The Greatest Spiritual Secret of the Century

by Thom Hartmann

  Paul opened the first of the two newspapers he’d brought with him, and flipped the pages to the want ads. Sipping his coffee, he scanned the columns of four different pages and found ads for copywriters, book editors, and newsletter writers, but nothing in the field of journalism that seemed close to a real reporter’s job. He put aside that paper and opened the second, hoping for better luck. It was The New York Daily Tribune, and he winced at the irony of looking for a new job in the publication of his old employer.

  Mary came over to his table with silverware wrapped in a paper napkin and a plate with his toast. She was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt that had Gardening Cultivates The Soul printed over an impressionistic drawing of colorful flowers. Paul lifted the newspaper and she put them on the table. She put her right hand on her hip, canted it slightly, and said, “Reading the want ads?” as if it were a joke.

  Paul felt his ears grow hot and knew they were flushing. “Yeah. Got laid off yesterday.”

  “You’re kidding!” Her tone changed to one of concern. “You’re a reporter. They don’t lay off reporters.”

  “They can lay off anybody.”

  She smiled and lifted her chin in a mock gesture of pride. “Not the waitresses. The lower you are on the food chain, the more essential you become.”

  He laughed. “You learn that in psychology class? Or are you a business major, too?”

  “I learned that in the school of hard knocks,” she said with a mock upper-class sniff as she walked away.

  She went back to the kitchen and brought out his omelet, putting it on the table in front of him along with the Tabasco. He moved the newspapers to the side so he could read while he ate.

  “Bon appetit,” she said, using the French pronunciation. Before he could reply she was off in the direction of two elderly women who’d just walked into the restaurant.

  Paul opened the Tabasco and poured it over his omelet, took a bite and savored the vinegary hot taste mingled with the feta, onions, and tomatoes of the omelet. With his free left hand, he turned the paper to the comics’ section, and then looked down at the far left corner to see what was happening with Doonesbury. It was the continuation of a story theme he’d been reading for the past week, and as he read the panels he didn’t notice the man walking by until he sat down in the chair opposite Paul.

  “How ya doin’?” the man said, his voice sounding like there was coarse sand in his throat. Paul guessed he was in his fifties, and probably homeless. He had the broad, lined face of Irish ancestry and years of alcohol, broken veins spidering across his nose and cheeks, his fingers cracked and dirty like antique leather that’s been left out in the rain for years, his fingernails yellowed and striated. He wore two hooded pullover sweatshirts, the inner one red and the outermost gray, a black stocking cap that barely held in wild strands of greasy gray hair, and as he had sat down, Paul noticed his pants were army camouflage fatigues. The smells of body odor, urine, and wood smoke surrounded him like an invisible mist.

  “I’m fine,” Paul said, wondering what was going on. After Noah, he was ready for anything.

  “Good eggs?” the man said. “I see you like the hot sauce.”

  “Yeah, they are,” Paul said. “You want some?”

  “Nah,” the man said. “I had my breakfast a few hours ago. Cooked up some grits with cheese, and put a couple of poached eggs on ’em. They’re good with hot sauce, too, but you want to get something with a little more character than just that Tabasco. I’m partial to JoB’s Chilipaya, although Odin’s Feast makes a great hot garlic sauce, too.”

  Paul nodded, trying to take in the idea of a homeless gourmet. “Coffee?”

  “That’s a good idea,” the man said, reaching into his pants pocked and rummaging around. He brought out four one-dollar bills, carefully unfolded them, and put one on the table. “I pay my own way. Can collecting was good last night.”

  Paul nodded and waved at Mary, pointing at his coffee cup and then the man sitting opposite him, and she nodded and headed for the coffeepot.

  “My name’s Jim,” the man said, reaching out his hand.

  Paul shook it, surprised at how cold and firm it was, and said, “Paul.”

  Mary put the coffee cup, a napkin, and a spoon in front of Jim with an undisguised look of disapproval. “Is everything okay?” she said to Paul, not giving Jim any eye contact.

  “Anything else for you, Jim?” Paul ignored her implied question. He knew a part of her job that she disliked–but her continued employment depended on-was preventing homeless people from reaching the restrooms. By staking Jim to himself, Paul gave him a bit of respectability, saving her the unpleasant task of throwing him out.

