No matter what happens, I will always be grateful to Irina for getting me out of that lab and setting me up here. I don’t know how much time she had to come up with this plan and put it together, but I’ve been able to make it work. I hope I’ve made her proud.
My “cabin” was actually a wooden jewelry box, about six inches high and eight inches wide and deep. The lid opened on hinges at the back, and there was a lock on the front. Unlike the lab cupboard, however, I could reach the metal latch from the inside and shove it into the locked position and back as needed.
The lid also had a decorative pattern cut into the top, sort of a stylized sunflower, which proved much-needed ventilation. Inside I found grooves in the walls that used to anchor slats that had divided the box into several compartments.
The box’s current contents were few but invaluable. A decorative pillow four inches square and almost an inch thick was obviously intended as a bed. A terrycloth pocket—originally used as a washcloth—could be an oversize sleeping bag for me. Irina had also cut a bedsheet or a pillowcase into six four-inch squares and spread them on my “bed.” A cotton ball could serve as a pillow, but it would be rather scratchy until I could find something to wrap it in.
There was a one-inch cube of rubber that puzzled me until I realized it was an old-fashioned eraser, slightly worn. My first use for it was as a platform to stand on when I latched the box lid, but it also worked as a stool or chair when set against a wall. It also took me some time to figure out the light button: a two-inch-diameter plastic lamp, powered by a watch battery, that I could switch on and off by pressing with all my weight onto the top. I could also, if I chose, remove a layer of film from the back to expose an adhesive strip and affix it to an interior surface, but I decided it was more useful as a portable lamp.
The most sentimental objects were a pair of fabric strips that I eventually determined must have been early precursors to the loincloth that Irina had presented to me in the lab. With more reverence than it probably warranted, I tied one about my waist. I also wistfully noted that almost all the box’s contents carried Irina’s scent.
My bivouac secure, I ventured out to see what else Irina had provided. The food was a five-pound bag of trail mix: nuts, raisins, M&Ms. The water was in a plastic jug with a spigot at the bottom, which I opened too far the first time, inundating the (porous) floor of the milk crate. She also included a resealable package of sanitary wipes.
I tore open the bag of trail mix, pulled out a raisin, and took a bite while I contemplated my new environment. The garage didn’t look insulated, and while it was still summer, I had better plan on it getting colder. I was going to need a way to transport and store small portions of water, and I would need some sort of latrine. I already regretted making an irreparable hole in my food store, although I couldn’t think of any other way to get at it.
With some food in my stomach and water restoring my tissues, I realized how long it had been since I had a truly restful sleep. I was in a new and unfamiliar environment, and I had no idea of what the threats were nor any plans for how to defend against them. I was just so tired.
I walked to a corner of the crate against the wall and pissed through an opening. This is just for today. I’ll find a real latrine tomorrow. Returning to my “cabin,” I tucked two of the sheet squares into the washcloth, leaving the bottom sheet out far enough to cover my cotton ball pillow. I stood on the block eraser and closed the lid over me, then turned the latch.
I felt like a burrowing animal as I crawled into my terrycloth nest. Irina’s faint scent was all around me, and when I closed my eyes I saw her compassionate face hovering over me, but what truly transported me to a place of safety and calm was the memory of her voice, reassuring by its timbre and cadence alone, saying that I deserved my place in the world and that nothing bad would happen to me.
I slept like a log.
I was awakened by the sound of Dorothy entering the garage again by the interior door. She had also turned on the overhead fluorescent light, but that had much less impact on me enclosed in my cabin. I sat up and listened, but she didn’t seem to approach my shelves and she switched off the light when she left.
I was going to have to adjust my eyes to seeing in much less light. All of the ambient light came from the edges of the garage door, wryly reminiscent of the cupboard in the lab. The light button helped at night, but I wasn’t eager to engage in nocturnal activities in any event.
The first order of business was to secure my food supply. The punctured bag hadn’t attracted any vermin yet, but eventually it would. The plastic tackle box I had hidden behind earlier seemed like a secure repository, but opening it revealed additional resources.
To the inside of the tackle box lid was affixed a label bearing four words, the first two in printed type and the last two in a spidery cursive: “Property of Ronald Plunkett.” Ron had a more fastidiously-organized tackle box than any other I had ever seen. The flies and lures and floats and plain hooks were all stowed in their separate compartments, and I actually felt a little bad evicting them to make room for the trail mix.
I was seized by a mania to find uses for all those pieces of metal and plastic small enough for me to handle. Split in half, the bobbers made excellent vessels for ferrying trail mix and water to my cabin. The thin metal edges of the spinners were very useful for turning screwheads and generally prying things apart. I wondered how best to make tools from the hooks, and then I discovered the most useful treasure of all: a spool of fishing line.
