The Tiger Catcher Page 26

  Part Three

  Medea

  “That man that hath a tongue, I say is no man,

  if with his tongue he cannot win a woman.”

  William Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona

  34

  Moongate

  IN THE DARK JULIAN COULDN’T TELL IF HE WAS FALLING.

  His eyes couldn’t adjust to the blindness. No, he definitely wasn’t falling. He was stuck, confined on all sides by ragged walls. Or maybe he was oscillating so fast, he couldn’t tell he was moving. But it didn’t feel like it. He’d been trapped before. He knew what trapped felt like. First shock, and eventually panic. Julian tried to feel above his head but couldn’t move his pinned arms. The shaft was too narrow.

  Because he was compressed, his breathing was labored, and he became anxious. Running out of oxygen anxious. Why did he jump with his arms at his sides like an idiot. Now what was his plan? In four minutes, was there going to be no more air? Maybe he should take little gulps to conserve it. Perhaps in two or three days he’d lose some weight and drop dead to the cave floor—one way of getting down.

  Julian opened and closed his eyes, trying to see, to hear noises, maybe Sweeney overhead? This wasn’t claustrophobia. It wasn’t an irrational fear of confined spaces. He was squeezed into a canister and unable to escape. Seemed rational to be alarmed. He counted to sixty, to feel time passing. Everything stayed the same.

  But there had been action. There had been movement.

  There had been a change.

  There was joy.

  There was. There was.

  Devi didn’t lie! The conduit that wasn’t there at 11:59, opened for Julian at 12:00, and let him in. He had life. He had hope.

  Because he was in the future.

  That’s when he realized he wouldn’t run out of air. Because he wasn’t in an airless canister.

  He was on a magic carpet.

  He just had to learn how to fly it.

  His heart rate steadied when he decided to approach his predicament with Holmsian logic. He could not be stuck with no way out. Therefore, there must be a way out. He wriggled his shoulders. He twisted his pelvis. Why did he wear such a heavy jacket! If it weren’t for the jacket and all his sweaters and jerseys and tees underneath, he’d be slimmer. A good thing he had lost all that weight. Forty extra pounds of Julian wouldn’t fit into this tube, wide enough for one man but not all men.

  Couldn’t gravity help him just a little? There was still gravity in the magic cave, wasn’t there? Gravity came to the known universe before all matter. Before there was matter, there first was a law governing matter.

  Why did there need to be a law governing matter before any matter existed?

  Why did there need to be a law governing something that didn’t yet exist?

  And why couldn’t this first principle of gravity help him now? Was he no longer part of the known universe? He wished he could squirm out of his jacket. Devi had given him contradictory instructions. The cave is cold, he said, wear something warm. Well, here he was. Man enough, warm enough, and stuck.

  His shoulders were wider than his pelvis, and the top of his body wasn’t moving. What could Julian do, short of dislocating his arms? A lot of good he’d be to himself, alone in a black cave with his limbs out of joint.

  Little by little he managed to fold his upper body inward. He hyperextended his turned-in feet. Weaver, the Peckham quack, had noticed that Julian presented with abnormal body posturing. Hell, yeah. Good thing, wasn’t it, that his old brain injury made his limbs bend and contort and flex in unusual ways when he was stressed. Hooray for old brain injuries. He moved his hands and then his arms in front of him. This allowed his shoulders to narrow. His body inched down. Progress! The longest journey through time began with a single wormy slide.

  Julian wriggled and twisted, painfully slowly. Belatedly he thought that maybe he was Ralph Dibny after all. How disappointing, a rubber contortionist. Josephine would approve.

  He was barely moving, constantly getting speared on the ragged walls. He lost all sense of how long it had taken him to descend even a few feet. The darkness was deeply disorienting. Nevertheless, he persisted. The few things he knew about caves helped him. Caves were coal mines under the surface of the earth. Long shafts led down. He was inside such a shaft now. Eventually he had to hit the cave floor.

