Bone

by George C. Chesbro

  Anne paused, withdrew a tissue from her pocket. She wiped her eyes, blew her nose, then continued, "Mary suffered from what psychiatrists call undifferentiated schizophrenia. She had a mix of symptoms—hallucinations, obsessions, voices in her head telling her what to do; she had it all. A psychiatric social worker noted on one of her files that she was a great 'breakout artist.' There just wasn't any appropriate facility for Mary that she'd stay in. She was one very sneaky old lady, and the law limits us in how far we can go to keep even someone like Mary locked up against his or her will."

  Bone said, "It certainly sounds as if she was a threat to herself."

  Anne shrugged. "You'd be surprised how many civil rights lawyers and advocates for the homeless would disagree with you; it gets tricky when you try to deal forcefully with people who've committed no crimes, even when the guidelines are changed—and when the guidelines are changed, as they have been from time to time, then the city doesn't have nearly enough beds to accommodate all the people we bring in. We did manage to get Mary committed a few times—then she was either released too soon in order to make room for somebody who was even sicker, or she wouldn't stay put long enough for the doctors to get her properly stabilized on medication. I know she was terrified of being in closed places. For years she slept on the steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral, but then the Fifth Avenue merchants' association managed to get the police to drive her away—bad for business, they said, and I can't really argue with them. So Mary moved up the street a few blocks, to St. Thomas Episcopal Church. It was only a block or two from there where she was murdered, along with the old man. It was relatively safe for Mary at St. Thomas, more in the open, and I guess we'll never know why she suddenly decided to leave there in the middle of the night."

  "What about the other victims? What can you tell me about them?"

  Again, the man and woman exchanged glances; Barry pursed his lips, shook his head.

  "We don't really know that much about them," Anne answered. "As I said, there are so many . . . without the heads, it's difficult. So few of these people carry any kind of identification. We only know what we read in the newspapers at the time."

  "But it's possible that the police could have made positive identification after the initial stories in the newspapers?"

  "It's possible. We wouldn't necessarily be informed."

  "What's your point, Bone?" Barry asked.

  "I was just wondering if there might not be some common link between the victims—aside from the fact that they were homeless." He paused, looking at the dark possibility in his mind, then forced himself to voice it. "We know that I was somehow in contact with Mary Kellogg—even if it was only to rob her. I was just considering the possibility that I could somehow be linked to all of the victims. I wonder if any—or all—of them knew me?"

  "My God," Anne whispered. "You'd search for that link, even if it condemned you?"

  "I want the truth, Anne—even if the truth is that I'm a madman and a murderer."

  "I think that makes you a very brave man."

  Embarrassed, Bone averted his gaze. He did not see his attitude as reflecting courage at all; he felt more terrified at the possibility that he could be executed, sent to prison or a mental hospital, virtually as a passenger, a prisoner inside the body of the stranger, without ever learning who he was. It was not enough to know what the stranger had done; he had to know who the stranger was, and why he had acted as he had. Asking questions was all he could do now for the stranger, and it could not be helped if the answers he received were meaningless. If he could retrace his steps, go back to the places where the stranger had been, perhaps he might remember—but he could not do that while he was locked up in the secure ward of a mental hospital. And so there was nothing else to do but keep asking the questions as they occurred to him, wait, and hope that something would turn up to show that the stranger might be innocent of the terrible crimes he was accused of.

  The streets held memories of at least one of the two lives he had lost, but he could not get out on them.

  "Bone," Anne continued quietly, "are you all right?"

  He nodded. "Yes; I was just thinking." He paused, looked back and forth between the two social workers. "I want to thank you both again for . . . everything."

  "You're welcome," Anne said, and smiled warmly. "It's what we're paid to do."

  Bone shook his head. "You don't do it for the money; you do it because you care. How did the two of you end up on this 'street squad' of yours?"

  Anne brushed a strand of brown hair away from her eyes. "I trained for social work; it's what I took my degree in." She paused, squeezed the arm of the burly man beside her and laughed good-naturedly. "Now, Barry here is a frustrated priest. His bark is really much worse than his bite. Most of the time you've seen him, he's had a frown on his face; but he's really a great big pussycat—and a very good human being. You should see how some of those poor people on the street respond to him." She paused, winked coquettishly at Bone. "Except for you, of course; you didn't respond to anyone."

  Barry flushed slightly, obviously embarrassed, then grinned; it made him look younger, almost boyish. "I'm not a 'frustrated priest,' Anne, and you know it. If I'd wanted to become a priest, I'd simply have stayed in the seminary."

  "But you were studying for the priesthood?" Bone asked the man.