I soon had some rudimentary utensils and dishes, as well as a couple of bedpans. Once I figured out how to cut the fishing line, I could use it and the hooks to haul heavy items up to my shelf. The sinkers were small and hard enough to serve as crude hammers.
On my first day of exploration I determined that the main posts holding up the shelving had regular perforations to allow the height of some of the shelves to be adjusted. These small holes made perfect hand- and foot-holds for me, and the corner posts provided cover in two directions, allowing me to climb between shelves without being noticed by a casual observer.
The shelf immediately below mine contained a box-cutter, which I disassembled with a spinner. The extracted blade was primarily useful for cutting the fishing line, but I also used it to cut my way into cardboard boxes that I couldn’t otherwise access. A jar containing nails of various sizes yielded more tools, once I had tipped it on its side and wedged it between two boxes to give me the leverage necessary to loosen the lid.
I saw my first spider on the second day. It was probably less than an inch long and it fled as soon as I saw it. Nevertheless, I quickly fashioned several spears using small nails for the tips and kept them handy in several locations within my new domain.
One of the larger nails solved my latrine problem by letting me poke a hole in the drywall and expand the hole wide enough to let me dump the contents of my bedpans. I had no idea whether my waste would repel or attract vermin, but I had already pissed in enough spots to sufficiently advertise my presence.
My real concern was rodents, specifically rats. I had no experience in identifying rat droppings or other signs, but I couldn’t find anything that aroused my suspicions. However, Dorothy had a bad habit of leaving the garage door open and unattended for hours, and it wasn’t long before I began to stand watch during those periods of vulnerability. I was primarily on guard for any vermin, winged or quadrupedal, that might intrude and present a threat, but I also entertained the foolish hope that I might glimpse Irina out for a walk.
Even though no bugs had so far tried to make a meal of me, the thought of it gave me the willies. In the open, alert and armed with a spear, I felt like I could safely repel most bugs likely to be found in the garage. I was more concerned about the possibility of a surprise encounter, either the bug or myself exploring the shelves and suddenly coming upon each other. Even worse, a bug might crawl through the carved holes in the lid of my cabin while I slept.
It was this nightmare that occasioned my first expedition off the shelves entirely when I spotted a disused screen door on the other side of the garage. Equipped with the box-cutter blade and armed with a nail-tipped spear, I descended the post and made way underneath Ron’s truck, noting with misplaced concern the spot of oil beneath the crankcase.
Arriving at the base of the screen door, I wasted a few moments trying to determine why it had been abandoned here. Was the screen torn? Was the frame bent? I then realized I was worried that the screen I was about to vandalize might otherwise still be useful to someone else.
“Sorry, Dorothy,” I said to myself as I started to cut a lid-sized patch from one corner of the screen. It was when I shifted the door to get at it from the rear that I saw the rodent droppings. I almost lunged for my spear where I had left it propped against the wall, but then I looked again at the dusty pellets. Light was scant behind the frame, but I could nevertheless see the dry pellet crumble when I tapped it with my foot.
Despite the obvious age of the droppings, I had to fall back on my training to complete the excision properly while remaining alert. My time in the garage had already far exceeded my longest solo detachment, and I had had to find a new balance between diligence and vigilance.
Returning to my cabin with my prize, I pounded some staples I had salvaged from Ron’s staple-gun into the inside of the lid, affixing the patch of screen over the sunflower pattern of holes. That night, while the peace and calm evoked by my memory of Irina’s voice and face came more easily than ever, I somehow also got a premonition that I would never see her again, that I would spend the rest of my life a tiny scavenger in this garage. I guess it was better than being terminated with the rest of the experiment.
The days had passed faster at the beginning, when I was still familiarizing myself with the shelves and discovering new uses for their contents. I had found a stub pencil (that Ron had presumably used for carpentry) and used it to make daily hash marks on the wall next to my latrine. Sometime after I had made the thirtieth hash mark, I found myself bored.
Boredom is deadly, either on patrol or standing watch. There weren’t really any human enemies to worry about, and the bug sightings had been few. Feeling rather primitive, I wondered if I should take up hunting. My food supply remained ample, so there was no need to hunt for food even if I was interested in dining on raw bug (I wasn’t).
I quickly dismissed the idea, but it returned several times. I had to devise complicated routines of exercise, patrol, and inspection to pass the time while remaining alert. If only Ron had stored a collection of magazines on these shelves. I’d kill for even a single issue of Popular Mechanics or Field & Stream.
As I ranged further and further abroad in search of materials with which to fortify my position on the top shelf, I felt like I got to know Ron Plunkett a little. At my scale it was easy to determine which items had remained untouched and which had been plundered by Dorothy and their children. The condition and organization of the tools was impeccable, and I became mildly offended on Ron’s behalf that his family hadn’t put them to greater use.
