There was an entire world inside Shann’s silo, which was actually called Eden.
The world was frozen in time from around 1971.
That world included telephones wired into the walls. The phones were made from heavy plastic. Their mouthpieces were connected to the machinery of the telephone with tightly corkscrewed rubber cables. The phones had rotary dials on them and illuminated square buttons along their bottoms that were labeled with the names of other extensions within the silo called Eden.
Not one of us had ever used a phone like the ones we found in the silo.
I could hear a dial tone in them, and I’m certain I could have figured out how to place a call, but we decided there was no one any of us wanted to talk to, anyway.
We found out that Shann’s and Robby’s cell phones did not work inside the silo.
We discovered Eden’s cafeteria, a museum piece in stainless steel and formica.
There were soda taps behind the buffet lines, with machines that must have been producing ice cubes for several days. The only soda brand I recognized was Coca-Cola. There was also something called Nesbitt’s, which was orange, and another, piss-colored beverage named Vernors. The taps worked. The sodas came out cold and carbonated.
It was another miracle.
Free sodas.
And there was a warehouse filled with food. The food was all boxed in cardboard and contained green cans of just about every imaginable concoction you could eat. There were green foil pouches of peanut butter, and every one of the boxes contained small packs of cigarettes. This was the same kind of stuff the United States of America sent to its troops fighting in Vietnam, cigarettes and all.
“Thank you, Saint Kazimierz,” I said.
“Thank you, Saint Kazimierz,” Robby repeated.
Shann would not compromise her unsteady Lutheranism, most likely because she did not smoke.
“Robby and I both went to church on Sunday,” I pointed out.
“I was moving in,” Shann explained. “No one expects you to go to church when you’re unpacking boxes.”
There were enough boxes in Eden for us to unpack that we’d never have to go to church again.
GIDEON’S BREEDING RIGHTS
SHANN’S BEDROOM HAD a door that led into a brick wall and another that dead-ended at the foot of a stairwell. It was what I called a dungeon for horny Polish boys.
In truth, the silo called Eden went all the way into the foundation of the McKeon House, and the doorways in Shann’s room had been bricked off when the Eden Project work crews finished construction on Dr. Grady McKeon’s subterranean shelter.
Just as those McKeon Industries scientists back in the 1960s had been playing with self-sustaining universes they trapped inside globes of glass, the bigger enclosed bubble project they’d been working on lay beneath the ground under Shann’s bedroom and stretched beyond the derelict cornfields on Dr. Grady McKeon’s own property.
Here is what we found: Eden had a gymnasium, a fitness center with polished wood floors and weightlifting equipment, a sauna, and another shower room. There was a small facility for laundry that put the Ealing Coin Wash Launderette to shame in terms of its cleanliness and lack of discarded condoms and cigarette butts on the floor.
There was even a salon with those old-fashioned hair dryers that looked like brainwashing torture machines from science fiction movies, barber chairs, and haircutting tools.
Shann looked at her hair in the mirror. As always, it was beautiful, the color of mature wheat in late August. Her skin was perfect and unblemished.
I said, “Would you like us to do something with your hair?”
Shann said, “Do either of you guys know anything about hairstyles?”
And Robby continued our string of unanswered questions with, “Why are you both looking at me? Do you think it’s just natural that I’d be, like, into doing hair and shit?”
Later, we found Eden’s dormitories. Naturally, I was incapable of wandering through the bedrooms with Shann and Robby without feeling horny and guilty. I wondered if there had ever been threesomes inside Shann’s silo.
Each room had two double beds. They looked, in style, like hotel rooms, except they lacked bathrooms and toilets, which were all located at the center of a hub of hallways that connected the fitness center and the lecture hall and entry room where we had changed out of our Iowa surface-dweller clothing.
There wasn’t much room for argument in the discussion we had as we explored the bedrooms: Eden was built to house survivors for the end of the world. We could say the idea was to protect a few human specimens in the event of a nuclear war, but Robby and I knew Eden was probably built for something else entirely.
The idea that Robby and Shann and I were inside some kind of breeding compound for the genesis of an entire new species of humans was particularly thrilling and attractive.
“If we never came out of Eden, the three of us would be able to start an entire new race of underground Iowans,” I said.
“Uh.” Robby was unenthusiastic.
“Well. If we had to,” I offered. “Between you, me, and Shann, we would have enough genetic diversity to not breed two-headed boys and shit like that.”
I was somehow working into a long-range threesome strategy.
“Uh,” Robby repeated.
Shann said, “I bet that’s what Grady McKeon had in mind with the whole idea of Eden: starting everything over.”
“Everyone who eventually came out would just end up doing the same stupid shit that always happened up there,” I said, and pointed my thumb at the world above us.
“We should leave a copy of Porcupine’s History of the World down here, just to save mankind the trouble,” Robby said.
“That would be a good strategy,” I said. “When do you two suppose we might start working on the new species?”
Shann rolled her eyes and pushed my chest.
I liked that.
She also changed the subject: “There must be books or stuff like that down here,” Shann said.
