Escape Benjamin Simpson The single caged sixty-watt bulb cast harsh shadows upon the dark earth. Justin lay on his stomach digging forward with the trowel, pushing the dirt underneath and then behind with his feet. He had old t-shirts wrapped around his arms to protect the elbows and a visor to keep the dirt from falling in his eyes. Justin paused for a moment and looked at the dirt in front of him, the soft earth with the occasional large stone. By his elbow stood a wooden two by four from the house overhead, holding up the tunnel, the long gently twisting lines of grain visible in the harsh light. Justin adjusts himself and hits the cage of the light with his elbow, the bulb pops and dies. There is darkness. Open eyed darkness. And the weight of the twenty feet of dirt above him slams into his mind. There is the sudden fear, the fear of crushing, the fear of falling, the fear of buried alive, it is just fear, primordial, screaming from the top of his spine. The breath comes quickly and harsh in the dense stale air of the tunnel. As he pushes backward, the mound of dirt behind his feet impedes his progress. Each night he does this same maneuver in the light. But the darkness pulls forth the fears, the fear of large animals with fangs following, the fear of screaming and no one hearing, the fear of the unknown, the fear of darkness, the fear of, the fear of. Just fear pumping chemicals through the body. Justin pushes harder against the resisting dirt, and struggles along the length of the tunnel. Once through the mound of dirt, there is a little light, just a touch so the outlines are visible. And then more light, and his feet hit the end of the tunnel and he squirms around and climbs up the ladder. Standing in his living room with the dirt falling from his clothes, his breath dimishes. What the hell am I doing? He thinks, looking down the square hole in the middle of his living room with the ladder protruding like a piece of modern art. What the hell am I doing? He thinks again and glances around the living room. The couch and the coffee table and the standing lamp and the television all look normal against the surreal ladder. The television has a magazine cut out taped over the screen, showing palm trees and golden sand. Justin looks at his slowly empting house and considers his current life. Next time there will be two light bulbs in the tunnel. *** It is a day, not a day that is hot or cold. Not a day that is cloudy or sunny. It is just another day in a life. The birds sing and sometimes they are noticed and sometimes they are not. The trees are green and the flowers bloom and sometimes they are noticed and sometimes not. Cars drive down the single lane of the road with a soft purr and Justin sits in his car. It is not a car that anyone wants. It is the car that is left over after someone buys a new car. The passenger door is a deeper red than the rest of the car, and a scrape down that side highlights the missing gas door. The bird shit has etched itself into the flaking discolored paint on the hood, roof, and trunk. One of the taillights is covered with red plastic. Justin sits back in the drivers seat and takes a deep breath through his nose and exhales from his mouth. Reaching forward, he turns the key again. The engine spins, wa wa wa wa wa wa and he holds the key and listens to it wind down like a record player slowly spinning to a stop. Taking another deep breath he looks out to the street and the color fades away. The red car ahead fades to pale pink, the black one across the street is now grey, the leaves fade from green and the sky is no longer blue. But the details stand out in sharp focus. The deep grooves of the tree trunk, the small stones imbedded in the asphalt, the key scratches on the trunk lock of the car ahead, and the stray wisps of the clouds in the pale sky. The sharpness begins to fade and the scene falls out of focus. Justin holds his eyes open, not blinking to reset the focus and the scene falls apart and condenses to large blobs of grey and black and white and nothing but fuzz and pointlessness. After a moment or a minute sat staring at nothing, Justin holds his eyes closed and then reopens them and looks at the world. The world is there in front of him, the grain of the grey-white picket fence, the green grass, the black street. The blue sky is imprisoned in the windshield of his car, held back and obscured by the cracked glass. Justin blinks his eyes again, grabs his briefcase and walks toward the bus stop, failing to lock his car. *** "What happened to you?" "My car wouldn't start." "You need to get rid of that piece of junk and buy a new car, something to get you here on time, you know we can finance it for you. We would just take it out of your paycheck." "Yes I know, how long to pay it off?" "Only five years." Only five years, Justin says to himself, while his boss walks away. *** "You should get a Mini, chicks dig them." "I'm not sure." "No, you should get a Miata, a convertible in the summer, out in the sun." "I don't know, maybe I could spend the money on something else." "You hafta have a car, how else are you gonna meet woman." "I was thinking of a vacation, somewhere like Tahiti. Somewhere far away, completely different from here." "That's too far away, the flight will kill you and you will never enjoy the vacation, why don't you go to Ensenada, all the college chicks will be there." "I guess the point would be to get a way from all the same people. I don't know." "Well I think you should get a Beetle." "Yea, if you're Gay." The table erupts in laughter. "Hey come on Justin, it's only Monday, and we're going to Club PostNuclear on Friday, come with us." "I don't know." "Yes you're coming with us, and since you don't have a car, we'll even come and get you." "I don't know." "Don't worry about it, we will pick you up on Friday." The four young men's discussion at the yellow plastic lunch table wanders in other directions. ***
That evening Justin sat in the window of the bus and watched the world pass by. The McDonalds cups with striped plastic straws sitting in the gutter, the ripped advertisements with beautiful women staring blankly into a dark world of dirt and ugliness. The models stare at the graffiti on the brick wall. They stare at the old ugly women and laugh. They stare at the dirt and hire someone to clean their house. At his stop there is a convenience store and Justin buys a six-pack of on-sale beer and a frozen pizza and does not notice the clerk. Justin walks home past his broken car and past his mailbox with its credit card bills and past his creaking gate and into his house. Justin likes his house, he has a house, not an apartment. His co-workers live in apartments with housing regulations and locked gates and noisy neighbors and parking laws and pools and mortgages. But Justin lives in a house, it was a one-bedroom house, with a small bedroom, a small kitchen and a small living room. It is an old house, with the paint peeling and the floors crooked and small cracks in the walls. The landlord does not care, he has owned it for forty years and lives in Florida and never talks to Justin. Justin sends his rent check every month and there is no other correspondence. The other thing Justin loves about his house is the location. It sits on the outskirts of the first suburban influx of this large city. Some time in 1850's. Where the houses were built close enough to downtown to take a horse drawn carriage to work. His house used to be the edge of the city. And so beyond his ivy covered chain link back fence is the swath, an arch of green surrounding the city. But beyond the swath, was modern suburbia, the suburbia of the 1960's with its cars and its strip malls and its vision of the perfect world viewed through a camera lens.
