We watch the two youngsters. The girl is showing Adam how to wind yarn around the sticks.
“Nothing wrong with his eyes.” Marcus grins.
“Who is she?”
“Bea can be a bit—you know . . .” He makes a quacking gesture with his hand. “But she’s a good girl. Heart of gold.”
“She looks—”
“Normal. Yup. Just like your boy, she’s uncontaminated.” Marcus winks, as though I am being let in on a big secret. “Folks keep waiting for science to come up with a solution, but I’ve been saying all along, it’s going to happen the good old-fashioned way: boy meets girl.”
Before I can protest this line of thinking, he dashes off to the food table.
I return to my seat only to find the girl has performed a very neat trick in the few moments I’ve been gone. She has made off with Adam’s heart.
Most of the dwellings are tents, but some are constructed from cardboard, corrugated iron, and bricks. Up close, it’s clear how much care has gone into each home. Some even have tiny porches with rails and shingled overhangs. Bea’s tent is shaped like a wigwam and is made from animal skins. It is decorated with colorful scarves and hundreds of ribbons. At the opening of the tent is a mat that reads,
WIPE YOUR PAWS
, and next to it, in a pot of real dirt, a silk geranium. Coming from the tent is the pungent smell of incense and the sound of her giggling.
I take another step closer. She’s saying something about cinnamon. She’s having him touch something.
Then she asks, “Are you guys in trouble?”
“I don’t know. Maybe,” comes Adam’s reply.
“You didn’t rob a bank, or anything, did you?” She laughs again. “It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me; I’m just being a busybody.”
There’s a brief pause, and she says, “It’s toenail polish, silly.”
Instead of going in and asking that they return to the common area, I hold back. Being drawn to this pretty girl has come naturally to Adam.
He is behaving like any teenage boy would, not like someone who has lived his entire life in isolation. Why should I now interrupt something that I feared would never happen to Adam? Why should I let my own fears ruin a perfectly good experience for him?
I sneak around the other side. As luck would have it, there is a tiny mesh window on the other side of the tent. I peek through. Candles in little colored jars and an oil lamp light the space surprisingly well. It’s like looking into a kaleidoscope. Carpet scraps cover the floor. Pinned to the inside walls are pictures of birds and flowers and a sun with sleepy eyes, and dangling by threads from the center post are paper doves and butterflies and lollipops. A narrow cot is piled with pink and red blankets, a fluffy purple pillow, and a herd of stuffed toy animals. Instead of chairs, yellow cushions are scattered on the floor. Adam is seated on one of them next to a white Buddha statue. Bea, cross-legged opposite him, is showing him a scrapbook.
“How long have you lived here?” he asks, flustered when she catches him staring at her freckled chest.
She shrugs and flicks several braided strands off her shoulder. “I don’t know. I really don’t keep track of time. I know I probably should and all, but clocks are just so mechanical. I don’t care for them at all.”
Instead of telling her he loves mechanical things, that if he had his way, he’d make things that tick and turn all day long, he announces that he doesn’t care much for clocks, either.
She grins, then springs up. She hurries over to a plastic tub and comes back with a box of cookies. “Dessert!”
Adam’s got the look of craving written all over his face, except not for food.
She takes a cookie apart and licks the center. Adam about chokes on his.
“Why do you live here and not outside?”
“I like it here,” she answers. “It’s peaceful. Nobody bothers you.”
“It’s dark.”
“You can be in the dark and still have light in your life.” The girl makes her point by flicking her braids. The effect has Adam bewitched.
“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, living out there. You’d be surprised what people are capable of doing in broad daylight. Sometimes, I think all that sunshine blinds them.”
Adam takes a bite of his cookie.
“I’m not saying all of them are like that.” She pauses. “You’re not like that.”
“I’m not from out there.”
She stops chewing. “You’re not? Where are you from?”
The question has him stumped. “Nowhere,” he finally answers.
“No one’s from nowhere. Where are your people from?”
Why doesn’t she drop it?
I have to strain to hear Adam’s answer. “I don’t have any people, except for my mom.”
Yes, and what a disappointment she has turned out to be. The freed captive will eventually see herself as she really is—isn’t that what Pops said about the allegory? I am Adam’s mother, but I am also the puppeteer who has given him shadows to name.
The girl says, “Marcus is one of your people.”
