The Aztecs no longer exist.
At face value, one might think this a good thing, because their practice of mass human sacrifice wasn’t exactly a charming highlight of history...but on the other hand, every culture has nasty skeletons in its historical closet: sacrifices, slavery, Elvis impersonators—and who is to say if the Aztec gods might not have lost their thirst for blood had the conquistadores not flattened them under their armored feet.
But, unfortunately for Elvis and the Aztecs, the way we die is the way we are remembered—just as “the King” will be forever clad in the hideous rhinestones and white bell-bottoms of the seventies, the Aztecs’ rich culture will always be overshadowed by the human hearts they served to Quetzalcoatl. Perhaps that is the greatest crime of conquest—that a civilization is denied the right to evolve beyond its own embarrassment.
It may be true that some milestones in history are inevitable; events that stand like great boulders in the flow of time that no amount of wisdom can avoid. But there are other times that the course of history turns in the hands of individuals....
The Downsiders were neither stupid nor suicidal, but they were desperate. So desperate that they clung to the convictions of a fourteen-year-old boy who had survived his own execution.
With word spreading that Talon had dared to enter the Chamber of First Runes, people twenty and thirty years his senior looked on him with a reverence that he ignored. Instead, he reined their awe into cooperation. Talon’s plan was simple, his passion persuasive—and the Wise Advisors dared not oppose him, for Topsiders had already breached some of the outer tunnels, and time was short. Soon Talon had gathered all the tappers, and in turn they gathered every other Downsider who could be put to the task. Even little Pidge helped, sacrificing one of her prized playthings for the good of all.
As the gas tappers went out to begin their fearsome undertaking, the rest of the Downside gathered in the Floodgate Concourse, deep within the inner core of the Downside world. With mattresses torn from the Chamber of Soft Walls, entrances to the Concourse were tightly plugged to keep everyone within the Concourse safe from the cataclysm about to sweep through the High Perimeter. Word throughout the crowded cavern was that the Fates had spoken to Talon and told him that the only way to save the Downside was through a trial by fire. Talon didn’t argue with them because perhaps they were right. Perhaps the Fates didn’t speak in words but in turns of the heart. He wondered if he would have considered this course of action if he had not been exposed to the brutal truth of their own history—the folder that he still clutched in his hands as he waited for the High Perimeter to be flooded with methane.
When the last of the tappers returned, the final doorway was sealed. “We’ve closed all doors and hatches to the High Perimeter,” one of the gas tappers reported, “but there’s no telling how many of them will hold.”
If they did hold, the high-perimeter tunnels would collapse, sealing out the Topside once and for all...but if those doors and hatches blew, there was no telling how much of the Downside would be lost as well.
“We’ll be safe in here,” the tappers assured everyone, but Talon wondered how certain they were.
As families huddled together, Talon found himself just a kid once more, clinging to his sister, and to his parents, who held them both in their frightened but protective arms and whispered words of comfort.
Meanwhile, in a High-Perimeter tunnel, where natural gas and oxygen had blended in lethal proportions, Pidge’s old battery-operated puppy, the soles of its feet covered with gritty matchbook friction-strips, slowly shuffled its way toward a forest of matches.
Lindsay Matthias’s eyes snapped open after hours of anesthetic sleep that passed in a dreamless instant. The electricity was still out, but the sun was now high in the sky. Usually morning light would always bring her clarity and a sense of peace, but today it brought a bleak and weighty cloud of regret. She had left Talon with her head held high, confident that her actions would bring about some glorious reconciliation of the two worlds. But what on earth had made her think such a reconciliation would be glorious—or that one was even needed? She had been so excited to uncover the truth of how the Downside came to be that she rode the fever of that excitement, only to realize that she had brought them a disease as virulent as smallpox. Yes, she had discovered the truth—but there were other truths as well— like the dignity the Downsiders had found; the passion and purity with which they lived their lives. What gave her the right to hold her truth above theirs?
Stormed by the Topside and stripped of their convictions, what would the Downsiders become under the heel of Topside life? She already knew the answer: They would be seen as insignificant curiosities, impoverished and pitifully ignorant. How long until the Downsiders saw themselves that way as well, becoming an underclass of destitute souls—the same way they had started more than a hundred years before?
With these thoughts brewing, she went downstairs to find Todd snoring on the couch, and her father sitting at the kitchen table, staring at nothing in particular.
This was the first sign that something was horribly wrong in her own little world as well, for usually her father was a body-in-motion, always running from one thing to another. But now he sat with a sense of inertia so heavy, he might as well have been shackled to the kitchen chair. The second sign that something was amiss were the chocolate bars—or at least the wrappers. It was no secret that her father was a chocoholic, but usually he could keep his cravings under control. Here on the table, however, was a wasteland of brown-and-silver Hershey’s bar wrappers—just as there had been on that night so many years ago when he and her mother had decided to divorce. As on that day, the green-gilled dyspeptic look on her father’s face had little to do with the bubbling cauldron of chocolate in his stomach. He now resided beneath his own black cloud as well, and Lindsay idly wondered if their two clouds could coexist in the same room without generating a thunderstorm.
