The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx (14 page)

“He’s also prevented me from getting jobs. Jobs in the government.”

“What about moving to another city?”

“I’m not going to be pushed from my home.”

“Okay, then
you
have to push
him
out of your thoughts, don’t you?”

“Just look at all he’s done! He’s behind all the highways, he’s building bridges, parks, pools. It doesn’t end!”

“So what? Why can’t you just live your life and let him live his?”

“The man is a power-hungry megalomaniac and he should be stopped!”

“Then he will be,” the doctor replied in a calm voice. “But how does that concern you?”

“He controls everything! You think I’m crazy? Just go look at all his accomplishments. He’s behind everything.”

The doctor sighed and asked Robert if he would repeat a simple statement.

“What kind of statement?”

“A declaration of independence.”

“Sure,” said Paul, mostly to appease the doctor.

“Robert Moses did not pay for these pools, parks, highways, and bridges …” the doctor began.

After a moment, Paul sighed and repeated the words.

“He did not design, nor build, nor does he own these pools, parks, highways, and bridges,” the shrink said.

Paul felt idiotic as he recited the phrase.

“He is just one of a list of bureaucrats who is affiliated with the construction …”

As Paul echoed the doctor, he told himself,
This will make Teresa happy
.

“And if he were not alive, these highways and bridges and pools and parks would be built anyway …”

Paul slowly repeated the doctor’s declaration.

“… by mayors, borough presidents, governors, with people’s tax money and Board of Estimates votes, and by the countless people they hire. Robert Moses is merely one of many, many names. And, most importantly, he does not control my joy or pain. Paul Moses is master of Paul Moses.”

When Paul finished the ridiculous recitation, the first session was officially over. The psychiatrist scheduled a second appointment, but Paul never showed up. When his wife asked why he hadn’t gone, he said he didn’t need it. The doctor had put things in perspective and he was feeling much better.

Teresa woke up one night soon after to hear her husband quietly weeping into his pillow. The next day, she found him making strange expressions at the breakfast table. She realized he was desperately trying to restrain his rage while reading the newspaper. Later in the week, while chatting with her kids, she heard a sharp yelp coming from the bathroom. Paul stepped out with a strange smile on his face. The following morning, Teresa delicately told Paul that she and the kids had become uncomfortable in his presence. She asked him to move out—she wanted a divorce.

After a week with the clock, Uli was able to keep track of both the habits of the miners and the tedious passing of his own long days. On the back of an old document recovered from the Mkultra titled “Project Artichoke,” he and Root kept careful records, each taking turns sleeping so one of them was always awake. During that time, Uli told Root about his own amnesia, explaining that it predated his arrival in this place. One day he asked her about how she had ended up down here.

“I got here the same way as everyone else—trying to escape from Rescue City, Nevada.”

“So you were living in the real New York City when it was attacked?”

“Oh, no. I came with the second wave a few years later, in ’72, when they decided that antiwar activists were terrorists. I was one of the Diggers.”

“Diggers? You mean like these guys?”

“No, the Diggers were a group in San Francisco in the late ’60s who helped young hippie arrivals. They were started by a guy named Emmett Grogan who’s still in Rescue City.”

“Were they anarchists?”

“Most were. When I joined there were half a million U.S. troops in Vietnam—the My Lai massacre occurred a few months later. Then Bobby Kennedy and King were assassinated. A bunch of us went to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago where we all got beaten with billy clubs and arrested, so we—”

“I remember,” Uli interrupted, wanting Root to continue with her story instead of giving him a history lesson.

“We eventually wound up on the attorney general’s list and found ourselves detained in Rescue City. Emmett and some of us soon got tired of all the bad smells and hippie crap in Staten Island and decided to go up to Queens instead. This was just as the Piggers were taking over the Bronx and Queens and the Crappers were claiming Manhattan and Brooklyn. We refused to participate in all the partisan violence or declare allegiance to either gang, so a group of Pig-gers approached us and said we had to leave their borough.”

“What happened?”

“We barricaded ourselves in a city park and decided we weren’t going without a fight. To avoid a conflict that might’ve brought in the Crappers, the Pigger’s told us that if we moved down to Brooklyn and vanished for six months, they’d meet us near the drain hole in Staten Island and give us the escape drug.”

