TRAPPED IN A CAVE by Matt Greene
In one sense, Tom and Jake have recently been in many places, places with Duwamish names and then, later, names like species of trout. They have retreated at the sight of a wall of snow twenty feet high, where the plowed road ended in the Flathead Range. They have nearly killed deer and have killed a flock of songbirds that, as if by miracle, left no mark on the windshield of Tom’s Camry. They have slept on couches whose owners Jake has compensated with tabs of acid, which, he explained, were given to him for free by his landlord’s “distributor.” Just this morning, en route to a cave in South Dakota, they have felt their hearts flutter at the base of Devil’s Tower with what, they are both certain, was extrasensory communication with Rock Beings.
But in another sense, they have been right there, seated in a car, just like they are now, for days on end. Tom is sitting here, in the driver’s seat, and Jake is over there, in the passenger’s. Or Jake is sitting in the driver’s seat, Tom in the passenger. Tom is here. Jake is there. Jake is here. Tom is there. It is daytime. It is night. There is a road with yellow lines that indicate merely a contract with oncoming traffic. They are here and oncoming traffic is there. There is no guarantee against a sudden swerve, impact. They sit in their seats hurtling rapidly through space, feeling time warp and elongate.
Tom and Jake are driving across the country with half of Tom’s belongings. The other half of Tom’s belongings are in Central Pennsylvania, where his partner has started a tenure-track position in Film Studies at a small liberal arts college. Her Accord is there and so is she. Together, Tom and Kristen drove the Accord east from Seattle through a blur of drive-thrus, podcasts, and motel beds for a stretch of four yawning days. In Pennsylvania, finally, they departed the interstate for a country road that wound the contours of a mountain range where the GPS lost signal. They came to a place where they had to choose left or right. They went left, with no way of knowing which choice, if either, was correct. The speed limit shrunk through a bend behind which appeared an Amish woman dressed in black driving a black buggy drawn by two black horses. When Tom tells people this story, he doesn’t feel they ought to believe it, and yet.
Jake works in Antarctica driving heavy machinery around for the US government. This is a seasonal gig. During Northern Hemisphere summers, the Antarctic winter, Jake is mostly unbound, but for the time being he has placed himself immediately at Tom’s right, in the passenger seat, barely fitting inside the cabin, knees pressed against the glove box, hair brushing against the ceiling.
In a more immediate sense, Tom and Jake are driving north toward Rapid City, South Dakota, where they will eat lunch. They are hungry and they are irritable because they woke before dawn in order to make the first tour of the Wind Cave some several hundred miles from their motel, and because later that morning, after making their way through limestone tunnels they became trapped.
* * *
The tour group collects obediently in front of the cave entrance in order to observe air escape through a rodent-sized crevice, which it does with enough force to inflate a small pink balloon. Soon they will travel below. The guide asks for a line leader. Several children raise their hands and Jake heads through the threshold without comment. The guide shouts after him to stop at the first landing. Then she asks for a caboose. She asks if everyone knows what a caboose is. She makes eye contact with Tom several times, nodding her head towards the staircase, and Tom realizes he is being impelled forward, that he is being asked to be Jake’s minder. Tom reaches the first landing and Jake is only present in the echoing of his steel-toed boots rattling somewhere below.
Tom catches Jake wide-eyed in a wet room. Jake scans the limestone as if for an absent secret. He appears bored. Everyone is always trying to catch Jake. At twenty-one, he dropped out of college, maxed out a series of credit cards, and bought a one-way ticket to Hong Kong. For the next decade he glimmered in and out of sight, a mirage beyond the perpetual motion of Late Capitalism.
Kristen got her dream job and then a few days later Jake emailed Tom a photo of himself playing bass on the ice. Tom had learned this phrase, on the ice, during this car trip. If you worked in Antarctica, you were either on the ice or you were off the ice. Off the ice meaning the rest of your life, the sum of experience elsewhere.
In the photo, there was a whole band, beards and pigtails, red windproof jumpsuits and hard white plastic boots. They looked like they’d been plucked from a coffee shop open-mic in an Appalachian backpacking town and sent into outer space.
Tom replied, Wanna drive across the entire country? And Jake said, Yup.
Above, Tom can hear the group muttering as they make their way down.
“You didn’t stop at the landing!” the guide shouts, but she doesn’t sound mad. Everything is pleasant. Every surface is smooth and polished.
* * *
Tom and Jake are between jobs. They are between coasts, between meals, between a cave and a middle-of‑nowhere town named Rapid City which bristles in their minds with hopeless potential. They know their lunch will be unsatisfying and nonetheless the joy of eating awaits them.
