A Tight Squeeze

　



　


There are certain themes of which the interest is all-aborbing, but which are too entirely horrible for legitimate fiction. These the mere romanticist must eschew if he do not wish to offend or disgust...
"The Premature Burial" – Edgar Alan Poe (1850)

　

　

　

1.

The dog strained at her leash. She felt a disturbance in the atmosphere, pressure dropping, wind rousing itself sullenly as if resentful of the heaviness in the air opposing its motion. The streets were shadowless because the sun was hidden, gloomy with the dark, fragmentary clouds thrasing about in the sky.

I was eight blocks from my house when the first drops fell, cold and electric against my face. The dog shook her head as if besieged by mosquitos. Puddles already slumped along the gutter dimpled with the drizzle. Then, there was a crash and the sky opened and the deluge began. Ankle-deep torrents poured along the sides of the cambered residential streets and air was opaque with falling rain.

There was no point in hurrying. We were soaked in a minute and I felt my clothing hanging heavily from my body, sodden and chilly. Low places on the sidewalk were lakes through which we waded.

In 1979, British songwriter living on Long Island wrote "Escape" more popularly known as the Pina Colada song. Everyone seems to know this tune. In the song, a man who is bored with his relationship with his wife reads a personal ad in the newspaper. The personal lists the adventurous attributes that the correspondent desires in a romantic partner. A man answers the ad and arranges to meet the woman at O’Malley’s Bar. She turns out to be his wife and the two of them reaffirm their love, promising to "escape" together. (The author of the song, Rupert Holmes, describes the use of pina coladas in the first line of the personal as a fortuitous accident – he originally wrote "if you like Humphrey Bogart" but the name didn’t exactly match the song’s rhythm and so he used the name of the drink. Holmes doesn’t like pina coladas and has publicly said that they taste like kaopectate.)

The song is clever and has a catchy hook. It’s the kind pop song that bores into your brain. Once you hear it, the words and melody won’t leave you alone. The lyrics began: If you like pina coladas/ And getting caught in the rain/ If you’re not into yoga/ And have half a brain. The song continues with a daringly extended phrase: If you like making love at midnight/ In the dunes on the cape –the rush in the prosody of the line approximating the risk that the writer is taking and her increasing excitement. Needless to say, "cape" is used to rhyme with "escape" – then, we’ll make our escape.

The song celebrates a certain kind of freedom, lyric spontaneity, a willingness to take risks. Wet to the bone, I went into the back of my house, the little mud-room where there are washers and dryers and hanging coats and tennis shoes. With the force of revelation, I realized that I didn’t like getting "caught in the rain." In fact, I was shivering and my soaked clothing clung to me in an embrace that I found repulsive and the downpour outside wasn’t an exciting thing – it was just a loud and furious nuisance.

Later, my muscles all ached. I felt very low. I was disappointed with myself and a great door, it seemed, had slammed shut on me.



2.

Omodt’s family had come from the Sudan and escaped murder by the "skin of their teeth." When Omodt was eight or nine, he heard someone use that phrase at a Mission dinner at the Church that sponsored his family. He was puzzled and wondered at the words – after all, your teeth, if properly brushed, don’t have a skin at all.

In the Sudan, men came with jeeps and pickup trucks to villages. Sometimes, the men killed people where they lived, slaughtering everything that moved or breathed, including the cattle and goats. They burned up the huts and left the bodies lying where they fell. At other times, the men selected their victims, loading people into the pickup trucks until their vehicles rested heavy on their axles. They drove the villagers into the woods where there were ravines or eroded gulches and shot the people so they pitched down into those places. Omodt didn’t remember anything about this – he had been a babe at his mother’s breast when his family walked across the desert and sought refuge in Ethiopia.

Omodt’s father worked killing chickens in a factory on the prairie outside the small town where the Church that sponsored them was located. Although he had learned a little English in the Sudan, he never acquired much proficiency with the language. He was often very frustrated and told his children that he wished he could return to Africa. He told Omodt that when the killings began, he and his wife went into the brush a dozen yards from their home and, after pushing their way twenty or thirty meters through the undergrowth, cut a trail that led through the thickets to the river. People in the village customarily walked to the river by a wide, dusty path. The ancient trail was used by women carrying water and it made a clear, straight way to the river. Omodt’s father and mother hacked their path through the bush a couple hundred meters to the side of the old trail and it was a very narrow way, just wide enough for one person to flee along. The new trail was concealed by dense shrubbery near the house, but the way to the path was marked by a nondescript pail, rusted-out and useless except as a guidepost. After a thousand meters, the new trail descended to a marsh full of sucking mud and green and blue crabs. Omodt’s parents dismantled some of plywood sheets comprising the ceiling in their house and, by the light of the moon, dragged those wood planks to the swamp to make walkways. The planks ended on the shore of the river where a tiny boat, a raft with empty jerry-cans as floats, was hidden in the tall marshes.