Adam half nods, half shrugs.
“I’ll be one of your people.”
Adam goes from looking like someone who doesn’t have much to show for himself to a kid who has suddenly struck it rich. As he takes in his good fortune, Bea leans across the space between them and just as quickly flits back again. Adam appears dazed, like he can’t believe what just happened. Kissed, right on the lips.
Marcus went outside at dawn to retrieve our suitcase from the alley and came back restless. He has spent much of the day talking to Dyno about heading south to the Indian reservation. Dyno did a lot of nodding and uh-huhing, but gave the impression he’d just as soon have a hole swallow him up than go riding off into the sunset on one of Marcus’s big ideas.
Adam and Bea skip ahead. Since meeting, they have become inseparable. One minute they’ll be sitting next to us, the next they’ll have snuck off. They’ve attended a rehearsal, gone to see the murals, and helped prepare and serve lunch. And now, they’ve consented to let the adults go with them to day care. They remind me a little of Arlo and me, except with the roles reversed. Bea is the one brimming with confidence, the one doing the leading, and Adam looks like you could measure him in volts.
This second tunnel echoes with the sounds of a playground. Its sides
are painted with colorful scenes, the floor is lined with Astroturf, and artwork is pinned to a zigzagging clothesline. We go through a gate in a white picket fence and enter into a large, brightly lit antechamber. Children flock toward us. Some of them hobble, some of them crawl, their limbs too twisted to stand. A barrel-chested boy carries a shrunken boy with an enormous head. There must be twenty of them, thirty perhaps, none without deformity. It’s like looking at a different species. Adam, not used to being handled, laughs nervously as a kid latches on to him. It’s me who takes a step back.
At various stations in the room are several other children, each with an adult. A little boy spinning in circles is settled into the lap of a large-bosomed woman. Pops, waving to her, tells us she is the day-care director. “A saint at school and a devil in bed,” he says, matter-of-factly. I give Marcus my big-eyes look, and he shakes his head just enough as though to say, Don’t do anything that might encourage him.
We head for an area of the room that is lined with deck chairs. On one of them is a sickly little girl.
Pops greets her with a bow. “Your Highness. May I present Sir Marcus and Lady Blythe?”
Marcus kisses her forehead. “A little bird told me it is your birthday today.”
It’s hard to tell her age. She is exquisite even without hair, even with the large tumor on the side of her neck.
She smiles. I have to listen real close to hear her. “I’m turning ten.”
“Can’t be! It was just yesterday when you were a baby, this big.” He cups his hand.
“Toadstool,” she manages to say.
“That’s right. I found you curled up on a toadstool. Lucky the fairies didn’t find you first.”
“Kidder.”
“Now, would I kid when it comes to fairies?”
She smiles, all the way this time.
He hands her a necklace of wooden birds, something from Bill Bowers’s workshop, if I’m not mistaken, while Pops chats to a child half her
age who is lying on his side because a massive tumor prevents him from lying on his back. What Pops says must be very funny because the boy about falls off his cot laughing.
“Isn’t there anyone who can treat them?” I ask as we pass a play area with wooden toys, homemade plush toys, buckets of building materials. Bea is playing dress-up with a group of children, and Adam is helping three boys assemble a pile of rocks into a tower.
“Laura’s got her brains outside her skull and Thomas has his kidneys in that pouch on his back. We make the long journey to a clinic and they gon’ tell us no-can-do. Even the can-dos are no-cans. Can’t justify the expense is what they’ll say. Then they’ll talk life expectancy, and who needs to hear that?”
Pops chimes in. “None of us are to be spared suffering. The better question is, are we being defined by our afflictions? Are we to live with them or live above them?”
We come to a smaller room where children are rolling around on mats, honking and squeaking. It’s worse than a barnyard. Marcus explains that they are unable to sit or stand or walk, but lying in a crib all day is not good for them. If I pay close attention, he says, I will notice that they have a language all their own. It’s hard to watch—if ever there was an argument for sterilization, this is it—but after a few minutes, it becomes clear that these children are playing. They gently bump their foreheads together and then spin around and bump their feet together, reminding me, in a way, of water ballet.
We return to the main portion of the antechamber, where Bea is braiding the hair of a little girl who looks as old as a wizard. Adam is giving a piggyback ride to a humpbacked boy.
“These are the children you brought from Sunflower?”
