Twice: A Novel

by Lisa Unger

  He leaned forward quickly on the table and Lydia felt the guard twitch at her side.

  “Sit back, Murphy,” he barked at Jetty. His voice boomed off the cold walls and filled the room. Murphy jumped back as if he’d been shocked.

  “It’s okay,” said Ford, looking at the guard. “Me and Jetty go way back. Right, Jetty?”

  “That’s right. Way back,” said Jetty, relaxing and casting a smug smile at the guard.

  “I can’t make you a deal, Jetty. I won’t lie to you. But I might be able to get you a few privileges, put in a good word at your next review. I’ll tell you straight that you don’t have to help me. But I’d really be grateful if you did.”

  Something about the way Ford had softened his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, the way he leaned in slightly toward Jetty, seemed to have an impact. Jetty looked less hopeless, a little less edgy. Lydia had to remind herself that she was looking at a rapist and a murderer, but it was hard not to have compassion for someone who just seemed so weak, so desperate. Ford lifted a bag that had been sitting by his feet filled with candy bars and a carton of cigarettes.

  “I remembered that you used to have a sweet tooth, Jetty.”

  “We’re not allowed to have that stuff here,” he said, casting a sidelong glance at the guard and a longing look at the bag.

  “I’m sure I could get them to bend a few rules if you help me today, Jetty. What do you say?”

  Jetty shrugged, trying and failing to look nonchalant. “What do you want to know?”

  Ford took a Baby Ruth from the bag and slid it over to Jetty, who grabbed it up, ripped the wrapper off, and shoved it in his mouth in one movement. He pressed the bar into his mouth, chewing at it frantically, smearing chocolate on his face, as if he were afraid if he didn’t eat it fast someone would snatch it from him. Lydia looked away. It was pathetic. She wondered what had to happen to a person in his life that he wound up here, like this.

  Ford took a photograph from his pocket and slid it over to Jetty, waiting patiently for him to finish eating. When he was done, Jetty wiped his hands on his jumper, leaving long streaks of chocolate up his leg. He reached for the photograph and stared at it.

  “It’s a painting. But does this face look familiar to you?” asked Ford.

  “Yeah … yeah. It’s the man I saw that night. The one I told you about.”

  “Tell me again what you saw that night.”

  “I was behind this building looking through the garbage. I was a junkie then and I was always looking for something to sell, you know. I heard voices up above me … loud, scared. It sounded like two men and one woman.” He was talking fast, the sugar making him hyper.

  “Try to remember now, Jetty, did you hear anything that you could understand? Did you hear what they were saying?”

  Jetty closed his eyes as if trying to transport himself back to that night.

  “I heard the woman. I heard something she said.”

  Ford looked surprised. “You did? You didn’t mention that ten years ago.”

  “Didn’t I?” Jetty shrugged. Then, “You don’t believe me?”

  “Sure I do. What did she say?”

  “She said, ‘I don’t love you. Not like that. I never did.’ She screamed it. I mean, she was screaming her lungs out. And then another voice, said, ‘You’re lying. It’s time to surrender.’ He was yelling, too. That was all I could understand.”

  Lydia caught the word and remembered what Julian had said to Dr. Barnes, that she’d chosen to surrender.

  Ford looked at Jetty and couldn’t decide whether the guy was full of shit or not. Jetty had given a statement and testified in court ten years ago and had never mentioned those words before. But why would he be lying now?

  “Then there was a, like … I don’t know how to say other than it was like a roar. It was scary, man. I almost bolted, but there was a lot of good garbage. Then I didn’t hear anything for a while except a sound that could have been the woman crying, like a low wailing. And then, when I thought it was over and started looking in the trash again, the back door of the building came slamming open and a giant man with long gray dreads, just like this,” he said, lifting the picture, “came out. He turned, but I was behind the Dumpster, he didn’t see me. It was dark, but I saw part of his face. Then he ran. I don’t know why, but I followed him. But he just disappeared … he rounded the corner of Prince and Lafayette and he was gone. That’s it. That’s what I saw.”