  And eventually he did. His feet and legs dangled. Another twist or two from his flexing torso, and he fell—maybe ten feet—landing gracelessly on the hard ground. He sat for a few moments, getting himself together, feeling relief but also rising tension. It was black like the bottom of the ocean. There was no visual imprint of any kind. But there was sound. Water was dripping.

  Julian was about to turn on his flashlight but was stopped by another sound—distant flapping. He remembered that bats lived in caves. Were they in this one? Would they attack him? He was reluctant to turn on the light and see their tiny rat bodies, grotesquely large eyes, cartilaged fanning wings. Drip, drip. A flap or two.

  He twisted on the Maglite, bought brand-new at Boots that morning. Without it he wouldn’t be able to find his way. Unlike the webbed flying mammals, Julian didn’t travel by sonar, he had no echolocation. The flashlight was cheap but would do. It had variable settings, was slim, used a non-replaceable lithium ion battery and was rated to stay on for 100,000 hours.

  He wouldn’t be in the cave for 100,000 hours, would he? Before Julian grew discouraged from dividing that number by the hours in a day, he got up and got going.

  He didn’t know what was more eerie: to sit sightlessly in an ebony space with no shadows or to see the narrow beam reflected off the low-hanging stalactites as he moved forward. His earlier excitement had dimmed and was replaced by gnawing worries. He found a long stretch of tunnel, an underground corridor that he hoped would lead him to a moongate. Isn’t that what Devi had told him? You’ll meander. You’ll feel lost. When you see a moongate, you’ll know you’re close. The river is just beyond.

  His tentative footsteps echoed off the walls. Slowly he made his way through a dripping, flapping tunnel filled with cascading lime, a dark labyrinth, an unmarked haunted house, every curve and choice between left and right jolting his anxious heart. Other than bats, what else lived in caves? Bizarre troglodytes like salamanders, the decomposers at the bottom of the food chain, were they waiting for Julian around the next turn?

  Was he the bottom of their food chain?

  And what if he made the wrong choice and went left when he should’ve gone right?

  Case in point: he didn’t get far before he came to a dead end. He brought nothing with him to mark the walls or leave a crumb trail like Hansel. He returned to the previous fork and tried again. When he didn’t watch where he was walking, he tripped over a stalagmite. When he didn’t watch his head, he butted into a stalactite. Julian decided to watch out for the head, since he knew from bitter experience he couldn’t do without it, though breaking a bone was also less than ideal—as he also knew.

  In frustrating fits and starts, often doubling back and repeating his steps, he made his way through the subterranean maze, grateful for every turn that wasn’t a dead end and didn’t have bats swinging from the ceiling.

  How long had he been walking? He took out the watch he had bought from the flirty girl at the Observatory and checked the time.

  It read noon.

  Damn piece of junk. He threw it against the wall. It echoed as it broke.

  But at last, something new was happening.

  The tunnel deepened, widened, lengthened. The noise of dripping water echoed louder. The stalactites got longer. Beneath them, the stalagmite hills that towered like termite houses grew taller. The passageway emptied into a vast underground chamber webbed with dangling rock.

  The drugstore flashlight exposed the immense space a fraction at a time. Julian examined it foot by foot.

  Bisecting the enormous room was a spine of jagged stalactites uniting with calcium columns and f
lowstones. Amid the spectacular asymmetry Julian found a perfectly formed circular opening in the stone. Was that the moongate? It was silver white, lit up by the blue LED from his Maglite. A smiling Julian took a step forward, aiming the light at the tamped-down dirt at his feet, taking care not to trip.

  Instead of dirt, a few feet in front of him the cold beam found nothing but blackness.

  Julian stopped smiling.

  Julian stopped walking.

  He couldn’t take one more step.

  The ground underneath his feet had ended.

  ***

  His eyes had to be deceiving him. Looping the lanyard of the flashlight around his wrist, Julian inched forward and pointed the beam into the black void. The light was swallowed up by the darkness. His legs pulsed from standing too close to the edge. Backing away, he walked up and down the chamber, shining the light at the segmented blackness hoping to find a way across. But it was no use. The void split the cave in half, a canyon between him and where he needed to be.

