’s dwindling savings. She strikes a match and their shadows flare hugely for an instant before he shortens the wick. The flame through the glass illuminates only a few feet around them.

  They continue downward, into the pit.

  A hundred feet later the tunnel branches to the left and right, and they stop.

  “Which way?” She looks at Peter. He pulls the compass out of his pocket. By the guttering lantern flame, he studies the instrument—then shakes it, and shakes his head.

  “What is wrong?” she asks.

  He holds up the compass. The needle swings right, pauses, swings left and then right again, refusing to come to rest. “Broken.”

  She nods, struck by the thought that the problem may not be the compass but what lies ahead in the underground darkness. North, the compass says. West, south, west, north. She shivers, not only from the subterranean chill.

  “What now?” she whispers. “Can you find our way without it?”

  Peter frowns. The directions that Paolo gave him through the tunnels were vague at best. South and then east, almost under the river, the Italian had said: not much to go on in these unknown diggings. And really, he thinks, the reasonable thing would be to turn back now.

  He looks up and sees her expectant expression in the flickering light. And for no clear reason, the image of his father’s face comes back to him.

  “Maybe.” He nods. “Stay quiet.”

  He waits until the echoes
of these words have died away. When they do, the silence of the tunnel is unsettling. During Peter’s months in New York, the white noise of the city has become what stillness means—so that now, this absolute absence of sound feels like something else, heavier and more threatening.

  Closing his eyes, he snaps his fingers and listens to the series of fading clicks down the tunnel. He snaps his fingers again, trying to visualize the city above, the shape of the branching rock walls around them. He opens his eyes.

  “Half a second to the first branching. Can you remember?”

  “Why?”

  “The echoes. A trick my father taught me.”

  Abruptly the puzzlement on her face shifts to an expression of wonder, as realization—and with it, a crowd of questions and possibilities—floods her mind.

  “Of course—like Archimedes, measuring the displacement of water!” She steps toward Peter, grasping his arm. The idea of using echoes this way, substituting sound for light—the notion takes her breath away: a whole new kind of vision, a means of mapping the unseen corners of the world. “Tell me, is this done often on the frontier? Has anyone built a machine for the purpose? And why snap your fingers instead of, for example, whistling? Do you find that lower sounds echo better than a higher pitch? Because I would think—”

  “Ssh,” Peter interrupts, glancing back toward the mouth of the tunnel, and she realizes that she’d nearly been shouting. “Later,” he whispers. “We need to keep moving.”

  She nods, chagrined, and follows him down the left fork of the tunnel, descending deeper into the earth. As they walk she snaps her own fingers and slaps the cave walls experimentally, trying to correlate the reflected sound with this underground geography, until he asks her to stop—and they move onward in silence.

  Darkness and more darkness. After a time, she cannot tell whether they have been walking for minutes or hours. She feels as if she is going blind, the small puddle of yellow lantern light around them revealing the same scene again and again: dull rock on all sides, repeated to infinity. Twice they arrive at dead ends and she feels the beginnings of panic, imagining the two of them wandering sightless until they die of cold or starvation. She tries to ignore the weight of unseen stone pressing down on all sides, to focus only on her footsteps, the next breath, and the next. Finally, after an eternity of this, he stops and holds up a hand.