Underworld (33 page)

She gestured to Gracie. Just then the girl slipped through a maze of wrecked cars and by the time Gracie reached the window she was barely a flick of the eye, lost in the low ruins of an old firehouse.

“Who is this girl,” Gracie said, “who's out there in the lots hiding from people?”

Ismael looked at his crew and one of them piped up, an undersized boy in spray-painted jeans, dark-skinned and shirtless.

“Esmeralda. Nobody knows where her mother's at.”

Gracie said, “Can you find the girl and then tell Brother Mike?”

“This girl she be real quick.”

A murmur of assent.

“She be a running fool this girl.”

Heads bobbing above the comic books.

“Why did her mother go away?”

“She be a addict. They un, you know, predictable.”

All street, these kids. No home or school. Edgar wanted to get them in a room with a blackboard and then buzz their heads with Spelling and Punctuation. She wanted to drill them in the lessons of the Baltimore Catechism. True or false, yes or no, fill in the blanks.

Ismael said, “Maybe the mother returns. She feels the worm of remorse. But the truth of the matter there's kids that are better off without their mothers or fathers. Because their mothers or fathers are dangering their safety.”

“Catch her and hold her,” Gracie told the crew. “She's too young to be on her own. Brother Mike says she's twelve.”

“Twelve is not so young,” Ismael said. “One of my best writers, he does wildstyle, age eleven or twelve. Juano. I send him down in a rope to do the complicated letters.”

Edgar knew about Ismael's early career as a graffiti master, a legend of spray paint. He was the infamous Moonman 157, nearly twenty years ago, and he told the nuns how he'd marked subway cars all over the city, his signature running on every line, and Edgar believed this was where he'd started having sex with men, in his teens, in the tunnels. She heard it in the spaces in his voice.

“When do we get our money?” Gracie said.

Ismael stood there coughing and Edgar moved back against the far wall. She knew she ought to be more sympathetic to the man. But she was not sentimental about fatal diseases. Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday. She intended to meet her own end with senses intact, grasp it, know it finally, open herself to the mystery that others mistake for something freakish and unspeakable.

People in the Wall liked to say, When hell fills up, the dead will walk the streets.

It was happening a little sooner than they thought.

“I'll have some money next time,” Ismael said. “I make practically nothing on these cars. My margin it's very minimum. I'm looking I might expand out of the country. Don't be surprise my scrap ends up in North, you know, Korea.”

Gracie joked about this. But it was not a thing Edgar could take lightly. She was a cold war nun who'd once lined the walls of her room with Reynolds Wrap as a safeguard against nuclear fallout. The furtive infiltration, deep and sleek. Not that she didn't think a war might be thrilling. She often conjured the flash even now, with the USSR crumbled alphabetically, the massive letters toppled like Cyrillic statuary.

They went down to the van, the nuns and five kids, and they set out to distribute the food, starting with the hardest cases in the projects, just outside the Wall.

They rode the elevators and went down the long passageways. Unknown lives in every wallboard room. Sister Grace believed the
proof of God's creativity eddied from the fact that you could not surmise the life, even remotely, of his humblest shut-in.

They spoke to two blind women who lived together and shared a seeing-eye dog.

They saw a man with epilepsy.

They saw children with oxygen tanks next to their beds.

They saw a woman in a wheelchair who wore a Fuck New York T-shirt. Gracie said she would trade the groceries they gave her for heroin, the dirtiest street scag available. The crew looked on, angry. Gracie set her jaw, she narrowed her pale eyes and handed over the food. They argued about this and it was Sister Grace against everybody. Even the wheelchair woman didn't think she should get the food.

They talked to a man with cancer who tried to kiss the latexed hands of Sister Edgar. She backed rapidly toward the door.

They saw five small children being minded by a ten-year-old, all of them bunched on a bed, and two infants in a crib nearby.

They went single file down the passageways, a nun at front and rear, and Edgar thought of all the infants in limbo, unbaptized, babies in the seminether, and the nonbabies of abortion, a cosmic cloud of slushed fetuses floating in the rings of Saturn, and babies born without immune systems, bubble children raised by computer, and babies born addicted—she saw them all the time, three-pound newborns with crack habits who resembled something out of peasant folklore.

