Tunnel Yarn

I’m in a tunnel. I don’t know how I got in here. I don’t think I was always here, but I don’t remember ever being anywhere else. If there’s one thing I know for sure though (besides the fact I’m in a tunnel) it’s that there’s a lot of things in here. Lots to do. Places to go. People to meet. Fish to fry. Which is all very true of the non-tunnel world as well. In fact, if you were to decide, with healthy skepticism, that there was nothing about my experience in the tunnel that necessarily warranted your attention, and that it was really little more than a loosely connected string of anecdotes, I’d find it hard to argue with you. There’s nothing essential about my tunnel stories. I’m just another man without a plan, drifting my way through the world around me as I see fit. It just so happens, though, that that world is a tunnel (and a different kind of tunnel, I might add, from the ones in your world) so if this singular difference inspires sufficient interest, read on. Read the words set out before you, and wonder which were chosen intentionally, and which were haphazardly typed out from the caboose of a tunnel trolley on the way to a Tunnel Bowl watch party, with little regard for intent, more as a means of adding to the story than as a result of trying to communicate anything in particular. Because what else do you do in the back of a tunnel trolley? Since waking up here, I’ve wanted to have a story. I’ve wanted to sing songs from atop the walls and declare my experience for all to hear. So please, if for no other reason than to indulge my selfish desire, read on.

A while ago, in the crunchy, wobbly, orange part of the tunnel, I met this guy, Barry the Beekeeper. “Ironic that your name sounds like ‘bear’ but you protect bees,” I said to him. “What’s a bear?” he said to me. And then I said to him, "How is it possible you don’t know what bears are?” “My question still stands,” he said. So I described bears. Sometimes they’re land sharks, and sometimes they’re cute. They like honey. “What’s honey?” he said. I was flabbergasted. “If bees here don’t make honey, what do they even do?” And at that he just scratched his head and said “Do? Why would they do anything? They’re bees. They fly around.” Then he whistled the little bee song that brought the bees out, swirling along in their geometrical swarming forms. All of a sudden, this gave me an idea of a way I could show Barry his namesake. I gathered a bunch of bees into a ball of yellow sky clay, and then, careful not to inflict harm, I molded it into a cute little bee bear. I was rather proud of my handiwork, but unfortunately it was to be that Barry took his bees more seriously than you or me, and his only response was to scowl at my darling bear. Nonetheless, he remained amenable to sale. Thus, I returned to the streets with a freshly freed bike (that’s the old timey word for a group of bees) of bees.

Barry couldn’t have been more wrong. My new friends soon proved extremely capable of doing things. Among the orange part of the tunnel’s orange reaches roamed snakes of many sizes, but no snake big or small could ever hope to slip through my carefully arranged web of bees. Circling, hovering, and pivoting in suspiciously helicopter-like fashion, the bees patrolled every inch of ground across which a snake might slither. Sometimes one snake would try to play decoy in an attempt to occupy one of my bees, in order to clear the way for another snake to slip through and catch me unawares. This never worked. The bees were too wise. The snakes, too dumb. These wiley things had other consolations, though. As they swirled around my bee web, I saw them snatching up the little snakeberries that dotted the tunnel floor.

I sometimes wondered where these snakes lived. I mean, of course they lived in the ground, but when you’re in a tunnel, you can never really be sure where the ground ends and the walls, and then the ceiling, begin. Whenever this occurred to me I would imagine all the snakes sliding along through their mini-tunnel homes in spiraling rings along the length of the tunnel’s all-around ground, around and round and round again. I wondered if, perhaps, the smallest snakes made their homes in the dirt
closest to the tunnel surfaces, and, if that were the case, whether the medium snakes made their homes slightly further out into the dirt, with the largest snakes eking out existences one rung further in turn. If this was the case, what lay beyond the outermost snakes? I envisioned distant serpents, too unimaginably fat to slither through even the widest reaches of the tunnel. These super-snakes, I imagined, may even have been the originators of the tunnel I now walked through, and surely, they must have been very bored if so. While I was allowed the pleasure of wandering through an established tunnel, apt to present new curiosities and consequences at every turn, the super-snake(s?) could only traverse blindly through the dirt. Closer examination of the way the tunnel listed left right up and down at random only served to strengthen my impression that the super-snake broke out of the straightward path of the hypothetical forward-going snake in a nervous, almost dancelike manner, as
if, having exhausted all other possibilities for amusement—of which there were few (one (even a giant snakey one) can only for so long make merry the act of chomping gravel)—it had resorted to indulging in the swaying, lilting sensations of subterranean g-force as a last means of alleviating boredom. From this thought grew first a subconscious inclination and then a conscious ideation to do the same, despite the dirt’s dangerous denizens, so I, swirlingly, dashed around and abound snake and berry alike, until a sudden lack of the absence of people inspired me to stop.

