“We’re on the City Hall lawn,” he said.
Catalina gave him a look. “Where else would we be?” she asked. She looked toward the building. Its lights still burned bright. “Looks like everyone inside is okay. And looks like the votes haven’t been tabulated yet.”
The ground beneath them continued to twitch and roll. This was the first time Gran had been directly above the Hollows, and he was startled that he could see their movements. Wherever the Hollows went, the earth undulated.
“Don’t worry,” Catalina said. “They’re leaving.”
“Can they get out?” Gran asked.
“The Hollows? No,” she said. “Think of a shark surviving outside the ocean. Not possible.”
“What happens to them now?”
“Usually they go away. They amass power and speed and rip through the underground in a fury. But when they’re thwarted, they disperse. They’re like a defeated army going back to regroup, to regain their strength.”
Catalina sat back, her hands on the ground behind her. She looked relaxed in a way Gran had never seen before.
“I think they’re whupped for tonight,” she said.
“They won’t come back?”
“Not today.”
“So does that mean I’m a Lifter now?” Gran asked.
“What? No. No. You helped out. You did a good job. You really did. But Lifters have to go through a long process of training and assessment. And it all starts with an elaborate process where you have to make a Lift, and then there are weeks of training just on the lifting…”
“But I already have a Lift,” Gran said.
“Don’t start this again. There’s no way you already have a Lift. They have to be made a certain way. By hand.”
“Mine is. I’m sure of it.”
“Let me see it.”
Catalina grabbed it, seeming to be weighing it in her hand. She tossed it to her other hand. Her face implied that she was impressed by it. “That’s not a Lift,” she said.
“It already worked for me,” Gran said.
“Then make it work again,” she said.
“I will.”
“Then do it. Or don’t. I know you’re easily embarrassed.”
“I don’t care,” Gran said, feeling a new feeling. Was it confidence? “I’m not about to be embarrassed.”
Gran bent down and stuck his handle into the earth. For a moment, his confidence wavered. He had the distinct feeling it wasn’t going to work.
But then it did work. A door emerged.
“How’d you do that?” Catalina asked.
Gran had no idea. He’d just found the Lift in his attic and tried it. Then again, it was his great-great-grandfather’s work, and that had to mean something. He was trying to think of how to explain it when the doors of City Hall burst open.
“We won!” a woman’s voice roared. It was Phyllis Feeley. She was followed by hundreds more, maybe even everyone in town. Most of the faces leaving the building were happy, some were not. The face of Dr. Woolford emerged in the doorway.
“I’ll tell you all one thing,” he roared to the dispersing crowd. “When a moose attacks, don’t come to me for medical help!”
There were laughs from all corners of the City Hall lawn.
“Oh c’mon, Walter,” Phyllis Feeley said. “Let me treat you to an ice cream sandwich.”
And Gran saw something remarkable: Dr. Woolford agreed. The idea of an ice cream sandwich seemed to soften him, and he smiled and walked toward Phyllis Feeley, and when he was within reach, he extended his hand and Phyllis Feeley took it. They walked together down the street, heading for ice cream sandwiches.
“So I guess we get some money for parks and schools,” Catalina said. “That’s good news.”
Gran watched the door, thinking his mother and Maisie would emerge any minute. He wanted to congratulate his mother, and even thought she would be in the same kind of celebratory mood he was; he thought maybe they’d all go for ice cream sandwiches too. But she and Maisie didn’t emerge.
“What are you looking for?” Catalina asked.
“My mom and sister.”
A phone rang. The sound was familiar; Gran was sure it was the ring of one of the old-fashioned wall phones that connected to the Regional Manager. Catalina dropped down into the tunnel and answered it. Gran ducked his head into the tunnel to hear her side of the conversation.
“Yes? I know. Okay. Really? I don’t know if that’s right. Sorry. I know I’m not the Regional Manager. You are. Fine. Sorry. Yes. Sorry. I know. I will. Thank you.”
Catalina hung up, and Gran jumped into the tunnel.
“I don’t think this is fair,” she said.
“What isn’t fair?” Gran said.
“It took a lot longer for me,” she said.
“What did?”
“To become a Lifter.”
“So I’m a Lifter?” Gran asked.
“No. But the Regional Manager says that you’re an exception. He knows you found or made your own Lift, and made it work. And apparently that gives you the right to attend the Hemispheric Conference.”
Gran swelled with something like pride.
“It’s not fair. I waited two years before my first conference.” Catalina was doing something Gran never thought possible of her: she was pouting.
“When is it?” he asked.
This practical question, and its practical answer, seemed to snap Catalina out of her funk. “It’s in about an hour,” she said. “We better get going. I’ll explain on the way down.”
“Down?” Gran asked.
Catalina led him through some tunnels he’d seen before, and some he hadn’t. They ran for what seemed like miles as the tunnels wound up and down and left and right. And finally Catalina turned to him.
“You trust me, yes?”
“Sure,” Gran said, unsure. He did trust Catalina, but when someone asks if you trust them, it usually means they’re about to do something that will make you reassess that trust.
