BEYOND THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD-CHAPTER 27-GRAVITY

STITCH’S POV

my only friend is the city I live in

Monday morning, April 4, 2011

The underbelly of New York City was as alive and forgotten as its residents. You lived so far below that if one were to flip the city on its axis, you’d be the one living in the penthouse of a high rise and Trump would have the walls of his palace decorated with crusted sewage. The city’s life force ran beneath its streets, descending layers of phone and electrical wires, gas, water, and steam lines, and sewer tunnels. Beneath the city, an abandoned gas main was considered prime real estate, the original property of one of New York City’s fifteen gas companies in the mid-nineteenth century. As those companies merged over the years, pipelines were shut off and left behind, tunnels to nowhere. And there were the random artifacts frozen in time: a ninety-two-foot long merchant sailing ship found under Front Street where its stern still sits, the wooden stockade built to keep out intruders (Indians) hundreds of years ago that gave Wall Street its name. The world marches on every day in taxi cabs and skyscrapers, but you lived in the past, in centuries of unsuccessful executions by myopic city planners. Ideas were often like people in the city; they were given one chance to prove themselves, and when they didn’t, they, too, were discarded--out of sight, out of mind. The people on the surface had christened you ‘mole people;’ the lore insisting that after years of living in cold, dark, filthy tunnels, all would turn into rat-like creatures whose teeth would automatically sharpen, an accessory to compliment expert night vision.

It was an unfair characterization and an old one. Prior to 1990, there were thousands of people living in the shadows of the city, but over the years, law enforcement and so called ‘Outreach Groups’ had routinely tossed your quarters, forcing those of you who had no intention of returning to an aboveground society to keep moving, over and over again. Those who were determined to stay went deeper and deeper because every cop had his limit of how far he’d descend to do a day’s work.

When you joined the ranks of the tunnel dwellers after the first Gulf War, you learned fast which cops and social workers you could trust and which were more likely to enforce New York’s newly-passed statute allowing involuntary commitment. The number of people actively trying to ‘resolve’ the homeless problem kept diminishing over the time, and you ran and ran and ran from them and their offers of ‘help’ until they finally got tired of looking.

There was only once in your underground life that you felt lucky to have been forsaken. Your indication that something wasn’t right upstairs on that September day ten years ago was the exact opposite of the one the rest of the world received. Your domain fell completely silent. Never in all of your years of living in the tunnels had the trains ever stopped before nine a.m. You waited for a while, until curiosity got the better of you and your improvised family, and made your way to the surface with a fellow veteran close behind you. Everyone else was told to stay behind.

When you reached the top, the sunlight and fresh air that should’ve been filtering through the camouflaged opening of the tunnel weren’t. The towers had fallen, and the two of you ushered some of the terrified crowd into the entrance you’d just emerged from. The twenty or so city dwellers that you took in tried to piece together what had happened. It was one of the few times in your life that you didn’t feel out of place. They were all as filthy as desperate as you’d ever been. It was then that you realized that being a New Yorker was about attitude, not altitude.

*******************

there’s a bad moon on the rise

The first thing you forfeit when you concede to life in a crawl space is your memory of the life you had. You’d think that the hardest thing about being homeless would be not having food or shelter, but that’s easy compared to teaching yourself to forget who you were. Once you’ve forgotten, the transition becomes so much easier—a doctor who failed on the surface becomes a healer again, a teacher advocates literacy for a people who have no books, a priest who hears the confessions of those who’ve already gone to hell.

The going price for redemption is dignity.

As in any society, there’s a pecking order beneath the streets that determines where you’ll sleep, what you’ll eat, and how safe you’ll be. Security in the tubes is bought and sold in human comforts that you don’t dare allow to knit into your memory. There’s no reason to remember each day or month or year, so instead you focus on the challenge of a particular instance, experience it and move on.

You’d invited Alan to live with you years ago, after you’d watched him come and go, quietly loitering at the entrances to one of the more coveted tunnels. You’d pass him everyday on your way to the soup kitchen, and the two of you would watch each other carefully, knowing that the odds were that neither of you could be trusted. He got his nerve up one day and asked if he could follow you, and you nodded. You’d been together ever since.

