This Side of Brightness

  “Heyyo,” he says, “heyyo.”

  He moves to the back cave with the candle and reaches up to the shelf where he keeps his maps. He has hundreds of small graphs and one giant map on a sheet of art paper, carefully rolled and precisely tied with a shoelace. Treefrog spreads a plastic bag on the floor so the paper doesn’t get covered in muck. He opens the shoelace and unrolls the map. The one thing he hates is having to use the eraser, but it is necessary when he gets a new reading. Here, the bedside table, rising up to a plateau. A long butte for his mattress. Circular mounds for the rise in the dirt floor. A cave for the Gulag. All elevations marked in tiny increments. Delicately he scrubs out a contour and widens it for a new reading he made of the cave wall this morning after the woman’s visit; he may have been wrong, his hands were trembling after he saw her.

  He bites the top of his glove to unfreeze his fingers, brings blood to them, works for hours, then falls asleep. When a rat tiptoes across his genitals he wakes and is disgusted to find that he has left a bootprint on the edge of his map.

  Moving out from the back cave, Treefrog wipes sleep from his eyes and sits on the side of his bed.

  In a giant plastic bag he keeps all the leaves from fall.

  The leaves are brown and brittle to the touch, though their outside edges are a little damp where they have started to mulch. Treefrog rubs them between his gloved palms, crumples a few in his fingers, and sprinkles them equally around the fire pit—a ring of rocks with a dome of old ashes in the middle. He tears a yellowed New York Times into thin strips and curls them around the leaves. Near the bedside table—one leg supported by books but the whole table still a little drunken—he reaches for his pile of kindling.

  He breaks eight little twigs in his fingers, makes a tepee of them around the newspaper, and lays some bigger twigs above them.

  When the fire is lit and leaping, Treefrog reaches into the Gulag and unwraps some ham from its aluminum foil. He rips up one of the slices for Castor, tears it into nice little chunks—just enough to keep her happy and enough to keep her hungry. He pours a small amount of milk in a pan and puts the pan on a grill above the flames. Prometheus Treefrog, the fire stealer! Come down, lovely eagle, and consume my liver for eternity!

  He touches the pan with his right thumb and then his left, sits back against the mattress, and waits.

  As the milk begins to heat he strokes Castor, fingers a knot of mud from under her belly, throws the mud from hand to hand. She keeps her head cocked toward the pan, and when the bubbles begin to appear Treefrog pours the milk into a small bowl.

  Castor laps at the milk delicately, noses over to the plate of ham, and sniffs around.

  “Good girl,” he says, “good girl.”

  Treefrog reaches for his bottle of gin. He drinks deep, then carefully cracks two eggs into a pan. A long hair from his beard drops and he picks it off the unbroken yoke with his right finger, imitates the movement with his left. He lays a slice of cheese over the eggs to melt. Treefrog eats his breakfast on the catwalk, using a hubcap for a plate. Looking along the tunnel, he remembers the way the woman had stepped near to the rails. She was so lovely, in her fur coat and red miniskirt. Gorgeous legs, long legs, magazine legs. She reminded him so much of Dancesca. Treefrog smiles and lets some bread soften against his tongue.

  * * *

  A church on Park Avenue. Christmas. A choir sang. They entered together. They had never been in a Catholic church before, but they liked the singing; it drew them in. Dancesca adjusted her hair. He held Lenora in the crook of his arm. The child was six months old. It was 1976. She still only fit between the length of his hand and his elbow. He leaned down and kissed the child’s forehead. His hair was short and he had no beard. He opened the zipper of his ski jacket, and then he touched Dancesca’s wrist. She nodded. They went to a back pew. The singing was lofty and beautiful. The priest was drinking from a chalice of wine. The choir sang on. Around them the pews began to empty. The people were walking toward the altar. He and Dancesca looked at each other, suddenly nervous, unsure of the ceremony. They followed the line toward the altar and began to imitate those around them. He put out his tongue, and the bread was placed gently by the priest. The priest touched Lenora on the forehead and smiled. Walking back down along the aisle, he could feel the strange wafer soften and stick to the roof of his mouth. He reached in with his forefinger and scraped a little of the bread off. A tiny piece remained on his finger. He placed the sliver in his child’s mouth. An old woman in a head scarf stared at him, eyes wide. He could feel his cheeks suddenly flush. He had done something wrong, he didn’t know what. For the rest of the service he kept his head bowed and pulled his child close, cradled her. When the service was finished they walked, head-hung, embarrassed, out from the church, but when they were far enough away, up Park Avenue, Dancesca burst out laughing and the sound of it erupted around him. At a row of parking meters, he handed Dancesca the child. He stood up on a meter—it was his trick—balancing on just one foot. He felt wonderful and ridiculous and alive. He could still taste the bread in his mouth. They walked to their apartment together, turned the key in the door, stood by the heater, put their arms around each other, and kissed, their sleeping child sandwiched between them.

