The Underworld
Reading, the phone trembles where it was set aside, as if something has frightened it. You pick it up the way a parent abruptly picks up a crying child and ask it with your face what’s the matter. A text from a friend confirming that that time will work for them, an email from Old Navy, an airstrike on a school turned shelter. The phone makes them equal because the notification is the same. They are nowhere near equal, of course, but seem to be. Now you are holding the phone in your hand. You know it’s yours because no other face will open it. Your face! A little older than it was yesterday, much older than it was a year ago, but it still works, like an old key with bad teeth. Maybe not all has been lost. Maybe something essential remains. The novel you were reading has grown used to being set aside like this. It lies face-down, splayed open, trusting that you’ll return to it soon, when you will struggle to find where you left off, rereading a passage that you’ll realize you read already, but seem to only vaguely remember. The novel has learned to be patient, and has even learned to take pleasure in the fact that you so often reread a paragraph, sometimes an entire scene. But for now, you have been captivated by your friend’s message, the one trying yet again to get off his meds; by the email from Old Navy advertising back-to-school fashion, a beautiful mixed-race family laughing amidst leaves; the story about the school turned shelter that the weapons your tax dollars paid for just obliterated. You lie back under your phone’s anti-moonlight, but really, without your quite realizing it, you’ve descended to the underworld, the tunnel system where you increasingly spend more and more of the finite savings that is your life. As far as you can tell, this underground maze is infinite. Part of the reason for its infinitude is the fact that it is always changing. Therefore, even if there are specific entrances to this world, akin to caves, and even if, as a whole, it has a location one can point to, saying that it is here and not there, the fact that it is always changing means you can explore it forever but never discover it. This isn’t to say you can’t grasp hold of things down there. Jewel-like links glow in niches — to touch them is to be transported to a different part of the maze. You don’t need me to tell you that this maze is nothing like the labyrinth at Knossos, with its packed dirt floor and monotonous walls and dark dead ends where it smells like something died. This maze changes depending on where you are in it and takes on the qualities of what is to be found there. This is why you never grow bored of it. Meanwhile, above you, the old world carries on, the world your grandparents knew, the world we used to mean when we spoke of the world. There, still, the grasses are dusty with dust tires have raised, green-eyed girls are being laid gently in their beds after their older sisters’ birthday parties, the lives of animals who’ve had to adjust to the world that has seethed up amidst them live and die much as they always have. Somewhere up there is the book you’ve abandoned, a kind of maze in and of itself, though one that no longer holds your interest the way this maze does. In the maze of the book you encounter characters. Down here, you encounter real people, by which I mean each has a social security number. But they seem unreal, flickering as they pass you. They cannot fully inhabit these bodies — nor can you yours — or else the part of them that remains above ground could be in danger. And so the realest part of them remains up there, like sentries responsible for guarding the sleeping king. The body above ground is your original body, the body your mother gave birth to, lying now on the couch, your contacts lifting up off your eyeballs as they dry out and shrink. This new maze requires you to so often be bifurcated, not unlike your kind has always been at night when the heavier part of you volunteers to remain there so the lighter part can go off dreaming. Those who have constructed this new maze have made it so that you can dream all day without sleeping, with your eyes wide open. You can go where you want, when you want, though deep down you know that some invisible force is guiding you, making you take that way instead of this way. Often — increasingly often, it seems to you — you come to a wall. The wall is transparent so you can see what lies on the other side of it. What lies on the other side of it is always preferable to what you see around you, but you have to pay a toll to walk through the wall. Some walls you’ve apparently paid in advance to walk through because, upon approaching them, they melt away. This gives you a feeling of power and ease, and you step into the world beyond the wall in confidence, as if you belong there, when really it’s an alien place you feel like leaving almost immediately upon entering it. But, lucky you, there is always a new way to go, including, if you wish, back to the world above you. It is the easiest thing you can imagine, returning to the world above. There is no minotaur down here, keeping you trapped against your will, nor is there any need to unwind a ball of string behind you to find your way back. All it takes for you to return to the world above is to do something as simple as what Dorothy had to do — knock her ruby shoes together three times. Actually, it’s even simpler than that. All you have to do is look up. The problem is, as the years go on, the eyes they gave you for free so you can see down here seem to be growing heavier and heavier, to where it is becoming harder and harder to lift them.
I really enjoyed this. The quotidian details stud the placid surface of sci fi descent, lifting the corners of my mouth. I leak into happiness