by Pete Hamill
Then they are on the narrow ledge and Cormac can see above them the blocked mouth of the cave. Another path moves right and turns abruptly to the higher ground. To a passing pilgrim, some Sunday hiker in pursuit of wildflowers or butterflies, this would be another blank outcrop of schist and granite, lost in a dark forest. But now he has found the path. The city is gone now, dissolved in the falling rain, screened by the primeval trees. He will see no more trembling eastern dawns, no more scarlet western dusks, no sun rising in Brooklyn to set in New Jersey. This is the end of it. The city itself is as erased from sight as the towers. Every man and woman, all those thousands who have just died, all the countless millions who preceded them, reduced now to us, to me, to you, Delfina, to the child, here at the sealed entrance to this last hidden cave. Up ahead are all the others I have loved, in the place where I will wait for you. I will see you soon, Da. I will tell you all that has happened.
Gathering strength, hugging Delfina to him, Cormac remembers his image of the city as gigantic horizontal sculpture, and now sees the gods, all of them, speaking Greek and Latin and Yoruba and Irish, looking down upon this last dreadful alteration, this atrocious mauling of life, and they decide that there should be no more time for the invisible sculptor. They will give all the puny humans twenty-four hours to evacuate, and then they will lift the island from its northern end, and raise it into the sky, thrust it thirteen miles above the harbor, and leave it there forever, as monument to human folly, as warning against all forms of hubris. Cormac sees it being lifted, hears the sucking sound as it rises from its mooring, sees the dangling roots of trees, the bones of humans long dead, the tangled web of ruptured sewers and water pipes and subway tunnels, all buses and automobiles and cranes and trucks falling loosely through the streets to the bottom, while the merging waters of the North River and the East River and the vast Atlantic rush in, to cover the jagged remains of what once was an island called Manhattan. And he sees himself: clinging to the side of the Woolworth Building, the last man left alive, the man who can’t evacuate, the man who must tell the story.
He looks down and Thunder has galloped once more into mist. A rich dark aroma of soaked earth and rotting vegetation rises through the rain to enter both of them. The water of Oshun. The sea of Usheen.
Then, carrying Delfina, he goes up the twisting path until he is at the sealed entrance of the cave that gave him too much life.
He holds her very tight, breathing into her ears and face, kissing her cracked nails and raw hands. The wind is rising.
I must do this, woman, for you, for the boy. He turns from her, and moves her out of the rain, and unsheathes the sword, and begins to chop furiously into the sealed entrance. A kind of cement has formed, made of stones and pebbles and sand, tufts of grass, the enameling power of rain. God damn you, God damn you, open, open to us. He smothers the rage, then makes controlled slices in the surface, wiggles the sword to widen them, then stabs with purpose at the next layer. He keeps thrusting until he feels an emptiness on the other side. He has breached the outer shell, and then the entrance crumbles into porous dust and rubble. He uses his weight and bulk and the sword to keep widening the hole, and then at last the mouth opens. He takes a flashlight from the backpack and peers down its rocky throat.
The cave.
The place where he will find the entrance to the Otherworld. His hidden shee in the American earth.
He pushes into the slit, turns, and gently drags Delfina behind him. She doesn’t stir. I know the child is safe, I know your body shields him, I know that he will live. He wraps the two of them inside the cape, gripping the bag, using it to cushion her body, and they slide gently down a slope, Cormac using his heels as brakes. Then they stop in the blackness. You will not lose him, you will not… He plays the flashlight against the walls. The cave has not changed since last he saw it: dry and high-roofed and deep. He sees the waxy stumps of old candles, made by men long dead, their wicks like tiny black fingers. He needs matches. The lighter. Where’s the lighter? He lifts Delfina and carries her to the place where he awoke long ago and saw Tomora, and felt her healing caress, and heard from Kongo about his gift of life, and its limiting terms, and its possibilities of escape. He lays Delfina on the cape and she moans in a chilly, helpless way.
