As Above, So Below

Katie begins counting down when Isaak comes to pick her up at 9 pm. Three hours.

The night is too warm for winter. The clouds hang low and close, smothering the hills on the horizon and diffusing the traffic lights into multicolored halos. On the other side of the freeway, cars cluster in their race to get home; they seem, in this misty darkness, less like individualized vehicles and more of a swarm of bioluminescent insects.

Katie brings her knees up to her chest and watches the window instead of watching Isaak. Her mind—for all it had been clouded over with worry, anticipation, yearning, in the days, weeks, months prior—is now blank. She thinks about the air conditioning, how it pricks at her bare legs, leaves the skin clammy. She thinks about how much warmer it is outside the car. She wonders if there’s going to be a storm. Not that it’ll matter, where they’re going.

Isaak slides his phone towards her. The action pulls her back down to earth.

“It’s too quiet! Let’s have some music.”

Katie straightens her spine, puts her legs down. “Sure. Anything you want?”

“You choose.”

“It’s your car.”

“Ah, it’s my mom’s car. But—no, come on, you should choose.”

They make it seven minutes into the first song on Elder’s Dead Roots Stirring before Isaak puts on the new Carly Rae Jepsen album. The car’s audio quality has degraded over the years; the bass fizzes unpleasantly.

“This sounds like shit in here,” she says.

“So did yours!”

“Yeah, but stoner rock is supposed to be crunchy.”

Isaak fiddles with the audio control knobs. The crunch recedes to a tolerable level.

Time flows more thickly once they’ve left the city. Once they exit onto the I-5 it loses all meaning. There’s just the valley on all sides, confining mountains snuffed out by the fog, and the road and the pinpricks of headlights and the same four chords of pop music.

And Isaak talks, a bit. He talks about his classes, and Katie, who is not in college anymore, nods along. He talks about the highs and lows of taking testosterone, and Katie, whose transition so far has been purely social, if that, nods along. He talks about the newest Twitter outrage, and Katie, who deleted all her social media a year ago, nods along. She almost forgets to count.

Two hours and ten minutes. They exit the freeway, pulling down a straight road with one or two cars, then a winding road with none. The sky is clearer here; the lights of the nearby city glow on the other side of the freeway.

They’re just in time—the gate into the park closes at 10 pm. Katie passes Isaak $5 to pay for parking. Fortunately, the gate going out is open all night; no one wants stragglers to be trapped inside.

The road narrows as they plunge into the trees. Isaak turns the music down and slows the car to a crawl. Katie counts the lamps perched on the side of the road. Dim as they are, they’re unshielded, spewing their sickly sodium light out into the sky. Katie imagines popping them like balloons, each one exploding into showers of glass shards.

Two hours and five minutes. They pass the lifeless visitors’ center, a rectangular silhouette against the trees. They pass through the first parking lot. Two cars sit there—it’s impossible to tell their true colors in the yellowness of the lamplight, and impossible to ascertain their true shapes with the depth of the shadows cast. Two other people with whom they could potentially cross paths, two others here so late at night. To do what? To interrupt them? To watch? To linger as an outside presence beyond their control?

They park at the very end of the road, in the tiny final parking lot. This deep into the park, the gently sloping hills wall them in on three sides. The head of a hiking trail peeks out between a line of oaks.

The air in the car is soupy. Katie closes her eyes and wonders if she should’ve brought a thermos of coffee. No, that would make it seem too real—bring the spirit of the morning and the daylight into an endeavor too diametrically opposed to the workings of the sun. Besides, caffeine does weird things to her head.

“We should have brought shrooms,” she tells Isaak, still with her eyes closed.

“God, imagine! I think my instructor would personally murder me.”

Katie half-chuckles. “As if we wouldn’t die for sure if we were high while we were in there. Fuck. As if we’re not gonna die anyway.”

“Dude. Don’t say that.”

“Sorry.”

A sudden pulse in her mind. Dark waves. A void, expanding then contracting. Sound muffles for a split second.

“You good?” comes Isaak’s voice. 

“Sorry.” She opens her eyes. “Let’s go.”

