The Swing Voter of Staten Island (12 page)

“Why are you so eager to take me to this place?”

“I was instructed to,” the chieftain replied.

“By who?”

“Look,” the woman said as if reading his thoughts, “your fear is understandable, but this is one of those moments in life when it really pays to have a little faith. We’re under a serious time constraint, but I guarantee you’ll be safe, and you might come to understand why you’re here. In the meantime, we can answer all your questions in the boat.”

Under any other circumstances the idea of venturing out with a group of obvious nuts would have been simply out of the question, but it seemed unlikely they would go through all this just to kill him. Besides, if they were going to execute him, they’d have the entire night to do it anyway.

“Let’s go.”

The chief gave a sharp low whistle, then led Uli downhill toward the embankment of the smelly basin. A long, leaky wooden canoe was being paddled across the fetid waters by a muscular man. The chieftain with the white cream caked on his face and the tall muscular woman grabbed the sides of the boat when Uli got in. The blind elderly guy stood on the shore as the woman and man started paddling across the quagmire that had formerly been the old airfield. The putrid smell alone was almost enough to make Uli hallucinate.

Only when they were far from shore, as Uli accidentally rocked the boat, did the chief mention that this little body of water was known as the Bay of Death; if any of them fell in, they’d perish before the day was done.

“I guess a life preserver wouldn’t make a difference anyway,” Uli replied, pinching his nostrils, then asked, “So, are you a born-again Indian tribe or something?”

“Actually, I’m a Buddhist,” the man smiled. “I was formerly a Harvard professor of Psychology.”

“How’d you get stuck out here?”

“I experimented with some mind-expanding drugs, advocated others to do so, and finally got arrested. Nixon himself sent me here,” he said almost proudly.

“How about the others in your tribe? I heard something about environmental terrorists.”

“We all care about the Great Mother,” the woman spoke up, “but most of us are former Diggers from the Bay Area or Yippies from New York. My name, by the way, is Bea.”

Uli shook her hand and turned back to the man. “You’re the head of this shindig?”

“No way. They voted a pig as the head of the tribe, kind of a joke on the Piggers, but he died a few years back. I’m Tim.”

“This place belongs to the Verdant League?”

“Actually, this area was Paiute and Shoshone. At least it was in the last century. But even before that, this part of Nevada was the site of the Sacred Caves going back thousands of years, and we’re loyal to that.”

“Where are they?”

“Below us, around us. Huge underground caverns, aquifers. There are long lava tubes and subterranean rivers redirected to build that damned waterway for the reservation. The Indian spirits probably blocked the drain for despoiling their holy place. There are documents that go back a hundred years foreseeing this area as the final reservation of the world’s many scattered tribes.”

“Who documented it?”

“A Paiute mystic who was raised by whites. He talked about a dung-filled meadow where herds of buffalo could graze while the albino man destroyed himself.”

“Was it Black Elk?” Uli asked, as they continued paddling over the shit-filled basin.

“No. Wovoka. But the whites gave him a Christian name, Jack Wilson.” Uli remembered that as the alternative name of Flatbush Avenue. “He came back repeatedly, pretending to be one of the refugees, swearing he was from Manhattan.”

“What do you mean he
came back
?”

“Actually, he was always here,” Tim corrected. “Jackie Wilson was alone here for over a hundred years, waiting without aging, knowing without saying, being without hoping.”

“And this is the guy who summoned me?”

“Yes.”

“By name?”

“Yes, and he also gave me your face.”

“So what’s my name?” Uli asked, trying to get his mind off the smell.

“Ew-el-la-lee.”

It sounded biblically similar to the other name he had heard two days earlier in Brooklyn—Huey. “Did he tell you why I’m here?”

“He doesn’t answer questions. He shows.”

After ten more minutes of being paddled through an ever-narrowing creek, Uli asked, “Where exactly are we heading?”

