Part 1, Chapter 5

 

 

 

V: The Bedroom

 

 

              They stood in the newly unlocked bedroom, every breath of dusty air tickling the back of Ray’s throat. Paula’s arms were crossed, and her whole stance had shifted into one that was serious, calculating. They’d turned on another pathetic bulb in the bedroom, which hung like a vine from the ceiling, its cord twisted and fraying. Its light was cold and shy, bathing the room in a bluish hue reminiscent of moonlight.

“These are the papers I mentioned—the really boring journal entries.” He gestured to the pages he’d discarded to the floor. “Those are the ones I already read.”

She whipped her head and scowled at him. “Are you serious? You’ve been throwing them onto the floor?” She shook her head. “We’re going to go through these papers, and we’re going to do it in an organized fashion. It looks like they’re all dated.” She collected a couple dozen of the papers into a neat stack and flipped through them with quick fingers. “June 9^th, April 12^th, May 21^st…”

She laid them one by one on the floor in order of date, moving them to create extra space as she picked up more pages and scanned for their dates. Ray picked up the remaining pages and together they worked until the entries were arranged from oldest to newest.

Paula held her hands up, surveying their work. “Now we read them.”

She knelt by the papers and Ray did the same. He did his best to fix his mind to the task, but the mundanity of the subject matter and the repetition of the writer’s awfully dull daily tasks made his eyes defocus and find more interest in clusters of dirt on the floor.

“Second time he’s said this,” she said, tapping her finger to the top paragraph of the tenth page. Ray snapped out of his staring-into-space and followed her finger to the line: My hand hurts. “And look, this is in present tense,” she added, “But everything else is in past tense.”

She was right; everything before and after that line was written in past tense—like a real-time interjection from the writer.

Paula kept reading, dragging her finger down the sides of the pages as she skimmed.

“Again,” she said, tapping another line on the thirteenth page: My hand hurts.

Now his attention was properly back on the journal entries. That was a bit strange. He read alongside her pace, now. Again, on the bottom of the fifteenth page: My hand hurts. Then again on the seventeenth. Then on the eighteenth and nineteenth.

Great frequency…Yes, now his mind quite locked in.

What information could be extracted from that? What could be causing someone’s hand to hurt, with greater frequency, and such that it did not seem to get better over the course of months?

              “If it were an injury, I’d think the pain would go down over time,” Ray said. “Maybe it’s like a disease?”

              “One that didn’t get treated.”

              “Or where treatment just didn’t work.” Ray scanned the pages over. “But the rest of it’s weird, too, right? Who’d write something like this? I get having a journal if you have a life, but this guy just writes about drinking water and walking around the room.”

              Paula clicked her tongue pensively. “Maybe there’s something wrong with him in the head.”

              “Or ‘her’.”

              “Or ‘her’, yes.”

              The black bird, having heard all the chatter in the bedroom, entered and eyed the papers curiously before fluttering onto Ray’s shoulder to participate in the conversation. Paula’s attention was pulled away from the journal.

“It’s still down here, I see,” she observed in an irritated tone.

“I tried getting him out, I swear!” he said. “He wouldn’t leave!”

Paula made a motion with her head that gave the impression of rolling her eyes and, to Ray’s delight, didn’t press further about the bird and returned her attention to the journal. The bird fluffed its feathers, then gave a shake and settled himself. Its claws dug into his sleeve and sparked pinching pain in Ray’s arm, but he was too enamored with the bird’s trust of him to want to shoo it away.

After the discussion was concluded (with no further concrete ideas as to the odd journal entries), Paula organized the pages into a neat stack, organized by date, and set them on the desk. Then she put her hands on her hips as she surveyed the rest of the room, and though Ray couldn’t even see her eyes he could feel them noting faults and planning rectifications. Eventually, her gaze had settled on the chalkboard.

They scrutinized all the faded writing on the board, but all of it was so smudged and faint that it was illegible. The only clear writing on the board was in fact not on the board itself, but on a sticky note that had been posted on the border, reading: GLOVES! in neat, elegant cursive—most certainly it had been written by a hand different than the one who’d written the journal entries.

              “We’re going to write down anything we think might be related to our pasts up here,” Paula said, “so we can visualize it and think about it more clearly.” She wiped the remaining chalk marks from the board with the side of her palm and then picked up one of the white stubs. “Abandoned stadium,” she said, and wrote it on the board in print. As she pressed the stub to the board, the tip of it crumbled in a ghostly cloud and left streaks of white on the floor. “Glowing eyes…sunglasses that partially rid me of blindness…”

“Partially?”

“It’s not perfect. There are some dark spots in my field of vision.” She moved on to the next line and continued: “Tattoos…raven….”

“Does the bird really count?”

She whipped her head around. “That,” she said, pointing with the chalk stub at Ray and the bird perched on his shoulder, “is not normal. It absolutely does count.”

“Add your hair.”

She touched a hand to her hair. “Why?”

“’Cause I’m starting to think it’s not actually dyed,” he said. “I don’t know if you can see well enough to tell, but look at the tip of your hair. It’s different from when we woke up.” The difference was slight, and only affected about an inch of her hair, but at the very tips the dark purple grew redder and paler, into a dull pink.

