The old man had been sleeping in the crawl space for three days now, undiscovered by the squatters in the house above. His stench had not yet found it's way through the floorboards to announce his secret place, and he covered himself every night with mud and cinders to mask the smell of his rotting legs and the heavy gas that still seeped from his ass while he slept. The fingers of his right hand were finally scabbed over from his homemade print removal, and his left hand was still tied behind his back. He lay cramped in a fetal position under the black floor joists. In the morning before the family stirred up above, he was just able to see well enough under the edge of the blindfold to scratch a few lines on the oily back of an old field manual.

"By misunderstanding is existence marked." He mumbled out loud, then shushing himself with a bloody finger, he wrote on. "Love is a stony precipice, above a raging river." He looked at the words with wonder and confusion, "The River was older than Solomon, the King of the sandy Persian veld, The River took advantage of the wide valley, rushing through in haste to lay claim to all before it, to all geography, all opportunity, all desire and all hope. The River owned the valley and sought the next one beyond. And each by each it took over the land and conquered it and came to the sea."

The old man lowered his head onto his arm and rested, He repeated his name to himself, "Simon Naught." He thought the name as useless as anything else, "Simon Abraham Naught." He watched the River in his mind, washing the soil and large boulders before it, tumbling through the forests, sweeping villages and people downstream into the Sea. The River was keeper of wisdom that people could not know. The River was a teacher without a lesson plan, without a curriculum and without students.

The wind ran before the water and through the trees with great force. The sound like a huge train on tracks of iron, like ghosts fleeing imagination, like the last feeble threads of comprehension from his mind. Simon slept, and awoke, his dreams like the net of a fisherman, grasping at memories of his wife, his children and his lost life before the storms.
"Let me count the ways," He said quietly to himself under the old house, "All the ways man will find himself... unafraid," He wrote this on the yellowed cloth cover, "All the ways man will forsake his past---  and embrace the future-- the empty space between myth and reality." He scratched out the last line and wrote, "The most authentic thing man can do... is die.

Then he crawled further under the house through a snakelike a depression he'd carved out and down into the original basement. It consisted of a ten foot room with a badly crumbling field stone foundation and a dirt floor. The ancient coal furnace was gone and where it had stood was a deep hole straight down nearly eight feet into the earth. Simon lowered himself to the bottom of the hole and crouched like a rabbit feeling around for his cave. He had been digging the earth for many weeks until he had formed a tunnel roughly horizontal to the vertical hole up to the basement. The floor of the tunnel was a smooth hard material like polished marble, or like black glass. It felt cold to the touch as Simon crawled over it through the tunnel, but if he stopped for any length of time, it would begin to warm up to match his body temperature.

Simon crawled along and the floor of the tunnel curved very slightly downward. Ahead was his cave, a leveled out area which was large enough to sleep and store his supplies. In his excavations Simon had discovered voids in the earth which were handy to fill with dirt that he'd carved from the walls of his tunnel. The sleeping area was about ten feet in diameter and the ceiling was four feet off the floor. One one side of the cave at the bottom of the wall was a void that was impossible to fill with dirt. He would scrape the ceiling and push the dirt into the bottom of the wall and it would never compact, would never stop accepting more dirt.  In this way Simon was able to expand his cave and make it large enough to live comfortably without having to carry the dirt all the way out of the tunnel. Over time he had created a self sufficient place to live, well stocked with scrounged cans of food, canvas bags of old rice and three empty coke bottles that he would carefully position in a depression to collect the drippings of moisture that seeped from the wall.

In this way Simon lived. And when the storms came again he was safely asleep in his burrow far below ground and when he was awakened by the noise and the rumbling earth, he ventured out far enough to discover that the old house had been destroyed and had filled the basement with rubble. In the darkness he examined the wall of broken timbers with his good hand, he felt the fractured concrete and dirt and understood that he would need to retreat back to his cave and reconsider his situation. On his way back he thought he should dig out the soft area near the bottom of the wall, the place that he could never fill with dirt.

He set to work that night, for deep in this tunnel night was the same as day. He dug a large hole at the bottom of the wall, and the more he dug-- the more the dirt gave way and fell in. It was as if the dirt disappeared beneath his digging. In this way he dug for three days, building a new tunnel just big enough for his prone body. He slept when tired and paused only to eat three peaches from a can he'd brought with him.

As Simon dug-- the earth gave away more rapidly, at times easily revealing the smooth floor, and the further he progressed-- the more he noticed the tunnel descending. He was definitely heading downhill. And the more the floor curved downward the easier the earth was to dig. On the forth day Simon began to notice the earth becoming wetter, but as heavy as it was with moisture it was still easy to push to the side and continue on. Simon drank the water by squeezing the dirt in his hand and dripping it into his mouth. Now all he needed was more air.

On the fifth day he felt a slight anomaly  on the floor. It was very subtle, but as he was very familiar with the smoothness of the floor and a small discrepancy caught his attention. He followed what felt like a seam with his fingernail. It was maybe a sixteenth of an inch deep and went across the floor from wall to wall of his little tunnel. He stopped to rest and wondered what to do. Deciding to follow the seam, he began to dig both directions at first, but to the right the dirt was softer on his worn hand. His breathing was becoming very painful now. The air was thin this far under the earth and his work had caused him to use more oxygen. He fell asleep and slept for a long time on the smooth dark surface.

Simon dreamed that the seam led to a hatch which opened to a sunny garden with fresh air and flowers. A garden with vegetables and a stream with clean running water. In his dream, he breathed deeply of the sweet air and drank his fill of the pure water. He then fell asleep in the shade of a great chestnut tree.