Underworld

  “The old jalop needs a tune-up,” Gracie said. “Hear that noise?”

  “Ask Ismael to take a look.”

  “Ku-ku-ku-ku.”

  “He’s the expert.”

  “I can do it myself. I just need the right tools.”

  “I don’t hear anything,” Edgar said.

  “Ku-ku-ku-ku? You don’t hear that?”

  “Maybe I’m going deaf.”

  “I’ll go deaf before you do, Sister.”

  “Look, another angel on the wall.”

  The two women looked across a landscape of vacant lots filled with years of stratified deposits—the age of house garbage, the age of construction debris and vandalized car bodies, the age of moldering mobster parts. Weeds and trees grew amid the dumped objects. There were dog packs, sightings of hawks and owls. City workers came periodically to excavate the site and they stood warily by the great earth machines, the pumpkin-mudded backhoes and dozers, like infantrymen huddled near advancing tanks. But soon they left, they always left with holes half dug, pieces of equipment discarded, styrofoam cups, pepperoni pizzas. The nuns looked across all this. There were networks of vermin, craters chocked with plumbing fixtures and sheetrock. There were hillocks of slashed tires laced with thriving vine. Gunfire sang at sunset off the low walls of demolished buildings. The nuns sat in the van and looked. At the far end was a lone standing structure, a derelict tenement with an exposed wall where another building had once abutted. This wall was where Ismael Muñoz and his crew of graffiti writers spray-painted a memorial angel every time a child died in the neighborhood. Angels in blue and pink covered roughly half the high slab. The child’s name and age were printed under each angel, sometimes with cause of death or personal comments by the family, and as the van drew closer Edgar could see entries for TB, AIDS, beatings, drive-by shootings, measles, asthma, abandonment at birth—left in dumpster, forgot in car, left in Glad Bag stormy night.

  This area was called the Wall, partly for the graffiti facade and partly the general sense of exclusion—it was a tuck of land adrift from the social order.

  “I wish they’d stop already with the angels,” Gracie said. “It’s in totally bad taste. A fourteenth-century church, that’s where you go for angels. This wall publicizes all the things we’re working to change. Ismael should look for positive things to emphasize. The townhouses, the community gardens that people plant. Walk around the corner you see ordinary people going to work, going to school. Stores and churches.”

  “Titanic Power Baptist Church.”

  “What’s the difference—it’s a church. The area’s full of churches. Decent working people. Ismael wants to do a wall, these are the people he should celebrate. Be positive.”

  Edgar laughed inside her skull. It was the drama of the angels that made her feel she belonged here. It was the terrible death these angels represented. It was the danger the writers faced to produce their graffiti. There were no fire escapes or windows on the memorial wall and the writers had to rappel from the roof with belayed ropes or sway on makeshift scaffolds when they did an angel in the lower ranks. Ismael spoke of a companion wall for dead graffitists, flashing his wasted smile.

  “And he does pink for girls and blue for boys. That really sets my teeth on edge,” Gracie said.

  They stopped at the friary to pick up groceries they would distribute to the needy. The friary was an old brick building wedged between boarded tenements. Three monks in gray cloaks and rope belts worked in an anteroom, getting the day’s shipment ready. Grace, Edgar and Brother Mike carried the plastic bags out to the van. Mike was an ex-fireman with a Brillo beard and wispy ponytail. He looked like two different guys front and back. When the nuns first appeared he’d offered to serve as guide, a protecting presence, but Edgar firmly declined. She believed her habit and veil were safety enough. Beyond these South Bronx streets people may look at her and think she is a quaintness of ages past. But inside the strew of rubble she was a natural sight, she and the robed monks. What figures could be so timely, costumed for rats and plague?

  Edgar liked seeing the monks in the street. They visited the home-bound, ran a shelter for the homeless, they collected food for the hungry. And they were men in a place where few men remained. Teenage boys in clusters, armed drug dealers—these were the men of the immediate streets. She didn’t know where the others had gone, the fathers, living with second or third families, hidden in rooming houses or sleeping under highways in refrigerator boxes, buried in the potter’s field on Hart Island.

  “I’m counting plant species,” Brother Mike said. “I’ve got a book I take out to the lots.”

  Gracie said, “You stay on the fringes, right?”

  “They know me in the lots.”

  “Who knows you? The dogs know you? There are rabid dogs, Mike.”

  “I’m a Franciscan, okay? Birds light on my index finger.”

  “Stay on the fringes,” she told him.

  “There’s a girl I keep seeing, maybe twelve years old, runs away when I try to talk to her. I get the feeling she’s living in the ruins. Ask around.”

  “Will do,” Gracie said.

  When the van was loaded they drove back to the Wall to do their business with Ismael and to pick up a few of his crew who would help them distribute the food. Ismael had teams of car spotters who ranged across the boroughs, concentrating on the bleak streets under bridges and viaducts. The nuns represented his North Bronx operation. They gave him lists that detailed the locations of abandoned cars along the Bronx River, a major dump site for stolen, joyridden, semistripped, gas-siphoned and pariah-dog vehicles. Ismael sent his crew to salvage the car bodies and whatever parts might still be intact. They used a small flatbed truck with an undependable winch and a motif of souls-in-hell graffiti on the cab, deck and mud flaps. The car hulks came here to the lots for inspection and price setting by Ismael and were then delivered to a scrap-metal operation in remotest Brooklyn. Sometimes there were forty or fifty cannibalized cars dumped in the lots, museum quality, a junkworld sculpture park—cars bashed and bullet-cratered, hoodless, doorless and rust-ulcered, charred cars, upside-down cars, cars with dead bodies wrapped in shower curtains, rats ascratch in the glove compartments.

