Underworld (109 page)

Does Sister want him to be deathly ill? Does she think he ought to be punished for being homosexual?

Everybody's watching TV except for her. She's watching Ismael. No pallor or weight loss or lesions or other visible symptoms. The only thing he shows is a snaggle smile from out of his history of dental neglect.

Why does she want to see him suffer? Isn't he one of the affirmative forces in the Wall, earning money with his salvage business, using it more or less altruistically, teaching his crew of stray kids, abandoned some of them, pregnant one or two, runaways, throwaways—giving them a sense of responsibility and self-worth? And doesn't he help the nuns feed the hungry?

She studies him for marks, for early signs of incapacity. Then she steals a look out the window, hoping to glimpse the elusive girl. Sister has seen her a number of times from this window, almost always running. Run is what she does. It is her beauty and her safety both, her melodious hope, a thing of special merit, a cleansing, the fleet leaf-fall of something godly blowing through the world.

Two of the charismatics come in to watch TV. These are people from the top floor, operating the only church in the Wall, a congregation of pentecostals seeking to receive the gift of the Spirit, laying on
hands, shouting out words, prophesying—the whole rocking socking package that makes Edgar want to run and hide.

Of course they look at her a little sideways too.

Ismael appoints four members of the crew to go with the nuns and distribute food in the area. But the crew is rooted right now. They urge Juano to pedal faster because this is the only way to change channels and they want to watch cartoons or movies, something with visuals better than a head.

They're saying, “Go, man, fasta, fasta.”

The bicycle boy bends and pumps and the picture wavers briefly but then springs back to the round announcer's face and the moving lines of prices. Ismael stands there laughing. He loves the language of buying and selling and the sight of those clustered sets of letters that represent enormous corporate entities with their jets and stretches and tanker fleets. He starts pulling kids off the cushionless sofa and stone-slinging them toward the door while the other kids and the jivey charismatics keep urging Juano on.

They're saying, “Fasta, fasta, you the man.”

The boy cranks and strains, bouncing on the seat, but the numbers keep flowing across the screen. Electronics slightly up, transports down, industrials more or less unchanged.

Three weeks later Edgar sits in the van and watches her partner emerge from the red brick convent—rolling gait, short legs and squarish body. Gracie's face is averted as she edges around the front of the vehicle and opens the door on the driver's side.

She gets in and grips the wheel, looking straight ahead.

“I got a call from the precinct near the Wall.”

Then she reaches for the door and shuts it. She grips the wheel again.

“Somebody raped Esmeralda and threw her off a roof.”

She starts the engine.

“I'm sitting here thinking, Who do I kill?”

She looks at Edgar briefly, then puts the van in gear.

“Because this is the only question I can ask myself without giving in to despair.”

They drive south through local streets, the tenement brick smoked mellow in morning light. Did Edgar know this would happen? Lately, yes, a knowing in her bones. She feels the weather of Gracie's rage and pain. In recent days she'd approached the girl, Gracie had, and talked to her from a distance, and thrown a bag of food and clothing into the pokeweed where Esmeralda stood. They ride all the way in silence with the older nun mind-reciting questions and answers from the Baltimore Catechism. The strength of these exercises, which are a form of perdurable prayer, rests in the voices that accompany hers, children responding through the decades, syllable-crisp, a panpipe reply that is the lucid music of her life. Question and answer. What deeper dialogue might right minds devise? She reaches her hand across to Gracie's on the wheel and keeps it there for a digital tick on the dashboard clock. Who made us? God made us. Those clear-eyed faces so believing. Who is God? God is the Supreme Being who made all things. She feels tired in her arms. Her arms are heavy and dead and she gets all the way to Lesson 12 when the projects appear at the rim of the sky, upper windows white with sunplay against the broad dark face of beaten stone.

When Gracie finally speaks she says, “It's still there.”

“What's still there?”

“That knocking in the engine. Hear it? Hear it?”

“I don't hear a thing.”

“Ku-ku. Ku-ku.”

Then she drives the van down past the projects toward the painted wall.

