“I don’t know yet,” she said. “But something.”
“You’d be better off letting it go.”
“Sure,” she said. “You’re right.”
They both knew she wouldn’t listen to his advice.
Chapter 4
November 27, 3:17 p.m.
Gallo Underground House
New York City
Edison’s warm nose nuzzled against Joe’s knee, and he looked up from his laptop. “What, boy? Can’t you see I’m busy?”
He wasn’t really busy. He was never busy these days. On the day of his first panic attack, he’d quit work. Now he just screwed around online.
The dog looked pointedly toward the door. He wanted to go outside. The poor guy had been watching Joe stare at his laptop screen and pound on the keys for hours. Dogs must think humans are completely strange.
Joe checked his laptop’s clock. Just after three. Time for Edison’s walk. It was as if the dog had his own built-in chronometer. Joe stood up and stretched, causing Edison to make a break for the door. Joe loitered and looked around the room. It had originally been called the parlor, and it existed in a kind of time warp. Crimson velvet curtains, drawn on two walls, seemed to shut out the light of day. But, of course, they didn’t. The light of day never made it down here. The curtains hid stained glass windows backed by stone.
He’d been sitting in a leather wingback chair with his laptop. In front of him an electric fireplace crackled like the real thing. He turned it on most evenings, for the warmth and the soothing noise. Even though the fireplace looked modern, the mantel built around it was an antique treasure made of hand-carved mahogany. He counted the sea shells scattered atop it—cyan, blue, red, green, brown, orange, and slate flashed in his head. A human skull rested among them and a statue of the Egyptian cat Goddess, Bastet, carved from black basalt. It had been collected by the Victorian gentleman who’d insisted on living here, in the midst of his greatest creation.
Joe envied him. As much as he loved the house, he didn’t live here by choice. If he could have gone, he’d have been outside in a heartbeat, living in a glass house with the ceiling open to the sky. But he couldn’t.
Joe turned off the fireplace and walked past the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with leather-bound volumes and passed a large oil painting of a girl in a gauzy white dress. He found Edison waiting in the front hall, holding his leash in his mouth, next to an umbrella stand made from an elephant’s leg. Joe made sure that Edison got outside in the sunlight and fresh air every day—he wasn’t about to force the dog to stay in his underground prison all the time. Like everyone else in New York, he’d hired a dog walker.
They closed the door and walked along the planks to the elevator. The house sat in the middle of a long tunnel. Both ends of the tunnel were capped by giant metal doors accessible only by entering the eight-digit code and using the key in Joe’s pocket. Near one end of the tunnel was an elevator that would take him up into the famous clock at Grand Central Terminal. He also knew of a fourth exit—a secret passageway behind the bookcase in his bedroom that he’d discovered quite by accident—but he rarely used it because he had to scramble through it on his hands and knees.
He pressed the button, and the elevator doors opened automatically. Since he was practically the only one who ever came down here, the elevator was where he’d left it.
The doors opened on an antique birdcage elevator of curling wrought iron. The wall beyond was visible through the metal lacework. This contraption was older than Joe, his mother, and probably his grandmother.
He tried not to think about it. With Edison at his heels, Joe stepped inside and pulled the metal grate closed, before moving the elevator lever to the side. He had to hold it in position all the way up, or the car would stop.
Stone walls slid by. He imagined poking his finger through the fancy iron, pulling back a bloody stump. Elevators had come a long way in the last century. Now they had safety features, like walls and extra cables. Even with those safety features, twenty-six (blue for two, orange for six) people per year died in elevators. What’d those numbers been like when they built this behemoth?
As usual, though, the creaky old elevator functioned flawlessly, and the doors opened onto a tiny room with a spiral staircase. At the top of the stairs he lifted a hatch and climbed out with Edison close behind, carefully closing the hatch before turning to the next door. It opened into the round information booth underneath the clock in the center of Grand Central Terminal.
“Good afternoon, Miss Evaline,” he said to the cheerful black woman sitting on the chair there.