She unwraps her limbs and climbs out of the car into cooler air than she expected. Isaak stretches, heaving a contented, much-too-loud sigh. Then he goes around the back and opens the trunk. Katie doesn’t move. Her eyes follow the trajectory of the hiking trail, disappearing into the impenetrable mass of the trees.

The trunk shuts. Isaak’s struggling to carry over two large duffel bags.

“Maybe we should change now,” he says.

“What? No. Come on, it’s a whole hike.” And she doesn’t want the streetlamps to know where they’re going.

“Okay, yeah. Here, you gotta carry yours, though.”

He shuffles over and deposits one of the bags at her feet. There’s a metallic clunk as she picks it up, the loose equipment shifting inside. It’s lighter than she thought it would be, though its weight still makes her feel lopsided.

Two hours.

Beyond those first two oak sentries, the trail opens into a wider footpath. To the left, the rock of the naked hillside, slanting steeply upwards. Dark masses of bush and grass cluster in the pockets of dirt between the crags. To the right, the liquid black of a river far below, snaking through a bed of giant, jagged stones. Flecks of light from Isaak’s phone glint off its surface.

“I guess this is the right direction,” Isaak says quietly, looking down at the river. “If we follow the water downstream.”

“It shouldn’t be far.”

“When was the last time you came here?”

There’s no reason for her to lie. “I’ve never been here before.”

“Oh,” says Isaak. He laughs nervously. “Goddamn. Okay. Well, I guess that makes it more of an adventure, right?”

“Yeah.”

“It can’t be worse than that time in Pinnacles.”

“Yeah. True.”

The trail narrows as they walk. The hills grow taller, creep further and further into their space until there is room only for two things in the little valley between them: the path and the river. Knobbly boulders gather around them, breaking off from the side of the hill to choke or divert the stream of water. One, twice as tall as Katie, sits in the middle of the riverbed, a giant blot of darkness cutting the river in two.

She stops. The void licks at the shores of her brain. One hour, fifty minutes.

“This way,” she says, and steps off the trail.

“What?”

There’s an easy pathway across the river. Katie slings the duffel bag over her shoulder and stretches out her arms for balance, stepping carefully from one crooked boulder to the next. A foot below, the water rushes quietly.

The trees on the other side grow into the slope of the hill; they jut at odd angles, trunks only barely illuminated by Isaak’s faraway light. The rock is rough and uneven, solid against Katie’s fingers. Her hands find the path she can’t see. There’s no trail here, just the inhospitable earth, bushes jabbing at her face, trees looming over her like curious giants.

“Dude. Where are you going?”

“It’s this way.”

“The lake?”

“We’re not going to the lake.”

Silence. Even without looking behind her, she can sense Isaak perched there on one of the rocks, eyes wide.

“Where are we going?” he asks, voice climbing an octave.

“I’ll show you.”

“Do we still need the gear?”

“Yeah.”

She almost thinks he’s going to turn around and walk right back up the trail. She almost wants him to. It would be one less pair of eyes.

But Isaak jumps across the rocks anyway.

“I mean,” he says, once he’s caught up with her. “You never said it was the lake we were diving in. I just assumed. But hey, now it’s even more of a mystery. A greater adventure!”

One hour, forty-five minutes, thinks Katie. She says: “Shit. I don’t want to—you don’t have to come.”

“No, no. I’m coming.”

“Okay,” says Katie. She thinks about Pinnacles. “Okay. This way.”

There’s no solid ground on the slope of the hill. They move from outcropping to stony outcropping, clinging to the thin trunks of protruding trees, blindly feeling their way forwards. Up the hill, around, down again. Into a new valley, a new crack between the hills. They can no longer see the old footpath. Everything is still and silent and dark. A fuzzy sliver of moon shines through the clouds, separating the outlines of tree branches from the grayed-out sky. Katie’s shoulder aches with the weight of the bag.

And it won’t be like Pinnacles this time, because at Pinnacles, neither of them knew what they were doing. Back then, they wanted to go rock climbing, though neither had done it before in their lives. Here, now, they can both contribute something. Isaak has the SCUBA certification, the borrowed gear. And Katie…

The entrance to the cave is less of a mouth than a trepanation. A hole in the hillside, two feet in diameter. A massive slab of granite hangs over it; with all the rocks piled up around them like giant, lopsided tombstones, one wouldn’t notice this strange, not-quite-circular crevice unless they were looking at it head-on.