“Why’d you trust them?”

“Emmett had defected and joined the Queens Pigger party, but we knew we could still trust him.”

As Uli and Root talked, several of the miners left their tunnels while others came and resumed work. Root noted their movements.

Uli didn’t know if it was just empathy stirred by Paul’s painful yearning for Teresa after she filed for divorce, but he found himself quietly attracted to Root, a tough, smart survivor alone in this world of whackos.

23

T
wo weeks after Teresa asked him to leave, Paul dusted off his electrical engineering degree and his honorable discharge from the army and got himself a wartime posting. He was appointed Superintendent of Construction at the U.S. Navy base in Bayonne, New Jersey. He was glad to finally have a steady job and paycheck, but it was too late to save his dying pool business, much less his marriage. Despite the impending divorce, he was still intent on paying back his loans to Teresa’s family. The loss of his business and family left Paul, who had just reached fifty years of age, constantly tired and listless. He put all his possessions in a storage facility and slept on a squeaky metal cot in his Jersey office.

Over time, Paul began to enjoy his time in New Jersey. He threw himself full force at his work as though he were fighting the war all by himself. He had never felt so utilized. He mailed a portion of each paycheck to Teresa as if he were buying back his hocked self-esteem.

One morning in late 1944, Paul woke in his cramped office and discovered an envelope from his ex-wife sitting in his mailbox. Inside, he found his latest check, uncashed. A simple typewritten note said,
PAID IN FULL, good luck in life, Teresa
. His debt was finally over. He called to tell her that he wanted to help with her kids’ tuition, but the maid said that Teresa no longer wished to hear from him.

After the war came to an end, while everyone else celebrated, Paul wondered what lay ahead for him. He offered to stay on as an employee at the navy base.

“Paul, we don’t really need any electrical engineers,” said his boss. “But hell, I’m sure your brother can get you more work than you know what to do with.”

Paul sent out his resume to a few select places for jobs that truly interested him, but with the war over, an army of young men was coming back looking for employment. Fortunately, the Depression was over too, so Paul started once again seeing some income from his inheritance.

After he moved out of his New Jersey office, he rented a room in a cheap Times Square hotel—the Longacre—intending to live there only temporarily while looking for a new home.

As he’d return to his hotel room at night, however, the emptiness of his life began to suffocate him. Joining some other guys he had befriended in the area, he took to spending his days in the balmy spring of 1947 hanging out in Bryant Park. Most of them were veterans from the First World War and conversation was always lively. One older fellow who had also fought in the Spanish American War showed him tips for living on the cheap, like taking him to soup kitchens. Paul didn’t mind joining the ranks of nameless men eating side by side in basement benches. In a way, he felt he deserved it for failing so miserably. His greatest fear was being spotted by any of his former friends, so he made a habit of pulling his fedora over his face and never making eye contact with passersby.

One morning, while walking up Fifth Avenue, he spotted Teresa heading uptown on the other side of the street. She was wearing high heels, a beautiful dress, and a tiny black hat, holding a clutch purse. She looked like a million bucks; oddly, it occurred to Paul that he didn’t look half bad either. He had just gotten a haircut and happened to be wearing a nice shirt with his best suit. He experienced palpitations as he crossed the avenue and slowly approached her from behind. He was about to tap her on the shoulder when he caught a profile of her beautiful pixie face. She looked happy, an expression he had rarely seen during their final years together. Fearing that his presence could only depress her, he stopped in his tracks and let her walk away.

Paul spent his days wandering around Times Square, which suited him given the state of his life. At the main branch of the New York Public Library—the best in the world—he became well-acquainted with a small community of lost scholars and drunken intellectuals that time had forgotten. He found that he could effortlessly sneak into movies and the second halves of Broadway plays during intermission. From St. Clements Church on the West Side and St. Agnes on East 43rd Street, he would collect used clothing and free food. Every morning he’d get copies of the
New York Times,
the
Herald Tribune,
the
Wall Street Journal,
and the
New York Sun
to check for his brother’s name over scalding cups of black coffee.

One afternoon while hanging out in front of the Horn & Hardart’s Automat across from Grand Central Station and skimming the
Daily News,
he heard a shrill female voice shout his name.