“This is the canal that Rafique made that drained most of the water covering Staten Island,” Tim replied calmly. “It leads to an old lake bed, and at the end of that is what was called the Goethals Bridge. Actually, the rock formation that once arched over the Goethals Basin collapsed, so it’s really now just an overhang …” As the chieftain talked, it was obvious that the odors didn’t bother him. Just as Mallory had said, everyone he had seen since arriving at the terminal had evidently sacrificed some of their senses for surviving in Staten Island—any indication of their having an olfactory system was gone.

“So what is all that white stuff on your face?” Uli asked the chief, still trying to get his mind off the stink.

“I’m Irish. It’s sunscreen. This place is a melanoma nightmare,” the man replied as Uli pulled out the nose pin he had bought on the bus. “You okay?”

“My nose is dying a cruel and unusual death.” Tears were streaming down Uli’s face. Although his sinuses were as blocked as the sewage river, the toxic vapor seemed to infiltrate every pore of his body.

“Oh! I brought this for you,” Tim said, and casually pulled something out of his waistband. He handed Uli a tiny tin. “We should start preparing for your meeting with Wovoka. Lie back in the canoe, remove your nose pin, put some of this on your top lip, close your eyes, and just listen to my voice.”

Opening the tin, Uli found a clear ointment and smeared some under his nose. The long and skinny claw of E. coli that had hooked up into his intestines suddenly withdrew. A strong mentholated aroma liberated his sinuses. Lying back in the rear of the boat, Uli closed his eyes and listened to the chieftain, who said, “When we get to our destination, what you’re going to be doing is commonly called
bilocation
. With Wovoka’s help, you’re going to travel out of here.”

“Where?”

“You two will decide that,” Tim said. “All I want you to do is try to relax, and when the time comes I want you to just let go. Do you understand?”

“Not really.”

“We’ll practice. I’m going to put you in a scene, and I want you to try to just lose yourself.”

“Okay.”

“Envision a cool November day. You are walking upon the spongy floor of soft pine needles, among rolling hills of a New England forest. I want you to think of this as you inhale and exhale. Imagine your breath is like the spirit of some bird; look and try to find your bird guide, and it will take you over the trees and gentle pastures. Just inhale, exhale, and stay focused on your guide.”

A
fter roughly half an hour of contemplation, imagining himself as a pigeon flying through some pastoral scene, Uli’s cool inner reality came to an abrupt halt. The canoe started tipping from side to side. The woman warrior said, “Come on. We walk from here.”

Nearly naked now except for scanty articles of cloth and homemade moccasins, his three companions were waiting for him.

When Uli got out, Bea and the silent paddler pulled the canoe up on the shore and flipped it over, draining the putrid water that had leaked inside. The man unknotted the long thick rope from the front of the boat and wrapped it around his bulging chest.

“I’m surprised the sewage flows this far,” Uli commented.

“This was all the backed-up water that covered Staten Island,” the chieftain said. He led the three others up along a series of stony plateaus rising like a row of massive steps. Although the copper rays of the setting sun illuminated everything, clouds blocked Uli’s view of the summit. Looking back, he could see Staten Island spread out below. The black lines of sewage water snaked over it like veins and arteries on an old person’s hands. Manhattan and Brooklyn were barely visible in the distance.

“What is this place?”

“It’s a very big, very old volcano,” Tim replied. “There are only a few of them left in the world. Some are thought to be a thousand times larger than a regular volcano. And they are devastating. In fact, thousands of years ago, one of them in Africa was responsible for the near extinction of mankind. They believe that after it blew, only about seven thousand people remained.”

“And this is one of those?”

“The entire reservation is built on a super volcano. The sacred caves are its lava vents and fumaroles, and someday when it blows the entire country as we know it will come to an end.” Tim paused. “Strange things don’t happen here simply because we pray for them or because old Indians say they do. They happen because this is a portal. It’s literally the beginning of the end. In a few minutes, when you are lowered into the Goethals, you’re going to be closer than anyone else alive to that awesome power.”

