I can’t tell you this. I don’t want to gut you, reach inside and pull things out, not again. Old wounds and sleeping dogs, you know. Tales better left untold. And you’ve heard this one before, even if your story wasn’t quite the same.

But that’s what sat me down to write. If it’s just a story, maybe we can understand, come to terms. Make peace.

Pretend it’s not ours.

I don’t think I ever told this to you. When I was little, my dad used to come tuck me in at night, and sometimes I’d blink and he’d disappear. He’d be sitting on my bed, singing or smoothing my sheets or telling a story, warm and alive, and between one blink and the next he’d be gone. My heart would thump and I’d clutch the blanket, terrified, eyes thrashing back and forth across the dark spaces of my room like a trapped bird looking for a way out, looking for him, but he’d be gone, and I’d be alone.

Maybe premonition. More likely was that I’d fall asleep, waiting for him to come in, and dream he had. Some noise would jerk me up to a room where he’d long since looked in on me and pulled the door gently shut. But how I rationalize it makes no difference. It doesn’t change how I lived that loss, each night it happened. How I can feel it even today. The person who loved me most, erased from existence in a blink. I’ll never forget how that felt. Even if it never really happened.

So. Maybe a story is a language we can speak, you and I. Find in the telling the truths that matter. Embellish, excise. Revise. Revision.

Although our story really did happen. You know that.

Fine then. Here goes. You ready?

This is what happened when we found some stairs underneath my bed, and decided to go see where they led.

Chapter 1

Right from the start things were wrong, but I couldn’t see it. Maybe I didn’t want to. Or maybe I’m being too hard on myself. There wasn’t exactly a roadmap for what happened, a script to follow. But it’s undeniable that even on that very first night—the night of the Russian dance club, remember?—things started happening that shouldn’t have.

I was in the kitchen making ramen, that big kitchen with its vintage appliances and endless counter space, completely wasted on college kids. We’d just moved in a few weeks back, Niko and I and our friends, mostly his, students and lapsed students and a few brave graduates, still settling into the rambling old off-campus house we’d found in the newspaper. (Cast your mind back to a time when kids like us had figured out the internet but people old enough to own property hadn’t, so instead of browsing classifieds our bandwidth went entirely to downloading all the music in the world.)

I was stirring noodles when Niko forced his way in through the side door, perpetually stuck, the soul-juddering screech of metal on wood already a familiar sound, a sound of home. We’d stopped using the front door for reasons I no longer remember, so everyone came and left through that massive kitchen. He gave the doorjamb an affectionate slap and turned his searing grin in my direction, the grin that meant he wanted something. “Ryan, my man. What the deuce is up?”

“Dinner,” I said, with a wary glance that meant I was on to him: but smiling despite myself. The temperature always rose a few degrees when he came into a room, like he radiated in all frequencies, emotional and thermal.

“Cool. Hey. What are you doing tonight?”

Resigned. “Tell me.”

“A bunch of people, like everyone really, are heading out to Orbits. Heard of it?” I shook my head; he rolled his eyes. “Course you haven’t. It’s that new dance club over by the old stadium. Supposedly they play this fucking feral, crotch-pummeling Russian dance music and lots of sexy people will be there tonight, including us.”

“Huh.” I stirred the pot. “Not really my thing.”

“Leaving the house isn’t really your thing, yeah, I get it.” He came over beside me and reached a bronzed hand over to pinch a couple of noodles, wincing at the heat and slurping them up fast, grinning. “But sometimes you have to get outside your comfort zone, you know?” He licked his fingers and fixed me with a look that said he wasn’t taking no for an answer, and maybe it said something else, or I wanted to pretend it did. His eyes were so fucking sharp. When they looked at you and wanted something, it hurt.

“Uh. I’ve got Bio homework.” I blinked. Green. His eyes were green. “And I don’t want to be around a lot of loud drunk people tonight. Or loud drunk music.”

“Oh come on,” he pleaded, running a hand through his black curls. “It won’t be any fun if you aren’t there. Hey, maybe some drunk straight guy will start making out with you cause Russian techno makes him feel all experimental and shit.”

“That’ll definitely happen.”

“Look man, what was the point of coming out if you never actually go out?” He crossed his arms. “Come on. Please?”

It clicked then that he was the one hoping to get some action tonight, probably with some sweet-smelling, dark-skinned exchange student with feathers weaved into her long, black hair. (Yes, her. I know, I know.) She was the one he wanted to take to this club. Maybe it had been her idea. The thought of watching from a corner while he made moves on some intoxicating girl made my stomach knot up.