Tom and Jake are days into driving Tom’s Camry across the country. They have days to go until Tom deposits Jake in Chicago. Tom will then drive the remainder in one extended moment, stopping for a beer at a brewery in downtown Cleveland where the server will ignore him until, not knowing what else to do, Tom raises his hand like a schoolboy, stopping again in Pittsburgh at a supposedly century-old Jewish deli Tom finds located in a strip mall, with plastic tables and laminated menus, where he will order a small sandwich and receive a large, paying the few extra dollars without comment, eating half in the parking lot, the other half with his right hand as he plugs along the Pennsylvania Turnpike in darkness.
In the Antarctic winter, Jake lives in Palo Alto because Tom and Jake met in California on scholarships and have had their lives tainted by that peripheral glimpse of paradise. In college, Tom read that grizzlies once fished for salmon in the Los Angeles River. That a hundred years ago he could have taken a train from their college town out in the desert all the way to Union Station, where a trolley would take him up to a resort at the top of Mount Wilson.
Once, Tom and Jake and their friend Aidan had gone up into the mountains that framed their lives. They drove from strip malls and neat rows of palms up above the smog and found a road called the Rim of the World. There was a high school there hanging on the edge of a cliff and a lake with ducks. They stopped at a diner where the waitress muttered strange incantations under her breath, possibly bent out of shape because they had ordered just sweet potato fries. After eating they tossed rocks off the Rim of the World, then cigarette butts, then beer cans. They bought more beer and they bought Black and Milds and on the way back down the clouds parted to illuminate plumes of smog in towers of light.
“Hey God,” Jake said. “Do you like Black and Milds?”
To afford Palo Alto, Jake rents a garage behind a mansion. The mansion is owned by a YouTube Content Creator whose genre is a standard New Age mix of self-help religiosity and pseudoscience. Sometimes, when Tom feels down, he will watch the YouTube Content Creator’s videos, and he is cheered up. Tom does not believe. He finds the videos funny. And yet, he is also aware that in a literal sense the self-help videos do help him. When it was time to leave Seattle for good, and Tom lay in bed unable to sleep, he slipped away into the bathroom and watched the Content Creator explain how to burst clouds with the power of the mind. Like anything, he said, it takes practice.
Jake pays a lower rate in exchange for acting as the building super. Shortly after moving in, wildfire smoke collected over the Bay Area, and commuters walked to and from BART in surgical masks. The Content Creator approached Jake and asked why he hadn’t mowed the lawn.
“I’m waiting for the smoke to clear,” Jake said.
“But the smoke won’t affect you,” the Content Creator said, “if you don’t believe in it.”
Despite paying rent, Jake doesn’t so much live in Palo Alto as have an address there. Where Jake is is everywhere all at once. How this stands with his role as a super, Tom is uncertain. Tom’s perspective is normally limited to the fixed perch of social media, where Jake is in Fiji, trying to discover his own island, chartering a boat and foraging mangos and catching crabs in the shallows. He is walking tangentially from Mumbai to Barcelona, where an ex has taken up with a nightclub owner, and also he is living in a cottage in a mountain village as an apprentice watchmaker, and hitchhiking the Turkish stretch of the Mediterranean, and waking up locked in a dark basement and kicking open the cellar door, vanishing into the night. Jake lives a life so unbelievable that it simultaneously feels true. And yet, Tom can’t help but wonder the degree of performance. Perhaps Jake does not embellish, but then what exactly is he looking for?
For now, Jake is in the passenger seat. They are driving north toward Rapid City, and have just left a cave in which they were trapped.
“I want a burrito,” Jake says.
“Some al pastor,” Tom says. “Carnitas.”
“Fajitas. Rapid City, all I’ll ask is fajitas. What are the odds they got some decent fajitas?” Jake takes out his phone and says there’s no service.
Through the windshield, the prairie unfolds like a kind of taunting freedom. They could go anywhere they want and it wouldn’t be any different. If it weren’t for the mile markers dictating their progress, how could they know they’re headed anywhere at all?
* * *
In the cave there are stairs and track lights and children. The guide tells family-friendly anecdotes that distract from the nausea of the world above. For Tom, it is like any other tour, a choreographed unreality of sing-song punchlines.
This is Jake’s third attempt at the cave. The first two times they were out of tickets. These tickets cannot be bought online and they cannot be bought over the phone. Tour tickets are sold exclusively on a first-come, first-served basis, and this is because the cave is in a National Park in the middle of the United States, a place so rural that the greatest commodity is an illusory erasure of one’s perception of modernity.