When the men wearing red bandanas and stolen watches like ringlets on their forearms came in their jeeps and pickup trucks, Omodt’ parents took their children and plunged into the brush behind their house, kicking over the pail in their haste. They darted along the secret trail and, then, hopped over the planks in the marsh to reach the little raft hidden in the marshes. Night was falling and they heard the rattle of automatic rifle fire in the village and, then, saw little conical orange flames rising above the trees where the village was located. Omodt heard this story many times and he, often, thought of the tiny trail machete-cut through the thicket.

Omodt’s father had a stroke and died before he was fifty. Omodt’s mother had trouble with her boys. Omodt listened to rap and fancied himself a gangster. He was invulnerable. After all, hadn’t he survived near death in the Sudan? Before he was ten, Omodt had memorized the system of alleyways behind the houses in his town. The alleyways mostly cut through the blocks, lined by backyards full of lunging, frustrated dogs and little detached garages. The alleys formed a regular grid except that there were exceptions, a half-dozen or so. Several alleys simply dead-ended at fences guarding people’s back yards. In four of the alleys, there were intersections. For some reason, a few blocks were much longer than others and the alleys passing through those tracts of homes formed intersections with other alleys that turned in one direction or the other to the street. Omodt had a small bicycle – the alleys were too rough with big pot holes and alligator-scaled broken asphalt for his skateboard – and he rode along them, imagining that they were avenues for escape, ways to get away from his house and flee through the night and, even, elude pursuers. When he was little, Omodt imagined the pursuers as the men in the battered jeeps and old pickup trucks, but, later, after he had been in some trouble, he thought of the people chasing him as cops in their blue uniforms in cars with police dogs and spinning red lights. On the TV, he saw that the police often shot Black boys and, of course, he couldn’t help but think of himself as gunned-down lying in his blood on a sidewalk or a driveway. He never imagined himself shot to death in the alleys because he knew that they could be used to engineer an escape from any place in town where he might be in jeopardy: all you had to do was reach an alley and, then, hurry along to one of those idiosyncratic intersections and flee in that direction leaving the authorities to roar down one of the dead-ends and crash against the backyard fence, maybe, even knocking it down so that the front of the car would plow into the gazebo behind the house or the small trampoline.

A Somali man ran a little Halal grocery. Omodt sometimes went to the grocery and sat with the man watching soccer matches on TV. The man had cases of Tusker beer in a cooler hidden below the shop but he couldn’t sell the stuff openly because he didn’t have a liquor license. When Omodt was 14, the man sometimes gave him a beer in exchange for making deliveries on his bicycle or lugging distressed produce out to the dumpster behind the store. The Tusker beer was very strong, more like a malt liquor than most American brews, and, when he drank it, Omodt became quite drunk.

Omodt knew where the cases of Tusker were kept and, sometimes, he helped himself to a bottle. The Ethiopian sent money home by wire and, often, went down the block to the Mexican bakery and grocery where there was an Envios de dinero. When he was away from the cash register, Omodt sat behind the counter and managed the till and, sometimes, even took for himself some of the cigarettes that the Ethiopian kept in a box. The Ethiopian sold cigarettes individually and not by the carton. He also sold aspirin and tylenol by the pill – this was how these medications were sold in his home country.

One afternoon, Omodt was drunk and he fell off his bike and scuffed both knees. He blamed the Ethiopian for his injuries which were minor but painful. As he was walking his bicycle along the sidewalk, it began to rain. At first, Omodt shrugged off the cold drops of water bombarding his head and shoulders but, then, he heard the hiss of the oncoming deluge and looked around for a place to wait out the storm. The Elk’s club didn’t exactly abut the old bank building, now a shop selling second-hand clothes for bigger ladies. A gap opened between the buildings. The space between the facades was about a yard wide and, above, someone had placed some plywood boards spanning the gap between the structures. Omodt left his bike at the curb and entered the opening between the store-fronts. It was dry under the plywood although water was merrily splashing down on both sides of where he was standing. Behind him, the gap narrowed and, in fact, came to an inaccessible point, a dead end too tight to enter, the vertex of the elongated pie-shaped space between the buildings. The space behind him was floored with raw, greyish gravel littered with broken glass and, at the place where the opening constricted and was too narrow to enter there was a stack of shingles set against the wall, probably asbestos-bearing and, therefore, impossible to trash, and a scabrous-looking pair of underpants. The rain pouring down on either side of the plywood boards overhead splashed his ankles and calves. The cavernous fissure between the buildings, coming to a point forty feet from the sidewalk, fascinated Omodt. Here was a wonderful place to hide, an inexplicable opening in the downtown where a bandit or outlaw could conceal himself, lurking in the shadows as the pursuers ran back and forth on the sidewalk only a few feet away.