Her feet are sliced and scabbed. Her face is swollen and distorted on one side, as if she had been punched. Her damaged hand seems thicker now. Her eyes are closed. Her breathing is slowing and then she moans and a hand goes to her stomach, to her spiraled belly, to the place where the child lives, to the place where the child might now be dying. Now Cormac lashes himself. She is broken and hurt and you brought her here because you need her for your own good-bye. You selfish idiot. She will die. The child will die. For you.
He touches her face. She begins to shake from the cold. Her teeth clack. Death has entered her.
He shouts at the emptiness: “Kongo! Where are you, Kongo?”
He arrives from the dark rear of the cave, not the entrance. He is dressed now entirely in white, including a white shawl over his shoulders. He looks at Cormac in the light of the upraised flash-light, says nothing, lights two of the candles with matches and then kneels over Delfina. Cormac switches the flashlight off as Kongo begins to chant in a language that is neither Yoruba nor Ashanti. His head is bowed. As he chants, he moves his own hands above her hands, and above her damaged face, and then takes each scabbed foot and runs his tongue over her wounds. His voice is pitched higher than her moaning. Then he places both hands a few inches above her stomach. He is more intense now, his voice rising from chant into plaintive song. His hands move horizontally above her stomach, then caress her belly, as his singing begins to float, to echo, to fill the cave.
The scabs on her feet fall away. The swelling leaves her face and her injured hand. Her moaning stops. Her eyes remain closed, but now she is radiant.
Kongo ends with a small song of supplication and then rises. He turns to the rear of the cave. To the darkness.
“The place you are searching for is back there,” he says, pointing into blackness.
He removes the white shawl from his shoulders and lays it over Delfina’s breasts and shoulders. He nods at Cormac, and then walks abruptly to the entrance, to climb the slope and go out into the wet New York night.
She sits up and faces Cormac, flexing her fingers, turning her feet as if they were adorned in spangles. She smiles in a shy way, she stretches, she rubs her hands on her belly. Her eyes move around the cave, wide in surprise and alarm.
“Where are we?” she says.
“In a cave in Inwood.”
“How did I get here?”
“I carried you.”
He holds her face in his hands and kisses her very lightly on the lips.
“I can feel him,” she whispers. “He’s there. He’s moving. He wants to meet you.”
He hugs Delfina, her golden warmth streaming into his own body, and he feels his own surging emotion, his need, his fear. They are quiet for a long time. And then she stares around her at the walls of the cave.
“I was in a staircase, packed with people, with lots of smoke,” she says, a kind of wonder in her voice. “There was thick smoke everywhere. I looked down and there were hands on banisters going down and down and down, all the way down.” She pauses. “There was a man in a wheelchair being carried by three men. Doors opened and the smoke was thicker, and we kept going down, and then there were firemen, lots of firemen, all going up, and we were reduced to one lane, and then we weren’t moving at all. Everybody was quiet. Nobody was crying. And I tried my cell phone, and it didn’t work, and I thought: I might die here. I might die here, carrying this baby, I might die here without… without ever saying good-bye to you.”
She begins to weep now, her body shaking with great wracking sobs.
“I was trying to find you too,” he says. “The cell phones didn’t work anywhere….”
Her weeping slows.
“After that, I don’t rem
ember much of anything,” she says. “Just running and falling. Like a dream you have when you’re six.”
He tells her what happened, and how both towers fell, how many thousands are dead, how Islamic hijackers took four different airliners and smashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, a field in Pennsylvania, how everybody is talking of war. She listens and doesn’t listen; she hears but does not hear. She stares straight ahead. Cormac says nothing for almost a minute, as her lips move silently and she absorbs what he has said. She clears her throat.
“They’ve ruined the world,” she whispers. “They’ve ruined the world where this boy will walk. They’ve ruined it, haven’t they? God damn them all.”
