By Nathan Jefferson.
I first met M.V. at the anniversary party of a mutual friend in one of the evil suburbs of Northern Virginia seven years ago. I was taking in the slanted rays of a sunset on the patio after a conversation with a man who made his living selling the unthinkable when she stepped outside to do likewise. Our ties to the man who invited us were weak enough that it took no time at all for the one between us to supersede him in importance. In only a few minutes we discovered shared interests in the cluster of red cedars lining the backyard, the writings of David Kilcullen, and the typologies of man that walk the streets of our nation’s capital. We both knew ourselves to be wastrels beneath contempt in a way nobody else in the room could imagine.
Common ground established, we moved on to the past. I talked about nights riding dirt bikes with a group of boys now scattered unwillingly across the northeast; when I rolled up my shirtsleeve to punctuate the recounting with a faded scar her laugh was clear as a bell. She talked about her first job manning the counter at a convenience store in a town that could no longer be found on any map. The story had only just started to gather momentum before we were obliged to join the rest of the gathering for dinner.
When we were finally able to reconvene, the boundary cedars were a shifting mesh in the dark. We continued with conversation of a different flavor; we both took advantage of the other’s ignorance to offer preemptive explanations for problems that would only arise much later. The store was a wreck, she said, a shambling mess doomed by its location on a since-superseded street. The real work of the place for the ten or so employees was figuring out the next steps. Necessity brought forth invention in its most American form. To a one everyone there was a scammer, using the crumbling remains of the store as a frame upon which to hang their schemes. The office computer was used by worldly girls to squeeze money from lonely men who were quickly blocked the moment payments lessened or demands grew. The assistant manager, a former vet, was working on a double-dipping plot that involved him receiving lucrative VA grants for collecting and recycling the pallets packages arrived on. Inventory was only a suggestion by then, and the high schoolers working evenings gorged themselves on powdered donuts and sweet tea.
M.V.’s crush, she said, had higher ambitions. A front row seat to a cousin’s bacchanalian month paid for by a stolen card left an impression that a five-year prison sentence could do nothing to deter. Soon after coming on in what they all knew were the store’s dying days, he too got his hands on a card cracker and spent the days working with M.V. scouting, plotting, laying out a plan. Preliminary essays were only insignificant dry runs; like an experienced fisherman he had his eyes on a singular prize.
One day it walked in the door. A bald man stepped out of a truck the favorite of petrostate autocrats around the globe to replenish his supply of caffeinated drinks and protein bars. It was M.V. who met him at the register, she said, and while he was greeting her with a smile that bordered on lascivious and complimenting her on the waves of curly black hair that bounded out in such fractal volume it was impossible to focus on any individual part, her crush rounded the corner with a gleam in his eyes. When the bald man pulled out a metallic black card and let it tap edgewise on the counter with a weighty clunk, M.V. feigned an issue with the register—eminently believable, considering the state of the place—and handed the card to her crush while continuing to let the bald man see her entertain his interest.
The bald man left; M.V.’s crush quit on the spot the moment his truck left the lot.
Although M.V. could not bring herself to follow him, his attempts at persuading her became one of those moments that occur but a few times in a person’s life where they get nudged down a new path. The trick, her crush said, was that he wouldn’t clone the card once, but a thousand times. A single duplicate got flagged, he’d heard, but the new method was strength in numbers, an uncountable army of duplicates overwhelming any report system.
Shortly after her crush left, the store was shuttered and M.V. went to college. But the idea stuck with her, she said. A single face hidden in multitudes.
The second time I met M.V. was some months later, at a defense tech symposium in D.C. I was languidly circling the perimeter of an antiseptic hall when I came across her doing the same in the opposite direction. We greeted each other with delight and left for lunch together. Over plates of rice and falafel, we once again had a pleasant conversation that carefully circumscribed any topic which would naturally generate probing questions. Little wonder, then, we returned to the past. It was my turn this time; by way of discussing my interests I began talking about the first tunnel that mattered to me.
