by Colum McCann
The neighbors clasp their hands and hang their heads, too polite to ask what happened. Maura stands with them—nobody wants the chair—and combs a long strand of hair away from her eye. She tells her neighbors that her husband has already become a fossil and some of them wonder what the word means, but they nod their heads anyway and let it hang on the edge of their lips: fossil.
* * *
Nathan Walker repeats the word after making a brief visit to Maura’s apartment, having left an envelope full of money on the kitchen table after passing the hat among the sandhogs.
He walks the bright winter streets toward the ferry and wipes at his eyes with an overcoat sleeve, recalling one evening last winter after work. He was coming out early from the hog-house showers and was set upon by four drunken welders. They used the handles of pickaxes as weapons. The blows rained down on the top of his skull, and he fell. One of the welders leaned over and whispered the word “nigger” in his ear, as if he had just invented it. “Hey, nigger.” Walker looked up and smashed the man’s teeth with the heel of an open palm. The pickax handles hit him again, the wood slipping on his bloody face. And then came a shout—“Jaysus Christ!”—and he recognized the voice. Con O’Leary, out from the shower, stood only in his boots and trousers. The Irishman looked flabby and gigantic in the sunlight. He began swinging with his fists. Two of the welders fell, and then police whistles were heard in the distance. The welders stumbled off, scattering in the dark streets. O’Leary knelt down on the ground and held Walker’s head against his white chest. “You’ll be all right, son,” he said.
A patch of blood spread beneath the Irishman’s nipple. He picked up Walker’s hat from the ground. It was full of blood.
“Looks to me like a bowl of tomato soup,” said O’Leary.
The two men tried to laugh. O’Leary had said the word “tomato” as if there were a sigh in the middle of it. For weeks afterward Walker would see his friend and remember every syllable: to-mah-to.
Now, moving down the streets of the Lower East Side, Walker wipes the tears from his eyes and hefts the weight of another word upon his tongue: fossil.
chapter 3
the first snow
There is a moment upon waking when he thinks he might not wake forever. Treefrog touches his liver to make sure he is still alive and remembers the crane found frozen yesterday in the Hudson.
A jab of pain rocks his stomach. He turns in his sleeping bag, pulls the zipper down, opens his shirt, and rubs his fingers over the dent the metal has made in his chest. He pinches the dent on either side and watches a red welt rise on his skin. Cold, so goddamn cold, colder than topside even. Reaching across his bedside table, he lights a Sabbath candle and holds both hands over the flame, letting the heat slip through him. His palms hover close to the flame and for a moment his hands seem disembodied in the candlelight, the rest of him left in darkness. The closer his palms get to the candle, the higher the flame licks. Treefrog allows his hands to hover until the heat is so intense he pulls away, enjoying the pain, his two hands held high in the frigid air.
He hears a couple of rodents scuttle in the rear cave. “Fuck,” he says, “fuck.” He throws an empty can over his shoulder. It rattles against the wall of the cave and the rats are quiet for a moment; then they begin scrabbling once more. Time to set some traps.
Sitting up in his sleeping bag, Treefrog puts his hands down by his crotch for warmth, leans forward, and looks across the low wall of his elevated home.
The first snow falls through the ceiling of the tunnel, filtering down through the metal grill. Forty feet in the air, the grill holds the snow for a moment and then releases it. The flakes spin in shafts of light, blue winter light. They gyrate and land by the railway tracks, forming patches of snow that reach out into the tunnel, and are then swallowed by darkness. Treefrog has seen this happen often enough that he has learned not to be surprised, but still he watches for a long while and then he says aloud to nobody, “Underground snow.”
* * *
Each day begins like any other. His morning ritual. He rises and dresses in the abysmal cold, lights a candle, closes his eyes. He moves, blind, to the rear of his nest. The nest is two rooms in all: an old elevated storage room and a cave.
Treefrog feels the darkness, smells it, belongs to it.