Having Alan around worked for you. He’d willingly make the trips to the kitchens and shelters, getting you anything you needed, his way of thanking you for giving him a safe and consistent place to sleep. He listened to every story you every told and kept your bed warm in the winter. There was safety in numbers where you lived--an unfinished restroom on a subway route that’d been ultimately rejected, but, by some demolition oversight, still had running water. You killed the guy who had it before you because he told you to; he was dying of AIDS. You shot him and stuffed his body in a pipe. You had twenty years on Alan; twenty years and a semi-private, rent-controlled bathroom in the bowels of the city to show for it.

After you’d known Alan for a month or so, he admitted that he’d waited at the end of your particular tunnel because he wanted to meet you. “I’d seen your murals everywhere. After a while, I could recognize your style without having to look at your tag.” So you took him with you when you painted the tunnels, and as he got more and more comfortable, he began to show you what he could do. Once you were able to teach him how to control his can so it didn’t drip, his talent exploded. When the two of you weren’t painting, you were designing murals and scoping out ‘canvases.’

There was no better canvas in the middle of the night than parked trains, perched to take off the next morning. It was dangerous to paint them because there were always cops and workers around, but because Alan’s father had worked in the subway system for years, Alan knew the schedules the transit workers kept. And after an undisturbed night of painting a four- or eight-car mural, there was nothing more satisfying than hiding where you could watch your masterpiece zoom by ablaze with color and gauge the reactions of the passengers. They always seemed intrigued by your work, and it only egged the two of you on—to design something better and to paint it somewhere even more risky.

Every underground joy is short lived, though, and your work would be gone by nightfall, pressure washed by some minimum-wage lackey with an acidic mixture that stripped the paint right off. When the city began to replace old trains with ones that were literally graffiti-proof, you and Alan moved on to other things. His sister was an artist in the city, and he’d often come back from seeing her with copies of her sketches, photographs of his sister and his little niece, or sometimes he’d just describe something he’d seen and you’d draw it as he talked. Those were your favorites.

Not everyone who lived under the streets was an original artist. You’d known plenty of guys (and one woman) over the years who could recreate a work by Monet or Matisse from memory. One guy you knew favored variations of Warhol, using cans of spray paint rather than soup cans, his reasoning that he might have to eat soup all day, but he sure as hell didn’t have to paint it. It was Alan’s idea to paint ‘tributes’ to his sister. "She’s the only one who lets me be who I am."

……

You always know when it’s Monday because the train schedule changes. They run more often, make more stops, and the roar above your room gets louder much earlier. You fall asleep to that roar, tending to favor a nocturnal schedule, and very early that morning you remember seeing Alan get dressed by candlelight before he left. You started to worry when the afternoon rush hour was winding down, and Alan still wasn’t home. He’d been gone too long.

*******************
DANIEL CARTWRIGHT’S POV

and some have to live with the scars

Monday morning, April 4, 2011

Five hours and the blood was still staining your sidewalk. Five hours and no one could tell you what the fuck happened. Sooner or later, the exhaustion of climbing Mt. Sinai would descend upon you.

It would happen a couple of hours later while you were sitting in the hospital’s cafeteria with Jonathon, drinking bad coffee and sucking chocolate pudding off a plastic spoon. The texture was soothing you. Nothing was soothing Jonathon. A psychiatrist who can’t hide his own frustration is painful to be around and his was achingly evident.

“I wish you’d say something, Dan.” He’d only been shortening your name for the last year or so.

“There’s nothing to say.” The exhaustion was starting to hit you, the numbness just starting to wear off.

……

Sometimes Jonathon wears his clinical training on his sleeve, “There’s always something to say.”

“Okay. They won’t let me clean the blood off the sidewalk.”

*******************
ALAN HARPER’S POV

I think it’s death that must be killing me

It’s true what they say—there is a light at the end of the tunnel. But you didn’t need it. You could feel where you were going and knew where you were going to end up, and the events that brought you to this place were already starting to fade. Memory can be such a fickle mistress…

Perhaps if you’d known that yesterday would be your last day on earth, you’d have done something different, varied your routine. But even sewer rats are creatures of habit.

