“I’m not really Jewish,” Robert responded to the packed synagogue.
“But your name is Moses,” pointed out the rabbi, allowing Robert a chance to more fully explain.
“I didn’t pick it,” he snapped back. “And unlike my namesake, I have no intention of leading anyone out of bondage.” After some additional perfunctory remarks, he thanked the stunned crowd, told them to remember to vote, and left the temple.
The margin by which his brother lost the election made Paul feel warm all over. Yet soon after this triumph, Paul got a tax bill for ten thousand dollars and found he had no money to pay it. The end was near. The bank immediately initiated foreclosure proceedings on his pool property.
“I worked so hard and came so close,” he complained over the dinner table. “I was almost there. I mean, it’s a solid investment. Now I’m going to lose everything.”
Teresa got on the phone and within a week her father and aunt had ponied up yet more loans.
Someone must’ve dug all these rocks out of the earth, Uli realized, snapping away from Paul. He left the storage depot and pushed past the chain of drone laborers, heading back down into the dim dome-shaped room. He gazed up and for the first time noticed the large uneven tower of modified wooden desks. It resembled some kind of primitive ceremonial structure. Hanging from the top was a rotting corpse. Uli examined the body in the flickering candlelight and realized it had undergone some kind of outlandish transfiguration. The feet were violently twisted backwards. Worse, though, was the missing head, replaced with a long-snouted skull.
A dull clinking of hammers drew Uli away from the corpse and over to a large hole in the wall at a corner of the chamber. Once he descended into the dark hole, he found a small tunnel shooting upward and a larger corridor that corkscrewed downward. Other smaller tunnels began spiraling off from the corridor and soon he feared that he was getting lost. He flicked on his flashlight and noticed wires above him held together along a single small wooden bridge like a violin. Tinkering sounds surrounded him. People were digging. Moving along this main artery, he realized the wires along the top led into the various side tunnels. Suddenly, a box of rocks crashed out of one. Crawling down the tunnel roughly fifty feet, Uli came upon the bottom half of a sweaty, half-naked man digging furiously into the earth. He wore something black wrapped like a turban around his face and head; Uli assumed it was an improvised air filter.
“Hello!” Uli called out.
“Fuck off!” the digger shouted. Uli withdrew to the outer corridor, where he fingered another wire leading to the next cave. This time he encountered another seminude turban-headed digger. Again, when Uli greeted the man, he was instructed to fuck off.
He continued examining the ten or so guide wires fastened to the low ceiling above him until he heard the tinkering of yet another man.
“Who’s in charge?” Uli called out.
“Fuck off!” the crazed miner responded, as though following the same script. Eventually, Uli turned around and crawled back up the circular passage. Emerging in the domed room, he wiped dust off himself and followed the line of drone workers up the service tunnel toward the storage depot. After a few minutes he discovered they were now being led by someone. He sped up along the side of the tunnel. A middle-aged lady was directing the passive chain gang into the upper caves.
“Hello!”
“What?” the lady screamed, almost jumping off her feet.
“I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Fuck off!” she shouted, lifting her hands defensively.
“Why is everyone so angry here?”
“We’ve all been trapped in this dungeon for years. What d’you expect?”
“Who’s in charge?”
“Did you see the diggers in the Convolution?”
“If you mean the hole that leads to the little caves with the nasty bastards, yes,” he said. Nodding behind the chain gang, he added, “I also see these poor bastards carrying rocks out of the tunnels.”
“That’s called occupational therapy, asshole! They’re senile. I found them starving to death, and I rescued them.”
Uli didn’t respond. Making them into unsupervised laborers wasn’t exactly a rescue or therapy.
A few moments elapsed before she said, “Sorry if I’m a bit rude, it’s just the best way to deal with most of these guys. This place makes everyone very agitated. I can see by your short beard that you’re new here.” She resumed leading her group upward.
“The congregation back in that catch basin didn’t seem particularly angry. And yes, I just got here.”
“The people back there in the basin are just very sad,” she said, as she continued leading the group up through the storage area and into a new labyrinth of tunnels. “They realize that if they all cling together, they can help each other survive. But they have no real hope of ever escaping.”
“That must be why they pray.”
“All the guys who made it up here work nonstop. To their credit, they’re still trying to get out, but none of them get along so they don’t work together.” She paused. “They’re each intent on finding their own way out.”
Uli extended his hand and introduced himself. The woman said her name was Root Ginseng.
“Hell of a name.”
“I was born Persephone, a bad name for this illiterate age. When I was growing up, most people who read it pronounced it as Percy-phone. When I moved to San Francisco, I worked in a health food store and people jokingly called me Root and it stuck.”
“Nice to meet you, Root … Hey, what is that central room anyway? And what the hell is that thing in the middle of it?” Uli asked, referring to the tower of stacked wooden desks.
“We thought this was the bottom of an old missile silo.”
“If that’s the case, wouldn’t there be a launch opening directly above it?”
“That’s why we built the tower and dug up into it, but it turned out to be a dud.”