She sat down across from him, although she had no idea what to say. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to know what this particular Hershey Horror was about—such was the distance that had fallen between them in the weeks since her arrival.
“I thought you’d still be out with the rest of the city’s engineers,” she said. “Digging for gophers.”
He shook his head. “They’re not interested in my help,” he told her. “They just want someone to blame.”
“Blame?” That caught Lindsay by surprise. It never occurred to her that her father might end up taking the brunt of this utility disaster. True, her father was indirectly responsible for the city’s woes by having dug the Westside Aqueduct Shaft in the first place—but no one on the surface could know that. “How can they blame you? That’s ridiculous,” she told him, as if dismissing it would make the problem go away.
“People don’t care who gets blamed, just as long as somebody does.” He picked up another chocolate bar, considered eating it, but gave it to Lindsay instead. “The fact is, I was the one uprooting the city’s infrastructure, and I was the one who lost a truck down the shaft. My butt was a target the size of New Jersey, just waiting to get kicked.”
“You really think they’ll kick it?”
“They already have.” Then he cleared away the wrappers before him to reveal a piece of official city stationery beneath it. The letter written on the paper bore a single line, and a space for her father’s signature.
“They’ve requested my resignation.”
Lindsay noticed a pen near the letter of resignation, lethally poised like a pistol. She wondered how long her father had been sitting there, contemplating that pen.
He blinked slowly, as if even his own eyelids were now a burden. “I put five years into building this aqueduct. Now they’re taking it away from me...” His voice trailed off, and his gaze turned to the pen.
Perhaps it was the knowledge of what else was at stake today in the tunnels down below, or perhaps some of Todd’s insensitivity had finally rubbed off on her, but Lindsay found herself wanting to shake her father. It’s just a hole in the ground, she wanted to say...but as she looked at him, she realized it wasn’t just the hole he was seeing. He was seeing everything else that would be sucked into that hole: his career, his home, but most of all, his dignity. And it occurred to Lindsay that he wasn’t all that different from Talon—for her father, too, would be losing his world today.
For the first time in as long as she could remember, Lindsay wanted to reach across that precarious chocolate wrapper chasm to him, but she had no idea what she could do or say. She couldn’t share with him her own woes and misgivings...she couldn’t tell him about the Down-side...but as she thought about it, she realized she did have something they could share that could bridge the distance between them.
There was the box in her suitcase.
She had hidden it so well, she had almost forgotten about it. Without a word, she left her father and went up to her room. Then, standing on her desk chair, she pulled the suitcase off a closet shelf and fished out the shoe box, which was creased and dented from the trip out from Texas and her own weeks of neglect. She didn’t have to look inside—she had done that enough before she arrived, and she knew every item inside. Looking at them had been like scratching a scab—knowing it would bleed, yet unable to stop. She was supposed to have presented these items to her father upon her arrival. Instead, she had taken guilty pleasure in hiding them...for in its own way, the box was a letter of resignation, too—one that she had no desire to deliver.
When she returned to the kitchen, her father was still there, contemplating the pen. She sat down and set the shoe box between them. “Mom said you should have this,” she told him, then opened the box to reveal her mother’s parting gift to both of them.
Inside were a dozen incomplete items. The left half of memories.
There was a single champagne glass—half of a set her parents had sipped from on the day they were wed. There was Lindsay’s baby book—an oddly slim thing that on closer inspection revealed itself to be only half the book, neatly rebound to hide the fact that every other page was missing. There was one pink baby bootie—part of a pair Lindsay had worn shortly after the exaggerated forty-eight hours of labor her mother claimed to have endured. There were other things, too—from keys for locks that no longer existed, to a ceramic bookend with no mate.
She wanted to hate her mother for dividing these memories, but then she considered the care with which they had been prepared and packed. Her mother had done this painstakingly, with great attention to the gravity of her task. She had cleanly separated the inseparable, like a surgeon transplanting a heart.
Now the other half of this collection was part of another world, and although Lindsay never expected her parents’ two worlds to be reconciled, neither did she want to admit that they would be eternally separate. Lindsay tried to imagine her mother somewhere in the Serengeti looking at her half of this final settlement of accounts. Did her mother even take them with her, or were they like the furniture she left behind in the dark limbo of storage? Well, maybe some truths were better left unknown.
Her father looked at the box, but did not attempt to remove anything, as if it were some sort of diorama—a fragile shadowbox to be seen, but not touched....
So Lindsay reached in and pulled out the pink knit booty. “I’m sorry for the things that have been taken from you, Daddy,” she said, then she reached out and pressed the tiny knit sock into his hand. “Maybe this can make up for it.”
For the longest time he rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger, staring at it, saying nothing. Then he looked at the pen. Perhaps it was just her imagination, but it seemed to Lindsay that the pen no longer held the same malevolence it had only a moment ago. He picked it up and, in one smooth, confident motion, signed his name to the letter of resignation, as if that particular loss was now unimportant. And he smiled.
Far away there was a distant rumble, like the foundation shifting. The walls rattled for an instant, and a report came up from the drain, like a hollow belch from the center of the earth. But even then, Lindsay and her father continued to share their moment of silence, if for no other reason than to honor the memory of all the worlds lost to the passing of time.