“It’s still with us,” Jahns said. “That’s what they’d say, anyway.”
“What do you believe?”
“Me?” She pushed herself up from the pillows and rested on one elbow, watching him watch her. “I don’t know, really. I keep too busy to think about it.”
“Do you think Donald’s soul is still here with us?”
Jahns felt a shiver. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had uttered his name.
“He’s been gone more years than he was ever my husband,” she said. “I’ve been married more to his ghost than to him.”
“That don’t seem like the right thing to say.”
Jahns looked down at the bed, the world a little blurry. “I don’t think he’d mind. And yes, he’s still with me. He motivates me every day to be a good person. I feel him watching me all the time.”
“Me too,” Marnes said.
Jahns looked up and saw that he was staring at her.
“Do you think he’d want you to be happy? In all things, I mean?” He stopped rubbing his legs and sat there, hands on his knees, until he had to look away.
“You were his best friend,” Jahns said. “What do you think he’d want?”
He rubbed his face, glanced toward the closed door as a laughing child thundered down the hallway. “I reckon he only ever wanted you to be happy. That’s why he was the man for you.”
Jahns wiped her eyes while he wasn’t looking and peered curiously down at her wet fingers.
“It’s getting late,” she said. She slid to the edge of the small bed and reached down for her boots. Her bag and stick were waiting for her by the door. “And I think you’re right. I think I’ll be a little sore in the morning, but I think I’ll feel stronger, eventually.”
12
On the second and final day of their descent into the down deep, the novel gradually became the habitual. The clank and thrum of the great spiral staircase found a rhythm. Jahns was able to lose herself in her thoughts, daydreaming so serenely that she would glance up at the floor number, seventy-two, eighty-four, and wonder where a dozen landings went. The kink in her left knee was even soothed away, whether by the numbness of fatigue or an actual return to health, she didn’t know. She took to using the walking stick less, finding it only held up her pace as it often slipped between the treads and got caught there. With it tucked under her arm, it felt more useful. Like another bone in her skeleton, holding her together.
When they passed the ninetieth floor, with the stench of fertilizer and the pigs and other animals that produced this useful waste, Jahns pressed on, skipping the tour and lunch she’d planned, thinking only briefly of the small rabbit that somehow had escaped from another farm, made it twenty floors up without being spotted, and ate its fill for three weeks while it confounded half a silo.
Technically, they were already in the down deep when they reached ninety-seven. The bottom third. But even though the silo was mathematically divided into three sections of forty-eight floors each, her brain didn’t work that way. Floor one hundred was a better demarcation. It was a milestone. She counted the floors down until they reached the first landing with three digits and stopped for a break.
Marnes was breathing deeply, she noticed. But she felt great. Alive and renewed in the way she had hoped the trip would make her feel. The futility, dread, and exhaustion from the day before were gone. All that remained was a small twinge of fear that these dour feelings could return, that this exuberant elation was a temporary high, that if she stopped, if she thought on it too long, it would spiral away and leave her dark and moody once more.
They split a small loaf of bread between them, sitting on the metal grating of the wide landing with their elbows propped up on the railings, their feet swinging over empty space, like two kids cutting class. Level one hundred teemed with people coming and going. The entire floor was a bazaar, a place for exchanging goods, for cashing in work chits for whatever was needed or merely coveted. Workers with their trailing shadows came and went, families yelled for one another among the dizzying crowds, merchants barked their best deals. The doors remained propped open for the traffic, letting the smells and sounds drift out onto the double-wide landing, the grating shivering with excitement.
Jahns reveled in the anonymity of the passing crowd. She bit into her half of the loaf, savoring the fresh yeastiness of bread baked that morning, and felt like just another person. A younger person. Marnes cut her a piece of cheese and a slice of apple and sandwiched them together. His hand touched hers as he passed it to her. Even the bread crumbs in his mustache were part of the moment’s perfection.
“We’re way ahead of schedule,” Marnes said before taking a bite of fruit. It was just a pleasant observation. A pat on their elderly backs. “I figure we’ll hit one-forty by dinner.”
“Right now, I’m not even dreading the climb out,” Jahns said. She finished the cheese and apple and chewed contentedly. Everything tasted better while climbing, she decided. Or in pleasant company, or amid the music leaking out of the bazaar, some beggar strumming his uke over the noise of the crowd.
“Why don’t we come down here more often?” she asked.
Marnes grunted. “Because it’s a hundred flights down? Besides, we’ve got the view, the lounge, the bar at Kipper’s. How many of these people come up to any of that more than once every few years?”
Jahns chewed on that and on her last bite of bread.
“Do you think it’s natural? Not wandering too far from where we live?”
“Don’t follow,” Marnes said around a bite of food.
“Pretend, just as a hypothetical, mind you, that people lived in those ancient aboveground silos poking up over the hillside. You don’t think they would move around so little, do you? Like stay in the same silo? Never wander over here or up and down a hundred flights of stairs?”
“I don’t think on those things,” Marnes said. Jahns took it as a hint that she shouldn’t, either. It was impossible sometimes to know what could and couldn’t be said about the outside. Those were discussions for spouses, and maybe the walk and the day together yesterday had gotten to her. Or maybe she was as susceptible to the post-cleaning high as anyone else: the sense that some rules could be relaxed, a few temptations courted, the release of pressure in the silo giving excuse for a month of jubilant wiggling in one’s own skin.
“Should we get going?” Jahns asked as Marnes finished his bread.
He nodded, and they stood and collected their things. A woman walking by turned and stared, a flash of recognition on her face, gone as she hurried to catch up with her children.
It was like another world down here, Jahns thought to herself. She had gone too long without a visit. And even as she promised herself not to let that happen again, some part of her knew, like a rusting machine that could feel its age, that this journey would be her last.
Floors drifted in and out of sight. The lower gardens, the larger farm in the one-thirties, the pungent water treatment plant below that. Jahns found herself lost in thought, remembering her conversation with Marnes the night before, the idea of Donald living with her more in memory than reality, when she came to the gate at one-forty.
She hadn’t even noticed the change in the traffic, the preponderance of blue denim overalls, the porters with more satchels of parts and tools than clothes, food, or personal deliveries. But the crowd at the gate showed her that she’d arrived at the upper levels of Mechanical. Gathered at the entrance were workers in loose blue overalls spotted with age-old stains. Jahns could nearly peg their professions by the tools they carried. It was late in the day, and she assumed most were returning home from repairs made throughout the silo. The thought of climbing so many flights of stairs and then having to work boggled her mind. And then she remembered she was about to do that very thing.