James Hynes - Kings of Infinite Space

Bob Wier led Paul down a narrow path that wound between the columns and the stalactites, and Paul had the feeling that he was walking through the strings and lumps and tissues of somebody’s brain. My brain, he decided. That’s where I am. I’m dreaming of a journey to the center of my own head. He laughed aloud with delight. This dream was turning out to be a concatenation of every subterranean narrative he’d ever read or seen, from highbrow to lowbrow and every brow in between, a Mixmastering of Dante and Jules Verne, of Tom Sawyer and Buffy the Vampire Slayer , of the Mines of Moria and the Hall of the Mountain King. He looked up and was well pleased with the fecundity of his subconscious. The ceiling was forested with pale, almost translucent soda straws, and seamed with small stalactites like jagged mountain ranges seen from above. To either side, in niches like private boxes at the farther reaches of the amphitheater, the formations were growing together like connective tissue, and out of these crannies the pale faces of homeless guys watched Paul. He thought he heard a steady murmuring; it wasn’t the usual—“Are we not men?”—but something else that he couldn’t make out.

The air was cooler as they descended but more humid, and Paul thought he smelled something other than the dank air of the cave, something that reached to the back of his nostrils. But he couldn’t place it, and he mopped his forehead and flung the sweat away from his fingertips. Bob Wier had sweated a wide streak down the back of his polo shirt, and he seemed to be gasping even more than the exertion demanded. They had reached the lowest circle of the amphitheater, where a passage led to an even brighter chamber beyond. The wind was coming from that narrow gap, and Paul thought gleefully, what next? Trolls? Dinosaurs? A Balrog? The circle of panders, seducers, and flatterers?

“Hey, Bob,” said Paul. “Mind if I call you Virgil?”

Bob Wier stopped and glanced with wide-eyed anxiety back up the slope. Paul turned too, to see several pale men with flashlights trooping down the path from above — How’d they get here so fast? Paul wondered, then thought, fuck it, don’t ask, it’s a dream — while others filtered out of the crannies, stepping carefully down the slope around the soapy bulges of stalagmites. Their murmuring was getting louder, but Paul still couldn’t make out what they were saying. He turned to go forward again, but Bob Wier held him back with a hand on his shoulder and fixed him with an intent gaze. He lifted his hand from Paul’s shoulder and turned it palm up, offering Paul the ignition key of the golf cart.

“Take it,” he said in a low, urgent voice. “Take it and go back the way we came. It’s not too late for you.”

“Maybe Virgil’s too formal,” Paul said, still determined to get into the spirit of things. “How ’bout just ‘Virge’?”

“I beg you,” breathed Bob Wier, his eyes filling with tears, “in the name of Christ Jesus, go back now. I’m going to hell, but you still have a choice.” He essayed a trembling smile. “ ‘Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you.’ ” He swallowed hard and said, “Philippians, chapter two, verses twelveand thirteen.”

Paul’s smile faded, and his next remark—“Don’t be a buzz-kill, Bob”—faded on his lips. He glanced down at the key in Bob Wier’s trembling palm, but then it was too late, as the gathering tide of pale men reached the bottom of the path.

“What is the law?” they were murmuring. “What is the law?”

They flowed around Paul and Bob Wier, and with the mild pressure of their hands swept both men through the passage into the next room.

THE PASSAGE WAS LOW AND NARROW AND S-SHAPED, and Paul could not see what was ahead, only the glow of electric lights. Having decided that all this — the caverns, the pale men, the torment of Bob Wier — were features of a dream, still Paul was surprised and a little alarmed to follow Bob Wier around the final curve of the passage into an aisle running between the gray upholstered walls of cubicles on either side, under bright, fluorescent fixtures. At first he assumed that, following the peculiar logic of a dream, he was now wandering the aisles of the General Services Division of TxDoGS. But the lights were much brighter, and as he squinted against the glare he noted that the fabric of the cubes was mottled and streaked with damp; that the thin carpet under foot was lumpy and uneven, a thin padding over hard rock; and that the faces of the men rising from their desks all around him were not the faces of his coworkers in the world above but those of pale, homeless men, their glasses glaring in the light, their milky skin gleaming through their buzz cuts. The cube walls came up to Paul’s cheekbones, as they did at TxDoGS, and he saw the bulbous heads rising from the centers of cubes all around him, some taller than others, some broader in the forehead, but all with the same blank gaze. Because of the glare of the lights, Paul could not tell how far the cubes receded into the distance. Straight ahead, past the cringing shoulders of Bob Wier, he saw that the aisle ended in a T, and that at the intersection of the two aisles an iron pole crusted with reddish rust rose straight up into the air. Next to the pole waited Boy G, his arms hanging straight at his sides, his glasses pushed all the way up his nose, his pens lined up, his name tag neatly centered over his breast pocket.