  The echo in the hollow space amplified every drop of falling water. Acoustically it sounded as if the water was gushing not dripping.

  Was the chasm his imagination? It had to be, right? Nearing the edge, Julian knelt on the ground for stability, just in case, not wanting to crouch and, in his unbalanced desperation, topple over as he once did into the backyard pool. He lowered his hand into the black space, fingers wiggling. Nothing but air.

  Rising to his feet, Julian stood, mouth ajar, lungs shallow, the flashlight drooping from his fingers.

  And there he had been, thinking that what he disliked most was cramped spaces and things that lived in them. Spiders, crabs, silkworm, blind fish. The creatures that adapted to a world devoid of light, that evolved to inhabit blackness, how could one not be afraid of such things? Yet here in front of him was something even more frightening than cave dwellers.

  Across the chasm, the giant cavern was full of shadows and inky forms, a city of statues sculpted by the cave itself, abstract and colossal. Everywhere Julian pointed his light, there was extraordinary ominous beauty of strange creation. If the divide was real, Julian could not cross it. He knew that. It was thirty feet wide, maybe more. What could he do, scale the side wall like a salamander? Vertical caving, like vertical mountaineering required special equipment for humans to ascend and descend. It required special skills. Julian had neither the skills nor the equipment.

  Deciding to test his reality, he broke off a small piece of a soda straw stalactite, hoping it wasn’t a weight-bearing crosspiece. Would the cave come crashing down on his head again because he had touched something he wasn’t supposed to?

  When that didn’t happen, Julian proceeded to test if spacetime was real. He lobbed the hard chunk of calcium into the ravine. It fell and fell. He never did hear the sound of it landing.

  He prayed he’d gone deaf. He broke off two more pieces from a different soda straw. One as a control, one as a test. He threw the control against the wall, like his useless watch. That made a sound. So he wasn’t deaf, alas. The test went into the hole in the earth.

  It fell and fell.

  In a small corner of a giant room, he sank to the ground, his legs numb from fear.

  Just like before, in the open wild, Julian became certain he was going to die.

  Devi hadn’t prepared him! He told Julian much would be required, but he didn’t say what it would be. He said the cave wasn’t a revolving door. There was only one way out. Forward.

  But there was no way forward! Damn that Devi.

  What was the cave called? The Q’an Doh Cave, Devi said. What did Q’an Doh mean? Why hadn’t Julian asked? Maybe it was important. Maybe Q’an Doh meant Cave of Illusion. Julian was so hung up on the meridian and the portal, and the impossibilities of it all, he forgot to ask the Hmong man about impassable divides.

  Eventually he calmed down and tried to think—by no means as easy as it sounded. Nothing in his thinking could grasp the physics of an ill-trained terrified man long-jumping thirty infinite feet.

  Okay. Assuming Devi hadn’t sent him here to die, what else did the Hmong cook say?

  So many incongruous things. It was like hearing a foreign language. The familiar words stuck. Everything else fell through the sieve of incomprehension. Devi hoped Julian wasn’t afraid of heights. Julian had ignored him. How could you be underground and worrying about heights? But maybe this is what Devi had meant. The dizzying height of leaning over an underground crater.

  What else did Devi say?

  He said Julian would have to learn to do many things he had not done before.

  You will have to jump, Devi said.

  You might even have to leap.

  Julian got up and walked cautiously to the lip of the canyon.

  Indisputably, Devi said that to get to the river, Julian had to walk through the moongate. Undeniably, Devi said Julian would have to learn how to jump.

  This was insane! Julian wasn’t an Olympic jumper. Hell, he wasn’t even an Olympic boxer. Not that boxing skills would help him now. He shined a light across the blackness to the milky entryway. It was so tantalizingly near, yet so unreachably far.

  What was real, what was illusion?