Access to the cave’s thousand miles of sprawling limestone tunnel is granted only by way of guided tour, except for the staff caver, who, it is explained, lives like a spider, flattening and spreading his limbs through crevices, clinging to walls that throttle the void.
Jake is a caver. He is a member of a NASA-funded caving team that has, for each of the past three springs, been deployed to Oaxaca to plumb deeper into the recesses of Sistema Huautla. Each year the team has gone a little further, traveling another hundred feet below. Tom wonders if this is a function of capital – that they go no deeper so there is always occasion for another trip. On the team website, each member has a bio that describes their role like a position on the baseball field. Jake is the “Survivalist.”
In the social milieu of the guided tour, Jake grows visibly unstable. They linger in chambers roofed with ancient boxwork where Jake rapidly shifts his weight from foot to foot, edging to the front of the group.
Jake does not offer that he is a caver. There is no opportunity to do so. There are forty-one individuals in the tour group, including the guide. The majority are children.
* * *
The day has grown hot, prairie expanding in all directions while the Camry dissects muted hills. Tom is hungry and they are still more than an hour from town, but the last time he gave in and had a handful of almonds, it was like swallowing something toxic, like mouthing clumps of cold butter, which his mother and her sisters had done as children when their parents weren’t home. Tom’s mother didn’t often talk about her childhood but the butter story she often shared, perhaps to shame Tom on account of his privilege. Sometimes as a child Tom’s mother had been locked in the kitchen closet for days at a time. Her mother had been a paranoid schizophrenic. Her father died of cancer when she was nineteen. When she did talk about her parents, she described them like an angel and devil on either shoulder. Tom couldn’t imagine the two interacting. When he tried, all he could conjure was a void. It was like how he imagined death. Total emptiness, the lack of even lack.
Tom is driving. They have covered some distance since the cave, but it has been the same terrain for the drive’s duration. In the video games of Tom’s childhood, the landscape would sometimes render too slowly and there would be a brief moment where the car he controlled travelled a roadway surrounded by plains or buildings or forest that, at a certain threshold, vanished into sheer gray that wasn’t a wall or barrier but a placeholder. And sometimes, on long drives in his father’s car, he would wonder about the landscape beyond the visible horizon. Who was Tom to say what was beyond the limit of what he could see? In a philosophy course he had read that humanity was only an image in the mind of God. Would it be a waste of processing power to buffer uninhabited space? When Tom had left Minneapolis after visiting his maternal grandmother on her deathbed, paralyzed, grunting beyond speech, had the city really carried on in his absence?
* * *
The tour group settles in a chamber with branching passageways, most too small for a human body. Tom wonders what kind of life might persist beyond the passable human threshold, whether each lightless nook harbors a wealth of bacterial life thriving on mineral deposits. And also he thinks it is possible that in the black vacuums that nip the chamber, no living thing has ever gone.
The guide opens a green lock box and produces an oil lantern, which she ignites. She gives a slight warning and then cuts the electric track lights. There are several gasps. Tom wonders if this is because some ignored the guide’s warning or if it is because these people are moved by the experience of subterranean darkness. The guide moves the lantern around the chamber to illuminate various sections of wall.
“Now you are seeing the cave as its first explorers saw it,” she says. And yet they stand on a flat cement surface, and above them glows a patch of graffiti. Several children express wonder in breathy wows. Already they have grown accustomed to experiencing only facsimiles of reality, already they have internalized the Neoliberal end times and see the world unfolding before them as an object that has been finished. The graffiti says Anna.
Even in the dark, Tom can feel Jake shifting his weight back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth.
* * *
Tom and Jake eat gyros in Rapid City. Tom is allergic to dairy and orders his gyro without feta, without tzatziki. When he does this, the cashier grimaces. Despite the accommodation, Tom feels his stomach bubbling before he has finished half his meal. He hopes that if diarrhea comes, it will leave him efficiently.
“It’s good,” Jake says.
“Yeah,” Tom says, and he doesn’t mean it but he tries to sound convincing.
“I like it,” Jake says.
Jake finishes before Tom. In college, Aidan had triangulated these meals. They’d spend a Saturday driving around the desert, or wandering orange groves, and then, exhausted, they’d head home, ravenous, and stop for burritos in Baker, or Needles, or Barstow. For Tom, California had felt limitless, like no matter which direction they headed the hills would glow and the dust would gather at the edge of the roadside and there would be a shack with the best pinto beans he’d ever tasted, or the best lengua, or barbacoa that came with Styrofoam cups of goat broth. In the calm of the day’s fluorescent afterglow, Jake would finish, then Tom, then Aidan, who never much cared about food but always had some big idea he was chewing on, something absurd that could get them talking.
