Tunneling

A unique, captivating first novel chronicles the adventures of Rachel Finch, a nerdy, sickly seventh-grader who lives a secret double life as an adventurer in space-time. By the author of A Burden of Earth. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

Tunneling

I was wrapped in his cape and we were flying through the firmament, which was very beautiful and bright and yet perfectly colorless and also great-tasting, and above us burned a flame that shone white and yet not white, as all color had disappeared and with it the desperate, confused cruelties of humanity and meanwhile the coelum empyreum and hoards of Angels hovered in an extremely celestial fashion, the Seraphim Cherubim Dominions and Powers all hovered singing praise in perfect pitch and turning their perfectly illumined faces up toward what I could just glimpse to be a fiery and variegated Throne and below us breathed the more resolute perfection of the primum mobile, I really liked that primum mobile, the way it got things going, and I knew I was safe in spite of being a human girl because he had his ways of keeping me safe and then suddenly I was alone and sailing through that unalterable fifth substance, alone and bouncing amongst the fixed stars, alone and crashing through one crystalline sphere after another on which hung as if in some renegade sixth-grade science project (I was going into seventh) the giant and terrible planets, Saturn Jupiter Mars and Venus, also Mercury, and as the light waned and the music of these spheres faded from my too-human ears I smashed on through that last sphere and sailed on past the Moon into mutable space, into this realm of mortal sin and all that festers, and I burst helter-skelter into a cold morning sky and went reeling above miniature fields and tiny thatched roofs, and went wheeling arms and legs akimbo into a flock of high-flying honking geese and an embankment of thick cloud, and went tumbling down toward stone belfries and the vaster monasteries and the massive Tower itself, and just as I plummeted toward Bridgegate with its weathered skulls and their mouths like Os, he caught me.

"Gotcha," he said.

"You must be kidding, S-Man," I said, rising and dusting off my britches. "What does the 'S' stand for anyhow?"

"Never mind," he said uneasily. "We're there."

"This isn't Prague, is it?"

I knew well enough from those weathered skulls; how often had I read about the remains of such prisoners, who dig tunnels by night and hide the dirt by swallowing! How often had I thought of standing before the gates of London Bridge! And yet--and this irked more than his having hurled me through an Elizabethan cosmos--I wanted above all things to fly back in time (not this much) and east in space (a little more) to Prague, where I hoped finally to make the acquaintance of the great Franz Kafka.

It was Kafka's "Metamorphosis" that had inspired me to write, or rather to pledge my young life to the cause of writing.

"Patience," S-Man would only remark.

"That's easy for you to say."

S-Man shrugged powerful shoulders. His cape fluttered. His brown boots shifted on the cobblestones. Months before his world debut, S-Man was still experimenting with diverse workaday styles; on this occasion he wore an indigo cape spangled with stars and signs of the zodiac, a tight-fitting leotard on the bosom of which a slew of Ss tore off into purplish oblivion and a thick pair of mustard-colored leggings above thick boots.

"You could apologize," I told him.

S-Man stood gazing out over the city of London.

I had never been to London before and was impressed in spite of my vocation by the breadth and sweep of the Thames. To either side of the covered bridge lay wharves and jetties, and seafaring vessels, and innumerable tugs laden with dried goods, tanned hides and the thick-spun cloths destined for this and that banks of the river. A fishwife waited on a quay, her arms bent and in them a wooden crate. S-Man could smell its contents from where we stood and he pinched his nose. He was always making me laugh, even when the doctor was coming. She was a grim woman of German extraction; I wondered what she would have thought to catch me out of bed!

A carriage hurtled noisily toward London Bridge; we jumped to let it pass. The driver, cursing, urged his horses on into the shadowy covered shops that spanned the river. The river sparkled. A yellow sun shone; a gray oak tree spread gnarled limbs; the world seemed composed of myriad levels of correspondence. "Shall we?" he asked. "Why not?" We turned and walked on and he filled me in on the details of our mission. Shall we? Why not? the very air, also the earth, the water, the flames flickering above a lone chimney--all seemed to sing softly, unless that was the music of crystalline spheres still humming in my ear. I hummed along a few notes and then stopped because even in Elizabethan England, I could not seem to carry a tune.