Paula stepped back after finishing her masterpiece, and together they admired the word map. Ray stared at the words blankly, as if simply looking at them would spark some kind of epiphany, but nothing came to him.

They spent the remainder of the day scouring the bedroom, in some way using the abundance of strange little items as a substitute for the lack of answers they’d found concerning their pasts; though it was another person’s items, and arguably items they had no business rummaging through, it was both entertaining as well as an activity that gave them the same emotional impression of solving something unknown.

However, though they were becoming well-acquainted with the room, they hadn’t found anything of supreme interest. It was a strange room, but a dull kind of strange—a strangeness characterized by how pervasively grey everything was. Even the books strewn about, which had faint ghosts of color in their covers, were faded and so deeply acquainted with dust that the particles had seemed to weave themselves into the fiber of the books. And the more they shifted around the items of the room, the more dust was released into the air, and the more it smelled of mold and faint burning.

Eventually Paula grew tired and, after shaking off as much dust as she could from the sheets and mattress, lay down on the bed. She had curled into a little ball, as though she were trying to minimize the surface area of her skin that would touch the sheets. Ray, however, had only grown more energetic, and had no intention of spending the next few hours alone underground. He shut the door to the bedroom behind him and headed towards the ladder.

As he stepped onto the first rung, he heard a flutter behind him and the bird, who had been inspecting the lopsided kitchen counter, appeared at the base of the ladder.

“Come with me,” he whispered to the bird. “We’ll get some fresh air.”

Ray ascended the ladder and pushed open the lid of the manhole, holding it in place as he crawled onto the damp earth. The bird beat its wings, feather-tips brushing the diameter of the passage, burst through the hole and landed beside him with a gust of wind. The drying leaves underneath the bird crackled as it dug its talons into the ground.

The world was so much more pleasant at night. The stars were a kind presence, and the moon lit his path enough for him to see. The Sun was a creature of overcompensation, of overdoing—but the moon was calm, measured. Here he could open his eyes wide and absorb his surroundings instead of seeing through the armor of squinting or shielding the light with his hands.

He emerged from the woods onto the beach, kicking sand and little green coconuts as he reviewed the day in his thoughts. As he walked the bird became occupied with its own activities, hopping from branch to branch and catching insects in its beak, but never strayed further than a few tree-length’s away from Ray.

Then his legs took him to the abandoned stadium. Tonight there were no workers, and all the tents and structures of the preceding days had been dismantled and carried away. On this side of the massive building, there was a makeshift ramp connecting the main level with all the rows of faded seats up to the roof of the stadium. It was old and rotted, composed of a rusted steel frame over which flat boards of wood had been laid, entirely graffitied so that none of the original wood color showed.

The movement he made towards the dilapidated ramp was so instantaneous it could hardly have been called a conscious decision, and in moments he was creeping upwards, arms spread outwards to keep his balance—between the boards of wood were wide gaps through which he could see the rows of seats below. As he stepped along the planks, the bird soared and dipped overhead, pivoting if it had wandered too far and wheeling back in Ray’s direction.

He cleared the final gap and leapt onto surface of the roof. Like the rest of the structure, it was thick grey concrete, smothered in color vandalism—much of it, cacography illegible to him, but still it pleased his eyes, and he traced his fingers along the painted loops and arches. Then seated himself at the ledge of the roof, legs dangling in the warm air, and the bird fluttered to a stop and rested beside him.  

“Why do you follow me?” Ray laughed. The bird ruffled its feathers and cooed.

“I think you’ve earned name privileges,” he said to the bird. Cautiously, he lifted his hand close to the bird, and then brushed his fingertips along its neck feathers. Now that he was observing the bird up close, its air of power struck him. It had a broad back, and a magnificent wingspan; and its beak was thick, the color of charcoal, with the sharpness of a blade. In the bird’s feathers he could see the light of the nearly full moon above them.

He craned his neck upwards towards the sky, and suddenly an image flashed before his eyes, briefly but vividly, like a bolt of lightning: a drawing, shabby and grainy as if done by a child with crayon, of the night sky. The sky was a scribbled mass of black. He wanted to believe it was a personal memory he had just recovered, but the flash was indistinguishable in specificity from any other vague information he retained in his brain.

He looked to the sky. The night sky wasn’t black, he thought, and wished he could tell that to whomever had made the drawing; it was blues, and purples, and greys that mingled and wove in and out of each other like paint. It was strange, and complex, and told of a depth and vastness the day only seemed to hide. Far in the distance, in the top floor of a high-rise past the placid bay, the light in a window extinguished.

Towards the coming of dawn, Ray returned to the underground chamber and fell asleep on the mound of salvaged towels in the main room. During the few hours of sleep he had before he woke to the noise of Paula stirring, he dreamt of a great mango tree towering over him, its hanging fruits swaying in the sultry breeze with all colors of the sunset. When he awoke, he remembered none of this.