“You ever wonder if moths harvest our dreams?” Aidan had once said, a bean and cheese burrito in his right hand. In the bright light of the taco joint, Aidan’s cheekbones looked skeletal.
Tom had taken a bite and chewed slowly because he didn’t know what to say.
“But the real question,” Jake said, “is to what end? What have they got planned?”
Aidan knew how to push, how to push buttons in conversation but also how to push limits. One day he announced they should drive Death Valley. They did. Then he said Texas. And they did that too, and while Jake and Aidan grew closer Tom became tired, worried, about school, about how far they could take it. And he felt himself beginning to pivot away.
For a moment, Jake watches Tom eat, and then Jake begins to walk around the restaurant. The cashier eyes him. Jake walks to the bathroom in long strides, his gait thickened by zip-off camping pants.
Tom is a fast eater and when he eats with Kristen, he always is done first, always watches hungrily as she takes her time savoring each bite. Is it that patience that has landed her a real job in academia? Tom thinks so, is skeptical his adjuncting will ever amount to anything, feels that somehow his appetite and his ambition are linked in their lack of sophistication. But Jake is a faster eater than Tom, and with Jake it doesn’t count against him. For a job interview, a date, they tell people to be themselves, but while Tom isn’t sure the “self” is anything but a means to commodified materialism, he also simultaneously feels that he does have a self, and that this self is a lightless festering pit.
In graduate school, Tom and Kristen and their friends played a board game based roughly on Buddhism. The goal was to activate all of your chakras. Kristen and the others made their way around the board, empowering their third eyes, their solar plexuses. Tom started strong, immediately charging his root. But from there, he made no further progress. He drew cards that replaced his dignity and camaraderie with greed and narcissism, watched, stuck in his root chakra, as Kristen won the game, read a secret from a booklet that sat in the middle of the board, enshrouded by an orange velvet sack.
Jake returns from the bathroom and sits down, stands up, grabs his water glass and walks to the soda fountain. He drinks a glass of water and then another and another.
* * *
At the end of the tour, the group is funneled into an elevator room. There are two elevators, one of which has a printed paper sign that says, Out of Order. The guide locks the door behind them, explains that they can’t have anyone wandering back into the cave and damaging boxwork or vanishing into the darkness, that the elevators only carry ten at a time, and that she has to ride with each group back to the surface. There are forty-one people in the elevator room and the fit is snug.
Tom is disappointed that he has to wait for an elevator. He has been sitting for days on end and wants to move. He wants to walk back up the 300 feet they’ve descended and emerge into daylight zapped with exercise-induced serotonin.
But Jake must feel even worse. They have visited this Disneyland-style cave for Jake, Jake the caver, and it can’t possibly be what he was looking for, this place where they drifted as if stuck in traffic. Caves were not something Jake discussed in college, not something Tom could recall him mentioning at all until an offhand comment in an email about going on an expedition with a man who has a Ted Talk about submarines. On the drive, when Tom asked Jake questions about his role in the cave, the answers were evasive. “Support,” Jake said, and he said that meant a number of things. Sometimes it meant running supplies. Sometimes it meant holding the rope. Then, each time Tom asked further questions, Jake changed the subject to the food in Oaxaca, the varieties of molé, the cheese, the fresh tortillas.
The guide begins to count off the first load. She gets to seven and then points at a large mother and her daughter. Jake walks into the elevator, cutting in front of the child. He is the eighth. The mother and daughter make nine and ten. The guide makes eleven. The guide said the elevators can only take ten and Jake is a large man, but no one reacts or comments as the doors draw closed. There is a display with a needle pointing at a B, and the needle begins to climb towards a one, and then a two. The needle stops between one and two. The needle plummets. A little girl shrieks.
* * *
Tom and Jake are an hour past Rapid City and have entered the Badlands through the park’s backside. The road turns to gravel. Tom slows, and he grows impatient. They round several bends and then begin to trace the arc of foothills.
There is a buffalo in the road. Tom stops. They wait. The buffalo does not move. Jake turns down the radio. The buffalo does not move.
“What do we do?” Tom says.
“We go around or we go back.”
The buffalo does not move.
“Go figure,” Jake says.
