Time Thieves

rather than run any farther. His chest ached; his calves and thighs felt strained and loose. As he walked, he held a hand over his heart, as if clutching it, feeling the beat of it and wishing there were some way to slow the tempo. He took turn after turn in the subterranean network; each twist into a new branch of the drainage system was one more obstacle to anyone who might be trying to follow him.
        
        Ahead, concrete steps, fortified with flagstone insets, led up into more darkness. The city was built on two hills and in the valley between; necessarily, there would have to be different levels in the drains. Weak, blue light, filtering down from above, showed him the way. He climbed the steps, avoiding the soggy clumps of rotting, dead leaves that clung in all the corners of the risers.
        
        At the top of the stairs, he found a landing from which two tunnels bored away in opposite directions. Directly in front of him, in the blank stone wall, there was a heavy, metal door, painted gray with the number 17 stenciled on it in white. A blue safety bulb burned in a wire cage above the door. He crossed to it, tried the handle, and found the door locked.
        
        “Hello in there!” he called without response.
        
        He pounded on the door, sure that he had found a maintenance area of some sort. It was sturdily hinged and reverberated only slightly, despite the force of his knocking.
        
        “Hey, in there!”
        
        Still no answer.
        
        He turned away from it and went back to sit on the first step of the stairway. Instead of thinking about his plight, his mind traveled to thoughts of Della, where it dwelled for long, pleasant minutes.
        
        He tried to picture her, lying in bed yet, warm, curled up, one hand drawn to her mouth, almost as if she would begin sucking her thumb. It was how she always slept; he had little trouble envisioning her.
        
        But he could do better than that. He bored a hole in the obsidian walls around his mental landscape and projected a beam of cognition, seeking her.
        
         Della…
        
        See her: frightened.
        
        She dislikes things that crawl, centipedes, caterpillars, waterbugs, snakes, and she draws away, cold with the fear of being touched by them. She never shows this fear because she doesn't want you to think of her as a typical female, as a ninny afraid of her own shadow. She is terrified of cancer, of tumors that bring death unknown, unsuspected and unwanted. She is frightened of the way you sometimes drive too fast, corner too closely, pass other cars when there is little room to pass. Some nights, she dreams of being killed in the Thunderbird, crushed, canned, bleeding across asphalt paving while ambulence lights flicker and sirens wail and doctors hopelessly try to extricate her from the mass of steel and upholstery and glass…
        
        See her: confident.
        
        She is not afraid of people, open and candid, willing to accept everyone. She is self-sufficient and knows she can extricate herself from any circumstance, be it embarrassing, dangerous or boring. As long as her adversary is always another human being, she knows she can handle the situation. She is not afraid of being poor, of watching her belongings drain away in some recession or depression or through some catastrophe of nature. She knows that she will always be able to provide for herself. She is not frightened of love-making or the joys of flesh, for she holds no faith in deities who punish for joy or in codes that restrict without reason. She is not frightened of herself, either.
        
        His appetite for exploring her mind, for knowing the innermost of her opinions on every subject, was almost crippling in its intensity, at once both unbearable and deliriously desirable.
        
        Was this what love had always been leading to, what love always should have been, this tasting of her way down inside and finding her both ugly and radiant? Each new bit of datum that he acquired was another link between them. Here, through such deep exploration of her, he was finding a truer, stronger love than he had ever known before. She was becoming so well-known to him that they were one and the same. And one can never hate himself, not actually, not below whatever facade he may erect. She was of himself, and he loved her.
        
        He