Story by: Michael Zahniser

Art by: David Huang

Reading Time: 15 minutes

The elevator doors opened and noise hit Walter like a slap in the face: shrieks of laughter, pattering feet, and a shrill buzz that must have been either a kazoo or a distressed waterfowl. He pulled his cap down tighter and tried to sneak past the common room. No luck. Miri’s two youngest boys spotted him, flopped down on the rug, and started barking like seals.

The kids called him Walter the Walrus, on account of the whiskers and the wrinkles; also probably because of the bald patch and the blubber, although he preferred not to think about that. His husband Tom thought the name was hilarious. If Tom were here Walter would’ve gotten down on his twice-reconstructed knees and played along just to make him laugh. But without him, Walter didn’t have the energy for this game. He retreated to the elevator. Miri followed. “Walter, wait! Jamal, take your brothers outside. Walter—”

He squeezed between the closing doors, pressed the button for the second floor, and let out a sigh that came closer to a sob. When they moved to the city, Tom had picked this particular housing block because of the families. It would keep them forever youthful, he said.

A tear ran down Walter’s face and lodged in the wrinkles under his chin.

The elevator stopped and the doors opened. “Walter, I’m so sorry.” Miri was breathing heavily; her young legs had carried her up the stairs faster than Walter’s elevator.

He wiped his face. “They’re just kids. They can’t understand.”

She pointed to his satchel. “Running errands? We can fetch stuff for you if you want. You don’t have to do this alone.”

“No, I’m— I was going to visit Tom.”

“Oh.” She scuffed at a spot on the tiles with her sandal.

Walter tried to smooth out his expression. He didn’t want Miri to feel bad. “We had just started reading a book together when— Well, I thought he’d want to hear the ending.” He couldn’t leave Tom alone in the silence of the undercity.

“You’re a good man.” Behind them the elevator slid shut and whirred off to a different floor. Miri studied his face. “Do you want a hug?”

He considered it. “No. But, thank you.”

“Tell Tom we miss him.”

He snuck out the rear and across the terrace like someone’s secret boyfriend making an early morning escape. The trees were mostly bare but a few buds had opened, revealing shriveled golden leaves. Spring was coming to the Emerald City. Walter had worked on the urban planning team back in the day. Before the first tower was framed, the city had already existed in his mind: skyscrapers rising like forested mountains, an arboretum under glass. Even in winter when the roofs turned brown and the vines lost their leaves, he could lose himself in the serene beauty of the architecture.

His knees complained as he climbed down the stairs to the street. A bus arrived, only half full. He took a window seat and watched the colors of springtime blur past. Ten minutes later the bus deposited him on a hemlock-fringed plaza overlooking the waterfront. An arched entryway like the mouth of a beached whale beckoned him down into the undercity. “Well, here I am,” he said to no one in particular.

The escalator rattled out a dull thunk-a-thunk-a-thunk as he descended. The space above ground held homes, offices, and the farming stacks. The warrens beneath them served more prosaic purposes: storage, water reclamation, geothermal plants. In late summer when all the shade trees and reflective paint in the world couldn’t keep the streets at a livable temperature, these hallways would throng with visitors and pop-up markets. Today, aside from a few city employees and robotic carts, they were deserted.

A shallow ramp led down into the catacombs. The smell hit him at once, fresh and loamy like a barnyard. A worker nodded in silent greeting. Piles of hay, wood chips, and starter soil filled the corner by the entrance. To his left, the room stretched so far into the distance that perspective tapered the walls down almost to a point. Metal cylinders, each a meter and a half tall, lay on their sides in long rows. A lamp hung over each one, leaving the rest of the chamber dim and cozy like the reading room at the library, full of shadows you could lose yourself in.

He found his way to capsule forty-three, borrowed a folding chair that a previous visitor had left against the wall, and set his satchel down. “I miss you, babe.” He fished out the book. “Where were we? Ah, yes.” The only other visitors were far in the distance; they wouldn’t be bothered if Walter read aloud.

Halfway through the chapter—already his throat was growing hoarse—a man with two teenagers in tow came down the ramp. Walter lowered his voice to avoid disturbing them. As they headed toward the far end of the room he wondered who they had lost. A sibling? A parent? He leaned against the cylinder’s hatch, pressing his cheek to the bare metal. “Tom, I yelled at Miri today. You would’ve done better.”

The metal was warm. Startled, Walter leapt to his feet, dropping the book. He felt the door. The heat was unmistakable. Could it be? Of course not. He knew better: the stroke, the doctors. But why—? He stumbled off to find one of the workers. “My husband’s capsule, it’s warm. Could it—? Is he—?” Surely no one would make such a mistake.

The young man set his wrench down on the cart he’d been repairing and stood up. “I’m sorry, they should’ve covered that during intake. The heat is natural. Have you ever seen a compost pile steaming in the middle of winter?”

“Oh, right.” They probably had explained it; he’d been in no state to absorb information. He and Tom had both agreed this was the way they wanted to go, but theory had turned to reality faster than he was prepared for.

“Is there anything I can help you with?”

