The Digging Machine

"What the hell is that?” Joan stood smoking a cigarette on the stoop leading into the suburban, one-car garage. She gestured toward the lumped together metal with the glowing ember in her right hand. George beamed at her from behind it in his plaid button-down and cut-off jeans.


“It’s a digging machine. Our digging machine.” Pride poured off George into an intense, electric cloud surrounding the hammer-beaten conglomeration between him and Joan.


The air hung heavy around them, and an autumn chill crept in from the crack under the garage door. Joan shifted her slippered feet against one another. This is how it starts, she thought. People go through their whole lives dull as dirt before disappearing into their garages and madness. I’m going to spend the rest of my life taking care of this.


“Where did it come from?” she asked.


“Well, from here, mostly. It’s a lot of the old car and those electric blenders your family keeps sending us. Really, two last just last Christmas – something had to be done. There’s about half the dishwasher in there, too. Sorry about that; I bought a drying caddy and some sponges.”


“George, you’ve been out here for three months. Why do we need a digging machine?”


“Well, see, everyone’s going to have one soon. They’re the way of the future; I’m sure of it. Public transportation’s going bust with the buses breaking down all the time, and given the way people are breeding, there’s hardly going to be room for roads on the surface soon. We’ll have to make our own roads underground, if we ever want to get to another of those hateful family reunions your parents insist on holding every year. That’s where the digging machine comes in. Plus, really, all those blenders simply had to be dealt with. There wasn’t any way around it.”


Joan exhaled an eddying cloud through her nostrils. She felt the nicotine coat the back of her throat, and tapped her cigarette against the standing ashtray. At least he managed to hang on this long, she thought. At least the kids are out of the house. At least we have enough money put away to stick him somewhere nice. But god, what will the neighbors say? I’m never going to be able to look that fucking Judy Gardner in the eye again.


“How does it work?” Better to play along, she supposed. He still looked like George, standing there with his own cigarette now. He still fidgeted in the self-conscious way she would never associate with anyone else.


“It’s all very technical,” he grinned. “There’s a lot to do with internal combustion and forward propulsion and friction reduction. It runs on gasoline, of course. It’s amazing how far you can get with a million tiny explosions pushing you. That’s a good Scrabble word, don’t you think? Explosions?”


“It’s got the ‘x’ and the ‘p,’ but it’s ten letters long.” She responded out of habit, falling into one of the tried and true conversational patterns they used to pass the time.


“Yeah, yeah, but you could snag a bingo if you build it off ion.”


“It would be a good play,” she said.


They stood facing each other, each appraising the situation and trying to watch for changes in the other. Light leaked from the rectangular garage windows onto the driveway and into the breezy, streetlight heavy night. Stubbing out the cigarette against his sneaker bottom, George asked the inevitable question.


“Do you want to try it out with me?”


“Aren’t you afraid of the tunnel collapsing? We’d both suffocate or be crushed.”


“Why, no. This old thing’s solid as a rock. We’d dig our way out.” He slapped the side of his contraption with an inventor’s confidence. “It definitely won’t explode, either. I already fired it up once.”


“Yes, I heard.” Joan remembered the screeching, gear-grinding racket she had made her way into the garage to investigate.


“It’s quieter inside. I promise.” He held her eyes with his, needing to be believed. Without saying another word, he opened the Buick car door (now rotated such that it swung downward and hung parallel to the ground from the hulking, vertical machine), and climbed behind the steering wheel. “This only has two seats. It’s just a prototype, really. Eventually, there’ll be sedan models and cargo carriers.”


It’s like this, then, Joan thought. I can either have him carted away right now, or I can let him crash us both into the garage floor. She looked at the embedded blender blades covering the machine’s needle-nose, suspended by the surrounding supports a few inches above the ground. It didn’t look like a fall that would seriously injure either of them, but if asked later, she could not have said what made her clamor up into the passenger seat beside her husband. Fastening his safety belt, George flushed with gratitude.


“No smoking inside the vehicle, please,” he said. Joan cracked the door again, and flicked her cigarette onto the concrete below. After fiddling with some knobs that seemed to do nothing whatever, George turned the key he’d left dangling in the ignition.


A belching roar filled the confined space around them, but it did seem somewhat muted to Joan. George reached up to load a compact disc into the gutted player hanging from wires between them.


“I really should have mounted this,” he said. “But I ran out of clamps. I don’t think it’ll swing around too much.” From speakers beneath their seats, the jangling guitar of Subterranean Homesick Blues began to play.


“Funny, right?” George said. “I thought it was funny.”


“It’s very funny,” Joan said. She gripped the ragged edge of George’s cut-offs as he flipped a switch, and they went screaming into the grey stone floor. Jesus, christ, oh god, she thought as little chunks of rock began to fly up all around them. It’s working, jesus – this is going to cost a fortune to repair.


“Those titanium blender blades are goddamn incredible!” George cried as an ecstatic mania stretched out all of his features. He violently twisted a knob that seemed to have once belonged to the Buick’s air conditioner, and fluttered the gas pedal with a motion that roughly approximated his coffee-induced jimmyleg. Only the top half of the machine’s windshield remained above the floor, and in the bottom half, an earth-brown lip began to steadily expand.


“George, you stop this!” Joan screamed above Dylan’s whining vocals.


“It’s too late now! The dirt’s up past the doors. We’ll have to burrow for awhile, and then try to come out in the backyard.”


Joan slumped into her seat, and fumbled with the seatbelt next to her. After finally snapping it, she looked at George, and felt a swelling, insane pride before falling unconscious. Her shoulders tilted forward against the straining seatbelt, and taking one of his hands off the steering wheel, George reached over to pet her hair.


Dismay gushed into Joan when she awoke. We’re still underground, she thought, but at least we’re still moving. George, illuminated by the dim overhead car-light, hunched next to her, watching the digging machine erode its way through yellow-orange clay. He looked over as Joan started awake.


“Don’t be angry,” he said. “We’re safe.”


“How long have we been digging?”


“About three hours now. We’ll be popping in soon.”


“Popping into what?”


At that moment, the machine lurched forward, and blackness swam up all around them. Jesus, thought Joan, the whole thing’s hollow. Just like an egg.