"Never mind," S-Man said.

"Is this the way?"

He pointed south. So we set off in the opposite direction of London proper, that is, toward the tannery and the bear gardens. We passed a tinker with his cart, a farmer on his wagon drawn by two stumbling horses. We stepped around patches of thick brown mud and avoided a heap of sunbaked straw in which several mice were spontaneously generating. We paused, for a moment or so, to observe a beaver at work; a doe lingering on the edge of a thicket; then walked on briskly, looking for all the globe like an Elizabethan player or perhaps a magician and his boy--a given of my travels with the superhero, who rearranged at will the fibers of his outfit, was that I disguise myself as a boy. That was fine with me! In fact I had recently taken a second vow, more private than the first. The mud deepened, the sky turned a bolder shade of blue. I couldn't sing but from the bushes a bird could and did, in piercing, mellifluous syllables.

Upon reaching Southwark, however, we found our progress halted by a woman in muddy skirts who emerged to block the lane. She said something I couldn't understand. S-Man bowed low, his cape grazing the soil; then, rising, he shook his head.

The woman slipped behind a gate into the depths of a florid garden.

"What did she want?" I asked suspiciously but S-Man shook his head. He looked very fine in his cloak, with the blue-black curls at his nape peculiarly fetching.

Not for anything, I swore, stumbling after him; not for anything in the world would I become a woman.

"You think too much," he said, turning back. His eyes were the color of coal.

"Quit it."

With his superbreath he was making an S of rustling leaves--the S wound around my ankles, crawled over my Keds! "Just quit it," I said. His eyes narrowed. From somewhere a bear growled. My companion strode toward the theater entrance, an oaken door cut into a rounded wooden wall. I hurried after him and inside, where the long stage stretched emptily beneath voluminous wooden tiers.

"Where is he?" I asked, clambering after.

Already S-Man was scanning the Globe with his S-vision; I followed his gaze as far as my human eyes could, to the open roof above and the earthen floor below us; later I would learn more about what I was and wasn't seeing, about the heavens with their hidden dressing room and balcony, the trapdoor and hellish enclave beneath the stage and beyond it little rooms, alcoves and crannies where a man and woman might go to be alone.

"Well?"

He shook his head.

I picked up a largish pebble and tossed it onto the stage. Seconds later another pebble fell through the open roof and a faint smell of mold or earth wafted toward us.

"Uh-oh," I said loudly.

S-Man nodded.

Even my human senses could pick up the mildly unpleasant odors of certain villains. Worst by far was the odor of Malathion exuded by the archvillain Laff Riot, whom S-Man had still in real Earth time to encounter, and yet whom he detested and by whom he was detested and feared. Nothing of this temporal paradox passed through my mind as we stood beneath the open roof, surrounded by that inimitable if lesser odor of villainy, and beneath it the smell of old sweat and the ambiguous promise of rain. Sure enough a larger pebble fell; another; a veritable shower of pebbles and stones cascaded upon the great stage where a lone tree rattled its branches.

A similar tree--representative, I suppose, of Dunsinane--adorned the jacket of a book I read in New Jersey, when my parents were fooled into thinking me asleep. I was severely asthmatic and my nocturnal rasping caused them much concern. If they knew the life I actually led, not in bed but beneath it! I kept apples and canned juices stashed there and a flashlight under my pillow, and I would wait only for them to leave, the door to close, before climbing beneath my bed. There is a particular feel to cold, hard floor against a girl's belly; meanwhile box springs reflected the flashlight's neat glow; books lay carefully stacked (I was otherwise a slob, although recent research into Kafka's life had turned up his Spartan habits) according to the intricate mysteries of their call numbers. Who doesn't love a call number? I would stay there, sometimes reading, sometimes not, until the dust motes swam like little fishes toward sunlight pouring through the window; later, at breakfast, my mother would touch my forehead and my father raise his eyes, and my sister, Elaine, get sent once more for his stethoscope. "I can't understand it," my mother would sigh, meaning that I seemed to go to bed healthy only to wake up exhausted and wheezing.

