To a Flame
"You're a science guy, so I know you'll appreciate this. It's a recent study. Five minutes of relaxed breathing before bed led to a twenty-five percent increase in REM sleep," he says with a small, sly smile, like he's letting me into his confidence. In reply, I ask again if there's some medication that I can take for the dreams or anxiety.
"No, Alex, it's important to treat the disease, not mask the symptoms. Claustrophobia is something called a psychosomatic condition. It's something that you can unlearn." he says. "I know I sound like a broken record when I say this, but it's important to remember: what you're experiencing now won't last forever." I bite my lip and stare bitterly at the carpet: a mess of bright yellows and reds that somehow evokes the feeling of heat. After a moment, Dr. A suggests I write my experience into a story, inclining his head in his gentle and ever-so-patronizing way and adding,
"It might help."
"Help who?" I want to ask. "You or me? Because I think I'm beyond help, and I think you think so too, so I don't think that me writing down what I've already told you will help either of us."
I'm not in the mood to trade barbs, so I nod and say that I'd try my best. For that, he favors me with an extra-wide smile, like I was a fifth-grader presenting him with a perfect score on a vocabulary test instead of a twenty-one year old guy making a half-assed commitment.
"Good," he says, still beaming. "Good. Are you off to hunt for rocks now?"
With relief, I see that it's already four-fifty. There's a difference between rocks and minerals, of course, that Dr. A has neglected to remember.
"Minerals," I say, rising to leave.
---
A light drizzle shades the street and pricks my face with cold. It's too early for the Seattle U students to come scuttling to the bars, and with the gloomy weather, the streets are mostly deserted.
Four blocks of brisk walking brings me to Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe. The storefront is full of the usual kitschy tourist stuff: models of the Seattle Space needle in your choice of wood, plastic, or metal; bright vistas of the bay stamped on postcards; t-shirts bearing dumb Seattleite slogans. I step in and nod hello to Sylvia, the resident mummy, her leathery face frozen in an expression of ghoulish surprise. She straddles a skull of an Indian chief (or so the bright placard proclaimed). They've got a new shelf of amethyst geodes; I stroll over to inspect.
"I heard they were getting some real weird shit this week." I jump at the voice at my shoulder, but it's only Benny, lounging against a shelf of guidebooks.
"Hey Benny," I say.
"S’up Alex," he says, and shakes his shaggy brown hair out of his eyes. "You hear about it? Carved ox bone rings from China, or something."
"I didn't think you were into that stuff. Are you proposing to Amber sometime soon?" I had meant it as a joke, but Benny looks down at the floor and shrugs.
"Maybe, once she graduates. We're kind of fighting." He smirks. "Amber loves this witchy shit. If I tell her that there's an ancient curse on the ring, she'll say 'yes' just to get her hands on it."
"Where are they?"
"Not on display yet, but... wanna check?" Benny gestures with his head towards the door at the back of the store, a motion which causes his hair to fall back in front of his face.
I glance to the counter. It's empty; not unusual given the time of day.
"Yeah, okay," I say, not wanting to risk getting caught but wanting to chicken out even less. "Let's take a peek."
The storeroom door opens silently, and a sliver of pale light spills past us into the dark room. The acrid smell of formaldehyde burns my throat and stings my eyes. For a second, I can't make out anything other than the indistinct shape of boxes.
"They've certainly got something back here." Benny slips past me through the door and sweeps the beam of his cell phone over the storeroom. Shadows bloom and race across the walls. I glimpse cobwebs, filing cabinets, and glass jars with occupants rendered ghostly by Benny's light.
"Oh sick, check this out," Benny lifts up one of the jars. A dead gecko spins silently beneath the cloudly glass.
"They'll probably pass it off as a dinosaur," I say. Benny snickers and advances deeper towards the back of the room, where a dark mound, a little shorter than him, rests against the wall. I squint as Benny's light gets closer, and with a jolt, I realize what I mistook for an object was actually a ragged archway where the brickwork had crumbled away.