Part 1, Chapter 4

 

IV: The Orange Sunglasses

              Ray gripped the cold door handle and turned it downward—he’d unlocked it.

              His heart raced, pumping energy that spread in a warm wave over his body. He flexed his hands restlessly. Anything could be behind that door. He turned his eyes to Paula, who lay curled up on one of the discolored towels. Should he wait for her? No, no—she didn’t like this place. It would probably only stress her out to have to think about exploring a locked part of the chamber.

              Quietly he rose to his feet and slipped into the dark room.

              His face contorted with confusion as he peered into the area before him. Against the far wall was a mattress, complete with disheveled sheets and a deflated pillow that still bore the impression of a head that had lain against it.

              His heart sank. Why in the world was there a bed down here? Maybe Paula had been right. Maybe someone was using this place, and frequently enough to sleep here.

…But still, what even was this? Some place of work? Wouldn’t a worker just go back home at the end of the day, and sleep there instead? So then, what if this underground chamber was somebody’s home?

              He brushed the bed sheet with his hand. It was coated in an airy black dust that clung to his fingertips. His shoulders relaxed. The room must have been ancient; maybe he and Paula, and more importantly their access to the pantry, were safe after all.

              He turned his attention to the other parts of the tiny room. There was a cramped wood desk against another one of the walls, with a chair tucked in. Its surface was entirely cloaked by a mess of papers, on many of which were scribbled black bars obscuring lines of text or handwriting.

              It did not occur once to Ray that these papers likely contained private matters that he, out of moral principle, should not explore. Rather, he fidgeted his hands in excitement over where he should start in perusing the pile. He picked one at random, pulling a paper of which only the corner was exposed under the weight of dozens of others, and held it up to read:

              June 1^st

              I woke up. I walked to the sink and washed my face. Then I changed clothes. My hand hurts. Then I got a box of cereal and ate approximately one and a half servings of dry cereal in a plastic bowl. Then I put the bowl in the sink and rinsed it. Then I put the box of cereal back. Then I poured a glass of water. I had a sip of water.

              Insufferable! The entire page went on and on in the same agonizing fashion! He discarded it to the floor and picked up another:

              May 9^th

              I woke up. I walked to the sink and washed my face. Then I changed clothes. Then I poured myself a glass of water and drank some of it. I coughed once. Then I ate some dry cereal in a bowl.

              What was with this person? Who would bother tracking such mundanities with such detail? Was that really what all these papers were?

              He picked another:

              May 20^th

              I woke up. I walked to the sink and washed my face. Then I changed clothes.

              In disbelief, he let it glide from his hand to the floor. An excruciatingly boring journal, and on loose-leaf pages! Whoever had lived here had had too much time on their hands.

              Suddenly, a loud metallic clanging from outside.

              Ray forgot the papers.

He peered out of the bedroom into the main part of the chamber on light feet, where Paula was sitting up on her towel, the light behind her eyes flashing orange. She reached a hand out to her side, where Ray had been resting, and found that he had gone.

“I’m here,” he called in a whisper. “I know, I hear it too.”

“What if it’s someone who works here?” she whispered back.

Ray paused and imagined a man on the surface, kneeling over the manhole. What would he think when he came in and saw them? Maybe he would call the police. Or try to hurt them for having invaded his space.

              But the noise was rhythmic. Tap-tap-tap-tap, in clusters of four, over and over again.

              “I don’t think it’s a person,” he said. “Doesn’t sound like one.”

              He stepped towards the ladder and looked upward at the bottom of the manhole cover. It vibrated with each clang. The noise was certainly coming from up there; something was knocking against the lid.

              “Don’t open it,” Paula hissed.

              “I won’t,” he said, but already he was placing a foot on the bottom rung, followed by his hands, and then he was ascending steadily to the manhole cover. The clanging was loud and brash and pierced his ears in jagged throbs as he climbed and neared the metal disc. TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP. He pushed forcefully upward and the cover swung open, a blast of humid air rushing down the ladder column.

              Ray raised his head out of the hole and past ground level. There, standing before him in the tangled grass and fallen leaves, was the great black bird. It stood proudly and testily, like it was irritated that Ray had kept it waiting. It cocked its head and scrutinized him with beady eyes that shone a dull red.

              Then in a flurry of hasty wing flaps, the bird launched itself down the hole and into the underground chamber. Ray slammed the cover shut behind him and slid down the rungs in pursuit.

              Paula was shielding her face as the bird surged around the room, knocking into walls and grazing against the floor until it calmed itself and settled on the center of the floor, a couple of its fallen black feathers gliding to the floor beside it.

              “It was just the bird,” Ray said.

              Paula was smoldering, in disbelief of Ray’s disobedience and of the persistence of the bird.

              “What is wrong with this bird?” she spat. “Why does it hate us?”

              Suddenly the bird broke from its stance and hurled itself towards the towels Ray had lain down on the smudged floor. It snatched Paula’s sunhat off one of the towels, took a few mischievous steps forward, and in a clean snap of its beak, tore through the band of the hat so that it fell misshapen to the floor and curled awkwardly like the peel of an orange.

              “Did it just break something?” Paula asked, digging her nails into her scalp.

