The Knife Thrower (26 page)

Repeated measurements of our passageways have led to conflicting results, in part because very few of the paths end in a clear and
decisive way. Some say that all passageways once came to an end at the precise boundaries of our town. Others argue that the passageways, though limited in space, are in effect endless, winding in and out of each other in an intricate design that represents the boundless; a minor and much-ridiculed school claim that the paths wind beneath towns and hills and ocean floors in a great underworld circle of passageways. We who have wandered beneath our town from earliest childhood know that many paths grow narrower and narrower until, without ending, they become impassable. In the shadowy half-dark we peer into the narrow crevices, which vanish in blackness.

Now and then it comes about that our passageways are closed for repairs. Blue velvet ropes are stretched across the tops of stairways, or across the lower arches that open onto the passageways. Even though we know that the repairs will last for only a few days, a restlessness comes over us. In the hot summer days we find ourselves retreating to our cool cellars, where we sweep up flakes of plaster that have fallen from the walls, examine the water pipes for signs of rust or leakage, assemble piles of things to be thrown away: old coils of garden hose grown stiff as pipes, dusty damp gift catalogues. Sometimes at night, when we wake and cannot fall back to sleep, we go down to our cellars and walk about in the dark, smelling the familiar damp. In the stillness of the night we hear or imagine we hear a scratching or scraping: the secret digging of tunnels, in the cellars of our town.

At times we experience a violent craving for heights, we tunnel wanderers, we under-creepers and travelers in the dark. Then we climb into our attics or onto our sloping roofs, ascend to the belfry of our tallest church and look out past the great iron bell at our streets and rooftops, ride to the top of Indian Hill with a picnic lunch, gaze up with envy at workers at the tops of telephone poles or at the top of the high water tank with its S-shaped stairway. In the sunny offices of travel agencies we find ourselves lingering over glossy brochures showing high white hotels, white-capped blue mountains, wondrous skyscrapers that seem to reach all the way to the sun. We brood over the virtues of sunlight and the upper view, reproach ourselves for our underground lives, our blind burrowing in the dark. But the time comes when the heights displease us; the brightness hurts our eyes and prevents us from seeing; the blue skies beat against our skulls like hammerblows. Puzzled by the failure of the high view, we return with relief to our dark and branching passageways. Sometimes it seems to us that only there, under the ground, do we experience the true exhilaration of height: the town itself, imagined from below.

It’s possible, for those who know nothing about our passageways, to imagine them as monotonous, empty, and devoid of surprise. In a superficial sense this is certainly true. The dirt paths are only dirt paths; no decorations or furnishings divert the eye. From behind
the next bend, no startling sight (a crystal cave, a minotaur) shocks us into wonder. One might argue that the aisles of a supermarket, bursting with color, are far more exciting than our dull world below. But for those of us who know our passageways, the very thought of monotony is preposterous. For one thing, the passageways are continually widening and narrowing, so that you experience distinct and always changing sections. For another, the rocky walls are rough and irregular, marked by fissures, recesses, ledges, cracks, bulges, nooks, and cave-like openings; and the paths, though smooth in a general way, are pitted here and there, littered with small stones, and spotted with dampness or small puddles. In addition, our passageways are repeatedly intersected by other passageways, which lead off in other directions, so that very quickly you lose a sense of familiarity and feel that you’ve embarked on a new journey; and new passageways are always being discovered by workers as they repair older passageways, which themselves are continually changing as a result of natural forces and the picks of workers. And when you keep in mind that these always changing paths don’t move on a single level, but from time to time dip downward and pass under other passageways; and when you also keep in mind that this vertical system of passageways is so tangled and complex that there is no agreement on the number of levels, some maintaining that there are three distinct levels, others four, or five, or two, and still others—a minority, to be sure—insisting that under the lowest level there is always another level, awaiting discovery; then it ought to be clear why we never experience monotony in our passageways, but on the contrary a sensation of pleasurable uncertainty, of surprise and adventure. When all is said and done, what we feel, when we go down among our
passageways, is a sensation of expansion—as if some inner constriction were suddenly bursting.

Some years ago a town meeting was held to consider this proposal: that we leave our homes and move permanently into the passageways. Arguments of all kinds were advanced by the advocates of the proposal, who claimed that our repeated descents were proof of our deepest desires. It was even said by some that the town itself served no purpose other than to make descent possible. Such intemperate arguments were easy to ridicule but difficult to refute, for all of us feel the deep attraction of the passageways and can, at a pinch, imagine a world without our town, but not without our passageways. The strongest counterargument was therefore not a defense of the town, or praise of the virtues of life in the upper world, or a meticulous explanation of the impracticability of living below the ground, but rather this: our absolute certainty that, should we actually leave the upper world and move into our passageways, not a week would pass before, in the blackness beneath the dark paths, we began digging new, deeper passageways.

