For every step down the staircase, little mists of dust rise and dance over my feet, and I can’t help but feel affronted at this unwonted show of levity when I’ve never felt so low. But I can’t avert my eyes or I’ll fall down the stairs, so I stare hard at the next step down, blocking out my shoes, blocking out those little dances, blocking out everything.
The staircase ends on a concrete landing, lit dimly by uncovered fluorescent bulbs. There’s no door or hallway or anything, just a plain room, but one of the walls has been broken through leading down a dirt tunnel. I scuff up white dust and kick a couple of pebbles and briefly wonder what the hell they used to bash through concrete this thick and wishing I’d been there to see it.
The tunnel is lit with more fluorescent bulbs, wires running through cables stapled to the packed dirt wall, or maybe it’s just some kind of brown stone, I don’t know and I don’t care. I have to be careful not to slide down the long slope so I go sideways, shuffling along the wall. It would’ve been easier to slide down it on my butt like a slide, but I’m not doing that kind of thing anymore. I should never have been doing things like that. Stupid things, irrelevant things.
Eventually the tunnel levels out into a dingy room, a little more brightly lit, and he’s sitting on a stool up against the wall with another hole leading down somewhere dark. There’s a hole in the ceiling for the smoke rushing up from a fitful cooking fire and the smoke curling up from a misshapen pipe, the knotty wood the same color as his thin wrinkled lips. He’s reading something out of a tiny book with yellow pages, out of a stack of similarly small tomes next to his stool.
Is this where he lives? Seems dismal. There isn’t even a place for him to sleep, and I’m only assuming the fire next to his stool is for cooking since there’s nothing cooked around it.
His eyes wander up from the text to see me standing in his doorway.
Damn. I have to speak now. With a deep breath, I summon up a few rocks from the bottom of my stomach and lob them up my throat through my teeth. “You are the brother?”
I hate this new way of speaking. It feels like I’m hearing someone else’s choking lungs pump out desperate air through my own lips. But it has to be this way. The other way is wrong. I know that now.
The old man removes the pipe from his mouth and nods once, slowly, lyrically, and I instantly resent him. How can someone so gnarled and old like him who lives in a hole in the ground have such careful, smooth movements in something as simple as a nod, when my mere words are stumbling and crashing on each other like tides in a storm?
“I’m going down,” I jerk my chin towards the dark tunnel. “You’re a guide or obstacle?” I keep my sentences short and succinct, I don’t care if it’s rude, it hurts to talk.
With that same insufferable slowness, this dancer-like patience, the old man closes his book and stands to his feet. I expect the muscles in his back to pop and crackle like a disintegrating log consumed by fire, but his spine is silent and I hate him more. He bends, picks up a log from the fire, and points it towards the tunnel in the room, nodding for me to go first.
I don’t move for a moment. Throughout all of today, seems like everyone’s been trying to stop me from moving onward. Cal from the cafe wanted me to stay and talk. The homeless fellow who told me about this place told me to stay away. My SO… well, I don’t know what they want for me today, but it’s better this way, they’re happy, they’re happy now, it’s better this way. Just stay, stay, stay, it’s been nothing but that all damned day. It’s sudden and a little off-putting to see someone pointing me onward for once tonight.
This is my choice, right? This is where I’m going. This is better. I move on.
I hear him following behind me as I step down into the dark, dark tunnel.
The pathetic torch he brought offers little light, maybe just enough for dark-adjusted eyes to see where they’re stepping, maybe to see the shadows thrown about on the old man’s deep-set eyes and drooping mouth and bushy silver beard, but otherwise it’s just a glowing scarlet orb filling the air with the brackish smell of smoke. There are no stairs down this tunnel, but it’s sloping down at a steady rate, so it’s not so hard to walk down without falling as long as I walk slow.
It’s quiet, so quiet here, deep in the earth and walking to hell. There’s no sound of wind, no chatter of people, no tinkling chorus of rain which I’ve gotten so used to in this coastal town. I hear no outside world, and it becomes clear to me as we descent that there is no world, there is no earth, in this liminal space between the world and hell there is only darkness. The tunnel walls around me fade and I can’t see the floor any longer, though I feel it beneath my feet. Maybe this is the underside of the world. Maybe the earth is flat and this is what slumbers below.
