Transient Debris

1.

The first time Mara climbed down into the tunnel, she vomited before she'd gone forty feet.

It was the smell that did it — not just sewage, but something older underneath, wet concrete and rot and the mineral stink of water that never sees light. She stood bent over in the dark with her hands on her knees, no phone, no flashlight, listening to her own breathing come back at her off the walls.

But it was a straight shot. The storm line ran under the boulevard from the parking structure behind her office all the way to the drainage ditch at the end of her street. She'd seen it on a county utility map a maintenance man left open on his cart, a fat blue vein drawn right through the middle of everything. A mile and a quarter underground, versus a mile and a quarter through the neighborhood where, eight days earlier, a man had walked beside her for three blocks breathing through his mouth before he wrenched the phone out of her hand hard enough to sprain two fingers. The officer taking her statement spelled her name wrong twice and didn't fix it either time.

So she pushed through. She counted her steps. She kept one hand on the curved wall, feeling the slime give under her fingertips, and when she finally saw the pale coin of evening at the far end she climbed out into the ditch behind the Hendersons' fence and stood in the weeds shaking, and told herself never again.

She went back the next day.

2.

It got easier. She hadn't wanted it to.

By the second week she'd stopped gagging. By the third she'd stopped counting steps. The smell didn't retreat so much as move into her — one Tuesday she caught it rising off her own coat sleeve in the elevator at work and felt, before anything else, a small dumb flush of comfort. Her own pillow smelled like that. She stood there between two coworkers and thought, I should be horrified — thought it flatly, reading it off a card. The horror didn't come. She waited for it. It didn't come.

The tunnel asked nothing of her. That was what she was learning, out in the long blind middle where the light from either end gave up. Above ground everything asked. The lawyer's office asked for signatures dissolving eleven years into a stack of paper with little arrow stickers showing her where to bleed. The oncologist asked her to think about her goals of care, which she'd learned meant how would you like to die, asked with a soft pen and a soft voice in a room with a watercolor of a lighthouse. Her sister asked, in voicemails Mara no longer had a phone to receive, whether she was doing okay — Dana's voice already pre-grieving, already practicing.

Down here nothing looked at her with careful hospital eyes. Down here her body was just a warmth moving through the dark, and warmth doesn't have a prognosis.

There was a junction chamber near the midpoint where a smaller pipe came in from the north, and above the waterline a concrete ledge, dry and smooth, long as a church pew. She started stopping there. Five minutes. Then not five minutes. She'd sit with her back against the wall and let the dark press on her open eyes. There's a weight to it, she discovered, real dark, the kind with no leak in it anywhere; it sat on her eyeballs like a thumb. The water ran its long syllable somewhere below her, and her divorce did not exist, and her scans did not exist, and nothing in the world knew where she was.

That last part she kept turning over. Nothing knew where she was. Forty feet up, people were locking their cars twice and walking fast with their keys laced through their fingers, and she was underneath all of it, unfindable, safe in the one place the whole city agreed no person would ever be.

She realized one night she'd been on the ledge for three hours and couldn't recall a single thought from any of them. It was the best she'd felt in two years.

She pressed on that feeling like a lump, waiting for it to hurt. It didn't.

3.

She stopped bringing the lantern in April.

Not as a decision. She just noticed one evening that it was still in her tote, unlit, and that she'd walked the last half mile by the wall alone. She knew the tunnel by hand now — the seam at four hundred steps, the root that had forced its way through a joint and hung down like a wrist, the patch where the concrete went suddenly cold, some pipe behind it, something the county had buried and forgot. She could hear the junction before she reached it, the acoustics going tall. Once, to test herself, she stopped dead in the middle stretch, turned in a slow circle three times, then pointed — home — and walked, and she was right. She stood in the black grinning about it. Thirty-five years old, dying, grinning alone in a storm drain, and if you'd told her to be ashamed she'd have asked, and meant it: of what? Name one thing up there I should trade this for.