"It happened just like that to the Bubble Boy," Elaine would say darkly.

The Bubble Boy, as we schoolchildren all knew from our Weekly Readers, was a child whose allergies so threatened his life that he was obliged to lead it inside a translucent plastic bubble-shaped dome. He lived in a hospital in Arizona and only saw his family during visiting hours.

But now S-Man leaped onto the stage and bounded into the air. I stood my ground and breathed deeply of the year 1609. I knew my part in our mission--we were here to save Shakespeare from himself, a notion that made total sense. Already we were experiencing terrific mental communications. A veritable avalanche of pebbles tumbled through the open ceiling onto the great stage and a black hat sailed down after, its lone feather fluttering loose and a tiny man darting to catch it as S-Man plunged through the roof to stand, legs parted, arms folded amid rocks still crashing around him.

Mr. Stick, that telepathic imp, sat on the air, arms and legs folded in bold mimicry!

"I give you thirty seconds to get off this planet," S-Man said.

"Ha-ha!" said the tiny man.

My companion's face flushed.

"Twenty seconds," he said.

"Ha-ha-ha!" said the tiny green creature. He darted here, there, hovering in the branches of the lone tree. S-Man took a deep breath and folded his arms. No doubt he was counseling himself to be patient.

"Make that fifteen," he merely said.

At such a rate I might never meet Mr. Kafka! I vaulted the stage, dodging the last rock or so as I raced into the players' room, grabbed a quill and an inkwell, scribbled the blocky letters of a word (backward) onto a scrap of parchment and ran once more into daylight.

"Hey," I said. "Can you read this, mister?"

The imp flew near to get a better look.

I held my breath as he whistled in my face. I would have pitied him, had it not been for his exhumations. In the months before my asthma I had often felt the urge to display my reading skills to teachers and classmates. I had felt it like another scourge: Look at me, listen to me. . . . But I knew that Mr. Stick, with his pixie face and green costume--he looked a little like Peter Pan--was not to be trusted; unlike Laff Riot, who had no sense of humor, Mr. Stick tended to find the cruelest jokes funny. The harder he laughed, the immenser his tele-empathic powers grew; the only way to exile him to his own environment--I shudder even now to think what that must have been--was to trick him into admitting the tragic nature of this universe.

Sure enough: just as recklessly as he had flown down, he pronounced the letters D-E-A-T-H and was gone.

"Well done," said S-Man.

My companion motioned for me to hold on as we flew off again toward the bend in the river. Was that a trick of the era's light, or a young cupid stretched upon a cloud? Even now, these years later--it is four centuries or thirty years later, take your pick--opening The Complete Pelican Shakespeare to its frontispiece, I feel that subtle shock of recognition. The cupid wears only a fluttering white cloth and its thighs dimple and it doesn't seem the least concerned with being a girl or a boy. Even now its sheer cuteness, head to toe, recalls that other zone, the firmament my companion and I had traversed, and the music of those revolving spheres and the notion or hypernotion of a perfection that knows no color, nor divisions of class nor age nor even, as I say, gender. But we have spiraled down the air. Clouds puff white against a background of river and sky; houses proliferate like skunkweed on the opposing shore. How distinctly I recall each detail of our voyages; if only I had time to tell you all!


From the Hardcover edition.

BETH BOSWORTH is the author of A Burden of Earth and Other Stories and of numerous stories, which have appeared in The Kenyon Review and elsewhere. She is founding editor of The Saint Ann’s Review and has taught English and writing at Saint Ann’s School, The New School for Social Research and CUNY’s New York City Technical College. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.


From the Hardcover edition.