THIRTY-SEVEN
GRIFF CAME INTO HIS BEDROOM WITH TWO CRESCENT WRENCHES. Unlocking the Unifying Theory of Everything was a challenge. Unlocking the TOE Box was simple. He knelt by the painted mailbox and clutched the wrenches gingerly, like fine-boned birds.
He stood up and double-checked the door. Locked.
When he knelt, his right knee brushed the butcher paper on the closet door. To bust a padlock, you used oppositional force. Pressed heads of twin wrenches together like toothless gears within the narrow window of the hasp.
He took a breath for accuracy, the way Leo claimed to do when shooting.
Griff squeezed. Wrenches slipped. His elbow glanced off the papered mirror with a tearing sound. From the corner of his eye, half a face.
“No,” Griff whispered.
He looked again. The eye winked.
Griff gasped. Grabbed the paper, pressed it to the mirror. With his other hand, he probed for tape, something. The only thing he could reach were the wrenches. He tucked the side of the paper beneath the tear and picked up the wrenches.
Lazily, the paper flopped back down. Griff turned to the mirror.
It was Leo.
His face in the mirror, cast in a torn paper frame. They blinked at each other. Both breathing. Trembling, Griff reached up and Leo’s eye flicked toward his wrist.
“Nice bracelet,” Leo said. “Reminds me of something.”
“I’m so sorry, Leo,” Griff whispered. He could barely find the words.
“Give me a hand here?” Leo blew up at the torn paper, like he had hair in his eyes. Griff extended the tear, revealing his complete face.
Another long stare.
“What could you do?” Leo shrugged. “You screamed my name. Right? Jumped right in? You’re a strong swimmer. I imagine you did everything you could.”
“I made a line. I tried—”
“Little late, though. Right? Always been a little late, Griff.”
Griff looked back at the lock.
“I need to open the box,” Griff said. “You’d be fine with it.”
“I’m not.”
“Yes,” Griff said. “You would be. We worked on this together.”
“I put a lock on the box, Griff. That’s pretty clear. And I’m telling you not to.”
“That’s questionable.”
“Also,” he said, looking up, “that shit is cursed. From my watery grave.”
Leo did the curse fingers.
“Please stop,” Griff said.
“Spiders, too. Crawling. Breeding. It’s actually a spider farm.”
Leo knew he hated spiders.
“Okay,” Griff said.
Griff crawled across the carpet and returned with Scotch tape. Ripped a strip. Leo watched with determined eyes and said nothing as Griff papered over his reflection. He lifted the heavy wrenches from the carpet. His blood felt thick. Arm wobbled.
Griff inserted the wrench heads and made a fist.
The lock shattered. It felt loud as a gunshot. Griff sat, panting, staring at the lock’s broken pieces. What had he done?
KNOCK KNOCK
“What!” Griff spun.
“Okay in there?” his father called.
“Jesus, Dad. I’m fine!”
Footsteps plodded off. Griff shut his eyes. When he opened them, the box was listing open, just a crack. The smell of low-tide sulfur. He pulled open the heavy, swinging door.
Griff exhaled.
The TOE Box was packed. Fuller than he’d imagined.
Cassette tapes. Radios. Headphones. Waterproof notebooks. A thick white cardboard tube, deadheaded with tamper-proof tape.
KEEP SEALED
“No recording, huh?” Griff said. He took the cassettes out and stacked them click, clack. Over twenty tapes, labeled with longitude, latitude, times. Coded like the Preppers had taught them, don’t make anything easy. Griff split the tube’s tamper-proof tape with a soft pop. He reached his fingers inside. A tickle.
Spiders!
No. Two tight rolls of graphing paper. He spread them out on the carpet. Leo’s cramped, meticulous handwriting clustered in the corners, slashing across great, wide swaths of geography.
One of the maps was of Oregon. Even with coded labels, Griff recognized how the banks and cays fit together like the loops and sockets of a puzzle. The first map was casually marked.
The second map was much more detailed. Dotted arrows. Interlocking circles, drawn by a compass. Meticulous elevation lines. The markings depicted a vast plateau between crisscrossing mountain ranges. If Griff understood the scale, the landform was too massive to be unknown to him.
Where could it possibly be?
If Leo’s map was scaled at 20 miles to an inch—as it appeared—the plateau was hundreds of square miles wide. There couldn’t be many such spaces on Earth. Griff went to his computer. He searched California, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Nevada for an elevated landform that size, between 250 and 300 feet high. The Midwest. Russia. Siberia. Africa. Europe. What was he missing?
He texted Thomas: I NEED YOU TO FIND SOMETHING FOR ME.
ON IT CHIEF, Thomas responded. SHOOT.
Griff sent him the rough dimensions. Hundreds of square miles, a few hundred feet high.
Hours later, Griff lay exhausted on his bed. Lights on. Still dressed.
NADA, Thomas texted. SURE YOU’VE GOT THE MEASUREMENTS RIGHT?
“Where?” he said out loud. He looked at the paper on the mirror. He rolled around in his bed. Punched his pillow. Flipped it.
He looked at Leo’s bed, neatly made.
“Whoomp,” Griff said.
Griff remembered the first night, when Leo had locked the TOE Box. Griff scooted to the foot of the bed and hung his head upside down, from the bottom. He stared at the box. Looked up at the pebbled ceiling.
The realization struck his body first. Goose bumps up the back of his neck, nipping at his hairline.
“Upside down,” Griff whispered.
He sat so suddenly the world jerked, tilted him sideways out of bed, and he stumbled up to his computer. Tapping the screen. Then grabbing the map.
No plateaus of that size 250 feet above sea level.
But Leo’s elevation lines were 250 feet below.
“Atlantis,” Griff whispered.
Leo had tracked the radio signal to the bottom of the ocean.