“I’m not going to be bitten by snakes or anything, am I? Cause I’m terrified of snakes.”

“No, you’ll just sweat a bit.”

They continued climbing upward several hundred feet until, winded, they reached the last step, a long flat plateau. Just when Uli thought the hike would get easier, the terrain started buckling into layers. He felt as though he were on the surface of a hostile planet. Trenches and precipices began appearing along with endless steam-filled ponds and geysers.

They finally reached a massive rock formation that rose like a stone rampway and jutted out over a large bubbling gorge. They walked out onto the rocky overhang about a hundred feet, until it nearly vanished into the mist.

The muscular paddler took the thick rope he was holding and began making complex knots.

“Once we lower you, I want you to close your eyes and concentrate like you did in the canoe,” Tim instructed.

The muscle man told Uli to lie flat on the hot rocks as he slowly fit the knots around Uli’s limbs, then wove the rope into a harness.

“What was your bird guide?” Tim asked.

“I imagined I was a pigeon.”

“The flying rat of New York, perfect! Now, instead of green fields, let your winged rodent take you over a special place somewhere in New York.”

“Can’t we just do this here?” Uli asked, referring to the terra firma of the ridge.

“The visions over the Goethals are the strongest.”

“My memories of the Big Apple aren’t too good.”

“Do you remember 42nd Street?”

“I think so,” Uli said, and closing his eyes he was able to recall a postcard image of Times Square.

“Just focus on that,” Tim said.

Wrapping the loose ends of the thick rope around their waists, Bea and the paddler lowered Uli off the narrow overhang of rock and into the foggy breach below. Laying flat like a static superman, Uli saw steamy plumes rising from the crater, shrouding the surface of a deep and bubbly cauldron. To push away all fear, he closed his eyes and tried to recollect the group of old buildings squeezed together by intersecting avenues around the palpitating heart of 42nd Street.

He simply couldn’t remember a lot: Moderately sized buildings and low-level theaters with all the flourishes of the last century were pressed up against the cracked New York sidewalks. The strangely futuristic white structure—the Allied Chemical Building—with its lightbulbed news ticker sat in the middle of the Square.

A backfiring truck sent a flutter of pigeons high in the air. Uli watched as they descended in a dense yet complex pattern like little gray-feathered bombs flying onto the sill of a grungy office building. He now realized that he was one of them. But he wasn’t in Times Square, he was in a residential community in one of the outer boroughs, he didn’t know which. The backfiring wasn’t a truck. It was the subdued explosion of dynamite under a steel blanket. A freeway was being built right through some neighborhood. Then, as though seeing old photographs from his past, he remembered attending an Ivy League school and traveling down to Mexico. Uli had no idea why he was seeing this, but pushing it out of his head, he directed his thoughts back to the unharmonious buildings around Times Square.

Time seemed to slow down. The artful manner in which the body harness gently looped around his shoulders, waist, and thighs made him feel as if he was flying.

His blurry images of 42nd Street crystallized. The buildings in the Times Square tableau began moving like chess pieces being played. As though a great lens were being brought into sharp focus, vivid details came to him. He saw the faces of people that he couldn’t possibly have imagined. Cornices, friezes, and intricate designs appeared on the façades of each of the old buildings. He could faintly make out neon signs and illuminated billboards. Blockbuster movies and musical theater were shamelessly advertised around the vast urban canyon. Rings of steam rose out of a billboard of a giant cowboy’s mouth simulating cigarette smoke.

The minutia of cracks and potholes came into view along with litter on the pavement: Cigarette butts, broken ice-cream sticks, and ripped bus transfers washed around the dirt-encrusted gutter. Drug dealers, prostitutes, pimps, and cops all played out their fleeting routines. It was as though another bigger brain had climbed into Uli’s cranium and usurped his feeble memory.