  Jim shook his head. “Coffee’s fine, ma’am,” he said, even though Mary kept her head and eyes pointed at Paul. She looked at Paul and raised an eyebrow, as if to say, Do you really want to get into this? so Paul added, “Mine is, too, Mary.”

  “I’m glad,” she said in a neutral tone, giving Jim no encouragement in case there was a next time, and left.

  Jim watched her backside for a moment as she walked off with a rigid step, and said, “I don’t believe I’ll leave her much of a tip. Whatever happened to human civility? I served my country in Vietnam; I paid my taxes for better than twenty years; and I was born in this country, which is more than half the people in this city can say. You know, the poor get no respect.”

  “Maybe she’s having a bad day,” Paul said, not wanting to make the situation worse for Mary.

  Jim leaned forward as if imparting a secret. “Fact is, Paul, she’s afraid. Her deepest fear is that she’ll end up, someday, just like me. And the truth is, she’s closer to it than she could ever imagine.” He picked up his coffee cup and looked at the white steam misting on its surface. “Everybody is, in fact.”

  “Are you an angel?” Paul said, figuring he may as well just get right to the issue. If it turned out to be a foolish question, at least it wasn’t like he’d asked it during a job interview or of a neighbor.

  Jim pulled two sugar packets out of the cup on the table, tore them both open, and drained them into his cup. As he stirred the coffee, he looked up at Paul and said, “No, I’m just a human being, just like you.”

  “How come you sat down here?”

  Jim tapped the spoon on the edge of the thick white porcelain mug and carefully placed it on the napkin. He picked up the cup and blew across its top. “You looked like you could use some company.”

  “Seriously?” Paul took a bite of his eggs. The feta cheese and onions overpowered the smell from Jim’s clothes.

  “Actually, Joshua said I’d find you here.” He pronounced the name oddly, as if it were Yeshua.

  Paul swallowed the bite. “Joshua?”

  “Guy who lives in the house next to me. At least so far. The mayor keeps siccing the cops on us.”

  “Why’d he tell you to find me?”

  “Said he’s got something to tell you.”

  “Something?”

  Jim put his coffee cup on the table in front of him and spread out his hands. “Said you were gonna help us save the world.”

  Paul was startled to hear Noah’s words in Jim’s mouth. “How’d you know who I was?”

  “Joshua said to look for a young white boy. Said you’d be eating an omelet with lots of hot sauce in the Fashion Coffee Shop, right around the corner from the Fashion Institute. And here you are.”

  “He know my name?”

  Jim shrugged. “I dunno. If he did, he didn’t tell me. Just said, ‘You find that white boy and bring him to me.’ So here I am.”

  “You’re supposed to take me to him?”

  Jim grinned and his face wrinkled like a puppet’s. “Yep. You interested in coming?”

  “Are you part of the Wisdom School?”

  Jim smiled. “Life is a school in wisdom, isn’t it?”

  “Is Joshua an angel?”

  Jim looked at his coffee, took a slow sip, put down the mug gently, as if
it were fragile. “You’ll have to ask him that. You ask the people around him, you’ll get all kinds of answers.”

  “Finish my eggs first?”

  “By all means. Coffee refills are free here, so I expect to get at least one for my money.”

  Chapter Seven

  Into The Tunnels

  Paul and Jim walked west along 27th Street, crossing first Ninth and then Tenth Avenues. The sky was a bright blue between the buildings, the air sharp and cold, a light breeze blowing the smells of car exhaust and the Hudson River into their faces from the west. Buildings behind them and to their left obscured the sun, casting long shadows across the streets. They walked on the right side of the street, occasionally stepping into the sun and feeling its warmth. Paul wore a brown leather flight jacket over a blue work shirt and white cotton sweater, stonewashed blue jeans, and old sneakers. The air was cold, well below freezing, and his ears ached. He kept his hands in the pockets of his jacket to protect them from the cold. The streets were filled with cars, delivery trucks, and taxis, but the only people he saw out walking marched with a grim determination toward the business districts of the city.

