Eleven Twenty Nine

by Daniel Paul Lockwood

The taste of metal tells you the bleeding has started again, running down from your left temple into the corner of your mouth. It’s only a trickle, a thin ribbon instead of a sturdy rope. Not enough to pull yourself out with. Should you drink it to stave off the dehydration, or would that be as useful as eating your leg to keep from starving?

But you’re not going to die of starvation, are you?

That takes weeks, maybe even months. Dehydration takes days, but suffocation? Well, how long has it been? Your watch says it’s nearly 8 p.m. so that makes it over 26 hours already. Did your messages send after all? She must know you’re missing by now, but the way things have been going, what if she thinks you’ve left her on purpose? Just taken The Beast and driven off into the sunset? Hell, it wouldn’t matter either way. Even if she got a rescue team together, even if they found the truck stashed in the bushes, you were at least three or four miles away, and at least twenty feet underground.

The whole things was so ironic, you’d laugh until you cried if you could do either. As it is, you drank the last of the water hours ago and it’s work enough just to breathe. No, it’s going to be good old-fashioned asphyxiation for you, unless the fucking mosquitoes do the job first.

They were way worse last night. Maybe your struggling attracted them or maybe they just know you’ve got barely anything left to donate now. Or maybe they’ve just had enough of your particular flavor of misery. Because this isn’t actually anything new for you. You’ve been slowly suffocating for most of your life.

\(O)/

Yesterday morning, you slipped off without waking Abha. You’d already had to listen to her flurry of Mayan curses. And she’d warned you, rightfully, of all the reasons not to go. Snakes. Jaguars. Looters. Drug gangs. But the rainy season had been driving you crazy. You’d been so irritable lately and quick to anger – she had to know this was good for both of you.

The drive out of Mérida had felt so liberating. Stopping in Muna for delicious papadzules. Seeing the return of the buses ferrying hundreds of tourists to the Uxmal ruins. Just being out driving The Beast with the wind blowing in your hair. It was stupid, and she would never understand, but it felt like destiny, like things were going to finally happen. Maybe you’d find your own Uxmal out there.

Ditching the truck in the bushes on the side of a dirt track, you were off. You walked for hours, but all you saw were trees and rocks and mud. Nothing interesting until the damned turkey. It exploded in a frenzy of sound and motion when you surprised it. Ugly mother looked like it had multi-colored tumors all over its face, but it would still make a cool photo. You tried to follow it in the bush, moving as slowly and quietly as possible and - damned ankle!

You fell and the earth swallowed you whole.

/(O)\

Your right arm starts aching down in the hole. Your shoulder is pinned against a rock which must be cutting off the circulation. Make a fist, then release, fist, release. That helps, keep doing that.

You’d already tried everything else to extract yourself. With your right hand deep in the earth, you fished around for loose dirt and rocks, scraping and clawing at the walls of the tunnel. With your free left hand, you found a spoon in your backpack and tried your best to loosen the rocks around you. But where could you put them? It was like digging a hole in sand that just kept collapsing back in on itself. So you hung your backpack from a jutting stone and filled it up. When that was stuffed, you started meticulously pulling out rocks and placing them above you, jamming them into cracks, balancing them on ledges. It was brutally exhausting work. Your ribcage was pinned and moving for more than a few seconds took the wind out of you. So it was slow movement, rest, another movement, rest. Baby steps. Between the two hands you probably moved a whole pound of gravel in a day. Incredible.

\(O)/

You dragged yourself out of the water and lay panting on the rocky floor. There was a gash on your head and it was gushing. You fished out your phone, which was miraculously undamaged, and turned on the flashlight to help you rummage through your backpack. Gauze, alcohol, tape – still dry. Bandaged up, you leaned back against a rock and tried to process.

Turkey. There was a wild turkey and then you went over on your stupid ankle and fell into the brush and kept falling. You know what happened? You fell into a god damned cenote sinkhole. Up above, you could make out the blue of the sky through its overgrown mouth. It couldn’t have been more than thirty feet up, but it was overhung all the way. Basically, you were in a fishbowl.

A column of light beamed down into the pool, illuminating it and giving off an eerie green glow. Looking away, your eyes slowly adjusted to the dark and you saw the walls of the cavern stretching away into the darkness on both sides. The ceiling dripped with stalactites and the floor was covered with little phalluses. Everything you shone your light on glittered and sparkled. It was actually breathtaking.

Slowly, you eased yourself up to your feet. Your left ankle was badly twisted but probably not sprained. The wooziness you felt was mostly gone but had been replaced with a throbbing pain. You’d either cracked your head on the edge up there or in the pool, maybe on a boulder or something. Instinctively, you shone your light into the water and fell back onto your ass. A skull was staring right at you from the shallows.