My high school, I told her, was a colossal Richardsonian Romanesque funded by a gilded-age coal magnate who ordered all extant copies of the building’s blueprints burned upon his passing. Careful surveying later produced reasonably accurate reconstructions for building and fire codes, but rumors persisted throughout the decades of hidden rooms, parallel stairwells, features not on any map of the place. Now and then a student would swear that a closet had led to a passageway previously unknown to them, but no such accounts could ever be substantiated .
The subterranean floor of the high school was home to a number of athletic facilities with low-slung ceilings, performance spaces for the music department, and some ancient antiquated boiler facilities. There was one short tunnel, we all knew, from the boiler room to an adjacent facility through which, in bygone days, coal would be transported for heating. There were rumors of additional tunnels beneath the school and occasionally an especially adventurous group of boys would break the boiler room lock and attempt to journey to the center of the earth, but all that greeted them was a cobwebbed wood-lined pathway some fifty or so yards long.
I do not remember what was the precipitating event, but sometime during my sixteenth year the idea of the tunnel began to consume me. I wanted not only to see it, but to explore it for myself; I grew confident for no reason that it was not just a single pathway but an entrance to a larger system, the boiler room a single node in a descending network beneath the school.
One Saturday, opportunity arrived. I was at school for a track meet and, wandering off alone after my lone event was over, I found my way to the boiler room. It was unlocked, for reasons I assumed had something to do with the weekend and the rapidly arriving winter, so I entered. Inside, the ancient room was round, brown, and warm. A wide, low-ceilinged door on the far side was bolted shut with a padlock that was old and easily pickable. I left the door half-open and went in, using my phone as a beacon.
The tunnel, I told M.V., was lined with stone and pleasantly cool. The ceilings were higher than the door, and there were rusted-out receptacles at regular intervals on the walls that once must have held torches or lanterns. I walked ahead some fifty yards, creeping along with padded feet though there was no chance of disturbing anything or anyone. The tunnel ended at a thick wooden door of equal proportions to that of the entrance. Cool and damp to the touch, it did not give an inch when I put my shoulder against it.
There was nothing else to do. But I was not ready to leave, so I resolved to pace the distance a few times, absentmindedly feeling the warm stone. On my third lap I had the distinct sensation of picking up a far-off sound. It took another lap to find the source: in my backpack, an empty metal water bottle was… not ringing, but issuing some precursor to a ringing, a vibration right at the very edge of subsonic, only for a few strides at the midway point of the tunnel. I stood there silent, eyes closed, phone off, confirming that the sound was more than just the auditory hallucinations of a sensory deprived mind, and suddenly I knew that there was something else beyond the wall that I would never be able to see. But that knowledge was enough. I stood there a moment more, then returned to the boiler room.
Did you ever go back? she asked.
There was no need, I said. I had everything I wanted.
We agreed it was fascinating that two entirely different paths had brought us to the shared problem of obfuscation. Over the course of the day we resolved to stay in touch if at all possible.
When I arrived back home after the conference, I found I had received a request from M.V. to connect via some meaningless professional platform. I accepted it and thought no more of it until a few days later, when a second and third request arrived from two accounts with names and professional headshots seemingly identical to M.V., but with the slightest of changes to professional details. Where the original—I believe—included a job in Newark, the second gave the location simply as New Jersey and the third as “NYC Metro Area.” I rejected both requests. But then, upon visiting the platform a few days later for an unrelated reason, I found that they were now listed among my connections as well.
A few days after that, a text arrived from M.V., alerting me to her recent publication in an industry trade mag we both subscribed to. I complimented her on her willingness, in the piece, to consider alternate viewpoints. Her grateful thanks was followed, within twenty-four hours, by four different numbers sending four different articles identified as useful next steps if I was interested in reading more. I blocked them all.
The following week, the dam began to burst. I checked my work email and saw an inbox full of messages from M.V. speaking to me in a dozen voices, all persuasively familiar. My phone was deluged with texts arriving every few minutes from a range of different numbers. I cut my cellular data and opened the website of the Washington Post, where I was met by an opinion page full of M.V.s espousing every possible angle on the issues of the day. She was both sides of the debate on the sports blogs, the only reviewer on the trendy music sites, and the authoritative voice on the baroque kettlebell forum I hadn’t frequented in years. Yet I did not realize the sheer extent and reach of her work until I shut my laptop and turned on the TV, where I saw her cycling between anchor desks as I flipped through the channels. Very well.
