“I don’t loaf,” Andy says. “I do things.”
“Likely story,” Les says.
“Big talk from someone who’s been playing with dogs all day. I’ve—” Andy stops because he realizes that Les is joking. Les’s smile slips into puzzlement. Sam hands Andy a pair of comically large headphones, which Andy slips over his ears, and the world goes mercifully silent.
Dr. Cameron keeps pushing. Enough already. Fuck. OK, Andy had been the one to discover his father. That day, he’d been doing equipment-carry training, a relay race with coiled hoses and mocked-up light portable pumps, and the assessor stood there with a stopwatch, looking disappointed in everyone. Andy, knackered, ignored him when he got home. His father had the telly to Top of the Pops. Just a week before, his father had asked how things were going, and Andy said, “Jesus, why do you care? You’re a fucking waste,” and his dad said, “Don’t you talk to me that way,” and Andy replied, “Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me.” This conversation replayed itself every time Andy passed his father, and that day, he had no desire to relive it one more time.
And if Andy hadn’t noticed his father’s pallid complexion when he’d gotten home; and if Andy hadn’t stayed in his room until he heard his mother come home and scream, “Andy, Andy, come quick!”; and if Andy had hesitated touching his father’s flabby neck to check for a pulse; and if Andy had performed chest compressions so violently that his father’s sternum cracked — if all these things had happened or hadn’t happened, what difference did it make?
“My father is dead,” Andy tells Dr. Cameron, and Dr. Cameron responds, “I know.”
“I hear something,” says Andy.
“What?” says Colin. “What is it?”
“Scratching.”
“Are you sure it’s not static?” Les asks. “Sometimes the wires get staticky. Shite Chinese equipment.”
“Everyone shut the fuck up!” says Andy. The men look at him as if he’s never said a harsh word in his life. “I can’t hear a fucking thing with all this noise.”
“You heard him,” Colin says. “Settle down.”
Andy presses the headphones tight. Anything. Anything at all. Just a sign. One sign and we can get you out.
The sound is so faint that it could be a sigh.
“Someone’s down there!” Andy cries. “I’m sure of it.”
“Well, let’s be sure,” Colin says. “Get the video probe. We can’t do much more heavy digging, or this place will collapse on our heads.”
“The void down there,” Andy says. “It’s big enough to sustain oxygen levels.”
Colin waves Sam over. “I believe you, Andy,” he says. “But we have to be completely sure.”
Andy’s legs feel jittery. Fuck the shrink and his stupid diagnoses. He is concentrating on the living. Someone is down there, and Andy will move this building, piece by goddamn piece. Andy will go down into the void and brave the nail points poking out of walls and razor-sharp shards of glass, and he will climb deeper into the earth than he has ever gone, and he will come face-to-face with this person, this lonely, trapped soul, and look him in the eye and nod, just once.
Sam sets up the video equipment, which consists of holding lead cords and finding sockets to put them in. He turns on the video monitor, but nothing shows.
“What are you waiting for?” asks Andy.
“We need to know what condition the victim’s in before we start moving things around,” Les says.
“I know, I know—” But Andy is tired of corpses. The piles of ash on the road, the char marks like an exploding star. Those used to be people. The bittersweet stench — he’s smelled it on burn victims, on remnants of hair singed away in a flash, on blackened skin peeling off in gooey sheets.
“We’re go,” says Sam, giving a thumbs-up. Andy wants to snap that thumb right off. The screen is a field of white. The camera, the size of his pinkie finger, points at nothing, and the light attached to the camera radiates outward, a single white dot.
“Feed the line in,” Mike says. Les has coils of fiber-optic cable looped over his shoulder, and he spools it into the hole. “Follow the microphone line.” Andy puts the headphones back on. If only he could send a message—We’re coming; we’re coming—through the microphone. Les waggles the cable. The on-screen blur makes Andy’s eyes hurt. He understands why epileptics have fits. Overwhelming flashes of light.
“Left, left,” says Sam. “OK, got it.”
Andy concentrates. Blood whooshes in his ears. He can’t remember the last time he was so conscious of silence, its utter emptiness. Andy fills his life with noise from all directions, because if he’s doing something, then he never has to stop, and if he doesn’t stop, then he doesn’t have to listen to the dull throb in his temples.
The screen goes dark. They’ve reached the void.
Andy eases up on the headphones. He’s been pressing them so hard his ears ache. Everyone’s mouths move without sound.
“Nothing on the monitor, sir,” says Sam.
The team gathers around the screen, hushed by empty space.
“Give it a moment,” says Les.
I heard something. I know it.
Les guides the camera deeper, unwinding it at a steady pace. The void is no larger than a sleeping bag, but on-screen, it seems without limits. If you were to wake up in a black space, how would you know if you were alive or dead? Maybe people in voids are neither living nor dead. It’s not until someone finds them — hours, days, weeks later — that they become one or the other. It’s worse, in a way, than death: this suspended animation, this not knowing. All it takes for you to live or die is for someone to see you.
The men crowd around the screen. From Andy’s angle, all he sees is a shimmer of white on the screen, like the outer edge of a dream. Les points; Reg has his hands on Colin’s shoulders, leaning forward; Emiko stands on tiptoe. All of them squint.
And Andy hears it: breathing. Shallow, so quiet that it might not exist if someone weren’t there to hear it.
“Aspiration!” Andy yells. “I hear someone aspirating!”
Such a beautiful sound! He could listen to it all night. Inhale. Exhale. Someone is alive; there’s been a miracle here after all; God is not cruel and capricious. It means they’ll work all night, and that they’ll bring someone out alive.
Everyone stays transfixed to the screen.
“Did you hear me?” Andy says. He stands, but the headphones yank his head back.
He looks at the screen. He sees what they see. The light shines on a small figure crumpled on the ground: a dog, lying on its side, its flank moving so imperceptibly that it might be screen flicker. The dog has its eyes open, its mouth open, and it moves its head as if to acknowledge the presence of the light, before it resumes its previous position in the void between worlds.
Mike gathers everyone.
“I’m proud of all of you,” he says. “Everyone put in one hundred and ten percent, working hard and nonstop. We’ve saved lives.”
“Sir,” says Andy.
“We’ve earned a rest. New teams are coming in who are fresh and ready to go.”
“Sir,” repeats Andy.
“So as of now”—Mike looks at his wristwatch, making this act official—“I’m ordering the team to stand down.”
“Sir!” says Andy, loud enough to be heard.
“McGreevey?”
“Shouldn’t we try to save her? She’s still trapped. I’m not sure how much longer she can survive.” Andy hears her scratching, paws scrabbling futilely, searching for the ephemeral light. “We all saw it. She’s still alive. She’s all alone.” He feels like he’s inhaled helium, light-headedness, lack of breath. The others have stowed their gear, brushed themselves off, heaved themselves back onto the truck. Even Emiko is aboard, Momo and Kami in tow.