But there was something insistent in the way he demanded my presence. Why did he want me there, too? What role was I supposed to play?

I sighed. “I’m going to hate it.”

“Yeah you are.” He grinned wickedly. “Every second. We’re leaving at eight. I’ll knock on your door.”

I was somehow committed. I was going, like he’d wanted. On the off-chance that something interesting would happen.

Something did. But not till much later, when we got back home, drunk and exhausted.

*******

I’d hated the club, as predicted. The music was so loud it hurt, almost as much as it hurt to call the shit they were blasting “music.” I’d worn my rainbow pride bracelet, the one I’d bought a few months ago and mostly been too chickenshit to wear (it was a college town but a conservative state). I might as well have worn a bag over my head. Everyone ignored me, including hypothetical hot guys with loosened inhibitions. I mostly stood against a wall hating myself and how I probably looked to everyone, an acne-faced geek in too-small clothes lurking on the outskirts, wishing he was back home listening to Dvořák symphonies. I drank too much and as usual it didn’t help. I watched Niko dance his ass off, mostly with girls, and once or twice with guys, whether out of politeness or genuine interest I couldn’t tell. I’d never really been able to tell. He flirted with everyone, flashed the same manic energy in all directions equally. But he, too, seemed to fail at making any solid human connections, and I was relieved when he cornered me and asked if I wanted to duck out early.

Walking home through the chill night air was a relief. It was nice just walking with him, and not only because by that point in the evening it would have been hard to walk a straight line on my own. We’d been friends since freshman year of college and best friends since the year after that, and by now we felt like something more, placidly absorbing jokes about being joined at the hip, going everywhere together. We were; we did. Especially since his accident, we’d had a profound if unspoken level of companionship I’d never felt with anyone. Usually I was content with that.

In some ways we had so little in common it was astonishing we’d become friends. At other moments it seemed like the universe had meant us to find each other. Over the years we had grown together, like two plants in the same small pot. It had been an especially tumultuous gauntlet of an undergrad—although I guess it probably seems that way to everyone—so shared roots twined us together now, half-remembered fragments of stories and selves: skipping a funeral to camp together in the rocky canyons of Brushwillow, sharing long silences amidst the lakes and pines; pulling all-nighters on mad projects with desperate stakes; driving to the next town over through a summer midnight, windows rolled down and air thrumming through, desperate to find fresh vegetables for reasons that seemed incredibly important at the time, buzzed from both caffeine and alcohol as in so many stories involving Niko. In our defense the alcohol was supposed to go in the ragu.

In the fall we’d be starting our fifth year of college, neither of us particularly close to graduating with any particular degree, and for the first time that felt ominous. The future that had been staked out before us our whole lives was running out. A blank canvas ought to have been exciting, but any direction we could imagine to go in seemed blocked off, prematurely closed, inaccessible or unrealistic. Friends were picking already between the few remaining well-flagged routes: getting careers, getting married, getting pregnant, getting gone to new cities, new lives, new starts. It would be our turn soon enough.

On the way back from the club I got ranty about real music, and by the time we reached the house had a half-dozen songs queued up to play for Niko. Mentally, I mean: digital music players weren’t really a thing yet, although it was still tragically too late for my records to be anything but anachronism. Vinyl wouldn’t start making a comeback for years and was deader than dead. Maybe that was why I liked it. When we moved in I’d stacked my crates of LPs precariously in the closet, so now as we tromped up the stairs to my room and dragged them out to hunt for the albums I wanted to play him, we got drunkenly annoyed at the lack of anywhere to put them. So that was how I ended up on my hands and knees, searching fruitlessly for a way to open up my bed.

“Bed” was generous: it was really just a mattress, thrown on a raised wooden platform built into a corner of the room. The platform was mattress-sized and had therefore seemed like the sensible spot to put one, but the bulky thing also really seemed like it ought to be hollow and have some storage space inside. I’d never found any handles or hinges, but in our drink-addled haze it seemed ridiculous that the thing couldn’t be opened somehow, and because I can’t leave well enough alone and because unsolved challenges annoy me, and, okay, because booze, there I was on hands and knees fiddling with the paneled edges of the platform, shoving and kneading and banging on them. When something finally gave with a satisfying chunk, I whooped in satisfaction; but leapt back startled when the whole platform groaned and swung up, pencils and organic chemistry textbooks sliding off the mattress onto the pitted hardwood floor.

Underneath was a set of steep stairs down.

This is just one way the story can go. In the final version of Subcutanean, the text will change for each new reader: no two copies will ever be quite the same. Find out more at https://igg.me/at/subcutanean