“I’m going to open this door,” she said, putting her Lift into what seemed like a vertical rock wall. “And when I do, I’m going to drop, and I’ll drop for a long time. You’ll do the same thing right after me. Or you can do it first. You want to go first?”
Gran didn’t know where they were going, so he said no, he didn’t want to go first.
“Fine,” Catalina continued, “when I drop, and when you drop, it’ll seem like you’re dropping for about four or five miles.”
“But what?” Gran said, interrupting.
“I didn’t say but,” Catalina said.
“It seemed like you were saying it would seem like you’re dropping for about four or five miles, but…”
“I never said but,” Catalina corrected. “It seems like you’re dropping for four or five miles because that’s how far you’re dropping.”
“Wait. We’re dropping four or five miles? To where?”
“Something like that. It’s really hard to tell. It hasn’t been measured. It’s not like you can take a tape measure to the walls of the chute.”
“It’s a chute?”
“That’s the closest thing I can compare it to. It’s a tube and it goes down. So it’s a chute. We can talk on the way. Ready?”
Bravery has its limits. Bravery sometimes needs a rest.
Shortly after Gran saved City Hall through his courage and ingenuity, Catalina had just suggested that he drop through the Earth four or five miles, to attend something called the Hemispheric Conference, which Gran knew nothing about. (Catalina had promised to explain it on the way, but was that really okay? That’s like explaining skydiving while you’re falling from an airplane.)
Standing there, in front of a seemingly bottomless hole, Gran had the thought that maybe he had done enough brave things for that day.
He pictured his home, and his mother and Maisie, and his father far away, and he wanted to be with them. He wanted to take a bath and sit on the couch in dry clothes, wat
ching TV as Maisie pretended to be a cat. He decided he wanted that. To be home and safe and dry and warm. He did not want to leap into a miles-long lightless chute.
“Ready?” Catalina said again.
“I think I should go home,” Gran said.
“What? You can’t go home. After all that? You followed me around for weeks. You kept saying you wanted to help. Please, please, on and on. Now the Regional Manager gives you this opportunity, and all you have to do is jump into the center of the Earth for a while, and you’re going to back out?”
“Exactly,” Gran said. “I don’t even really know what I was thinking. I don’t know what it is to be a Lifter anyway. You were right. I’m not qualified.”
Catalina reached out for Gran’s hand, and he had the momentary fear that she planned to fling him into the chute. Of all the people he’d known in his life, Catalina Catalan, who had punched him and kicked him, seemed the most likely to fling him into a five-mile vertical tunnel leading into the inner mantle of the Earth.
But when she grabbed his hand with her rough hands, she simply turned his wrist to look at his watch.
“We have one minute. If we’re going to make it in time, we have to leave in sixty seconds.”
“That makes it easy. I don’t want to go. There. We only spent two seconds. You have fifty-eight seconds left.”
Catalina did something unexpected. Gran thought she would either hit him, or say something mean to him, or just jump into the hole herself. But instead she leaned back against the wall of the tunnel, and she sighed.
“When I first met you,” she said, “I saw your watch. It’s kind of a fancy watch, so I assumed a lot. I assumed you were rich. And that you were the kind of kid who wears a watch, which is itself unusual. To have a fancy watch and be willing to wear it, I figured you were some rich airhead who I’d want to punch in the gut.”
“You did punch me in the gut,” Gran noted.
“But that wasn’t because of your watch,” Catalina clarified. “Anyway, because of the watch, I figured you weren’t serious about anything, and that there was no possibility that you’d ever been sad. So when you said you wanted to be a Lifter, I said no way. Because to be a Lifter, you have to be serious, and you have to be brave, and just as importantly, you have to know sadness.”
“Why?” Gran said. He was intrigued.
“Because sadness is duty,” Catalina said. “Do you understand?”
“No. How is sadness duty?”
“Because if you know sadness, you understand sadness in others. And if you can understand sadness in others, you’re obligated to help.”
She saw Gran’s blank look. Gran had certainly known sadness, because he saw it every night in the eyes of his mother, and he saw it on the faces of many of the people of Carousel. But his concept of sadness was more a solitary thing. It seemed to him a thing experienced alone, a thing that rightly or wrongly made you look inward. The notion that Catalina had just explained, though, was utterly opposed to that kind of self-centeredness.
“If you know sadness, you want to help lessen it,” she explained. “Improve things. Brighten the days. Lift people up. You know?”
Gran thought he understood. Almost.
“Yes,” he said.
“So we prop up the tunnels the Hollows make. Get it?”
“I get it.”
“Because if we strengthen what’s underneath, we might allow for happiness above.”
Gran didn’t completely understand.
Catalina looked exasperated. “If we strengthen what’s underneath, we might allow for happiness above. No? ¿No comprende?”
Gran thought he understood. But he wasn’t sure he understood. It was all very confusing. But while Catalina was explaining the Lifters’ work, something had happened to Gran. He had begun to feel like he wanted to jump with her. That he didn’t need to be home and warm on the couch. That he wanted to see what was in the chute. He wanted to see what was next.