In the cave he crouches and moves around with his eyes shut. Candle wax drips onto his hand. The cave is black and damp. Nooks and crannies in the rumples of gray rock. A ledge on the wall. Hidden cubbyholes big enough to stuff his fist into. He places the candle on top of the ledge and reaches for a piece of graph paper and a sharpened pencil. Circling the small cave, he trails his hand against the wall as he goes, feeling the crevices and coldness. With each change in the landscape he opens his eyes and marks an increment on the graph paper. He returns and feels the same place with his other hand, caresses the rock, and lets the cold seep through his leather gloves. He breathes heavily and imagines the clouds his breath makes before his eyes—strange shapes and odd motions. Running his hands along the wall, he instinctively bends and twists and turns and comes to his library, tucked at the very back of the cave. Both his palms rest on a rickety wooden shelf, and he stays there as if in prayer.
Treefrog switches the pencil from hand to hand.
On the shelf he keeps his engineering journals, encased in special plastic bags, labeled with stickers. He runs his fingers along them, stopping at his favorite—tunnel building—and then moves on past his collection of maps, down the length of the world and beyond.
Ducking out from the cave, he goes back to the large front chamber; even with his eyes closed, he knows the shadows that appear in the flickering candlelight. His boots slide from carpet to dirt floor back to carpet again. He never places a foot wrong and always takes an even number of paces. Every hollow and crinkle of mud is recognized from the way it touches his feet. Most of his junk is kept here, old crates, newspapers, a sofa found bloated in the rain, cans, pots, knives, needles, three dozen hubcaps, and books stuffed into Ziploc bags to protect them from the damp. Kindling is piled around the fire pit. Treefrog stops at the Gulag, a foot-deep hole in the wall. Beneath the Gulag is a box for his cat, Castor, to sleep in. Nudging along the wall, under a clothesline strung together from ties, past his bed, Treefrog is careful not to let his feet touch the giant piss bottles lined up at the end of the mattress.
He will empty the bottles later, taking them topside to carve his name yellow in the snow where it will be illegible except to the crows.
At the edge of his nest he reaches up and touches a steel girder, spins his body, and reaches out his other hand. He marks the high edge of the graph paper with his pencil. Treefrog feels for a broken speedometer hung from the steel girder of his nest—the needle stuck at thirty-six, his age—and he says to himself, Take it easy, don’t crash.
He opens his eyes, looks at the graph paper, the rows of dots and the squiggled lines. He draws a quick ordnance survey profile of where he has walked. This is his most important ritual; he cannot start his day without it. He exaggerates the features to ten times their map size, so that, on the paper, the nest looks like a rumple of huge valleys and mountains and plains. Even the tiniest nicks in the wall become craters. Later he will transfer them to a larger map he has been working on for the past four years, a map of where he lives, hand-drawn, intricate, secretive, with hills, rivers, ox-bow lakes, curved creeks, shadows: the cartography of darkness.
Fingers trembling in the cold, Treefrog stuffs the morning’s map into his bedside table drawer and walks onto the catwalk with his eyelids shut. The narrow beam requires supreme balance—below him is a twenty-foot drop to the tunnel. He swings his way down to the second beam ten feet below, crouches, then leaps and drops soundlessly to the gravel, knees bent, heart thumping. He opens his eyes to the darkness.
* * *
He lives three blocks from anybody else in the tunnel. Sometimes, gazing along its length, he sees a watery movement in the distanc
e, and it looks to Treefrog like a canoe being paddled with intent; or his daughter swimming toward him, arms stretched wide; or his wife moving through the blackness, slender, night-eyed, forgiving. But then the dark clarifies itself, and the visions are gone.
* * *
Sitting in the stream of blue light from topside—beside the mural of Salvador Dalí’s Melting Clock—Treefrog lets the flakes fall down around him. From his overcoat pocket he takes a hypodermic needle, holding it to his eyes to see the marked calibrations. He fills the syringe quarter full with air, then wets the size sixteen needle with his tongue. Almost icy enough for his tongue to freeze against the metal. He leaves a bubble of spittle on the point and rummages in his other pocket for a pink handball. He shoves the needle into the ball and pushes the end of the plastic casing. It feels like entering skin. The ball bloats with air and Treefrog rubs the new roundness of it. Perfect. He takes a black pen and marks the point where the needle entered the ball, searches in the depths of his overcoat for a second syringe, already filled with glue. The syringe is wrapped in a sock to keep it warm. He strokes the casing with both hands.
