They went left. They should have gone right.
Eventually, they spotted light slewing beneath a door at the far end of the tunnel. They were accustomed to the dark, so already, from this distance, they had to blink and squint. It seemed possible, for all their left turns, that they were back where they started, in which case a more circumspect fugitive might have hewn to the wall and crept up on the door for the purpose of surveillance. But no. Anne-Janet was too tired to care. She trotted up to the door and gasped for the pain in her foot.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Vicki said. Anne-Janet pressed on.
The door was more vault than door, and locked from the inside. In fact, there was no handle or knob to let them in, just an intercom and button.
“What’s the big deal?” Anne-Janet said. “It looks like a bank.”
“But it’s not,” Charlotte said. “Could be many things, but not a bank. Let’s go, okay?”
“Why?”
“Because,” Vicki drawled, “if you don’t belong here, bad things happen. You need an appointment for every place in the Sub.” And when Anne-Janet pushed for more, they betrayed a brochure’s worth of info, highlights of the Subterrain: Below the Garfield Suites Hotel, a brothel full of Singapore girls, codified by an airline, fetishized by a nation. In the cellar of the Verdin Bell and Clock Museum, access to the operations center of a Deepnet marketplace for counterfeit money and contraband of the month. There was gambling. Ultimate fighting between inmates sprung from Queensgate jail for this purpose. A sweatshop for the sewing of official Major League baseballs, the work farmed out by Rawlings’s Costa Rica factory, where the oft-suspected juicing of the ball occurred. There were maps for sale online, though you had to know where to look, and the maps were not cheap. There were passwords to be bought. Security clearance. There were in the tunnels only people who belonged, attired according to venue, which is why three women in costume (two whores and an electrician) were able to tour the spread unremarked, the consensus of any observers being that they hailed from or were headed to Flaunt, in which you impersonated who you wanted to be and were applauded for it. The Sub was decades old. It had probably started with an underground speakeasy and proliferated from there.
Anne-Janet’s mouth opened, but only for a second. “Oh, come on,” she said, and when the others did not flinch, she said, “You’re saying that beneath the city of Cincinnati is some kind of second city? That’s insane.”
Vicki shrugged. “It’s not. There’s people doing all kinds of ugly shit in back alleys and basements all over the world.”
“This is just a little more organized,” Charlotte said. “A little more high-class.”
Anne-Janet didn’t have time for this nonsense, and so she pressed the button, which cued on the other side of the vault a wind chime followed by static on the intercom and a voice — May I help you? — which came as a relief, because, while Anne-Janet was playing it cool, it did occur to her that this door might in fact be the chthonic maw of snuff videography. Go in and you never came out.
“Fuck,” Vicki said. “I don’t know the entry script for this place.”
“No shit,” Charlotte said. Like anyone knew the script. The script was valued at ten thousand dollars street, assuming you could get it, which you could not.
Anne-Janet bent in close to the intercom and said, “Hi, can you let us in? We’ve been walking for a while and I need a bathroom.”
Charlotte was now cursing volubly. “My ’plasty is in twenty minutes! Let’s go!”
“You’re not gonna make it,” Vicki said.
Anne-Janet depressed the button again.
“Six months,” Charlotte was saying. “Free because of some new technique. Like I have health insurance. Like insurance was gonna pay, anyhow. Six months.” She slouched to the floor. “I think Thurlow got sick of me because of my labia, okay? It’s one thing to be tossed aside because your man thinks you’re working for the feds, but way worse if he thinks you’re gross. You got off easy.”
Vicki joined her on the floor.
“Hello,” Anne-Janet said. “My friend here is running late — can you just let us in already? Man, oh man, if you only knew who I was.”
“What was I thinking?” Charlotte said. “Why am I even here?” She had her face in her hands. “I’m not a Helix Head. I don’t even care that much if I stay alone. But Lo was just so sweet. Said we’d be like a family. All of us. I don’t know. I’m an idiot.”
Vicki began to rub her back. “You’re not an idiot,” she said. “You’re not.”
“Look,” Anne-Janet said, and she drilled her finger into the button. “I just had the most mortifying experience a person can have with another human being, and I have never felt more self-disgusted in all my life, I might go up in flames for how bad I feel, so please just let me in”—at which point the door began to open with ceremony, inch by inch, so that the light from within came upon them like a benediction.
They sprung to their feet. “Just get a map,” Charlotte said. “If you can. Then we’re out of here.”
There was an anteroom. Carpeting in hues graham cracker and shrimp. A row of plastic chairs bolted to the wall. It resembled a bus depot or processing foyer for the urban sanitarium of last resort. At the desk, behind a glass partition, the intercom lady, in a sports visor and white seersucker tennis dress with red and green piping down the middle and neckline. So perhaps this was a gymnasium. A super-fancy gym.
Charlotte and Vicki huddled against a wall. Outside the purlieus of the Helix House, they had grown shy. Anne-Janet asked for a map. The tennis pro qua receptionist laughed and said, “Just fill out this form and bring it back up to the desk when you’re done.”
“I don’t want a form, I want a map.”
“Most people don’t come through this way. Since you people did, you have to fill out the form. Several, actually.” She closed the glass. It was smudged with handprints (fingers splayed, palms flat) and the imprint of a forehead that together were like a pillory for clients to fit themselves into during a losing encounter with the tennis pro.
Anne-Janet perused the questionnaire. Her first thought: This is not a gym. Her second: Oh, man, this is so not a gym. They wanted to know her age, weight, and emergency contact info; okay. But they also wanted references, a waiver form, and a confidentiality agreement more draconian than your average mortgage contract, plus a brief sexual history (if applicable), an explanation of that history (if applicable), a profile of her sensitive spots and no-no’s (if not submitted in advance), a blood report, and a letter from the client’s referring therapist.
She thrust clipboards at Charlotte and Vicki. Vicki didn’t even look, but Charlotte skimmed it over and, when she was done, seemed even more distressed than before. “We have to get out of here,” she said. “I know what this place is, and we need to go.”
Vicki seemed less convinced. “Yeah, but maybe they can do a ’plasty here, too.”
“Earth to Vicki,” Charlotte said. “The people who come here don’t need vaginoplasty.”
“What do you mean? Some people are born with big lips. Not every busted lip is because you fucked all the boys in Kansas.”
It was slow dawning for Anne-Janet, but then her ears went cherry at the tips. “So let me get this straight, people come here to, ah—”
“Customize their first time, you got it,” Charlotte said.
“Customize?” Anne-Janet said. “Whatever happened to flower petals and satin sheets and a real guy saying he loves you, and not just because he wants to ejaculate on your face?”