Candlelight suffuses the part of the cave in which they sit upon the cape. He gazes at her, feeling seconds becoming minutes, and then rises to one knee and turns to face her. He takes her hand. She looks at him with wariness in her eyes.
“I have to tell you a story,” he says. “One that I’ve never told you, or anyone else, and one you never asked to hear.”
“So tell it, man.”
He takes a deep breath, then exhales slowly.
“I was born in 1723, in the north of Ireland,” he begins. She smiles up at him as if expecting a joke, but his serious face keeps her from saying anything. “When I was sixteen, my father was killed over a horse….”
And so he tells her about the Earl of Warren and how he crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of the man, intending to kill him. He tells her about the indentured Irish and the slaves in the hold of the Fury and how he helped give the Africans food and water. He explains about the revolt, and how he saved Kongo’s life, and how his blood merged with the African’s blood as they rode north to this cave.
“He was a babalawo,” Cormac says.
“A babalawo.”
“And in this cave, he gave me a gift.”
“Eternal life,” she says.
Cormac is surprised. “How did you know that?”
“A babalawo can do that,” she says. “The babalawo in Puerto Rico, the man who made my tattoos? Some people say that he’s been there since before the Spaniards arrived. That another babalawo gave him the gift… He was here just now, wasn’t he? I can smell him. I know that smell. And he healed me, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
She stands now too, pulling the white shawl tightly over her shoulders, bending her head to inhale its odor, gazing around the visible part of the cave.
“You really are a little old for me, man,” she says, and laughs. “I’m a little old for everybody.”
She turns with a wistful smile on her face.
“What’s the rest of it about?” she says. “There’s got to be more.”
“There is.”
“You’re gonna leave me, right?”
He doesn’t answer directly.
“There were terms to the gift,” he says. “I couldn’t leave Manhattan. If I did, I would die. And I’d be barred from the Other-world. It would be a form of suicide, and suicide was forbidden…. That’s why I couldn’t go to Brooklyn with you, or Orchard Beach. I was told by the babalawo that I would meet a dark-skinned woman adorned with spirals and that I would make love to her in this cave and then I could pass over…. I looked for the woman for many years and never found her. Until the day I saw you on Fourteenth Street. This might all sound preposterous, but it’s true. I’ve lived it. My life is the proof.”
He thinks: There is no time to tell her how he had lived through all the history of the city, how he absorbed its life, its menace, its cruelties, its toughness, its joys and sorrows and beauties. He could tell her about the women he knew and the friends he made and how Bill Tweed gave him the house on Duane Street, and how everybody he loved had died. But there’s no time. There is no time to tell her of the men he killed. No time to explain how his enemies had died, how houses had died, and neighborhoods had died, and how he kept going: through words and art and time.
She walks around him, looking at him. She pinches the flesh of his arm as if to verify his presence. Then she laughs in a bitter way.
“This is such a bitch,” she says. “I loved you so I could live. And you loved me so you could die.”
She leans down and lifts the cape, angrily shaking away its dust, and slips it over her shoulders with the white shawl beneath it. She picks up a candle.
“I’ll see you, Cormac,” she says, and begins to walk toward the deep part of the cave, the dark unknown place that Kongo pointed to for Cormac.
“Delfina—”
“If you want to die, go ahead,” she says, tossing the words over her shoulder. “I’m just not gonna help.”
Her candle bobs as he goes after her.
“Don’t go there,” he says, his voice echoing now. “That’s the wrong way out. That’s not for you.”
He reaches for her, finds her hand. In the light of the candle, her skin is the color of cinnamon, her eyes liquid with fear and hurt.
“Don’t go there,” he says.
She begins to bawl. A great hopeless weeping, filling the cave. The candle falls and goes out. He holds her, running hands through her hair, caressing her skin, kissing her eyes and ears and mouth, until they fall to the ground, fall upon the cape, fall together, and begin to make love.
“Go,” she whispers, “go. Just go. Please go. Go.”
