I sat in one of the backseats in Mychal’s minivan, and as he drove south on Michigan Road, Daisy started playing one of our favorite songs, “You’re the One.” Mychal was laughing as Daisy and I screamed the lyrics to each other. She sang lead, and I belted out the background voice that just repeated, “You’re everything everything everything,” and I felt like I was. You’re both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You’re the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You’re the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody’s something, but you are also your you.
As Daisy switched the song to a romantic ballad that she and Mychal were singing, I started thinking about turtles all the way down. I was thinking that maybe the old lady and the scientist were both right. Like, the world is billions of years old, and life is a product of nucleotide mutation and everything. But the world is also the stories we tell about it.
—
Mychal turned off Michigan at Tenth Street, and we drove for a while until we reached a pool supply store with a flickering backlit sign saying ROSENTHAL POOLS. The parking lot was already half full. Daisy stopped the music as Mychal pulled into a spot. We got out and found ourselves surrounded by a weird mix of twenty-something hipsters and middle-aged couples. Everyone but us seemed to know one another, and the three of us stood next to Mychal’s car for a long time in silence, just watching the scene, until a middle-aged woman in an all-black outfit walked over and said, “Are you here for the event?”
“I’m, um, Mychal Turner,” Mychal said. “I have a, um, a picture in the show.”
“Prisoner 101?”
“Yeah. That’s me.”
“I’m Frances Oliver. I think Prisoner 101 is one of the strongest pieces in the gallery. And I’m the curator, so I should know. Come, come, let’s head on down together. I would be fascinated to learn more about your process.”
Frances and Mychal began walking across the parking lot, but every few seconds Frances would pause and say, “Oh, I must introduce you to . . .” and we’d stop for a while to meet an artist or a collector or a “funding partner.” Slowly, he was swallowed by all the people who loved Prisoner 101 and wanted to talk with him about it, and after we stood behind him for a while, Daisy finally grabbed him by the hand and said, “We’re gonna head down to the show. Enjoy this. I’m so proud of you.”
“I can come with,” he said, turning away from a gaggle of art students from Herron, the art college in town.
“No, have fun. You gotta meet all these people, so they’ll buy your pictures.” He smiled, kissed her, and returned to his crowd of fans.
When Daisy and I reached the edge of the parking lot, we saw through the trees a flashlight waving back and forth in the air, so we wound our way down a little hill toward the light until the brush opened up into a wide concrete basin. A tiny stream of water—I could easily step over it—bubbled along its bottom. We walked toward the bearded man waving the flashlight, who introduced himself as Kip and handed us hard hats with lanterns and a flashlight. “Follow the tunnel in for two hundred yards, then take your first left, and you’ll be in the gallery.”
The light from my helmet followed the creek downstream. In the distance, I could see the start of the tunnel, a light-sucking square cut into a hillside. There was an overturned shopping cart just outside the start of the culvert, trapped against a moss-covered boulder. As we walked toward the tunnel’s entrance, I looked up at the black silhouettes of leafless maple trees splitting up the sky.
The creek ran along the left side of the Pogue’s Run tunnel; we walked on a slightly elevated concrete sidewalk to the right of the creek. The smell enveloped us immediately—sewage and the sickly sweet smell of rot. I thought my nose would get used to it, but it never did.
A few steps in, we began to hear rodents scurrying along the creek bed. We could hear voices, too—echoey, unintelligible conversations that seemed to be coming from all sides of us. Our headlamps lit up the graffiti that lined the walls—spray-painted tags in bubble letters, but also stenciled images and messages. Daisy’s light lingered on one image featuring a portly rat drinking a bottle of wine with the caption, THE RAT KING KNOWS YOUR SECRETS. Another message, scrawled in what looked like white house paint, read, IT’S NOT HOW YOU DIE. IT’S WHO YOU DIE.
“This is a little creepy,” Daisy whispered.
“Why are you whispering?”
“Scared,” she whispered. “Has it been two hundred yards yet?”
“Dunno,” I said. “But I hear people up there.” I turned around and shone my light back toward the tunnel’s entrance, and a couple of middle-aged men behind us waved. “See, it’s fine.”
The creek wasn’t really a body of water anymore so much as a slow-moving puddle; I watched a rat scamper across it without ever getting its nose wet. “That was a rat,” Daisy said, her voice clenched.
“It lives here,” I said. “We’re the invaders.” We kept walking. The only light in the world seemed to be the yellow beams of headlamps and flashlights—it was almost like everyone down there had become beams of light, bouncing along the tunnel in little groups.
—
Ahead of us, I saw headlamps turning to the left, into a square side tunnel, about eight feet high. We jumped over the trickling creek, past a sign that read, A PICKETT ENGINEERING PROJECT, and into the concrete side tunnel.
You could only see the artwork by the light of headlamps and flashlights, so the paintings and photographs lining the walls seemed to come in and out of focus. To see all of Mychal’s picture, you had to stand against the opposite wall of the tunnel. It really was an amazing artwork—Prisoner 101 looked as real as anyone, but he was made from pieces of the one hundred mugshots Mychal had found of men convicted of murder and then exonerated. Even up close, I couldn’t tell that Prisoner 101 wasn’t real.
The rest of the art was cool, too—big abstract paintings of hard-edged geometric shapes, an assemblage of old wooden chairs precariously stacked to the ceiling, a huge photograph of a kid jumping on a trampoline alone in a vast harvested cornfield—but Mychal’s was my favorite, and not just because I knew him.
After a while, we heard a clamor of voices approach, and the gallery became crowded. Someone had set up a stereo, and music began reverberating through the tunnel. Plastic cups were passed around, and then bottles of wine, and the place got louder and louder, and even though it was freezing down there, I started to feel sweaty, so I asked Daisy if she wanted to go for a walk.
“A walk?”
“Yeah, just, I don’t know, down the tunnel or something.”
“You want to go for a walk down the tunnel.”
“Yeah. I mean, we don’t have to.”
She pointed into the darkness beyond the reach of our headlamps. “You’re proposing that we just walk into that void.”
“Not for like a mile or anything. Just to see what there is to see.”
Daisy sighed. “Yeah, okay. Let’s go for a walk.”
—
It only took a minute for the air to feel crisper. The tunnel ahead of us was pitch-black, and it curved in a long, slow arc away from the party until we couldn’t see the light from it anymore. We could still hear the music and the people talking over it, but it felt distant, like a party you drive past.
“I don’t understand how you can be so inhumanly calm down here, fifteen feet below downtown Indianapolis, ankle deep in rat shit, but you have a panic attack when you think your finger is infected.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “This just isn’t scary.”
“It objectively is,” she said.
I reached up and clicked off my headlamp. “Turn off your light,” I said.
“Hell, no.”
“Turn it off. Nothing bad will happen.” She clicked off her light, and the world went dark. I felt my eyes trying to adjust, but there was no light to adjust to. “Now you can’t see the walls, right? Can’t see the rats. Spin around a few times and you won’t know which way is in and which way is out. This is scary. Now imagine if we couldn’t talk, if we couldn’t hear each other’s breathing. Imagine if we had no sense of touch, so even if we were standing next to each other, we’d never know it.