The Zero Game

39

My stomach leaps into my chest as the cage plummets. For the first few feet, it’s no different from an elevator ride, but as we pick up speed and plunge down the shaft, my stomach sails up toward my esophagus. Jerking back and forth, the cage bangs wildly against the walls of the shaft, almost knocking us off our feet. It’s like trying to stand on a rocking rowboat as it bottoms out under you.

“Harris, tell her to slow down before-!”

The floor of the cage heaves violently to the left, and Viv loses her chance to finish the thought.

“Lean against the wall — it makes it easier!” I call out.

“What?!” she shouts, though I can barely hear her. Between the pounding of the cage, the speed of our descent, and the rumble of the waterfall, everything’s drowned in a never-ending, screeching roar.

“Lean against the wall!” I yell.

Taking my own advice, I lean back and fight to keep my balance as the rowboat rattles beneath me. It’s the first time I take a glance outside the cage. The safety gate may be closed, but through the grating, the subterranean world rushes by: a blur of brown dirt… then a flash of an underground tunnel… another blur of dirt… another tunnel. Every eight seconds, a different level whizzes by. The openings to the tunnels whip by so fast, I can barely get a look — and the more I try, the more it blurs, and the dizzier I get. Cave opening after cave opening after cave opening… We’ve gotta be going forty miles an hour.

“You feel that?” Viv calls out, pointing to her ears.

My ears pop, and I nod. I swallow hard, and they pop again, tighter than before.

It’s been over three minutes since we left, and we’re still headed down what’s easily becoming the longest elevator ride of my life. On my right, the entrances to the tunnels continue to whip by at their regular blurred pace… and then, to my surprise, they start to slow down.

“We there?” Viv asks, looking my way so her mine light shines in my face.

“I think so,” I say as I turn toward her and accidentally blind her right back. It takes a few seconds for us to realize that as long as our lights are on, the only way we can talk is by turning our heads so we’re not eye to eye. For some people in the Capitol, that comes naturally. For me, it’s like fighting blind. Every emotion starts in our eyes. And right now, Viv won’t face me.

“How we doing on air?” I ask as she looks down at her oxygen detector.

“Twenty-one percent is normal — we’re at 20.4,” she says, flipping to the instructions on the back. Her voice wobbles, but she’s doing her best to mask her fear. I check to see if her hands are shaking. She turns slightly so I can’t see them. “Says here you need sixteen percent to breathe normally… nine percent before you go unconscious… and at six percent, you wave bye-bye.”

“But we’re at 20.4?” I say, trying to reassure her.

“We were 20.9 up top,” she shoots back.

The cage bucks to a final halt. “Stop cage?” the woman asks through the intercom.

“Stop cage,” I say, pressing the red button and wiping the slime against my tool belt.

As I take my first peek through the metal safety gate, I look up at the ceiling, and my mine light bounces off a bright orange stenciled sign dangling from two wires: 4850 Level.

“You gotta be kidding me,” Viv mumbles. “We’re only halfway there?”

I press the intercom button and lean toward the speaker. “Hello…?”

“What’s wrong?” the hoist operator barks back.

“We wanted to go to the eight thousa-”

“Cross the drift and you’ll see the Number Six Winze. The cage is waiting for you there.”

“What’s wrong with this one?”

“It’s fine if you wanna stop at 4850, but if you plan on going deeper, you gotta take the other.”

“I don’t remember this last time,” I say, bluffing to see if it’s changed.

“Son, unless you were here in the 1900s, there ain’t nothin’ that’s different. They got cables now that’ll hold a cage at ten thousand feet, but back then, the furthest they could go was five thousand at a time. Now, step outside, cross the drift, and tell me when you’re in.”

I tug on the safety gate, and it rolls up and out of the way. A downpour of water from the shaft forms a wet wall that partially blocks us from seeing out. Darting straight through the waterfall and feeling the freezing water pummel my back, I dash out into the mine, where the floor, walls, and ceiling are all made of tightly packed brown dirt. No different from a cave, I tell myself, stepping ankle-deep in a puddle of mud. On both sides of the tunnel as it stretches out in front of us are another twenty feet of side-by-side benches. They’re no different from the ones up top, except for the elongated American flag that someone’s spray-painted along the entire backrest. It’s the only patch of color in this otherwise muddy-brown underworld, and as we walk past the long stretches of bench, if I close my eyes, I swear I can see the ghostly afterimages of hundreds of miners — heads hung low, elbows resting on their knees — as they wait in the dark, beaten from another day spent huddled underground.

It’s the same look my dad had on the fifteenth of every month — when he’d count up how many haircuts he’d need to make the mortgage. Mom used to scold him for refusing tips, but back then, he thought it was bad taste in a small town. When I was twelve, he gave up the shop and moved the business into the basement of our house. But he still had that look. I used to think it was regret for spending his whole day down there. It wasn’t. It was dread — the pain you feel from the thought that you have to do it again tomorrow. Entire lives spent underground. To cover it up, Dad put up posters of Ralph Kiner, Roberto Clemente, and the emerald green outfield at Forbes Field; down here, they use the red, white, and blue of the flag — and the bright yellow door of the cage that sits fifty feet dead ahead.

Crossing the drift, we plow through the mud, heading straight for the door marked Winze No. 6.

As I enter the new cage and pull the safety gate down, Viv scans the even tinier metal shoebox. The lower ceiling makes the coffin feel even smaller. As Viv cranes her neck downward, I can practically smell claustrophobia setting in.

“This is Number Six Hoist,” the woman announces through the intercom. “All set?”

I glance at Viv. She won’t even look up. “All set,” I say into the intercom. “Lower cage.”

“Lower cage,” she repeats as the coffin starts to rumble. We both lean back against our respective walls, prepping ourselves for the freefall. A bead of water swells on the ceiling of the cage, drops to the ground, and plinks into a small puddle. I hold my breath… Viv looks up at the noise… and the floor once again plummets from beneath us.

Next stop: eight thousand feet below the earth’s surface.