  Barry nodded, lowered his gaze. "I thought I had a calling," he said quietly. "For as long as I can remember, I felt God wanted me to devote my life to helping people who were less fortunate than I was. Being Roman Catholic, naturally I interpreted this strong urge to mean that I should become a priest. But I was wrong. I entered the seminary and studied for a couple of years, but . . . I just couldn't connect with what was going on around me. It seemed to me that I was spending my time there studying to be a kind of administrator, administering, for the most part, to people who shared my personal beliefs. I didn't want to be an administrator. I realized then that God wanted me to play some other role; I didn't know what it was, but I felt that God would eventually show it to me. So I left. To tell you the truth, that was a very upsetting time in my life. I ended up knocking around New York for a while, taking odd jobs and devoting almost all of my free time to doing volunteer work for various charitable agencies. But the fact of the matter was that I was spending so much time doing volunteer work that I was barely making enough money to support myself. So I cut back on the volunteer work and landed myself a job with an outfit called Empire Subway Company Limited. It was the grace of God that sent me there."

  "Why the grace of God?" Bone asked, intrigued. Nothing in the man's previous behavior or demeanor had indicated the religious fervor and genuine urge to do good that was in this man. He wondered what similar surprises he might find as he probed deeper into the mind of the stranger; even people in command of their memories were not always what they seemed. "I'd like to know. What's the Empire Subway Company?"

  Barry seemed hesitant, but Anne nodded encouragement. "Tell him, Barry. You usually love to talk about your work with Empire Subway."

  "Down there," Barry said, pointing to the floor as he obviously warmed to the subject, "is a world you wouldn't believe, Bone. I mean under the streets of Manhattan. The Dutch started digging there, near the tip of the island, in the sixteen hundreds, and we haven't stopped since. There are underground lakes, streams, caves—and these are natural formations. For more than three hundred years they've been building aqueducts, subway and train tunnels, laying water and sewer pipes, gas lines and electrical cables. I won't bore you with the details, but now, before anyone can put up a new building or do anything that requires digging, they have to know what they're going to run into down there. All the systems—electric, gas, steam, sewage, high- and low-pressure water mains, the transit subways—are all entwined down there, and they often interlace with very old systems that go back to the time of the first settlers, structures that have never been mapped. Grand Central Terminal, for instance, goes down seven stories below
street level, and there are people who think there are older structures or systems beneath it. No one map shows it all, and a lot of the old maps have been lost. For example, we know that the Treasury Department used to use underground pneumatic tubes to deliver financial notes and securities; they didn't want a lot of people to know about the system, so only a very few maps were made—and these were lost over the years as the underground system was abandoned. A hundred and fifty years ago, the post office used to deliver mail through their own tunnels—and a lot of those maps were lost. You've got three different water systems which were constructed at different times.

  "Anyway, you get the idea. Before anybody—construction company or utility—can poke so much as a shovel into the ground, they have to know what they may be digging into. Empire Subway acts as a consultant that supplies that information. They've been doing it for a long time, and they know more about what's under the city streets than anyone. What they don't know, they find out. Before any new tunnel is built or electrical cable laid, Empire Subway checks out the terrain underground and files a report or map; this information is then shared and used by all the utilities and transit companies to expand and update whatever maps and records they may already have. I worked as a member of a team of 'moles' down there, checking out the situation whenever somebody wanted to build something. There are areas down there where different cables are laid so close together that they look like spaghetti, and workers literally use spoons to dig around them. Anyway, that was my job, and it paid well."

  Barry paused, and Bone was startled to see tears suddenly well in the man's green eyes, brim over and roll down his cheeks. He quickly looked away, wiped at his eyes as Anne reached out and touched his arm.

  "I found other things down there besides old aqueducts, sewers and tunnels," the social worker continued in a voice that seemed slightly muffled. "People. There are men—and even an occasional woman—living in those tunnels down there, all over the city. They live in perpetual darkness, and God only knows what they eat. Some of them, I think, just go down there to die. They live there with the rats and the spiders and the filth. That's when I finally knew what it was God wanted me to do—work with the homeless. I applied for a job with the Human Resources Administration, and they temporarily waived the college degree required; I'm taking courses now. So, that's how I ended up doing this."

  Down there is a world you wouldn't believe.

  Bone closed his eyes, listening intently as the words echoed in his mind, struggling after them to see where they might lead. Why did the words produce such strong reverberations? Bones; he must have picked up the ossified bone somewhere underground. Maybe. But he had certainly not found it in a subway tunnel or water main.

  Dark places.

  He opened his eyes. "Do you go underground to try to work with those people?"

  Barry shook his head, and when he spoke there were traces of anger and bitterness in his voice. "The city won't allow us to go down there; it's considered dangerous."

  "Most of the people down there are really crazy," Anne said. "They're usually all right as long as you leave them alone—but totally unpredictable if you try to approach them. City policy is that we try to reach them if they come up, but we don't go down into the darkness after them. It's a sound policy. There's far more work than we can handle on the streets without going underground to look for more, and at least up here we can see what we're dealing with."

  "They won't even let me go down on my own," Barry said tersely. "If I do, and they find out, I get fired. It's not right."

  "What would you do if they did permit you to go down there, Barry?" Anne asked in the tone of voice of someone who'd had this conversation before. "Those people aren't going to come up with you, and you know it. All you'd manage to do is get your throat slit."

  "At least I could take them food and water."

  "Which would remove any motivation they might have for coming up. The administration is right."

