Turtles All the Way Down by John Green
After a while, we heard a clamor of voices approach, and the gallery became crowded. Someone had set up a stereo, and music began reverberating through the tunnel. Plastic cups were passed around, and then bottles of wine, and the place got louder and louder, and even though it was freezing down there, I started to feel sweaty, so I asked Daisy if she wanted to go for a walk.
“A walk?”
“Yeah, just, I don’t know, down the tunnel or something.”
“You want to go for a walk down the tunnel.”
“Yeah. I mean, we don’t have to.”
She pointed into the darkness beyond the reach of our headlamps. “You’re proposing that we just walk into that void.”
“Not for like a mile or anything. Just to see what there is to see.”
Daisy sighed. “Yeah, okay. Let’s go for a walk.”
—
It only took a minute for the air to feel crisper. The tunnel ahead of us was pitch-black, and it curved in a long, slow arc away from the party until we couldn’t see the light from it anymore. We could still hear the music and the people talking over it, but it felt distant, like a party you drive past.
“I don’t understand how you can be so inhumanly calm down here, fifteen feet below downtown Indianapolis, ankle deep in rat shit, but you have a panic attack when you think your finger is infected.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “This just isn’t scary.”
“It objectively is,” she said.
I reached up and clicked off my headlamp. “Turn off your light,” I said.
“Hell, no.”
“Turn it off. Nothing bad will happen.” She clicked off her light, and the world went dark. I felt my eyes trying to adjust, but there was no light to adjust to. “Now you can’t see the walls, right? Can’t see the rats. Spin around a few times and you won’t know which way is in and which way is out. This is scary. Now imagine if we couldn’t talk, if we couldn’t hear each other’s breathing. Imagine if we had no sense of touch, so even if we were standing next to each other, we’d never know it.
“Imagine you’re trying to find someone, or even you’re trying to find yourself, but you have no senses, no way to know where the walls are, which way is forward or backward, what is water and what is air. You’re senseless and shapeless—you feel like you can only describe what you are by identifying what you’re not, and you’re floating around in a body with no control. You don’t get to decide who you like or where you live or when you eat or what you fear. You’re just stuck in there, totally alone, in this darkness. That’s scary. This,” I said, and turned on the flashlight. “This is control. This is power. There may be rats and spiders and whatever the hell. But we shine the light on them, not the other way around. We know where the walls are, which way is in and which way is out. This,” I said, turning off my light again, “is what I feel like when I’m scared. This”—I turned the flashlight back on—“is a walk in the fucking park.”
We walked for a while in silence. “It’s that bad?” she asked finally.
“Sometimes,” I said.
“But then your flashlight starts working again,” she said.
“So far.”
—
As we kept walking, through the tunnel, the music behind us growing fainter, Daisy calmed down a bit. “I’m thinking of killing off Ayala,” she said. “Would you take that personally?”
“Nah,” I said. “I was just starting to like her, though.”
“Did you read the most recent one?”
“The one where they go to Ryloth to deliver power converters? I loved the scene where Rey and Ayala are waiting for that dude in a bar, and they’re just talking. I like your action scenes and everything, but the just talking is my favorite. Also, I liked that I got to hook up with a Twi’lek. Or, Ayala did, I guess. Your writing makes me feel like it’s real, like I’m really there.”
“Thanks,” she said. “Now you’re making me think maybe I shouldn’t kill her.”
“I don’t mind if you kill her. Just make her die a hero.”
“Oh, of course. She has to. I was thinking I’d make it some Rogue One–style sacrifice for the common good. If that sounds okay?”
“Works for me,” I told her.
“God, is the smell getting worse?” she asked.
“It’s not getting better,” I acknowledged. It smelled more like rotting garbage and unflushed toilets, and as we passed an offshoot to the tunnel, Daisy said she wanted to turn around, but in the distance ahead of us I could see a pinprick of gray light, and I wanted to see what was at the end.
As we walked, the sounds of the city grew slowly louder and the smell improved because we were close to open air. The gray light grew larger until we reached the edge of the tunnel. It was open and unfinished—the tiny trickle of water that was supposed to be diverted from the White River was instead dripping down into it, two stories below us.
I looked up. It was past ten o’clock, but I’d never seen the city look so blindingly bright. I could see everything: the green moss on the boulders in the river below; the golden frothy bubbles at the base of the waterfall; the trees in the distance bent over the water like the roof of a chapel; the power lines sagging across the river below us; a great silver grain mill absurdly still in the moonlight; neon Speedway and Chase Bank signs in the distance.
Indianapolis is so flat you can never really look down on it; it’s not a town with million-dollar views. But now I had one, in the most unexpected place, the city stretching out below and beyond me, and it took a minute before I remembered that this was nighttime, that this silver-lit landscape is what passed, aboveground, for darkness.