Marcus nods.
“But not Bea.”
“No. Her father brought her here when she was still a baby,” Marcus explains. “He was dying and couldn’t take care of her and figured the best place to hide her was with the children everyone wants to forget about.”
“For the same reason you didn’t want doctors messing with your boy.”
Pops wanders off to talk to the director, while Marcus and I stand at the gate and watch the kids.
“If Diablo had been a war, this would be written about in the history books,” he says. “If we’d won—or if we’d lost—there would be pictures of these kids. People would’ve built a monument.
NEVER FORGET THEM
would’ve been engraved on it. Instead, folks saw these children and felt like their noses were getting rubbed in it. They got angry. They felt like Diablo was going to keep happening to them, over and over. Not too many years back, a vigilante group went around to group homes where orphans were being cared for and gassed everyone, even some of the kids who were fine. That’s when we got the idea to start bringing them here and hiding them.”
He goes on. “Like Pops says, though, you can’t let the past keep on dictating. Got to give the future a say-so, too. One day there won’t be no need for a place like this. Every kid’s going to find hisself a home. They’ll shut down Sunflower and others like it and just let us mixed-bag race sort ourselves out, one way or the other.”
A woman comes rushing to us from the other end of the tunnel. She’s sweating. “Got a call coming through on channel twelve from E22. They bought it.”
Marcus gives me a look as if I’m supposed to know what this means. “I had a friend of mine put out word that they’d found you and Adam dead from exposure on the northbound trade route.” He grins. “People believe everything they hear on the CB.”
“Does this mean . . .” I’m almost too afraid to ask, too afraid to jinx it with the words.
“That’s right. You’re going home.”
Long ago, when I was first taken Below, I would wake up in the middle of the night terrified that the darkness had swallowed me whole. Not
anymore.
I am the one who has swallowed the darkness. Small enough to pass through membranes, to be carried around in my bloodstream, small enough to circulate through my heart and settle in my cells, the darkness has been grafted to me. We are one. That’s why when the last of the lanterns goes out, I feel relief. I wish it weren’t so. I wish daylight had the effect on me that darkness does. But maybe Pops and Plato are right. Maybe after a while, the light will dazzle me less. Perhaps my eyes will adjust. Perhaps tomorrow when we go to Eudora, Adam and I will begin to name the things that are real. Maybe a few we might even call Good.
Lying on Marcus’s cot, I turn my back against the wave of smells—smoke, boiled meat, urine—and listen to people acclimating to their own darkness. Beside me is the lengthening of Adam’s breath, the gentle snore that comes so quickly, and in some recess not too far away someone’s urgent toil for gratification. There are creaking knees, a cough like a car engine turning over, mutterings, recited prayers, and an endless shifting of bodies that cannot get comfortable. I pull the covers over my head.
Hours must have passed because there is absolute silence when someone pulls them off again. At first, I think it is Adam who rouses me, until a claw clamps around my mouth and the sharp odor of vinegar stings my nose. I leap out of bed. Fully upright, I strain the pitch darkness for any sound of Adam. The only thing I hear is the faint whistle of air being expunged from rancid lungs. Clenching even harder, talons dig into my cheek. In case there is any mistaking the intruder’s intentions, something equally sharp is shoved against the small of my back. I am to move out of the tent. Shuffling forward, I confirm Adam is no longer on the floor. I step over his blankets. Outside the tent, I take big sweeping steps forward, hoping my foot will knock something over and alert Marcus, who is sleeping a few doors down. Where is the dog? My insides lurch. Dread dams my arteries. I feel my heart as soon as it stops beating.
Whump.
Death for everyone, I now realize, comes right in the middle of things. When you most want to stay alive, even if it’s just long enough to see your boy one more time, it ferrets you away.
“I have the boy.”
We come to a hole in the wall. I know this by the rush of dank air that smells of tobacco. By wedging a screwdriver finger between my shoulder blades, the specter indicates that I am to climb up into it. Without being able to see where to put my feet or hands, I scramble in. I try straightening up, and ram my head against the ceiling. I have to keep to all fours. Unlike the other tunnels, this one is cobbled with river rocks. I crawl forward. In my head, I go over his exact words.
I have the boy.
Aren’t there other ways he might have phrased it if Adam were not still alive?
“What did you do with my son?”