They handed out food and Edgar rarely spoke. Gracie spoke. Gracie gave advice. Edgar was a presence only, a uniformed aura in regimental black-and-whites.

They went down the passageways, three boys and two girls forming one body with the nuns, a single swaybacked figure with many moving parts, and they finished their deliveries in the basement of a tenement inside the Wall, where people paid rent for plywood cubicles worse than prison holes.

They saw a prostitute whose silicone breasts had leaked, ruptured and finally exploded one day, sending a polymer whiplash across the face of the man on top of her, and she was unemployed now, living in a room the size of a playpen.

They saw a man who'd cut his eyeball out of its socket because it contained a satanic symbol, a five-pointed star, and Edgar talked to this one, he'd popped the eyeball from his head and then severed the connecting tendons with a knife, and she talked to him in English and understood what he said although he spoke a language, a dialect none of them had ever heard—finally flushing the eye down the communal toilet outside his cubbyhole.

Gracie dropped the crew at their building just as a bus pulled up. What's this, do you believe it? A tour bus in carnival colors with a sign in the slot above the windshield reading
South Bronx Surreal
Gracie's breathing grew intense. About thirty Europeans with slung cameras stepped shyly onto the sidewalk in front of the boarded shops and closed factories and they gazed across the street at the derelict tenement in the middle distance.

Gracie went half berserk, sticking her head out the van and calling, “It's not surreal. It's real, it's real. Your bus is surreal. You're surreal.”

A monk rode by on a rickety bike. The tourists watched him pedal up the street. They listened to Gracie shout at them. They saw a man come along with battery-run pinwheels he was selling, brightly colored vanes pinned to sticks—an elderly black fellow in a yellow skullcap. They saw the ailanthus jungle and the smash heap of mortified cars and they looked at the six-story slab of painted angels with streamers rippled above their cherub heads.

Gracie shouting, “Brussels is surreal. Milan is surreal. This is real. The Bronx is real.”

A tourist bought a pinwheel and got back in the bus. Gracie pulled away muttering. In Europe the nuns wear bonnets like cantilevered beach houses. That's surreal, she said. A traffic jam developed not far from the Wall. The two women sat and waited. They watched children walk home from school, eating coconut ices. Two tables on the sidewalk—free condoms at one, free needles at the other.

“Granted, he may be gay. But this doesn't mean he has AIDS.”

Sister Edgar said nothing.

“All right, this area is an AIDS disaster. But Ismael's a smart man, safe, careful.”

Sister Edgar looked out the window.

A clamor rising all about them, weary beeping horns and police sirens and the great saurian roar of fire-engine klaxons.

“Sister, sometimes I wonder why you put up with all this,” Gracie said. “You've earned some peace and quiet. You could live upstate and do development work for the order. How I would love to sit in the rose garden with a mystery novel and old Pepper curled by my feet.” Old Pepper was the cat in the motherhouse upstate. “You could take a picnic lunch to the pond.”

Edgar had a mirthless inner grin that floated somewhere back near her palate. She did not yearn for life upstate. This was the truth of the world, right here, her soul's own home, herself—she saw herself, the fraidy child who must face the real terror of the streets to cure the linger of destruction inside her. Where else would she do her work but under the brave and crazy wall of Ismael Muñoz?

Then Gracie was out of the van. She was out of the seat belt, out of the van and running down the street. The door hung open. Edgar understood at once. She turned and saw the girl, Esmeralda, half a block ahead of Gracie, running for the Wall. Gracie moved among the cars in her clunky shoes and frump skirt. She followed the girl around a corner where the tour bus sat dead in traffic. The tourists watched the running figures. Edgar could see their heads turn in unison, pin-wheels spinning at the windows.

All sounds gathered in the dimming sky.

She thought she understood the tourists. You travel somewhere not for museums and sunsets but for ruins, bombed-out terrain, for the moss-grown memory of torture and war. Emergency vehicles were massing about a block and a half away. She saw workers pry open subway gratings in billows of pale smoke and she knew she ought to say a fast prayer, an act of hope, three years' indulgence, but she only watched and waited. Then heads and torsos began to emerge, indistinctly, people coming into the air with jaws skewed open in frantic gasps.