  Along the way, Jim alternated between purposeful silent marching and chatting. When he talked, he slowed down to a walk, as if marching and talking at the same time were incompatible.

  “Where’re we going?” Paul said.

  “Tunnels.”

  “You mean the sewers?”

  “Nah,” Jim said. “Back around the Civil War time, the whole west edge of Manhattan was railroad, running along the Hudson. Tied together the slaughterhouses downtown, the garbage dumps midtown, the warehouses all over from downtown to uptown. Most everything come into the city come in on the rail; weren’t trucks back then, and only a couple of bridges. People built shacks all along the tracks, they’d use coal fell off the trains for heat, worked for the railroad or in the dumps or whatever they could fuid.”

  They crossed Eleventh Avenue, and Jim waved around at the streets and buildings. “During the Civil War,” he continued, “and then again in the thirties when the economy went to hell, this area was miles and miles of shantytown, all up and down the Hudson, with rail tracks running right through it.” He waved uptown. “’Bout the mid-thirties, old Bob Moses got the idea to cover over the mud flats uptown, so’s the rich folks wouldn’t have to look out their windows onto railroad tracks and tarpaper shacks. So they built the promenade, all the way out to the water, and covered over the railroad. It was still there, they just put steel beams and concrete over it, and then built streets and buildings and all sorts of stuff over that. Over the years, it came all the way down here to this part of town, covering over the tracks.”

  “We’re not talking about the subway?”

  “No, this is something different. This was the railroad. I think Amtrak owns most of it now, as it’s their cops who’re all the time rousting people out. Them and the city’s finest, dancing to the mayor’s tune.” The sarcasm in his voice was unmistakable.

  “So what happened to the people?”

  “Well, most of ‘em, back in the thirties, they got run off. Went elsewhere. The railroad had these huge underground tunnels, and uptown they even built concrete bunkers—rooms—into them so the guys who worked on the railroad could live in ’em. The poor guys, you know, who shoveled coal and all. And then the railroads went out of business when everybody started using trucks. This’s just in the past fifty years, really. But that’s been two generations, and people forgot about the tunnels; the railroad companies that built them are long gone, so nobody knows about them.” They stopped at the mouth of an alley between two massive brick buildings, just short of Twelfth Avenue and the river beyond it. “Except us, of course,” Jim added with a wide grin.

  “You live in the railroad tunnels?”

  Jim stood up straight, pulled his shoulders back a bit. “Come full circle, I guess you could say. Back into the womb, if you want to get philosophical, but for me it’s back to my teenage years. I was a tunnel rat in Vietnam. Chased Charlie around, underground, climb through these little tiny places, never know when you’re gonna find the enemy, a booby trap, or snakes and rats. I didn’t much like that, but at least I survived it, although several of my buddies didn’t. Anyhow, now I’m back, living in the tunnels again, only this time the war is here in Manhattan, not in Vietnam.”

  “The war?”

  “The war against the poor and the homeless.”

  Paul nodded, remembering the time just a month earlier when he’d seen a homeless man with a mangy dog sitting on a dirty blanket on Fifth Avenue, up near 60th Street. The guy had a sign made out of the side of a large cardboard box, explaining in red crayon that he was “a permanently disabled Vietnam veteran with Agent Orange poisoning,” asking people to put spare change into the green plastic cereal bowl that rested in front of his dog on the blanket. A New York City cop had been walking just ahead of Paul, and as the cop passed the homeless man, he grabbed the sign and tore it in half, then tore it again. Paul stopped walking and watched in horror as the man grabbed his dog and began to cry. The cop marched to a trash basket and stuffed the sign into it, then came over and kicked the man’s bowl, scattering the change it in out into the street. As Paul walked off, feeling miserable and powerless, the cop was kicking the man’s garbage bag of clothes and personal effects, yelling at him to get up and move on. New Yorkers walking by either pretended not to look or nodded in silent approval of the cop.

  “So, here we are,” Jim said, walking into the narrow, trash-strewn alley between two large old brick buildings, one now a warehouse and the other a vacant factory. Paul followed him, wondering what was going on; there was no exit from the alley, just a large Dumpster at its end. Was it a trap or a setup? He glanced at Jim’s kind face and told himself it wasn’t, that everything would be okay.