A couple months passed. Omodt was arrested on the street for minor consumption and found with pockets full of cigarettes. The police raided the Halal grocery and fined the owner several thousand dollars. The next time Omodt came around to watch soccer with owner of the store, the man threatened him, shouting in Arabic, a language that was offensive to Omodt, and, even, brandishing a small pistol at him. Omodt waited until nightfall and, then, walked downtown. It was a couple hours before the bars closed but after the downtown cafes had shut their doors and so the streets were empty. Some drunks were hooting in the parking lot behind the bars. A Laotian cook sat on the stoop of his restaurant smoking a cigarette. Kids were cruising the downtown drag playing bumper-tag but there was no one on the sidewalk except a teenage girl every two or three blocks, all of them walking furiously as if on a mission. Most of the upper windows over the storefronts were dark and hooded but a few of them shone with yellow light. In the former hobby shop, old men sat around a couple of tables playing cards under lights that gave their cheeks and white whiskers a greenish tint.

Omodt found a brick fallen from a facade crumbling after a fire. The brick had been scorched and was marked with soot and char. He carried the brick to the front of the Halal grocery. The windows above the grocery were covered with thick tapestries – Omodt knew this from having been in the owner’s apartment – and only a little honey-colored light oozed around the edges of the window-frame. The air smelled faintly of turmeric.

Omodt pitched the brick underhand against the big window at the front of the store. The brick bounced off the window and fell at his feet. He reached down and threw the brick overhead. This time, it pierced the window and sailed far into the store and the glass fell in a satisfying way, sheets of it descending to explode on the pavement. Someone shouted and Omodt ran away. He dashed through an alley to the street on which second-hand clothes emporium was located. In the distance, he saw the sign announcing the Elk’s Lodge. A couple blocks behind him, a siren shrieked. The sidewalk in front of the Elk’s Lodge was empty. Some big old Buicks and Lincoln Continentals like boats were drawn up in front of the Lodge. A mannequin in the second-hand shop for big ladies beckoned blankly at him.

Omodt dived into the gap between the buildings and plunged back into the darkness, passing by the stack of asbestos shingles, and, then, leaned back until the walls on both sides of him gripped tight. A police cruiser with its light swirling red against sidewalk and walls sluiced by. Omodt backed deeper into the crevasse and, then, his foot caught on a beer bottle pitched deep into the recess and he lost his balance. He started to fall backward and, indeed, one of his legs came off the ground, but the tight vertex between the Bank and the Elk’s Lodge caught him. His shoulders were now constricted so that he couldn’t raise his arms and he felt as if the walls were now tightening to crush him. The vise gripping him half-upright compressed his chest and he couldn’t breathe properly.

The walls constricting his shoulders and chest were solid and utterly immoveable. Omodt felt his whole world, everything that he knew and believed, and all of his memories converging in those impenetrable walls. He gasped and cried-out and, then, a flashlight probed the darkness, its beams alighting on his face.

"He’s here," a cop cried. "Come out of there, you motherfucker!"

Omodt shouted that he was trapped.

"Trapped, my ass," the cop said. Again he blinded Omodt with the beams of his flashlight. "If I have to come in there and haul out your ass, I’m gonna tase you."

"I’m stuck," Omodt said.

More cops gathered. The slit in the wall was only a couple blocks from the Law Enforcement Center.

A dog barked.

"Send in the police dog officer," one of the cops cried.

"No dog!" Omodt cried. He was afraid of dogs.

The dog was big as a mule. It pranced into the fissure between the buildings. Omodt howled and the dog lunged forward to seize his left calf in its jaws.

"Don’t you hurt my dog," the cop screamed.

The dog yanked and yanked at Omodt and he felt his pants tear first and, then, the flesh in his leg.

"It’s killing me," Omodt cried.

"Here Gunther," the cop said. Gunther was the name of the police dog officer. Reluctantly, Gunther backed out of the crevasse. Omodt felt blood pooling in the tennis shoe on his left foot.

"Good dog," the cop said.

Someone else said: "He’s jammed in there." Another voice said: "Get Lieutenant Nguyen."

Lieutenant Nguyen was Vietnamese and very slender. Omodt began to scream for help.

After awhile, Lieutenant Nguyen appeared. "What’s the racket?" he asked.

Four or five flashlight beams skittered over the broken glass and the heap of old asbestos tiles.

"We’ve got to the pull this shithead out of the crack," the cop with the dog said.

"He’s bleeding like a stuck pig," Lieutenant Nguyen said.

"The asshole tried to hurt Gunther," the dog-cop said.

Omodt could see the shadow of the big hound with his tail wagging frantically. The dog hunched up to deposit a big coil of shit on the sidewalk.

"He’s excited," the dog-cop said apologetically.

Lieutenant Nguyen stepped sideways into the crevasse and edged toward Omodt.

"Please get me out," Omodt said.

Lieutenant Nguyen reached out his hand and said: "Grab a hold, buddy, and I’ll pull you out."

"I can’t move my arms," Omodt replied. Nguyen shook his head in disgust and backed away.

On the sidewalk, Lieutenant Nguyen asked: " How’d he get jammed in there?"