The only thing keeping me from wondering if I’m in a dream is the old man behind me, shuffling his feet against the floor, and I wish his feet would shut the hell up. I turn my head to look at him, at the stick he’s hold whose ember has mostly faded out. It’s just a quiet red glow now, not strong enough to cast any light.
“What are you here for?” Even in this darkness I’m still tossing boulders through my mouth, and I hear pebbles bouncing against the walls. “Why do you lead me down?”
If my words are rocks, his gaze is an ocean, and the tide regards me now.
“What’s your name?” I’ll get used to this way of talking, eventually. But still the man does not respond.
“If you don’t tell me the name I’ll make you one,” I warn, and cough at the scratches the words are leaving in my throat. I glare at him as though the pain is his fault, and really it is. I wouldn’t be feeling it if he’d been the one to speak.
Rush, goes the tide.
“You’re Charon, then.” If I had said these words above, I would have shuddered at my own impertinence, my implication. If I had said these words the way I used to speak, the name would have sounded like a benediction. Here, it sounds like an insult, and I do not care.
I turn my back to the old man and continue my walk.
This tunnel is awfully long though, and no matter how hard I hold on to my air of aggressive indifference, I feel it slipping away through the cracks. I want to talk. It hurts so bad, but I want to talk. I can’t feel my neck through my stomping feet. Time is postmarking me for every beat. I need something real.
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“I haven’t any name right now,” I say abruptly. “Thanks for asking.”
Rush, goes the tide.
I turn back, affronted. “You don’t know anything,” I spit. “You don’t know shit. I don’t know shit, so you don’t either. Go fuck yourself. Don’t pretend to know what I’m here for, because I don’t.” What color were his eyes again? I know their depth now. “I hate you. I don’t want you here. Stop leading me, stop being so goddamned pretentious. Go away.”
I’ve stopped in my tracks to deliver my tirade, and so has the old man. I wait in the silence for a long minute before turning back around.
“Why do you follow, anyway?” I ask, hearing the surliness in my own voice. “Aren’t you a guide?”
A guide is not needed if the way is known, I suppose, and it’s not like I could get lost on the way down this long, dark tunnel. Still, I’m in no mood to be charitable, and the tunnel is too deep and dark for me to keep the silence.
A small red light flares in the embers of the old man’s pipe. I see his throat work and his eyes half close, and then a low baritone rumbles out of the wizened old man, a sound like that which would issue from the earth itself. I am frozen in the middle of the tunnel as it changes in pitch, rising, pausing, then falling, and I realize he’s singing.
Mute, I turn and begin a slow trod down the tunnel, my feet in step to the glacial rhythm of the guttural tones.
I used to sing for my SO too, I almost say, but I hold my tongue because I don’t want to interrupt Charon. The last time we came to town, I was in Charon’s position, following around my SO as they looked for something they couldn’t name, and it only stopped when I took them in my arms and sang a song for them. Ever since, they’ve been hooked on music, listening to my amateur vocals, buying every album of every genre and rocking in place to the rhythm, a beatific smile on their face.
And I don’t understand.
“My SO and I have been together for three years,” I murmur, and though Charon quiets in order to listen, the low tones do not falter. “But we’ve never talked about our pasts. It’s too painful for us. All we had to understand was how broken we both were, and how being together made us feel… less broken.”
Is the music coming from Charon behind me, or is it coming out of the blackness, the very mouth of the abyss?
“But they’re different now,” I say, raising my hands as though I can see my SO before me, and maybe I do, I shield myself from their striking eyes - “They don’t need me. They’re better off without me now that they’re better.”
I say this calm, but I feel like I could scream these words, let loose an earthquake with this compiled bitterness in my chest that drips little by little out of my mouth like river pebbles.
“They’re better off -” I try to say, but it grows too painful to speak.
