Tim Pratt - The Crawlspace of the World.pdf - Tim Pratt - widez2

T HE C RAWLSPACE OF THE W ORLD

T IM P RATT

Three days into our hike, Morgan ditched me. I woke in the nest I’d

made of socks and children’s winter coats and sat up in the gray non-

morning, groping for my water bottle, calling her name. I climbed onto a

three-legged rolltop desk to get some perspective, and I could see her path

clearly, where she’d kicked her way through alarm clocks, lamps, and coffee

mugs toward the towering, distant, swaying mountains. I couldn’t see

Morgan herself, though—her path disappeared around a ten-foot-high hill

of tangled wire coathangers.

“Morgan!” I shouted, but only once, because she’d told me it was best to

be quiet here, in the crawlspace of the world. She knew at least one monster

lived here, after all, and she thought there might be others. I picked up my

pack—distressingly light, now, since the water was running out, but there

was plenty of jerky and dehydrated fruit, at least—and set off along the

pathway she’d kicked and stomped clear. Trekking across broken picture

frames, antique cameras, splintered snowshoes, and drifts of paper, I

followed Morgan. No surprise that she was gone, really. I was forever losing

her. Story of my life.

It took all day, moving under that neutral gray sky, climbing over

occasional outcroppings of armoires and armchairs, working my way

through great snarls of swingsets and backyard jungle-gyms, with always

some sign of breakage or snag or passage to point me on her path. The

objects that made up the landscape were larger now, in the foothills of this

place, closer to the mountains.

I found Morgan near the base of a hill made of battered cars, many with

seaweed and barnacles and undersea fungus clinging to their fenders and

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windshields. She stood with her hands on her hips, blonde hair pulled back

in a messy ponytail, staring up at the mountains.

“Morgan—”

“You weren’t moving fast enough,” she said. “I knew you’d move faster

if you had to chase me, if you thought I’d left you behind.” She turned to

look at me, daring me to argue, and for the millionth time in the past few

days I marveled at how much she’d changed in the past five years. The girl

I’d gone to college with had been tough and forthright, but this Morgan had

real steel in her, and her features were sharper and even more beautiful than

they’d been when she was twenty. “I couldn’t keep plodding along while

you stopped to look through every pile of old records and comic books. I

came to this place for a reason .”

I didn’t know what to say. I put down my pack and sat on a ripped

vinyl bench seat torn from some old Detroit behemoth of a car. I hated

disappointing her, and I resented her for frightening me, and of course, I

loved her. Why else was I here?

Once I’d calmed down enough to resist shouting at her—monsters

aside, I feared triggering an avalanche—I said “Well. We made good time

today. What now?”

“Through the mountain pass,” she said. “Down to the valley.”

“And then?”

She shrugged. “And then we kill the dragon.”

That last night in college five years before, in my bedroom with the

thumbtacked blacklight posters and the stereo system almost as big as a

chest of drawers, I lay in bed beside Morgan, resting my hand on her belly,

while she stared up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. “Don’t

forget me while you’re in Europe,” I said, tentative. We hadn’t talked about

what would become of us when she left, and we were running out of time to

do so.

“I’ll never forget you, Rob.” She didn’t look at me. “But I think we both

know our lives are changing. At least, mine is. Sometimes I wonder if your

life will ever change.”

It was an old discussion, an argument made almost comfortable by

familiarity. She was going to spend the summer as an intern at a museum in

Italy, and from there, she would move on into the rest of her life. I had no

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plans beyond the next party and dealing enough weed and acid to pay

another month’s rent. We shared a love of old movies, antiques, and kinky

sex, and were comfortable with one another to the point of nearly total

unselfconsciousness, but otherwise our trajectories diverged.

“So are you saying I’ll never see you again?” I tried for a joking tone, as

if the idea were absurd.

She shrugged against me. “I don’t know. You’ll see me tomorrow

morning. You’ll see me off at the airport. After that, I can’t say.”

“I don’t want to lose you.”

“Oh, Rob,” she said, jaded and world-weary in the way only a 21-year-

old newly-minted college graduate can be, “everybody always loses

everything eventually. Just enjoy the time we have.”

After we made love for the last time, I whispered in her ear, fierce and a

little possessive: “If you ever need me, any time, even years from now, just

call, and I’ll come, no questions asked.” I didn’t expect her to promise the

same in return. We’d spent three years together, and Morgan’s depths were

still fundamentally a mystery to me, but I knew she valued her

independence.

“I’ll remember that,” she said, and that was the last significant exchange

we had until we said goodbye at the airport.