  The money he paid the nuns for their locational work went to the friary for groceries.

  When the van approached the building Edgar felt along her midsection for the latex gloves she kept tucked in her belt.

  Gracie parked the van, the only operating vehicle in human sight. She attached the vinyl-coated steel collar to the steering wheel and fitted the rod into the lock housing. At the same time Edgar force-fitted the gloves onto her hands and felt the ambivalence, the conflict. Safe, yes, scientifically shielded from organic menace. But also sinfully complicit with some process she only half understood, the force in the world, the array of systems that displaces religious faith with paranoia. It was in the milky-slick feel of these synthetic gloves, fear and distrust and unreason. And she felt masculinized as well, condomed ten times over—safe, yes, and maybe a little confused. But latex was necessary here. Protection against the spurt of blood or pus and the viral entities hidden within, submicroscopic parasites in their soviet socialist protein coats.

  The nuns got out of the van and approached the building.

  Squatters occupied a number of floors. Edgar didn’t need to see them to know who they were. They were a society of indigents subsisting without heat, lights or water. They were nuclear families with toys and pets, junkies who roamed at night in dead men’s Reeboks. She knew who they were through assimilation, through the ingestion of messages that riddled the streets. They were foragers and gatherers, can redeemers, the people who yawed through subway cars with paper cups. And doxies sunning on the roof in clement weather and men with warrants outstanding for reckless endangerment and depraved indifference. And there were shouters of the Spirit, she knew this for a fact—a band of charismatics who leapt and wept on the top floor, uttering words and nonwords
, treating knife wounds with prayer.

  Ismael had his headquarters on the third floor and the nuns hustled up the stairs. Grace had a tendency to look back unnecessarily at the senior nun, who ached in her movable parts but kept pace well enough, her habit whispering through the stairwell.

  “Needles on the landing,” Gracie warned.

  Watch the needles, sidestep the needles, such deft instruments of self-disregard. Gracie couldn’t understand why an addict would not be sure to use a clean needle. This failure made her pop her cheeks in anger. But Edgar thought about the lure of critical risk, the little love bite of that dragonfly dagger. If you know you’re worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.

  Gracie knocked on the door.

  “Don’t get too close to him,” Edgar said.

  “Who?”

  “Ismael.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s not well.”

  “I saw him three days ago. I was here. You weren’t, Sister. How do you know he’s not well?”

  “I can sense it.”

  “He’s well. He’s fine,” Gracie said.

  “I’ve sensed it for some time.”

  “What do you sense?”

  “AIDS,” Edgar said.

  Gracie studied old Edgar. She looked at the latex gloves. She looked at the nun’s face, emphatic of feature, eyes bird-bright. She looked and thought and said nothing.

  One of the kids unlocked the door—latch bolts, dead bolts, steel shafts.

  Ismael stood barefoot on dusty floorboards in a pair of old chinos rolled to his calves and a parrot-print shirt worn outside his pants, smoking a whopping cigar and resembling some carefree islander wading in happy surf.

  “Sisters, what do you have for me?”

  Edgar thought he was quite young despite the seasoned air, maybe midthirties—sparse beard, a sweet smile complicated by rotting teeth. Members of his crew sat around on scavenged sofas, improvised chairs, smoking and looking at comic books. Too young for one, too old for the other. She knew in her heart he had AIDS.

  Gracie handed over a list of cars they’d spotted in the last two days. Details of time and place, type of vehicle, condition of same.

  He said, “You do nice work. My other people do like this, we run the world by now.”

  Edgar kept a distance of course. She looked at the crew, seven boys, four girls. Graffiti, illiteracy, petty theft. They spoke an unfinished English, soft and muffled, insufficiently suffixed, and she wanted to drum some hard g’s into the ends of their gerunds.

  “I don’t pay you today, okay? I got some things I’m doing that I need the capital.”

  “What things?” Gracie said.

  Retroviruses in the bloodstream, acronyms in the air. Edgar knew what all the letters stood for. AZidoThymidine. Human Immunodeficiency Virus. Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti. Yes, the KGB was part of the multiplying swarm, the cell-blast of reality that has to be distilled and initialed in order to be seen.

  “I’m making plans I get some heat and electric in here. Plus pirate cable for the Knicks.”

  Here in the Wall many people believed the government was spreading the virus, our government. Edgar knew better. The KGB was behind this particular piece of disinformation. And the KGB was responsible for the disease itself, a product of germ warfare—making it, spreading it through networks of paid agents.

  She’d stopped talking about these things to Gracie, who rolled her eyes so far up into her head she looked like science fiction.

  Edgar looked out a window and saw someone moving among the poplars and ailanthus trees in the most overgrown part of the rubbled lots. A girl in a too-big jersey and striped pants grubbing in the underbrush, maybe for something to eat or wear. Edgar watched her, a lanky kid who had a sort of feral intelligence, a sureness of gesture and step—she looked sleepless but alert, she looked unwashed but completely clean somehow, earth-clean and hungry and quick. There was something about her that mesmerized the nun, a charmed quality, a sense of something favored and sustaining.

  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 sh
e 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.