“There’s a Herzog film,” Tom says, keeping his eyes on the buffalo, “where two indigenous Australian guys have a meeting with an official in Sydney. They ride an elevator up to an office and the official says, “Why don’t we go to lunch?” So they ride the elevator down, and it gets stuck. They spend a while trapped in the elevator. Finally, they get out. They go to lunch, and they’re eating, and the official says, “What if we never actually got out of that elevator? What if we’re still all sitting there, waiting, hungry, imagining ourselves out to lunch?” Then, after they eat, they have to take the elevator back to the guy’s office. The elevator gets stuck. They’re trapped in the elevator again.”
* * *
Jake is in the elevator as it drops. The guide’s arms shoot from her sides and she presses her palms against the walls. The mother crouches to her daughter’s height and embraces her.
The elevator lurches to a stop. Jake feels no pain. It reminds him of a fair ride. The lights turn off. The elevator jerks up, and then down. It does this several times. Then it resumes a rapid descent.
* * *
In the elevator room, several children have begun to cry.
“No. No, no, no,” a little girl says.
“It’s like a horror movie,” a teenage boy says.
“We all end up in the ground eventually,” a father says. His wife slaps him in the arm but she is smiling. She looks excited, happy to be complicit in a harmless offense. She has found her life partner in this not-too-bad bad boy.
Two fathers begin discussing exterior siding. A couple discusses lunch, the woman toying with her son’s hair, perhaps to keep him calm and stationary.
Tom does not feel terrified but he does feel tired. He is hungry. He wants lunch. He wants to exit the locked door and walk back up the way he came. He wants a can of spray paint, to add his name next to Anna’s.
There is a ringing sound and it seems to come from a small box on the wall. The box appears locked. As the others chatter about what to do, Tom finds himself removing the unsecured padlock and opening the box, answering the phone.
“Hello?” Tom says.
“Who am I speaking to?”
“Tom,” Tom says, and he wants to know why that matters. He wonders why they think his name is relevant, and then he realizes they are just being polite.
“Tom, as you may have figured, your friends have a little issue in the elevator.”
Tom processes friends as meaning he and Jake, and he wants to clarify he doesn’t know the others. He wonders if they know who he is from the debit purchase of their tickets, if they are blaming him for the incident by way of Jake. He feels these thoughts are stupid, and he doesn’t verbalize them, but they nonetheless have happened. He is guilty of thinking stupid things.
“Your friends are OK. They’re going to be just fine. Can you tell everyone that?”
Tom tells the group that their friends are going to be just fine. He feels uncomfortable but in a familiar way, in the way of leading a group of college students in a discussion about Utilitarian ethics, listening to their comments absentmindedly, nodding, his stomach tightening with dread.
“It’s going to be a little while, though. We have to send for the elevator repair people, and then we’ll get your friends out. Then we’ll get you out. OK? Sound good?”
“How long is that going to take?”
“Just a little while.”
“A little while.”
“We’ll have you out shortly. We’ll have you all out in time for a nice lunch. How does that sound, Tom?”
* * *
“What if we’re still trapped in the cave?” Tom says. The buffalo still has not moved from his spot but he has turned his head, and now Tom and the buffalo are looking at one another. The buffalo is cute.
Jake cackles a little. “Yeah,” Jake says.
“We’re imagining this road, this buffalo. The buffalo is the limit of what we can imagine. We can’t go on.”
“Last time I was here, I dropped acid with Aidan,” Jake says.
Tom has never dropped acid. In college, Jake and Aidan would disappear for long stretches and return conquering heroes of consciousness. Sometimes, Tom was there with them, fucking off to the Manson Ranch at the lip of the Death Valley, where they ate pomegranates fresh from the tree, or driving to Yuma for dinner, or scrambling up Joshua Tree boulders in moonlight. But often Jake and Aidan disappeared together, without Tom, climbed a mountain, sledgehammered junks near the Salton Sea, drove all the way to Portland, got brunch, and drove back. Once Jake and Aidan spent a week tripping in Yosemite and when they came back Aidan told Tom that Jake was a real person. That he had feelings. This had angered Tom because it dehumanized Jake, but also because it meant that Jake had opened up to Aidan in a way he hadn’t with Tom. Tom and Jake were friends, but Jake treated Tom like anybody else. He was large and solid and always in motion.
Sometimes Tom feels as if the span of college was his life, and that everything before and after is only an illusion. Or, if not an illusion, a cheap facsimile. There are days Tom watches his own actions as if from a deep remove, as if gray gauze has settled over his vision. In the time following college, he assumed this was some kind of post-grad blues, and likely it was, but it is also a melancholy that hasn’t left him, even years later. There were the good days, living communally with friends, his only real job to idiotically discuss being and hegemony. Now there are just days. Each night since Seattle, Jake has offered Tom acid, and each night Tom has told Jake that he’s worried about driving the next day. But really he is worried about the gauze. His tether to reality already feels thin.
