When the surge came, it marked the fifteenth hour of the baby’s ceaseless crying. Jean-Pierre pulled it close to his chest, shielding its eyes and squinting his own against the bright wash of light, whispering nonsense and “shhh” into its fresh, new ear. At its peak, the surge, the electricity could be felt on the skin, but it faded quickly, leaving post-coital hollowness in everything that could feel. The surge was what passed for celestial time in the place they called Treppenwitz, and fifteen hours, whether night or day, was a long, long time.

“Shut it up, then,” said Luc, done with cleaning his pistol for the fifteenth time in as many sleepless hours. “Shut it up or I will.”

Jean-Pierre didn’t hear. He heard the crying, though. He heard the crying and knew that it had to end. He eyed Sophie just beyond his legs on the concrete, stiff and bloodied. “We should’ve closed her eyes,” he said to nobody.

“Close them, then,” said Luc.

“We should’ve,” said Jean-Pierre.

“Then do it,” said Luc.

Desmond chanced leaving his corner to meet Jean-Pierre’s ear with a whisper. “The tit,” he said, cutting an eye to pale Sophie’s shape. “Try the tit,” and it was back to his corner, to his box and treasures.

The tit was dry, had been dry or soured or anything but giving, but Jean-Pierre tried it all the same, placing the baby on the lifeless chest, guiding its mouth to the cold nipple. “We should’ve closed her eyes,” he said, as the baby cried on.

“Goddammit!” said Luc. “She’s your problem. Hell with you and her eyes.”

Another voice, one from A Column called out an agreement, “And to hell with your shouting and that goddamn crying.”

Desmond’s box was nearing overflow, the little trays, their holes brimming with with buttons and coins and shell casings and pins and clasps—jewelry, too—all of it arranged tray by tray into categories of color and substance. He was fidgeting for a space for Sophie’s ring, the one he’d taken while whispering the word “push” into her ear. It wasn’t only a matter of room. It had to fit where it fit best, alongside gold or in with rings or in some other category, such as love. Every choice seemed wrong. Fifteen hours and thirty configurations, and he was no nearer a satisfying solution.

The surge. The sixteenth hour.

“She needs milk,” said Desmond.

“Milk?” said Luc. “She’s past milk.”

“The baby,” said Desmond. “The baby.”

“There is no milk,” said Luc. “It’ll die before long, besides. Then we’ll have some quiet, milk or no.”

Jean-Pierre squeezed the baby closer into his chest, until her breathing became labored. “Fuck you, she’ll die. You’ll die.”

Luc said nothing. He cleaned his gun, nothing resembling a thought on his face, for the thousandth time.

Desmond, grinning over his most inspired configuration of items in the box, looked up to say, “The Moins-Quinze.”

Luc laughed. “The Moins-Quinze,” he said. “So, there’s a dairy there, now. Where does it end?”

Desmond said nothing.

“The switch,” said Jean-Pierre.

“Fuck the switch,” said Luc. “There is no switch.” He stood, stretching his neck, his handgun hung at his side, and crossed to the grand door of Une, rusted and meaningless, for effect. He kicked it with the steel toe of his boot. “There is no switch. There’s no outside, no milk. There’s only this. So shut up that goddamn baby or I’ll throw it down the stair and leave it to find your goddamn switch.”

“You can feel it on Moins-Treize,” said Desmond. He traced the edges of the keys he’d found there with his index finger. “It’s too much to stand.”

“And on and on,” said Luc. “The baby will die like everything else, but these pointless fairy stories will keep for as long as there are idiots who’ll hear them.”

Desmond closed his box and pulled its strap over his neck as he stood. “Come then,” he said. “Prove me a liar.”

Luc smiled.

It was an hour’s walk to the stair. Desmond led. Luc followed, though each knew his way. The people before them, their fathers, if they’d had such, had called it L’esprit d’escalier, a joke of sorts whose meaning had been lost well before Luc and Desmond descended its steps. The baby’s cries had grown so thin by then that there was little telling if they were real or imagined.

“Probably dead, already,” said Luc. “This is pointless.”

“Of course it is,” said Desmond, his eyes nearly vanishing in the intense stairway lighting as the surge came to remind them of time’s persistence.

Approaching the landing for Moins-Trois, Desmond spotted a silver cuff-link and pocketed it.

“You’re a rat,” said Luc.

Desmond nodded, pushing on to the next flight.

The stair was largely untraveled below Moins-Cinq, the temperature too low and the ambient current too much for most. “Moins-Huit is my deepest,” said Luc, taking the lead as Desmond flagged. “You?”

