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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part 1, Chapter 2

 

 

 

II:  The Raven

The night passed peacefully, considering the frantic movement and hushed conversations of only hours prior, and soon a faint pink crept over the water’s horizon and scattered itself over the sand. Out in the distance, the first of the day’s sailboats appeared on the water. Through the morning condensation, the skyline was only faintly visible, appearing to Ray as vague misty shapes. Paula still slept, her arms shielding her head and her bony shoulders bobbing softly with each breath as she lay in the sand.

             Ray had spent the entirety of the night awake (and only now, with the rising sun, was beginning to feel fatigue wear at him), but not once did he grow restless of his idleness; he was completely entertained by contemplating the identity of the girl beside him, and what they should do at the coming of dawn. He marveled at the warm light emanating from behind her eyelids—how it seemed to pulse softly along with her breathing, and quietly pondered something he hadn’t noticed before: what appeared to be a small tattoo on her left arm, grainy as if inked by an amateur, reading:

EXP 5483

             Another note: the darkness of the night hadn’t tricked his eyes, after all; the growing sunlight confirmed that Paula’s hair was, in fact, violet, even at its roots. She must have dyed it recently, then—so before whatever had befallen them in the stadium, she must have had the time and resources to choose how she presented herself.

             Several times his curiosity nearly pushed him to wake the resting girl, but her bruised, pale flesh stopped him short; she needed her rest.

             Within an hour or so of the first hint of sun, Paula had begun to shift, and soon was sitting upright on the sand, eyes open. In the daylight, the piercing light of her eyes wasn’t nearly as noticeable from afar, though Ray still had to avoid her gaze. When she first sat up, she gripped the sand and breathed in the salt of the ocean in confirmation that the night’s events hadn’t, in fact, been conjured up in a dream.

             He wished her good morning, and soon after couldn’t help pressing her about his nocturnal thoughts:

             “You have a tattoo on your arm,” he said. “Did you know that?”

             She rubbed the skin of her arms as if to search for a tangible mark. “No. What is it of?”

             “It says, ‘E-X-P five-four-eight-three’.”

             She paused. “What about you?”

             Somehow Ray hadn’t even considered that, and he felt foolish. Pulling up his left sleeve, he revealed another poorly-inked tattoo, reading:

EXP 2002

             “E-X-P two-zero-zero-two.”

             Matching tattoos, then—that was interesting. And clearly both unprofessionally done, too, with shaky lines and uneven darkness; so who had inked them? They weren’t particularly aesthetically pleasing.

             “Another thing,” he said. “Your hair’s purple. Looks like it was dyed recently.”

             Paula shifted uncomfortably. “My eyes are weird, I have a tattoo of a random number, and I have purple hair. I don’t sound so inconspicuous.”

             “I’ll make sure we stay safe,” he said, although really he wasn’t sure if he should have any confidence at all in that statement. “Do you remember anything else now? From before you woke up?”

             “No,” she said quietly.

             And neither did he. Before his waking to incessant water droplets on his neck, his mind was blaringly blank. There was nothing. No memory of family, of childhood, of friends—and he thought to himself that that must sound sad to an outsider, but really, he felt indifferent, having no concrete sense of what he may be missing. But his brain hadn’t been wiped completely clear; because here he was, formulating complete sentences and knowing the names of things like clouds and trees and the sea. Maybe they could still extract some information about their pasts from the sort of memory they’d retained…

             But first: there was a sharper, more emotionally pressing matter at hand, and that matter was that Ray was agonizingly hungry, and so, he inferred, must have been Paula.

             He surveyed the beach, and the mess of tropical vegetation behind them. As the light grew, the insects and frogs calmed their voices, and the nocturnal singing was replaced by squawks of gallinules and the bassy rhythm of distant reggaeton music. One thing he knew for certain was that he had no idea how to find food in the wilderness. But many parts of the island seemed to have been touched by man; surely there would be a proper source of food somewhere.

