Innocence: A Novel (2 page)

The second room, like the others, was eight feet high. The thick walls, floor, and ceiling were of steel-reinforced concrete through which vibrations sometimes traveled but never any identifiable sounds other than the aforementioned music.

To each side of the doorless doorway, a hammock was suspended wall to wall. The canvas was easy to sponge clean, and my blanket was the only bedding to be laundered.

When Father still lived, on nights when sleep eluded us, we would lie awake, either in the dark or in candlelight, and talk for hours. We conversed about what little of the world we’d seen firsthand, about the marvels of nature that we studied in books of color photography, and about what all of it might mean.

Perhaps those were among my happiest memories, although I had so many that were happy, I wasn’t easily able to favor some over others.

Against the back wall, between hammocks, stood a refrigerator. Father’s father had once lived without this amenity. My father—an autodidact like me—taught himself to be a fine electrician and an appliance mechanic. He dismantled the refrigerator, brought it down from the world aboveground, and reassembled it.

To the left of the refrigerator stood a table holding a toaster oven, a hot plate, and a Crock-Pot. To the right were open shelves that served as my larder and tableware storage.

I ate well and remained grateful that the city was a place of plenty.

When Father’s father discovered this deep redoubt, electricity and a minimum of plumbing were already provided, although the rooms were unfurnished. No evidence existed to suggest that they had ever previously been occupied.

Before Father found me alone and waiting to be killed, he and his father imagined many explanations for these chambers.

One might think this place must be a bomb shelter, so deep beneath the street, under so many thick layers of concrete, that multiple nuclear blasts would not crack it open, reached by such a circuitous route that deadly radiation, which traveled in straight lines, could not find its way here.

But when you removed the receptacles from their mounting screws
in any wall outlet, the manufacturer’s name stamped in the metal junction box identified a company that, research proved, went out of business in 1933, long before a nuclear threat existed.

Besides, a bomb shelter for only two, in a great city of millions, made no sense.

The third room, a bath, also concrete all around, was not designed with the expectation that the city and its utilities would be atomized. The pedestal sink and the claw-foot tub offered two spigots each, although the hot water was never more than pleasantly warm, suggesting that whatever boiler it tapped must have been far from there. The old toilet featured an overhead tank that flushed the bowl when you pulled on a hanging chain.

During construction, perhaps some official who was also a sexual predator with homicidal desires might have provided for this sanctum under one pretense or another, intending later to erase its existence from all public records, so that he could by force bring women to a private dungeon to torture and murder them, while the teeming city overhead remained unaware of the screaming far below.

But neither a city engineer nor an architect of public-utility pathways seemed likely to be an insatiable serial killer. And when Father’s father discovered these cozy quarters back in the day, no gruesome stains or other evidence of murder marred the smooth concrete surfaces.

Anyway, these rooms had no ominous quality about them.

To those who lived in the open, the lack of windows and the bare concrete might call to mind a dungeon. But that perception was based on the assumption that their way of life was not merely superior to ours but also without a viable alternative.

Every time that I left this haven, as I did for many reasons, my life
was at risk. Therefore, I had developed a most keen sense of pending threat. No threat existed here. This was home.

I favored a theory involving the unseen world parallel to ours that I mentioned earlier. If such a place existed, separated from us by a membrane we couldn’t detect with our five senses, then perhaps at some points along the continuum, the membrane bulged around a small part of that other reality and folded it into the stuff of ours. And if both worlds, in their becoming, arose from the same loving source, I liked to believe that such secret havens as this would be provided especially for those who, like me, were outcasts by no fault of their own, reviled and hunted, and in desperate need of shelter.

That was the only theory I wished to accommodate. I couldn’t change what I was, couldn’t become more appealing to those who would recoil from me, couldn’t lead any life but the one to which my nature condemned me. My theory gave me comfort. If one less reassuring revealed itself, I would refuse to consider it. So much in my life was beautiful that I wouldn’t risk pondering any darkening idea that might poison my mind and rob me of my stubborn joy.

I never went into the open in daylight, nor even at dusk. With rare exception, I ascended only after midnight, when most people were asleep and others were awake but dreaming.

Black walking shoes, dark jeans, and a black or navy-blue hoodie were my camouflage. I wore a scarf under the jacket, arranged so that I could pull it up to my eyes if I had to pass along an alleyway—or, rarely, a street—where someone might see me. I acquired my clothes from thrift shops that I could enter, after hours, by the route that rats might enter if they were as born for stealth as I was.

I wore such a costume on the night in December when my life changed forever. If you were a creature like me, you expected that no big change could be positive in the long run. Yet were I given a chance
to turn back time and follow a different course, I would do again what I did then, regardless of the consequences.

I CALLED HIM FATHER BECAUSE HE HAD BEEN THE
closest thing to a father that I had ever known. He was not my true father.

According to my mother, my real father loved freedom more than he loved her. Two weeks before I was born, he walked out and never walked back in, off to the sea, she said, or to some far jungle, a restless man who traveled to find himself but lost himself instead.

On the night that I was born, a violent wind shook the little house, shook the forest, even shook, she said, the mountain that the forest mantled. The windstorm quarreled across the roof, insisted at the windows, rattled the door as if determined to intrude into the place where I was born.

When I entered the world, the twenty-year-old daughter of the midwife fled the bedroom in fright. Weeping, she took refuge in the kitchen.

When the midwife tried to smother me in the birthing blanket, my mother, although weakened by a difficult labor, drew a handgun from a nightstand drawer and, with a threat, saved me from being murdered.

Later, in the calm of morning, all the birds were gone, as though they had been blown out of the trees and swept to the edge of the continent. They didn’t return for three days: first the sparrows and the swifts, then the crows and hawks, and last of all the owls.