  * * *

  When noon threatens, Treefrog rises from bed and switches a red coffee can from hand to frozen hand. There is no water left in his yellow canister, so he drops all the way to the gravel and saunters along between the two railway tracks.

  Far down the tunnel, he passes the cubicles. An array of graffiti spiders its way across their doors. ELIJAH IS KING. SAILORS AT SEA. GLAUCON WAS HERE, ’87. FUCK YOU. On Faraday’s door, beneath the suspended toilet seat, are the words ALL I WANT TO DO IS SIT ON MY ASS AND FART AND THINK OF DANTE.

  Treefrog stops and blows a kiss to Elijah’s door, where the woman must still be sleeping.

  Under 94th Street there is a giant kitchen area with a campfire grill in the center. MOCKINGBIRD DON’T SING. LLCOOLJ. TROGLODYTES! I THINK, THEREFORE I AMBLE. WE ARE NOT MILITIA. NY SUCKS. An overcoat is hung out to dry on a long steel cable. The area is all darkness, punctuated by the beams of light coming from the grills. The shafts bear down, blue and white and gray, upon the graffiti and the murals that Papa Love has painted on the tunnel walls. The murals are spread out every hundred yards or so, rats running under the faces of Martin Luther King; John F. Kennedy; Miriam Makeba; Mona Lisa with a penis in her mouth; Huey Newton being crucified beside two white thieves, Nixon and Johnson. There is a petroglyph of a bison with USDA BEEF written on the side. Someone has drawn giant pink udders on it.

  Fields of cans and bottles and needles are strewn beneath the paintings.

  Pulling the overcoat collar up around his neck, Treefrog goes through a hundred yards of tunnel, past the cubicles and shacks. He can tell the time of day by the angle of the light shaft—that and the trains.

  He reaches the metal stairs and climbs up to the gate, fourteen steps and always fourteen. Dean’s shopping cart is tied to the gate with a length of barbed wire—four tiny teddy bears are wound around the side mesh of the cart, along with the Star-Spangled Banner, mudstrewn. Four dented Pepsi cans sit in the bottom of the cart, but Treefrog decides to leave them alone; no need to cause trouble for just twenty cents.

  He peers out the gate, through the lacy ironwork, to the embankment covered in a foot-high drift of snow. All is silent, few cars even on the curve off the West Side Highway. There are often crashes on the curve, and he likes to remove the hubcaps from the wrecks before the tow trucks take them away.

  Treefrog hunkers down on the metal steps, shoves the empty coffee can through the gaps in the gate, and scoops up some snow and packs it down with his gloved fists: right first, then left.

  Below the fresh coating of snow he comes upon hard ice. He should spread water on his catwalk and it would ice over and then nobody would come calling to his nest for sure, they would slip and fall and snap their necks and he would be left i
n peace forever.

  He shoves the can of snow into his overcoat pocket and returns along the tunnel, climbs up on the catwalk—he knows he will never fall; he can even do it on tiptoe—and, in his nest, begins to light another fire. Almost out of wood and leaves, he uses mostly newspaper.

  The flames rise up quickly.

  He dumps the snow into a blackened pot and chooses an herbal teabag from the Gulag. The Gulag is four feet in the air and one foot deep into the tunnel wall above his bed, built in his second year underground. It took him weeks to chisel out and smooth down perfectly flat. He laid down a little steel toaster tray in the center, so the food wouldn’t get rock dust in it, and hung a red bandanna in front for a door. He hammered nails in the wall and then meticulously filed the nails down into spikes, so that if rats jumped up and tried to steal the food they would rip their feet to bits on the sharp points. He has never seen a rat make the leap, so mostly he uses the spikes to hang his socks from.

