Est evacuatio timoris propter confirniationem liberi arbitrii, qua deinceps scit se peccare non posse. Fear is cast out because of the strengthening of the will by which the soul knows it can no longer sin.
—ST. BONAVENTURE, ON FEAR IN PURGATORY
March 1985
Men’s faces greasy with condensation shimmer in the pitch-black of the tunnel. Beneath his hard hat Joshua’s hair is slick and wet. Sweat trickles down the men’s backs, in the folds between clothes and their rain gear. Mold grows in the creases of their skin, in the warmth of their armpits, between fingers and toes, in their crotches, in the tender places about their ears, and their skin begins to rot. But Joshua has experienced this before many thousands of miles away. And this is not the only thing that reminds him of other places.
From cross-sections and secondary tunnels—ventilation shafts and sluice breaks—men appear suddenly, faces peering out of the dripping darkness, and he cannot tell who they are until they mutter their name: Javier, Sully, John Chang, P.J. Rollins, Billy Gillespie. And the hollow, eternal sound of water droplets falling and reverberating through the tunnel as if they are at the bottom of some abyssal well.
Eyes glisten from pale and gaunt washed-out faces like hard gems in the gloom, like the backs of darkling beetles. And some eyes bleed from their whites, as nitrogen-starved corpuscles explode. Or stepping from pillars of steam: black, shifting figures like the soldiers that move through the misty jungles of his dreams, moving seemingly without end, much like the workers of this tunnel—and always they are following him, always searching for a way to move up, up into the light.
And always the deep, falling, cavernous sound of raindrops, dropping from the walls into holes and cracks and pools about them and echoing like minor concussions enlarging and then diminishing, settling back into the earth and creating the suggestion of vastness, of a free-falling dark without end. And in this dark, faintly, Joshua hears Jamie Minkivitz crying and his brother telling him to stop, pleading with him for the love of God to just shut the fuck up.