  Ford was impressed that this man who was so fried from drugs and medication remembered anything at all. Except for the conversation he claimed to have overheard, the details of the story hadn’t changed much in ten years, though Ford didn’t remember Jetty telling him that he’d seen the man’s face. He would have remembered that; they would have had a sketch done or something. As far as he knew, the man in the painting was a figment of Julian Ross’s twisted imagination and Jetty was just embellishing his story to make himself feel important.

  “And you’re sure that this person in the photograph is the person you saw?” asked Ford.

  “You wouldn’t forget that face if you saw it,” said Jetty, and Ford could see Jetty believed it to be the truth.

  “You sure you didn’t see anything else when you rounded the corner? Think back. A cab speeding off, a door closing … any hint of where he could have gone.”

  “There was a subway station.”

  “When we went down into that subway station, there was a metal gate. It was locked up. He couldn’t have gone any farther.”

  “Well, that’s not true. I know things now about those entrances that I didn’t know then,” said Jetty with a sly smile, tapping his foot rapidly on the floor. Lydia could see that some of his teeth were brown and jagged, some of them missing entirely.

  “What’s that?” asked Ford.

  “People live down there, man. In the tunnels. The mole people.”

  “Give me a break, Jetty.”

  “No, for real. There’s, like, a whole society under there … mainly psychos and junkies, but they’re under there. They make whole, like, towns … with mayors and ‘runners,’ people who go topside for stuff. I’m not making this up. You can check it out for yourself.”

  “I’ll do that,” said Ford. He wasn’t about to engage in an argument with a prisoner in a mental institution. It was a story he had heard before but never quite believed. The thought of people lurking beneath the ground, living their lives out there, was just too weird to be true. A lot of cops he knew believed it, but he’d never seen any evidence of it. Anyway, anybody who was willing to go down there to investigate the possibility had a screw loose, as far as he was concerned—Jeff and Dax included.

  Jetty seemed to have fixated on Lydia after he finished talking. He couldn’t take his eyes off of her and Ford couldn’t blame him. It must have been a long time since he’d seen a woman like Lydia.

  “I know you,” he said suddenly, pointing a bony finger at her, his mouth widening into a jagged grin.

  “I don’t think so,” said Lydia with a polite smile.

  “Yeah, I do,” he said, nodding vigorously. “You’re Jed McIntyre’s girlfriend.”

  The sound of Dax knocking on the metal door reverberated on the concrete around them and sounded like thunder. Silence was the answer and the two of them stood holding their breaths, waiting. Jeff was half hoping that no one would respond to the knocking so that they could get the hell out of there.

  After a moment, they heard a shuffling inside and then a thin tentative voice whispered, “Who?”

  “Danielle sent us. She said you could help us find someone,” Dax answered, sounding as casual as if they were selling Girl Scout cookies door-to-door.

  The door opened slowly and Dax and Jeff entered a small, tidy, warm space that was lit with hurricane lamps. The ceiling must have been sixteen feet high and the floor was actually carpeted. Large cushions and beanbag chairs were scattered about the floor, and a wooden table leaned against the far wall covere
d with a black crocheted tablecloth and topped with silk flowers in a blue and white vase, a chair on either side. A futon mattress was covered with sheets and quilts and plenty of pillows. A small refrigerator hummed in the corner and a kettle sat on top of a hot plate.

  “There’s electricity here?” said Dax, incredulous, looking around him.

  “Of course, young man. Just because we’re houseless doesn’t mean we’re uncivilized,” said the woman who let them in.

  “Of course,” said Dax, throwing Jeff a look.

  “My name’s Violet,” she said. Her voice sounded like coins dropped on tin, her white hair stuck out like wires. Her eyes, sunken and misshapen, were an unnerving shade of violet, hence her name, Jeff imagined. And it only took a second to realize that her fixed stare meant she was blind. Short and round, with hunched shoulders and a shuffling gate, she took Jeff’s hand as he and Dax introduced themselves with a strong confident grip. She wore a gray bathrobe over a pilled, stained green sweater and navy blue sweatpants. Her feet had been shoved into too-small black Chinese slippers. Using a cane to move across the room, she seated herself stiffly on a pile of cushions.