The midwife and her daughter kept the secret of my existence, either because they feared being accused of attempted homicide or because they could sleep well only if they forgot that I existed. They claimed I was born dead, and my mother confirmed their story.

I lived eight years on the mountain, sleeping as often as not in that cozy little house at the dead end of the narrow dirt track. In all that time, until the afternoon of the day I left, I saw no other human being but my blessed mother.

Eventually the cloistered spaces of the forest were mine to roam at an age when most children would have been denied the wilds. But I had great strength and uncanny intuition and a kind of kinship with Nature, as if the sap of the trees and the blood of the animals were in my DNA, and my mother felt more at peace when I was not in the house. The shadowed woods by day and the moonlit woods by night became as familiar to me as my own face in a mirror.

I knew the deer, the squirrels, the birds in great variety, the wolves that appeared from—and vanished under—the graceful arcing ferns. My community was populated by feathered and furred creatures that traveled by wings or four swift feet.

In the bosky woodlands and in the meadows that they encircled, also occasionally in our yard, I sometimes saw the Clears and the Fogs, as I came to call them. I didn’t know what they might be, but I knew intuitively that my dear mother had never seen them, because she’d never spoken of them. I never mentioned them to her, because I knew that hearing of them would distress her and cause her to worry about me even more than she already did.

Later, I would see the Clears and Fogs in the city, too. And I gradually came to understand their nature, as I will explain later.

Anyway, in those years, I was happy, as to one extent or another I have always been happy. The forest was not a wilderness to me, but
served instead as my private garden, comforting in spite of its vastness, and endlessly mysterious.

The more familiar that a place becomes, the more mysterious it becomes, as well, if you are alert to the truth of things. I have found this to be the case all of my life.

Shortly after my eighth birthday, my mother would not have me in the house anymore. She could not sleep in my presence. She could not maintain an appetite, and thus lost weight. She didn’t want me nearby in the woods, either, in part because the thought of me at home in the forest reminded her that she was not welcome there in the way that I was, but also in part because of the hunter. And so I had to leave.

I couldn’t blame her. I loved her.

She tried hard to love me, and to an extent she did. But I was a unique burden. Although I am always happy—or at least not unhappy—I made her terribly sad. The sadness was slowly killing her.

MORE THAN EIGHTEEN YEARS LATER, IN THIS FAMILIAR
yet mysterious city, came the December that changed my life.

When I went out that night, with a backpack slung from my shoulders because I intended to partially restock my larder, I took a pair of compact LED flashlights, the first in hand, the second clipped to my belt in case the other failed. The route from my rooms to the metropolis above was for the most part dark, as are many passages in this world, underground and not, concrete and not.

A five-foot-wide corridor led out of the hammock room for ten feet, where it appeared to terminate in a blank wall. I reached high, to the top right corner, inserted an index finger in the hole that was the only feature on that smooth surface, and pressed the latch-release button in there. The foot-thick slab pivoted silently on a concealed pair of over-under ball-bearing hinges that were set one foot from its left edge.

The resultant opening was four feet wide. After I crossed the threshold, the massive door swung shut and latched behind me.

Even without light, I could navigate the second corridor: eight feet straight ahead, then the curve to the left, and finally ten feet to a cunningly designed louver door. From the farther side, the door appeared to be merely the cover for a large ventilation shaft.

In darkness, I listened, but the only things that passed between the louvers were silence and a draft as faint and cool and pure as the breath of a snowman brought to life by love and magic.

The air carried the scent of damp concrete, the lime that had fluoresced from the walls over the decades. In this section of the city’s underworld, I never smelled the decomposing rats or the foul molds that sometimes flourished elsewhere.

Like the pivoting concrete wall, the louver door featured a hidden lock release. It closed automatically behind me.

I switched on the flashlight, and a storm drain formed out of the darkness, as if the blade of light carved it from bedrock. The great cylindrical concrete tunnel appeared sufficiently large to spare the world from a repeat of Noah’s flood.

On occasion, maintenance teams in electric vehicles the size of pickup trucks passed through primary drains like this. At the moment, however, I was alone. Over the years, I had seldom glimpsed
such crews at a distance, and more seldom still had I needed to flee from them to avoid being seen.

I seemed almost to have had cast upon me a spell of solitude. When I traveled below or above ground, people usually turned away from me and I from them in the moment before they might have seen me.

Otherwise, I would have been murdered long ago.

The most recent major rainstorm had been in late October. The tunnel bored into dryness, the floor littered with the small things—plastic bags, empty beer and soda cans, fast-food containers, cups from Starbucks, a knitted glove, a baby’s shoe, a sparkling fragment of costume jewelry—that had settled out of the flow as the last of the runoff withered away.

The amount of debris was not great. I could have walked for miles without stepping on anything. Raised three feet off the floor, however, along both sides of the drain, were maintenance walkways where the surging water rarely deposited trash.

Periodically I passed other louver panels that were nothing more than they appeared to be, and iron-rung ladders that led up to service traps in the ceiling, and the mouths of smaller tributary pipes that, during a storm, fed water to this drain.

In this subterranean maze, earlier drains than this one were built of brick or stone, or concrete blocks. They possessed greater charm than more recent constructions, for they were the work of masons who were also proud craftsmen.

According to metropolitan lore, one crew of masons had been secretly in the employ of a crime boss of that distant era, and they had walled up several of his enemies, some dead but others living. I had never seen one of the small crosses that were supposedly carved into
bricks to mark those tombs, nor had I seen any skeletal fingers in the gaps of mortar between stones, like once-questing but long-fossilized pale roots. Perhaps such stories were not true, just urban legends, though I was well aware of how inhumane humanity can be.