Twenty-four hours ago, you waited outside Daniel’s place. It was before five a.m. You didn’t need a watch when you were around him; he was the poster child for punctuality. You made a fateful decision the day you refused the key he offered you. “I trust you, Alan,” he told you. You thanked him and then left it on the kitchen counter, unable to tell him that you slept next to people who would kill for that key. You spoke little about your subterranean lifestyle because it provoked a rescue-reflex in most everybody. When he'd emerged at five a.m., he'd let you in. You always locked the door behind you.

You were grateful for the chance to shower, eat, and sleep before Harper and Amelia arrived. Harper was rarely punctual, generally oblivious to those trying to keep a schedule.

Amelia would’ve greeted you that day with her ‘Uncle Alan’ dance which was different each time, but always clamoring hard for your attention. You could see your sister in Amelia’s philosophy: If you can’t beat them, entertain them. Had you seen Harper that day, she would’ve told you that she was barely pregnant—somewhere between nine and eleven weeks.

Were you sitting on Daniel’s steps that morning thinking about Amelia’s smile? About how, after the dance, she’d stand on a stool to reach a ‘big people’ easel and paint with one eye always glued to her mother, imitating her facial expressions? Or were you absorbing the dread that was rounding the corner, clinging to you like a cobweb?

You’d never get the answer to either.

*******************

I know who I want to take me home

Alan James Harper
1981-2011

Death was much more efficient than life. Your spirit flew out of you in those last moments, not interested in chaperoning your body anymore. It had other more important things to take care of. You could feel the weight of obligation pressing on your shoulders; something you hadn’t felt in years. You had a role to play in all of this. It was your turn to chaperone someone else…

Madeline Ruth Collins
April 5, 2011

Madeline. She was the reason you had to wait. The reason that every step you took kept you in the exact same place, some sort of existential treadmill. It took about twenty-four hours for her to come.

She arrived just as you had, empty handed. She seemed to need you, and you carried her with no memory of ever picking her up. Light as a feather. Her tiny fingers clinging to the one button left on your jacket.

It was finally time to go.

*******************

as long as you follow

You stopped walking when the water was covering your feet, glancing up when it began to look pink, and there she was, waiting for you.

“Alley.”

“Mom.”

She wasn’t alone.

“Nurse Tate.”

Her smile was as bright as her uniform, “Alley-oop. Good to see you.”

By the time your mother was less than a foot in front of you, you were ankle-deep in water. “She’s my grand-daughter?” she asked, but she already knew the answer. Madeline didn’t cry when your mother took her and held her next to her wet body, her thin nightgown completely transparent. “She looks just like Josie, doesn’t she?” she remarked, taking your hand and urging you to walk with her. And then as if she wanted to give you her full attention, handed Madeline over to Nurse Tate who hugged and kissed her, making her smile for the first time. Your mother tugged on your hand, pulling you forward. There was nothing in front of you but an urge to keep going.

You didn’t have to talk to her if you didn’t want to; she knew everything, as if your thoughts were being fed to her through your entwined fingers. The walking continued, and then she stopped, squeezing your hand and turning to you, “It’s okay, Alley. You only see what you remember.”

*******************
DANIEL CARTWRIGHT’S POV

can’t for the life of me remember a sadder day

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

You didn’t want to leave the hospital that Monday night, but Harper had insisted that you take Amelia and go, that she and Sam would stay with Alan. So, you reluctantly agreed and took a cab back to your place with Amelia asleep on your shoulder. You got home around nine-thirty, and tucked Amelia into what you’d always think of as Justin’s room, made a sandwich, and listened to your messages. Jonathon had helped you out earlier that morning by canceling the rest of your week and calling Justin. His was the only voice on your answering machine that resonated with you at all, telling you that he would arrive tomorrow morning.

You were awakened a little before one a.m. by Amelia, crying for her mother. You walked down the hall to her room where she was sitting up in bed with tears streaming down her face.

