“Do you work with Jeremy?” Robert manages.
“Jeremy, that fuck,” the commander says, already walking away. “Doesn’t know his own ass from a prolapsed hole in the ground, pussyfooting between the courts and the mafia, trying to play one off against the other, and meanwhile Indianapolis growing darker for us each day… ”
“Here, take this,” a hand placing a pill in his.
“What is it?”
“It’ll help with the fever.”
Robert is laid out on a cot, shaking, muscles jerking, face contorted. A militiaman is assigned to his bedside. They’ve seen this before: discontinuation — he was on something other than just the tranquilizers they shot him up with at the hospital, and whatever it was, his body has grown dependent. Impossible to tell, without knowing the drug, whether the situation is life-threatening, but the symptoms look familiar to anyone who’s come off certain long-term psychotropics: sweating, nausea, tremor, confusion, nightmares, “brain zaps.” The only thing to be done, with the war going on aboveground, is to let him ride it out.
Beside his bed, a woman that could be Viola, or could be the woman he saw at the storage facility, the almost-Viola. She comes closer, until he can’t quite make out her expression for the shadows across her face. She takes his hand, urges him wordlessly to his feet. They make their way out through the cell and further into the tunnels, past the ranks of training militiamen, who begin to grow larger and stranger the further into the tunnels they go, men clinging onto the walls and ceilings at impossible angles, men with the fur and general facial structures of rodents. Goggles turn into strange eyes, black and unreflective, set deep into the skull. Heads turn to peer at them as they pass, necks rotating a full 180 degrees, the intentions of the dull black eyes impossible to discern. Finally they are alone again in the blackness, and she is leading him to a light, set so far off in the distance that Robert is sure they will never reach it. “That flame has been burning here since these caverns were first explored, by the great-great ancestors of the guinea-piggers. It rises from the depths of the earth itself.” Robert has no idea how long that is, but from the way she says it, he imagines that it’s long indeed. He thinks of who or what was here before the guinea-piggers. He hears an unearthly sound from deeper in the tunnel, somewhere far beyond the fire. It is the sound of voices keening, the combined pitches alternating almost painfully between harmony and disharmony. And then somehow they are upon it, the fire, a snake tongue flicking through the mouth of the earth.
“This is a picture of our child,” Viola or pseudo-Viola says. “And these are pictures of what might have been. Throw them in the fire.”
The flame rises up to meet them. Viola grows more shadowy with each picture they throw in.
“And these are pictures of us,” she says. “Do not look at them. Throw them in the fire.”
“Oh God,” Robert says. He is shaking now. “Everything?”
“We have hurt each other too badly, Robert. We have been judged by the secret courts. We have to go into the fire as well.”
Robert throws one picture after another into the fire. It is hard. He is not throwing away what might have been but what was. Viola helps him. She holds him when he cries, with her hand she brushes the sides of his face, his hair. She insists, though, on feeding them into the fire. When Robert has trouble placing the next photograph into the flame, she guides his hand, gentle, unyielding.
By the end he has done it, he has fed every moment of their past into the fire. He falls back onto the cavern’s uneven floor, her next to him. He is not even sure now of their names.
III
~ ~ ~
Robert watches the riots on television from his parents’ house in Geist, Indiana. Pictures of downtown Indianapolis look like a different place: windows smashed in, cars overturned, flames licking out from the faces of storefronts and businesses. Most of the city has been shut down, for three days. Now, though, on the news, they are announcing that the last of the rioters are being hunted down and arrested. Fire crews and police work around the clock to retain stability. Somehow, in the suburbs, things are quiet. Robert’s mind is a complete and absolute blank. He imagines, that were he to peel his skin back, he would find nothing underneath.
~ ~ ~
He visits his grandmother in the nursing home, and she starts screaming as soon as she sees him. A pit, a pit, he thinks.
~ ~ ~
Viola calls Robert to tell him that she is safe, that she is staying with some friends in the suburbs. “I’m glad to hear that,” Robert says.
“Robert, where are you?” she asks.
“I’m safe,” Robert says.
“I would think you would want to be together at a time like this,” Robert’s mother says.
“We’re… separated,” Robert says, searching for the word.
Viola calls Robert and when he won’t say anything, she listens to his breath over the line. Robert goes to sleep each night in his childhood bed, feeling four times too large for his room.
~ ~ ~
Then one night, sometime after the last of the riots, there’s a tapping at his window. It’s Viola, standing on one of the lawn chairs from the backyard. She makes a motion for him to pull the window up. Robert stares at her. She slumps, her forehead against the glass, looking more tired than Robert can ever remember her looking. He pulls up the window.
“You have lines around your eyes,” Robert says. “I don’t really remember seeing them before.”
“Thanks,” she says.
“No, I like them,” he says.
“Are you going to come home?”
“Why didn’t you answer your phone?”
“Oh God, Robert,” Viola says. “If I had had any idea where you were — It must have been horrible—”
“I don’t care what you were doing. I could live with that. But just — why didn’t you answer?”
Viola thinks. She wants to answer this correctly. Not as in give the right answer, the one that Robert wants to hear, but to answer him as honestly as she is able. She says, “It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. It was — I didn’t answer your first call, and I should have. Only it didn’t seem like such a big deal, not to answer. And then it didn’t seem to matter if I put it off, calling you back, at least for a little while. When I got the next call from you, I thought, I shouldn’t answer this, I should call him back first. That is, I thought it would be better if I called you. But I was embarrassed about calling you, because you had just called me twice. Only slightly, but enough to cause me to put off calling you again. Then… I don’t know. It added up. It became harder and harder to call. Putting it off made so little difference — that is, each decision to put it off seemed to make comparatively little difference in the overall situation. And the idea of finally calling you began to feel momentous. I couldn’t even listen to your messages. I was afraid of what you would say.