              “Your hat,” Ray said hesitantly.

              Paula balled her hand into a fist. “It hates me! I don’t get it!”

              “Yeah, that was…weird,” he said, kneeling on the ground and holding the ripped fabric in his hand.

              “Why did you let it in?”

              “I didn’t!” he said. “I just opened the lid to check, and he flew in.”

              “You shouldn’t have opened the lid.” Paula slapped her shoulder. “I think you let in some mosquitoes, too,” she grumbled.

              “If I hadn’t, he would’ve kept making that loud noise, and it could’ve drawn someone’s attention to where we are.”

              “So, what, then he’s just going to stay here?”

              Ray considered her words. If someone outside was suspicious of the metallic clanging noise, another clanging noise five minutes later would only add fuel to their curiosity.

 “We can let him out in the morning, and see if it happens again.”

Paula sighed impatiently. “Fine. I don’t care. I’m going back to sleep.”

 

With not a pin of light breaking through the cover of the manhole, there was no way to tell time from the inside of the underground chamber. Ray restlessly entertained himself with the bird, watching as it preened its magnificent wings and hopped from corner to corner, conducting its peculiar investigations of clumps of dust and smudges of grime on the walls.

It could have been morning, or it could have been earlier or perhaps later, but in keeping with his compromise, in a couple of hours Ray ascended the ladder and opened the lid—but the bird did not follow. In fact, it hadn’t even seemed to notice him opening the lid in the first place. He slid back down to the floor and locked eyes with the bird, who was perched on the top edge of the door to the kitchen, eyeing him daringly.

Ray sighed and circled around to the back of the door, then clapped and waved his hands behind the bird in an attempt to inspire flight. But the bird, instead, turned to face him and eyed him once more disapprovingly.

“Yeah, the bird’s not leaving. I think he’s gonna stay.”

“What do you mean, ‘stay’? You mean, indefinitely?”

Ray paused. “Maybe?” The bird clicked its beak.

“What are you gonna feed it? Do you even know what that thing eats?”

No, he didn’t.

“I’ll try letting him out again in a little,” he said. “But he’s being pretty good right now. He’s just sorta sitting there.”

“Yes, until he decides to attack something else.”

Ray’s mind was elsewhere already. Ah! He hadn’t even shown her the room!

He led her to the open doorway and into the bedroom, describing everything in detail. As he did, he realized just how much of the room he himself hadn’t yet had the chance to notice. On the wall opposite the mattress hung a large dusty chalkboard that covered almost the entirety of the wall space, on which the faint white ghosts of old marks were still visible, but not clearly enough to be legible. Tiny nibs of chalk lay haphazardly on the floor before it. In one corner of the room was a hole, small in diameter but very deep (a toilet?). The whole room was very strange; bare in terms of essentials, but plentiful in other items. He recounted to Paula his discovery from the night before, of all the bizarre journal entries, and how all of them detailed more or less the same mundane activities. She was as disturbed as he had been over the presence of a bed, but was comforted by the thick layer of dust that enveloped it.

It might have been day, or it might have been night, but after narrating the room Ray began to feel tired and sluggish, and soon lay himself to rest on the mattress of towels in the main room.

He awoke to Paula standing before him, wearing a pair of sunglasses. At first Ray didn’t recognize them, as their frame and lenses were a bright orange, unlike the black pair he’d found in the woods where the bird had dropped the broken water bottle. But then he realized the color was not from the material itself, but a result of the material absorbing the warm light that shone out of Paula’s eyes—now that the glasses were on her face, they were no longer black but glowed a brilliant orange that flickered towards crimson or gold as she moved her head.

“It’s so dark,” she said faintly.

Ray wasn’t quite sure how to respond. “Like before, no?”

“No, everything was bright before.” She took off the sunglasses and averted her gaze so as not to blind him. The light from her eyes bounced off the metal wall and illuminated the entire room in a soft glow. “See, everything is very bright now if I don’t have these on. Bright yellow.” She placed the glasses back on her face. “But now everything is black.”

She took a breath, and her shoulders relaxed. “It’s like the world has stopped screaming at me.”

              “But it’s strange, it’s like—” she continued, stepping in the direction of the ladder, where the weak lightbulb hung. “I can see light, right here. Is that a light?”

              “Yes! Yeah, it is!” Ray jumped to his feet and followed her to the lightbulb. “You can see that?”

              “That’s an actual light? That I can see?”

              “Yeah, it’s a lightbulb!” Ray was beaming.

              Paula outstretched an arm and tapped her fingers to the bulb. She pursed her lips as if to catch herself from smiling.

              “Can I see them for a second? The sunglasses?” he asked tentatively, afraid to take them from her but blazingly curious about what was different about these glasses.

              Paula removed them slowly, as if unsure of separating herself from them, then handed them to him.

              The glasses were sleek and simplistic, now reduced to a cold black without the light from Paula’s eyes. There was no logo or brand name, and the entire piece seemed to be made of the same material. He handed them back.

              She touched their frames as she gazed at the lightbulb, her face only inches away.

“I want to see the sky.”

