“What is the law?” they were murmuring. “What is the law?”
They flowed around Paul and Bob Wier, and with the mild pressure of their hands swept both men through the passage into the next room.
THIRTY-EIGHT
THE PASSAGE WAS LOW AND NARROW AND S-SHAPED, and Paul could not see what was ahead, only the glow of electric lights. Having decided that all this — the caverns, the pale men, the torment of Bob Wier — were features of a dream, still Paul was surprised and a little alarmed to follow Bob Wier around the final curve of the passage into an aisle running between the gray upholstered walls of cubicles on either side, under bright, fluorescent fixtures. At first he assumed that, following the peculiar logic of a dream, he was now wandering the aisles of the General Services Division of TxDoGS. But the lights were much brighter, and as he squinted against the glare he noted that the fabric of the cubes was mottled and streaked with damp; that the thin carpet under foot was lumpy and uneven, a thin padding over hard rock; and that the faces of the men rising from their desks all around him were not the faces of his coworkers in the world above but those of pale, homeless men, their glasses glaring in the light, their milky skin gleaming through their buzz cuts. The cube walls came up to Paul’s cheekbones, as they did at TxDoGS, and he saw the bulbous heads rising from the centers of cubes all around him, some taller than others, some broader in the forehead, but all with the same blank gaze. Because of the glare of the lights, Paul could not tell how far the cubes receded into the distance. Straight ahead, past the cringing shoulders of Bob Wier, he saw that the aisle ended in a T, and that at the intersection of the two aisles an iron pole crusted with reddish rust rose straight up into the air. Next to the pole waited Boy G, his arms hanging straight at his sides, his glasses pushed all the way up his nose, his pens lined up, his name tag neatly centered over his breast pocket.
The faces peering over the cube horizon on either side all turned to follow Paul’s progress up the aisle, and he glanced back to see the men who had followed him down the amphitheater crowding up the aisle behind him. The murmuring grew louder as the men in the cubes joined in.
“What is the law?” they muttered. “What is the law?”
As he got closer to the intersection, Paul noticed that the iron pole was a sort of ladder, with L-shaped iron rungs protruding at right angles, at alternate heights on either side; unlike the rusty central pole, the rungs were worn smooth to a dull gray sheen. Paul glanced up, but the top of the pole was lost in the glare of the lights. The tang he’d detected in the air in the amphitheater was sharper here, like the smell of burning oak.
As they reached the junction of the aisles, Bob Wier stepped to one side, and Boy G’s gaze fell on Paul, who felt a tremor of cold up his spine.
“Who are you?” whispered Boy G in his toneless voice.
Paul sweated under the lights, in the clammy humidity of the cavern. He felt the pale men crowding behind him.
“Myself?” he said, uncertain what else to say.
Boy G turned his magnified eyes to Bob Wier, who licked his lips and glanced from Boy G to Paul. “He’s a man,” Bob Wier said.
“A man! A man! Like us!” murmured the pale men behind him. Out of the corner of his eye, Paul saw the pale faces above the cube horizon nodding in agreement.
“He’s a man,” Bob Wier said again. “He must learn the law.”
“Say the words,” murmured the men all around. “Say the words.”
Paul felt the chill tightening his skin. I wonder if it’s too late, he thought, to get that key from Bob.
Boy G turned and walked up the perpendicular aisle to the right, and Bob Wier followed, gesturing curtly for Paul to follow. Paul turned to see if he could go back, but the pale men in the aisle were pressing forward, murmuring, “Say the words, say the words,” while the other pale men began to filter out of their cubes into the aisle, murmuring, “A man like us, a man like us.”
“Um, Bob?” said Paul, edging up the aisle. “Could I talk to you for a second?”
But Bob Wier ignored him, and Paul had no choice but to follow. Suddenly the cubicles ended on either side, and Paul found himself walking on the cave floor again. Beyond the glare of the fluorescent lights he saw ahead of him a vast, oval cavern of creamy yellow rock, like custard, its ceiling dripping with stalactites and soda straws and other, more delicate formations like hanging draperies. Water dripped in an irregular rhythm from above; Paul felt the tap of droplets on his scalp and his wrist. Along the left side of the cavern, across a wide, shallow pool of clear water, were three huge formations in a row. The one closest to Paul was a creamy hillock like a huge lump of melting vanilla ice cream. As from a leaky tap, water dripped from a cluster of thin, bladelike projections above, then pulsed in shallow waves down the broad, soapy slopes of the hillock into the pool. The formation farthest from Paul, at the end of the cave, was like an eroding sand castle, a clotted cluster of blunted stalagmites that rose nearly to the dripping roof. And, in the middle, was the tallest and most striking formation, a long, curved, blunt-ended column that stuck out of a wide, conical base of flowstone and rose in layers of long, saber-fanged stalactites nearly to the ceiling. It looked, depending on your point of view, like an enormous stack of decaying wedding cake, or a giant, sagging candle, or — as Paul, the ex-husband of a gender theorist, couldn’t help noting — a giant, erect, rotting phallus. The column’s reflection in the clear water of the pool trembled with each drop of water from above.
“Professor!” cried a voice, and Paul turned to see Colonel approaching him from the right side of the cave. “You’ve joined us at last!” Colonel was wearing his office kit — dress shirt with sleeves rolled down and cuffs buttoned, tie knotted firmly up under his dewlaps — and he joined the procession and pumped Paul’s hand firmly and warmly.
“A big night, son!” His face was flushed, whether with whisky or excitement, Paul couldn’t tell. “We’ve been preparing for your feast.”
He threw his arm around Paul’s shoulders, squeezing him tight and gesturing towards several rows of long, folding tables along the right side of the cavern. Each table was covered with a long, checkered tablecloth and lined with mismatched chairs. At regular intervals along each table stood a little skyline of salt-and-pepper shakers; rolls of brown paper towels upright on spindles; and bottles of hot sauce, jalapeños, and barbecue sauce. At the far end another table was set crosswise, where Paul recognized the landscape of classic Texas barbecue: stacks of paper plates and plastic utensils; potato salad and coleslaw in big plastic bowls; a metal bowl heaped with pickles; wedges of cheese, tomato, onion, and avocado on wide platters; loaves of white bread still in their plastic wrappers; a pair of sweating aluminum urns of iced tea; and a big Crock-Pot of beans, plugged into a fat, orange extension cord that snaked away into the recesses of the cave. At one end of the table stood a squat plastic barrel full of Dr. Pepper, Big Red, and Shiner Bock on ice.
“Yo!” cried J.J., who stood behind the farthest table in jeans and t-shirt and a baseball cap, tending to two large barbecue smokers, each an enormous black metal drum on four legs with a firebox like a low, square snout at one end. The floor of the cave was on a slight incline, tilted to the left, and the front wheels of each smoker were chocked with wedges of wood to keep them from rolling across the cave into the pool. J.J. wore an apron, not like some suburban backyard chef, but like a pro, the string wrapped around his waist and tied at the front. Black smoke puffed from the little chimney at the end of each smoker, staining the stalactites above with soot, and as Paul watched, J.J. lifted a short length of oak from a neat stack of logs.