When they get there the angel is already sprayed in place. A winged figure in a pink sweatshirt and pink and aqua pants and a pair of white Nike Air Jordans with the logo prominent—she was a running girl so they gave her running shoes. And little Juano still dangles from a rope, winched down from the roof by the old hand-powered hoist the crew uses to grapple cars onto the deck of their flatbed truck. Ismael and others bend over the ledge attempting to shout correct spellings down to him as he drifts to and from the wall, leaning in to spray the interlaced letters that mark the great gone era of wildstyle graffiti.

The nuns stand outside the van watching the kid finish the last scanted word and then see him yanked skyward in the cutting wind.

Esmeralda Lopez

12 year

Petected in Heven

When they get to the third floor Ismael is smoking a cigar, arms folded on his chest. Gracie paces the room. She doesn't seem to know where to begin, how to address the nameless thing that someone has done to this child they'd so hoped to save. She paces, she clenches her fists. They hear the gassy moan of a city bus some blocks away.

“Ismael. You have to find out who this guy is that did this thing.”

“You think I'm running here? El Lay Pee Dee?”

“You have contacts in the neighborhood that no one else has.”

“What neighborhood? The neighborhood's over there. This here's the Wall. It's all I can do to get these kids so they spell a word correct when they spray their paint. When I was writing we did subway cars in the dark without a letter misspell.”

“Who cares about spelling?” Gracie says.

Edgar used to care but not today and maybe never again. She feels weak and lost. The great Terror gone, the great thrown shadow dismantled—the launched object in the sky named for a Greek goddess on a bell krater in 500 B.C. All terror is local now. Some noise on the pavement very near, the stammer of casual rounds from a passing car, someone who carries off your child. Ancient fears revived, they will steal my child, they will come into my house when I'm asleep and cut out my heart because they have a dialogue with Satan.

She says a desperate prayer.

Pour forth we beseech thee, O Lord, thy grace into our hearts.

Ten years' indulgence, a blockbuster number, if the prayer is recited at dawn, noon and eventide, or as soon thereafter as possible.

One of the girls is pedaling the bike, Willie for short, and she calls out to them,
hey, here, look,
and they gather at the TV set and stand astonished. There is a news report of the murder, their murder, and it is freaking network coverage, CNN—tragic life and death of homeless child. The crew is stunned to see footage of the Wall, two and a half seconds of film that shows the building they're in, the facade of spray-painted angels, the overgrown lots with their bat caverns and owl roosts. They
gawk and buzz, charged with a kind of second sight, the things they know so well seen inside out, made new and nationwide. They stand there smeared in other people's seeing. Then the anchorwoman comes on. They tell Willamette to pedal faster man because the picture is beginning to fade and the anchorwoman's electric red hair is color-running from her head in a luminous ring, which makes her all the more amazing, and she describes their lives to them in a bell-tone virgin voice, a woman so striking of feature she makes the news her own, and Willie pedals for all she's worth and they urge her firmly on.

Sister does not watch. She sees nothing for the rest of that day and the day after and the two or three weeks after that. She sees the human heart exposed like a pig's muscle on a slab. That's the only thing she sees. She believes she is falling into crisis, beginning to think it is possible that all creation is a spurt of blank matter that chances to make an emerald planet here, a dead star there, with random waste between. The serenity of immense design is missing from her life, authorship and moral form, and when Gracie and the crew take food into the projects Edgar waits in the van, she is the nun in the van, and when Gracie maces a rat at the curbstone Edgar does not blink.

It is not a question of disbelief. There is another kind of belief, a second force, insecure, untrusting, a faith that is spring-fed by the things we fear in the night, and she thinks she is succumbing.