One hour and twenty minutes.

“Oh,” says Isaak. He looks at Katie. Back at the cave’s mouth. “That’s… we’re not going in there.” His voice is weak.

“I am.”

“Dude, I’m not certified.”

“Yes you are.”

“Not for caves! Not for fucking—cave diving!” He straightens up, backing away until he collides with the bulging face of the boulder behind him. The light of his phone is aimed at one of the smaller rocks at his feet—with such a concentrated source of illumination, the dusty gray of the granite shines bright white.

“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” Katie says. Her voice is level. She feels as if she’s floating outside herself, unable to summon up the will to respond with an emotion more befitting Isaak’s panic. The darkness in her mind’s eye creeps ever closer. “It’s okay. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

“How did you even—” He makes a vague gesture towards the hole. The phone light skids across the rocks. “Are there maps? Is this, like, a known cave?”

One hour and eighteen minutes. Katie angles herself away from the entrance; she knows that if she glances once more into its depths then she won’t be able to physically stop herself from crawling inside.

“No,” she says. “I knew. I saw it.”

“Where?”

“I just saw it.”

Isaak presses his lips together, eyes creasing with concern. The singular light source makes his expression look more stark, ghastly.

“Katie,” he pleads.

The void pulses again. Dark, insistent. Waves crash over her mind, engulfing her in blissful numbness. Isaak can make his decision on his own.

She drops to her hands and knees and squeezes herself into the entrance. Darkness descends instantly. The passage is only just wide enough to accommodate her; her shoulders and spine scrape up against the rough walls closing in around her. Under her bare knees is hard, cold granite. In front of her is only the tunnel. Only the blackness of the lightless earth.

Isaak makes a noise of distress behind her. She can’t tell whether or not it’s words. The canvas of the duffel bag slides against the rock.

“I should’ve brought a real flashlight.” His voice is muffled. The phone light only does enough to illuminate the texture of the walls, nothing of the tunnel ahead.

The passage widens. The chamber before them could not possibly be called a room, not when Katie extends an arm above her head and immediately meets a shelf of rock, her elbow bent at an acute angle. With two duffel bags in between Isaak and Katie, his phone light cannot even capture the compact dimensions of this chamber. It’s no matter. The void comes from below her. Katie rocks onto her side, kicking her legs out in front of her, only to meet solid rock once more. Angling her feet downwards, she discovers a cavity—a diagonal slant. Feet-first, she pushes herself into it, hands braced against the sides of the chamber, then the sides of the shaft as she fits herself inside. For once, she feels grateful for her wiry frame and flat chest. The rock is at her back, against her stomach, snug as a duvet laid across a supine body. Suddenly, she feels the weight of it—so many hundreds and thousands of tons, stopping just short of the tip of her nose.

“Oh god,” Isaak says, somewhere above her.

This new, tight shaft is too bumpy to merely slide down. Katie makes the mistake once of inhaling too deeply; her chest expands painfully into the unyielding stone. Palms splayed against the underside of the shaft, she inches herself downward, wriggling from side to side, feet finding purchase in the cracks in the walls. She can’t tell if the rock pressed to her skin is simply cold, or if it’s beginning to become damp.

And then there is nothing under her feet. Katie bends her knee and follows with her heel the curve of the rock face behind her. There is a larger chamber here. She kicks blindly until she finds a foothold, some ninety degrees off from where the last one was, and slowly lowers herself down towards it, bent like a yoga crab.

There is a floor, now, and a ceiling higher than her extended arm can reach. She shimmies out of the crack and emerges into a space—not a large space, she thinks, but one that she can stand in. Her head buzzes and aches. The darkness engulfing her could be anything—just beyond her reach could be thin air, rock, water.

Isaak ruins it by shining his light directly down the diagonal shaft.

“Oh my god,” he says again. His voice cracks.

It’s barely a room—maybe large enough to be a bathroom, or a closet. The floor angles downwards. The lower half of it is flooded with water. At the very end of the chamber, a pure black chasm. The water is still, silent, empty. It beckons.

