This Side of Brightness (8 page)

She looks so much like Dancesca.

Moving toward the tunnel wall, near the mural of the Melting Clock, she looks around furtively, then squats and lifts the flap of her fur coat, careful not to soil it.

Treefrog doesn't want to watch as she pisses, so he quietly pulls down the zip of his sleeping bag and swings his feet onto the floor, careful not to step on any pellets of ratshit. He tugs on his boots, ties the laces with numb fingers. At the end of his bed, Castor stirs, and he reaches out to stroke her with both hands. Castor arches her back and nestles up close to him.

He moves quickly through the darkness of his nest toward the catwalk, and before he swings himself down he touches the carcass of the traffic light: Take it easy, don't crash.

The beams are cold; he can even feel the chill through his gloves as he swings down, twenty feet in all, toward the ground. He hits the tunnel gravel with hardly a sound and looks to see the woman stand up and adjust her skirt, a puddle of steaming piss at her feet. She glances toward him and sniffs at the air, but Treefrog pulls back into the shadows.

“Who's that?” she says.

He pulls himself deeper into the darkness.

“Who the fuck is that? Elijah? That you?”

Treefrog breathes down into his overcoat so she won't see his breath making clouds.

“Don't play no games,” she says.

He can almost hear his heart thump.

“Who's that?” she says again. “Elijah?”

She rummages in her handbag, and he thinks for a moment that she might have a gun, that she may spray bullets around the tunnel, that he might end up with a hole in his head or his heart, or both, that she may even put the gun to her own head. But instead she takes out a pack of cigarettes and cocks her face sideways, lights the cigarette. Her fur coat falls open, revealing a tight shirt underneath, her nipples pointed and at attention in the cold. She takes a step and each breast jiggles minutely. How long, he thinks, since there was a woman down in the tunnels? As she pulls furiously on the cigarette he notices that the whites of her eyes are rolling around in her head. He keeps himself pinned to the dark, and when she starts to move he blows her a kiss.

She steps from the shaft of blue light into long darkness and into light again and then into an even further blackness, where all he can see is the outline of her figure as she moves, hugged into her coat. The tunnel is like a doubtful church, letting in light at strategic points and leaving the rest in shadows. A dog barks above a grate and the woman stops, looks up, takes out a small mirror, and wipes a hand across her cheeks—she must be crying—and he imagines the mascara stains darkening her face.

He slithers along behind her on the same side of the tracks.

The woman walks in the hard-packed dirt. Her high heels leave tracks. Treefrog wipes his hand across a runny nose and then lifts his head at the sound of a noise. Two pinpoints of light appear in the distance: the upstate train. He darts a look at the woman ahead of him. She has her head down as she walks. Treefrog's heart jumps. The sound of the train grows louder, and suddenly his throat feels dry.

“Don't,” he whispers. “Don't.”

She lifts her head and stares long and hard as the headlights bear down. She moves nearer to the tracks. The train horn blasts loud and sparks flare from the underside of the carriage and the noise is deafening and he thinks that she is going to stand in front of the train—to clutch it to her chest like a massive bullet—and he shouts,
“Don't!”
but the shout is drowned by the howl of the engine. He covers his eyes, and when he looks again she is simply standing by the track, staring up at the windows, letting the Amtrak rifle past.

He sits on the ground and puts his hand to his heart and closes his eyes and says aloud to nobody, “Thank you, thank you.”

She moves on once more in the tremendous cold. Treefrog follows behind at a safe distance, all the way down to the cubicles at 95th Street. The cubicles—concrete bunkers once used by the railway workers—are set in a long row.

She doesn't even flinch when Faraday comes out from his solitary cell and stares at her. Faraday, in his filthy black suit, lets out a low whistle and she ignores it, swings her handbag like a weapon.

“Hey, honey,” says Faraday.

“I ain't your honey.”

“You sure look like it.”

“Fuck you.”

Her voice is high and shrill and uneven, and Treefrog is sure she is sobbing.

“Yes, please,” says Faraday. “Fuck me please.”