             He was sorry to ask Paula to close her eyes again, but he didn’t want to risk any passerby locking eyes with the burning light. He took her hand (which was very warm!), and together they navigated the thick foliage and returned to the pavement by the stadium. In daylight, washed over by the powerful sun, Paula’s eyelids looked normal from a distance; so Ray felt more confident stepping out from the cover of the trees and onto the broad asphalt.

             Now there were even more white tents, and more vested workers arranging equipment—and with this increase in busyness came several food carts, each painted with loud colors and words that begged for the money of the hungry. The cart closest to the perimeter of trees had a man working with a compact grill, and the scent of fried food hit Ray in a warm punch. He drummed his fingers against his side.

             “Stay here,” he said to her.

             As he approached, he saw it was an arepa cart, and although Ray had no idea what an arepa was, he desperately wanted one. If he could just snag one off the grill…

             He kept his eyes away from the stand, feigning a walk towards some other food cart. The man was working away from the grill, doing something on a counter. Ray’s plan had been to, while the man’s attention was on the counter, discreetly slide an arepa into his pocket. But when he reached the stand, he saw that at the counter, the man was stuffing an arepa with avocado and cheese and sauces. The temptation was too great. He abandoned his plan. He needed the stuffed arepa, in all its glory.

             He kept walking past the stand, glancing behind him as inconspicuously as he could to keep tabs on the worker. He was nearly at the base of the stadium when the cook finally finished the arepa and turned back to the grill. Ray pivoted and walked back towards the stand, this time on the side of the counter. But when he reached the counter and flicked the arepa with his hand, it missed his pocket and flopped pathetically onto the asphalt. He gritted his teeth, but then paused; this could be good. Now he had an excuse to take the arepa and wouldn’t need to worry about being caught stealing.

             “Oh, man, I’m sorry—I knocked it onto the ground,” he said, holding up the now gravel-y arepa to the cook. The cook said it was fine, and outstretched his hand to throw it away for him, but Ray, polite as he was, told him not to worry about that—he would take care of it.

             He ambled back to the treeline, brushing off pebbles from the bottom of the arepa. “Food,” he said to Paula, and handed her the half that hadn’t touched the ground. They sat together under the shade of towering palm trees, backs against trunk. The grass was overgrown and feathery, and dotted with patches of little yellow flowers. Overhead a band of green parakeets screeched and bickered, then pivoted and landed in boisterous flaps on the graffitied roof of the stadium.

             Paula ate slowly and quietly. Ray devoured his half in seconds and spit out a few stray pebbles that had nestled themselves into the fried dough. It was a delicious, but unsustainable, food source—he knew well that he couldn’t pull this stunt every day.

             After eating they walked the length of the island, always under the cover of trees, with Ray describing in detail to Paula everything he saw. At the edge of the tree cover, around a twenty minute walk from the stadium, there was an enormous overflowing dumpster, with rotting furniture strewn about its base. Further, at the far end of the island, lining the road were a few buildings: a school, a marine lab, and some water management structures; and at the very tip, the main road lifted into a bridge and then lowered itself, continuing onto another island. This time around he wanted only to observe the island’s features from a distance to get a sense of which areas might be safe to wander. But even then, nothing seemed to call his attention; nothing inspired in him any sense of what could’ve possibly happened to them, or even a mild sense of familiarity.

             By the time they returned to the woods near the stadium, the hot sun had drained their bottles of water, and he guided them back in the direction of the water fountain.

             Sleep-deprived, Ray didn’t notice someone come up from behind as he drank from the fountain.

             “Hey buddy, this isn’t a public access area,” a burly man in a reflective vest sneered.

             Oh.

             “It’s not?”

             “No. You need’a leave.”

             “We’re just getting water real quick. Then we’ll head out.”

             He eyed Paula. “What’s wrong with the girl?”

             “Uh, she’s fine.”

             “Why’s she just standing there with her eyes closed?”

             “She’s tired,” Paula hissed.

             The man grunted and headed back to the work area as Ray turned to leave with Paula. Lovely. No more water fountain, then, at least during daylight hours.

             It was late afternoon and the sun was still high. Even through the cover of mangroves and palm trees, the sun was hot on Ray’s back as they made their way back to last night’s place of rest on the shoreline. His head had begun to feel heavy, and his legs weak with exhaustion as they navigated fallen palm fronds and packed patches of Mulhy grass.