It was brown with age but the teeth were still frighteningly white. They reminded you of Marcia with her fake titanium smile. The blank, uncaring eyes, too. And god, the turkey! “Turkey” was what she’d always called you when you screwed up in public. Sounds a whole lot nicer than what you got called back at home. She’d love to see you trapped like this, wouldn’t she? She’d revel in it like she’d done your whole life, taking every opportunity to push you down to bring herself up.

But when you moved closer and squatted down, she looked different. You saw the cut marks on the top and the small piece smashed out, and it made you shudder. Supposedly, the Maya interred their revered dead in cenotes. But sometimes they also threw in sacrifices.

Leaving the skull behind, you started cautiously following the long, curving wall of the cavern. As you continued on, the stalactites and stalagmites started to get bigger, like the fangs of some sleeping monster. It became like a forest, and then you spotted a massive column that stretched from floor to ceiling like the thick trunk of a tree. And you weren’t the first to find it.

The base of the column was littered with pots and jars, some broken but others intact and looking like they’d just been left there last week. They were different sizes and shapes and decorated with pictures of people, animals, and unidentifiable beings. The cavern wall behind the stone tree was covered with paintings in blacks and reds, strange signs and symbols unmistakably made by people.

You’d wasted precious time in a daze, examining and photographing everything in detail – precious battery, too – before you noticed the ants. They were laden with their treasures like the people who carried these offerings down here. And that meant there was another way in and out.

/(O)\

It wasn’t a pyramid but it was something. Something you’d always dreamed of, and then you lost it just as quick as you found it. What, should that surprise you? Did you really think you’d ever actually succeed at anything?

This thought has been plaguing you all day, but a new one has come to mind. It’s been dark for hours and like a cool tile floor, the earth is slowly sucking the warmth out of you. It’s actually getting chilly.

When was the last time you felt anything even close to cold? An air-conditioned restaurant here, a beer cooler there, but nothing like the bite of winter back home. You’d grown up feeling its constant threat, the knife edge of the wind, the sting of the morning air where your breath frosts your eyelids shut. You’d always suspected you’d die by its murderous hand, but this isn’t that vicious cold. It’s too lacking in emotion – just the oppressive cool of a loveless parent. Not enough to kill you but more than enough to ruin you.

\(O)/

Following the ant trail, you found the mouth of the tunnel quickly. It was no more than two feet wide, but that was big enough. You knelt down and pushed your backpack up first, then slipped on through.

A ladder up to the mouth of the cenote would have taken no more than a minute to climb up, even with your head wound and hurt ankle. But instead you spent hours lost in the twists and turns of the tunnel, crawling on your belly like a snake. You were tired and hurt, and regularly banged your wounds agonizingly against the rocks. The tunnel also got narrower and harder to navigate. You lost all sense of time and space, trying to just move ahead inch by precious inch. How the hell had anyone managed to do this with just a torch? And why? Then at some point you realized you weren’t just fighting friction but also gravity.

The tunnel had gone just about every direction but up, but now it was decidedly vertical. If you’d only been thirty-something feet down, you only had thirty-something feet to go, but at this point you could barely move at all. The passage had become so tight that you had to jam both your arms above your head and just feel your way along. You were pushing, squeezing, dragging, scraping your way up blindly until you got stuck. And the terror crept up the tunnel right behind you.

You grasped for anything you could use for leverage but your left hand felt only smooth stone. Your right hand sent a shower of dirt and rock down into your face. Your phone fell face-down beside you and everything went black. Your feet kicked even while your legs were clamped on all sides, and you started to panic, clawing and jerking wildly. The voice in your head, her voice, hissed, “Just give up. You should have been an abortion, anyway,” and you felt lead in the pit of your stomach.

There, in the dark, you froze. The grotesque familiarity of the feeling was somehow calming, and through it you gained control of your breathing again. Your right arm could still move. It bent down to feel for the phone, found it, and light returned to the world. Your left leg shifted a bit, and then your pelvis, and then your right toes found a grip. You moved up half an inch. Another twist, another inch, and then your left leg came loose. Two inches. Two more and it was over.

You were free and moving upward again. The squeeze began to widen and you could actually climb instead of slither. You started measuring distance in feet. You even began to smell something more than just dirt and must. The forest – life!

It was a devastating shock, then, when your right hand-hold came loose, sending you and a pile of rubble back down into the squeeze.