The buffalo turns its head, but doesn’t budge.
“One of these plains days, we should get a motel and trip,” Jake says. “I’ll be there for you. If you can’t drive the next day, so what? I’ll drive for both of us.”
Tom regrets not dropping acid in college. He regrets not doing shrooms. He feels he has lived too cautiously and that now it is too late. He wants to have tripped at least once. He wants to trip, still, but also he wants to be sure he can return to reality. Tom can’t help but wonder if hallucinogens helped make Aidan paranoid-delusional. Tom has read that paranoid schizophrenia can be inherited. He has read that hallucinogens can have a severe effect on a paranoid schizophrenic brain. Once, as a child, Tom woke to find his bed shaking. He assumed it was an earthquake. He saw blue lights swirling around the corner of the room. For a while he watched the lights and then he rolled over and waited. This was likely a dream.
The buffalo still has not moved.
“That guy is kinda cute,” Tom says.
“Yeah,” Jake says. “Cute. Yeah.”
* * *
In the elevator, the woman draws her daughter close and says she will always love her. That no matter what, she will always love her.
“First week on the job and the elevator breaks down,” the guide says.
The mother has begun to weep and her daughter is now bawling.
The guide says, “They trained you for this, it’s okay. It’s okay, they trained you for this. Keep them talking, they said. Okay, okay, okay. Just keep them talking and they won’t think about it.”
Jake cannot believe the woman is saying this out loud. Does she realize she is saying this out loud?
The guide turns to Jake, says, “And what do you do for a living, sir?”
* * *
Tom is driving and Jake is in the passenger seat. Half of Tom’s belongings are in the car, directly behind them. Ahead is Bozeman, two or three hours away. Two days later they will be trapped in the Wind Cave. Far behind them is Seattle, where Tom felt stuck in place until graduate school, until Kristen, until, together, they became stuck in a very different way, piecing together part-time jobs and adjuncting gigs at different colleges, hanging on to the edge of academia hoping for a golden ticket. And then. Sometimes Tom wants to ask Kristen about her board game booklet secret, but it’s as if he already knows what it said. When she had flown east for her campus visit, he hadn’t been worried she’d blow it, even though he knew the pressure would’ve kept him up all night in her place, that he would’ve puttered around the campus from meeting to meeting wondering how exhausted he looked.
It is night and they have already driven ten hours today, eaten nothing but almonds, have had a lot of coffee. Tom feels his heart racing and is light-headed. His eyes are strained and he wants to stop but they cannot stop because they have couches to sleep on ahead in Bozeman. Tom is accustomed to pushing the limits of exhaustion. Once, in college, after pulling an all-nighter to write a midterm, Tom sat in his Psychology lecture and watched the second hand tick forward, forward, backward, then forward. Another time, he lay in bed trying to read a textbook chapter in the middle of the night. His dorm room door was open and he heard the sound of approaching footsteps. He watched as two girls walked from the left to the right and out of view. He looked down, read a sentence. He heard the approach of footsteps. He watched as the same girls walked again from the left to the right and out of view.
After graduating college, Tom became depressed. He moved back to Seattle where the damp grey had never bothered him, but now it did. Each morning before dawn he walked for twenty minutes to a bus stop, rode for a half hour, transferred, rode another little while, and then walked for twenty minutes into the windowless kitchen of a steakhouse where he halved Romas for hours at a time, spooning their guts into a steel bin, smashing the flesh over a bladed grate. He couldn’t sleep. He walked from his apartment kitchen to the bedroom to the living room, back and forth, drinking chamomile tea. He often took Benadryl as a sedative. Then he set off before dawn to pass another fluorescent set of hours removing the beaks from thawing squid.
In the distance, Tom sees small lights fluttering up and down. They move without pattern, perhaps headlights obscured in part by a hill. His heart is palpitating and he wonders if Jake has dosed him. He dismisses the thought, and then it returns. They are listening to a podcast about how to retire by age thirty-five, Jake’s choice. Tom feels dangerously tired. Last night, he slept on a friend’s floor, spread across seat cushions from two separate recliners.