“How’d you manage to get all these guys to work on it?”
“Sandy and I somehow got most of them to put aside their differences and collect desks to build that tower up to the ceiling.” That accounted for the absence of desks right near the Sticks. “But soon they were all fighting again.”
“Fighting over what?”
“You name it. ‘That’s my chisel.’ ‘You drank my water.’ ‘This is my area to dig.’ ‘Quit breathing so loud.’ Constant trouble.”
“No truce lasts forever,” Uli said as he walked with her.
“They got about fifteen feet into the rock before they started shoving each other for elbow and leg space.” She paused again. “I’ll never forget hearing that awful scream as the first man fell to his death. Then a few days went by, and another man was pushed. Soon we realized they weren’t just fighting, they were actually sacrificing people up there. When there was only the original group of about eight left, they gave up and went back to lateral drilling … You’ll excuse me for asking, but who exactly are you?”
“I own a pool club in Pennsylvania and—” He caught himself. “Actually, I just crawled out of the sewer and I’m looking for a way out of this hellhole …”
Moments later, Root reached her new destination and said it was time to take care of the babies.
“You have babies?!” Uli asked as he followed along.
“That’s just what I call them cause they’re as helpless as infants.”
She headed into an abandoned cave and lit some candles. Uli saw right away that it was covered with dirt and human excrement. Root grabbed a shovel and scooped out the waste as though the place was a giant litter box. Then she laid down some new dirt and a chemical that seemed to mask the odor and spread out some pieces of cardboard—voilà, it was transformed into a giant bunk room.
Root moved into another dimly lit cave where others were standing around waiting. Following her lead, Uli grabbed a bucket and the two washed the group down, then dried them with pieces of old cloth. Next they led
the men into another cave, where they handed out crackers and cups of water. After the meal, Roots escorted another group into a cave where she had them sit on a long bench with holes in the seats—a makeshift row of toilets.
21
Paul imagined that his brother would someday retire up in Albany as a minor government functionary, a body second from the left in the third row of various group photos with central politicians in the front. When the first few expressway projects were announced, Paul made a joke about Mr. Robert wearing a T-shirt while digging ditches and shoveling blacktop out in Long Island. The highways cutting across so much private property—little farms and homes—immediately reminded Paul of the bad press Robert had drawn trying to enact his controversial Standardization Plan under Mayor Mitchel nearly twenty years before.
When Paul read that his brother had declined both city and state salaries and was living off his stolen inheritance, he concluded that this was one of the great secrets to his success. Though Paul couldn’t contest the will without jeopardizing his little nest egg, he figured there had to be something he could do to turn his meager trust into more cash. He decided to call the garment shop and see if he could sell them a long-term lease for a lump sum.
“Tell you what,” said Mel Green, one of the proprietors, “would you take forty thousand dollars for the thirty-year lease?”
“Let me think about it,” Paul said, but he immediately knew that this would be more than acceptable. He also knew that he wouldn’t be able to reach Robert by phone, so he typed up the proposal and mailed it to him. A few weeks later, he got a letter back from his cousin Willy:
Dear Paul:
Robert and I have carefully considered your request and have decided that this really isn’t a wise offer. We understand you’ve been shortchanged by these people in their monthly payments, but they still owe us all that money, and the depression should be over soon. Bowery Wardrobe promises to pay all back rent with interest as stipulated in the original agreement. Hold tight and I guarantee you’ll get all the money that is owed to you. My best to Teresa and the kids.
Sincerely,
Your cousin,
Wilfred Openhym
After a terse follow-up phone conversation with his cousin, Paul hired a lawyer and brought a suit against Willy and Robert, stating that they were deliberately mismanaging his trust in order to bleed it for their own funds.
Willy, in turn, showed up with his lawyer at a subsequent arbitration meeting; he stated that Mr. Robert Moses was unable to attend due to government commitments. After reading the briefs and listening to arguments on both sides, the judge found Paul’s complaint about mismanagement of the trust to be groundless. On the other hand, he ruled that it was unfair for Willy and Robert to extract income when the primary beneficiary wasn’t earning his due. So he ruled that until Paul got his full back payments, they were not permitted to withdraw another cent. Although he wasn’t able to accept Bowery Wardrobe’s offer, Paul still felt he had won a victory by depriving Robert of his money.
Meanwhile, Robert’s professional life took a turn for the better with his greatest achievement to date—connecting Manahattan, Queens, and the Bronx with just one bridge. The throne for this accomplishment was the newly created Triborough Bridge Authority, of which Robert would be king. The endless stream of revenue from tolls would be used solely at Robert Moses’s discretion.
“How can this be legal?” Paul shouted while reading the details in the New York Times at the counter of a coffee shop on Third Avenue and 52nd Street.
“Hey, buddy, you’re scaring my customers,” said the proprietor. Paul ripped the newspaper in half, slapped a dime on the counter, and stomped out.
“I met him a couple times,” Root said to Uli as he helped her bring some of the tired workers into a cave.
