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Every large city has an equally large underground system. Sewers, service tunnels. Air raid shelters and bunkers. Most of those are ones most people will never see. Then there’s the other ones. Car parks. Underground railways and their underground stations. Your basement, if your building has one.
I have a --well, she's more a friend of a friend-- who tells me about work.
She’s an archeologist, and she works with the city, with the company that’s building the new big railway tunnel. The new big railway tunnel will make the trains run even more on time. The new big railway tunnel will swallow up even more people every day from one of its many mouths, and regurgitate them elsewhere in the city.
My friend works with the city to make sure they don’t destroy anything of value while they dig the tunnel. She laughs and says, the city’s heritage becomes “of value” only once someone bothers to dig it up, apparently. I laugh as well. I think about my grandfather, the mines, the coal.
I think about the .
The warm .The low hum of the . The becoming darkness pierced only by head lamps.
I neck the rest of my beer and ask her, do you ever find some fucked up shit? Human remains? Worse? My friend tells me no, they don’t, and even if they did, she wouldn’t tell me about it.
So I say, come on, what’s the most fucked up shit you found?
No, she says. Sorry, I can’t tell you.
No, she says. Sorry, I can’t tell you.
But I can tell you this--