  “Have a seat and tell me, what can I do for you boys?” Violet asked affably.

  Jeff and Dax seated themselves across from the old woman and told her who they were looking for. Jeff wondered if it was impolite to point out at this time that he was unsure how a blind woman could help them to find Jed McIntyre.

  “Just like topside, there is good and evil under here,” the old woman said as she stared off at nothing. “The balance is the same, just some people up there hide themselves better. Down here, all pretenses have been dropped. The one you are looking for is down here. He’s a different kind of bad.”

  “I don’t want to be rude,” said Dax, “but you’re blind. How could you know that?”

  “If anything, I’m at an advantage,” she said. “You two stumbled through the tunnels, not used to the dark. I heard you coming ten minutes before you arrived. Darkness is my natural habitat. I’ve only got these lights on for visitors. Besides, I’ve been down here longer than most. People come to me for advice, with gossip. I know everything that goes on.”

  Jeff and Dax exchanged a look. Jeff’s disbelief was palpable, but Dax shrugged. Jeff stared at the woman, who he thought looked a little bit like Yoda without the ears. He didn’t question her sanity; he could tell by the way she spoke that she was as sound as either of them, educated, intelligent.

  “Well, then … where is he?”

  “I’ll have to take you there myself. If you don’t mind following behind an old blind woman,” she said with a raspy noise that was somewhere between a cough and a giggle.

  “And what do you want for your help?” asked Dax. In his experience, people like this never did anything for nothing. It was the way of the streets.

  She cocked her head a bit. “Young man, I just want him out of the tunnels. People are afraid of him. They call him The Virus because that one’s no good for anyone. No one’s safe with him down here. People start coming after him, and we’re all gonna be in trouble. It starts with you two, next thing you know it will be the police, the FBI. This hole,” she said, waving her cane, “is the only place I have in the world. I lose this and I have nothing.”

  Dax nodded. “Well, let’s go, then.”

  The three of them exited her nest and continued down the tunnel that had led them to her home. Violet led the way and Dax trailed behind them. The going was slow and the darkness and stench became less and less tolerable the deeper they got. The flashlight Dax carried created a narrow beam of light, but there were so many edges and corners it didn’t illuminate that it didn’t make the blackness any less menacing. After a while, Jeff lost track of the turns and stairways they had taken and said a silent prayer that this woman could be trusted enough to lead them back.

  Though she walked with a limp and a cane, Violet didn’t stumble and grope in the darkness as Dax and Jeff did, didn’t seem startled by the sounds of rats or voices in the distance. She was home and they were not; she could see and they were blind.

  “How did you wind up down here, Violet?” asked Jeff, after they’d been walking awhile. She’d pushed off the offer of his arm and lumbered up ahead of him. She sighed lightly as if she’d been expecting the question but was reluctant to answer it.

  “How did you not wind up down here, Jeffrey?” she asked in return. “There’s no easy answer to that question, is there? How many decisions little and big did you make every day of your life, how many factors known and unknown to you, within and out of your control, led to your life being what it is today?”

  “I never thought of it that way,” he answered, chastened.

  “Why would you? You don’t seem like the kind of person who has a whole lot of reason to question your decisions … and maybe not a whole lot of time, even if you had reason. Me, I find that I have plenty of both. Reasons and time, that is,” she said without bitterness, her voice little more than a whisper.

  “So what did you come up with?” Jeff could sense Dax moving in closer to hear the answer.

  “Short version: I was born blind, like I told you, in the late thirties. Part of a large Irish family living in a railroad flat in the East Village. I grew up, got married, was a teacher at the Helen Keller School for the Blind. My husband, Patrick, worked in the Bowery sweatshops making men’s shirts. He handled all our finances and I trusted him to do it, even though he was a drunk and a gambler. I thought that all our lives we were putting money away for our old age. I had a pension, insurance. But when he died about ten years ago, I learned that he had drunk and gambled away every penny, even going so far as to take a loan against my pension. It was only a matter of months after his funeral that I was on the street.”