“You met Paul Moses?” Uli hadn’t said a word about the onslaught of thoughts rushing through his head.
“No, Plato, the guy who got elected leader. The one thing I fault him on was his family. I think he left them cause his boy was handicapped. I told the kid he could have access to C-rations if he ever needed any.”
“As far as I can tell,” Uli said, “you’ve done a lot more than this leader in terms of finding a way out of here.”
“Yeah, if overseeing a bunch of dead-end tunnels ever helps anyone. Hell, most of them are pointed downward or run parallel to each other.”
“Why do they even bother? The only way out of here is obviously up.”
“Long ago, Plato told everyone that there were stairwells at the lowest levels of this place.”
“Can’t the diggers come up with a plan so at least they each take a different direction?”
“A man after my own heart!” she said, smiling. “I have to confess, it’s exciting to be able to talk about this with someone.”
She led Uli off to a small cave that she had converted into a private office. She carefully lit several candles, revealing a strange model built out of little sticks and blocks that resembled a spiraling tree lying on its side with eleven branches. The largest branch of the tree was the central corridor of the Convolution.
“These tunnels move in different directions,” Root explained, pointing to several branches, “but most of them are loosely parallel.”
Over a dinner of canned prunes and two square tins of Spam that she had been saving for a special occasion, Root told Uli how she had first climbed out of the sewer with a group of others about five years before. All were immediately warned against going into the Mkultra. They were told it was pure savagery. Over the first couple of years, she watched as her compatriots fell victim to the memory disease that ravaged the place. One day, though, she noticed that the ropes rising from the sewer were twisting wildly. A large man climbed up. His name was Herman, and after being warned against leaving the catch basin, he declared that he would get out of this place or die trying. She asked if she could join him and he consented.
They started off by climbing three levels through the vast, abandoned installation. They cooked white rats and drank from the buckets of runoff water as they fought back roving gangs, psychopaths, and a host of other lost souls. Together, they hatched the plan to turn a group of mentally damaged men into miners.
“What happened to Herman?”
“He instructed me that when the day came that he couldn’t remember his own name, he wanted me to kill him.”
“Any idea why you were never affected?”
She shook her head.
“You didn’t take any kind of medicine?”
Again, she shook her head.
“And you’ve been alone with the diggers ever since?”
“Actually, there was another woman already here when we arrived.”
“Who?”
“She was suffering from partial memory loss and couldn’t remember her name, so I just called her Sandy Corner, since she used to sleep in the sandy corner of the storage depot downstairs. She wasn’t as far gone as the others.”
“What became of her?” Uli asked.
“If you were in the silo, you probably saw her hanging there.”
“I hope you’re not referring to that mutilated body?”
“Yeah, but the miners actually liked her. They decided that she would be a great offering to the gods, so they strung her up there.”
“They liked her so much they killed her?”
“She was pretty out of it by then. It was more like a mercy killing.”
“God,” Uli murmured, “human sacrifice.”
“The more dire a situation, the greater the need for some divine intervention. This is probably how all religions get started.”
“What did they do with her head?”
“Lopped it off and replaced it with that dog skull.”
“Where did they get the dog?”
“The Mkultra was originally a big laboratory, and scientists used all sorts of animals for experimentation.”
“But why did they cut off the poor
woman’s head?”
“One of the miners, a chubby Italian guy, came up with the idea from some weird Aztec calendar he had found on his way through the Mkultra. Sandy’s body represents the death guide Xolotl: head of a dog, body of a human. And we’re all in someplace called the Mictlan.”
Uli was genuinely impressed by this woman. Working alone for several years now, she had somehow managed to control all these crazed human mole rats. In doing so, she had become the closest thing to a central force that this subterranean termite hill had. Inspecting the three-dimensional model of the tunnels, Uli asked, “Would the most efficient number of tunnels be—”
“Six, each going in a different direction.” Pointing to her mock-up, she added, “These tunnels would maximize our chances of getting out of here.”
“Why don’t you tell the miners?”
“Oh, I tried—years ago. I begged them! But all they say is Fuck off. Most of them are pretty blind. Hell, half the time they’re just trying to find their own tunnels.”
“What do you mean?”
“After working for hours, they crawl out and sleep in the storage depot or Lord knows where. When they return, those wires along the top of the caves help direct them back to their own tunnels.”
“Why don’t we just redirect the wires so that they go into the six tunnels that you selected?”
“The real problem is scheduling them so they don’t overlap,” Root said. “If one finds another in his tunnel, it’s over.”
Uli started checking through his ratty pants. “I thought I had a watch, but …” But he was thinking of the pocket watch Paul had been given in Mexico.
“Why do you need a watch?”
“With it, we could track everyone’s work and sleep patterns, right?”
“Not a bad idea,” she affirmed.
The two headed up into the Mkultra, venturing far out to the furnished part of the Lethe. Searching through several hundred desk drawers, they found stacks of old Mkultra documents and boxes of No. 2 pencils which they could use to track the diggers. Root came upon an old windup alarm clock.
The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx Page 10