A chorus of voices from other cops said: "It’s not our fault."

Someone said: "We’re gonna have to get a wedge of some kind and winch the buildings apart."

"What?"

"We have to separate the buildings, use a big pry-bar to pry them apart," one of the cops said.

"How will that work?" Lieutenant Nguyen said.

"Maybe, use the ‘Jaws of Life’, you know, the car-crash extraction device."

"I don’t think so," Lieutenant Nguyen said. The police dog officer barked merrily.

Omodt knew that he was trapped forever. His world had narrowed to this dark slit that seemed to press ever more tightly against him with each breath that he took. He groaned and tears coursed down his cheek.

　

3.

I have always been interested in caves. When I moved to this part of the world, I learned that the land just beyond the county-line was karst formation riddled with deep and intricate caves. Sometimes, I spent weekends driving the gravel roads in the next county, studying from my car the hundreds of sinkholes dotting the terrain. The sinkholes were funnel-shaped and their sloping sides were covered with old trees and dense sumac underbrush and there were yellowish limestone boulders at the base of the pit, half-covered with rusted-out augers and other farm equipment. There were a couple commercial show-caves that I toured. In one of them, a high slippery dome was pierced by a tiny stream and a ribbon of water, about the width of the flow from a garden hose, plummeted down into the muddy darkness.

I found an old map, printed in the late sixties, and it was marked with a red dot showing the location of something called Coldwater Cavern. I searched along the county roads for some sign of the cavern but there were no markers. At the church-school nearby, an expensive Lutheran college famous for its choirs and orchestras and bands, I saw an exhibit of pictures showing Coldwater Cavern. The images were glistening with light reflected off flowstone formations and the slick walls of the huge cave seemed to be decorated with rock shapes that looked like dolphins and the humped backs of whales. The black and white photographs were lustrous with cave-ooze glistening on stone but there was nothing that explained where the cavern was located or how to enter it.

I looked at some plat maps and found several tracts of land that didn’t seem owned by local farmer but, rather, an enigmatic nature conservancy. One of these acreages was at the side of a winding country lane, at the bottom of a long ravine leading to a narrow valley where a creek braided itself across a meadow and, then, slid over a bed of bright pebbles next to a grey, striated and overhanging cliff. I found a path mowed across the meadow and, even, a stile that crossed a barbed wire fence. The mowed path led to the creek side where the water made a deep puddle under the frowning cliff face and vanished. I supposed that this was the siphon that led under the rock to Coldwater Cavern, but I was never able to verify this one way or the other.

Katherine worked for me as a paralegal. She was from the bluff country where the sinkholes and caves were located. Katherine said that she knew of an old show-cave, closed now for many years, but still accessible. The local kids explored the cave and, if I wished, she and her husband, Nick, would show me the place. Of course, I was excited at this opportunity.

Today, an interstate freeway courses across the hilly, green country, deep valleys with slopes too steep to plow covered by old trees, tiny serpentine creeks gushing from narrow ravines, and small outcroppings of limestone, slate-grey or chalk-colored among the groves. We met at a bar at a crossroads on one of the last exits before the state-line. A church and some mobile homes were scattered around the intersection and the bar had a long porch and a kind of hitching rail where people could tether their motorcycles. Katherine and Nick were in a battered pick-up and there was a local man, someone with access to the land riding between them in the cab. I followed them along the old state highway down a steep hill to the bottom of the nearby valley. Then, we got out and hiked up the slope, opening several stock-gates and passing some troughs for the cattle. The big animals were resting in the shade of the trees on the hillside. A zigzag path, once covered with wood chips but now mostly overgrown climbed toward the bluff-top. The cave was accessed through a big metal door set in a concrete block retaining wall.

The door was covered with red rust and it was both tightly shut and chained. The local man clawed at the door until it was open about 10 inches and, then, slid the chain down so that it lay on the ground at the threshold. He was slender and sunburned and, without any difficulty, he slid through the opening. It was a hot day and a fine mist gathered around the opening into the cave.

Katherine and Nick slipped through the opening. Then, it was my turn.

"I don’t think, I’ll fit," I said.

"Just suck in your gut and push through," Nick said.

I inhaled and put one leg through the slit. Then, I turned my head to the side and pressed my belly against the heavy metal door. I was caught for a moment and tried to turn my head to look down. My nose and cheek hit the cold metal hard enough to make me feel that my nose was bleeding.

"Come on!" someone shouted. I leaned to the side to let gravity pull me down and, then, my shirt ripped, buttons spraying off into the darkness and I was inside. It felt as if I had gouged my stomach badly. I ran my fingers up and down my midsection. Except for the torn shirt, I seemed more or less intact.