  He leaves the pot over the fire, gets back in his sleeping bag, listens to the sibilant wind whistling along from the south end, waits for the gray snow of Manhattan to boil. So slowly time passes, he thinks, if it passes at all.

  * * *

  On Broadway in the evening, when the snow has briefly relented, he walks along with a bag full of cans and spies her, sitting under the awning of Symphony Space.

  With an outstretched arm she holds a tall stack of perhaps twenty paper coffee cups. The top coffee cup almost bows in supplication to the street. He laughs at the sight and listens as she says to passersby, “Spare some change and I’ll dance at your wedding!”

  Even when nobody gives her money and her body slumps to the ground and her arm becomes tired and her feet are splayed and her eyes are glazed and the edges of her mouth are carved into two deep sorrowful furrows, she continued to smile and say, “Spare some change and I’ll dance at your wedding!”

  * * *

  He listens at the door until he is sure that Elijah is not around: easy to tell, since the radio is not playing and Elijah always insists on noise—even when he’s sleeping.

  Treefrog toes his way forward, waits, knocks, and hears her moan.

  “Heyyo.”

  A long silence and a ruffle of blankets, and he nudges his feet against the door and raps on the wood again. Another moan, but he can tell she’s shifting in the bed.

  “Get out.”

  “It’s me.”

  “Who?”

  “Treefrog.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Just me.”

  “Get out.”

  “Hey, where’s Elijah? When’s he back?”

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “I won’t touch you. Got a smoke?”

  “No.”

  “Is today Wednesday or Thursday?”

  “Get out.”

  “It’s Friday, ain’t it?”

  He enters, and she is flat on a mattress in the fabulous dark; he can’t even make out her shape. Electricity must be out. He flicks the lighter with one hand, then the other, holds it over where he knows the bed to be. She puts her arm across her eyes and says, “Get out!”

  He can tell that she’s been crying, her upper lip sucked in against her teeth, her fists clenched, her eyes red.

  She looks like a sad sandwich between five sets of blankets.

  Shoving the lighter into his pocket, he sits down in the darkness on a wicker chair by the bed, puts his feet on a shattered television set with a fist hole in its glass, and listens to her rummage under the blankets. The chair has two short legs, so he rocks it diagonally.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Don’t hurt me.”

  “I won’t hurt you. What’s your name?”

  After a long silence she says, “Angie.”

  “There’s a song about that.”

  “If Elijah finds someone here he’ll kill me.”

  “I just wanted to say hello.”

  “You said it. Now get out.”

  “You look just like somebody.”

  “Get out, I said.”

  “I just want a cigarette.”

  “I have a knife,” she says. “If you come any closer, I’ll kill you.”

  “Saw you this morning,” he says. “And I saw you up there on Broadway, too. With the coffee cups. I like that. A big long line of coffee cups. Never seen that before.”

  “Out!”

  “You look just like a friend of mine. I thought you were her. Hey. Why you crying?”

  “I ain’t crying. Shut up and get out.”

  “What’s wrong with the juice?” he asks.

  “The what?”

  “What happened the electric?”

  “Elijah’ll kill you if you don’t get out. He said don’t let nobody in here.”

  “You’ll have to get Faraday to fix the electric.”

  “He that ugly white motherfucker in the suit?” she asks.

  “Yeah. Connects everyone up. From the light poles topside. Runs the cable down. Even goes to the other tunnels. He can pirate it off the third rail. Sometimes he steps the electric down with transformers. He’s a genius with the juice.”

  “Elijah’s gonna kill him too. He whistled at me. Say, what’s your name again?”

  “Treefrog.”

  “That’s the weirdest goddamn name I ever heard in my life.”

  “I play the harmonica.”

  “That don’t explain nothing.”

  “Everyone else calls me that. I don’t call me that. I don’t like it.”

  He hears her pull the blankets high around her neck. “Motherfuck,” she says, “it’s cold.” There’s a scuffle in the background and she sits up urgently. “What’s that?”

  “A rat.”

  “I hate rats.”

  “You should get a cat.”

  She shivers. “Elijah don’t like cats.”