“Okay,” Gran said. “I’ll go.”
“You will?” Catalina said, seeming more surprised than Gran expected. “Wow, I’m good. I mean, I knew I was good, but I didn’t expect that little speech to convince you. I’m impressed with myself.”
Catalina’s crooked smile overtook her face.
“But we should go. Let me see your watch again,” she said, and grabbed his wrist.
But instead of looking at the time, she jumped into the void, and pulled Gran with her.
Falling toward the center of the Earth is something few people have done. Statistically, the number of people who have done this would have to be somewhere between 2 and 5 percent. Maybe lower.
For a while it feels just like diving from a high board at the pool: there is the same weightlessness and wind in one’s hair. But then it does not end.
“It’ll end eventually,” Catalina said, her voice rushing up. That is, at the moment she spoke, Gran had already fallen a hundred feet below her words. They were distant, faint, shooting far above as he descended. Stranger still, Gran could not see Catalina. He couldn’t see anything. He could feel nothing but the wind under his arms, the wind that shot up through his shirt. It was sending his shirt into his face, which was profoundly uncomfortable.
“I usually tuck in my shirt,” Catalina noted.
Gran thought it impossible to tuck in his shirt while falling through the inner mantle of the Earth, but when he tried, he found that just about anything he normally could do, he could do while descending.
So he pulled the shirt off his face and tucked it into his khakis, and immediately felt more comfortable. There was no more wind shooting up through his collar, but there was the occasional feeling that he might hit one of the tunnel walls, or an outcropping. He pictured a pebble thrown down a well—if it even skimmed the wall of the well, it would careen wildly off course.
“Keep your arms and legs in if you can,” Catalina said.
Eventually, any steady thing can become routine. People fly in airplanes every hour of every day, and we forget that they are metal tubes shooting through space near the speed of sound. It is not a routine thing, to fly through the air in a metal tube, watching TV or sleeping while we do this, but it becomes routine.
And so it was with Gran falling through the Earth. He was afraid to do it, and then startled by the feeling of blackness and speed and the unknown below him. Then, after a few minutes, he wondered when it would be over.
“Almost over,” Catalina said.
And moments later, Gran felt himself slow. The air below him seemed to become more dense, or more resistant.
“There’s an updraft here,” Catalina explained. “It slows you down, then eventually it’ll stop us altogether.”
The air became thicker, and Gran’s progress slowed to the point where he could reach out to the shiny-smooth wall of the chute and feel their speed—which was about the speed of a Ferris wheel.
“Get ready for light,” Catalina said. “It’ll take a second for your eyes to adjust.”
Gran looked down, and saw a pinpoint of butter-colored light.
“That’s where we get off,” Catalina said. Gran looked to her, and could see her face, ever so faintly, in the growing illumination from below.
“How do we stop?” he asked.
“We’ll stop,” she said.
But first they slowed. The resistance beneath them grew stronger until they were floating above it, perfectly still. Gran was loving it, hovering and somersaulting in midair, but soon he noticed that Catalina was already standing in the tunnel next to him, tapping her foot impatiently.
“We have to go,” she said, and yanked him from the air current. He collapsed in the tunnel like a bag of oranges.
“Thank you,” Gran said.
He could hear voices, hundreds of them, down the tunnel.
“Hurry,” Catalina said, and pulled him along.
The tunnel was sturdier, more permanent, than the ones closer to the surface, and there were tiles underfoo
t—a patchwork of round tiles of various colors. Above, there was a string of lights mounted on the rounded ceiling.
As they hurried down the hall, the voices grew louder and Gran detected an echo, as if whatever room or cavern the voices were in was enormous.
Gran followed Catalina around two tight turns, one left and one right, and then stopped. The tunnel had opened like a river to the sea. The room before them was vast. It sloped gently downward, like a theater, until it leveled out at what appeared to be the stage. There were easily a thousand people in the room, almost all of them kids like Gran and Catalina, every one of them about the same height they were. There was an air of excitement and welcome, a cross between family reunion and rock concert.
“Who are these people?” Gran asked.
“Don’t play dumb,” Catalina said.
Gran knew they were Lifters. Now he began to notice their Lifts in their hands and back pockets. A few wore them around their necks. Some were silver and ornate, as Catalina’s was. Others were simple and made of wood.
“I didn’t know there were so many,” he said.
“One for every town, Gran. At least,” Catalina said. “How could everything hold up without us?”
Because most of the Lifters were dressed up—or at least dressed with clean clothes—Gran wished he weren’t wearing the same khakis, drenched and dried with urine and milk and water, that he’d been wearing for a full day now.
“Don’t worry about your pants,” Catalina said. Gran couldn’t decide how he felt about Catalina’s ever-increasing ability to read his mind. Was it good to be known so well? He decided it was good. With Catalina it was good.
As they moved through the crowd, Gran heard other languages, Spanish and Portuguese among them, but the rest he couldn’t name. There were too many to count.