“Amelia, what’s wrong?”

“Mommy.”

She crawled into your lap when you sat down beside her and told her, “Mommy is with Uncle Alan, but we’ll see her in the morning. Remember?”

“I can’t find the potty.”

“You need to go potty?”

“I can’t find it.”

You carried her down the hall to the bathroom, helped her, and then took her back to her room, staying with her until she fell asleep again. She slept the rest of the night, awakening a little before six. You hadn’t fared as well.

It’d been twenty-four hours since you’d found Alan, bruised and bloodied, half of his body lying in your rosebushes. There was blood on the sidewalk and a trail where they dragged his body. You did everything you were supposed to do in a situation like that; you called 9-1-1, checked his airway, his pulse, your sleeves stained red. Afraid to move him, you moved the bushes instead so you could really see him. He groaned when he saw you; he couldn’t smile. You asked him repeatedly what had happened while you were trying to help him, and although the ambulance’s sirens were getting closer and closer, you heard the one word that he finally spoke, “Pigs.”

At breakfast that Tuesday morning, Amelia was bright-eyed again as you made bacon, eggs, and toast. And as you sat her plate in front of her, she announced, “I’m having breakfast with Dr. Car-ride.”

“You certainly are,” you told her.

“And then, I’m going to go see Mommy.”

“That’s right.”

“But I’m not going by myself.”

“That’s right. You’re going with me.”

“Yeah,” she agreed, as you saved her from spilling orange juice down the front of her shirt, “I’m going with you.”

*******************

oh very young

Jonathon was waiting outside the hospital for you when you pulled up. You knew by the look on his face. “He didn’t make it?”

Jonathon shook his head, confirming your worst fears, “No, he died on the table, but…” He paused, looking at Amelia and then back at you. You put her down, watching her out of the corner of your eye as she tapped her feet on the bricks.

“But what?”

“She lost the baby.”

……

You held your hand out, calling her name, “Amelia, come here.” She came back, wandering between the two of you, using your legs as columns of some sort. “When?” you asked him.

“Early this morning. She went into labor around eleven last night.”

"Why didn't you call me?" you asked.

"What were you gonna do? You're a shrink, not an obstetrician."

“They couldn’t stop it?” you asked.

Again, Jonathon shook his head, “No. They tried.”

You peeled Amelia off of your pant legs, picked her up, and began to walk into the hospital. Jonathon followed behind, matching your pace, “Dan, she doesn’t know about him yet.”

You walked quickly through the echoing hospital lobby, hitting the ‘up’ button on the elevator before Amelia had a chance to ask. Jonathon was right behind you, and Amelia stared over your shoulder, informing him, “Me and Dr. Car-ride are going in the evelator, Dr. Jon.”

“So am I.”

The elevator was crowded, but you let Amelia press number six anyway. Little things like that made her so happy.

You left Amelia with Jonathon in the maternity waiting room and went to find Harper’s room. When you knocked on the door, Sam answered, looking like he’d been up for days. He opened the door and stepped aside so you could enter; Harper was sound asleep.

“She’s sedated,” he told you.

“Sam, I’m so sorry.”

He said nothing, just sat down in the chair beside her bed, “She doesn’t know yet—that he didn’t make it.” His face rested in his hands, “I don’t know how I’m going to tell her.”

“One thing at a time.”

“They fucking murdered him, Dan. Fucking murdered him.” You didn’t know what to say, so you remained quiet, moving to sit in a chair next to him. "How’s Amelia?" he asked. "Was she a nightmare last night?”

“Not at all,” you told him. “She’s out there with Jon right now.”

“Let her come in.”

“Sure.”

You wandered back down the hall and found her sitting in the waiting room, flipping through a copy of Redbook while Jonathon fiddled with the television. She threw it down when she saw you, turning around on her stomach, and sliding out of her chair, “I wanna go see Mommy.”

“Come with me; I'll take you.”

She held your hand as you walked down the hall, her little black shoes announcing her arrival long before she got to Harper’s room. Sam was standing in the doorway, “Hey, pretty girl. I heard you coming.”

