“Imagine you’re trying to find someone, or even you’re trying to find yourself, but you have no senses, no way to know where the walls are, which way is forward or backward, what is water and what is air. You’re senseless and shapeless—you feel like you can only describe what you are by identifying what you’re not, and you’re floating around in a body with no control. You don’t get to decide who you like or where you live or when you eat or what you fear. You’re just stuck in there, totally alone, in this darkness. That’s scary. This,” I said, and turned on the flashlight. “This is control. This is power. There may be rats and spiders and whatever the hell. But we shine the light on them, not the other way around. We know where the walls are, which way is in and which way is out. This,” I said, turning off my light again, “is what I feel like when I’m scared. This”—I turned the flashlight back on—“is a walk in the fucking park.”
We walked for a while in silence. “It’s that bad?” she asked finally.
“Sometimes,” I said.
“But then your flashlight starts working again,” she said.
“So far.”
—
As we kept walking, through the tunnel, the music behind us growing fainter, Daisy calmed down a bit. “I’m thinking of killing off Ayala,” she said. “Would you take that personally?”
“Nah,” I said. “I was just starting to like her, though.”
“Did you read the most recent one?”
“The one where they go to Ryloth to deliver power converters? I loved the scene where Rey and Ayala are waiting for that dude in a bar, and they’re just talking. I like your action scenes and everything, but the just talking is my favorite. Also, I liked that I got to hook up with a Twi’lek. Or, Ayala did, I guess. Your writing makes me feel like it’s real, like I’m really there.”
“Thanks,” she said. “Now you’re making me think maybe I shouldn’t kill her.”
“I don’t mind if you kill her. Just make her die a hero.”
“Oh, of course. She has to. I was thinking I’d make it some Rogue One–style sacrifice for the common good. If that sounds okay?”
“Works for me,” I told her.
“God, is the smell getting worse?” she asked.
“It’s not getting better,” I acknowledged. It smelled more like rotting garbage and unflushed toilets, and as we passed an offshoot to the tunnel, Daisy said she wanted to turn around, but in the distance ahead of us I could see a pinprick of gray light, and I wanted to see what was at the end.
As we walked, the sounds of the city grew slowly louder and the smell improved because we were close to open air. The gray light grew larger until we reached the edge of the tunnel. It was open and unfinished—the tiny trickle of water that was supposed to be diverted from the White River was instead dripping down into it, two stories below us.
I looked up. It was past ten o’clock, but I’d never seen the city look so blindingly bright. I could see everything: the green moss on the boulders in the river below; the golden frothy bubbles at the base of the waterfall; the trees in the distance bent over the water like the roof of a chapel; the power lines sagging across the river below us; a great silver grain mill absurdly still in the moonlight; neon Speedway and Chase Bank signs in the distance.
Indianapolis is so flat you can never really look down on it; it’s not a town with million-dollar views. But now I had one, in the most unexpected place, the city stretching out below and beyond me, and it took a minute before I remembered that this was nighttime, that this silver-lit landscape is what passed, aboveground, for darkness.
Daisy surprised me by sitting down, her legs dangling over the concrete edge. I sat down on the other side of the trickle of water, and we looked at the same scene together for a long time.
We went out to the meadow that night, talking about college and kissing and religion and art, and I didn’t feel like I was watching a movie of our conversation. I was having it. I could listen to her, and I knew she was listening to me.
“I wonder if they’ll ever finish this thing,” Daisy said at one point.
“I kind of hope not,” I said. “I mean, I’m all for clean water, but I kind of want to be able to come here again in like ten or twenty years or something. Like, instead of going to my high school reunion, I want to be here.” With you, I wanted to say.
“Yeah,” she said. “Keep Pogue’s Run filthy, because the view from the unfinished water treatment tunnel is spectacular. Thanks, Russell Pickett, for your corruption and incompetence.”
“Pogue’s Run,” I mumbled. “Wait, where does Pogue’s Run start? Where is its mouth?”
“The mouth of a river is where it ends, not where it begins. This is the mouth.” I watched her realize it. “Pogue’s Run. Holy shit, Holmesy. We’re in the jogger’s mouth.”
I stood up. I felt for some reason like Pickett might be right behind us, like he might push us off the edge of his tunnel and into the river below. “Now I’m a little freaked out,” I said.
“What are we gonna do?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing. We’re gonna turn around, walk back to the party, hang out with fancy art people, and get home by curfew.” I started walking back toward the distant music. “I’ll tell Davis, so he knows. We let him decide whether to tell Noah. Other than that, we don’t say a word.”
“All right,” she said, hustling to catch up to me. “I mean, is he down here right now?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think it’s for us to know.”
“Right,” she said. “How could he have been down here this whole time, though?” I had a guess, but didn’t say anything. “God, that smell . . .” she said, her voice trailing off as she said it.
—
You’d think solving mysteries would bring you closure, that closing the loop would comfort and quiet your mind. But it never does. The truth always disappoints. As we circulated around the gallery, looking for Mychal, I didn’t feel like I’d found the solid nesting doll or anything. Nothing had been fixed, not really. It was like the zoologist said about science: You never really find answers, just new and deeper questions.
We finally found Mychal leaning against the wall opposite his photograph, talking to two older women. Daisy cut in and took his hand. “I hate to break up this party,” she said, “but this famous artist has a curfew.”
Mychal laughed, and the three of us made our way out of the tunnel, into the silver-bright parking lot, and then into Mychal’s minivan. The moment my door slid shut, he said, “That was the best night of my life thank you for being there oh my God that was just the best thing that’s ever happened to me I feel like I might be an artist, like a proper one. That was so, so amazing. Did you guys have fun?”
“Tell us all about it,” Daisy said, not exactly answering his question.
—
When I got home, Mom was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a mug of tea. “What is that smell?” she asked.
“Sewage, body odor, mold—a mix of things.”
“I’m worried, Aza. I’m worried you’re losing your connection to reality.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I’m just tired.”
“Tonight, you’re gonna stay up and talk to me.”
“About what?”
“About where you were, what you were doing, who you were doing it with. About your life.”
So I told her. I told her that Daisy and Mychal and I had attended a one-night art show beneath downtown, and that Daisy and I had walked to the end of Pickett’s unfinished tunnel, and I told her about going out to the meadow, and I told her about the jogger’s mouth, about thinking Pickett was maybe down there, about the stench.
“You’re going to tell Davis?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“But not the police?”
“No,” I said. “If I tell the police, and he is dead down there, Davis and Noah’s house won’t even be theirs anymore. It’ll be owned by a tuatara.”