They all laughed. “That’s very entertaining,” said Nate. “If you keep doing that we don’t need to talk.”
“Only one show per customer,” she said. She adjusted her pack, tugged at her jeans, and continued down the tunnel. “I believe we were talking about art?”
Roger grinned. “Think so, yeah.”
“The short answer,” she said, “according to several psychologists, is childhood rebellion.”
“Psychologists?” echoed Nate.
“Oh, yeah,” said Xela. “I mean, for someone to keep ignoring her parents and wasting time on pointless things, there has to be something wrong with them, right? Probably something the nanny did.”
“You had a nanny?”
“No, but you know how it goes. ‘How our kid turned out is everyone’s problem but ours’.” She shook her head. “You sure you want to hear this? I swear, it’s like a bad sitcom plot.”
“Sitcoms are cool,” said Roger.
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.