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“Are you serious? ABBA.”
“Like it’s so obvious.”
“Isn’t it?”
“What did you use for me?”
“I’m not telling.” I hear the smile in his voice.
I widen my eyes. “Come on.”
“Nope. Sorry.”
Playfully, I shove at his shoulder. I kiss his cheek. I nip his earlobe. “Please,” I beg.
“Nope.”
“Hmmph. Well I’ve got one for you, Henry. For the name Henry. And you won’t like it.”
He says nothing.
“You won’t like it. Not. At. All,” I add. Then it hits me. “There are thousands of employees! You remember all their names?”
“Only the local ones.”
“That’s more than a thousand,” I say. “That’s…intense.”
“Once I started it, I felt like I had to keep it up.” A thread of weariness winds through his words. He makes it look easy to be him. Doesn’t mean it is.
More hammering from below. “How long until we’re out?”
“I don’t know. Between ten minutes and an hour.”
“Uh.” I pull into myself more tightly, my limbs finding the old familiar grooves with each other. I feel like I’m falling, falling, back into that well.
“Are you claustrophobic?”
I pull my legs tighter. I should answer, but I want him to talk, not me.
“You seemed okay in the many elevators we’ve been traveling,” he says.
“It’s because this shaft feels like a well. The unfinished sides, the light above.”
“Oh.” A beat, then, “Do you have…history with a well?”
“I fell in one,” I say. “When I was younger. They didn’t find me for a pretty long time, and I was just terrified out of my mind.”
“How long?”
I’m about to say three days, but that’s the kind of thing that gets reported in the news. “Long enough,” I say. “I felt like I’d fallen off the face of the earth. But most of all, it was terrifying. I was scared of the dark to start with. And you don’t know how dark the bottom of a well is—you have no idea. I thought I’d never get out. People couldn’t find me. And there are slugs, and it’s just…” I shudder. “It was a long time in there.”
He slides his arm around my shoulders. “This isn’t a well.”
“I know,” I say. “But I kind of don’t know.”
He pulls me close. I find myself leaning into him.
“It would be scary,” he says. “Alone. Not sure if you’d be found.”