"Oh ho! Looks like we've got a secret passage on our hands." Benny says and bends down to peer into the gloom. Some sort of a tunnel extends from the back of the room. The light of Benny's phone glints down its wet-slick rock walls. There's no comforting end to that tunnel; nothing to limit how long or deep it is, and now I'm hoping that someone catches us, drags us back into the light and scolds us to stay away from where we don't belong.
I glance over my shoulder, back into the brightly lit shop. It's empty. I can't hear any noise from the street, and I get the creeping feeling that it's still, too still, like I'm staring at a flat photograph of the store. If I look away, then I'll be trapped in the dark room full of dead things.
"Benny, come on," I hiss, risking a glance back into the storeroom, hoping he'll turn away from that awful hole.
Benny ducks in, disappearing from the chest up, and the light of his phone fades to a glow.
His voice echoes from inside. "Come on my guy, this is the real deal!" His footfalls echo, and then fade. I stand stock-still in complete silence. A wave of frigid air washes over me, far colder than the rainy day outside, and I shiver in my sweater.
"Benny," I hiss again, louder, my heart thumping in my chest. No answer. The hole is a pool of spreading ink against the wall, and I turn and dash out of the room, not even bothering to shut the door shut behind me. Four bounds and I break free into the air, almost colliding with a gaggle of teenage boys. The biggest glares at me and mutters something, but I grin like an idiot at the open sky above me and the bright, living things moving around me. It's only then that I let out the breath I didn't realize I had been holding.
---
Seven hours later and I'm here, staring at a blank page, listening to the wind rattle the shutters, and wondering when I can go for my next smoke. Wondering if Benny found anything more than a back alley of leaky pipes, and why he isn't answering his texts. It's only two AM, far too early to sleep and I have nothing better to do, so yeah, I guess this is Dr. A's victory. I'll write out my nightmares like they're a damn story.
I'll start with the dreams. Or rather, the dream -- the same dream that continues night after night like a perverse omnibus of _Journey to the Center of the Earth_.
In my dream, I'm walking deep underground. The air is stagnant and cold. My bare feet slap on the wet stone and my breath puffs out in front of me in clouds. It's dark, but I can just make out the pale, shelled things suckling the thin broth that drips down stalactites. As I take a step, something by my foot slips soundlessly into one of the black pools that pock the stone. I shudder and continue down.
The nights blur together. Sulfurous springs spit and churn, grottos of geodes glimmer in the gloom, and great caverns of enormous fungi nod in the still air. When I turn my head, I catch glimpses of faces I knew, or dreamed of, in the flecked gneiss. A crevice gurgles as something pulpy shifts in a subterranean waterway. Soft moss beneath my feet, then water-worn stone. The tunnel widens into a chamber, and my footsteps echo in the empty space. A rush of cold air stings my skin, as if the earth itself is letting out a deep breath --
And I awake, shivering, slumped at my desk, to the light of the moon shining on my open notebook.
---
I wake up the next morning feeling like shit. But that's nothing new.
Sometimes I think that I'm miserable because of the cigarettes, or maybe I'm miserable for the same reason that I smoke. Because of the jet-black thing wrapped around my amygdala that I'm paying eighty dollars an hour for Dr. A to coax out with his degree from Yale and his gentle condescension. One day, it'll wind its way out of my mouth and quick as a mongoose, Dr. A will pin it to a page in the DSM with a stroke of his blue BIC. Or I'm wasting my money and I just haven't accepted that life is a one long toothache, start to finish, till you have no teeth left.
I sit on the side of my bed and think of the hole in the wall and Benny's disappearance and my dream last night. I think of the bills I have to pay and all the promises I've made to Dr. A.
In the end, I swallow my angst and wash it down with a bowl of Cheerios. As much as I hate my job, it's a comfortable sort of hate, and the sterile lighting of the grocery store leaves little room for shadows.
