I opened the first door of the bunker for it, but then Hendrikson took my forearm in his hand, shook his head no, maybe saved us all.
We don’t know what’s a trick, what’s not.
The sheep finally walked away from the door, became a heat signature on our thermal monitor, a yellow-tinged splotch wending into the structure. But standing in the structure is no protection from winter.
What the structure is is rebar and iron girders and I-beams and chain-link. It looks like an unfinished project, like the funding fell through and now it’s been abandoned, left to rust back into the earth.
This is why nobody stops.
How long we’ve been here is ninety-six months.
My daughter Sheila, she’s about that old now. When my wife called to report her first steps, there were approximately fourteen relays between her voice and my ear.
I walked out into the night after that, no jacket.
The structure was a skeletal silhouette against the bright sky.
Since we started monitoring it, it’s moved north-northeast exactly six and one-eighths inches. It doesn’t displace the soil as it goes. In its track, the grass stands as if it’s always been there.
On every spectrum we know to look at it with, it appears to be just what it is: iron and steel, the metal guts of a prison built in West Virginia in 1918.
The reason we’re here is that, eight and a half years ago, that prison collapsed and killed all seventy-eight prisoners and guards sleeping inside it. The concrete walls just crumbled down on them, as if there was nothing supporting them anymore. Because there wasn’t. It had been dreamed away.
Three months later, four Casper men were brought up on charges of killing their friend.
When they were arrested, they were in a bar. Only one of them was drinking. The other three were just sitting there, holding drinks as if they know they were supposed to be drinking them, but the ice or the glass or the alcohol, it all had all just become too heavy.
Their testimony was that they were collecting scrap metal from some old place on BLM land, and their friend, an ex-lumberjack named Manny, he kept walking down all the halls trying to get an echo or something, and then he just suddenly wasn’t there anymore.
Without a body to support foul play, or any kind of motive, or history of malice, the four men were never convicted. Instead, four different men were assigned to watch a structure that nobody remembered, that wasn’t registered at the county courthouse, and didn’t show up on satellite photos as recent as four months before. The structure that would turn out to have the same floorplan as that West Virginia prison.
What Hendrikson thinks is that what the lumberjack did was turn just the right series of corners, like cracking a code, and that the next time he looked up, it was to a chunk of concrete falling down onto him. A whole ceiling of concrete.
Maybe.
The first time I placed my naked palm to one of the I-beams of the structure, I was crying.
Later I would watch a recording of myself in infrared, touching the I-beam.
On the recording, of course, there’s no sound.
What I was saying, though, was please.
Some nights Ben forgets he’s sleeping, and sits at the controls, his fingers running over the board.
Used to, we’d wake him, try to make him understand, but now we know he just recalibrates a lens or two then goes back to bed. And it’s usually a lens that needs recalibrating.
For a while, Hendrikson had me believing I was doing that too, but then I tied my feet together with knotted-together socks one night, proved him wrong. Unless of course I retied them in my sleep as well.
Our commanding officer, Russell, he’s tried to kill himself forty-two times now. We know all the ways to bring him back.
Because of Sheila, I’ve never tried to kill myself.
I think of that sheep in a diaper more than I should, though.
We don’t know if it ever left the structure or not. Maybe, just on dumb animal luck, it stumbled onto that series of halls that the lumberjack did, and went to someplace warmer.
The next morning, anyway, the structure was unchanged.
And it’s a lie that I’ve never tried to kill myself, of course. I just did all that before coming here. It’s out of my system now.
The joke we still say is what we were originally told: that this would be a temporary assignment. That relief’s being trained as we speak.
My wife’s name is Joella, and Maryann, and Wanda. Her face mixes with all the other girls I’ve known.
She’s living with a guy off-base now.
She says she’s sorry.
The one time I tried to run away, Hendrikson tracked me on satellite until I collapsed, and then he walked out with a sled and pulled me back, took my shift.
When I asked him why, he said it was because I was the life of the party, man, and then slapped me on the upper arm, cupped my shoulder in his large hand.
The northern lights with the naked eye are a curtain of light.
Your lips can turn blue, watching them, so that if you smiled, it would hurt. But smiling wouldn’t be enough, either.
One of the ways Russell tried to kill himself was climbing as high as he could up the structure, and jumping off.
We nursed him back to health. Ben even gave him two pints of his own blood.
The structure moves so slowly you can only see its progress on paper.
It neither speeds up nor slows down.
If you get Hendrikson drunk enough, he’ll explain it to you, the structure. How what happened was, one night some prisoner, probably a new one, he laid in bed all day just thinking about getting out. That that occupied his whole and complete mind. But he wasn’t thinking rocket packs and helicopters or any of that. What that prisoner wanted to do was walk out. And, for that to happen, the prison would have to fall down around him.
Meaning, after he fell asleep, he somehow wished the prison gone.
Only he wasn’t strong enough, or wasn’t particular enough in his wish, or didn’t word it right, or – and this is what I think – only metal of a certain age can be physically transported in a dream like that.