  There is magic out there.

  You might even have to leap.

  Oh my God.

  It was impossible.

  Like a coin coming up heads for eternity impossible.

  No.

  Simply no.

  In a panic Julian called out. Called to the dripping walls, to the rocks full of chilly humidity. “Anybody out there? Is there anybody out there?”

  His voice came back, an unrecognizable high-pitched echo. Theretheretheretherethere . . .

  “Help,” he yelled.

  Helphelphelphelp . . .

  “Please. Somebody help me.”

  He sank to his knees. “Please,” he whispered. “Somebody help me.”

  Memememememe . . .

  Maybe Devi didn’t tell him the truth. Maybe the portal did reopen. Julian could climb up the shaft, return to his life. The old woman, Quatrang, Devi, all of it a wretched grief hallucination. Weaver had warned him. Withdrawal from Klonopin was dangerous stuff.

  But . . . if this was a dream, you couldn’t get hurt in dreams. Julian pinched the skin on his hand. It hurt. He began to rationalize. Maybe you could get hurt in dreams. Maybe what you couldn’t do is die in dreams. He was ready to conform all knowledge to his present reality—anything so long as he didn’t have to jump.

  How much time needed to pass before he got desperate enough to do it?

  How long was that other man trapped in the canyon before he cut off his arm and lived? Julian should’ve bought the guy’s memoir that fateful day at Book Soup, read it, memorized it. He might know now how to save a life.

  One thing for sure: it would take more time than this before he jumped. Perhaps a hundred thousand hours—until the Maglite died.

  How many of those hours had he already spent down here? Julian couldn’t tell. He wasn’t three days thirsty, or forty days hungry. What he was, was afraid.

  He lay down on his side, curled up in a corner, and fell into a dreamless sleep.

  When he woke up, he flicked the light back on. Was it his imagination or was the flashlight dimming? Turning it off, he closed his eyes and tried to remember things.

  Gravity bends both light and time.

  The gravity field inside a black hole is so intense that not even light can escape or penetrate it.

  And if there’s no light, there is no speed of light. And if there is no speed, there is no movement, and if there is no movement, there is no time.

  Inside the black hole, time stands still.

  What does that tell you, Julian?

  There is no speed. There is no time. There is no distance.

  There is only space.

  And in space you are weightless.

  Oh my God.

  There is only one way out. Forward.

  He open
ed his eyes and flicked on the Maglite.

  You will see what you’re made of.

  Nightmare formations, dripping water.

  Ask yourself—what is the deepest desire of your heart?

  If you know the answer, then leap.

  Julian stood up.

  He measured out how many of his running strides it took to get to the edge of the canyon from the wall of the cave.

  Fifteen strides.

  And then he practiced counting and running with the light.

  He shed his two sweaters and his sleeveless tank, shed them like skins to remake himself into a being light enough for leaping. He left on his jacket because it had her beret in it.

  He practiced counting and running with the light. He wished he’d worn his sneakers instead of the thick waterproof shearling boots.

  Carrying the flashlight impeded the forward thrust of his arms. He attached the lanyard to one of his belt loops and practiced running the steps another hundred times with it bouncing against his hip. That also turned out to be cumbersome. It was easy to get distracted and misstep. But he couldn’t run in the dark.

  Or could he?

  What if he miscounted? Did he leap on fifteen, or did he run fifteen and then leap?

  Julian stuffed the Maglite into his pocket, closed his eyes, and took three tottering steps in the darkness. Was it better to see or not to see himself falling into the abyss? Why didn’t Devi tell him to bring a catapult? A long pole to run with, to vault off, to help him get across. What was he going to use as a pole vault now, his heart’s desire?

  Water dripping, dripping, dripping. His heart beating, beating, beating. Two hundred times a minute it pummeled in the chamber inside his chest and echoed in the chamber of the cave. When he couldn’t take it, he waited out his terror on the ground, rocking back and forth. And then he would get up and practice the fifteen steps again.

  And again.