---
I stand in front of Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe. I don't remember getting there. I had shuffled out of work, head down, my mind running in circles around Dr. A and Benny and my dreams, and my feet had led me here.
Despite the weight that the store had placed on my mind over the last day, now, standing on the sidewalk, there's nothing sinister about the place -- unless you're a tourist in danger of buying overpriced knickknacks. I guess I had been expecting it to be half swallowed in a sinkhole by now. There was a simple, obvious explanation: hole was just a hole, nothing more. Mortar crumbles, bricks fall, and the cheap little curiosity shop doesn't care to fix it.
What was it that Dr. A said? "Fears can't survive daylight." It's not exactly bright outside, but the weather is about as un-bleak as Seattle gets in the wintertime, so I'll have to make do.
I walk back to the end of the street and peer around the back of the line of buildings. A long, narrow alleyway stretches ahead of me, brickwork walls peeking through the peeling whitewash. A few wayward plastic bags shuffle around the aluminum cans littering the cracked cement. The natural habitat of the hole in the wall.
From behind, there's nothing to demarcate the row of shops, only a line of dark windows and unmarked doors set at odd intervals in the flaking walls. I send a Busch can skittering in front of me. If my fears live here, they have bad taste in beer. Putting them out of their misery would be a mercy.
Another step, and someone calls to me. It's Benny's voice -- but it's diffuse, as though it's coming from a distance, his words indistinct.
"Benny?" I say, alone in that barren alley, unsure whether to feel afraid or absurd. In the minutes it's taken me to walk this far, the sun has withdrawn behind the walls. Walls that loom over me like a forest at night.
Benny chatters on. He's snickering about something, the way he does when I've landed a sarcastic quip. Distorted, it sounds like a pig snuffling around my feet. As I take another step, I realize that the sound is coming from beneath me, from the metal storm drain a few feet away, half buried in a mound of decaying maple leaves. My throat goes dry.
I lunge forward and scatter the leaves with a violent kick. Cold leaks from between the metal slats, and the rotten egg smell of sulfur engulfs me. Something soft and pale squirms away from my sneaker and disappears past the grate. Thumbing on my phone light, I kneel on the concrete and peer.
Down.
Down past the tangled braid of pipes, past the rotting concrete with splintered bones of jutting rebar, past the varicose veins of ancient cedars.
I see a vast cavern. From below, Benny calls my name.
---
Dr. A holds up a hand.
"Let's take a deep breath together, okay?" His sharp shoulders rise and fall in pantomime. "Do you remember when we discussed unhelpful storytelling? What story is your nightmare telling you?"
I look away from Dr. A, from the half-smile that invited confidence and the poised BIC, and out the window to the concrete plaza outside. It's uncharacteristically sunny and the stark shadows of the cedars cut ragged furrows on the pavement. I wonder if there's any value, therapeutic or otherwise, in insisting that what I saw wasn't a nightmare. In another couple of seconds, he'll ask me another question, a carefully calibrated probe designed to guide my mind back into the light. Away from what I saw.
So I tell him, as matter-of-factly as I can manage, that I wasn't dreaming. I tell him about the cavern of crystals beneath the sewer grate, twinkling like stars in my phone light, with a big black pool of water in the center. I tell him about the hole in the wall of the store, and Benny's disappearance down the dripping stone passageway. And I say, swallowing the quaver in my voice, that if he didn't believe me, that we could walk down to Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe right now and settle things.
"Tell me about your job search," he says, crossing his legs and looking down at his notes. "Last time, you told me that you enjoyed your geology degree. Have you tried writing to any of your old professors? Maybe you could work in a lab."
"No." I stare him directly in the eye. "I don't want to talk about my job. I don't want to talk about my love life or my smoking or my diet, either."
Dr. A's smile doesn't shift, and his pen goes tap-tap-tap. His eyes flicker from me, to the clock, and then down to his notepad.