Walter felt like a fool. He wondered how many distraught visitors this boy had to deal with every day. He shook his head. “What’s it like, working down here? Do you enjoy it?”

The young man, who a second ago had seemed eager to escape the conversation, stretched his shoulders and smiled. “I do, actually. Maybe it’s silly, but I think it matters that someone’s taking care of them. It’s not a job I’d want to leave to the robots.”

“God, no,” Walter said, imagining the catacombs transformed into a gleaming and desolate factory. “That would be awful.”

****

When he returned to the surface, the sun was setting. The pale yellow sky silhouetted the arm of a construction crane. A new residential tower was going up by the waterfront. The crane’s basket, carrying pine trees bound for the upper balconies, swung in the wind like a giant bowl of incense. Behind him, the skyscrapers caught the sun, their windows bright as molten metal. This was the time of day when Tom, whether hunched over his desk or taking a turn at dishwasher duty in the big kitchen, would stop his work to look outside and sing a song to greet the evening.

As he rode home, crammed into the corner of a crowded bus, the sky turned red, then purple, then black. Lights came on in the windows overhead. Back home, the common room was packed. A man from the fifth floor recognized him. “Walter! We saved you a plate.”

Tom would’ve remembered the man’s name; Walter did not. “Thanks.” He hadn’t eaten in the big kitchen since the day they took Tom to the hospital. In fact he’d hardly eaten at all. He glanced at the food: bean casserole. His stomach rumbled.

The man smiled. “We’re playing board games in the den later, if you want to join us. No pressure.”

“Maybe.”

He took the elevator to his own apartment and sat on the couch to eat. The casserole was a blend of lentils, kidney beans, and mushrooms—probably from the greenhouse. Tomorrow he would have to make something to share in return; otherwise he’d feel bad about taking food from the big table.

As he washed the plate, Walter caught sight of his reflection in the window, a tired old man with a bad comb-over. He wrapped a blanket around his shoulders and sat back down. Then he heard, or imagined, a quiet cough from the other end of the couch, the throat-clearing noise Tom used to make before bringing up something he knew Walter wouldn’t want to hear. Walter grunted. “I know, babe, I know.” Isolation was doing him no good. He stood, checked his hair in the bathroom mirror, threw on a cardigan, then stopped with his hand on the knob and leaned his head against the door.

He sighed. “I can’t, Tom, I can’t. It’s just pity. They don’t even know me.”

****

Weeks rolled by and everything stayed the same: the empty hallways underground, the bus, the quiet of his apartment. He ate in the corner of the big kitchen. Sometimes people tried to talk to him. And on one particularly rainy day when the elevator dumped him out into the atrium, Walter was greeted by the same shrill laughter as before. Miri’s kids were running in and out of the building, leaping through the waterfall cascading down off the sodden roof. They’d left wet patches on the floor. Miri was working her way down a row of plants by the windows, checking for ripe tomatoes.

Walter sighed, squared his shoulders, and stepped out of the elevator. The boys stopped playing and lined up next to their mother with wide and silent eyes. She must have tried to explain to them. They’d ordered themselves by age; their bodies formed a tidy trapezoid of diminishing height. Her youngest blurted out, “They’re turning Mister Tom into dirt?”

“Yeah.” He stepped carefully around the puddles.

“Why?”

Miri looked ready to interrupt, but Walter didn’t need rescuing. “Well, all our lives we take and take from the earth, and the earth gets tired. Tom wanted to give back.” He tried to chuckle to force the gloom out of his voice. “Back in the day, you know how they fertilized crops? With fossilized dinosaur poop mixed with acid.” Potty humor was a safe bet for entertaining kids.

“Gross!” The boys’ eyes lit up.

“But then we ran out.”

“No more dinosaur poop?”

Miri tousled her youngest son’s hair. “Remember the Sabbath Prairies, on the other side of the mountains? That’s old farmland. The dirt got thin and the desert grew, and people knew we had to let the land rest or there wouldn’t be anything left at all.”

“And now there’s buffaloes!”

“So many happy buffaloes,” Walter agreed.

Miri set down the watering can. “Could we visit Tom later, if the rain stops and the kids dry off?”

Walter smiled. “I’m sure Tom would love that.”

His coat was drenched before he reached the bus stop, but Walter didn’t mind; this had always been his kind of weather. Cherry blossoms floated in the gutters. After the storm blew past, the greywater cisterns would be filled to the brim and buds and flowers would be bursting open.

Walter was the only passenger. He spent the ride watching raindrops gather on the windows, racing each other across the glass. Down the escalator, through the hallways with his shoes squeaking and water dripping off his cap: had it really only been three weeks? Already his feet had memorized the route. When he reached the catacombs, a young woman checking temperature readings greeted him by name and Walter was taken aback. Was he coming too often? Were the workers talking amongst themselves?

After the first day, a sturdy chair with cushions had been waiting for him beside Tom’s capsule whenever he visited. He sat down. Moisture had gotten into his satchel. The book’s pages were damp and wavy, reminding him of Tom’s hair after a walk in the rain. A motor whirred, the cylinder’s insides spun with a sifting, rattling sound, and the platform rocked like the deck of a ship. Walter found his place. “We’re halfway through the book, Tom.”

