The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx (13 page)

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

P
aul 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.

“What time shall we make it?”

Uli said he greatly missed the bright rays of early-morning sunlight, so they set it for 7:00. Since there was no indication of a.m. or p.m., it was something they’d have to monitor carefully. The next stage was simply drawing up a list of names, or at least some way to assign the tunnels to different miners. Root said that so many of them had died or vanished—only to be replaced by others—that she had never bothered trying to learn many names. She just thought of the diggers as types: There was an Italian guy, a black guy, an old guy, and so on.

Over the next few days, Uli and Root took turns waiting in the large silo, jotting down the times of their comings and goings, as well as their sleeping habits.

It quickly became a lot trickier than Uli had expected. Some of the miners would sleep erratically, while others rested at steady four- or six-hour intervals.

22

I
n 1940, Teresa’s father and aunt began asking Paul to pay back his loans. Out of work for several years, Paul was unable to comply.

Exhaustion had deprived Uli of all strength to resist visions of Paul, and Paul in turn was overwhelmed by his brother’s achievements: Along with the Queens Midtown Tunnel, the Belt System—which included the Cross Island, Gowanus, Whitestone, Laurelton, and Southern Parkways—was also designed under Robert’s stewardship during the early ’40s. Paul visited the various construction sites, watching the huge earth-moving machines alter the city’s landscape. Rather than slowing anything down, the war seemed to be accelerating his brother’s victories.

When Paul’s wife said she’d finally had enough and didn’t want to hear about Robert anymore, Paul tried to keep it to himself. One morning, though, she woke up to his shouts. When she asked what was up, Paul yelled that Robert had demolished the New York Aquarium in Battery Park as an act of revenge against those who had protested his Battery Bridge project.

“I want you to stop this!” she demanded.

“Stop what?
He
did it!”

“Did what?”

“He had the fish dumped into New York Harbor.” Paul wept as though Robert had drowned his own children.

That was it for Teresa. She told him she was frightened. “I don’t want you back in the house until you see a psychiatrist.”

He reluctantly agreed. He knew there was something wrong with him. After a dozen phone calls, Teresa located Dr. Hiram Moshbeck, a distinguished older man with a thick crop of wild gray hair.

On the doctor’s soft leather sofa, Paul felt great pleasure in telling the older man how he once loved his brother. Though Robert was only a year younger, Paul had felt a strong urge to protect him against their overbearing mother. Even when his little brother would fight against him, he knew Robert was only trying to be a good kid.

“He couldn’t see it, but instead of rebelling against her, he rebelled against
me,
” Paul deduced. The psychiatrist let him go on, and Paul explained how the only real problem began when Robert stole his birthright.

“What exactly did he do?”

“He conned my mom into cutting me out of her will.”

“Did you hate her for doing that?”

“No, I don’t think she would’ve done it if she was in her right mind. I mean, we fought a lot, but we always made up. I never doubted Bella’s love for an instant.”

“And what was
his
relationship with your mother like?”

“He did everything she said.” Paul then relayed the entire history of Millie, who he had loved and followed down to Mexico, and how much his mother had hated the girl.

“It sounds like your mother punished you and rewarded your younger brother because he listened to her and you didn’t,” the psychiatrist summarized.

“That’s all behind us now.”

“Your wife says you’re obsessed with your younger brother.”

“You must’ve read about Robert Moses in the news?”

“Sure.”