by Daniel Quinn
As I lifted it, she grabbed it and wrapped it around the side of the ladder. She switched hands at my belt, then asked for my left leg. When that was in place, she surveyed the situation and told me to put my left arm through the ladder and grab a rung as far down as I could reach. I did that.
“What we’ve got to do now is get you around the right side of the ladder. Can you scoot over to that side?” I could, but only by a few inches.
“Can you reach your right arm around to my side of the ladder?”
“Yes, but not very far.”
“Get it around as far as the elbow.”
I managed that, and she planted my right hand on a rung in front of her.
“Now we’ve just got to get the rest of you around here.”
“My left leg is the problem.”
“Yeah, I can see that. Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll unwrap it and help you put it on a rung on your side of the ladder. Can you do that?”
“I guess so.”
When we got that done, she said, “Can you move some more to your right? We’ve got to get your arm around as far as the armpit.”
“Help me move my left leg some more.” I managed to use my left arm, looped over a rung in front of me, to take a little weight off it.
I was now basically hanging off the side of the ladder.
“Now we just have to put your right hand where my right hand is, then you’ll be able to pull yourself around.”
“Where will you be?”
“As soon as we get your right hand connected to the side rail, I’ll get out of the way.”
On her way down, she paused to twist my right foot around so it was toed in on the rung. It was an awkward situation but not nearly as awkward as falling thirty feet in the dark, so I managed to heave myself around. The trouble was, as soon as I did, my legs turned to rubber, and I had to hang there like a scarecrow for ten minutes till they started feeling like legs again and I could begin a wobbly descent.
Mallory used the interval to organize a reception, creating a small dining alcove lit by the larger flashlights, which were designed for area illumination. She sat me down on a crate and handed me a chocolate bar, which I ingested in not much more than a single gulp.
“I’m sorry,” she said matter-of-factly.
“You didn’t know it was going to happen.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I hope there are no more thrills like that one in store for us.”
“No, nothing like that,” she said ambiguously.
I looked up at the scene of my narrow escape and asked how we were going to get back.
“Oh, we’re not going back that way.”
“Obviously.”
“I mean that was never the intention.”
“You mean we could have come a different way?”
“Of course. There are hundreds. This is just the one I know.”
“If this is the one you know, then how do we get out?”
“Getting out is entirely different.”
“How so?”
She thought about that and said, “It’s like a parking garage. The trick is finding your car, not getting out. You can’t miss getting out—once you’ve found the car.”
“I see what you’re saying.”
“Right now, you could find your way back without me—just take any opening that heads upward. But without me, you’d never find the place where we’re going.”
“I get it.”
“Are you ready to go on? It’s not far now.”
I said that was good news and dragged myself up.
WE WERE NOW beyond all reach of light from the surface, and as we continued to thread our way through the maze, the beams of our flashlights turned the region into a dancing maelstrom of shadows.
“This is probably an extremely silly question,” I said, “but are we headed for one specific spot you know about?”
“Of course,” she replied. “Why would you think otherwise?”
“Because you can’t possibly know exactly where you are.”
“What makes you think that?”
“It’s beyond belief that this chaos could be recognizable to you after two thousand years.”
“From my point of view, it’s more like two weeks.” “But it can’t possibly be the same now as it was then.”
Mallory paused in front of a rectangular niche, big enough to hold a couple of refrigerators. I call it a niche, but this implies a function the space may never have had.
“Do you know what was going on here two thousand years ago?”
“You mean right here in this niche? I have no idea, obviously.”
“It was a little flower stall, run by a girl named Shirley.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“You don’t? When Shirley went broke, it was taken over by a guy who had a line of handmade chocolates. Then later there was a guy dealing three-card monte, and after that a couple of rack-fillers used it as a warehouse.”
“Okay, I understand that none of this is true. What’s your point?”
“The point is that two thousand years ago, this niche was as empty as it is today, and for the same reason. It’s absolutely useless for any imaginable purpose. No one uses it, no one wants it, no one changes it. The same is true of everything down here.” She flashed her light on a coil of conduit that lay at our feet, one bit of trash in the midst of thousands. “Why don’t you move that?” she asked.
“Why should I?”
“Exactly—why should you? Why should anyone? No one’s moved it in two thousand years, and no one’s going to move it. Come back in a thousand years and it’ll still be right here.”
“I see what you mean,” I said.
A few minutes later we were heading down a long, round-sided tunnel like dozens we’d traversed and hundreds we’d passed. As in many, a bundle of pipes of various sizes ran down its length, held in place at shoulder height by heavy metal straps. Mallory was interested in this particular bundle, however, and was following it with her flashlight.
About midway down the course of this tunnel, the biggest of the pipes—perhaps thirty inches in diameter—was joined by another the same size coming through the wall beside it. As was usually the case down there, the work done to put this pipe through the curved wall of the tunnel wasn’t elegantly executed. A generous-sized hole had been punched through the masonry, and that was that. No one had troubled to fill the gap above the pipe. Why would they? There was room enough to shove a small suitcase through on its side—except that, as Mallory explained it, we weren’t going to be shoving any suitcases through the gap, we were going to be shoving ourselves through it.