His answer is indecipherable, something you might hear the devil say. Pig latin, perhaps. He prods me sharply again.
The cobblestone artery empties into another antechamber. I know immediately that Adam is in the space, even before the devil lights the lamp. That mix of sweat and sweet hay smell. I call to him in a panic.
“I’m okay, Mom.”
I rush toward his voice, my hands outstretched, and a small flame from a paraffin lamp grants my wish. Adam is rising from a throne in the center of the room, his dog at his side.
“Adam!”
“I’m okay,” he repeats, and though his face is a perfect study in composure, his voice is hollow, like he’s had the marrow scared out of him.
Whatever it is now closes off my airways, flips my insides upside down, and causes a great and terrible hallucination. The specter lights another lamp, giving more depth to the room’s ghastly dimensions. Adam and I are in a crypt lined with bones. They are not cobblestones
beneath my feet but skulls. Human skulls. Above us, the domed ceiling is a warp and woof of bones. Columns of femurs rise up to support arches of hip bones. I squint at a wall. Stacked like firewood are arm bones and thigh bones. Gauging from the alcoves, the walls are at least two feet deep with bones.
“He said he’s not going to hurt us,” Adam murmurs when I grasp his hand. He sounds not at all assured. I look around for something with which to defend ourselves and notice that the throne, too, is an elaborately stacked pile of bones. And that is when I have the feeling I am being watched from above. I slowly turn my gaze upward. Suspended from the ceiling is a chandelier of bones connected to each corner of the room by a garland of skulls.
“What do you want?” I ask the devil who materializes from the shadows as a tangle of bandages and rags. Tucked in his bindings are chisels and hammers and brushes, and in his hand a bone large enough to be a club.
Rather than answer, he lights a third lamp. Beside him are pelvises shaped into a bell, its clapper a femur. He puts the lamp on an ornate pedestal of ribs and approaches us. He raises the bone like a baseball bat, as if he intends to swing at us. I pull Adam with me to the floor and fold over him. The man grunts for us to get up. He has to prod us with his foot and grunt several more times before I do as I’m told. He points first to a coat of arms fashioned from small bones, then to a series of Roman numerals above the doorway, and finally to the formation of an anchor in the floor. A chapel of death is what I see. History written with jawbones, locked up with vertebrae shaped like padlocks.
“Mom, I want to go,” Adam whispers.
Before I can state our case, Blade shows us a jumble of bones near a recess. They are not chalky white like the others. Instead, they are caked with grime. Beside them is a stool, a bucket, and a scouring pad. He has us come to a small wooden table where hip bones have been wired together like petals in a corolla. He marks our reactions closely and is irked when Adam repeats that he would like to leave. It’s how he assesses Adam that terrifies me, like the man is making a mental note of
every rib, and somehow I realize that we have been brought here to admire his handiwork.
“You did all this?” I manage.
He looks as if he has in mind the perfect place for my skull, and yet he nods.
“It must have taken you a long time.” Many are the dead. Too many for graves. In this ghastly place, the extent of Diablo’s destruction sets in. Also, the extent of Dobbs’s efforts in keeping Adam and me from it. Should there be space in my hating him for thanks? For forgiveness? And if I let slip through a crack one cubit of gratitude, won’t then come a rush of pardon, and if pardoned, won’t the gates of hell open for Dobbs, a free man?
The custodian of the bones begins a recitation. “The Lord set me down in the valley which was full of bones. And behold, there were very many in the open valley, and lo, they were very dry. And he said unto me, ‘Behold I will lay sinew upon them and will bring flesh upon them and cover them with skin, and put breath in them and they shall live.’ And there was a noise, a shaking, and the bones came together, bone upon bone. And he commanded the wind breathe into them, and they stood up upon their feet, and lived.”
Adam and I do not reply. We stand while the dead gaze at us without favor, without finding fault, either.
The third time Adam asks to leave, Blade waves his permission.
“Ezekiel thirty-seven,” he mutters.
“Hurry, son.” Adam, the dog, and I are crawling back into the tunnel as his haggard voice follows us.
“I will open your graves and cause you to come up out of your graves, and I will put my spirit in you and place you in your own land, and ye shall live!”
“I don’t want to end up like these people, Mom. I don’t want to die.”
“You’re not going to die, Adam. You’re going to live.”
We scramble over the stony heads of the long gone.