The air in the cave was musty and smelled of earthworms and mud. I could see flashlight beams prodding caramel-colored thighs of flowstone, slick and wet and rising to cracked groin overhead. I turned on my flashlight and saw some old electrical wire dangling down from an eroded panel spiked into the cave wall. Flows of mud had buried most of the concrete sidewalk, but bits of it were visible, between ankle-deep tongues of slushy-looking dirt. I stumbled ahead and caught up with the group. They were standing about a hundred feet beyond the door in a bulb-shaped room. Some big tablet-shaped rocks had fallen from the dome overhead and, when the flashlights were turned upward, we could see a fissure lined with little white stalactites, all of them soaking wet, and, then, higher, a rock vault through which spidery roots of trees penetrated. I had a strong sense of trespass, that we had entered a place where we were not supposed to be. Everyone was whispering as if to avoid alarming the spirits in the place. Several crawl-spaces radiated away from the room and there was a corkscrew-like hole in the floor. We edged around the hole and saw that the room was rimmed with fragile terraces of pale flowstone, some of them cupping pools of cold water. At the far end of the room, the walls and ceiling came to a kind of point, a vertex barricaded by fat, greasy boulders fallen from the ceiling.

"It goes on past those rocks," the local man said. Droplets of water decorated his forehead like gems. "But you have to crawl," he added.

The cave was really just a cramped tunnel leading to this room. Big shadowy holes opened up to the side, sockets in a black skull. "You can go down those side passages," the local man said. "They don’t really go anywhere."

A forest of six-inch white stalactites caught our flashlight beams and raked them into serrated shadow and light.

We went back to the metal door. The door was still partly open and the warmth and humidity of the outside was palpable near that threshold. I could smell the grass outside and moist trees and, even, the warm mushroom-smell of the shadowy places under the sumac thickets.

One by one, the members of our group turned silhouettes and, then, inserted themselves through the opening. I was the last. The door frightened me. It’s edges felt cold and sharp. I pressed myself into the gap and was caught half-in and half-out of the opening. This time I panicked and exhaled and, then, was held fast in grip of the door. I pushed as hard as I could against the door but there was no give. In fact, the door seemed to fall back against me even more tightly and I was trapped.

On the grassy slope below the cave, my friends were laughing and pointing at the shit-colored smears of mud on their pants and shirts and their feet were all encased in the stuff. I saw them kick at the sod to knock the mud off their shoes and, then, begin slipping and sliding down the hill.

They were leaving me behind.

I had been practicing law for five or six years at that time and I fancied that I was a good lawyer, trustworthy and aggressive and clever. But where were all my briefs now, where my motions in limine because this moment was, indeed, in limine – that is, on the threshold, as it were? Where had my arguments and my pleadings and my statements of fact gone? Where were my summations, my client conferences, my letters dictated by the hundred, by the thousand even? Where was my easy facility with words, my glib self-assurance, my confidence and my expertise? I was helpless.

The door had slammed shut on me and I was caught half-inside and half-outside and my friends turned their back to me.

Katherine and Nick stood in a sunny spot on the hill, between two big, old oak trees. Cows dotted the valley. The local man took off his feed cap and waved it in the air and said something about wanting a beer. Then, they continued downhill, the green slopes exhaling with relief around them.

　

4.

The soil of Cappadocia is thin, a scalp six inches deep atop a brittle skull of compacted volcanic ash. The tufa ash is readily excavated – it is an excellent medium for tunneling.

I was on a bus tour of Turkey and we had come from the badlands, a territory of spiky pumice pillars and columns, many of them hollowed out to form caves where Christian hermits had once lived. In some of the caves there were pictures of God as a majestic emperor spreading his arms like the wings of a condor over the gloomy domes of crumbling volcanic ash. The Turks were Muslims and when they seized these grottoes and monastic cells, they went into the caves and pounded out the faces of Christ and his saints in the wall frescoes. The figures wore togas like Roman emperors and had long sensitive fingers and intelligent-looking toes but they were faceless.

We came down from the ridge all incised with dusty ravines and narrow portals between the chalk- and salmon-colored spires. My mother, traveling with us on this trip, had paid a man with a red fez to take her picture on a camel. The camel bowed to my mother but she was afraid to climb the rickety ladder necessary to mount the beast. The man with the fez was coaxing my mother up the wooden steps as if she were a balky camel herself.

We were traveling during the week that Australians remember their World War One dead at Gallipoli. About half of the tour group were boisterous Australians and quieter, more circumspect Kiwis from New Zealand. The bus crossed a desolate plain with eroded badlands around the edges of the high mesas with cypresses outlining their rims.

We came to an underground city. A small, poor-looking village occupied a hillside and there were some tractors plowing in a field, a few pickups parked around the edge of the hamlet and a couple of small cafes near the entrance to the hidden city, little lunch counters selling olives and felafel and shish-kabob doner on styrofoam plates. Red Coca-cola signs marked the cafes.

The tour guide told us that the underground city had been excavated in the 13^th century when the Tartars, the Golden Horde had overrun this part of Turkey. The city was a place of refuge, a hiding place from the Mongols. Because of that history, the opening into the underground city was inconspicuous, a kind of shallow quarry, with a narrow, dusty passageway sloping down and away from the crater cut in the volcanic ash. There were slits in the pit wall on either side of the entry and a big, granite millstone round as the full moon, leaned against the grey pumice wall.

