Tunnels run beneath the city—the Portland Underground, they’re called—a maze of them that connect the Willamette docks to the basements of many waterfront hotels and bars, long ago used for shipping deliveries to avoid street traffic, now a crumbling curiosity. Walking tours visit some of them. Others are occupied by the homeless. Others few know about.
Like this one, in the Pearl District, where Sarin leads him. They enter an alley heaped with garbage bags. A figure waits for them here, next to a Dumpster, beneath a fire escape. Lump. One of his crows squawks a greeting. He stands beside a grate, steel, the size of a door. He is also on the spectrum—somewhere closer to Sarin—able to translate and manipulate the shadowy patterns of the world. “You’re sure?” Sarin says, and Lump nods and kneels and yanks the grate. It croaks and flakes rust. A metal staircase leads down.
Juniper doesn’t like to think about his previous life. But sometimes a memory will sneak up on him—him sitting by bedsides or preaching before packed auditoriums, promising miracles, describing a candy-coated heaven—and the sensation is equivalent to biting into tinfoil. A sickening surprise. But some of the old words still ring true. Like this verse from Mark: “In My name they will cast out demons; they will speak with new tongues; they will pick up serpents with their hands; and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.”
Instead of uttering words from behind a pulpit, he is slinging from the streets a gun, a knife, his fists. This feels like a far more honest and effective way of living up to the same message—defending the light—which he supposes makes him a kind of ass-kicking version of the Great Commission.
Lump wishes them good luck and Godspeed, and closes the grate behind them before hurrying off on some other business. The air below the streets is cold and thick and mildewy. The walls are brick-lined, and between the bricks moisture weeps. Juniper and Sarin walk for a hundred yards. They don’t lower their hoods, keeping their faces obscured. He can hear music pulsing, like the blood beat of the earth. From the ceiling dangle red glass Christmas lights, like fiery roots, faintly illuminating the passageway. The music grows louder, a pulsing electronica. They take one turn, then another, before the tunnel straightens out and thirty yards ahead they can see it.
The club is called The Oubliette, the letters etched into the stone archway that is its entrance. Inside, strobe lights flash, silhouetting the figure who stands in the doorway. A bouncer, bigger than Juniper, with tattoos of eyes over his eyelids so that it appears he is always watching. A line of thirty or so people waits to get in, all of them shaved and tatted and dyed and make-upped and pierced in a way that would seem strange anywhere other than Portland.
The bouncer presents a tarot deck. He selects a card and holds up its back side to a kid with an orange Mohawk and quarter-sized tribal plugs in his ears. “The Magician,” the kid says, and the bouncer flips the card over to reveal the same before waving him through.
Some of the people in line complain when Juniper and Sarin cut past them—saying, “Wait the fuck up” and “Yo, check yourself”—but they don’t pause until they arrive at the bouncer, and he holds up a hand to block him. “There’s a line.”
“We got business,” Sarin says.
The bouncer’s eyes slide to Juniper. “You don’t look like you’re here to party.”
“Like she said. Business.”
“What’s this business bullshit? Business with who?”
“Babs.”
“Babs is busy.” He squints, trying to discern their faces below their hoods. “He’s in a meeting. Said not to be bothered.”
Sarin is fast, the lie spoken so quickly that for a moment Juniper believes it. “That’s why we’re here,” she says. “For the meeting. We’re late. Don’t make us any later.”
The bouncer scrunches his eyebrows, which pulls the star-point of the pentagram down his forehead like a drawn blade. “I wasn’t told shit about—”
He doesn’t get a chance to finish, because Sarin has slammed a Taser into his neck. Instantly he drops to the floor. His body spasms. Juniper turns to the crowd of people waiting to get in. “Come on,” he says. “Free beer. Free beer, everyone!”
They hesitate only a second before charging inside, bullying their way toward the bar, and then Sarin and Juniper step over the bouncer and through the doorway and enter a ballroom-sized space with stone pillars interrupting it. At the far end of it, atop a short stage, a DJ with oversize headphones and a forked goatee works the turntables. Maybe a hundred bodies writhe to the music, cast in the silvery strobe light in various poses, their hands running along their bodies one moment, thrown to the air in celebration the next. Glow sticks smear the air neon green, pink, orange. At one point the music cuts off in a pause—and everyone goes still, frozen like an otherworldly garden of statues—and then a whistle blasts and the heavy bass returns, and everyone explodes into motion again.
The bar is long and scarred, with backlit shelves that make the bottles glow like potions, and a mirror mossed over with age. The centerpiece is a tank full of whiskey with a body floating in it. The Drowned, the signature drink, costs five bucks a shot and supposedly brings health and happiness and luck. Two bartenders try to deal with the sudden crush of bodies reaching across the counter, snatching whatever is in reach. “Free drinks,” the voices call. “It’s all free.”
Sarin points to a door beside the bar. It has been glopped over with red paint so that it appears made of muscle. They start across the dance floor, shouldering people aside, most of them too caught up in the pulsing music to notice. Six cages dangle throughout the room, and in them men and women dance, dressed in black or red leather if they are dressed at all. Juniper spots a woman who appears to have a tail and a man with his naked body painted black and white to resemble a skeleton. He isn’t sure of the gender of the person who has mere slits for eyes, nose, and mouth.
More and more bodies shove up against the bar, all of them crying for free drinks, free drinks. One of the bartenders smashes a bottle over a head. The other shoves and punches and screams over the music, “Back off! I said back the hell off!” Somebody hurls a pint glass and it shatters the giant tank, and a flood of whiskey pours out, carrying the drowned man with it, his body flopping to the floor.
Sarin and Juniper pass by unmolested. Juniper expects the door to be locked, but the knob twists easily. He probably just imagines it as hot in his hand, as though the room on the other side were on fire. Flies buzz along the door, dozens of them, appearing like nail heads in the wood. He nods at Sarin. Only then do they pull down their hoods and draw their pistols and rush inside.
Chapter 10