Dinner came down with her. Cold noodles from the corner store, the kind that came with a packet of chili crisp she'd stopped bothering to open, eaten on the ledge in a dark so complete she couldn't have said where her own hand was except that the food kept arriving. At her kitchen table the second chair still sat across from her like an accusation. The chamber had no second anything. The rats had become traffic, soft and administrative; she knew their schedule now, the busy hour after dark, the lull, the late stragglers. One ran across her boot and she said "excuse me" out loud, and laughed, and the laugh went down both pipes for a long time, and a while after it stopped she caught herself listening — not afraid, she noticed that, only listening — in case the tunnel said it back.

Her voice was getting strange from disuse. Days she didn't work, it might not come out at all until evening, and then it came out wrong, furred, an octave low, somebody else's. She talked to the water to keep it running. Told it about the deposition. Told it what the man who took her phone had smelled like. The water took all of it, completely, and asked nothing back, which was more than anyone up there had managed in years.

In May the county came through. She heard them long before she saw them — boots, radio squelch, two flashlight beams swinging down the main line like something looking for her specifically — and what she did next she did without one conscious instruction: she was up and folded into the north pipe with her knees at her chin and her breath shut off before her mind had even finished the word people. She stayed there while the beams slid past, while a man's voice said something about the joint at four hundred steps and another voice laughed, and their light touched the ledge where her sleeping bag would be by June and moved on. It found nothing. She was good at this now. She had gone as still as the tunnel. Twenty minutes after they were gone she was still tucked in the pipe, hugging her shins, and her heart was doing something it hadn't done in so long that it took her a full minute to find the name for it. Joy — it was joy. She had hidden from the only two people to come near her in weeks, hidden like something that lived down there, and something in her had sung, high and thin.

That was the night she understood which side of the flashlight she was on now. She turned it over and found she'd known for a while.

4.

The body kept up its own quiet paperwork. The numbness in her feet had climbed to her knees, which down here was almost a mercy — the cold couldn't get all the way in. She found a gash on her shin one morning, deep, days old, already going shiny at the edges, and could not remember any of it: not the pipe flange that must have done it, not the pain, nothing. It might have been left there by someone else, for all she had of it. At a pharmacy in June she stood on the free scale and watched the number and did the subtraction from her driver's license and made a sound in that fluorescent aisle that turned a stock boy's head, and it was not a sob, and it wasn't until she was back at street level that she admitted it had been a laugh. Her hair came out in the shower now in slow soft ropes. She stopped using the shower. The tunnel didn't mind that either.

Work ended without ending. There was a Thursday, and she left at five, and Friday she simply didn't come up in time, and then it was somehow Tuesday — that was the first weekend the dark ate whole, three days gone into it smooth as water, and she surfaced into daylight so loud and pointed and prying that she stood in the ditch with her hand over her eyes like a woman coming out of a matinee, homesick, facing the wrong direction. After that she stopped surfacing for anything but food, and then for much of anything. Her mail grew in the box like a culture. Somewhere above her, her apartment held its breath: the spoiling milk, the sun crossing the empty bed, the second chair.

She knew what the weakness was. She'd been told, in the soft room with the lighthouse, what the end would look like — the tubes, the schedule, Dana's face doing its work at the foot of a bed. And she had decided, not in words, she never used words for it anymore, the way she'd decided everything since the tunnel: it would not look like anything. It would be dark, and it would smell the way the air already smelled, and the water would keep talking, and nothing down there would ask her a single question, ever, including the last one.

The final time she climbed down, she brought nothing. At the ledge she took her shoes off and lined them up side by side, toes to the wall, the way she'd always set them down inside her own front door.

5.

AIDEN COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE — MISSING PERSON

Mara E. Klings, 35. Last confirmed sighting June 11, Pine Street Market, described by the clerk as "very thin, talking quietly, I thought she was on something." No phone or financial activity after June 9. Family reports subject was recently divorced and being treated for a serious illness. Foul play has not been ruled out.

Anyone with information is asked to contact the Sheriff's Office. Volunteer searchers are directed to vacant structures, greenbelts, and parked vehicles. No search of county storm infrastructure is planned at this time.

6.

PUBLIC WORKS — SERVICE REQUEST #26-8841 (SEPT 3)

July 18th. Odor complaint, storm main under Marsh Blvd, vicinity of north junction. Crew walked line from both ends; noted personal items on mid-line ledge (bedding, footwear), presumed transient debris, not removed. Source of odor not located. Status: RESOLVED — NO ACTION.