She gave him a quick nod before returning to dispensing rapid-fire advice to a lost traveler. She had an extraordinary memory and was unfailingly polite and patient even as she had kindly refused him admission to the information booth over and over until he’d gotten his paperwork in order to move down below.
As always, his eyes were drawn upward to the giant rounded ceiling, background now restored to greenish blue with Zodiac constellations painted on it. It was the only night sky he ever saw anymore.
No self-pity.
He glanced toward the square pillars standing along one side of the concourse and at each of the large staircases flanking the giant room. One set of stairs led to a giant American flag and a restaurant, the other to another restaurant with no flag. He’d eaten at both.
Straight ahead in the hall, people darted back and forth like ants across the polished marble floor. Some headed to the giant information board that listed scheduled trains. Others walked down to the train platforms. He and Edison wove through them to the interior hall leading to the Grand Hyatt Hotel.
Unlike the terminal, the Hyatt was modern. It made no attempt at old-fashioned architectural style, just dark glass walls and a flashy silver front at street level. Functional, straightforward, uncomplicated. Its only nod to color was the red slash through its logo. Joe remembered these details from when he’d checked in, six months before.
Joe had to take a few deep breaths to cross through, because one side was a wall of glass lit by sunshine. He could deal with windows, but only if they weren’t too big and had substantial frames. He pulled open the heavy door and stepped inside the opulent lobby, the genteel patter of a fountain the only sound, the room empty but for a few seats occupied by well-dressed travelers.
He and Edison headed straight to the wooden coffee shack housing Starbucks. Tiffany already had his coffee waiting. Service with a smile, every afternoon.
A spray of freckles danced on the bridge of her nose when she smiled. The distinctive pattern of those freckles set her face apart from anyone else’s on earth. He tipped her, bought today’s New York Times, and sat to read it. His new daily routine—the refuge of the unemployed or the early retired—crossword puzzles.
He scanned the lobby for Leandro. Some afternoons, if Leandro was free, he would join Joe for coffee. After giving up on the battle for the house, he’d been surprisingly sensitive to Joe’s condition.
No Leandro today, which meant Joe had nothing to distract him.
According to the New York Times, his erstwhile company was doing well without him. On the day Joe had freaked out, Sunil Raghavan, Pellucid’s chief financial officer and Joe’s best friend at the company, had managed to get Joe back to his room and then cabbed it to the NYSE himself in time to watch the chief executive officer ring the bell that Joe, as chief technology officer, was supposed to have rung.
Joe had retired that very day. The new CTO still called him with questions, and every month or so the other executives mounted a campaign to persuade him to come back. What use was a man who couldn’t even go outside?
He was grateful that one of the Gallos, probably his friend Leandro, had run down a fiber-optic cable to wire the underground house for Internet. Joe’d hooked it up to a couple of Wi-Fi routers so that he had Internet all over the house and for some distance into the tunnels outside. Being fully connected gave him access to a giant
trove of time-wasting media.
A woman in black spandex pants and a green jacket jogged across the lobby. She passed the escalator and sprinted down the stairs, auburn ponytail bobbing. He counted to ten (cyan, blue, red, green, brown, orange, slate, purple, scarlet, and cyan plus black). She was probably outside by now, running down the dirty sidewalk, buildings leaning in toward her, hundreds of people jostling against her. He willed himself to think of something else, to calm his breathing, to still his racing heart.
He’d tried to go outside again, several times. Each time he’d reached the bottom of the escalator, he’d known he would die if he took another step. The psychiatrists labeled his feelings a panic attack. An attack of panic. True, but not useful. It failed to capture the intensity of the experience, how his brain short-circuited and drove him back from the door.
He’d always trusted his brain, but now it was betraying him.
No one could tell him why. In the first days, he’d grilled the doctors and scoured the Internet, searching for a reason why he was incapacitated if he tried to do something he’d done every single day of his life—go outside.