  “No family?” asked Dax.

  “None I could turn to,” she said quietly.

  “But there have to be programs set up to help “Jeff began.

  Violet held up a crooked hand. “I won’t live in a shelter or a hospital where they treat me like an invalid. I need my own space. This is not so bad … for a blind person. At least it’s quiet. I got people who bring me everything I need, a comfortable place to sleep. I’m safer down here than I would be up there.”

  “I could help you, Violet,” said Jeff. He thought of his own mother, who’d died five years back from pancreatic cancer surrounded by loved ones. If she had to die, he was happy she’d died like that, knowing that she was loved, that her life had meant something. He would rather have died himself than imagine her like Violet, living in a coffin.

  “You’re a nice boy,” she said, not turning around to face him. “But I’m like one of those recidivists. You know, those guys in jail who bitch and moan about how bad they want out of prison. But then they get out and they don’t even know what to do with themselves. They go right back. I don’t think I could live another life.”

  “Well, you get in touch with me through Dax and Danielle if you change your mind. You help me get Jed McIntyre and I’ll owe you my life,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder.

  She shrugged him off. “I don’t like to be touched,” she said sternly.

  “Sorry,” answered Jeff, turning around to look at Dax, who lifted his hands with a grin. He pointed a finger to his temple and made a circle in the air mouthing, Crazy. Jeff shook his head.

  “We’re coming into Rain’s territory now,” she said. “Stay close to me and keep your mouths shut.”

  “Who’s Rain?” asked Dax.

  “Someone down here that you don’t want to fuck with.”

  Dax gave a smug little laugh and Jeff checked the Glock at his waist.

  “What did you say?” asked Lydia as the ground and the room around her seemed to disappear. She looked at the wretched man before her and he looked back with a lascivious leer. She wanted to leap across the room and strangle him, but she kept her place by the guard. The room suddenly felt hot and small and she wanted nothing m
ore than to leave except to know why this little psycho thought she was Jed McIntyre’s girlfriend.

  “What are you talking about, Jetty?” asked Ford, the sweet lulling tone he’d been using to coax information out of Jetty gone, cast off like a bad disguise. His voice was a fist poised to take care of Jetty’s few remaining teeth.

  Jetty turned to look at him in surprise, the smile he wore flickering into a worried frown. He looked sadly at the bag of candy and cigarettes that Ford still had under his hand.

  “J-J-J-Jed,” he stammered, “had pictures of her. He talked about her all the time. Said she was waiting for him to get out.”

  “When did you have the opportunity to talk to him?” asked Lydia, who had always imagined Jed like Hannibal Lecter, bound, isolated, with a mask over his face. At least that’s how she liked to think of him.

  “During art therapy,” said Jetty quietly. “He only drew pictures of you.”

  Lydia had to suppress a laugh, even though there was nothing funny about any of it. The ridiculousness of allowing Jed to have art therapy where he fed his obsession by drawing pictures of her was a testament to the idiocy of the psychiatric profession in general and this hospital in particular. No wonder he’d been allowed to get away. “You bastards,” said Lydia under her breath.

  “You said a bad word,” admonished Jetty. Lydia shot him a look and he cringed as if he thought she’d strike him. She felt bad for a second. Then the feeling passed as another thought occurred to her.

  “Jetty,” she asked, moving toward him and sitting in the free chair beside Ford, “did you tell Jed McIntyre about the tunnels beneath the street?”

  Jetty nodded. “He didn’t believe me.”

  Ford looked at Lydia guiltily with a shake of his head.

  “What?” she said, a frown creasing her forehead and dread burrowing what seemed to be a permanent home in her belly.

  As they approached a ragtag group of men sitting around a lopsided card table playing poker by candlelight, Jeff decided that they had entered the twilight zone. They appeared to be playing for bottles and cans, using caps and metal tabs for chips. A few sacks filled with cans and bottles lay scattered on the floor around the table. Engaged in a loud, slurred argument over who had won the last hand, the card players did not acknowledge Violet, Dax, and Jeff as they passed until Dax accidentally shone the flashlight beam on their table.