"It'll be nice to get some fresh air once in a while, won't it?" he says.
---
I stand in the corner, where the taxidermied beetles meet the 100% Authentic Indian Tiger Skin Rug, and watch Dr. A make our case to the owner of Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe. Denuded of the authority of his leather chaise and framed diplomas, Dr. A looked like nothing so much as a kindly accountant inquiring if, perhaps, they stocked an obscure brand of ink for his collection of fountain pens. The owner, a big, bluff bear of a man in flannel, nods along and drags a rag over the counter with one of his hairy paws. He smiles amiably at Dr. A's precise tones and shoots me a wink.
Evidently, whatever story Dr. A had spun was good enough.
"Well Alex, let's take a good look at this hole in the wall." For the amusement in his voice, I give him the finger behind my back. Dr. A waits for me to catch up before moving from the counter. "Even after twenty-two years in the city, I'm still surprised by places like this. I'll have to come back on my own. I always feel lucky to learn from my clients." We turn the corner on a showcase of ammonite fossils and come face to face with the unassuming door to the storeroom.
What happens if the tunnel is there? Moreover, what happens if it's not? My pulse starts pounding in my ears, heart going a mile a minute. Dr. A must have noticed my expression because he says something in his cool, concerned voice, but I brush past him and into the room.
The chemical smell of preserved things hits me as soon as I crack the door. Without Benny's light, it's dark, too dark to see beyond the foot of dusty concrete in front of me, and I squint towards murk at the far end. The shadows at the back of the room churn like whirlpool draining into a shaft. My doubts from a minute ago have vanished, and I feel in the pit of my stomach a terrible certainty. I had imagined nothing.
"There we go," Dr. A says from behind. There's a click. The fluorescent tubes on the ceiling flicker to life.
The cramped space is a miniature labyrinth of filing cabinets and cardboard boxes, like a stockroom's version of a hay maze. Above, the shelves lining the room are cluttered with the oddities that are the shop's truck: small preserved animals, rocks and minerals, snow globes, a Monarch butterfly pinned to a cork. And in the back, where the mossy brick and mortar had fallen away, the hole drools darkness from its gap-toothed mouth.
"This is quite a collection. I can see why this place piqued your friend's interest. The sense of mystery... it's like you could find anything here." Dust rises and eddies around Dr. A's feet as he takes careful, heron-like strides across the room until he stands by the break in the bricks. Envy grips me at his nonchalance, the bitterness of the shackled for the free.
"This is it? I'm going to take a step inside, then come out. You'll see that I'm alright," he says.
With a fluid motion, Dr. A ducks in, then sticks his head out. The pale light makes his face cadaverous, a living relative of the mummy outside. "Look at me. Nothing has changed. Breathe, Alex. See? Even in here, I can still annoy you with your breathing exercises. Once you feel comfortable, I want you to come over and join me. I'll wait for you."
I stare past Dr. A, through the fading light, and into the thousands of miles of subterranean tunnels, the coiled entrails of the Earth. I see caverns grow, limestone dissolving slowly, patiently, blindly until one day a mouth fistulizes in a forgotten corner of civilization. The anastomosis of the sunlit above and lightless below. Was there peace away from the harsh scrutiny of the sun? I think of Benny, gone underground, matrimonial worries swallowed whole.
"Dr. A, do moths dream of the moon?"
"Come on, Alex. It's cold in here." Dr. A speaks with the voice of the underground. A chill breeze slips past my T-shirt and trails its fingers over my body. "You'll feel better once you see there's nothing to be afraid of." He calls my name again, tells me to come, and Benny calls me, too.
I am stepping beside the break in the bricks. Past Dr. A's cast off clothes. Pants hanging from a stalagmite. No need anymore. His milkpale form slips from view down a fork in the tunnel.
Water drips into a pool ahead of me. A ray of light shimmers on the spreading ripples before the surface stills. Then, it's perfectly dark.
And I continue down.
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