Sooner or later, reading always put him to sleep. In his dreams he was a ferryman, poling a barge made of stone down a black river deep underground.

****

Young voices echoed down the corridor, waking him. Walter picked up the book, combed his hair back into place with his fingers, then wondered what he was trying to prove or to whom. Miri and her kids tromped down the ramp. The metal rang like a drum, and visitors turned to see what the commotion was about.

The kids greeted him, far too loudly. Outdoor voices. Jamal, Miri’s oldest, pressed his forehead against the cylinder and shut his eyes. Walter wondered what the boy was thinking. Trying to see inside? Imagining what it would be like to lie there? The other two glanced over Walter’s shoulders and lost interest when they saw that the book had no pictures. One boy cuffed the other and ran away. They chased each other around the back of the neighboring capsule, weaving among the carts and machinery. Miri looked horrified. “Eli! Ben! No running.” Walter repeated the names to himself, trying to commit them to memory. He had depended on Tom for so much.

Jamal looked up and down the row, his brow furrowed—counting? Walter wondered if the boy was old enough to do the math in his head. In a city of a million souls who spend ninety years above ground and forty days below it, how many rooms to house them? How many capsules? How many mourners? How much grief?

Miri pulled up another chair. “Where will they put him, when he’s ready?”

“I said I didn’t want to know.” Her eyes widened. He hurried to explain. “This way no matter where I go in the city, I can tell myself Tom is right beside me.”

Eli lay on the floor with his arms crossed over his chest like a mummy. He wrinkled his nose. “It smells bad.”

“Eli! It’s just a garden smell.”

In the distance, workers had begun drawing curtains around one of the cylinders. People were gathering. Walter whispered to Miri, “They must be interring someone new.”

He’d underestimated the children’s hearing. Ben shot off in that direction. “I wanna watch.”

“No, Ben.” Miri chased after him and scooped him up.

Eli scrambled to his feet. “Are they naked?” His voice was so loud Walter was sure the crowd could hear. Miri flinched. Taking care of three boys on her own, she always rode the ragged edge of exhaustion, but he had seldom seen her this frazzled.

A clunk came from behind the curtains. He remembered the container sliding open, three weeks earlier, to receive Tom’s body. “I want to watch!” Ben shouted.

Miri, still holding Ben in one arm, grabbed Eli’s hand with the other and dragged him toward the exit. They nearly collided with a procession coming down the ramp, four people carrying a bier. Miri yelped and pulled Eli in the opposite direction. “Ow!” Eli shouted. Ben grabbed Miri’s hair, pulling himself up to peer over her shoulder. She retreated toward the corner where the piles of hay and starter soil sat. Walter and Jamal followed. Jamal looked helpless and terrified: old enough, Walter guessed, to recognize the distress on his mom’s face, but too young to know how to fix it.

He glanced in Tom’s direction, hoping for help or inspiration. How would Tom distract the boys and quiet them down? He’d probably tell a story. Groaning and trying not to think of how hard it would be to get up again, he lowered himself to the ground. “Come feel how soft the hay is.” He leaned against the pile and patted the space next to him—and flinched as, predictably, Eli dove in cannonball-style. “Shh. Shut your eyes for a minute.” Miri and Ben sat beside him. Miri picked straw out of Eli’s hair.

“Remember the rain this morning,” Walter said. “Remember it soaking the rooftops, trailing down the ivy, dripping into the gutters. Remember the sound of the rain. Remember how it smells. The trees are waking up. The buds are opening. Their winter roots are so thirsty. They drink up the water and breathe it out into the air, and the clouds suck in moisture and drift over the hills, and the mountains wring them dry like a sponge and the rain falls down and the rivers swell and the trees stretch their fingers toward the sky and we’re all a part of it, you and me and Tom, and the Earth spins round and round and here we are living out our lives in this fragile scrim of atmosphere between stone and sky. Shut your eyes and feel the planet turn.”

****

The boys were quiet. Even Ben was unusually somber until halfway down the corridor. Then he shouted, “Ice cream?”

Miri blushed. So she’d resorted to bribery to convince the kids to visit Tom. Walter smiled, not wanting her to feel ashamed. “I hope you’re buying me some, too,” he said.

Later they rode home with sticky fingers and ice-cream-smeared faces. Someone was going to have to clean the bus windows tonight. It stopped and the boys exploded out, running back into the atrium. Walter and Miri followed at a more leisurely pace. Ben had found his kazoo again. As he ran circles around the common room, approaching and receding, Walter could swear he heard a Doppler shift like a passing ambulance.

The sun broke through the clouds, gleaming on the horizon, a disk of burnished bronze filling the windows with golden light.

****

And the weeks rolled by, until a day came when Walter emerged from the escalator to find that full summer had arrived while he journeyed underground. Leaves, no longer shriveled and tender, spread broad and green overhead. The air was rich and alive, the smell of a city in bloom. He walked to the seawall and sat on a bench to watch the sun go down. Birds chirped; starlings were nesting in the ivy. A breeze sighed through the branches. Tom was gone, and Tom was everywhere.

And the world spun on.

Stay tuned…

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