Robby jumped on one of the beds like it was a trampoline. He said we should all do that, so Shann and I joined him. It was fun. We made a mess of that room. It was ours, anyway. Nobody could stop us.
I pulled out my little medal of Saint Kazimierz and looked at him and thought about how difficult the boy-saint’s life must have been.
I hopped down onto the floor. I pulled open the drawers on the nightstands at the head of the double bed Shann and Robby were jumping on. There was a Gideon’s Bible inside, but, naturally, there would be no condoms in Eden.
Every room had a Gideon’s Bible in it.
Grady McKeon must have worked some kind of deal with those Gideon people. Maybe he promised to let them leave some sperm down here, besides just a bunch of Bibles, I thought.
We had no idea of the time when we were down in Eden.
We also had no idea about what was beginning to happen up above us in Ealing.
Nobody did.
THE QUEEN OF THE UNIVERSE
WE FOUND EDEN’S library at exactly the same time the Hoover Boys and Grant Wallace found Eileen Pope and Hungry Jack in the alley at Grasshopper Jungle.
Now Eileen was very busy. She was getting filled up with the seeds of a new apex species for Planet Earth. She was happy. Eileen was the queen of the new universe. But she was hungry, too.
While Devin Stoddard, the same Hoover Boy who had kneed me in the balls the Friday before and was now a lumbering six-foot-tall mantis beast, pumped future generations of little Devin bugs into Eileen Pope’s swelling abdomen, she pivoted her thoracic midsection around clockwise and clamped Devin’s head in the toothy mace of her grasping arms. Devin Stoddard did not resist. He pumped and pumped and pumped. Devin Stoddard continued pumping semen into Eileen Pope even after she had eaten his entire head.
&
nbsp; Eileen Pope was doing the two things bugs like to do.
The other bugs watched and waited. They wanted more turns on Eileen Pope, even if she was still hungry after eating Devin Stoddard. When Eileen Pope finished eating, the only thing left of Devin Stoddard was a gooey smear across the floral sofa in Grasshopper Jungle.
And, at the exact moment we found Eden’s library and Eileen Pope was crunching her way through Devin Stoddard’s exoskeleton to get to the slick and nourishing goodness inside her mate, Johnny McKeon was locking up From Attic to Seller Consignment Store for the night.
Johnny decided to take a box of garbage out to the dumpster in the alley of Grasshopper Jungle.
It was not a good idea.
THE LIBRARY AND THE NEW TALLY-HO!
HISTORY SHOWS THAT an examination of the personal collection of titles in any man’s library will provide something of a glimpse into his soul.
Such was the case with Dr. Grady McKeon’s library beneath the ground.
Here was Dr. Grady McKeon’s collection of books: There was a wall of novels. And every one of the novels in Dr. Grady McKeon’s library was an American work. Also, every novel had been written by a man.
Before going down into Eden, I never knew that American men had written so many books and shit. The men who wrote the books in Dr. Grady McKeon’s library weren’t just guys, they were monuments, and had names like Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Dreiser, and on and on. The most recent novel, if you could call it that, was The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway.
There was not a copy of The Chocolate War, however, but that stood to reason.
Another wall in Dr. Grady McKeon’s library was filled with books on all kinds of scientific subjects: botany, evolution, taxonomy, genetics, and reproduction. The books on reproduction caught my eye. They were very old and conservatively worded, however.
But the most wonderful feature of Dr. Grady McKeon’s library were the rows of desks, each of which had been furnished with supplies for writing and drawing.
It was meant to be that Eden would have its historian.
“This is meant to be,” I said.
I sat down at one of the desks and looked through the assortment of pens and empty leather-bound logbooks. I felt around with my feet in the carpeting beneath where I sat. It was difficult for me to adequately concentrate on writing without Ingrid sighing under my toes.
So I said, “What am I going to do, Shann?”
Shann said, “I don’t know, Austin.”
Shann was smart. She knew I was troubled about things. She always let me have room. In some ways, Shann was like Ingrid.
“This is where I will write the history of the end of the world,” I said.
Shann said, “Uh.”
Then I picked up some thick permanent markers and opened their caps. Naturally, I smelled them. I do not know why, because that is not my job, but history shows that every time a teenage boy opens a permanent marker, he will first sniff it before deciding how to go about defacing the planet.
That is what I did.
On the empty wall above the desk where I sat, I drew a big hairy thing—a bison—in as close a likeness as I could manage to the figure that had been drawn so many centuries before on the wall of a cave at a place called Altamira. Maybe it was my great-times-one-thousand-grandfather who’d drawn the Altamira bison. It would have been back when the world was like this: messed-up and poisonous, and a few scared and confused specimens found their way inside a cave called Altamira that may just as well have been a silo called Eden.
They would have gone down in that cave to start things over again. Perhaps my great-times-one-thousand-grandfather also smoked cigarettes and wore a medallion of a virgin Polish saint around his neck. He would have experimented, too. Maybe he was also confused about the people he was in love with, and whether or not there was something wrong with him for frequently finding himself sexually attracted to the guy he grew up with.
You know what I mean.