They rise into each other, joining as one, writhing and weeping and gnashing, obliterating life in the little death. And then breathe as one. And lie silent.
Off in the distance, in the far reaches of the cave, Cormac can see a sliver of emerald light.
* * *
He snaps on the flashlight. Her head is turned away from him. He takes the spiral earrings from a pocket. He clips them to her ears.
“Wear these,” he says. “Wear them always.”
“I will,” she says, sitting up and leaning her head to one side and then the other. The earrings dangle in the light, changing shape with each movement of her head. “I’ll always wear them.”
He feels empty now, and free: the story told, the secret revealed. If she has questions, she can ask them now. She asks no questions.
He stands up now, finds the fallen candle, lights it with his lighter. He gazes at her face, its toughness and humor and the way the flicker of candlelight keeps altering her beauty and the way the yellow light glistens on the earrings. Without a word, he takes a breath, picks up the flashlight, and hands it to her. Then he takes the candle and moves into the darkness.
Up there, somewhere, is the entrance. Beyond the jagged stone and the dripping walls. All of them are waiting for him in the emerald light. Some have been waiting for a very long time. His father and his mother, Mr. Partridge and Bill Tweed, Bantu and the black patrol, women and friends, even Bran. He raises the candle and plays the light on the walls. He sees the ceiling lower. He sees a crack that in the distance seems to be an inch wide. He can hear a flute. A damp gust of wind blows out the candle. He moves closer. They are all there, beyond the shimmer of emerald light. All the people he has ever loved.
Except one.
He turns and walks back to Delfina. He reaches down and takes her hand.
“Let’s go, mi amor,” he says.
“Where?”
“Dancing,” he says. “Let’s go dancing.”
He feels her smooth, pliant hand pulsing with life.
“All right,” she says.
“We can try to find a cab.”
“That would be nice.”
“I love you, mi vida,” he says.
“But for how long, señor?”
“Forever,” he says, and they start to climb together toward the rain-drowned city.
By way of thanks
This is a work of fiction, an imagined journey through times past and present. But it was stimulated by my own many decades as a New Yorker, by my reporting during four of those decades on the events and people of my native city, and by a lifetime of reading into the extraordin
ary history of the city itself.
Among the books I cherish, and which helped directly or indirectly in the imagining of this narrative, are the amazing six volumes of The Iconography of Manhattan Island: 1498–1909 by I. N. Phelps Stokes. These were given to me in his last year of life by my friend Edward Robb Ellis, author of The Epic of New York City, which itself remains a fine introduction to our dense, layered history. More than a decade ago, Eddie Ellis urged me to write this novel; I wish I could have handed him his own copy. I will miss him all my days.
I also learned much from Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace. This is the first of two volumes, and it is a majestic piece of work. Its dense pages contain the raw material for hundreds of novels and will continue to inspire scholars and writers long after all of us are gone. It’s a book that every New Yorker should read, along with all others who want to understand this very American city.
In addition, The Encyclopedia of New York City, brilliantly edited by Kenneth T. Jackson, is an invaluable resource for all of us who still marvel at the endless complexity of this metropolis.
For many years, the diaries of Philip Hone and George Templeton Strong have helped put me into the New York that has vanished but is still not gone. The novels of Louis Auchincloss and Edith Wharton have helped bring that world to vivid life, elaborating the many generations that were built upon the original templates cut by Strong and Hone. I’ve absorbed all of them in different ways.
My own vision of William M. Tweed was deepened by Oliver E. Allen’s The Tiger: The Rise and Fall of Tammany Hall, Alfred Connable and Edward Silberfarb’s Tigers of Tammany, Leo Hershkowitz’s Tweed’s New York: Another Look, and Denis Tilden Lynch’s “Boss�� Tweed: The Story of a Grim Generation, a 1927 biography with a fierce tabloid energy. The last book was passed to me by my old New York Post editor, Paul Sann, who originally drove me to understand the history of New York while educating me as a reporter.