  Jim marched over to the brick wall that was the back side of the empty factory and kicked aside a scattering of loose newspapers, revealing a rusted grating over what looked like a square manhole. He pulled off the grating and set it beside the hole, then gestured at the black opening into the ground. “Our front door,” he said with a smile. “Climb down, and I’ll follow you and pull the grating back over us.”

  “Is it safe?” Paul said, feeling a claustrophobic dread as he looked at the silent black hole.

  Jim bent over and put his head into the hole, looked around, stood back up, and said, “Nobody down there right now. I’ll be with you. Nobody’s gonna hurt you.”

  “And Joshua’s down there?”

  “Yep. Let’s go.”

  “Are there rats down there?”

  Jim laughed. “The size of raccoons. But they won’t bother you. It’s the humans you gotta worry about, and so long as you’re with me or Joshua, you’re fine.”

  Paul walked over to the hole and could see there were rusted inch-thick steel rungs anchored into a concrete wall, each coming out about four inches, descending into the earth and vanishing in the blackness, which was deep and hollow in contrast to the bright day. He climbed down into the hole, his fingers and palms shocked by the freezing steel. His body began to shiver and tremble; when his head dropped below the surface he paused. He could tell from the sounds around him that he was descending into a cavernous area, and, hanging here, he was at least forty feet above the ground below. He took a breath and continued down until his feet hit gravel, then walked back from the rungs and looked around, his eyes adjusting to the dim light, as Jim, above him, pulled the grate back into place and began his descent.

  The tunnel was huge, the forty-foot-high ceiling made of row after row of massive steel I-beams, studded rhythmically with round-headed bolts and welds, their texture revealing rust and ancient black paint. The two walls were over a hundred feet apart, and a single pair of railroad tracks followed their ties off into an echoing infinity of distance in both directions. About every hundred yards or so in what Paul believed was the northerly, or uptown, direction, there were gr
atings over the tracks that allowed sprinkles of sunlight to beam down into the empty tunnel showing an occasional fragment of graffiti on the otherwise clean concrete walls. Southbound was a distant echoing blackness; the track, railroad ties, gravel floor, and cement walls swallowed whole. The air smelled of dust and wood smoke and old coal. The sounds of Jim taking his last few steps and then jumping to the gravel echoed off into the distance, both north and south.

  “It seems empty,” Paul said. The echoes of his own voice startled him, and he looked around warily at the dim, black-and-white world. Every stone and beam stood out in sharp relief, yet in the dim light it seemed that the world had been drained of its color. The temperature was at least ten degrees warmer than the street.

  “This is just the door,” said Jim. “We gotta walk about a mile, now.” He stepped between the two tracks and began walking south, toward the darkness. Paul looked up at the grate above him, fought down the urge to bolt and climb back up and out, and followed Jim.

  They walked into the darkness until Paul was stepping carefully to avoid stumbling. There was still enough light for him to dimly make out the tracks and the walls; the echoing sounds of each step told him where the walls were, but he could no longer make out the stones and railroad ties between the tracks. Jim was absolutely silent, and Paul took that as a cue to keep his thoughts and questions to himself.

  His first clue that they were close to habitation was the smell of food. Spaghetti sauce was Paul’s guess, with lots of onions, garlic, and oregano. And coffee, some kind of very dark roast, almost an espresso. Then he could hear the faint murmur of conversation. Ahead of him, Jim stopped walking and said, softly, “Take my hand, kid. This is kind of tricky.”

  Paul could just make out the shape of Jim’s body and felt the hand touch his chest before he saw it. He took Jim’s hand in his, and Jim led them off the tracks toward the wall to their left. Paul felt as if he were walking on the edge of the world, into a distant blackness, that at any moment he might step off the edge and fall forever. He held tightly to Jim’s hand. They came to the wall and walked along with it, Paul reaching out to touch its cold and pebbled surface with his free hand, it keeping him oriented and balanced. After twenty feet or so, Jim ducked down, and Paul realized he was crawling through a hole in the wall, a jagged and irregular opening that somebody had made with a pickaxe. The smell of food was now very strong, and Paul could make out the sound of cats meowing over the soft murmur of human voices.