Forestalling the objection I was about to make, she said, “This is the destination, Jason. We’re there. It’s ten feet away.”
I could hardly dig in my heels over ten feet, so I said, “Okay.”
She hesitated for a moment, then added, “This is no joke.”
“I didn’t say it was a joke. I said okay.”
There was just enough light to see her shake her head. “You’re going to think I’m playing with you, but I’m not.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Instead of answering, she hoisted herself up onto the pipe and worked her way into the hole, pushing her backpack in front of her. It was time to get seriously dirty.
I waited till I was sure I wasn’t going to get kicked in the face, then I slipped out of my own backpack, stowed my flashlight, and followed her example, heading in a direction I identified as vaguely east. There was one spot where my head would go through, provided my cheek was sliding in the dust on top of the pipe. With my arms inside, I had to apply first elbows then hands to the interior wall to propel the rest of me in up to my hips, at which point I seemed to be stuck. My legs, still outside, had nothing to push against, and my hands had nothing to grab onto except the dusty pipe I was lying on. I eventually adopted a sort of caterpillar wriggle, lifting my chest, bringing my stomac
h forward, and using that to propel me an inch or two at a time. I soon worked a knee through the opening, and it was easy after that. I wondered how Mallory had managed it so effortlessly, sliding through the hole like an eel.
Now that I was finished huffing and puffing my way through the wall, I noticed that the silence around me was absolute. Mallory and her flashlight beacon were nowhere in sight. I switched on my own flashlight and looked around. The pipe I’d crawled in on continued in its eastward course, disappearing into a wall three feet ahead, and nothing bigger than a rat could have followed it. Behind me, the wall of the tunnel curved up and away into a ceiling four feet away. The floor below, obviously the same as the floor of the tunnel we’d just left, made a north-south passageway running parallel to the tunnel.
As far as I could see, Mallory had vanished into thin air.
At last I understood why I might think she was playing with me. In fact, I was about one-third convinced she was playing with me. More to the point, however, I was two-thirds afraid that maybe she wasn’t playing with me—that she’d fallen into some hidden chasm and was gone forever.
I called out her name but got nothing back except echoes.
She’d said ten feet. Having crossed two of them to get to the middle of this passageway, there were presumably eight still to go. I slid down off the pipe and began digging through the junk on the floor, looking for trapdoors. There were none, of course. I checked the pipe itself for openings on the underside. There were none. Mallory had snuck in a reference to Eddie Tucker’s “loose brick,” so I looked for loose bricks in the east wall of the passageway. There were none. I played my flashlight over the ceiling without getting any more bright ideas than I’d had the first time. Resting atop the masonry of the tunnel like a board on a cylinder, the ceiling presented a smooth, unbroken surface.
I was reluctant to call out again—reluctant to admit I was stuck—but if she was honest in her ten-foot estimate, then that’s what I was. I thought of a way to end the standoff without humiliating myself. Speaking in a perfectly normal tone of voice, I said, “I’m beginning to think you’re playing with me.”
“Turn off the flashlight,” Mallory replied. Her voice bounced off the walls in a way that left me clueless as to its point of origin, but I couldn’t resist sending my light around again anyway, hoping to catch her hovering in midair, perhaps. No wiser, I turned it off.
For a moment I was blind. Then, as the rods and cones of my eyes gradually came to an agreement about the situation, I perceived an arm reaching into the darkness from a spot where no arm could be. It was apparently issuing from the juncture between the ceiling and the tunnel some four feet above and four feet to the north of the pipe we’d come in on.
“Do you see it?” Mallory asked.
“I see it.”
She withdrew her arm. Switching on my flashlight and directing it to the spot, all I now perceived was that no one could possibly be there. I climbed up on the pipe, then flattened myself onto the upper curve of the tunnel wall. From this position I could now see the opening Mallory’s voice was coming from.
“Get as much of your body as you can above the middle of the bulge,” she advised.
That made wonderful sense from a theoretical point of view, but turning theory into practice was a different matter. Standing on tiptoe, I was able to embrace a lot of the tunnel wall, and that was fine, but I couldn’t lift my feet off the pipe without sliding back down.
“Wait a second,” Mallory said. “I’m trying to think how I do it myself. Start with your left leg.”
“Start how?”
“It’s sort of like getting up on a horse. You need to throw your left leg up over the bulge. Then climb up and to your right, pulling your right leg up. You need to end up lying stretched out above the bulge. After that, it’s easy.”
She was right, provided you were talking about a horse the size of an elephant and were meant to ride not sitting on top but lying on one side of it. I managed to get up there and once in position felt secure enough to creep forward toward Mallory’s hand, visible four feet away.
Mallory was reaching down through an opening just above the juncture of the ceiling and the apex of the tunnel. To someone on the floor below, the bulge of the tunnel wall not only hid this opening, it persuaded the eye that no such opening could exist. There just wasn’t room for such an opening, so it was pointless to look for one.