              Given that right now she could only see the lightbulb, Ray was unsure of how much she’d be able to see. But they could try.

              They climbed the ladder, ascending the dark column until they reached the manhole cover. Ray pushed forcefully with both his hands, and the lid swung open, afternoon sunlight streaming down into the chamber.

              “Oh, my God! Oh, my God,” Paula exclaimed.

              Ray heaved himself up onto the grass, and an iguana scurried out of the way into the bushes. “What? Anything different?”

              Paula was gripping the final rung of the ladder and gazing up at the canopy, through which rays of Sun cut in jagged beams. “I can see.”

              “What can you see?” Ray asked hastily.

              “Eh—Everything? Everything,” she said, lifting herself to her feet and walking straight to the trunk of a palm tree. She placed her hands on the bark and gazed into the lines and ridges like the trunk was a page in a book.

              She craned her neck and looked above, through the intertwined branches and into the afternoon sky. In the light, her hair was not so dull, and he could see that there were strands of brighter purple and magenta intertwined with the darker shades. “I knew it,” she whispered.

              “You knew what?”

              She stared, head fixed upward. “That that’s what the Sun looks like.”

              “Okay, well don’t…stare at it too long,” he laughed.

              Paula whipped her head to look at Ray and furrowed her brow. “You look awful.”

              “What?” Ray suddenly felt as though he were being examined by some high-brow fashion designer.

              “Your hair, your clothes, everything, it’s all a mess! You don’t take care of yourself!”

              He didn’t?

              “I think I’m doing alright considering the circumstances.”

              She hummed to herself doubtfully, turning her attention back to the trees and the grass. She held herself like an inspector, pouting her lips in curiosity and criticism for her surroundings. She flexed her arms in the warmth of the Sun, stretching her fingers. She lingered for a minute, observing the woods and piecing through the past couple of days’ events with the new imagery in mind. Then she suddenly turned back to Ray.

              “I want to see the room.”

Part 1, Chapter 3

 III: The Manhole

 

             It was early enough in the morning that the deep blues of the night still lingered overhead alongside the pinks of dawn, so that the sky cast a cool lavender on the sand and sea. At one point of the night, Ray had become restless and had decided to walk the shoreline—staying the entire time, of course, where he could see Paula as she slept, just in case. On his walk, he’d been disappointed to see, alongside patches of washed-up sargassum and chipped scallop shells, evidence of beachgoers in the area: a cheap touristy sunhat discarded in the sand. He’d been glad about his discovery, and thought it’d be perfect to hide Paula’s closed eyes and avoid any commentary from passerby on their light, but at the same time was frustrated by just how much of the island was being traversed by other people. The hat, though cheap, was in good condition—a recent addition to the sand. He and Paula would have to find somewhere else to call their resting place if they wanted to be unbothered.

             When Paula awoke and sat up to breathe in the salty air, Ray thought that something about Paula—though it might have just been the diffusing colors of the morning atmosphere—had seemed more revitalized than when he’d first seen her. There was a faint rosy color in her cheeks, now, and the cuts and bruises along her arms were starting to fade. Ray gave Paula the hat to wear, and he was pleased to see that, coupled with the growing daylight, it nearly extinguished any visible light that escaped through her eyelids.

He decided to take a chance at leading them back to the lot by the stadium. Only a couple of men walked the area now, and they were on the opposite side; so once more Ray and Paula filled their beaten-up bottles at the fountain before stealing back into the mangroves.

             As prudently as was possible for him, Ray led them through the dense woods. He was sure to walk only straight ahead so as not to disorient himself, save for a few small detours around fallen logs or puddles of thick mud that bubbled ominously. Even with his earnest avoidance of particularly troublesome terrain, within minutes their feet were coated with coarse dirt and sand, and their legs ached from being scratched by the odd jutting branch. When they had walked the length of the island the day before, they’d stayed just at the edge of the forest, where the vegetation was kinder to unfamiliar travelers; but now he saw in fullness the inconvenience of their flip-flops and sandals.

             Suddenly Ray heard a fluttering behind him, and a force knocked the water bottle from his hand. He swiveled his head around to see a black bird gripping his bottle with its claws, barreling away with it on steady wings.

             “Are you serious?” Ray exclaimed. “What the hell is this guy’s problem?”

             “What was that?” Paula asked in a small voice.

             “That stupid–one of those black birds just snatched my water bottle out of my hand!”

             Far ahead of them, through the tangles of drooping vines and palmettos, Ray saw an object fall through the canopy and onto the earth, which he quickly realized was his bottle. But when they reached the site of the impact, he noticed another object beside it on the ground.

Peeking out under decaying thatch palms was something small and very dark. Ray bent down and pulled it out from under the brush. It was a pair of black sunglasses. That could be another strategy for hiding her eyes, he thought, and pocketed them for future use. He picked up the dented bottle and turned it over in his hand.  Upon frustrated inspection, he saw the bird had pierced it so thoroughly with its claws that it was rendered useless, with gaping holes up and down its side.