The faces peering over the cube horizon on either side all turned to follow Paul’s progress up the aisle, and he glanced back to see the men who had followed him down the amphitheater crowding up the aisle behind him. The murmuring grew louder as the men in the cubes joined in.

“What is the law?” they muttered. “What is the law?”

As he got closer to the intersection, Paul noticed that the iron pole was a sort of ladder, with L-shaped iron rungs protruding at right angles, at alternate heights on either side; unlike the rusty central pole, the rungs were worn smooth to a dull gray sheen. Paul glanced up, but the top of the pole was lost in the glare of the lights. The tang he’d detected in the air in the amphitheater was sharper here, like the smell of burning oak.

As they reached the junction of the aisles, Bob Wier stepped to one side, and Boy G’s gaze fell on Paul, who felt a tremor of cold up his spine.

“Who are you?” whispered Boy G in his toneless voice.

Paul sweated under the lights, in the clammy humidity of the cavern. He felt the pale men crowding behind him.

“Myself?” he said, uncertain what else to say.

Boy G turned his magnified eyes to Bob Wier, who licked his lips and glanced from Boy G to Paul. “He’s a man,” Bob Wier said.

“A man! A man! Like us!” murmured the pale men behind him. Out of the corner of his eye, Paul saw the pale faces above the cube horizon nodding in agreement.

“He’s a man,” Bob Wier said again. “He must learn the law.”

“Say the words,” murmured the men all around. “Say the words.”

Paul felt the chill tightening his skin. I wonder if it’s too late, he thought, to get that key from Bob.

Boy G turned and walked up the perpendicular aisle to the right, and Bob Wier followed, gesturing curtly for Paul to follow. Paul turned to see if he could go back, but the pale men in the aisle were pressing forward, murmuring, “Say the words, say the words,” while the other pale men began to filter out of their cubes into the aisle, murmuring, “A man like us, a man like us.”

“Um, Bob?” said Paul, edging up the aisle. “Could I talk to you for a second?”

But Bob Wier ignored him, and Paul had no choice but to follow. Suddenly the cubicles ended on either side, and Paul found himself walking on the cave floor again. Beyond the glare of the fluorescent lights he saw ahead of him a vast, oval cavern of creamy yellow rock, like custard, its ceiling dripping with stalactites and soda straws and other, more delicate formations like hanging draperies. Water dripped in an irregular rhythm from above; Paul felt the tap of droplets on his scalp and his wrist. Along the left side of the cavern, across a wide, shallow pool of clear water, were three huge formations in a row. The one closest to Paul was a creamy hillock like a huge lump of melting vanilla ice cream. As from a leaky tap, water dripped from a cluster of thin, bladelike projections above, then pulsed in shallow waves down the broad, soapy slopes of the hillock into the pool. The formation farthest from Paul, at the end of the cave, was like an eroding sand castle, a clotted cluster of blunted stalagmites that rose nearly to the dripping roof. And, in the middle, was the tallest and most striking formation, a long, curved, blunt-ended column that stuck out of a wide, conical base of flowstone and rose in layers of long, saber-fanged stalactites nearly to the ceiling. It looked, depending on your point of view, like an enormous stack of decaying wedding cake, or a giant, sagging candle, or — as Paul, the ex-husband of a gender theorist, couldn’t help noting — a giant, erect, rotting phallus. The column’s reflection in the clear water of the pool trembled with each drop of water from above.