  “You want some more blankets?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I got some extra,” says Treefrog. “Back in my place. Gimme a smoke first. A smoke for a blanket for the barter man.”

  “I don’t got none.”

  “I saw you smoking this morning.”

  “You promise you’ll give me a blanket?”

  “Yeah.”

  He feels a cigarette land in his lap and he searches in his overcoat for a lighter, snaps it aflame, pulls the smoke down deep into his lungs, continues rocking the chair diagonally in the darkness.

  “Thanks, babe.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Thanks, Angela.”

  “It’s Angie.”

  “I like Angela better.”

  “You’re an asshole,” she says. “Motherfuck, it’s cold. Ain’t it cold? You ain’t cold? I’m cold.”

  He rises up from the wicker chair. “Don’t go nowhere,” he says. “I’m gonna get you a blanket.”

  He goes to the door and looks across the tunnel to the fading light from the grill. “It’s snowing,” he says, after a moment.

  “I know it’s goddamn snowing.”

  “I like it when it snows. The way it comes down through the grates. You seen it?”

  “Man, you’re crazy. It’s cold. Snow is cold, that’s what it is. It’s cold. That’s all. Cold. This is hell. This is a cold, motherfucking hell.”

  “A heaven of hell,” he says.

  “What you talking about now, asshole?”

  “Nothing.”

  He walks down the tunnel, beating his arms around himself to stave off the wind that howls down from the southern end. In his nest, he finds his extra blankets in huge blue plastic bags beside his books and maps.

  Angela, he thinks, as he walks back down toward the cubicle, carrying a blanket for her. A nice name. Six letters. Good symmetry. Angela.

  * * *

  He sees her at the tunnel gate one evening, so stoned that her eyes roll around in their sockets. She tugs him by the sleeve and whispers to him that she used to dance in a club in Dayton, Oh
io.

  “A little shithole there, outside of town,” she says. “I used to do my face with the nicest makeup. There was two platforms. One girl on each. One night I was onstage and I look up and see my father coming in, you know; he sits himself at a table at the back of the club. My goddamn father! He orders himself a beer and then goes to giving the waitress a hard time ’cause he paid five dollars and only got a plastic glass. Sitting there, just staring up at me while I was dancing. I was scared, Treefy. I thought he was gonna get up there on the stage and hit me like he always done. I wasn’t dancing, hardly, I was so scared. All these men were booing and hissing from a table. And then I look down, and my father, he’s gone changed the angle of his chair; he’s looking at the other platform, at the other girl. Licking his lips. So then I decided. I danced the finest dance I ever done in my life. I swear all heads were turned at me, excepting him. He’s just drinking and staring at the other girl and never once looks at me. And when I go out in the parking lot he’s waiting for me and he’s drunk, and he says, Girl—I’m twenty-two and he’s still calling me Girl—and then he asks the name of the other dancer and I says, Cindy. And he says, Thanks. And then he leaves in his old gray Plymouth and leans out the window and says to me, That Cindy girl sure can dance. That’s what he said to me. That Cindy girl sure is a dancer.”

  * * *

  He dreams that night that she is standing in his liver. A red-brown wall rises in front of her. She has been given digging instructions by Con O’Leary, Rhubarb Vannucci, Sean Power, and Nathan Walker.

  She knows how to stand with widespread feet, one behind the other, and how to use all the economy of her body. She chunks away at the wall of his liver, scooping and bucketing out the sickness and disease, so delicate with her shovel that he doesn’t feel a thing. Angela scrapes all the residue from him, and when a spot is clean she leans across and kisses it, and it sends a shiver through the rest of his body. All the filth comes away at her feet and she buckets it out of his liver, and when she has the gland completely clean, when the buckets are empty, when he is cured, they dance around his liver together in an ecstatic twirl, their eyes closed, round and round and round, Angela with her colorful beads bobbing in her hair. Then there is a sucking sound and they are blown upward through his body and out his mouth and she stands in front of him, smiling, all the bile gone, even from beneath her fingernails, and she reaches out and touches him softly, moves along his chest, plucking at his hairs, and her fingers go down further to where she opens his fly with spectacular delicacy; there’s not an ounce of pain in his liver, it’s a beautiful dream. Every now and then a dream can be impeccable in the tunnel.