Thinking about being inside a cave with Robby and Shann made me feel very horny.
Robby said, “Nice cow, Austin.”
“It is a bison,” I pointed out.
“Oh,” Robby said. And he added, “Nice buff, Porcupine.”
Robby and Shann were great friends, true friends. They both allowed me the space that I needed. While I wrote the history of our day inside Eden, Shann and Robby sat and waited quietly. But there was still much of the silo we had to explore, so I rushed and abbreviated, and when I was satisfied that I had gotten down the important details of our discovery, I tucked the logbook under my arm and led the way out of the library and deeper into the mysteries of Dr. Grady McKeon’s sealed-in universe.
Just across the hallway from Eden’s library was a bar.
An actual bar, inside a compound designed to resurrect mankind.
Robby said, “I christen this bar New Tally-Ho!”
“Eden Five needs a gay bar,” Shann said.
“Everywhere needs gay bars, Shann,” I pointed out.
This was true.
We went inside the New Tally-Ho!
In the same way the Eden No Coins Required Launderette put to shame the dirty laundry joint at Grasshopper Jungle, the New TallyHo! was immeasurably more luxurious than Waterloo, Iowa’s one and only gay bar.
There were built-in wine coolers and every kind of liquor I had ever heard of in my life, and some others that I had not.
There was a bottle of something called Krupnik, which came from Poland.
Once again, all roads crossed where I stood.
The New Tally-Ho! was impressively furnished, with a wide mahogany serving bar and a floor-to-ceiling mirror behind racks of immaculately arranged bottles and crystal ware. There was a pool table with a perfect felt surface. It sat in the middle of the floor with plenty of space around for proper play. A dart board hung on one wall. The chalkboard beside it still recorded a match from four decades back, between someone named Doc and another player named Virgil. Doc, apparently, was not such a good dart player.
We killed this big hairy thing. We played darts. And that was our day.
None of us was in the mood to try drinking alcohol. Drinking was reckless, and made us unconcerned about doing stupid shit.
“Um,” I said. “Let’s not get drunk, Robby.”
We agreed to save that experiment for some other time.
Robby knew what I meant.
After our trip through the bar, we found a medical clinic that looked like it was equipped to do surgery.
“Lots of drugs in here,” Shann said.
“An entire navy of kayaks,” I added.
Eden was built like a starfish. Its arms radiated outward from the room we called the lecture hall, which was just beyond the mudroom and lockers and showers, where Dr. Grady McKeon had somehow managed to install a salvaged antique Nightingale urinal.
At the end of the arm that housed the medical clinic, there was a full-sized bowling alley with two complete lanes and a rack of balls and shoes, all of which had been personalized with the names of their owners.
Seeing those relics, as well as the scoreboard that had been kept for darts in the bar, made me suddenly aware that all the first people who had ever been down inside Eden were most likely dead.
“This is kind of creepy,” Shann said. She stared at a swirling pink bowling ball with dainty finger holes and a gold-etched name on it that said Wanda Mae.
Wanda Mae was the first Queen of Eden.
She was fertile, left-handed, and enjoyed having sex with multiple partners in Eden. Wanda Mae also liked to bowl.
People in Iowa liked to bowl.
Robby said, “Bowling creeps me out, too, Shann. Except for the fact that it is the only sport that encourages its participants to smoke cigarettes.”
/> I wanted a cigarette.
I tapped Robby’s shoulder. I did not have to say anything to him. Robby Brees always knew what I was thinking, even when I was thinking about something other than smoking.
We lit cigarettes and backtracked to the final unexplored arm of the place called Eden.
And there we found the most important treasure the silo had yet to offer up: Eden’s Movie Theater.
I will tell you.
VENTILATOR BLUES
BACK IN THE lounge, Robby uncovered a cache of reel-to-reel tapes in the cupboard below the tape machine.
“I would be happy to stay down here forever,” Robby said.
“The future of mankind is . . . Um. Inside our jumpsuits,” I said.
“I wonder what time it is,” Shann said.
“It is time to begin the rebuilding of the universe with hybrid Austin-Shann-Robby offspring,” I answered. I did not want Shann to think about leaving the silo.
Robby held up a box with a glossy black-and-white photo printed on its cover. It held a reel copy of Exile on Main Street.
“It’s a miracle. This is like heaven,” Robby said.
“Eden,” I corrected.
Exile on Main Street, according to Robert Brees Jr., was the most brilliant rock album ever created.
“In Eden, it is permanently the nineteen-seventies,” Robby affirmed.
“I never want to go home again,” I said.
Robby wanted us to spend the night in Shann’s silo.
He said, “Let’s sleep here tonight.”
“I’ll cook dinner,” I offered.
The opportunity was daring and thrilling to me. My heart raced with the thought of an Eden slumber party.
Shann said, “I can’t spend the night with two boys. What would my mom say?”
I said, “She will probably say for you to use condoms.”
“Shut up!” Shann answered.
“You are right, Shann. Eden needs us to not use condoms. It is our duty to repopulate Planet Earth with our handsome Iowan children,” I said.