His sources said that sudden onset agoraphobia was not unusual. A little over three million (red followed by six beats of black) people in the US suffered from agoraphobia, and no one knew why it sometimes appeared out of the clear blue sky. There were theories, but none stood up to careful scrutiny. His psychiatrists, and he’d been through a few, seemed to agree that he needed to work on controlling his panic attacks, that the first attack was probably triggered by the stress of taking Pellucid public and perhaps a genetic predisposition passed down the Tesla line. Joe’s father, too, had agoraphobia, and a few had speculated that their most-famous ancestor, Nikola Tesla, had had it, too.
Joe had asked them if his condition could have been triggered by a chemical, if a person might have slipped a drug into his drink at the party he’d attended the night before his agoraphobia struck. This suggestion had been met with a universal “no.” Long-term tranquilizer and alcohol abuse might cause agoraphobia, but nothing they knew of could do it in one shot. He’d demanded, and gotten, blood tests that had revealed nothing and caused the psychiatrists to brand him as paranoid.
His hands trembled as he opened the newspaper. The shakes came from the last dregs of the antidepressants. He’d been through a couple of regimens designed to calm him down enough to get his feet onto the sidewalk outside. None had worked, and each one had made him stupider than the last. He had to think clearly, so he’d stopped the drugs.
He’d stay inside forever before he’d poison his brain.
Besides, he was managing just fine. He had plenty of room to roam. An internal walkway linked Grand Central Terminal to the Hyatt, so he could get there without going through the front door and outside. The giant complex contained restaurants and all the shops he needed. It was big enough to give him exercise, and he’d joined the Vanderbilt Tennis and Fitness Club on the third floor of the station. He didn’t play tennis, but it had a decent gym and a window looking out onto the street below, under the giant statue of Mercury he’d admired on the last day he had been able to go outside. Plus, he had his new house and the tunnels underneath New York—train tunnels, subway tunnels, steam tunnels, coal chutes. He had a bigger range than most people chose to exercise.
But he lived in fear that it would get worse. That his brain would betray him again, make him terrified of more things, shrink his world into smaller and smaller circles. Moving down into the tunnels was his attempt to fight back. It would have been too easy just to stay at the Hyatt forever, waited on hand and foot, but down here he had miles and miles to explore.
Whole afternoons were spent wandering the platforms underneath Grand Central Terminal, breathing in the smell of soot and engine oil, and watching people board trains and head off into the wider world. It cheered him up. He had things under control. He was fine.
Right now, though, he had nothing to do but wait for the dog walker, and he was bored. And a bored Joe was trouble. A little bit of hacking would make him feel better. Nothing big. Or maybe something big was what he needed.
He clicked on the picture of a seagull nestled behind several of his on-screen windows. He’d downloaded it the night before, thinking to do something with the image to make Celeste smile—maybe an animation of it flying.
Now he had a better idea. He grinned as he opened his laptop. He’d already cloaked its IP address so that it was difficult to trace, but he bounced through a few computers before he got to an illegal iPhone-monitoring site he’d heard about. With a few clicks, he checked Times Square for iPhones. Plenty to choose from.
He brought up a live camera view of Times Square to see the precise location of those phones. Some were right where he needed them. By the billboards.
As he’d expected, most of the billboards used Wi-Fi feeds with simple encryption. Not a problem. He hummed as he took control of one billboard after another, beaming the image of a seagull through his network of borrowed phones and onto the electronic billboards.
He smiled as the seagull in flight appeared next to one person and then another when he shifted the image from phone to phone. It looked as if a flock of giant seagulls flew in and out between the billboards. Slowly, people noticed. Then, they stopped and stared. Even the ones whose phones he’d hijacked had no idea of their role in the drama unfolding around them.
A stir in the lobby drew his attention from his laptop. A few quick keystrokes disconnected him from the phones and computers until his laptop looked ordinary and honest. He bet the seagulls would make the news. He’d have to tell Celeste to watch for it. Seagulls were her favorite birds.
