The Swing Voter of Staten Island (19 page)

11/3/80

B
right and early the next morning at the bus stop, Ernestina announced to everyone that it was going to be a short day. They had to return to the complex no later than 6 p.m.

“Forecasts show a storm brewing tonight. And I don’t want anyone getting stuck outside.”

As all boarded the bus, Ernestina took Uli aside and suggested that he join another outreach group that was looking for new workers to rescue prostitutes in Brighton Beach.

Instead of responding, Uli posed his own question: “Did you find marks on your breasts?”

“I beg your pardon—”

“I made them,” he interrupted, “but I’m sure you must’ve found other strange things on your body as well.”

“You’re crazy!”

“Late at night you go to the abandoned warehouse on the pier and you have sex with multiple partners. None of you seem conscious.”

She didn’t say anything, just stared at him vacantly.

“I’d like to go back to Coney Island one last time,” he resumed. “I think I was getting through to some of the locals and was hoping to win them over. I guess I’m also half hoping to catch sight of Patricia.”

“If you do see her with someone,” she finally replied, unable to make eye contact, “don’t fight. Just try to find out where they’re going and notify the authorities.”

On the rest of the ride out to Brooklyn, Ernestina didn’t so much as look at Uli.

When the bus arrived at Coney Island, Uli headed toward the boardwalk. Only the tall hairless senior was there, sitting on his usual bench, muttering to the boundless emptiness surrounding him.

“Remember me from yesterday?” Uli greeted.

“Sure,” the old man replied with a smile, “you’re the parasite who crawled into my ear and got lost in my brain.”

Though the man seemed somewhat senile, Uli couldn’t resist asking, “Do you remember the girl who was with me yesterday? She vanished. You didn’t see her, did you?”

“You know what I know,” the old bird replied, then closed his eyes.

Stay on course,
Uli reminded himself.
Patricia will be found. You’re here to try to bring people a purpose in life.
He decided to try a different technique and looked for a crowd.

Walking a few blocks away, he spotted a group of men in the distance. There was an open-air court bracketed by ten-foot-high basketball hoops. A number of guys roughly his age were in the middle of a fierce competition. Uli waited, but the game wouldn’t end.

Compelled by the urgency of his mission, he walked over to the edge of their court and shouted: “Your only way out of here is through
education
!”

Some of the men running back and forth under the hot sun glanced at him, but they continued playing. Uli attempted to be a little more confrontational, muttering, “Don’t be apathetic
dolts
!” When they raced by him toward the opposite end of the court once more, Uli yelled, “You’re all a bunch of stupid
motherfuckers
!”

The shooter stopped mid-jump, still holding the ball.

Uli took to his heels with the entire basketball team running behind. The river was three blocks away. He passed the first block without a problem. By the end of the second block, the most athletic pursuer was right on his tail. A punch slid along his kidney, giving him a second wind.

A row of carbonized buildings lined his escape route. At the end of the street was a hurricane fence that had been clipped and rolled back. A retaining wall separated him from the waterway. Dodging singed furniture abandoned on the street, Uli jumped the wall, inhaled to the bottoms of his lungs, and speared hard into the blue-green waters.

Moments later, when his head broke the river’s surface, he gasped for breath and looked back. Twenty feet behind, their heads were bobbing over the crumbling concrete wall. Not one of them cared to join him in the slow-moving river. Something whizzed by, then a host of other items kerplunked about him. Stones and sundry salvos were being thrown as he splashed away. Fortunately, he discovered that he swam well in a suit. The water was as warm as a bathtub. But just as he was taking comfort in his lead—
bang!
Something big crowned him hard. Dazed, Uli unintentionally gulped the acrid water.

Flailing, he knocked into a long rectangular object drifting past him. It was an eight-foot-long wooden sign that read,
Water Hazardous—Do Not Swim.

“Don’t let us catch y’ass,” one of the basketball players shouted from the distance. “Cause when we do, you’re fuckin dead!”