It’s something you say to people you love. “If you ever need me, you

only have to call. I’ll get on a plane the next day, no questions asked.” You

trust they won’t abuse you. You trust that, if they call, it’s because they

really need you, because you can make a difference.

But you don’t sit around waiting for the call, because you don’t truly

ever expect it to come.

Five years later, Morgan called. I still had the same phone number I’d

had in college, still lived in the same house (though it was all mine, now, not

shared with four housemates), still made a nice living. As far as the IRS

knew, I ran my own collectibles business, selling old books and records and

folk art and tin toys online, but I secretly supplemented my income by

selling pot and mushrooms, with a clientele that included lots of college

professors and even a couple of young cops who liked to relax on their off-

duty days. Morgan was right, I guess; I hadn’t really changed. I’d just

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settled in. I was an indispensable part of the college town ecosystem -- the

reliable dealer, not too sketchy, not involved with anything too heavy, just

the guy you came to if you needed to make the weekend memorable or

finals week more bearable.

“I need you, Rob” she said. Her voice was flat and didn’t quite dare to

be hopeful.

I could have asked questions. I didn’t. I think it’s because I’ve read too

many novels, watched too many old movies. I was too fond of grand

romantic gestures, disappointed by the pedestrian contours of my life,

hungry for wonder. So I said “When and where, Morgan?”

Turned out she lived in the same state, several hours north, so I packed

an overnight bag, got into my car, and drove through the day, listening to

Cannonball Adderley on the stereo and thinking about loves lost and found.

I sent Morgan a few letters, when she was in Italy. I liked to believe they

just got lost in the mail. Overseas postal service had to be unreliable, right?

If she had an e-mail address, she never told me about it. She said you could

never say anything important by e-mail or in letters anyway. Important

conversations had to happen face-to-face, or laying side by side in the dark.

And if you weren’t saying something important, she once asked, why were

you bothering to talk at all?

Morgan didn’t waste time on pleasantries. After barely any helloes and

a quick embrace, she said “Come on. I need to show you something in the

basement.” I was grungy and road-dirty, conscious of the twenty pounds

I’d put on since she last saw me, feeling scruffy and unlovely. Morgan was

the same as always, but sharpened by the world, body slim and athletic, not

gym-cultured but earned honestly with hiking and running and rock-

climbing and bicycling, all the pursuits she’d loved in the old days, too. She

grabbed my hand and dragged me down to her basement. She lived in a

rambling old house with ancient added-on rooms and a screened-in

wraparound porch, and the basement stairs were rickety and narrow.

The basement was lit by bare bulbs strung from the ceiling, and it was

catastrophically messy, filled with boxes and metal shelves, car parts and

sawhorses, empty aquariums and busted televisions, workbenches strewn

with wire and gears and bolts. The walls were invisible, hidden behind

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heaps of crap. It smelled like engine oil and dust. “Jesus, Morgan, when did

you become such a pack rat?”

“All this came with the house.” She stood at the foot of the stairs, arms

crossed, gazing into the basement’s depths. “The former owner disappeared

a few years ago, and the bank foreclosed on the mortgage. We bought it

from them.”

We? Who was we?

“My husband Kyle is a collector—that’s how we met, he sold some

items to the folk art museum where I worked—so he took the basement as

an added incentive, certain there’d be some treasures down here.”

“Ah. You’re married.”

She ignored me. “He was right, too. We found all sorts of things down

here. I’ll show you the most interesting one.” Morgan led me down a

corridor of brown boxes and jumbled oddments, into a maze with walls of

junk. The box-lined passage took several right-angle turns until I began to

wonder just how big this basement was —it clearly extended some way

beyond the limits of the house above. Eventually the light bulbs gave out,

and Morgan wordlessly handed me a flashlight from a little stockpile of

them on a shelf. She flipped hers on and continued through the gloom. “Did

you ever read the Narnia books?”

I’d seen the movie, anyway. “Sure, kids go through a closet and meet a

talking lion, right?”

“Right. No closet here, and it’s not Narnia on the other side, but you’ll

see what I mean.”

Before I could ask any questions, we reached a wall of ancient red

bricks, mortar crumbling between the stones. There was a huge, ragged hole

in the wall, five feet high and twice as wide, with dim light beyond. “In

here,” Morgan said, ducking through.

Did it lead to another basement? Tunnels? A trove of pirate gold?

I ducked after her, and then shrank back against the wall,

claustrophobia replaced by agoraphobia.

There was a sky beyond the wall, a sky so gray and dull it hurt to look

upon, and the jumble in the basement was recreated ten-thousandfold here,

a gargantuan scrapyard land, a junk drawer for giants. “What the fuck ,” I

said.

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Tim Pratt - The Crawlspace of the World.pdf

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