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.