Uli kicked off his shoes and climbed up onto the wooden sign. Though he could’ve headed over to the desert side of the river on the far shore, there was nowhere for him to go from there, so he just kept floating downstream. He realized he never should’ve interrupted their game, let alone insulted them. He was simply trying to get their attention—to
help
them.

Soon he could see an even spacing of sewage pipes jutting out below the retaining wall of Brooklyn. Liquid refuse from the borough was intermittently plopping into the river. Still, the water here was nothing like the toxic muck drowning Staten Island. Before floating under the distant span of the Zano Bridge, he spotted some kind of ragtag community on the desert’s edge.

Staten Island—or rather a slice of desert dividing it from Brooklyn—was on the far side, but the water was moving too rapidly to cross. The angle of land shooting out from the desert turned out to be a sharp bend in the river, sending the waters north. Drifting closer, he saw that near the bend, along the banks dead ahead, there was a row of faux skyscrapers, similar to those he had seen from midtown. Like everything else here, these panels were an homage—an unintentional modern art installation mimicking the Wall Street skyline.

Moving along, he saw that the bend gave rise to a long wall extending all the way toward Manhattan. On the opposite side of the bend there appeared another waterway. In fact, a long concrete dam separated the northward-flowing river of Brooklyn from the southward-oozing sewage. The waste of all five boroughs was draining somewhere south along the eastern edge of Staten Island.

Uli floated alongside the base of the pseudo-skyline and finally located a small walkway next to the concrete wall where he was able to climb up onto the narrow shore between the two waterways.

Examining the lower panels of the walkway, Uli saw that each one was a diaphanous fiberglass sheet, ten feet square. They were locked into rusty steel frames and held up by scaffolding. Sand had accumulated along the steel grid, and an array of intricate cableworks were anchored into the earth with large spikes.

In the distance, Uli could see cars rising and dipping over the creaky two-lane causeway that joined Manhattan to Richmond County—the Staten Island Ferry Bridge.

“What the fuck you think you doin?” The voice came before the pain. A long chain whipped around his neck and pulled him backwards to the ground. Three paunchy middle-aged men moved close around him. The leader was short and balding with a close-cropped beard and wire-frame glasses. He held a thick lead pipe that looked perfect for breaking bones. The second man was stretching a black leather bullwhip before his huge beer belly. The last man, younger with a bushy mustache, sported an old machete with black electrical tape clumsily spooled around its handle.

“I’m sorry,” Uli said exhausted, “I was chased into the river.”

“Who chase you?” asked the leader, glancing around.

“A gang upstream in Coney Island.”

The guy with the pipe switched to Spanish: “Faggot thinks we’re idiots.”

“I think no such thing,” Uli replied in his own tortured Spanish.

“Look at his bullshit suit,” the one with the bullwhip said.

“I’m from Pure-ile Plurality,” Uli explained.

“Anyone can steal a suit,” said the man with the pipe. “You a Pigger runt?”

“No,” he replied, and buttoning up his shirt, he added, “I’m an outreach worker for Pure-ile Plurality. I was trying to get students to join our new educational program.”

“Hey,” the one with the bullwhip said, “you think you smart cause you speak a little Spanish? What are you doing on our monument?”

“Just admiring it, I assure you.”

“He’s scoping it out,” the man wielding the machete opined to the others.

“Look, he’s bleeding,” observed the guy with the whip. Uli touched his head and found blood on his fingers.

“Prove to me you’re from Pud Pullers,” the man with the heavy pipe said, giving him the benefit of the doubt.

“Call Rolland Siftwelt. He’ll vouch for me.”

“We’re in the desert, asshole, do you see a phone anywhere?” the whipper snapper said, then kicked Uli behind his knees, sending him back to the ground in pain. The fat man snapped his whip in the air.

“Let’s do the motherfucker,” snorted the machete man.

“Not here. Remember the last time. We got to get him to dig his own hole.”