I had no firm idea of how many children Ron & Dorothy had nor how much use they actually had for Ron’s tools. I wondered if any of them thought that Ron had been too much of a perfectionist, that they couldn’t possibly live up to his example, and that’s why they avoided these shelves. That they did so was to my great fortune, but I couldn’t help wishing that I could honor Ron’s legacy a bit by showing them what they could do with all this stuff.
I reached the last uninvestigated box on the bottom shelf on Day 52. It was densely packed, so I had to cut a hole in the wall of the box and clamber inside with my lamp to identify each of the contents. Most promising was an old tool belt, if only because I might have been able to salvage some small bits of useful metal.
Even deep within the musty box I recognized the sound of the interior garage door being opened. The fluorescent light flickered through the hole I had made, and Dorothy’s familiar flats echoed off the concrete floor. It was difficult to determine her proximity, but eventually a slight tremor communicated through the box and its contents forced me to conclude that Dorothy was, finally, rummaging through “my” shelves.
I was well out of sight and safe, unless this box happened to contain the item she was seeking. I looked around at the objects illuminated by my lamp, but I didn’t see anything that might be uniquely useful to Dorothy. I cocked an ear, and it seemed that she was looking around a shelf above my current location.
Would she identify my crate as a new arrival? There weren’t any other milk crates on the shelves, nor elsewhere in the garage that I could recall. The crate’s contents weren’t particularly obscured or camouflaged, primarily because I couldn’t imagine fabricating anything within my power that wouldn’t attract more attention than it would deflect. I (and Irina) had been relying solely on Dorothy’s neglect to hide me.
“I could have sworn I left it right here,” Dorothy muttered to herself. After a pause, her voice rose in pitch, “What on earth?”
No. Not my crate, please. My cabin, all my water. All my food, too, if she opened Ron’s tackle box. My mind raced through all my options for survival without the crate. It was very grim. My stomach flipped as I considered that I might have to reveal myself to Dorothy or perish.
“Who would take a box-cutter apart?” Dorothy asked the garage. Of course. I had just left the other pieces strewn about the shelf where I had disassembled it. Careless.
“Where’s the blade?” Oh fuck. I had left it just outside, next to the hole I had made in the box. The hole itself might have looked like normal wear and tear, but Dorothy seeing the blade next to it (and four shelves down from the rest of the casing) could well provoke some dangerous curiosity.
I prayed my minuscule movements didn’t create any noise audible to Dorothy as I scrambled down toward the hole, constantly glancing at the exterior light to look for any ominous shadows darkening the shelf. I abruptly halted my momentum when I reached the opening, trying to ascertain the location of Dorothy’s attention by sound alone. When I decided that she was still busy with the upper shelves, I took a deep breath and poked my head out.
All I saw were her polyester-covered legs and her humble sneakers. Without hesitation I scurried out, grabbed the blade, and jumped back through the hole. I was too panicked to take care to avoid cutting myself, but I was unscathed nonetheless. I lay there, afraid to take a breath, until I noticed that I had left my portable lamp on.
There’s no way Dorothy could have detected that tiny light, entombed in miscellaneous hardware, even if she were looking directly at the hole in the box. Nevertheless, I couldn’t let the oversight go uncorrected, and I crawled silently up and over the tool belt to shut the lamp off.
“Oh well, I’ll just have to buy a new one,” sighed Dorothy as she turned away from the shelves and exited the garage. I had no access to a watch or other chronometer, but it seemed like I sat there on the tool belt for an hour, trying to visualize every spot on the shelves where I might have left evidence of my presence or salvage. No glaring examples came to mind, and eventually I resumed investigating the box’s contents.
Now that Dorothy had examined them I dared not disturb the disassembled box-cutter components, but aside from that I added inspecting for and clearing my detritus to my daily routine. Dorothy didn’t return to the shelves, either in search of another item or to further investigate the mystery of the box-cutter, but I always had to be prepared for it anyway.
The possibility of revealing myself to Dorothy never left my mind, either. My food and water wouldn’t last forever, and the unheated garage would get very cold when winter came. At the very least I would have to fashion some warmer clothing, which would require ranging farther for materials. Whether I could trust Dorothy became a more and more urgent question.
She certainly didn’t spend enough time in the garage to reveal much about her character. I was fairly certain she didn’t have a dog or a cat, but I didn’t want to find out the hard way. Leaving the garage to conduct reconnaissance on Dorothy was too daunting to actively contemplate, but subconsciously my vigil changed, adding a long-term aspect to all of my observations and preparations.
Hurry up and wait.