Struggling through this opening, about twelve inches wide by twenty-four long, I found myself in a low-ceilinged, windowless, doorless room some eighteen feet square. Again, to call it a room is misleading. It was a leftover space, a purposeless and unintended volume created by the random intersection of six unrelated surfaces, and the fact that it could serve as a room was the sheerest accident.
Mallory added the area light from my backpack to the one she’d already set up. Without these lights, the room would have been as dark as the Carlsbad Caverns’ deepest pit. With them, it was surprisingly homelike. There were two or three makeshift chairs, a few crate tables showing signs of what might have been recent use if they hadn’t been covered in a thick layer of dust. There was a sizable sleeping pallet, which had been laid out on a pair of pallets of the kind used for storing cargo. Only later did I realize that all this furniture had been disassembled below and reassembled here once the parts had been passed through the narrow entrance to the room.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“This is where I spent the last three months of my life as Gloria MacArthur.”
Mallory returned my gawk with a cool, passionless gaze. Then she turned away to an area where she’d arranged two chairs and a crate table.
“Sit down,” she said. I saw that she’d cleared the chairs of the bulk of the dust they’d collected over the centuries, not that it mattered much, considering the filth we’d picked up in the last hour.
She sat down and started disassembling the crate with a rusty screwdriver she’d found somewhere. When she had the top off, she tipped it at an angle like a conjuror so I could see it was empty. Then she went back to work, taking it apart piece by piece till she was ready to make her next revelation. The crate had a false bottom, a space twenty-four inches square by four inches deep, packed solid with small bundles fitted together with painstaking precision to maximize the available room.
“Our treasury,” she said. “The collected remains of two lives.” She reached for one of the larger bundles, wrapped in what looked like oilcloth, explaining that they’d had room for only one book. She unwrapped it just enough to be able to flip through the pages till she came to a snapshot, which she handed me.
It showed a grinning African girl, a skinny sixteen-year-old, cute as a proverbial button, all nappy hair, blazing white teeth, and eyes as big as saucers.
“Who is this?” I asked.
“That’s Gloria MacArthur.”
I reeled.
I WAS AS MUCH staggered by my own blindness as anything else. What else had she been preparing me for but this?
Staggered or not, before I could stop myself, I glanced up from the face in the photo to Mallory’s face, checking the resemblance as an entirely automatic reflex. She caught the glance, understood its point, and laughed, uncannily creating a resemblance I wouldn’t have seen there two hours before, when her face was still clean and lily white. Now it was closer to being black than the grinning face in the snapshot.
She took back the photo, replaced it between the pages, and started to shove the book into her backpack when I asked her what book it was. She turned back the oilcloth to expose the cover. It was something called The New Negro.
“It was a very influential book in the twenties and thirties, even in the forties,” she explained. “Influential but also controversial. The guy who put it together had a tendency to see the ‘New Negro’ as someone who was almost white, as someone who had cut off his cultural roots well above such low life things as jazz and blues. The New Negro was expected to be much more d
rawn to Beethoven and Bach than to Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith. All the same, it had some valuable stuff in it that no one wanted to lose.”
“Who is this ‘we’ you keep referring to?”
Mallory rewrapped the book and put it in her backpack before giving me an answer. “I’m not going to let you piece the story together through interrogation,” she said. “I’ll tell it my own way.”
“Of course. That’s fine.”
The woman had a positive knack for putting me in the wrong before I even had a chance to go wrong.
“I’m not going to spend a lot of time telling you things you already know,” she began. “Americans weren’t crushed by losing the war, because they didn’t think of it as losing. Hitler’s scientists had beaten ours to the atomic bomb by a matter of months, and that was all it took. The planned Allied invasion was called off in a hurry, and a cease-fire was in place practically overnight. Germany had the whip in its hand but was too exhausted to use it. The United States was out of the war without ever having been bombed, invaded, or even threatened.
“It was different for the people of Europe, of course. Places like France, Belgium, and the Netherlands became virtual provinces of Germany. Great Britain barely talked its way out of being occupied. Those were the losers. The Americans weren’t losers, they just hadn’t quite managed to be winners. It was time to pick up the pieces and move on. People were glad to forget about it.
“Nobody officially ‘knew’ what had happened to the Jews. There were rumors about death camps, places like Buchenwald and Belsen and Dachau, but it gradually came to be believed that these rumors were being manufactured by the Jews themselves. The Jews were doing their best to keep alive hatred of the Hun—this is the way it was perceived, the way we were encouraged to perceive it. The Jews weren’t going to let things get back to ‘normal.’ They wanted the war to go on. I’m sure your little girls would have no difficulty explaining that.”
“That’s right. They wouldn’t.”
“I’m talking about the middle to late forties here, the years when television was just beginning to catch on. Writers for this new medium were producing a lot of cheap spy melodrama, and it was handy to have a ready-made class of enemies to draw on. Gradually this class of enemies became more and more distinctly Jews. It wasn’t necessary to call them Jews. You could identify them by their names, their clothes, their profiles, their accents. These were the people the good guys were always struggling with, always on the verge of losing to.