  "Now you sound like the bureaucrats who favor cutting off these people's welfare benefits if they miss one meeting with a counselor, or leave one official letter unanswered, because this offers them 'incentive.' That's insane, and it's inhumane."

  "I'm not in favor of that approach, Barry, and you know it," Anne replied tightly. "You're new at this, and what you have to learn is that you'll help more people, in a more efficient manner, if you let your head rule your heart once in a while. We're professionals, and we're not going to do anybody any good if we start poking around with the underground people and get ourselves mugged, raped, beaten up or even killed. There are skeletons down there too, Barry; I know, because you told me about them."

  Barry flushed, and suddenly the veins in his thick neck stood out. "I'm not so sure I want to be so professional that I ignore a whole segment of people who desperately need help." He paused, slowly looked back and forth between the woman and Bone. "Besides," he continued in measured tones, "I don't think you're in any position to lecture me about professionalism, or about helping the greatest number of people with the most efficiency."

  Now it was Anne's turn to flush. "You're way out of line, Barry. Now you cool it."

  Barry Prindle's bright green eyes glinted with anger. He glared at Anne for a few moments, then abruptly turned and started for the door. There was a buzz and click as the door opened, and Barry walked quickly out. Anne hesitated, then started after him.

  "Please don't go," Bone heard himself say. The words surprised him, as did the sudden surge of emotion that had accompanied them.

  Anne stopped in the middle of the room, turned back, cocked her head slightly and smiled. She again brushed hair back from her eyes, walked back to the bed, took his right hand in both of hers and squeezed it.

  Suddenly Bone was embarrassed—and afraid. Up to the point when he had found himself asking the woman not to go, the stranger had seemed reasonably complete unto himself—anxious, afraid of what the truth about himself might reveal, yes, but not lonely, not needy in an emotional sense. Now he realized that had been an illusion. This woman, with her very special beauty, had a strong grip on his soul, he thought. It had been her voice that had formed the trail of sound he had followed to emerge from oblivion, her persistence and caring that, finally, had probably saved his life.

  Why had he apparently wanted to die?

  Down there is a world you wouldn't believe.

  It was dangerous for him to be vulnerable like this, Bone thought. He could not afford to need—much less risk falling in love with—anybody. He would only stand to lose even more in the end, be crushed even more by the truth about himself. Being too close to this lovely, tough yet gentle woman was extremely dangerous for him—and maybe for her, if he was indeed insane and ultimately unpredictable.

  But he did not take his hand away.

  "I'm sorry," he mumbled, averting his gaze from the face that was beginning to increasingly occupy his thoughts. "I have no right to keep you here. I know you've got more work than you can handle, and you've already been far more than kind to me. I don't want to keep you."

  "It's all right," Anne said, squeezing his hand again. "Barry needs some time to cool off, anyway. You put up a great front, Bone, but inside you must be terribly afraid and lonely. I try to imagine how I would feel and react if I were in your place, not able to remember my name or past; I'm sure I'd be curled up in a corner, bawling my eyes out. Or screaming."

  It was too close to how he did feel, too close to what he feared he would come to. It was what he feared his affection for this woman might trigger. Not trusting himself to speak, he said nothing.

  "Barry can sometimes be just a bit too full of himself," Anne continued. She spoke quickly, as if conscious of Bone's misgivings, and sensitive to the discomfort he felt in the silence. "He's a big boy, to be sure—but in many ways he is still a boy. He means well, he's exceptionally good in dealing with our clients, but he can be very immature. Sometimes I think he spent too many years in the seminary, even if he never
finished. He has an annoying tendency toward male chauvinism, and the fact that I'm his trainer and supervisor doesn't always sit too well with him. He tends to get upset when he realizes that I don't really need or want him hovering around all the time to protect me.

  "He's jealous," Bone said simply. "His interest in you is a lot more than professional."

  "Barry can also be very naive. I don't mean to criticize him, but he had no right to talk to either of us the way he did."

  Down there is a world you wouldn't believe.

  "What he had to say about what's under the ground around here interested me," Bone said carefully.

  Anne nodded, shrugged. "I guess it is interesting, at least from a historical point of view. You've got stuff downtown, around Wall and Canal streets and the Bowery, that dates back hundreds of years. Aaron Burr built one of the first waterworks down there underground somewhere, and that waterworks indirectly led to his duel with Alexander Hamilton. Do those names mean anything to you? Do you recall any history?"

  Bone shook his head. "I haven't really thought about any history but my own."

  "There was even a guy who built a private subway in the late eighteen hundreds. It was closed down and forgotten about. Then, in nineteen twelve, workers were digging the BMT—that's a subway line—and suddenly found themselves in the first subway's waiting room. Surprise, surprise." She paused, shuddered slightly, grimaced. "There's a lot of history down there, but there are also things like rats—probably as many rats underground as there are people in the city. Some of them are mutants, immune to poison, and they can grow to the size of terriers. There's disease, and death." She paused again, laughed nervously. "But then, I'm prejudiced. I'm afraid of the dark, Bone—like a child. Maybe it's because I'm legally blind in my left eye."

  "How did that happen?"