"This is not mandatory," the guide said. He was a Turk living in South Africa where he led safaris when it was winter in Turkey. It snows a lot in Turkey and can be very cold – the climate is, as they say, continental. During the winter in Turkey, when the roads were buried in snow and ice, the guide led wildlife tours in the veldt near his home in Johannisberg. He was a great admirer of Ataturk but opposed to Erdogan and said that he was happy that he had emigrated from his homeland.

"How bad is it?" a couple of the Australian women said. "Oh, not bad at all," the guide said. "It’s actually quite roomy down there. We will see a Christian church. But there’s a tight spot – you have to crawl on hands and knees about four meters – the roof is only a meter above the ground."

I did the calculations in my mind. My brother, Christopher, who is a big man, shook his head. He took my mother by the hand and said: "We’ll go to the café and have a beer."

This part of Anatolia was riddled with underground cities. Every village had a hole and a narrow passageway, readily defended by only a few men, slanting down into a warren of hollowed-out chambers. Battles had been fought at these places. The Mongols came upon deserted towns and searched for the people and, in most cases, they could hear them – sheep and lambs and goats bleating in secret corrals under the ground. Then, they attacked the entrances, but complex pulley-systems yanked the huge round granite slabs over the round portals leading underground. Those approaches were impenetrable and so the Mongols went over the dusty and stony hillsides, seeking places where they could sink shafts down into the caverns below. Generally, there was a funnel hidden somewhere over the city, access for rain-water filling a cistern underground. The Mongols tried to widen those shafts so that they could descend into the network of chambers below. They searched-out airshafts and melted lead over great fires, ladling the molten metal down the airshafts to seal them and burn out the defenders. Sieges like this lasted for weeks, even months, until the Mongols’ provisions failed – they lived off foraging on the land and, so, they departed.

The guide explained this to us, while handing out tickets. We waited in a line outside the shadowy, oval opening. You had to squat to enter and, then, walk with bent knees for about fifty feet on a steep trail that went downward, reversing itself on several small, gloomy landings for defensive purposes. The air was thick and pungent with rotting roots and, then, cooler as the darkness increased.

We stood in a little basilica, an inverted cup of crumbling ash-grey stone. Several shadowy angels with wings like dragonflies were faintly discernible in the vault above – they were faceless; the Mussulmen had erected some kind of scaffolding to hammer off their eyes and noses and mouths and the craters where their heads once had been gave them a sepulchral and macabre aspect. An eroded stone goblet, chiseled for a giant, rested in the middle of the floor – it was a baptismal font. Dark niches of uncertain depth crowded the walls like hooded monks.

We went down again. The underground city was comprised of featureless chamber extending to the right and left of the low corridor. An Ariadne’s thread of wire-and-post electrical cord linked bulbs, beams vibrating in the heavy, still air. Our feet tramped up clouds of powder and the hallway was so narrow that he had to walk through the gloom in single-file.

Every couple hundred feet, the corridor widened and there were round rooms with arched ceilings eight or nine feet all and niches as well benches carved into the wall – the burrow was all alike, one room like another, small cell-like chambers linked by low stoops extending indefinitely to the right and left of the hall. More small rooms, each about the size of a little car radiated away from the larger chambers. "There’s four levels like this," the tour guide for the underground city said over her shoulder.

"Over ten-thousand people could take refuge here," the guide told us. This tour-guide was a slender woman who seemed to shiver in the cold and was wearing a rubbery-looking windbreaker. This number seemed doubtful to me.

We walked some more and came to the squeeze. You had to kneel and crawl forward with your head down facing the dusty, pebble strewn floor. If you lifted your head, it would crack against the low-slung ceiling. At the narrowest point, shoulders and hips touched the walls on both sides.

Every one giggled nervously and the first couple tourists, more lithe and young than the rest of us scrambled through the keyhole with ease. I was behind an older man from Australia, a big broad, square-shaped fellow with shoulders like the horns of a bull. He looked fit and powerful. Everyone from Australia and New Zealand looked very fit and healthy, faces flushed with sun burn.

The man dropped to his knees and shoved ahead and I followed crawling after him with my face turned down over the backs of his tennis shoes. He reached the tightest part of the squeeze. Then, suddenly he stopped. I crawled forward and almost collided with the broad beam of his buttocks. "Nope," he said. He made a choking sound and his legs thrashed a little and I was afraid that his heels would kick me in the eye. Perhaps, he had inhaled some of the dust in the crawl space.

"Nope," he said again. His wife was ahead of him. "I told you so," she said. "Mate," he said to me, "can you back up a little?" I tried but my feet collided with someone jammed tightly against my buttocks. We were all crouched nose to ass in the narrow corridor.

