Misdeeds in the Dark

The tunnels under Chicago shelter secrets like none other. The shadows here feel hungry, like they can’t swallow light fast enough.  

A good friend- a former good friend of mine- used to say that ascribing personality to the shadows gave them power, that to truly be comfortable in these tunnels I would have to accept that shadows were just shadows. 

I didn’t ask him for that advice, as was often the case when he gave it. I didn’t want to be ‘truly comfortable’ in the tunnels. I just wanted to feel out the shape of my fears. But he did have a point. Fearing the shadows gives them life. Personifying them gives them power.

My belief in the shadows is intentional. The darkness here is hungry. It already swallows light, and I can only hope it swallows secrets, too.

The closest active train track is half a mile away, but the acoustics in this labyrinth are baffling. The ground trembles, a train horn blares mournfully, and I have to grip a nearby pole, surface slick with rust and tepid water, to anchor myself in the moment.

The horn dopplers into the distance, but instead of fading completely, the sound wavers, bounces back, lingers. For an uncomfortable few moments, it sounds just like a scream.

I have to wait for the sound to fade from the tunnel, even longer for it to fade from my mind, before I can keep walking. I strain my ears for any sound besides my own footsteps scraping through tunnel water and grit, disregarding the occasional random drips that echo from all sides.  

An old friend of mine -the same friend, in most ways that matter- used to revel in his own fear. He thought that once he had felt it, he had a degree of power over it. He exposed himself to danger and bathed in his panic so that he could learn every nuance and flavor of it. Like some kind of terrified cartographer, he thought that mapping his fear would allow him to choose whether to feel it. He sought control over himself and, to him, that control was power.

He could be at ease anywhere, because he had been afraid everywhere.  

I admired him for that, once. But fear is only useful when the danger can be avoided. Some horrors can’t be comprehended until they happen. In this way, his control was an illusion.

My left foot catches on something in the same moment that my hand bumps into a rough outcropping.  My eyes are useless here, but luckily also wholly unnecessary. The two protrusions are directly above each other, jutting out about two inches, but otherwise unremarkable.

Which is the point, really. Even if some other pair of idiots stumbled across this stretch of tunnel and trained their lights directly on the wall, they would have no idea.

I pull my left glove, off tucking it into my belt and placing my hand on the higher protrusion. It’s cold to the touch, and... something else. Hard to describe, in a way I’m actually grateful for, because avoiding the description means I can put off acknowledging it. 

This section of the tunnel has seemingly random stretches where the smooth, slick concrete is replaced by old brick. After the first time we came here, my friend found the blueprints for this tunnel, from a time when it was only made up of stone and empty space.  

As it turned out, behind every stretch of brick was a walled-off alcove. Some were basically service closets, only a few square feet, but some were almost tunnels in their own right. All of them had been hidden quickly and poorly, with thin walls of brick and crumbling mortar. The two of us bought some industrial solvent to dissolve the mortar, and just like that, the walls could be overcome.

All it took was solvent and time, and we had plenty of both. We stood in the dark for hours, spraying and brushing the mortar, feeling our way around by touch, and most of all…talking. He knew that claustrophobia was a flavor of fear I had yet to overcome, and so he tried his best to make me comfortable, to share vulnerability. It was a big step for someone like him.

If dark, tight spaces are my anathema, then intimacy was his. In all of his life, he had only ever chosen to love one person, and befriend one other. It was about control for him, as I soon learned all things were.

Conquering his fears gave him the control he needed over his own life and heart, but that level of control was impossible to guarantee from anyone else. Loving someone was a leap of faith he made two years before we met, and our friendship was a more recent shot in the dark. He knew he was giving us the power to hurt him, because we were his first.

This was fear that he had never been exposed to, and a reality that he could only pray never came to pass. He told me all of this while we talked and mapped this tunnel, trading vulnerability as honestly as we could.

I can map the last few months of our friendship by the alcoves behind me. Five months, four alcoves, all explored in the name of friendship and conquering claustrophobia.

It almost seems fair that when I desecrated our friendship, he used my fear against me.

I have to stay in the moment for a little while longer. Ignoring the internal specter of ugly memory rearing its head, I shift my focus further inward. My lack of sight makes it easier to concentrate on my sense of touch. My fingers trail away from the protrusion, over one…two…there.

The texture of the brick has changed. All of the bricks behind me are crumbly, wet, dusty. But the bricks past the protrusion are cold and unyielding. No dust flakes off, the texture feels like steel molded into the shape of a brick. 

This is where my façade starts…

[This is part of a larger story. Reach out for more details.]