The air was thicker and more humid today, and with it Ray’s breathing more laborious. His hope was that if he just continued in this direction, they’d eventually come across a clearing in the dense woods that they could call their temporary home, but as they trudged it only became increasingly difficult to guide Paula away from the toothy edges of sawgrass and webs of intertwining mangrove limbs. Here, at the least, no one looking for a nice beach day would venture.

“The ground’s different,” Paula said suddenly.

“Huh?”

Ray backed up a couple of paces and knocked his heel into the ground. It was stiff, here. He bent down and brushed sea grape leaves and dust to the side to reveal a large metal disc with a handle on one side. It had browned under layers of silt and rust—even here where the beach was no longer visible, the sea air reached its oxidizing limbs into the woods, which no man-made structure could withstand forever.

“It’s like a manhole. Really rusty,” Ray said, running his fingers along it. “Gonna see if I can lift it up.”

“Oh, lovely! We’ll be contracting tetanus this afternoon,” Paula said.

Ray couldn’t help cracking a smile at hearing a sentence from Paula longer than three words.

He curled one hand around the handle and pulled upwards, but the cover remained stubbornly nested in the ground. He tried again with two hands, grunting as he struggled with it, and very slowly he swung the cover open until it supported itself vertically. The lid revealed a dark round hole that plunged deep enough into the earth that the colors at the bottom weren’t visible from where Ray crouched and admired. Running along the side opposite to the cover’s hinge was a thin metal ladder leading downward. It looked like it had once been painted red, but now was peeling and faded.

There was a moment of quiet as Ray gazed into the darkness.

“Okay. So what if—”

             “No,” Paula said. “You’re not going in there.”

             “Oh, no, I won’t just leave you up here! You’ll come with me,” Ray offered, but Paula scowled and shrank away from the hole. “It’s totally rusty and it’s in the middle of the woods. I doubt anybody’s been down here in years,” he continued, “and if I’m right and it’s empty, this is a perfect place to set up camp. We won’t have to worry about anyone bothering us.”

             “It’s probably a sewer,” she mumbled.

“You think you can climb down a ladder?”

Reluctantly, she followed him downward. He descended first, so that should she misstep he could help her recover, but both made it to the bottom with relative ease. It was roughly thirty feet to the bottom (deeper than Ray had estimated), and every few rungs Paula asked if they were nearly there.

              At the base of the manhole was a hard cement floor. Dangling to Ray’s right was a beaded string, which he pulled to spark a weakly flickering lightbulb hanging limply overhead. The bulb was tiny and pathetic, and though Ray had been able to see well enough with the light streaming in from the surface, the light’s warm tone mitigated the sense of general discomfort (which had slid off Ray like oil over water anyway, so dazzled was he by the magic of a hidden site) in the peculiar underground chamber.

              It was a room, small but not cramped, and enclosed by chipping grey concrete on all sides. There were three doors of a material just as grey as the concrete—two to the left, and one on the far side of the room. Though the chamber was bare, it still managed to carry an air of unwavering dilapidation and disrepair. The air was stale and metallic, and smelled slightly of burning.

              He described the room in detail to Paula, who stood stiffly by the base of the ladder with her arms crossed. The door at the far end was shut with an electronic lock, and the one to its left was shut with an analogue lock. The closest one to Paula, however, Ray was able to swing open, though it resisted at first.

              To his wonderment, the door led to a tiny kitchenette. Its appliances were dated and mismatched in style—there was a tawny-colored oven smeared with old left-over bits of food, a slab of wood for a counter, a refrigerator that was once white but was now firmly yellow, a microwave with scratched glass, and, at the far wall, a little white wall mount sink. Everything was run-down and discolored in some way, and had it been someone other than Ray looking over all of it, they would have been quite disappointed and perhaps even disgusted at the sight. The faucet was rusted and its basin discolored by brown and orange mold; the stove over the oven was half-covered in black ashy crust; a coppery liquid dripped from the bottom of the refrigerator into a puddle on the floor. But, all in all, it was a kitchen, and Ray was ecstatic. If anything, its state of disrepair lent him even greater excitement by confirming his suspicions that the underground chamber was no longer in use, and likely hadn’t been for a long time.

              And then, Ray turned to the other side of the congested closet of a kitchen and lay his widened eyes on something that gleamed in the weak light of the distant bulb and seemed to call Ray into an embrace: a set of cheap wire tiered shelves, half of which had collapsed in on themselves, stocked with packaged food.

              “PAULA,” he called, “You won’t believe what’s in here!”

              He ran over and grabbed her hand, pulling her into the kitchen. “It’s—it’s shelves, with food, it’s got—oh my God, pasta, rice… Cans! It’s like, beans. And corn! All kinds of food, oh my God. And it’s all in boxes and containers, so we can eat it!”

              “I don’t think that’s how that works,” she said quietly. “You said this place looks ancient.”

              “No, pasta lasts like forever, I mean—” he picked up a box and turned it over in his hands, frantically searching for an expiration date. “Look. April 2021,” he said, but as the words escaped his mouth he realized he had no conception of whether they were past or before that month. Fortunately, the confidence in his tone had gotten Paula to, possibly, accept that evidence, and she didn’t comment further on the pasta.