And then she steps through the orchard of garbage outside the cubicle where Dean the Trash Man lives. Light spills in behind her and she goes tiptoeing past the mounds of human feces and the torn magazines and the empty containers and the hypodermic needles with blobs of blood at their tips like poppies erupting in a field—in her black high heels she moves like a dark, long-legged bird—past the broken bottles and rat droppings and a baby carriage and smashed TVs and squashed cans and discarded cardboard boxes and shattered jars and orange peels and crack vials and a single teddy bear with both its eyes missing, its belly nibbled by rats. She keeps on going among all the leftovers of human ruin.

Dean comes out of his cubicle when she passes. He wears a rescued pince-nez and shoves it to his eyes and watches her go. Dean licks his lips, and there is a smile on his face as if he might one day collect her too.

An old piece of newspaper catches on her foot and wraps around her ankle, and she carries the page for about twenty yards. Treefrog—hidden way back in the shadows—thinks of headlines sweeping down into her ankles and being carried the length of the tunnels forever, but she kicks off the paper and reels on toward Elijah's place. She must have been here before, thinks Treefrog, the way she moves, the way she never looks over her shoulder.

She stops outside Elijah's cubicle where the ground is clean and free of rubbish. Papa Love has planted a tiny tree in the hard-packed dirt, and she rubs her hands along the brown deadness of its branches. Catching her breath, she stands in the shaft of light and then shouts, “Elijah! Hey, Elijah!”

She looks up and down the row of concrete cubicles.

“Elijah!” she shouts again.

Treefrog can tell she's crying, and he wants to stretch out and touch her, but as he steps out of the shadows Elijah emerges from his cubicle. He rubs his eyes and looks across the tracks to where she stands by the tree. Treefrog tucks himself away in the dark once more.

Elijah steps across the tracks and takes the woman in his arms, and she collapses into his shoulder and sobs. She pulls back the hood of Elijah's sweatshirt and rubs her fingers over the scar on his face. Elijah shoulders her to his cubicle, kicks the door open. It swings drunkenly on one hinge.

Treefrog sits outside and waits.

After an hour Elijah comes out of the cubicle and pisses against the wall like a dog marking his territory. He punches his arms toward the roof of the tunnel in delight. Treefrog turns and walks back down the tunnel to his solitary nest. He takes out the photograph of Dancesca and his daughter, throws the photo up and down in the air, catching it with both hands before it hits the dirt floor.

*   *   *

Chilblains. Hands so big from the cold and damp they feel like they could burst their gloves.

*   *   *

He will find out later that her name is Angela. She was living in another tunnel, downtown, between Second Avenue and Broadway–Lafayette, a subway station, a hundred yards from the platform, with trains going past every few minutes, no light from grills, all noise: a vicious tunnel, the most vicious of tunnels, the worst in Manhattan.

She was there for six months, sleeping on a rain-bloated mattress. Vials were crumpled into pieces in the pockets of her jeans. One night she fell asleep on the mattress in a walled-off hole by the edge of the tracks, no more than five feet from the trains. The noise had become nothing; it was like the sound of her own rhythmic breathing. She sucked down the steel dust that hung in the air. While she was sleeping four men with bicycle chains came down from the Broadway-Lafayette end. They kicked her awake and dragged her up by the hair. She'd never seen them before. She screamed and one of them shoved a sock in her mouth. They ripped her T-shirt and wrapped her arms with the bike chains, tightened them so they left a bracelet of oil on her wrists, bent her over, and took their turns. They whispered a world of obscenities in her ear.

When Angela gagged, they took out the sock and vomit streamed out after it, but they kept on going. She remained silent after that. One of them licked his tongue at her lobe and stole a gold earring with his teeth. He leaned down in front of her with the little hoop of gold on his tongue. She didn't have the energy to spit in his face.

Bent on all fours, she pleaded for mercy, closing her eyes to make them anonymous. When they finally left they threw down fifty cents each and told her to buy some candy—a Mounds bar, they said—and they laughed all the way out of the tunnel.

Angela couldn't walk for two days. The mattress stank. She used a stuffed elephant for a pillow. Its pinkness was ribboned with blood. In the subway trains, commuters rushed by, shadows in the windows. She looked at the shadows and watched them go and reached up and twirled the one remaining hoop in her ear.