Of course this prisoner, what he really did that night was kill himself.
When Hendrikson tells this story, Russell leans forward on his cot and stares at him with his face turned half away.
Of the four of us, I’m the only one with a child.
The reason for this is Sheila was born after I was assigned here, to a woman who was only my girlfriend of two weeks then. She’s my wife now, yeah – we were married on the telephone, and by mail, because the government wouldn’t pay for her healthcare any other way – but I don’t know that she’s ever used my name.
The pictures of Sheila, though.
I can tell which is which by how they feel.
The time Ben tried to run away, he was sleeping, so it doesn’t count, I don’t think, though he insists it does.
We got in a fight over this. It broke my nose.
Afterwards, we didn’t talk for weeks, until, finally, just to prove himself right, he ran off into a blizzard.
Where I found him was curled up behind a shrub that was a sieve for the wind.
I held him to me until he was warm.
The northern lights on infrared are nothing. According to Russell, who saw them from the top of the structure, they’re not what they seem to be, the lights, but he won’t tell us anymore than that, even with vodka in him.
It doesn’t matter, though. For the lights not to be what they seem to be they would have to be seeming to be something in the first place.
Ben knows I walk through the structure for twenty minutes each night, but if I pretend to be asleep then he doesn’t say anything to me about it.
Whether he tells the others or documents it in the log, I don’t know.
The only thing we know for sure about the structure is that if you bolt a lightning rod to it, if you bolt two hundred lightning rod
s all over it, so it bristles, still, when the lightning finally comes months later, it’ll strike our antenna instead, which is four meters lower.
This gives us faith that our watch is worthwhile.
Snow coats the structure like it coats everything in Wyoming, though. And – we’re not supposed to know this either – you can cut it with a torch, just like regular steel. The gas and smoke that rose from it as we were cutting, we saved it in an upside down jar, and were going to keep it forever until Russell tried to kill himself one night by breathing it in all at once.
It didn’t do anything to him.
It’s embarrassing to try to kill yourself and have it not work out, I think. But it’s good to not be dead too.
Whatever part of our rations we don’t finish, Russell always eats.
Whether he came from a large family or grew up poor or both, or whether this is another, longer suicide attempt, we don’t know, and don’t ask.
If you could somehow live off light, cut it up on your plate and fork it in, that’s what I would want to do, I think. Not because it would taste good or be filling, but because a little girl, watching her father do that, she wouldn’t say anything, would just watch, her eyes wide with wonder, and she would never forget it for however long she’d live. Which would maybe be forever.
What I don’t tell Hendrikson, even though it’s regulation too, and we’ve made promises besides, is that a few nights ago, walking through the structure during my shift, I saw a shape walking ahead of me. Not if I looked straight on, but he was there.
It was the lumberjack.
When I stopped walking, he looked back.
The way I knew he was real was that he wasn’t holding a double-edged axe, like all the lumber-jacks from my childhood did.
He wasn’t lost, either.
‘Tad,’ he called back to me.
That’s my name.
I looked away and he was gone.
He’s not on any of the recordings, either. I checked.
What Ben thought I was doing, stopping like that in the hall, I don’t know.
I did cry that night though, for some reason. Finally Hendrikson came over to my bunk and laid down beside me and touched my shoulder like he does, and then that made me cry more and harder.
It’s nothing unusual in the bunker, though, crying like that.
You just have to ride it out.
That night I didn’t dream of the sheep in the diaper, but I wanted to. I don’t know if that counts or not.
If you look at the structure long enough, you lose a kind of perspective and it just becomes a tangle of rust-colored lines. They don’t move or anything, and it’s all in your head anyway, but – it’s like if you say a word enough times, it starts to lose meaning. And then, the next time somebody says it just in normal conversation, you’ll get a dull jolt, like you’ve got a funny story associated with that word, but then you won’t be able to remember it and people will just think you’ve maybe had enough to drink already.
That’s how it is with the structure. You get drunk on it. And then you laugh a little, because, for the four of you, it still is what it always was: a prison.
But then you think maybe it’s more, too.
And you don’t tell anybody, even your best friend.
And it’s winter of course, but this is Wyoming, too. Even when it’s not winter, it’s winter.
Whatever you’re planning, though – you’re afraid to even say it in your head, because somebody might steal it – Russell messes it up by making everybody get their gear on and do the drill he made up. All it is is walking up and down the halls of the path of rocks we’ve laid out to the north of the structure. They perfectly mirror, down to the inch, the floorplan of the structure. To the east, in more rocks, is the slightly smaller floorplan of the second floor. To the south, the single room of the third floor – the watchtower, Russell calls it. He’s the only one who can stand there.
We didn’t use the land west of the structure because Russell’s superstitious.
And, though the rocks are tall, still, we have to dig them out until our mittens are crusted with ice.
What Russell thinks is the same thing he always thinks: that he’s cracked the code, figured it out.
So what we do is tie strings between two of us, while the third watches the structure and Russell directs.
