Measuring Reality

    Three steps from the stairs put me in utter blackness, fingers on the wall my only guide.  "I only know the tunnels by what grown-ups can still believe.  They tell me this place is called Arsenal because it was a munitions depot during World War One.  They say it was built in the Nineties, back when they still believed in central steam heat.  And since heat rises . . . "
    "They put the furnace below ground.  Right.  Simple.  No ghosts, no torture, no evil spirits."  Carl chuckled.  "But the stories do keep the kids out'a here."
    We walked a few steps before the dark stillness got to me.  "But why tunnels?"  I'd never have believed blindness would be so disorienting.  "Wouldn't it be cheaper to bury pipes?   Especially since they tell me that every building on campus has access to the tunnels."
    I still think he muttered, "And then some."
    "What?"
    "You win, son!"  Unnaturally loud.  His echoes would have wakened bats.  Or worse.  "Maybe they were paranoid.  This would make a heck of a hidey-hole when the Kaiser invaded."
    The Kaiser's armies must have been thirty years in the future when they designed this place, I thought, but I didn't say it because Carl's footsteps were no longer in front of me.  My hand found an opening, I turned left and found my escort silhouetted by a distant amber glow.  Carl stalked it and stopped in a doorway, beckoning me.  I paused at the opening to look.  I found a huge, low room, defined more by openings than walls.  To the right was a vast empty bin, its insides black as coal.  Pizza boxes and hamburger wrappers littered the carpet remnants that covered the floor.  At the heart of the room a huge steel Buddha welcomed us warmly, smiling through the uneven teeth of its stoking grate.  Beyond it hovered five huge boilers, lifting arms in praise or prayer to start the pipe pilgrimage I'd already seen.  And planted before it, swaying slowly in a massive Boston rocker, sat this Buddha's High Lama, the most unlikely janitor I could ever imagine.
    Above his threadbare carpet slippers and his striped and baggy socks, beneath a tasseled shawl of glistening cotton that covered any name tag he might show, he wore the custodian's customary steel gray, but his seemed to be caked with lime and it covered his shapeless bulk more like a ceremonial robe than a uniform.  He sat puffing on a long clay pipe, pushing with his fleshy legs whenever the rocker tipped forward.  He turned his hairless, liver spotted head to us as we entered and he smiled.
    I bit back a gasp.
    His teeth were a ruin.  Both his eyes were milky yellow, the pupils occluded.
    "Carl, my friend!  And you brought a guest."
    That voice.  That voice was a gift, was music.  A bass of surpassing clarity, it had the lilt and rhythms of Jamaica.  I heard power in that voice, it could bend a man's will, with a voice like that I could be happy, affluent and content.  With fewer scruples, I could be powerful.  And the man who owned that voice lived in a littered furnace room.  Perhaps he was innocent of the power in his voice.  Perhaps he was stupid, or mad.  Or very wise.  Perhaps he had scruples.  Stupid man.  Stupid, ugly man.
    "Welcome, Carl's friend," he said as I approached.  He held out his pipe, his soft arm slack as a rope.  "Want some mint?"
    I recognized the mint by the smell of its smoke.  Cannabis.  "No thanks, I'm . . . trying to cut down."
    "He wants to learn to read, Gus," Carl said, behind me.
    That fat, blind old face lit up and fell open like a paper lantern.  "Ahhh . . .  But can he?"

               From "Like an Open Book"