Promise Of The Past

Tommy slipped on the cracks in the marble below him and clutched towards the wall to break his fall. He grimaced quietly at the sudden pain in his wrist, but also at the solemn and filthy destruction around him.

“No care. No care for these old things,“ he mumbled as he looked up at the embellished ceiling, now covered with years of dirt. No one was around to hear his complaint, but it didn’t seem to him to have mattered either way. People didn’t listen to grumpy old men, and though he appeared like any handsome young man, maybe no more than twenty-four or twenty-five, he grumbled as if he were a hundred, which he was, depending on how you counted.

He sighed with sad relief as he made his way further through the chalky tunnel. Wide enough to hold
a hundred men, the grand underground reception now stood only as a relic of the city. The light from
the stairs behind him did not sparkle off the metal work above him. The mirrors lining the arched walls
dipped and swayed as if ready to drop from their long held positions with the sound of his next exhale.

The decay around him suited his mood. This world surrounding him now was a mess, and he no longer
wanted to be a part of it. All he wanted now was to go home.

Thomas MacDonald had left the comfort of Ottumwa to seek his destiny only three months ago as the
prodigal son of the small Iowa farming town, where the mention of his name alone would be met with a
glow of pride from every townsperson. Smart and handsome, Tommy had worked hard through school
and had earned respect from classmates and town leaders alike.

At fourteen William Hansen had seen the young man’s promise and hired him as a mere stock clerk for
a dollar a day, but Tommy soon became a well-loved addition to the shoppers at Hansen’s Mercantile.
He covered the deliveries, loaded the silage, or even helped the young girls select the finest ribbons for
their spring dresses.

It was not too hard to imagine that this was how the charming Tommy had earned the attentions of Lily
Sanderson. Lily was the daughter of Judge Sanderson, and the prettiest girl at Ottumwa High School, and
together, Tommy and Lily were the perfect couple. The ring advertised in the Iowa Ledger cost more
than Tommy made from the mercantile in six months, but it was all that Lily wanted, and all that Tommy
wanted was to make Lily happy, so Tommy left for New York. The laborers in the fields who stopped in
for cold lemonades at the end of the day had been talking about New York. They had said that there was
work for the able-bodied, sometimes paying up to three dollars a day. If he worked hard he could have
the ring for Lily in half the time, and they could begin living.

Getting to New York cost more and took longer than Tommy planned, and he had spent most of his
savings within a month. He also had still not found work at the myriad of construction sites. No one was
looking for a smart-alec farm boy with no experience. Soon enough, he couldn’t even afford the rent on
his bed and was sleeping on the streets with the other unemployed men. That was when he found the
doorway.

Run off a couch in the Grace Hotel lobby by a notoriously vicious hotel detective, Tommy scrambled

down the sidewalk, and stumbled down the large stone steps of the underground corridor nearby. Few
commuters would be passing through at this late hour, but the polished gas lamps still flickered brightly
off the mirrored tiles overhead. He ducked into an alcove nearby to avoid the diligent patrolman, and
as the footsteps drew nearer on the polished marble underfoot, Tommy pressed himself further and
further back into to the recess. Painfully, a knob poked out at his ribs from the dark corner, and without
thinking, he turned the handle, and slipped away from the noise of the city and into the dark.

When Tommy stumbled out into the sunlight of the street again, everything was different. The noise of
the city was louder, the sky, and even the park around him, looked greyer. He followed the sidewalk to
the street and was confronted by more people than he had ever seen, moving faster than ever before.

It was daylight, not the dusk he had left behind, but Tommy could barely tell. The fumes around him
made him cough, and the scantily clad people moving past him seemed to not even notice his distress.
No one offered assistance, or even slowed from their frenetic pace. He stumbled to the corner, but
only made it across the street by the force of the mass of humans around him. Once across, an almost
familiar sight greeted him, and he approached the corner newsstand as if it were a dream oasis in the
middle of the desert.

The newspapers hanging from the wood shack were full of colorful print, and Tommy stared at the
print as if it were foreign. The date on the byline seemed out of focus. It did not read 1928 as it should,
but 2010. The new century stuck Tommy with fear, and suddenly all his thoughts for success and pride
vanished. All he thought of was Lily, and home, and his normal life in Ottumwa.

He pushed himself back through the crowd, and away from the newsstand, and away from the headlines
that only confused his brain. Tommy tripped over cracks in the pavement, and slipped on garbage on
the street. At last he was back in the park. His head swam, and all he felt was raw, burning confusion.
He seemed to be in the same place, but it was covered in grime so thick that it was unrecognizable.
Faces around him were cold and unfeeling, and somehow managed to never look him or each other in
the eye despite the constant compression of the crowds. Only the thoughts in his head of Lily, and the
mercantile, and the farmland near his home were clear, so he did the only thing he could think, and
made for the grass lawn of the park he had come from.

The steps downward felt deeper and the light below was dimmer than he remembered, by he know the
spot that he had come from as if he were tied to it. The alcove was four feet wide and just as deep. He
could feel the now splintered wood in and scratched for the door handle like as if he were scratching at
a coffin lid holding him in the musty earth.

After one turn, then two, Tommy could feel the knob refusing to give up its secrets, but this old man
was strong of mind and body. He was not going to let the little piece of carved metal stand between him
and all that he knew and loved. Finally, corroded pieces of brass gave way and turned. He could feel the
rhythm of the bolts shifting into place within the heavy mahogany door. Tommy pulled with more force
in himself than he ever knew he had, and the blocked fell lose from its repose with a sigh, releasing fine
silt into the air as if with a huge sigh of reluctance.

Even without the help of the now broken lamps hanging from the ceiling, Tommy knew that the
darkness had won. As he ran his hands from ceiling to foundation, the cold bricks in front of him
sat firmly in place in front of him. The door had been filled in years ago. The passage was closed.

Tommy beat against the wall, but the workmanship of another time was prepared to hold up under this
or any force. He sank to the ground with his back turned against his former hope. “Where did it all go?”
Tommy asked the gloom around him.

“I’ll never get back,” he said to himself. Tommy thought of his life, or at least what he thought his life
was supposed to have been, and his heart broke for the thought of Lily, and his friends and family.

“I have a future. I have a life. All I want is to go home. All I want is to have all that I was supposed to.”

Tommy sat alone in the dirt and tried to imagine something new. He couldn’t understand what had
happened, but there had to be a way to fix it. No matter what else he thought of for the rest of his
modern life, Tommy would always be thinking of how he could get back to the promise of the past.