Treefrog plunges the second needle into the mark on the pink ball and lets out a slow whistle as the glue pumps into the rubber. It will take half an hour to harden, but the air and glue will give the ball a greater bounce. Further down the tunnel he hears a grunt, and he turns but sees nobody.
“Heyyo,” he says to the darkness. “Heyyo.”
Taking a second handball from his pocket, he steps back toward the tracks and faces the Melting Clock. The mural was drawn years ago by Papa Love, long before Treefrog came to the tunnel. The clock—gray and black, eight feet high, drawn under the grill to catch the light—is curved like a woman’s waist. Beside it, the wall has been slashed with a drunken line of red graffiti. Gangs of kids came down in the summer with spray cans. Treefrog watched them from his nest. Their baseball hats were turned backward. They stuck close together and were scared. After spraying the walls they left empty cans along the edge of the tunnel. But they never touched Papa Love’s murals. They even knocked on the door of the old man’s shack, but Papa Love never answered his door: never has, never will.
In the cyclorama of snow, Treefrog throws the ball against the wall, his black hair and long beard swinging around him. He slaps the ball first with his right hand, then with his left, there are laws to this game: he must maintain the balance of his body, keep the equilibrium, never hit out of sequence. If he hits twice with the left hand he must hit twice with the right. When he slams with the center of the right palm he must slam with the center of the left. He concentrates on the pink ball bouncing back from the mural. Most of all he likes it when he hits the heart of the Melting Clock, where the mural wiggles near clockhand four.
The ball zooms in and out from the wall.
Treefrog warms up, and there is nothing else on his mind except keeping the ball in the air, hitting underhand, overhand, from his chest, at his thigh, above his head, all simplicity, all precision, all control, in the tunnel, in the shaft of light, in the snow.
He maintains the rhythm perfectly, feeling the warmth slide through his body, its looseness, its generosity. A bead of sweat negotiates his underarm. He hits the ball too hard against a crack in the wall and it spins out of control, flies behind him, and lands on the second set of tracks. In the distance he hears a train, the 69 to Montreal, a rush of lights and metal. It comes loud loud louder and it is good night to the ball because the train is upon it and he doesn’t even turn around to watch; the ball will probably be carried way up the tunnel in the underdraft of a carriage or get squashed to nothing. The sound of the train fades away as it moves toward Harlem and beyond to Canada. He slaps his fist into the palm of his hand and hears a shout from behind him.
“Yo.”
Peering into the shafts of light that spill through the grates, he sees Elijah stepping out of the shadows at the far side of the tracks, a blanket pulled up over his hooded sweatshirt.
“Gimme a lighter.”
“Kiss my ass,” says Treefrog.
“Come on, man, gimme a lighter.”
“What for?”
“I’m freezing, gimme a lighter.”
“Your heater not working again?”
“Of course my heater’s working. I want to smoke a goddamn cigarette.”
Elijah pulls the hood away from his face, revealing a long red cut on his jawbone.
“What happened you?” asks Treefrog.
“Nothing.”
“Someone slice you?”
“What’s it to you, motherfucker?”
Treefrog shrugs. “Only asking.”
“Don’t ask. Nothing happened. Okay? Nothing. Gimme a lighter.”
Treefrog reaches for the second ball in his pocket and slices it sideways, making it spin off the wall at an angle. As he stretches out his arm to hit it, he chuckles. “What you gonna give me?”
“I’ll give you a smoke.”
“Three,” says Treefrog, and the ball is guided gently against the wall with the other hand.
“Two.”
“Four.”
“Okay, three, goddammit!”
“Show tell the barter man,” says Treefrog.
Elijah drops the blanket to the ground, delves down into his sweatshirt pocket, and takes out a softpack of menthols. He taps the pack and three cigarettes emerge.