My orange route had deposited me in the cavern that housed the city of Opal Ring. The first part of the name was of obvious origin. There were opulent opals everywhere as far as the eye could see. Little opals lining the walls, pavement, and sediment. Opals up and down the lamp posts, around the amphitheaters (Opal Ring was a disproportionately thespian town) and in the inns, on the shiny little keys they gave the guests. Opals in your dresser, that you took home because they glinted just right in the light that one night. Opals on the top shelf, back pocket, back shelf, top pocket. Opals, small, big, and medium, just like the snakes. Some so small they looked like shiny rice, some so big that they’d been used as canvases for single piece sculptures, and some so medium that they could be used for normal stuff. Some were even alive, like the two opal guards guarding the city gate in front of me. Yeah, that’s right. Giant opal dudes. They didn’t look like statues. More like rocks that had evolved to walk on two legs. The sturdy one on the left (by comparison of course, as they were both extremely sturdy) was Opal John, and the one on the right, wearing an elongated and cartoonishly crunckled stovepipe hat he’d found who-knows-where, was Opal Jeremy. I was friendly with both. It had been them who found me when I first arrived in the tunnel about a year before, in the exact spot where I now stood, unconscious, naked, aged somewhere between twenty-two and twenty-three years old, and covered in dirt and tunnel worms (like normal worms but fatter). They’d also been the ones to give me my name.

“Outsider!” Opal Jeremy exclaimed. His voice, which he used often, tended to possess a piercing and faintly alarming quality. He was by far the more talkative of the two. Opal John gave a characteristic grunt. I waved and grinned, but noticed their mineral faces both shone in consternation. “I hate to say this,” Opal Jeremy said, “but you’re going to have to put the bees away. They may tolerate open carry bees in the crunchy wobbly orange zone, but here in Opal Ring, we’re committed to the protection of the general welfare, and, even moreso, to the enforcement of the laws as decreed by the Ring. I know we’re boon companions, but”—“Don’t sweat it,” I said, cutting him off. “You won’t see another bee out of me.” As Opal Jeremy protested that it was in no way possible for him to sweat, I beckoned the bees back to my back pocket, into which they streamed rapidly, in single file. The sudden sensation of sixty-seven bees settling inside my pants was noticeable, but I was glad this was the case. To me, a frequent forgettor of back pocket things, it felt like a tragedy averted. At this point I'd already named the bees, and, though it may be hard to understand for those without experience in bee stewardship, I felt a deep attachment to them. They were the only pets I’d ever had. With each and every precious bee safely stowed, the gates opened wide and swallowed me up. I drifted along the current of afternoon enterers, always with the dance of pointy opal avoidance in my step, until, weaving myself a path along the market outskirts, I came upon my favorite rambling alleys in the whole city. As cats raced past chasing rats chasing gnats, I walked on, waiting to stop until precisely the moment the latent people-chatter sounds became inaudible. I didn’t want to get arrested, and, more importantly, I wanted to stay on Opal Jeremy’s good side, but beyond that I had no qualms about bee brandishment, so, knowing as I did that I probably wouldn’t run into anyone here in my alley sanctuary, and, knowing as well that if I did run into someone, they’d probably be committing crimes too, I unfastened my back pocket’s two buttons, releasing the bees. Upon their exit they tumbled out like paratroopers scattered through the air by the tiny alley winds.

Tunnel winds, I would come to learn, were a complex matter, though at this point I hadn’t given them much thought. According to Legend (this was the name of my hairdresser) there was a place, faraway to the Up—Actually, I should explain this first. The tunnel only had two cardinal directions, Up and Down. To say one was going for a stroll down the tunnel or up the tunnel was to mean it literally. Given that the tunnel was far from flat and often had hills or became nearly vertical in its steepness, this could be confusing. But whatever, lots of things about the tunnel were confusing. Also, for reference, the crunchy wobbly orange zone was to the Down. Now back to Legend’s legend. Legend said there was a place far away to the Up where the main branch of the tunnel came to a dead end, and at this dead end was something called the Windblower. Apparently, no one knew for sure what the Windblower was, but Legend had sworn up and down that it was actually the edge of the tunnel, and that the air flowed because the edge was open, so it was all flowing into an endless void of empty space. This claim, and the concept of the Windblower, for that matter, flew in the face of the more widespread belief that the tunnel was actually a giant ring that looped back around on itself, so that, if you were to walk continuously in one direction down the main branch, you’d eventually end up back where you started. If I’m being honest, I found this idea almost as shocking as Legend’s. I’d walked my share of the tunnel, and, from my perspective, it had seemed flat. Really, really flat. But according to the tunnel’s leading scientists, this was because the tunnel was simply such a long, large, skinny donut that you couldn’t even feel the curve. I found it hard to believe anything could really be that big, and on top of that, I was biased, having come from a flat world myself. Still, I couldn’t reject the idea. The tunnel had a knack for defying expectations. But I couldn’t help but conceive of my own Windblower. I felt the supersnake wriggling back into my imagination. Rumbling, it hurdled through the unchewn dirt with the roar of a rapidly refilling air pulling air pocket in its wind-causing wake. It was a mile long and had a million teeth, and, if the donut theory was true, it might come back around to eat us all someday.