"I got people tight on me behind," I said. The man moaned: "Nope." "Come forward," his wife called. With an effort and groaned, the man fell forward onto his chest and belly and, then, slowly writhed through the squeeze, twisting his hips sideways flopping like a fish out of water. "Oh, oh, oh," he said. 　

I waited until he had cleared the tightest part of the crawlspace and, then, hustled through myself, head cocked downward. The walls clutched at me for a second and I was hyper ventilating, inhaling more of the pumice dust than was healthy and so coughing, but I came through on the other side. I had trouble getting off my bruised knees. The tiny tour guide was standing on the other side of the squeeze and she helped to pull me to my feet. The Australian ahead of me looked pale and his hands were shaking. "Is there anything more like that?" he asked. "No, nothing at all like that," the woman said. "That’s the worst of it."

The Australian shook his head and tried to get his breath, but, at first, seemed to have trouble inhaling and exhaling.

"You see," he said. "I was in Vietnam when I was 21 and I was assigned a platoon that had to clear out Viet Cong tunnels. They had whole armies hidden underground and you’d go down there and follow the stench and sometimes you’d find dead ones face to face with you in hole. Other times, they’d be alive and there’d be a bit of a grapple you might expect. I have nightmares about it."

The man’s wife was apologetic. "I should never have let you come down here," she said.

"It reminded me of the spider-holes in Vietnam," the big Australian said. Most of the things in the world, you can escape but not memories. They hunt you down.

Later, we stood blinking in the sun. The Australians were convivial. My brother and mother were sitting on steel chairs under a awning at the café down the street eating baklava. Later, the Australians demanded that the tour guide take us to liquor store in the next big town. Turkey is a Muslim city and liquor stores are rare as hen’s teeth. The bus maneuvered down some shady side-streets and found the store. The tour-guide and a couple Australians went into the bar and came out with several cases of Fosters – they treated everyone on the bus who wanted a beer to a cold one.

　

5.

A baby is born. The birth canal is tight. The child is lubricated with blood and amniotic fluid. Emerging from the womb, the infant shakes his clenched fists in the air like a tiny boxer.

　

6.

The flood found a slope that was otherwise imperceptible and magnified it. The torrent of water ran white with rapids along the edge of the plowed field, next to long wooden fence shielding the acres of wrecked cars from view. The cars were shattered and leaking fluids and the flood bore on its shoulders slicks of blood-red transmission fluid and brake fluid and iridescent shimmers of oil. The drainage ditch surged with water from the snow-melt and hissed as the cold drizzle fell into the bristling waves and across the stubble of the farm-land and the distant shelter belts bare and bony with winter and the old farmhouses standing by their old barns with white mud-slathered chickens in their yards.

Someone had left a red wheelbarrow on the slope tilting down to the furious drainage ditch. Hector thought something depended upon the red wheelbarrow. He lived with his parents and a half-dozen immigrants from El Salvador in the farmhouse across the State Highway from the auto salvage place. It was convenient: the immigrants cars were old and ruinous and, when they failed, the men could go across the State Highway to the salvage lots’ office, show the desk-man there the broken part on a picture on a cell-phone and, then, buy a replacement. The refugees’ small children played in the old outbuildings and cavernous empty barn on the farmstead, dive-bombed their by doves and swallows that nested in the rafters of the big building. This drainage ditch pierced the right-of-way under the State Highway. The white water was constricted by silver, corrugated culvert big enough for a man to walk through when the stream was low. On the side of the road where the immigrants lived, the water fanned out across the field deeper than the ditch and sent peacock-tail whorls of pale frothy water, some of it decorated with the discharge from the wrecked cars, across the open fields. The water looked dangerous and the mothers living in the farmhouse told their kids to stay away from it. The State Highway was always busy with cars speeding to and fro and it was a danger too. Hector knew that he wasn’t allowed to play in the water or, for that matter, cross the state highway. But, then, he saw the red wheelbarrow slick with rain and so much depended upon that wheelbarrow poised on the other side of the highway. Hector took a deep breath and looked right and left, hurrying across the asphalt and trying to make himself small so that his mama would not see him breaking her commandments.

The wheelbarrow cupped some brownish water pricked by the drizzle and there was a muddy tennis shoe dipped in the puddle there. The mud on the shoe was all clotted, brown, like a kind of glistening clay. Hector slid down the bank toward the white water slamming through the culvert. The water was fascinating, bearing white apparitions on its back. It was something you could watch for a long time.

A couple cars passed on the State Highway. Hector had a Tootsie Roll in his pocket and so he took off one of his mittens to reach for the candy. The mitten flopped down the steep embankment, it’s thumb prodded by the flood. Hector knew that his mother would be angry if he lost the mitten and, so, he put the candy still unwrapped back in his pocket and gingerly inched down the slope toward the mitten. When he was within arm’s reach, he extended his arm, lost his balance and plopped into the water. For a moment, his face was underwater, but, then, he turned over and could breathe. Hector put his feet down but couldn’t find the bottom and, already, his legs and arms felt numb.