“And there’s a sink—!” he continued.

              He rushed over to the little sink and turned the handle of the faucet, which let out an awful death cry before giving out a sputter of water into the basin. But water was water, and it was (mostly) transparent at that, and from a faucet—surely safe to drink, Ray was sure.

              “Water, Paula, we can live down here!”

              Paula was silent. She looked at him through the cheap sunglasses, whose straight bridge gave her a perpetual look of being unimpressed, and Ray was aware the face under the glasses wore that expression, too. And, honestly, it was a welcome departure from her quiet indifference over the past few days.

              “How sure are you this place isn’t used anymore?”

              “Dude, nobody comes down here anymore. If you could see it, you’d see everything’s, like, destroyed, it’s so old. And the lid at the top was totally covered in dirt. No one uses this thing.”

              Ray had, of course, no way to be certain of these assertions. But there was food, and there was water, and the chamber truly did look abandoned.

              “We’ll just give it a try,” he offered. “If we feel like anything’s off at any point, we can leave. Keep the hat on if it makes you feel better, just in case anyone comes in.”

              Paula huffed a grudging agreement, and Ray grinned to himself over his discovery of the pantry. His stomach had begun to feel bloated and painful out of emptiness, and he was desperate to shove anything at all into his system. Even if the pasta were in fact long-since expired, he would’ve gladly eaten it raw.

              Like a cat he climbed onto the counter and stood with his sandals on the stovetop, searching through the upper cabinets. He found a black pot, which compared to everything else in the kitchen was relatively unscathed, and placed it on the stovetop. But when he got back down to the floor, he stared blankly at the pot on the stove and realized he in fact had no idea how to make pasta, about which he felt quite ashamed. But out of all the items he’d seen in the pantry, he felt compelled to cook it.

              It was a clumsy challenge following the instructions on the side of the box, and Ray trudged through many an obstacle like the black crust left on the knobs and stubbornness of the shabby stovetop. Several times throughout the ordeal, he was overcome by the temptation of the uncooked pasta and crunched on it straight out of the box. But eventually, after probably three times the amount of time it should’ve taken him, before Ray lay a pot of slightly undercooked penne pasta.

              By this point he was feeling especially inspired and wanted to animate Paula’s motivation for making the underground chamber their living space, so he took the great burden of not grabbing the pasta out of the pot with his bare hands and shoveling it into his mouth. Instead, as a refined gentleman would do, he thought to himself proudly, he located and washed two bowls and two forks and served himself and Paula. He sat beside Paula on the floor, who was hugging her knees with her back to one of the locked doors, and handed her a bowl.

              “Pasta,” he declared.

              She took the fork and touched it to the plain pasta. “This is an insane amount of food.”

              He eyed her bowl. It was indeed so large a mound of pasta that as he’d walked to hand it to her, a couple of precious pieces had fallen to the floor (he’d been sure to pop them into his mouth—he was no waster of food), but he’d thought beforehand that the bowls were simply small. Ray wolfed down his entire bowl with ease, but Paula left half of hers.

              “You’ll be living with a chef,” he said, “if we stay down here.”

              Paula gave a grunt somewhere in between annoyance and affirmation.

              It wasn’t long before Ray’s curiosity returned to the locked door to the right of the entrance to the kitchen. It was entirely made of steel and without any window through which Ray could see beyond it, which made him even more desperate to explore. The handle was simple and contained the door’s singular lock. If he found something of the right shape and material…maybe he could pick it open.

He remembered the dumpster they’d passed on their walk throughout the length of the island. They were already towards the middle of the island, here in the woods, so the dumpster wouldn’t be far from them. Maybe he could find something there—and if not, it was probably a good idea to rifle through the garbage anyway; anything could be in there, and their only way of acquiring items was to scavenge. He was sure Paula would be eager to leave the underground chamber for a bit, anyway.

              “You want to go dumpster-diving?”

              “You say that as if we’re above that or something!”

              “Everyone is above that,” she said.

              “That’s rude. And wrong. It’s not like we’ll be getting food out of there or something,” he said, “now that we have this wonderful pantry,” he added dramatically. “Sometimes people throw away things that are perfectly good.”

              Paula was coaxed into accompanying him, although she maintained that she would absolutely not be jumping into the dumpster with him, and Ray wondered airily if her opposition was some involuntary response to anything and everything that was proposed.

              As they left, Ray was embarrassed to realize he’d left the lid of the manhole open while they had been inside. He was sure no one would pass through the area, but he felt guilty having been assuring Paula of their safety while having left the entrance wide-open and visible. Once they ascended to the surface, he kicked some leaves and dirt over the lid to conceal the lid, and then took Paula’s hand and led them towards the far side of the island.

Their walk through the woods was not nearly as hot as through the barer parts of the island, being under the protection of the canopy, but was stiflingly humid. As if the air itself were water, Ray felt as though he was gasping for air as they navigated the greenery.