One hour.

The duffel bags fit down the shaft, just barely. Katie peels off her grimy clothes and forces her limbs into the wetsuit. It’s clammy, tight and resistant against her skin, smothering her in stiff rubber. But she’s remembered how to fit herself into it ever since Isaak smuggled her into the pool on his campus after hours to try out his rented gear. How to clip on her buoyancy control device and attach her tank and her snorkel. How to transform, to cloak herself in darkness.

“Katie—wait for me—turn on the light, you have to make sure it’s properly—”

Isaak, thin as he is, has a harder time squeezing down the shaft. His limbs flail too much. He keeps an iron grip on his phone. But when he emerges, panting and flushed, he goes immediately for his own bag.

“You don’t have to,” Katie says again, quietly.

“Yeah, well, who’s gonna make sure you don’t kill yourself.” He doesn’t look at her as pulls off his shirt and struggles out of his binder. “Ohh, we should’ve brought two tanks each. You’re going to have like half an hour of air if you play it safe. Fifteen minutes there, fifteen back.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t.” In the dim light, she can see he’s shivering.

Thirty minutes. Isaak insists on checking over every inch of both their suits. He makes them go over hand signals. He tells Katie about the bends, about frog kicking to avoid stirring up dust, about the backup lights, about the nitrogen narcosis that impairs one’s judgment. He’s never been this diligent before one of their adventures. Katie half-wonders what kicked that sense into him: taking diving lessons, or breaking his leg at Pinnacles. The other half of her attention is down there in that black water.

“Okay,” whispers Isaak. He sits in the shallow water, dipping the tips of his fins into the crack in the rock below. It’s wider than the earlier shaft was—just wide enough for a body and an air tank. Every opening so far has been just wide enough and no wider: wide enough to crawl, to shimmy, to dive.

Twenty minutes. They go in head first. The chasm leads straight down. It neither opens nor narrows, as far as they can see. The light on Katie’s wrist illuminates the cloudy gray of the granite walls, with all its crooked contours casting impenetrable shadows. Outside the range of the flashlight, the color of the cavern dips into a rusty aquamarine, then pure black oblivion. An unknown depth.

There’s no dust to stir up when the cave has no bottom. Katie frog kicks anyway, propelling herself lazily downward. A long and steady fall. Her mind is empty. The chill of the water nips at her exposed skin, freezes her cheeks where the mask bites into her flesh. Her wetsuit holds her like an embrace.

Ten minutes.

She almost doesn’t notice when the topology of the cavern begins to shift. The rock juts outward, curls inward, carving out little niches that go nowhere like some miner had abandoned a project halfway through. But, of course, no one created these formations, no matter how suspiciously right-angled the curve of a wall might be, or how much an indent in the rock might appear like the shape of a heart. The passage stretches on, curving diagonally, then sideways, then down again. A couple of voids in the walls appear to be alternate tunnels, but upon shining her light on them, Katie recognizes their deep blue as indicative of a faraway wall. The only true black is that which stretches ahead.

Until it doesn’t. Ten feet ahead, the ceiling dips violently, cutting off half of their passageway. Beyond it: the tantalizing dark, reduced to a sliver.

Five minutes. For the first time, Katie looks back at Isaak. He looks like another person underwater, his long dark hair fanning out around his face. He taps his fingers against his palm: how much air do you have?

Katie points at the crevice. Isaak shakes his head. He signals stop, go back.

She can make it. She has enough air. She’ll fit. But there’s no way to communicate all these things with her hands. She turns back around and propels herself towards the crack.

Up close, it’s smaller than it seemed. She grasps the edges of it with both hands, peering through into the nothingness beyond. It’s a lopsided shape, something like a trapezoid. If she pushes herself onto her stomach, flat against the wall, her head should go through. Her tank is less certain. If only she’d been able to mount it at her side, rather than her back.

She flips herself around again, squeezing her shoulders into the thickest part of the trapezoid, angling the tank towards the thinner edges. Wrapping her arms around her chest, curling them into herself as tight as possible, she’s just able to wedge her torso through the gap. Once her arms are free, she places the heels of her palms against the other side of the crevice and pushes hard. The walls have expanded outwards; there are no rocks ahead to cling onto.