The idea is that when we unlock whatever’s here, there’ll be some glimmer or something in the real structure.
Russell’s theory is that whatever happened, it wasn’t because of the structure, but because of whatever pattern that one inmate walked the day before the prison fell down on him.
By the time we’re done, our eyelashes are frozen stalks, our beards slush.
In the kitchen, Russell tries to stab his wrist with a dull fork, but his blood is sluggish, his skin over it calloused, tired.
Hendrikson says if we don’t make him clean it up himself, he’ll never learn.
We don’t write any of this down in the log.
My daughter is almost nine. I say this out loud to Ben one night, but he’s sleepwalking, sleep-monitoring, so I don’t think it really registers. But then he says her name back to me in his toneless voice.
I stand, watching him adjust a dial, and, because it’s either hit him in the back of the head or walk away, I walk away.
If you make your hand into a fist and blow into the tunnel of your palm, you can calm down from almost anything. It doesn’t matter what your other hand’s doing. It could be playing piano or cooking bacon or any of a hundred other things.
What I finally decide is that Ben saying my daughter’s name like that, it means something. There are no accidents in the bunker. Not after nearly nine years.
Instead of just leaving Hendrikson without saying anything, I walk by his bunk to tell him bye while he’s sleeping, but see that he’s pulled the covers up from his feet. What’s under them, tucked up against his wall, are powdery-white bricks, like the kind you build a fireplace from.
I stare at them and stare at them.
In the pictures we have of the old prison, before it crumbled, it’s made of these exact same bricks.
What this means, God.
Is the structure growing back?
Are all the men going to still be inside, sleeping, or will they be dead?
But – Hendrikson.
What I think is that whatever bricks the structure’s been able to call across the void to itself, he’s been sneaking them back to his bunk.
Because he doesn’t want our watch to be over?
Because he’s afraid of the structure ever getting complete?
I lean against the wall by his bunk. I’m sweating.
In the bathroom, I towel it all off, keep nodding to myself, about what I’m not sure.
Ben tells me nighty-night as I shuffle past his chair. Like every other night, I don’t say anything, just keep moving, a moth with no wings.
In the snow and the wind I just stand for a long time, my fingertips shoved up into my armpits, my breath swirling away to wrap around the planet.
The night I saw the lumberjack, I remember all the turns I made. It’s something you learn to do, something you learn to do without really meaning to.
And I know that Ben’s watching me, and know that he knows I know he’s watching me, so I try to just stare straight ahead, not shake my head no or anything.
And then I duck into the wind, walk ahead to the structure, and step through the east-facing cell I started in that one night, and, and the trick is, I think, the way I remember it anyway, is that I’m mopping, and that I keep looking back to see my trail of wetness, and that’s how I remember.
Two hours later, he’s standing there at his end of the hall, the lumberjack. Manny.
My jaw is trembling, my heart in my throat.
Where I don’t belong, I know, is Wyoming.
All he’s doing is staring at me, too. To see each other, we have to look sideways, not straight on, like
we’re each suspicious.
For him, I think, it’s still the night he came to salvage metal.
What I am, then, is an authority, the owner of the structure maybe, who saw flashlights bobbing through all this scrap metal.
I don’t know where the prisoners are, or the guards. Or West Virginia.
What I do know is that I’ve left my coat by Hendrikson’s bunk. Or in the bathroom.
The way I know this is that Manny approaches, keeping close to one side of the hall, which is as open to the wind as any other part, that he approaches and offers me the second of the two flannel shirts he’s wearing.
I take it, wrap it around my shoulders without pushing my hands through the sleeves, and Manny nods to me, smiles with one side of his face.
According to our training, the shirt I’m wearing isn’t a shirt, but an artifact to be catalogued, processed, dissected.
But it’s warm, from him.
I close my eyes to him in thanks, and then, when he’s shuffling away, looking for his echo, waiting for his voice to come back to him, I get him to turn around somehow. Not with my voice, I don’t think, though my mouth’s open. But it doesn’t matter. What does is that he waits for me to make my way closer, still pushing the idea of the mop, and then takes what I give him, holding it tight by the corner, against the wind: a picture of Sheila.
For a long time he studies it, then looks up to me, and then, behind him, there’s a brick along the edge of the hall where there’s never been a brick before.
I only notice this because I’ve been trained to.
‘Yours?’ he says, holding the picture up, and I nod, say that she looks like her mother, that her mother’s a real beauty, and then I look behind me to the idea of the trail of wetness, just so I don’t get lost in here like he has.
When I come back around, he’s gone.
What this looks like to Ben, I have no idea, and don’t care either. We don’t make eye contact as I pass his station anyway. At the kitchen table, Russell has all of our pills, antibiotics and vitamins and mood-regulators, lined up in the floorplan of the structure. What he’s doing is taking them one by one, as if he’s walking through. Since the last two times, though, they’re filled with confectioner’s sugar. He’ll get a cavity, maybe.
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories Page 235