She was found by a man named Jigsaw, who said, “Shit, Angie, I'll kill the motherfuckers did this to you.”

Jigsaw leaned down and held her real tight and he stank, but she let him hold her anyway. He had ropy arms. Later he bought her some hot coffee and a sandwich she couldn't eat. He stood in front of her with his tongue lolling around in his head—she called him Jigsaw because his mind had gone to pieces.

“Leave me alone, Jiggy.”

“No.”

“I don't want to talk to nobody.”

“You'll die here like this, sister.”

“That sounds nice.”

“Shit, girl.”

“I mean it, it sounds lovely, I'd like to die, it sounds like strawberries, it sounds delicious.”

“You gone crazy, girl.”

Jigsaw let Angela be and melted into the yellowy darkness—the tunnel punctuated with electric lights—and she came topside through the emergency manhole, out onto a traffic island in the middle of Houston Street, stumbling along in the snow with her body parched and her head imploding. She sat weeping in a bus shelter until a teenager with a nose ring took pity. He put his arm around her shoulder and took her to a police station in the Bowery. She was surprised at his smell of aftershave. It was alien to her, deep and sweet and lengthy.

A cop brought her inside a small interrogation room with the brightest of desk lamps. The room was warm. She sat with her hands limp and asked for the desk lamp to be turned off; it was hurting her eyes. A second cop twisted the neck of the lamp and pointed it at the floor, and a yellow spot of light remained imprinted on her retinas. She couldn't sit for longer than five minutes on the chair. She tried to write a report, but the cops said she had been asking for it, that's what you get for being a whore, that's just the way it is, you were looking for it, sister, why're you wearing a miniskirt and thin little panties?

“I ain't a whore.”

“Look, we're not stupid. You look like you're flossing your goddamn ass.”

“Don't look at my ass.”

“Don't worry.”

“Don't look at my legs. I told you I ain't a whore.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I ain't! I'm a dancer.”

“A dancer?”

“Yeah, you got a problem with that?”

“A dancer! Shake your thing for us.”

“You're just motherfuckers, that's all.”

“A dancer!”

She stuttered then and said, “I ain't a whore.”

When she pushed open the door of the waiting room, the boy with the nose ring was gone, but the scent of him was still there; she hauled it down into her lungs. One of the cops followed her to the front of the station and said, “I believe ya, sister.” And then he smiled and said he was sorry for what happened, that he'd make a trip down the tunnel, he'd write a report, she should come back the next day; and he gave her twenty dollars from his pocket. She hung her head, stuffed the money in her handbag, walked out of the station and through Greenwich Village in a daze, until she remembered her old friend Elijah living uptown, and she ducked down into the subway at Astor Place, changed at Grand Central, changed again at Times Square, came all the way to 72nd, walked down the road to Riverside Park and through the hole in the chicken-wire fence at the entrance of the railway tunnel, powdering herself with the remnants of her crack vials as she went, poking her finger around the containers. Then she came up the tunnel, stepping in her black high heels. If, at that time, Treefrog had made a map of the beats of his heart, the contours would have been so close together the lines would almost have touched one another in the steepest and finest of gradations.

*   *   *

Climbing back into his nest, Treefrog lies down with Castor at his side. So many winter hours in the tunnel are spent in sleep. Not an ounce of noise around him. From the bedside table he takes out the last of his remaining ganja and rolls himself a small joint, pinches it between thumb and forefinger, and pulls hard.

Above his bed his socks hang from the clothesline, a long multicolored line of neckties—blue ties, red ties, paisley ties, torn ties, magenta ties, even one from Gucci—all strung together with a series of perfect knots. The ties loop from one end of the dark nest to the other, sixteen altogether, each of them rescued from garbage Dumpsters. In a few places the line is nailed to the top of the tunnel so it doesn't bow to the ground too much. Treefrog takes off his shoes and hangs his socks on the clothesline. The socks are stuffed with sweat. After an hour they begin to ice over, and it looks to him as if another man's feet are dangling in midair.