Anyway, back to the bees. It’s occurring to me that maybe I should be using footnotes to recount these kinds of thought tangents, but, honestly, I just don’t want to. I think they’re part of the story, and the resulting footnote frequency would probably be annoying. But yeah. Bees. The bees tumbled out, and they got in a little line. All sixty-seven bees, front and center. For a few minutes I just stood there, basking in pure satisfaction. There’s one kind of satisfaction that comes with having achieved a goal; having visualized a potential outcome, and then followed through and done what was necessary to achieve it, and then there’s another, lazier kind: The accidental achievement. I had gone on my orange trip with many intentions (exercise, taking a look around an area I don’t see that often, meeting new people, shoe shopping, etc.) but not once had I considered buying bees until moments before I made my purchase. Now I was the proud owner of 67 tunnel bees. Why’d I done it? Because these weren’t ordinary bees. Tunnel bees were workers in the most literal sense. They could do complex tasks, and seemed to understand spoken commands and subtle gestures with ease. I suspected they could think. I had gotten to know them quickly on my orange snakewalk, which was longer than I think I made it seem, about 5 hours. They were distinctive enough in their individual mannerisms that I’d made an effort to give them apt names. There was a Tanner, and a Penelope, and a Brick, and a Sebastian the bee. Beethony, I could already tell, was special, and seemed to have a profound influence on the other bees. It was difficult to describe, but he seemed, somehow, to be suffused with greatness.

After a little more formation time, I motioned for them to disperse, giving them their first taste of free time under my ownership—already, I was beginning to feel the moral weight of the concept of tunnel bee ownership—and giving myself my first opportunity to observe their social dynamics in a setting free of scary snakes. At first, they seemed reticent, halting at the prospect of unguarded recreation. Then I beatboxed and they chilled out, either due to shared enjoyment (my naive delusion) or, perhaps more likely, because they bonded over the joys of ridicule and judgment. Soon enough, the bee function functioned functionally enough that my embouchure could rest easy. A few of the more athletically-inclined bees began to race around the alley, with Carmichael, a budding flying ace, leading the pack. Some of the bees elected to spend the time alone, wandering around the area and watching the others from afar. It was hard to tell whether these were anxious wallflower bees or introverted bees enjoying the sensation of being alone among many, but either way, their solitude was short lived. At first blending into the crowd, Beethony had wandered around from bee to bee, buzzing to each, as if spreading a message. Whatever it was he was saying–I had not yet studied tunnel bee language–it proved enough to consolidate the disparate bees. Once they had all gathered, either summoned directly or simply pulled in by the gravity of the growing yellow cluster, Beethony took figurative center stage. “Buzz,” he said. “Buzz buzz.” Then his buzzing continued. At first it seemed to take on a tone of conciliation. He understood that this was a gathering of bees with vastly different priorities, propensities, and perspectives. Ostensibly. I really wish I had been able to understand this speech. I could tell though, after a few minutes, when his buzzing picked up in frequency and volume, that he was on a roll. Gesticulating wildly with all six legs, he buzzed and buzzed, while the rest of the bees vibrated with fervor. Then, with one final, emphatic buzz, the speech ended. The bees broke back into smaller groups and buzzed at each-other for a bit, perhaps to deliberate. Then they re-assembled and conferred briefly with Beethony. He bobbed up and down emphatically (a bee nod?) and shed the group, flying towards me until we met at eye level. I nodded, and he bobbed again. Then he gave buzzing a try but quickly stopped, as if realizing I didn’t understand. For a moment, I was unsure whether the encounter would be able to progress, given the apparent language barrier, but then Beethony flew down to a particularly smooth alley-floor stone and began scraping and scratching furiously with his legs and body, clearing up small segments of dirt, dust, and grime until, bit by bit, a message began to take shape. “Hello.” was the first word Beethony etched in full. He knew tunnel-speak. I had only very recently attained fluency, and it had taken me nearly a year. That was eight bee lifetimes. At least, in my world it was. For all I knew, tunnel bees lived forever. The next portion of Beethony’s message took a few minutes to reach readability: “With the tides of history, man has acquired freedoms as yet unimaginable in the minds of bees. You have transcended the empire of the dark, the tyranny of the elements, the yoke of the feudal lord, and, above all, the desolation of ignorance. Seeing as these gains have been of the utmost benefit to your species, and that, having attained them for yourselves, you now behold the privilege of passing them on to those less privileged within the animal kingdom–and, indeed, those of all the kingdoms, plants, fungi, and rocks alike–I entreat you, grant us freedom! We bees are voracious, multi-faceted beings, capable of endeavors beyond those even the most imaginative dictator imaginable could imagine. Again human, I bid you, release us, that we may go wherever the winds see fit to carry!” I hesitated for a moment, not because I actually had to think about it, but because it felt like answering without leaving room for a dramatic silence would be rude. Then I said “Yes, you can go,” and the bees left. “It was nice meeting you!” I called out. Then I waved, and, though it was impossible for me to say for sure, I could’ve sworn that, from across that misty, cavernous distance, I saw Beethony’s tiny little legs waving back.

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