At that moment, I stop moving as well. The tunnel ahead evens out, and I can see a small chamber. There’s no light, but I can see within. In the center of the room ahead, there’s a hole in the ground. A piton is jammed into the ground next to it and I can see the frayed end of a rope tied to the iron stake. The way to hell, at last before me. The music has ended.
I turn around again. I was going to say something, there was something I wanted to say. “Tell my SO I love them. I’m leaving forever, so tell my SO I loved them.” But I didn’t say it; I’m not saying that. It was a thought. It was a spoken phrase. Yes. No. Yes. Yes. No. Love them, loved them, now, then, when, which one? Lodged in my throat and I choke, fall to my knees and choke, curl inside and choke. I love them. I’m jealous. I hate them. They uplifted themself out of their lifelong depression and didn’t take me with them. I scream. Take me with you. Please. I loved you. I’m screaming and rocks are gushing out of my throat. Rocks, rocks, rocks, pinning me down. An earthquake. Water bubbles out of the pit and rushes towards me. Water flowing uphill. Take me with you. Don’t go, don’t leave me.
Water, flowing uphill, flowing, flowing down. I sob and gasp and fall to the side. The boulders press me in, I’m so small in this corner. Don’t leave me here, I gasp. I love you. I can’t stay here. I can’t stay here. I’ll die, I’ll go insane. Take me with you.
I wish you were here.
…
Can the boulders scrape aside? Can a light shine through these cracks? Please. Let me see…
There’s a puddle on the ground next to my face.
The puddle is larger.
The puddle is too large. My clothes are damp. I sit up.
Water, flowing uphill, flowing through the cracks, and the boulders all lift up and float along the current. I can see back down into that room, I can see that hole in the ground and the ladder down. I turn around and swim back up the tunnel.
The water must have brought some light with it, because even though it’s dim I can see my way back up, I can see the tunnel so I don’t drown. I swim hard, pushing my way through the bubbles in my way, but they’re no obstacle at all, I swim right through them, and my lungs are about to inhale all this water when I burst through the surface at the top. The water laps just below the level of the room, and the campfire hasn’t set the stool on fire yet.
I stumble forward and fall to my knees, conscious of the old man walking calmly up the tunnel. I hack, I cough, I retch. His hand is comfortingly on my back. With a heave, I throw up an avalanche of rocks to crash on the ground.
And now, it’s done.
My hand is heavier than I expect and I press the doorbell before I have a chance to think it over, to decide to do something else, to go somewhere or anywhere else, or even what I want to say. My throat turned grey on the train ride back from Bug Town, and I’m not sure if it’s leftover rocks that I never coughed up, or if it’s the marks those rocks left as I forced them through my body.
Bug is such a weird place. It’s always raining, and everyone there seems to feel so sorry for you.
But I have to stop thinking about Bug and start thinking about what to say to my SO, because my hearing has sharpened like a bat’s and I can hear their footsteps coming closer to the door. One footstep to every heartbeat, that’s how fast my heart is beating, and it’s so loud I almost don’t realize that it’s near a miracle I can hear my SO’s footsteps at all, they’ve never been so solid before. They used to glide through the air, through the floor, through the walls, sometimes even through me. I wonder if the ground pressing against their feet feels like a miracle to them. It does to me, whenever I take off my shoes and socks.
Step.
I could run, right now, and come back later. I could run away, up the stairs, up the roof, onto the road, away into the forest. I could run away, but I’d run back, I know that now. They may be moving on without me but I know I’ll always try and catch up.
Step.
I should run away. They deserve a better partner than me.
Step.
I remember the treacherous thoughts that erupted from my brain, deep in Charon’s river. I wish you were here.
Step.
I don’t know anything, I really don’t. I don’t know what made me come back. I don’t know what made me swim to the top and not just let myself drown. I don’t know why they’d take me back or why they stick around me at all.
Step.
All I know is that I love them and I want them with me.
Step.
Even if we can’t heal each other.
Step…
Even if they can’t heal me the way I’ve somehow healed them.
The doorknob turns. I don’t run away.