There’s nothing ahead at all.

Katie squirms and kicks, wrestling the rest of her body through the crack. Her sides, protected as they are by the wetsuit, ache from the pressure. She closes her eyes and takes a moment to steady herself. She is adrift; she is free.

Two minutes. She turns to the side and raises the light on her wrist.

On all sides of the crack, the rock runs in a flat plane, uninterrupted except by the usual bumps and pockmarks of a cavern wall. It stretches off as far as her light will reach, fading into blue and then into true black.

And in front of her—below her—is an abyss.

The lake? No, they’re further down than the bottom of the lake. And if this was a lake, there might be—fish? Plants? Silt? But there is nothing at all. No walls, no floor. Nothing in any direction but back upwards.

One minute. Katie turns off her light.

There is no direction in the void. There is no feeling but cold. She is alive; she is safe. No one can see her if she is as dark as the water, down here where no sun has ever shone. For all she knows, the blackness could be unending. Time could unravel. She could drift forever, down and down and down.

Five, four, three, two, one.

Below her—feet or miles, she cannot know—a pinprick of light winks on in the dark.

The spell shatters. A wave of nausea pulses through her. She blinks, wiping her numb fingers against the front of her mask. The light persists. Faint, out of place, almost imperceptible—a firefly in a wind tunnel. It’s a white, steady glow, not a glint or a reflection.

Slowly, surely, it begins to brighten.

Katie turns around and surges towards the exit. The top of her head collides with the rock; pain lances through her skull. Fumbling to switch her own light on, she aims her wrist towards the crack—how does it look even smaller than before? No matter, no time. A glance back downward reveals that the alien light has gotten bigger still. It illuminates nothing but water; there’s nothing down there that would let her ascertain its relative size or distance.

She crams her head back into the crevice. Isaak is still there. Katie punches her arm through and jabs her thumb at the ceiling: go up, now.

Isaak swims closer. With one hand, he braces himself against a knob in the cavern wall. With the other, he grabs Katie’s hand and tugs.

It’s even harder to wiggle herself into the right position when she’s too panicked to notice the angle of her tank. She sticks both arms through the crack, pushing one hand back against the rock while the other clings firmly to Isaak. He directs her to turn to the side. Her tank makes a painful screech as it scrapes against the hard rock, but it goes through. Katie kicks her legs with all her might. She gestures again: go go go.

With her torso freed, Katie chances another look into the depths below her. A small triangle is all she can see of the abyss. The rest is lit up in pure white. A flashlight with a thousand times the strength of their own.

Isaak’s eyes go wide. He sees it too. He scrambles to get a hold of Katie’s arms, her wetsuit. She kicks and he pulls and all of a sudden she’s free, propelled forward into him.

They waste no time. The way back is clear, a simple tunnel curving upwards. Katie kicks as hard as she can, paddling with one hand and shining her light with the other. A glance backwards: the cavern behind them is illuminated by something other than their flashlights.

She doesn’t know how long it takes them to resurface. Her mind falters. Her joints ache like she’s run a marathon. All her attention is laser focused on the one action: kick, kick, kick.

And then—the gleam of surface tension. Katie breaks through the surface, spitting out her snorkel. Her chest burns, bile rises in her throat, but she grits her teeth and hauls her leaden, waterlogged body out of the tunnel. All she can do to make room for Isaak is to flop onto her side like a fish. Her vision swims. Her stomach and her limbs burn with pain.

Isaak collapses next to her. He tears off his mask; his skin is pale and blotchy.

“I’m sorry,” Katie hears herself whisper. Her chest constricts; she swallows down a sob. “I don’t know what I was—why did—why—I’m so sorry, I couldn’t help it, I didn’t know…”

At first she thinks Isaak is crying too, but when her vision clears she sees his face is split with a manic grin.

“I don’t know either,” he cackles. “Oh god. We’re alive. Let’s never do that again.”

“Yeah,” mouths Katie. Her mind is bright, agitated cacophony: no void to be found. She extends a limp arm and closes her aching fingers around Isaak’s hand. “Let’s not.”