If Jake had dosed him, he would like to know. He would pull over and Jake would drive. He wonders if Jake is tripping. Tom doesn’t feel like he is tripping, instead he feels the familiar tug of exhaustion. He knows that wondering if Jake dosed him is a symptom of his brain needing rest. And yet, if Jake had dosed him, Tom thinks he would be grateful. It would be like he had overcome an obstacle without any effort. It’d be like falling asleep and waking to find that they’d arrived in Pennsylvania.
Jake grabs the wheel and rips the car into the oncoming lane. The Camry narrowly misses a deer that has wandered into the road. Tom looks at the deer in the rear-view.
“Thanks,” Tom says.
“How you doin’?” Jake says.
“I’m fine. Came out of nowhere.”
* * *
Jake is in a dark elevator explaining his work in Antarctica to the tour guide. The mother and daughter weep. Two old men discuss the steaks they ate last night. One of them asks the other how the Chiefs are going to do next season.
Tom is in the elevator room explaining to a Mormon father that he is in between jobs, that he is in the process of moving. A little boy is punching another little boy and their mother has grabbed both by the arms and separated them.
The elevator needle begins to move and there is a cheer. The doors of the Out of Order elevator open. Inside the elevator the lights are off and it is empty.
“No!” a boy says.
“Where would it take us?” a girl says, and her father laughs. The elevator’s doors close and open and close.
* * *
Tom and Jake are driving from Seattle to Chicago but presently they are inert. They are in the country’s middle where a buffalo is in their path. On either side of the road is hill, going down on the left and up to their right. They can either go through the buffalo, or they can go back. Or they can sit. Tom is in the driver’s seat and Jake is the passenger. They cannot move because of the buffalo and because they are stuck in their seats. They shift idly, moving their thighs from side to side, adjusting the angle of their legs, stretching their arms backward. The day has grown hot and they are both sweating.
It’s been years since they spent so much time together, and at times they can’t remember how to interact. Tom has gone to graduate school, if only because of a lack of other options, has a Master’s Degree in Philosophy which has earned him only intermittent adjuncting gigs. Jake has worked in Hong Kong, and China, in Antarctica. He has seen more of the globe than Tom ever will, and when Tom thinks about this he is equal parts jealous and exhausted.
Jake turns the car stereo volume up, and Bob Dylan’s Modern Times has begun another lap in the CD player. He turns the volume back down.
* * *
Tom has caught up to Jake in a wet room in a cave. He had dreaded moving across the country, dreaded the drive with Kristen, dreads the job search awaiting him, dreads making new friends, but he has been looking forward to this trip with Jake. Jake was with Tom when Tom’s first car blew a rod near Barstow on a failed attempt at a Vegas buffet breakfast, and Tom has been hoping his ‘95 Camry won’t survive this trip either. That he and Kristen’s second-best belongings will end up at a Goodwill in Wisconsin or Ohio, that he’ll sell his Camry for scrap and use the proceeds to buy bus fare to Pittsburgh or some other place where Kristen might scoop him. That he’ll have a little insurance money to kickstart his new life, and Kristen’s nicer car to explore with. That he won’t have to unload the Camry and wash all their cooking equipment, won’t have to reassemble his bicycle. That he can have this trip punctuate itself so he can start fresh.
Jake has wanted to be in this cave for many years and now he is here. He came with Aidan, once, most of a decade ago, and sat on a bench taking in the news that they’d sold out for the day. He came again, years later, on a road trip with a girlfriend and failed once more. He knows intimately the feeling of failure as seen from the bench outside the gift shop, the yellowing tall grass on the other side of the parking lot. And also he has descended by rope through the maw of caverns in Mexico and Vietnam and Laos and now he is in the Wind Cave with a very different kind of group. His boot is in a shallow puddle. He is in the cave, and he scans the wall as if for an absent secret.
* * *
The guide counts to seven and then points at a mother and daughter. Jake steps onto the elevator. Eight. The mother and daughter, nine and ten. The guide. The doors close. The needle rises, plummets.
* * *
Jake is driving to the cave. It is his third attempt. The morning is cold. Jake is driving fifty miles per hour, five over the limit, and drinking gas station coffee out of a paper cup.
Tom is trying to sleep, but he isn’t sleeping. Tom can’t sleep on car trips or on airplanes. Tom is not good at sleeping. He sits up and grabs his cup of coffee. It tastes bad, but it’s nice to drink. It’s a kind of entertainment.
A flock of songbirds is spooked by the rush of the Camry and takes flight from the shoulder. One dives and the rest follow, and they make contact with the windshield, one after another. Three. Four. Five. Ten. Fifteen.
* * *
Jake is in an elevator, waiting for the elevator to move.
