Tunnel

After journeying about twenty feet into the tunnel, we stopped speaking. In front of us there was darkness and behind us the same. The tunnel had rounded a bend, and we had seen the daylight fade behind the curved rails and craggy walls after about fifteen feet. She had left the flashlight at her place, but we had decided to walk through the old train tunnel anyway. The tunnel smelled alive: fresh, moldy, and green. She had come here on her own before, with a flashlight, and she had brought me here to share this place with me. We were sharing favorite experiences. I heard the bottom of her jeans trailing along the metal and loose rocks of the tracks. I pictured the way the jeans got tight above her knees. I had never dated a girl with strong legs before. I didn't know how I felt about those legs, but, in the tunnel, I was glad for her strength.

We walked parallel to each other on the tracks. We knew not to walk into the walls by sliding one food along the rails. I was terrified of hearing anything else moving. I was suprised by how frightened I was of the dark.

On the train ride here (which went through the new tunnel) we had chatted seamlessly, weaving the story of our lives together into a beautiful new garment which we were happy to cloak ourselves in. We were both new to the concrete metropolis where we had met. We were both English majors. Both observer types. And we both loved playing the guitar. There were differences, of course. She had spent the first few months in the city leaving the urban area as soon as possible, and learning all the interesting hiking trails in the area and identifying all the local fauna and flora. I had ridden my bike around the various neighborhoods, noting the different microcultures and learning where to buy drugs. My parents were divorced, her's happily married. She was a vegetarian. She grew up rescuing small spiders. I was a unrepentant omnivore. I grew up taking cows to the abattoir with my dad. I thought we might complement each other.

We had kept talking as we left the station, passed the reflecting rice field and started our walk along the gorge. It was hot and humid. We could hear cicadas and gnats kept flying around us. We walked along a path that had been blasted in the middle of a cliff. Below us ran a wide river and much above us we saw trees. She had brought sweet buns from a famous bakery and she offered me one just as I started to feel hungry. The river was low, but she said that in the spring it had been much higher. We could see straight through it to the multicolored rocks on the bottom. It reminded me of the valley where I had grown up. It reminded her of walking along a pebbled beach. The path, though once just rockface, was now overgrown with sweet ripe blackberries and our fingers and mouths were soon stained deep purple. Overhead, we heard a loud shriek. She had seen baby hawks here in the spring.

After an hour more of conversation we reached the tunnel, our bodies and faces flushed from the exercise and the excitement of feeling understood. It was then she realized she had lost the flashlight. We weren't sure whether or not to proceed. The tunnel was long, she explained, and terrifying even with a light. I didn't mind leaving and returning another day. I was happy to just spend time with her. She decided that it would be a shame for us to have taken the trip without completing our mission, and I, wanting to please her, agreed.

We were talking about the film director Lars Von Trier as we entered the tunnel. Our first date had been to see Dancer In The Dark, which had left her in an emotional stupor and me nonplussed and more than a little bit irritated. She had gripped my hand during the hanging scene, and that had, too, had irritated me. It was cold in the tunnel. My sweat-soaked clothing became instantly clammy. Our conversation faded with the rescinding warm light. We stopped talking. The silence of the tunnel was insurmountable. At the opening there had been a faint breeze, but after a while, there was nothing, just coldness. It was a cold I had never felt before. In high school, I had a reoccuring nightmare about being shut in the walk-in freezer at the cafe where I worked. This tunnel was that kind of cold. It felt as if the walls were alive and generating cold the same way a human body generates heat.

We walked for a long time. Maybe for ten minutes. Inexplicably, though I couldn't see anything, some parts of the darkness seemed brighter than others. I imagined textures and patterns in the blackness. I wanted to reach out and the walls, but I was afraid of reaching out my hand and not being able to see it. I wanted to reach out and touch her, but I it didn't feel like an appropriate gesture.

"Do you feel that?" I asked her.

"No."

"There is a breeze."

"I don't feel anything."

But there was a slight breeze, and it indicated that we were nearing the end of the tunnel. Just a few steps further and the wall ahead of us was illuminated by the afternoon sunlight. We saw the jagged carved rock, rotting tracks and metal rails that had been our companions all along. As we left the tunnel, our eyes winced in self-protection at the sun's warm light. We sat down in relief. We had emerged in a wooded area, and we sat between the shadows of branches. I moved in to kiss her, to seal our successful fate, and she permitted a kiss. It was like a frozen blackberry. I went to hug her, but she pulled away. "I'm too cold to touch," she told me. She did some jumping jacks and deep knee bends, and I watched, wanting some human comfort.

Much later that night we made love for the first time. Her body was again cold and she was silent the entire time, in a way that reminded me of one sad old cow at the abbatoir.