“Moins-Treize,” Desmond replied, “but you knew that.”

“I suppose.”

With their slow descent, the surge-lights grew more and more intense. At Moins-Neuf, Desmond fished through the pockets of his coat and produced a pair of dark spectacles with a missing arm. It took some fidgeting to get them to stay in place, but they did, in time.

“I should take those from you,” said Luc.

“What would that make you?”

“It wouldn’t make me anything, my friend. There’s nothing to be.”

Two more levels and it was becoming difficult to breathe. Beyond that, the two found they had to consciously focus to remember their task. They tried hands at games, at first, but none stuck. In time, they agreed to the simple exercise of calling numbers in sequence.

“Seventy-eight,” Desmond would call.

“Seventy-nine,” would be Luc’s reply, and on and on.

By “two-hundred-ninety-seven” their voices were trembling too much to be understood. The air vibrated around them, inside of them. Their muscles twitched with external anticipation.

“Moins-Treize,” Desmond attempted to say, but there was no sense in the other of his words. The trinkets in his box shook, the material of their make taking on different tones as their resonant frequencies were met. The sound had become a sustained harmony, one that struck the travelers as familiar and ancient.

Luc struggled with his lungs to ask why anybody would have children in a place like this, why they shouldn’t be exiled down to these depths and away from the sane among them, but it was all nonsense, and then the surge came, and the two fell to their knees, and the voice of the box rose to become a choir of angels bent on their salvation. The two wept involuntarily. They stood when it had passed, now more able to live in the ambient wash, so subtle in contrast to what they’d just survived.

They moved more slowly, now, each action requiring conscious effort, down to breathing. They couldn’t forget to breathe. They couldn’t forget to remember. Luc turned and pointed up, a suggestion that they return to the surface. To Luc, Desmond, the light upon him as it was, looked as though he wore a halo, a saint with broken spectacles and a box of grave robbings.

Desmond shook his head, pointing further down. “One more,” he said, but the words were lost.

The understanding was enough. They ventured forward, lead in their feet, each step calculated and arriving from miles away. At the landing of Moins-Quinze, as the departed the humming steel of L’esprit, Luc’s nose let out a trickle of blood. Desmond checked below his own. He felt nothing.

Jean-Pierre had a book up top, one about divers. Desmond pictured the drawing on the cover, the man in the suit with its hose extending toward the surface. He looked over his shoulder to see if some hose of his own extended up the stair. There was none. There were only the two men, basements upon basements deep. The light on that floor had a quality of sound to it, so much so that the two senses seemed to blend.

Luc wiped nervously at his face as they made their way toward the center of the floor, bloodying his sleeves and cheeks. There was no dairy, no lost tribe, no nothing—two idiots and nothing more. He raised his gun to Desmond, desperate or angry, but his finger was too wild to trust, and he quickly lowered it. Desmond paid no mind. He pushed forward, past Luc. He could feel the machines ahead. He could feel the whole of it all up there, the source of—

The surge came. The box at Desmond’s side, its little voices, screamed until they could only be heard in his bones. Luc’s gun discharged, untouched. Before he could turn, Desmond fell, blacked out. The surge passed. Desmond stood. He stood alone. He checked Luc and saw no wound from the errant bullet, but he was dead, all the same—a victim of the surge. He took the necklace from around the dead man’s neck, silver and as worthless as anything, closed the dead eyes that regarded his theft, and continued along his course.

The machines were there as he’d imagined, the tops of them, at least. A great circle of catwalk stretched around a shaft too vast to be understood in a single glance. Huge corkscrews twisted slowly at the bellows bags that kept Treppenwitz breathing and lit, the works described by the fathers and long since relegated to myth. It was the heart of the world. Below, far below, there was no end. The geothermals were down there, but he saw no sign.

As for the switch, the key to the outside, if it was real, it was too well hid to be found. If he had a suit like the divers, he thought, he might be better able to search. The mind was too fragile for open exposure, was all, and he had no suit. There was only his little box and its singing. There was only the knowing that he couldn’t make it away before the next surge and that he wouldn’t survive it when it came. The baby would die, sure, but so would everything else in its time; so he tried to sing in step with his treasures, a joyous sound down through the well of machinery, and he smiled for knowing that at least he’d die with a purpose greater than trying to live. He smiled. He sang. He pulled his box to his chest like a baby, felt it sing through him, and stared into the infinite, awaiting its coming hand.

Timestamp: 07.05.08 at 04:49 PM. Filed under: Fiction.