Treefrog lets the ball go jittering through the gravel at strange angles, way down toward the six-foot-high mural of Martin Luther King. He takes out six plastic lighters from his coat pocket, arranges them on both his palms, and says, “Choose your poison, man.”
It’s all one swift motion and the orange neon lighter is grabbed from Treefrog and three cigarettes are gone from the pack and already Elijah is on his way back down toward his cubicle in the southern part of the tunnel.
Treefrog puts the cigarette in his mouth, flicks his lighter. He feels a clump of snow land on his cheek, and he says aloud for a second time, for symmetry, for equilibrium, “Underground snow.”
* * *
The first winter he came down it was so cold that his harmonica froze to his lips. He was sitting on the catwalk and hadn’t warmed the Hohner. It stuck to his mouth, and skin peeled away when he yanked the harmonica off.
Later, topside, he was caught stealing Chapstick from the pharmacy on Broadway. He tucked the small thin tube under his tongue to hide it, but a clerk saw and stood in front of him, pushed him backward. Treefrog tried to step around the man, but the clerk grabbed him by his long hair and yanked him into a display of cold medicine, the bottles of pills clattering to the ground. Treefrog stood up and broke the clerk’s nose with a single blow of his fist, but an off-duty officer came up behind him and put a gun to his temple and said, “Sonofabitch, don’t move.”
The gun felt cold against Treefrog’s head. He thought of how a bullet might sound to a dying man as it ricocheted through his skull, and he asked the cop to put the gun on the other side of his temple. But the cop just told him to kneel on the ground and put his hands in the air.
As he knelt, Treefrog spat the tube of Chapstick out on the floor. A small crowd had gathered to watch. The clerk picked up the tube with a piece of tissue paper. All the time Treefrog had the harmonica warming in his armpit.
When the uniformed cops came he couldn’t remember his real name and they shoved their nightsticks into his ribs, jabbed hard, searched him for weapons, and handcuffed him. The harmonica fell down his sleeve to the floor. They stamped down, and their black shoes crushed the Hohner. It was almost ruined; the metal was bowed down into the row of reeds, it made a sad silver lip. They asked him his name over and over again, and, with his arms stretched above his head, he kept shouting, “Treefrog, Treefrog, Treefrog, Treefrog!” Later, when he got the harmonica back—after two nights in the holding cell—it still smelled of his armpit. Not wanting to lick at his own body, he didn’t play the Hohner for a week.
* * *
Warm from playing handball, he takes off his coat and drops it on the gravel, then stretches out his arms like a man crucified. He looks up to the grate and lets the flakes fall into the cups of his filthy hands, where they melt. He rubs his fingers, freeing them of tunnel dust, brings his hands together, and washes his face with the snow water, letting some of it drip to his tongue. Then he scrubs the back of his neck and feels a cool droplet meander down the collars of his shirts and soak into the back of his thermal undershirt. It has been weeks since he had a wash. He rubs the cold water on his Adam’s apple and opens each of the shirts in succession. In one move he pulls the tight gray thermal over his head, throws it onto the heap of clothes near the tracks. His chest is scrimshawed with stab wounds and burns and scars.
So many mutilations of his body.
Hot paper clips, blunt scissors, pliers, cigarettes, matches, blades—they have all left their marks, the most prominent one on the right side of his belly. Treefrog once stuffed a man with a knife and it slid through the gap in his ribs; it was like puncturing a balloon, it slid in and slid out, the man let out a sad slow sigh, but it didn’t kill him—the man had stolen one of Treefrog’s cigarettes. That was way back in the bad days, the worst days, when Treefrog felt that he had to stab himself on the opposite side of the rib cage. On a New York City bus he punctured himself half an inch with his knife just to get the balance. He had to knock the end of the knife in with both fists. A peculiar warmth spilled over his belly, and blood ran all down the back of the bus. The driver called for assistance over the radio but Treefrog stumbled out the door, walked along Broadway, and lost himself in the neon of Times Square. Later, back in the tunnel, there was the terror of wondering whether he should balance the wound—should he stab himself on the left-hand side?—but he didn’t; he just pressed his thumb into his side and dreamed of the metal shaft entering his flesh.