Edison stood and wagged his tail, and Joe followed his gaze. Andres Peterson, a half-Estonian artist, was walking across the lobby toward them. A long woolen coat that looked as if it had been through a mysterious Eastern European war or two flared out behind him. He had light blue eyes and artfully disheveled brown hair. Celeste had recommended him as both an artist and a dog walker. Joe liked the photos he’d seen of his melancholy giant metal sculptures, and Edison adored him.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Tesla.” Andres took Edison’s head in his hands. “And Edison the Dog.”
Edison’s eyes shone and his tail wagged furiously. Edison was usually a somber dog, but Andres turned him into a puppy.
“Today we go to Central Park, bury some bones?” He lifted an eyebrow to ask. A scar bisected the eyebrow, perhaps from a fight or a long-ago piercing. The scar worked as a distinctive identifying mark. With his air of mystery and sexy accent, Andres was more Celeste’s type than Joe had ever been, and Joe wondered again if the two had dated.
“Central Park sounds good,” Joe said. No point in being jealous of the past. He liked Andres—the man was good-natured, smart, and great at his dog-walking job.
“One day, you come with us,” Andres said. “Not always working.”
Joe suspected that Celeste hadn’t told Andres about his condition. If she had, Andres never let on. “Maybe.”
He handed Andres the leash and watched the pair walk across the lobby on their way outside. For them, it was as simple as that.
Once they were out of sight, he dialed the number he’d dialed every day since he’d become trapped in New York. He held his breath waiting for an answer. One ring, cyan; two rings, blue; three rings, red.
“Hey, Joe,” said a weak and breathless voice.
“Celeste.” Relief flooded through him. She was well enough to talk on the phone.
“Think me a number,” she said.
“Seven,” he said. “Slate blue, like your eyes.”
Only Celeste understood about the numbers. A talented abstract painter, she loved blocks of color. She danced them around in her head as he did numbers.
“A cheap line,” she whispered. “I’ll take it.”
“Your eyes are cerulean,” he said. “Blue with a wash of gray, like slate or the sea before a storm—and the number sev
en.”
A tiny laugh came down the line, and he laughed with her.
When they’d been together, she’d painted him a giant canvas using shades of blue and gray, and called it Joe’s #7. It hung on the wall of his house in California. By the time he’d thought to buy it, it had cost a fortune. He made a mental note to get the painting shipped to New York.
“Is it a strong day?” he asked.
“Minus one,” she answered.
Celeste had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. It was slowly paralyzing her. Eventually, it would reach her respiratory system, and she would die. Most people who contracted it died within three to five years. He reminded himself every day that Stephen Hawking lived with it for more than fifty years (brown followed by black—a big, reassuring number).
“Minus one,” he said. “Cyan for one, but pale because it’s negative.”
“You make me smile,” she said.
“I made you a present today.”
“Oh, God,” she said. “Have you taken up knitting or papier-mâché?”
“Not yet.” He smiled. “Check the news. Look for the seagulls.”
She laughed, a short wheezy sound. “As soon as I get off the phone, but I wish you were here to show me in person.”
His stomach clenched. “If I could, I’d get a cab at the curb and see you in ten minutes.”
“Best you don’t,” she said. “My hair looks awful.”
“You always say that.” He remembered the last time he’d seen her, how her wavy blond hair had blown into his mouth when she hugged him good-bye at an airport. “And it’s never true. You have the most beautiful hair I’ve ever seen—like butterscotch syrup with strands of honey gold.”
“Remember the chocolate syrup at my parents’ house in the Hamptons?”
“Till my dying day.” Messy for the sheets, but worth every frantic second of cleanup after.
“It should have been butterscotch.”
He closed his eyes and wished that he could arrive on her doorstep with a jar of butterscotch syrup and a smile. Of all the things the agoraphobia had taken from him, this was the worst.
The World Beneath (Joe Tesla) Page 4