*** On the television was nothing, and the channels changed over and over again, trying to find something that had been seen before, something simple and easy. The beer is slowly drunk and the pizza eaten and he watches the world inside the television. Mothers tell him that a ring from this jewelry store will make the daughter love him. A man tells him that using this credit card will make his family happy on their vacation. Women drop their panties if you use this body spray. And that drinking this beer will have bikini clad women rubbing their glistening bodies against you. Justin picks up his beer and it is the same as the advertisement and he sighs. Stopping at Channel 31 Steve McQueen bounces his rubber ball against the wall of solitary confinement in a German Prisoner of War camp. Justin sits back and drinks and watches. They dig tunnels, they row down a river to freedom, they steal airplanes and crash, and they catch trains and get caught, and Steve rides a motorcycle into a barbed wire fence. Justin sat and watched at the screen and again his eyes glazed over and he stared at the flickering screen and saw the patterns and realized what he could do, what he would do, how he could get away. Underneath the coffee table and the rug, was the wooden floor of the living room. The boards creaked under Justin's bouncing. It would be easy to go through these boards. Justin stood in the center of his living room and looked out the rear window toward the swath, there was only darkness outside, but his mind created the wilderness of the swath, and the mountains strong and tall beyond, then the open ocean with a swaying boat and then palm trees along a deserted beach with the soft waves and nothing else. The television news babbled beside him, a school bus fell off an overpass, a gunman stormed a building, a suicide bomber killed eleven. Justin had a small hammer and two screwdrivers in his everything drawer. The wooden floor in the living room splintered easily under the chiseling of the screwdriver. Small slivers of wood were pushed to the side, and finally he broke through the floor with a large smack of the hammer and the screwdriver fell into the abyss below. The hole was too small to put his eye to and still have light fall inside, but Justin could smell the decay and the wet earth. Justin smiled as he sat in bed and reviewed in his mind what tools he would need. *** "Have you decided what car to buy?" "No, but I think I'm gonna to take a vacation first, go away for a week or two, then come back and buy a new car." "Where are you going to go?" "I think Costa Rica." "I heard that prostitution is legal there and there are hundreds of bars where they just wait for you." "I want to be able to sit on a beach and do nothing," Justin said while staring at his Heart Smart Gordito Burrito(TM). "But maybe I will do that too." "When are you going?" "I was thinking about that last night, and I think it will be three months from now, I think that is how long it will take me." Justin pauses for a moment and then says almost to himself with a small smile. "If I work hard I should be ready." *** At the hardware store next to the convenience store Justin wanders the isles looking for the tools in his mind. A chisel to break up the wood. A larger hammer for the chisel. A saw to make a hole. A flashlight to see down. And a shovel to dig in the earth. At the counter the old man types his purchases into the fifty-year-old push button machine and looks at a lamented paper on the counter for the tax. Justin realizes that his shoulders are slumped and he is looking around fugitively, like he is buying his first Hustler. Taking a large breath and pulling back his shoulders he smiles at the man. The old man just looks back solidly. The old man looks like he has been behind this counter for fifty years, in this dark tool emporium. Justin looks into his eyes and sees nothing. Just another day in another week in another year.