A short circuit, a subway fire.

Through the rearview mirror she spotted tourists getting off the bus and edging along the street, poised to take pictures. And the schoolkids going by, barely interested—they heard shootings all the time out
their windows at night, death interchangeable on the street and TV. But what did she know, an old woman who ate fish, still, on Friday, beginning to feel useless here, far less worthy than Sister Grace. Gracie was a soldier, a fighter for human worth. Edgar was basically a junior G-man, protecting a set of laws and prohibitions.

She had a raven's heart, small and obdurate.

She heard the yammer of police cars pulsing in stalled traffic and saw a hundred subway riders come up out of the tunnels accompanied by workers in incandescent vests and she watched the tourists snapping pictures and thought of the trip she'd made to Rome many years ago, for study and spiritual renewal, and she'd swayed beneath the great domes and prowled the catacombs and church basements and this is what she thought as the riders came up to the street, how she'd stood in a subterranean chapel in a Capuchin church and could not take her eyes off the skeletons stacked there, wondering about the monks whose flesh had once decorated these metatarsals and femurs and skulls, many skulls heaped in alcoves and hidey-holes, and she remembered thinking vindictively that these are the dead who will come out of the earth to lash and cudgel the living, to punish the sins of the living—death, yes, triumphant.

But does she really want to believe that, still?

After a while Gracie edged into the driver's seat, unhappy and flushed.

“Nearly caught her. We ran into the thickest part of the lots and then I was distracted, damn scared actually, because bats, I couldn't believe it, actual bats—like the only flying mammals on earth?” She made ironic wing motions with her fingers. “They came swirling out of a crater filled with red-bag waste. Hospital waste, laboratory waste.”

“I don't want to hear it.”

“Dead white mice by the hundreds with stiff flat bodies. You could flip them like baseball cards.”

“Cars starting to move,” Edgar said.

“Ever wonder what happens to amputated limbs after the doctor saws them off? They end up in the Wall. Dumped in a vacant lot or burned in the waste incinerator.”

“Drive the car.”

“And Esmeralda somewhere in those shrubs and junked cars. I bet anything she's living in a car,” Gracie said.

“She'll be all right.”

“She won't be all right.”

“She can take care of herself.”

“Sooner or later,” Gracie said.

“She's quick. She's blessed. She'll be all right.”

Gracie looked at her and drove and looked again, hearing the engine knock, and said nothing. Edgar was never known to take an optimistic position. Maybe this worried her a little.

And that night, under the first tier of scratchy sleep, Edgar saw the subway riders once again, adult males, females of childbearing age, all rescued from the smoky tunnels, groping along catwalks and led up companion ladders to the street—fathers and mothers, the lost parents found and gathered, shirt-plucked and bodied up, guided to the surface by small faceless figures with day-glo wings.

Weeks later Edgar picked up a copy of Time on her way out of the refectory and there she saw it, a large color photo of a white-haired woman seated in a director's chair beneath the old weathered wing of an Air Force bomber. And she recognized the name, Klara Sax, because she recognized everything, because people whispered names to her, because she felt stirrings of information in the dusty corridors of the convent or the school's supply room that smelled of pencil wood and composition books, because she sensed some dark knowledge floating in the smoke of the priest's swinging censer, because things were defined for her by the creak of old floorboards and the odor of clothes, a man's damp camel coat, because she drew News and Rumors and Catastrophes into the spotless cotton pores of her habit and veil.

All the connections intact. The woman once married to a local man. The man a tutor in chess to one of Edgar's own former students. The boy with necktie ever askew, Matthew Aloysius Shay, fingernails bitten to the pink, one of her brainier boys, male parent missing.

She knew things, yes, chess, all those layers of Slavic stealth, those ensnarements and ploys. She knew that Bobby Fischer had all the fillings
removed from his teeth when he played Boris Spassky in 1972—it made perfect sense to her—so the KGB could not control him through broadcasts made into the amalgam units packed in his molars.