“I heard me, too,” she told her father, lifting her arms so he’d pick her up. “Where's Mommy?” she asked, her little hands resting on his face.

“She’s in here, but she’s sound asleep. Can you whisper?”

“Yes,” she demonstrated.

“Okay.”

You stood in the hall and waited, your hands in your pockets, and stared at the floor.

*******************
ZEEK ZIRROLLI’S POV

everything can change in a New York minute

earlier that Tuesday morning

Kinney had called a meeting a eight o’clock sharp, and had you not already known the agenda, you would’ve when Rube showed up on time with no visible toys in his hands. There were no seats left next to Cynthia when you arrived, so you took one next to Rube, reassuring him as Kinney spoke that you wouldn’t be gone that long. Debbie shhed you.

After everyone at Kinney’s round table had been given their marching orders, you told Gabe good-bye and took one last whiff of Cynthia’s perfume before joining Kinney and Justin in the limousine that had been waiting outside. It was the first time you’d been a passenger in a limo and not the driver. Brian hadn’t wanted to park his Mercedes at the airport this time, not knowing how long he’d be gone.

It was also the first time you’d ever flown first class. Your ticket was bought and paid for before you could even blink, and that Tuesday morning, it landed you in the aisle seat in row six with Justin to your right and Kinney to his, his status seeming to automatically grant him the window seat on your one-way flight to New York City.

You spent your forty-five minutes accepting any and all alcohol offered to you while you looked over Justin’s shoulder as he flipped through a folder of pencil sketches he’d done of Alan over the years. Your favorites were the ones that he and Harper were in and the one of Alan and Harper’s daughter. It was the first time you’d ever seen Amelia.

At one point during the flight, Justin turned to you with a bag of peantus in his hand, "Do you want these? I'm not going to eat them."

You looked at him like he was a moron, "No, thank you. I don't want your nuts."

Admittedly, had this happened a month earlier, you would’ve refused to sit that close to Justin without an armed escort, but Kinney seemed to be taking things in stride. You didn’t have to have x-ray vision, though, to see that underneath Justin’s tray table, his hand was wound around Justin’s leg for the majority of the flight.

*******************

start spreading the news

LaGuardia was a zoo that morning, but eventually the three of you ended up in a cab headed for Mt. Sinai Hospital. You were anxious to see Alan. During the plane ride, Justin had been filling you in on the years you’d missed when you followed your little brother to Pittsburgh. Kinney had barely spoken.

Riding in the back seat of that taxi cab with them reminded you of every good movie you’d ever seen that was set in the South. There were always three men in a truck in those movies, smashed together in some kind of tobacco-chewing camaraderie. Kinney was going on to his hotel to check in and lose his luggage after he dropped you and Justin off. When the cabbie stopped in front of the hospital, Kinney helped Justin out, and then jumped back in. You were still sitting there, frozen, as you listened to the news at the top of the hour on WAXQ:

“Mt. Sinai Hospital has just confirmed the death of Alan Harper, the homeless man assaulted by two New York City police officers yesterday morning in front of the home of a prominent New York psychiatrist. Dr. Daniel Cartwright has testified for the prosecution on several police brutality cases over the last ten years. The connection between the assault and Cartwright’s testimony has yet to be determined, but is being investigated, according to detectives working the case. Harper is the son of James Harper, a twenty year veteran of the Metropolitan Transit Authority. He could not be reached for comment on his son’s death.”


Lyrics taken from the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s Under the Bridge, Credence Clearwater Revival’s Bad Moon on the Rise, Elton John’s Circle of Life, The Wallflower’s One Headlight, Semisonic’s Closing Time, Fleetwood Mac’s As Long as You Follow, Paul Simon’s Mother and Child Reunion, Cat Stevens’s Oh Very Young, Don Henley’s New York Minute, and Frank Sinatra’s New York New York. Icon bases used in this chapter came from basicbases, obsessiveicons, and khushi_icons. The following books were used as research for this chapter: The Mole People by Jennifer Toth and New York Underground: The Anatomy of a City by Julia Solis.