Before he could slink away, a beautiful dark-skinned woman was standing before him: “Paul Moses! How are you?”

“Fine,” he said quietly, not rising or revealing that he had no clue who she was.

“Paul! It’s me—Lucretia.”

He wondered if she had worked at Con Ed when he was there, or perhaps he had met her at the library.

“Maria’s daughter!” she finally added.

“Oh my God!” It was the daughter of his mother’s maid. He hadn’t seen her in years. When she hugged him, it felt so strange being touched by another person—something he hadn’t experienced in so long.

“How are you?” she asked.

She looked to be in her late twenties, but had to be in her thirties.

“Just fine. How’s your mom?”

“She passed away.”

“No!” Paul couldn’t believe it; she was less than ten years older than him.

“She got lung cancer two years ago and died shortly after.”

Paul wanted to give his condolences, but he couldn’t even speak. Tears came to his eyes and for the first time, he felt distinctly old. Poor Maria was the very first girl he’d ever had a crush on. And she had always been so fond of him.

“She tried finding you but you weren’t listed,” Lucretia said.

“The phone was in my wife’s name,” he muttered without looking up.

“What are you doing here anyway?”

“Waiting for a friend,” he answered, instead of telling her that the St. Clements soup kitchen didn’t begin serving until 6.

“Are you still working at Con Ed?”

“No, but I consult for them from time to time. How about you?”

“I’m an accountant,” she said. “I have about a dozen clients, all in the Bronx.”

“Oh, that’s right, your mother lived up there.”

“Yeah, she left me the place. Hey, you have to come up for dinner.”

“I’m not very good company these days.”

“You have to! No one has ever made me laugh like you.”

“Where in the Bronx is the house?”

“East Tremont. Don’t you remember it?”

“Things have been a little frantic for me lately,” he said. “But what’s your address?”

As she scribbled it down along with her phone number, he thought he would just throw it away after she left, but then she asked, “How’s Saturday at 7 p.m.?”

“I don’t know, I …”

“Promise me you’ll be there.”

“The Bronx is up north, right?” he kidded, knowing when he was licked.

At the bottom of a box of rations, Root found a tiny kid’s compass that looked like it had come from a Cracker Jack box. They were now able to determine north, south, east, and west. Numbering all the tunnels in Root’s three-dimensional model, they figured out the most practical caves to focus on. The trick now was to fool the men into digging in the selected caves around the clock.

After having monitored the sleeping habits of the miners—some snoozing like clockwork, others entirely unpredictable—Uli and Root were ready to turn them into a coordinated digging machine. At one point while the two passed through the silo, Uli glanced at his companion and saw tears in her eyes as she watched her old friend hanging from the desk tower.

“There are corpses all over the place,” Uli soothed. “Do you think they’d notice if we put another body up there instead?”

“I know where we can find a headless corpse,” she replied after several moments.

“Let’s try it.”

The two hiked up to the funereal cave. Clamping their mouths and noses, they lit a torch and Root led him to the decapitated remains. The body was recently deceased, so it didn’t smell too bad. They carried it back into the silo, then Uli scaled the tower of desks and cut down Sandy’s naked body. With a rope, he hoisted up the new corpse and strapped it in below the dog’s skull. Just to be on the safe side, he wrenched the feet backwards like Sandy’s had been. Together they carried poor Sandy’s headless body back up into one of the empty caves and interred her. Root gave Uli a grateful kiss on the cheek. For the first time since he had been consigned to hell, he actually felt good, and so did Paul …

24

… in fact, he spent a whole buck on a haircut and shave, complete with the cloud of talcum powder and a spritz of cheap cologne. He bought a new button-down Arrow shirt and picked out his least threadbare suit, which he went over with a lint brush. Then, at Grand Central, Paul gave the guy two bits for a dime spit shine. He bought a bouquet of flowers along with a box of Whitman’s chocolates. Hopping on the IRT 6 train, he rode all the way up to the Bronx for dinner with his former maid’s daughter. The closer he got to her house, however, the more angry he became with himself. Why the hell was he having dinner with some kid—a skinny, shy schoolgirl who would giggle and blush a lot—who he barely remembered? Maria never would’ve permitted this. He should’ve simply said no when she gave her invitation.