              As the woods opened into the gravelly clearing, they were kicked back into the blazing heat of the sun. He shielded his eyes and squinted at the burning expanse, ensuring no one was around. The dumpster was nearly the size of a truck and had no lid, so that its contents were left out to bake. By some miracle, he couldn’t detect any smell of rotting food as he approached and surveyed the container.

              “There’s an ugly sofa sorta leaned against the outside,” he narrated to Paula, “and a mattress with a long brown stain down the middle. Really great stuff you’re missing out on.”

              On the ground was a lone pink hair tie. He picked it up and brushed the dust off it. It was relatively clean, and no strands of hair clung to it from some past owner, so he placed it in Paula’s hand.

              “Here,” he said, “it’s an, uh…it’s a liga. If you wanna tie your hair up.”

              “A what?”

              A liga.” It hit him that that was a Spanish word, and he racked his brain for the English term as he stared it down. “The thing for putting your hair in a ponytail. Can’t remember the word in English.”

              “You know Spanish?”

              Did he?

              He scratched his scalp thoughtfully. “Maybe?”

              She slid the hair tie onto her wrist, touching it with a mild air of disgust. “I’ll clean it when we get back.”

              Two feet off the ground on the side of the container, the metal jutted out just enough for him to use as a footing. He looked carefully around them to confirm no one was nearby.

              “Just stay there,” he said, moving Paula to the shadow cast by the dumpster. Anchoring his feet on the metal strip, he hoisted himself up and over the side. He balanced his torso on the edge and held himself steady with his hands, surveying the options below him with the same hungry vigor as one hunting through the menu of a renowned restaurant. The metal was so searing hot in the sun that as he looked he had to alternate hands.

              For whatever reason, many of the items people had thrown in the dumpster were not in trash bags, which made Ray’s job of scavenging much easier. The object he had in mind to pick the lock was a paperclip—a common item, but, aggravatingly, something that was also tiny, which easily would be lost in the ocean of damaged furniture and random scraps of wood and plastic.

              He swung his legs over and leapt into the heap of refuse, the blazing sun glinting off shards of glass and torn sheets of metal into his eyes. With all these colorful items of every shape and material, it was nearly impossible for Ray to keep himself focused on locating a measly paper clip. The first item that caught his eye was a bundle of white towels that were not so white anymore, which he immediately scooped into his arms and threw over the wall of the dumpster onto the gravel—those would be coming with him. Then he rummaged through a pile of mismatched writing utensils, which he tested on the palm of his hand and, if approved, shoved into his pocket. And ah! A deck of cards (if only Paula could see, then she could play with him; for now, solitaire would have to do). The box was torn on one end and he had no idea if it was a complete set, but he didn’t care, and shoved it under his arm to carry back with him. There were many crumpled papers and empty glass bottles, many of which were broken and jagged, and red plastic cups so flattened he mistook them for plates. To his disappointment, no paperclip was in attendance, but he did gather a little collection of malformed metal pins and nails that looked to be contenders.

              Once they had returned to the underground chamber, Ray dropped the heap of towels onto the floor and unloaded all the items he’d stuffed into his pockets. He collected all the metal bits he’d taken and knelt before the locked door, surveying the challenge before him. It occurred to him that he wasn’t exactly sure how picking a lock really worked—he just knew it was a thing people did. Consequently, the task occupied him for a long time, possibly several hours as he stuck the pins blindly into the cylinder of the lock, until his stomach raised its gurgling voice at him once again and ordered him to the pantry.

              The warmth and texture of the pasta from that afternoon was flooding his brain in a mouthwatering phantom sensation, so for dinner, he made more of the pasta from that same box. But he felt, in spite of his hunger for it, that it was lacking as a dish, especially with it being the second time that day he’d present it to Paula; so he scanned the pantry for something that could spice the dish, and his eyes landed on a dented can of beans.

              He punctured the lid with one of the odd little pins he’d found, and was just about to pour beans into his and Paula’s bowls when he began to doubt whether or not beans really belonged on pasta. He concluded that if they didn’t belong on pasta, then surely they belonged next to pasta, and poured them on the side. Paula ate quietly, assuredly out of fervent appreciation for the flavors, as did Ray, so absorbed was he in gorging on his well-crafted dinner.

              He soon grew tired, although with no window to the surface from the chamber, he had no sense of what time it truly was, and was far too lazy to climb the ladder and take a peek at the sky. He arranged and layered the towels as best as he could on the hard concrete floor to make it just a bit more comfortable of a resting place, and fell into a short, but deep, sleep.

              He awoke only a few hours later, while Paula was fast asleep, and as soon as he’d opened his eyes his thoughts had begun to accelerate and awaken. With his body now in protest of a return to rest, his attention turned once again to the locked door and the collection of pins that sat in a disorganized collection before it.

              He could hear Paula’s even breaths as he picked up the pins and tinkered with them, then inserted them one by one into the lock. He twisted them almost at random, having no knowledge of the inner mechanisms of locks, but the repetition of it was almost hypnotizing, and he began to move through the process with fluidity. As he tweaked the pins and prodded the lock, he developed a vague mental image of the inward shape of the locking mechanism.

              Suddenly a click from within the lock.