Tom is in the elevator room, and the emergency phone begins to ring.
The buffalo does not budge.
“Still trapped in a cave,” Tom says.
“Trapped in a cave,” Jake says.
Jake grabs the wheel and steers the Camry out of the path of a deer.
“Thanks,” Tom says.
Jake is driving Tom’s Geo Prizm near Barstow. Aidan is in the back seat. The engine rattles and will soon blow a rod.
“Are the lines moving?” Jake says.
“What?”
“On the highway. The lines are moving. I think I’m having an acid flashback.”
Tom is talking to a Mormon father in the elevator room. He has a headache, and though actively conversing he is also remembering lying in bed as a child and watching the swirling blue lights. He remembers driving Jake to the airport on his way to Asia, having nothing to say, Jake passing through the tinted glass door into the departure area and vanishing. He remembers Jake speaking at Aidan’s funeral, Jake asking him to speak at Aidan’s funeral, not speaking. He remembers the call from Jake. He remembers imagining, for the first time, Aidan grey and cold in bed, still for days, still for good. Tom hadn’t spoke to Aidan in years, in most of a decade. But he knew Jake stayed in touch over sparsely phrased emails and intermittent long phone calls where Aidan talked about drifting back to school, studying agriculture at community college, studying religious studies, studying German only so that he’d be eligible for a job in the peer tutoring center. Jake must have seen the decline, must have carried Aidan’s mental health like a curse. He must have known, or intuited. There might have been things Aidan said. For all Tom knew, they might have discussed it. Suicide. One long unblinking stare. Once, the three of them stole a shopping cart from Walgreens and decided to push it into the Pacific. They named the cart Rocinante, sang ironic songs of honor and progress in expanding avenues. Aidan rolled his ankle, and Tom and Jake took turns pushing him in the cart as the sunset radiated purple over Fontana. But they gave up halfway, abandoned Rocinante at the LA Country Fairgrounds, where Aidan called his girlfriend and they got a ride the remaining forty miles. He remembers sleeping on the beach in a cold fog, intermittently waking to the chatter of sandbonis. He remembers the first night, too, emerging from a stretch of darkness into the fluorescent wash of a Domino’s, a mushroom pizza atop Rocinante’s canopy of sleeping bags, the box open, a veneer of grease shimmering in streetlight, the gaze of a flashlight beam and the road ahead.
The elevator doors open to reveal their smiling guide. “Next nine!” she says. Tom and the Mormons are walking outside on the grass. The day has become bright and hot. Jake is sitting on a bench, and when he sees Tom his face spreads with a smile.
“Well,” Jake says.
“You fucker,” Tom says. Tom is smiling too. “You motherfucker.”
“Well, well, well.”
* * *
“Fuck it,” Tom says, and he inches the car forward toward the buffalo, which takes a step back. If Tom were to label the expression on the buffalo’s face, it would be betrayal. The buffalo is scared and disappointed. The buffalo takes another step, turns, and flees from the roadway.
They are again in motion. Tom is sitting here and Jake is sitting there. They are driving across the country. Three days from now, they will eat Polish sausage on the South Side and Jake will say it was nice to get to do this again, and Tom will agree, and then change the subject to their fries. They will go their separate ways, another trip over. Jake will go to and from Antarctica, taking on and off his rubber boots, feeling again the breeze off McMurdo Sound on his Vaseline-lubed cheeks, again setting foot on the tarmac in Christchurch, another season in the books, a stateside address awaiting him, or not, an attempt at permanence that can only fail, because there’s the promise of a rumbling train in Cambodia, a cave whose bottom will never be seen, and because simultaneously there is the other promise, that of churches and strip mall yogurt shops clinging to the topsoil in the gaze of the inevitable, places where Tom will collapse and expand on the fringe of academia, on the fringe of extended childhood, Writers’ Centers, Development Offices, adjunct gigs, all the while afraid of stepping too close to the fire, afraid of losing what’s already lost. They never knew what to do, Tom or Jake or Aidan, unless they were on the road somewhere, anywhere, in which case they could do anything, anything at all, and it would roil ecstatically as they listened to the world hum.
And, for now, Tom and Jake are in motion. A buffalo flees down a hill. Behind them, a flock of birds lies dead. An elevator in a cave travels downward at the synaptic charge of a plastic button. Objects are in motion or they are still. Tom and Jake are in motion, and also they are still. They shift in their seats, sweat pooling in the arch of their backs, hurtling east.
Matt Greene’s work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Conjunctions, and Santa Monica Review.