Gary Braunbeck - Keepers

“How do you get there?”

“I heard the nurses saying that you have to go outside, across the street. But guess what?” She smiled at me, one of those delicious “I’ve-Got-A-Secret” smiles that become less enchanting the older you get, then lowered her voice to a whisper: “There are tunnels! Can you believe it? Like those secret underground places in all the James Bond movies. Pretty groovy, huh?”

Having been cooped up in this room and bed for most of the last ten days, I was all for it. “How do we get there?”

“I’m not sure, but I’m working on it. Stay cool.”

Beth worked on it, all right. One of the orderlies on our ward was the older brother of a girl Beth knew from school, and was easily talked into taking us there. (I remember that he and Beth had gone into one of the little rooms down the hall to talk about it and were in there an awfully long time.)

The Sunday morning we took off on our little excursion was an incredibly warm one, even for mid-May in Ohio. All of the windows were open but they offered no relief. My gown clung to me as I slipped out of bed (with Beth’s help, of course) and put on my slippers and the light hospital robe.

“I know the robe’s uncomfortable,” Beth said, “but I don’t want you catching a cold or anything worse-God, I’d just freak out if that happened. Just to be safe, here-put on your pajama bottoms. And don’t look at me like that, you.”

The IV bottle was tricky, a big, heavy thing made of thick glass that clinked against the metal pole from which it hung. At least the pole was on wheels so I could pull it along behind me, but the clinking noise drove me nuts; Beth remedied that by stealing some medical tape from a supply cart and wrapping it around the bottle so that it was attached to the pole. Thankfully, the wheels didn’t squeak.

Once I’d gotten myself out into the hallway, Beth, the orderly (whose name I never knew), and I headed for the elevators.

“We gotta go down to one of the subbasements in order to get to the other elevators,” said the orderly, putting his hand in the middle of Beth’s back. “Hope you aren’t afraid of dim places.”

“I’m not afraid of much,” replied Beth, pulling his hand away from her. “Except maybe having my time wasted.”

I knew there was a basement but had no idea there were floors beneath even that. We went all the way down to subbasement #3. Just seeing that light up above the elevator door gave me the creeps; this was deeper than they buried you after you died.

Yeech.

The doors opened to reveal a long hallway with concrete walls and bare bulbs cradled in bell-shaped cages of wire dangling from the ceiling. It was damp and cold and I was suddenly grateful that Beth had insisted that I wear the bathrobe and pajama bottoms.

I remember the walls very clearly. It was easy to see the boards that had been used as forms for the concrete because several of them had warped before the concrete had set properly; they looked like ghosts trapped in the walls, stuck forever between this world and the one they’d come from and now wished they had never tried to leave.

Double yeech.

Beth leaned over and whispered in my ear, “This is where they bring the dead bodies.”

“Huh- uh! ”

“Uh- huh! I heard the nurses say so.”

The yeech factor was then tripled with the notion that at any moment we could see a dead body being rolled down the hallway. I wondered if any of the bodies from Kent State had been brought here, if they’d been covered up and rolled over the very spot where I was standing. The thought frightened me so much that my fingers went numb. I shook them, confused by the effect. Usually when I got scared, my stomach got all tight and hurt; this was the first time I’d had anything happen with my fingers. Maybe fingers had something to do with real fear, and the stomach stuff was just with pretend fear, like with Godzilla or The Fly or The Incredible Shrinking Man. I’d have to think on that. Later.

The orderly took hold of one of Beth’s hands and guided us out of there in a hurry. The feeling began to return to my fingers as I heard Beth breathe a sigh of relief. I looked at her and she smiled, then took hold of my hand with her free one, the three of us now forming an unbreakable chain.

I felt like someone really liked me. I wondered what the kids at school would say if they could see me now, on an adventure with a girl, a sixteen-year-old girl who wore love beads and bell-bottomed hiphuggers and had friends who thought I was cute and actually wanted to hold my hand. Wow. (My interest in members of the opposite sex began in earnest during my ninth year, which only served to make me even more of a weirdo among my schoolmates; after all, everyone knew girls were gross, they had cooties and the last thing you wanted was for one to touch you. I’d thought about asking one of the nurses or doctors where the Cootie Ward was located, just to see if they could kill you like all the other kids said.)

There were things about Beth I didn’t really understand, like how she could get so serious sometimes. Once I’d awakened in my hospital bed a few days after my surgery to find her standing over me with two of her girlfriends. I tried to speak but my throat was still sore; she put a finger to my lips, then bent down and kissed me, just like that. Then her girlfriends kissed me, as well. I don’t know what kind of a reaction they were expecting, but the look on my face made all three of them go “ Awww,” and then touch me; my cheek, my hand, my shoulder. I never asked Beth about why she did that, or why her friends acted the way they did, because I was afraid that she’d tell me the look on my face had been goofy. Beth was the only person I didn’t feel goofy around, and if I’d looked that way I didn’t want to know. I would pretend. Like she did about her mother the famous stage actress. That would be okay.

“This way,” the orderly said, pointing toward a place where this tunnel split off into another.

He led us through the tunnel that connected with the building across the street. It was a long, boring tunnel, not a creepy one like we’d just come through, and I was happy about that. Boring was good.

Once we made it through the tunnel, we got into another elevator and took it all the way up. I was secretly hoping that we’d skip both tunnels on the way back and just walk outside and cross the street; if the tunnels were part of a great adventure, I’d just as soon go back to being a goofy Zero with iffy eyesight in his mismatched plaid and paisley.

The elevator stopped and the doors opened onto a large foyer. Open windows with a breathtaking view of Cedar Hill took up most of the walls. A cool, gentle wind came in through the windows, fluffing the curtains outward. Up here the ghosts weren’t trapped in the walls, they fluttered free, saying hello. Even the concrete floors seemed less threatening. On either side of the foyer were sets of swinging metal doors. We went through the set on the right, and as we stepped through it hit us full-force: the stink of ammonia mixed with the chemical cleaners. It burned the inside of my nose and made my eyes tear up. This probably should have been an omen but we continued on down the hall anyway, fun-fun-fun, following the smells until we came to the doors marked: SANCTIONED PERSONNEL ONLY.

“You okay?” Beth whispered to me.

“I guess. Do you think this is okay?”

She leaned her head to one side and sucked once on her lower lip. “Hard to say, kiddo, but we’ve come this far, might as well finish it, huh?”

I didn’t like her calling me “kiddo” but didn’t say anything about it. Maybe she was just nervous. I knew I was.

We pushed open the doors and entered a cavernous room. Equipment of all sorts stolen from every science fiction movie I’d ever seen lined the walls, and in the center stood interlocking pens with metal poles for sides. In two of the pens were pigs, in the other two were sheep. They had no straw for bedding and the concrete floor, dribbled with urine and liquid feces, sloped downward toward a system of drains. My first thought was: How can they sleep on this floor? It’s so cold and hard and… messy.