             They emerged onto the stretch of grey sand, and soon had reached the divots and footprints of the night before. Paula sat beside him, still as a stone against the half-hearted gusts of warm sea air. Ray lay on his back, arm over his eyes to shield them from the spots of burning sunlight that broke through the coverage of the palm trees. He intended only to rest and think, but in moments had fallen asleep.

        

 

 

             “Ray. Ray.”

             He awoke to Paula shaking his shoulder. It was dark, now, with no faint light in the sky telling of recent sunset. His heart sank, guilty he’d left her awake alone for so long.

             “What’s up?” he mumbled, clearing sand out of his eyes.

             “What is that?” she whispered. “It won’t stop.”

             “What?”

             He listened. From somewhere in the mangroves behind them, there snapped through the air the shrill caw of a bird. It was powerful and confident.

             He rose from the sand and peered into the mangroves, eyes following the call. Partially shrouded by mangrove twists, and perched on a branch at the height of his shoulders, was a large black bird. He wondered if the sand in his eyes had irritated them and warped his vision, because it seemed to gaze at him with piercing red eyes.

             “It’s a crow or something,” he called back to Paula. “I’ll scare it off.”

             Moistened by the humidity of the sea air and what must’ve been a recent rain, the leaves below his feet didn’t crunch and snap, but bent softly and nestled themselves deeper into the earth. He ducked under branches and was now only a few feet from the bird, who gave no air of being threatened. It sat regally on its branch, poised as if absorbed in its own glory.

             Ray outstretched his arm and waved a hand at it, but the bird only cocked its head at him as if offended, and Ray almost felt a little guilty for trying to scare it off. It gazed at him expectantly and ruffled its dark feathers, which even this deep in the mangroves reflected the soft pale blue of the moon. Then it chuffed impatiently and lighted on great wings, rising over the canopy and into obscurity.

             When Ray returned and told Paula of its having flown away, she rolled back onto the sand to sleep. But Ray, now, was alert. He aimlessly drew on the wet sand with a mangrove branch, and retreated into his thoughts.

             He returned to his earlier deliberation, of if his partial memory could still somehow be of use in figuring out what had happened to him and Paula. His strategy was to see if there were any particular topics about which he had more knowledge than others.

             Ray’s first question was regarding their location. Out of all the countries Ray could name, he recalled the most regional names for the United States, which combined with his and Paula’s languages and accents led him to assume he was somewhere in that nation. Clearly they were coastal, too, and somewhere that at least felt tropical, which narrowed down the country further.

             In the sand he wrote the names of Southern coastal states he could remember, at one point nearly tripping over Paula’s legs, and going state by state he took mental notes of how much he seemed to know about each. He was at first skeptical of his methodology, but soon pleasantly surprised to see that Florida, in particular South Florida, was emerging far ahead of the other locations. He was happy to recall the names of towns, local animals, and regional foods of the area. His eyes rose to the dark seawater, at whose horizon he could see white yachts and little sailboats cruising before the distant city skyline. South Florida seemed plausible. He had no way of confirming this suspicion now, but it was somehow comforting to Ray. To that first question Paula had asked him, about where she was, he had some sort of answer to give now, at least.

             He turned and looked at the sleeping girl, watching the warm light from her eyes flicker onto the sand by her face, and something inside him ached. He couldn’t remember his family, or his classmates, or friends, but having no semblance of who they might be made him feel detached from them.

             Here, on the other hand, before him on the sand, was a girl he felt deeply he should know. A gust of wind tossed a clump of her hair onto her face, so that her glowing eyelids were shielded from his view. It was the strangest feeling—as if he was mourning something he wasn’t even sure existed.

             She was so quiet. He was lucky to get even one-word responses from her. But he didn’t want to press her; she, too, was enduring something confusing, frustrating, and isolating. Whoever she had been in his life before—if she even had been someone in his life—he would let her take her time. Maybe, slowly, he could come to know the light behind her eyes.