*** At home Justin almost throws away the credit card bills, but stops and smiles and puts them in his briefcase. The television volume is up, to cover the hammering of the chisel. Finally there is a hole large enough to look through. Just a dirt floor, with some random animal droppings, cobwebs and a lone screwdriver. The saw easily makes a hole. There are crossbeams two feet apart underneath the tongue and groove floor. Justin makes a hole four feet by two, just smaller than his coffee table. Kneeling down on the dirt floor below his house, Justin looks around and sees the underside of his home and his life. He can see nothing worthwhile. Justin grabs the shovel and pushes it into the soil with his foot. It goes in easily and he tosses the dirt to the side. After a few feet down, Justin retires for the evening, placing the rug and coffee table over the hole. There is a noticeable dip in the center of the rug. Tomorrow he will purchase a board to make the hole unnoticeable. In the morning shower Justin takes his time digging the dirt from under his fingernails. *** Despite, or because of, his credit card debt, Justin has excellent credit. Justin applies for thirty credit cards before lunch. *** It was Friday night and Justin stood in the hole in his living room. He threw the dirt in the crawl space underneath his house, he would soon need to find somewhere else to hide the dirt. But at this moment there was a rock, his first large rock, and he dug around each side trying to find the edges, trying to pull it up. Will I need a pulley to get this out of there? Will there be more? Should I dig around? Could I break it apart? Then the doorbell rang. Like a frightened rabbit, Justin froze. Only his head and shoulders were visible above the hole in the living room. He twitched. There was silence and he twitched again. Then someone hammered on the door. "Hey Justin, Let's Go Dancing!" Justin finally took a breath and stood silently, he locked the door, right? There was another pause and the door was hammered upon again. The handle turned back and forth but the door did not open. There was mumbling from behind the door and then footsteps away. Justin sat down in the hole and looked around. With his shoulders slumped, he looked around anxiously, suddenly knowing that what he was doing was wrong, that he would be caught. That they would find him out, and single him out, and laugh. But the soft earth ground in his palm felt beautiful and real. And the hole gaping in his living room made him smile. The shoulders went back and Justin started to dig again. *** At twenty feet down the downward progress ended, and Justin headed south, toward the swath. A trowel was now the easiest way to move forward. At the Library he checked out an old book on building tunnels. How to keep it from collapsing, how to joist the wood, how to breathe. Justin was saving as much money as possible, after finding some free wood in the neighborhood to hold up the tunnel, he contemplated buying some at the hardware store. But there must be a better way, he thought. A few days later, while sitting in his cubicle at work, he realized that his house was made of wood. That would be easy, and somehow beautiful to leave a gutted house behind. That night he started to strip the sheetrock off the walls and pull out the two by fours that did not hold up the ceiling. The work continued steadily. The crawl space underneath his house was now full of dirt and in the evenings he would walk through the swath behind his house, dropping dirt from his backpack, staring up between the trees at the few stars, and wondering where he would emerge. ***
Justin's new credit cards were arriving daily and they all went into his briefcase waiting for the day. He horded his paychecks and one day took them all to the bank printed on front. "Hello, I would like to cash these please." The lady smiled behind the counter. "We charge four dollars to cash each of these." "But the checks are from this bank." "That is our policy." "Why." "I don't know. Don't you have an account you can put it into?" "I got rid of my account, I don't need it any more." "You could open an account here." "I closed it because I don't need it any more, why would I want to open one here?" There was a pause in the conversation. "Well, would you still like to cash these?" "I guess so." "You could get a friend cash them for you." "I don't have any friends." There was silence for the rest of the transaction. *** The time was growing near for the exodus. The television, couch, bed frame, books and bookshelf, desk and extra clothing were all sold. Red notices arrived in the mail for the utilities. Justin spent some time local army-navy store. Rugged clothes with lots of pockets and dark colors, simple black boots, a black canvas backpack and a grey floppy hat to fight off the sun. *** It was a week before the start of vacation and other than the final push to the surface the tunnel was finished. Justin spent his time walking the swath and the city in his new dark clothes. Justin looked at the city like a stranger, like an eavesdropper. No longer a part of the game, a step away, a moment out of touch. Justin felt free and content. He felt like nothing mattered and he could do anything. *** In the afternoon Justin said goodbye to his friends and they told him to have a good time and he said that he would. Getting home, Justin wondered what happened to his car. After it was towed, what did they do with it? Would it be crushed and made in to a new car, or just left abandoned in a lot, slowly rusting away into nothing. In the back yard, twenty feet above his tunnel, Justin built a bonfire in the earth. The last remaining wood from the house caught fire easily and Justin threw the last remnants of his life upon it. The box of receipts and tax returns sat square on the top. One side disintegrated in the flames and some papers slid out onto the glowing logs. Some of it caught the gusts from the flames and spun up and away. Floating pieces of flame in the sky. Justin reminded himself that he must keep all official documents for seven years. The house was clean and naked inside. Only the mattress was left, sitting in the center of the bedroom with the library book on tunnels on top. From the living room, Justin looked through the missing walls into every room. Justin stood at the top of the hole and looked around. He smiled at the house, he smiled at the small backpack at his feet and he smiled as he looked out the black back window toward the swath. Inside the tunnel Justin tunneled upward. The trowel finally broke through the surface after an hour or two of work. Justin clicks off both the lamps, and pushes his head up through the hole and looks around. There is no one around. His backpack is the first through the hole, and then himself. The full moon is shining, a lucky happenstance, and Justin brushes the dirt from his clothes and hair. Justin scans the trees. No one around. With his compass in his hand, his head and shoulders back, Justin walks south.
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