/(O)\

It’s weird that you can’t sleep. The first night, you slept like a stone. Getting stuck the second time had been a lot more devastating and you’d probably passed out as much as fallen asleep. When you fell, you smashed and scraped just about every part of your body against the rocks, including your head. Your phone disappeared, too, leaving you in the dark. But the worst part was the position you were stuck in. Your ribcage was jammed into a space that was just too narrow making it nearly impossible to breathe. If you hadn’t already freaked out the first time, you probably would have hyperventilated and suffocated yourself. Instead, you were too hurt and had already used up what was probably your last precious dose of adrenaline.

A night and a day later, you’re in exactly the same spot. Waking up in the morning was almost absurd. It had to have been a bad dream, but there you were, still stuck, still aching everywhere, still frozen in a ridiculous position. Sounds a lot like your whole life. But the patch of blue sky was by far the worst part.

You’d been right that you were getting close to the surface. The tunnel twisted a bit, but it couldn’t have been over twenty feet to the top. What is that, not even four body lengths? It was a brutal slap in the face. So you’d spent the day wriggling and plotting and thinking of preposterous solutions.

There was a rope in your bag. You could tie it to a rock then throw it without bending your elbow twenty feet in the air up a narrow vertical shaft where it would lodge into the crotch of a tree trunk and you could pull yourself free one-handed.

The phone was probably just below your feet. You could slip off your hiking boots with no hands, grab it and turn it on with your toes and make an emergency call with no signal.

Half a burrito was still left from yesterday’s lunch. You could use the cheese to grease your body up and slip out. You could use the foil to signal a passing plane.

You could light a fire to break the rocks, cut your belly off to make you thinner, magically teleport yourself, curse, pray, rage, or weep.  But while you tried the last few, it seemed nothing was going to get you out of this hole. So you stopped thinking about your escape and just thought about your life and how basically everything led you to this point. Failing with your family, failing out of school, failing in relationships, failing at everything you’ve ever done. It’s deliciously ironic that Abha, the one person you haven’t managed to disappoint yet, won’t see this as an accident, but a failure to heed her warning. She made you swear you’d be back home before the eclipse on Saturday because it was bad luck to be out under it. Utter and complete failure.

Eventually, the pain and shallow breathing combined with the lack of water are too much. You’re finally fading and you drift off into a tortured sleep.

\(O)/

The dreams come like terrible visions.

You’re in your childhood bedroom crying. Julie holds your hand and tells you that you should be a good boy or mommy won’t like you.

But you’re crying into in the cenote, and the pool turns into a whirlpool and starts sucking you down under the water where you come face to face with the skull which has Marcia’s hair and her body and screams, “You’re better off dead!”

You turn away and look in the rear-view mirror as the desert rolls out a beige carpet behind you just like the one you started the fire on which climbs up the walls and burns you right out of the family portrait leaving just Marcia and Dad and Julie the golden child whose face turns into a circle of blue sky hopelessly out of reach. Until a bat flies down to cover your eyes and when you rip it away, you see flickering torches around the underground tree but the monstrous figures have escaped from the painted pots and are dancing around hypnotically. They push forward a little girl dressed in white looking terrified as they pull out obsidian daggers and cut off her face revealing the white-toothed skull before they shove her over the edge. You’re falling together and she grabs your hand, crying and saying, “They did it to me.” And Julie is crying and telling you, “I know how horrible she was to you, but can you please just come home? She’s sick.” But you can’t because you’re collapsed on the floor of the kitchen naked and weeping and Abha is holding you tightly and taking the knife from your hand.

/(O)\

A strange sensation on your ankle jolts you awake. There’s something on your leg, in your pants. It’s climbing up through your clothes. Now it’s on your stomach, poking and scratching. Now your chest, up through the sleeve of your shirt. Its head pops out at your wrist and a huge, hideous centipede body follows, scrabbling away up to the surface. Even in your state, it’s so repulsive it makes you want to rip your clothes off.

Your clothes!

Your teeth tear away the sleeve button, freeing your left hand to unbutton the front. The knife cuts around the right shoulder seam and the shirt tears away so easily. It becomes a bucket, filling up with rocks and dirt. Your right shoulder shifts and the horrible pressure is gone as a stone plunks down the shaft. Your right hand finds your belt, your button, your zipper. Your left foot jerks itself out of its boot then helps the right. Push down with your hand, tug with your toes, push, tug, push, tug - the pants surrender and fall into the abyss. Your hips move – slightly, but they move, and now your ribs shift and you can breathe for the first time in two days. Keep going. Find purchase with your feet. Go slow and steady. Don’t rush, just stay calm and feel every step of the way. This is working. You’re moving.

You realize it’s dark again just seconds before the alarm you set so many days ago goes off deep below your feet. 11:29. And you laugh, because you weren’t caught out in the eclipse after all. You reach the surface just as the light returns, bringing the world back to life and you with it.

\(O)/