“Oh yeah. Get up,” the pipe swinger commanded.

With his knee throbbing, Uli slowly rose to his feet and was pointed to the left of the faux monstrosity. For ten minutes they hiked him back south down the broadening isthmus between Staten Island and Brooklyn.
If the son of a bitch hadn’t injured my knee, I could outrun them,
he thought as he limped onward.

When they moved back under the Zano Bridge, Uli got a better look at the cluster of shanties he had passed—a suburban encampment. Older women and disfigured men sat in the doorways of small earthen-floored structures.

The pipe wielder pulled a short-handled shovel out of a desert shrub and slung it over his shoulder. “Keep walking!” he ordered as they trailed behind Uli.

Staring into the empty horizon, thoughts of the blond stranger from Green-wood Cemetery flashed through Uli’s head. He was the only person Uli had recognized in Rescue City. At that moment, he deduced that this must be the reason he came to this place—to rescue this man. But why?

As the trio marched him forward, Uli confirmed that he couldn’t run.
I might be able to take out one, even two of them, if lucky,
he thought,
but not all three
. Suddenly, a pack of miniature dogs descended upon him, snapping at his heels.

“Conchita!” a shrill female voice cried out. “Conchita! You come back here, you bad baby!”

He turned around to see the reproductively crippled woman he had met briefly yesterday at Pure-ile Plurality. She was chasing after her surrogate baby, the big-eyed Chihuahua.

“Hold it!” Uli shouted. The three men froze beneath their raised weapons. “She can speak for me!” Her name popped into his head. “Consuela! Remember me from Pure-ile Plurality?”

“Oh yeah, I
always
see you there. You’re
always
so sweet,” Consuela replied. Fortunately, her mental fuzziness went well beyond the trauma of child deprivation. She ran up to Uli and started petting his sweaty head like he was a tall dog. “He’s
so
good, he’s
so
right.”

When Uli hugged her, she hugged back, reluctant to let him go.

“All right,” the leader said, pulling Consuela off him. Picking up her dog-child and handing it back to her, the man directed her to her shack, then he just stood there staring fiercely upward.

“Man, you not gonna let him go, are you?” the fat man with the whip asked, obviously disappointed.

“You wanna know why? I tell you why,” the leader answered. “Cause we kill him and Pure-ile Plurality gonna investigate. Then iz gonna be a matter of time before Consuela starts yapping about the nice man who was here, and they add one plus one, and we each lose our right hand, and I tell you right now, I don’t mind losing a hand, but I ain’t ready to give up sex.”

“Shit!” the bullwhipper said.

“No hard feeling, man,” the leader said to Uli, and as an offer of reconciliation, he held out his hand and said, “Slap me five, dude.” Tiredly, Uli slapped the man’s palm. “You tell ’em. Tell ’em. We didn’t mess you up or nothing, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“So that’s got to be worth a little something,” the leader suggested.

Uli reached into his pocket and handed the man a soggy stamp. He started to ask the guy how he could navigate around the waterway to get back to Brooklyn, but the mustached leader simply shoved him backwards, plunging him back into the swiftly flowing current. With his knee still in pain, Uli thrashed about helplessly in the water.

“Vaya con dios!”
the leader called out, laughing.

Uli fought to keep his head above water. The strong current and his exhausted body did not allow for a clean swim. The best he could do was drift along on his back for what felt like miles.

Paddling to the river’s edge back on the Brooklyn side once the powerful flow subsided, Uli grabbed at a narrow ledge that couldn’t have been more than five inches wide. He tried climbing onto it but slipped back into the water three times before he was able to edge up slowly. Reaching over a filthy drain pipe to the top of the retaining wall, he carefully hoisted himself up, flopping onto the paved shores of Brooklyn. Eventually catching his breath, he rose to his feet and stumbled sopping wet down a wide street until he came to a hand-painted signpost that read,
Atlantic Avenue
.