Sometimes, rounding the bend of a passageway, you come upon a lamplighter. The event is so rare that it’s accounted a piece of good luck, like seeing a praying mantis on a weedstalk in a field. In their dark green uniforms and peaked caps the lamplighters look very
much alike, an effect exaggerated by their silence—they nod, but never speak—and by the fact that they are all slow-moving elderly men, of approximately the same size. The tradition of the lamplighter is as old as our town, though their duties have changed: the earliest lamplighters placed flaming torches (pinewood dipped in tar) in iron supports driven into the rock walls. Not until the first years of the nineteenth century do oil lamps begin to replace the crude but striking torches, which were said to cast dramatic shadows as the torches crackled and the flames rose and fell high in the dark. Our modern lamplighters carry long aluminum poles with two separate attachments at the top: a small metal box that emits a flame for lighting extinguished wicks, and a larger container, shaped like a bowl and provided with a spout, containing kerosene. Sometimes, perhaps once in a lifetime, like a vision in the dark, you see a lamplighter at the top of a tall and very narrow ladder, adjusting or replacing a lamp. Proposals for a system of underground wiring and electric light have been made since the early years of the twentieth century, but they are regularly voted down. Our enemies accuse us of a debilitating nostalgia, a refusal to enter the modern world, but we know that the real reason, the secret reason, is that we would not willingly do without our dreamlike lamplighters, whose slow and silent movements beneath our town soothe us like tides.

Nostalgia! No, that is a charge that irritates us profoundly, one that we take particular pains to refute. If nostalgia is the craving for a past way of life no longer possible, then we ask our accusers:
what vanished way of life can possibly be represented by our bare, winding passageways? With pride we point to our town’s modern features—our satellite dishes and solar panels, our new barium-sulfur streetlights, our highway department’s up-to-the-minute graders, pavers, and rollers, our new waste-disposal plant. We are a late-twentieth-century town poised for the plunge into the new millennium, and if we honor our Revolutionary War dead and preserve our restored town hall on its original seventeenth-century green, if we dutifully place shiny bronze plaques on our eighteenth-century houses and display Quinnepaug axheads in the basement of our historical society, we are in no sense looking back misty-eyed toward some vanished way of life that none of us could tolerate, but are merely holding on to a few keepsakes and old family photographs as we make our difficult way through life like everyone else. Our passageways have nothing to do with some earlier, simpler way of life; though we can’t say, don’t know, what our passageways are, it would be far truer to say that they bear no relation whatever to any period of our history, but rather exist as a place apart—a place from which to contemplate the town coolly, or even to forget the town altogether.

One school of philosophy has suggested that all towns are like our town, but that only we believe in our passageways. It is our belief that permits us to descend, just as it is their incredulity that condemns them to the surface of earth. A corollary of this theory, proposed by a rival school, is that our passageways do not exist except
insofar as we believe in them—that the entire structure of stairways, shadows, and turning paths lies solely within us. Members of this school insist that the only way to find an opening to our underground world is to seek out a quiet and secluded spot. Close your eyes. Concentrate your attention inward. Descend.

For the rest of us, the stairways are most certainly there. We have only to walk along the railway embankment at the back of the stores on Main Street, or step behind the peeling red shed in the lumberyard, or wander in the north woods, where sooner or later we’re bound to come upon a fallen and decaying tree that partly conceals a rough opening with stairs going down. Carefully we descend the rough stone steps, from which blades of grass stick up, and on which, as we make our way down, patches of moss begin to appear. At the bottom we walk a short distance to a crude archway, over which a glass-globed lamp dimly glows, and stepping through the arch we come to a passageway, stretching right and left into the dark. Sometimes we wander only to the next archway before climbing back to the everyday world. Sometimes we wander for hours, or for an entire day. But however long we wander, however deep we plunge, the time always comes when we return. Indeed it is somewhat misleading to think of us as always leaving our town to descend into our passageways. It would be no less fair to think of us as continually emerging from our passageways, into the upper town. For surely the truth of our way of life lies here, in the continual act of descent and ascent. This up-and-down
movement is so striking in our lives that one school of thought has chosen the stairway rather than the passageway as our secret symbol. Even we who have no interest in symbols, we citizens who refuse to bind ourselves to any school, readily acknowledge that we are people of the stairway—uppers-and-downers, we, through and through. Those who dislike us say that we are restless, dissatisfied souls, forever escaping one place for another; though we defend ourselves sharply, we know that we can’t entirely evade this charge. Those more kindly disposed prefer to think of us as continually immersing ourselves in two necessary atmospheres. For if I have spoken of the exhilaration of descent, it is necessary to speak also of a second exhilaration, the exhilaration of return: the sun striking the sidewalk, the trembling blue air, the breeze heavy with town-smells: smell of porches and warm baseball gloves on sunny summer afternoons, of cut grass and creosoted telephone poles, tang of lawn-mower gasoline in the tar-scented air. And over there, that shimmering red roof, that shout, that face vivid as fire. For when we emerge, we cellar seekers, then for an instant the lost world enters us like a sword, before settling to rest. Then we seem to understand something that we had forgotten, before confusion returns. You who mock us, you laughers and surface-crawlers, you restless sideways-sliders and flatland voyagers—don’t we irk you, don’t we exasperate you, we mole-folk, we pale amphibians?

Books by Steven Millhauser