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.”