Keystroke 1

She sleeps on the roof when it's not too cold and this is where he sees her, on the roof of a boarded four-story building with fire escape intact. He's up there wandering, thinking his thoughts, a man who drifts in and out of the Wall, a sidler type, doesn't like to be looked at, and when you enter a name-search the screen reads
Searching.
He comes across the sleeping girl and feels a familiar anger rising and knows he will need to do something to make her pay. He's on her like that. She tries to fight but does not cry out. He beats her with the end of his fist, sending hammerblows to the head. Struggle bitch get hit. He wants to turn her over on her face and put it up inside her. She fights and whisper-cries in a voice that makes him angrier, like who the fuck she think she is, and the screen
reads
Searching.
Either way he's gonna hit her, she struggle or not, and he looks away when he does it, sidle-type. No eye contact, cunt. Last woman he looked at was his mother. After he does it, driving it in and spilling it out, he hits her one last time, hard, whore, and drags her up on the ledge and leans her over and lets her go. You dead, bitch. Then he goes back to thinking his nighttime thoughts. Screen reads
Searching.

Then the stories begin, word passing block to block, moving through churches and superettes, maybe garbled slightly, mistranslated here and there, but not deeply distorted—it is clear enough that people are talking about the same uncanny occurrence. And some of them go and look and tell others, stirring the hope that grows when things surpass their limits.

They gather after dusk at a windy place between bridge approaches, seven or eight people drawn by the word of one or two, then thirty people drawn by the seven, then a tight silent crowd that grows bigger but no less respectful, two hundred people wedged onto a traffic island in the bottommost Bronx where the expressway arches down from the terminal market and the train yards stretch toward the narrows, all that old industrial muscle with its fretful desolation—the ramps that shoot tall weeds and the waste burner coughing toxic fumes and the old railroad bridge spanning the Harlem River, an openwork tower at either end, maybe swaying slightly in persistent wind.

They come and park their cars if they have cars, six or seven to a car, parking tilted on a high shoulder or in the factory side streets, and they wedge themselves onto the concrete island between the expressway and the pocked boulevard, feeling the wind come chilling in and gazing above the wash of standard rip-roar traffic to a billboard floating in the gloom—an advertising sign scaffolded high above the river-bank and meant to attract the doped-over glances of commuters on the trains that run incessantly down from the northern suburbs into the thick of Manhattan money and glut.

Edgar sits across from Gracie in the refectory. She eats her food without tasting it because she decided years ago that taste is not the point. The point is to clean the plate.

Gracie says, “No, please, you can't.”

“Just to see.”

“No, no, no, no.”

“I want to see for myself.”

“This is tabloid. This is the worst kind of tabloid superstition. It's horrible. A complete, what is it? A complete abdication, you know? Be sensible. Don't abdicate your good sense.”

“It could be her they're seeing.”

“You know what this is? It's the nightly news. It's the local news at eleven with all the grotesque items neatly spaced to keep you watching the whole half hour.”

“I think I have to go,” Edgar says.

“This is something for poor people to confront and judge and understand and we have to see it in that framework. The poor need visions, okay?”

“I believe you are patronizing the people you love,” Edgar says softly.

“That's not fair.”

“You say the poor. But who else would saints appear to? Do saints and angels appear to bank presidents? Eat your carrots.”

“It's the nightly news. It's gross exploitation of a child's horrible murder.”

“But who is exploiting? No one's exploiting,” Edgar says. “People go there to weep, to believe.”

“It's how the news becomes so powerful it doesn't need TV or newspapers. It exists in people's perceptions. It's something they invent, strong enough to seem real. It's the news without the media.”

Edgar eats her bread.

“I'm older than the Pope. I never thought I would live long enough to be older than a pope and I think I need to see this thing.”

“Pictures lie,” Gracie says.

“I think I need to be there.”

“Don't pray to pictures, pray to saints.”

“I think I need to go.”

“But you can't. It's crazy. Don't go, Sister.”

But Edgar goes. She puts on her latex gloves and winter cape and
heads for the door, planning to take the bus and subway, and Gracie can't let her go alone. She rushes out to the van, wearing her retainer for spacy teeth, a thing she never wears in public, and they drive down past the Wall and into dark and empty streets and the van stalls out, doing a murmurous swoon, and they walk the last eleven blocks with Gracie carrying Mace and a cellular phone.