He’s crouching by the black mouth of the hole that leads below. Old slogans, old signs of the fight between the believers and the nonbelievers. Old tags stain the walls: MY LIFE, MY CHOICE, says one. A sun-faded and wind-battered sign must at one point have listed the station name it is illegible now, but for a few letters: H, O, B, K. Pigeons are roosting everywhere, on the peeled-paint benches, in the old trash bins, between the tracks. At some point, it must descend into the underground tunnels. There is a train track below us, torn up, a thicket of mangled iron and wood. We’ve emerged onto a large, open-air platform. The rat-man heaves himself up and out through the hole, then reaches down to help me. As he slides it open, the light is so dazzling and unexpected I cry out for a second, and have to turn away, blinking, while spots of color revolve in my vision. Soon the rat-man is fiddling with a metal cover in the ceiling. But then he says, “We’re here,” and steps to the side, so the flashlight’s beam falls on a rusted metal ladder and before I can think of anything else to say, he has hopped onto its lowest rung and started climbing toward the surface. We can only try, fumbling our way through the tunneled places, reaching for light. “I didn’t want to lose her again.” I have the urge to lay my hand on his shoulder and say, I understand. “They’d already taken her from me once,” he says quietly. He doesn’t look at us, but I see his shoulders rise and fall: an inaudible sigh. He is my age, but there is so much he doesn’t know. “I didn’t see her at all after that.” “I don’t understand,” Julian says, and for a second my heart aches for him. He must have the tunnel’s twists and dips memorized. “I didn’t see.” The rat-man has increased his pace. “You must have seen… I mean, it would have taken away the pain.” There’s a question in Julian’s words, and I know then that he is struggling, still clinging to his old beliefs, the ideas that have comforted him for so long. You were infected together, and then she was cured?” “Yes.” “And you chose this instead?” Julian shakes his head. Here.” “Wait, wait.” Julian tugs me along-we have to jog a little to catch up. “She was cured,” the rat-man says shortly, and turns his back to us, resuming the walk.
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It occurs to me, then, that people themselves are full of tunnels: winding, dark spaces and caverns impossible to know all the places inside of them. I wonder if Julian is as surprised as I am. “I was already sick,” the rat-man says, and although I can’t see his face, I can hear that he is smiling just a little bit. “I didn’t want to be cured,” he says at last, and the words are so normal-a vocabulary from my world, a debate from above-that relief breaks in my chest. My breath is coming quickly, rasping in my throat. For a minute Rat-man doesn’t say anything, and the three of us stand there in the stifling dark. I can’t help but blurt out, “Why?” He turns abruptly back to me. “Lost count.” Unlike the other people who have made their home on the platform, he has no noticeable physical deformities except for his single milk-white eye. I have a sudden terror that the rats are all around me, even on the ceilings.
Now all around us we hear the chittering of tiny teeth and nails, and the flashlight lights up quick-moving, writhing shadows.
“How long have you been here?” Julian asks, after the ratman has straightened up again. It is terrible to watch, but I can’t look away. From the corners of the tunnel the rats emerge, sniffing his fingers, fighting over the crumbs, hopping up into his cupped palms and running up over his arms and shoulders. Once he crouches, and pulls bits of crushed crackers from the pockets of his coat, scattering them on the ground between the wooden slats of the tracks. We walk in silence, although the rat-man occasionally stops, making clicking motions with his tongue, like a man calling a dog.
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