I needed to clear my head. I threw on a wool overcoat and went for a walk along the Potomac, leaving my useless devices behind. It was a beautiful cool day, the leaves in full deciduous bloom, but I had no eyes for that sort of thing. On a whim I stepped into a phone store and examined a display unit; bringing up the news delivered the same supersaturation of M.V. as before. I left straightaway and kept walking along the river. Then, in my peripheral vision, I saw dense curls of dark hair flanking me, moving in step with my pace, but perpendicular and just behind me; I turned and saw M.V. disappear around the corner, clad in a puffy black jacket and jeans. I considered following but resolved to keep moving forward along a trail I’d walked many times before. Once I reached Georgetown, I’d loop around to the north and begin working my way back home to figure out my next move. A half-mile on, however, I saw M.V. again, approaching from the upcoming intersection in a red sweatsuit and sneakers. I was unmistakable and unmissable, but her face showed no sign of recognition as she passed me and kept going. A few blocks further, a third M.V. came from the same direction, this one in a professional blue overcoat and tan loafers. She smiled politely in response to my terse verbal greeting, but did not break stride.
My plans had to change. My overcoat would be ruined, unfortunately, but I saw no point in waiting around. In my pocket I had a small electronic device that resembled a slightly larger, blockier cell phone. I bent down to tie my shoes and put the device on the ground; it would only need ten seconds. A single glance at the amber lines snaking across the black screen gave me the information I sought.
Washington D.C. has more tunnels than any other city in the country. The government, such as it is, is not the buildings along the streets but the network of corridors beneath them where functionaries walk in lockstep with heads close together. And there are tunnels beneath them, and yet more tunnels beneath those, unknown to almost all and inaccessible to most who do. There is another world down there, hundreds of yards beneath the surface. Ground penetrating radar will only help you so much; past a point, the tunnels—my tunnels—become honeycombs, Möbius strips, geometric works of art that no map can help you navigate. There was an entrance in an alley nearby, I knew, so I sped up, passing past two M.V.s chatting loudly with coffees in hand, and turned away from the Potomac.
In the alley, I lifted a dirty grate and stepped into the muck within. The overcoat became disgusting but it did its job. Once through, I forced my way forward, into a tiny opening, then emerged on the other side and began striding down the stone sewers beneath Georgetown. These were the elevated ones; I had to scramble up onto an access shelf and then down two long ladders into a pit before I could even get close to mine. The climb down was not a descent into hell so much as a yield to a transformation; full fathom five under the surface, the earth begins to hum and flow like a living being. When I reached the bottom of the ladder, it was with the same sense of arrival as a submarine arriving, at long last, at the very bottom of the sea.
And still I kept descending. Even lacking light I walked with easy relaxed strides as if the ground would adapt to my feet and not the other way around. I felt myself rising and falling like the waves; I felt through my thin soles the distant evidence of other tunnels and descents yet to come. I scrambled and slid and followed tight concentric circles to a final point: a clearing, six feet by six, with a single folding chair and a table. The walls were earth pounded flat and warm. I took off my overcoat, turned on the battery-powered lamp, and sat down with a sigh.
The folding table held a few books, pencils, scattered papers. I pulled the device out of my pocket and glanced at the blank screen as I placed it among the objects. Not for nothing, I understood at that moment, do they say that mirrors have something monstrous about them. I knew the problem the moment the screen caught my eye in the light. Tilting it up towards me I saw my face, dirty with grime yet comfortable, at ease, while a singular, unmistakable M.V. walked into the room behind me.
One hand brushed the dirt from her hair and the other pressed an imaginary doorbell as she trilled a two-tone ring: ding-dong.
Almost lost you back there, she said.
Despite myself, I had to smile.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nathan Jefferson is the Noir Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. His fiction has previously appeared in the Chicago Review and Five South. Originally from Philadelphia, he currently lives in Los Angeles.