The water propelled him toward the flooded culvert. He raised his hands to take hold of the culvert, but, then, the water sucked him under.

Hector surfaced once inside the culvert. There was an air-space big enough for him to look up to see the curved metal above him, clotted with parts of dead animals and thick bouquets of rotting leaves. The current was irresistable and it shot him toward the other side of the tunnel. He could see brightness there and white foam.

Some barbed wire was caught on a submerged tree braced diagonally in culvert’s outlet. The water forced Hector into the barbed wire and he was held fast. He kicked the tree and it shifted dragging him under.

At the farmhouse, a woman stood on the porch. She shouted a name. The stream overflowing the ditch fanned out over a muddy field. A truck passed on the highway above the culvert. Then, a mini-van hurried past, a woman at the driver’s wheel and two children buckled in behind her with a sloppy-looking reddish dog.

A half mile from the culvert, two deer came from a shelter belt to drink from a big puddle that reflected the sky and some high clouds overhead. A crow stood on a clod of mud watching the deer.

　

8.

My friend was a bit older and had many interests. He was the most vibrant lively man I ever knew. He thought that I was prone to melancholy and, so, often, he would walk down the street from his home, rouse me from my torpor, and take me for a walk. "Cheer up," he said. Then, he quoted Edmund Lear or, possibly, Lewis Carroll: "The world is so full of a number of things. It’s a wonder we’re not all as happy as kings." Then, we would walk for many blocks talking with one another. The way is short when you share it with a friend.

My friend knew a lot about jazz and he, sometimes, invited me into his house to listen to his records. He could read in several different languages and tried to teach me Greek and Latin grammar. (I couldn’t get the hang of it.) He traveled in Europe every Spring and, sometimes, brought back German books that he thought I would enjoy. He taught science classes at the Community College and was particularly admired for his lectures on geology and earth science. He had finagled his way into many mines deep in the earth and taken pictures of the underground workings that he could show as slides in his classes. When he was younger and more agile, he had explored some caves over in the bluff country above the Mississippi. He wrote a humorous column for the local newspaper and was an Elder at his Church. Sometimes, he was even invited to preach. I think he read two or three books a week and several magazines, although he was too frugal to subscribe to the periodicals – he read them in college library. He sang in a men’s ensemble, played tennis, and was writing a book about a famous mine rescue that had occurred in Montana. His working title for the book was A Tight Squeeze and told the story how brave men from several neighboring towns rushed to the mine calamity and rescued the men trapped underground.

One evening, I was watching TV and, it occurred to me, that I had not gone on a stroll for several months with my friend. This thought disturbed me a little and so I put on my shoes and walked down to his house six or seven blocks away. My friend’s wife met me at the door. She told me that my friend was napping but that he would be very glad for my company. I sat in the living room. It was gloomy and the walls and plaster ceiling had a greenish cast. My friend appeared and seemed happy to see me waiting for him. We went outside. A bat flew by.

My friend said: "The owl of Minerva flies only in the twilight."

"But that was a bat," I said.

"Just so," he replied.

The trees and lawns were shadowy. The streets were deserted.

My friend said that he was thinking of retiring from instruction at the Community College. He was entitled to a pension and said that he thought that he had better begin enjoying that money.

"Will you go to Paris this coming Spring?" I asked. My friend loved to visit Paris.

"No," he said. "It’s too much of a hassle. The flight just about cripples you."

I knew that my friend had fallen on the tennis court and twisted his knee. He no longer played tennis.

I asked him about jazz. He said that he hadn’t heard anything that interested him recently. "But I haven’t made much of attempt to hear new music," he told. In the past, he often traveled to Minneapolis where he enjoyed hearing musicians play in clubs. "We should go up there for some music," I said. "The traffic is awful," he replied.

A couple weeks later, I had lunch with him. He seemed distracted and told me that he had relinquished his newspaper column. "I don’t feel that I have much to say anymore," he explained. My friend told me that he no longer sang in the gospel ensemble.

"I don’t like the way my voice sounds," he said.

At the end of the semester, he retired from teaching. He stopped going to church. "I can’t pray anymore," he told me.

A month passed and I walked by his house and saw him sitting on his front porch. His eyes looked red.

He had a book on his lap. "What are you reading?" I asked.

It was the New Testament in Greek. "My eyes don’t work right," he said. "I can’t make out the letters."

I didn’t hear from him for several weeks and was alarmed. I went to his house and knocked on the door. "He’s napping," his wife said when she answered. "I’m afraid to bother him."

"I thought we could listen to some of his jazz records," I said. "He has given those away, all of them," his wife told me.

I said that I would take the chance of angering him and went to his bedroom. He was on his back without his glasses and looked old and frail.

He nodded slightly to me when I came into the darkened room.

"How is your book going?" I asked.

"I stopped writing it a year ago," he said. "It just seemed pointless."

"Are you okay?" I asked.

"I’m fine," he said. And, then, he turned his face to the wall.