All I wanted was to escape—to abandon Billy before whatever had ruined him infected me. I had no time, no strength, to contemplate the path he’d traveled to this place. He had been attacked and bested, that was all that mattered. And though I knew he would not die, that right now he was sitting on a couch in Manhattan waiting for his son’s return, I didn’t want to see what happened next. Not even if it meant solving the mystery of his survival.
The choice, of course, was not mine: I would see what I was shown. Billy rose, staggered to the middle of the room, picked up the rope. A loop was knotted into it already. He pushed his head through, the image strangely birthlike. And there my father stood, motionless, the rope trailing down his body like a gruesome necktie. I knew he was not searching for the courage to kill himself, but rather the physical coherence necessary to perform the act. He was in too much disarray even for that.
We were only three feet apart. Without intending to, I began to breathe with him. It was effortless; I had inherited his lungs. Billy fell into the chair and shut his eyes, then lurched forward and opened them and saw me.
I know that doesn’t make a lick of sense, but his face went quizzical and unbelieving and he stood and squinted and raised a hand as if to run it through the air and test whether I was real or just the latest in a long line of delusions. Then the resin pulled the plug, and I was out.
6
ou’ve got a tripartite drug economy in Fort Greene nowadays, unfolding within a four-block span and almost nobody the wiser. On the low end are the cats slinging on street corners up and down Myrtle, heads from the projects that bookend the neighborhood on the north side (and best believe the neighborhood does its damnedest to lean the other way, like there really was only one bookend), putting in banker’s hours in front of Chinese takeout joints that make ninety percent of their money selling chicken-wing-and-french-fry combos, and whose Mandarin countermen squint at you like “fucking with me, homes?” from behind their bulletproof lazy Susans if you try to order, say, moo goo gai pan, even though there’s a huge photograph of the dish right above them on the overhead menu, taken in 1981 from four inches away so that the food looks like a still from a stomach-surgery video.
The project kids sell no-grade bullshit, nickel bags of Mexican brown that smell like ankle-sweat, along with similar sock-stashed qualities and quantities of white and gray. They stay broke and confused and insecure about their business acumen, owing to the fact that they spend all day listening to various rappers brag about the sky-high money-piles they netted through similar means, not realizing that a) rappers are liars, and b) anybody who did stack real paper as a street dealer did so fifteen or twenty years ago, when crack-rock enthusiasts weren’t yet a dying and incarcerated breed and people were, on the whole, stupider and had stupider haircuts.
You know that scene in every movie where a BMW full of twitchy Caucazoid teens sporting pastel collar-popped polo shirts rolls into the belly of the ghetto to purchase narcotics from some swaggering, jail-buffed indigene? The last time that actually happened was June 1993. A Connecticut Muffin shop opened on Myrtle a couple of years ago. That’s what white people are doing in Fort Greene today: come for the baked goods, stay for the multimillion-dollar brownstones. Even if the new generation of residents were comfortable buying weed on the street from a sixteen-year-old black kid in a do-rag who’s saving up to buy an Xbox, there’s no way he’d sell to them, because they look like cops to him. Nor would his pesticide-laced dirt engender product loyalty.
Two blocks south of Myrtle, nestled between Dekalb Avenue’s French bistros and overbearing black-boho coffeeshops, you’ve got the intermediate stage of the weed economy, herbgates disguised as businesses a half-step too downscale for what the neighborhood’s become: an African hat shop, a video store, a taquería. These aren’t like Uptown weed spots—those bodegas with one box of baking soda in the window and two cans of grape soda in the cooler and some scummy, pockmarked dude ignoring you from behind four inches of glass, places only a retarded six-year-old would mistake for legitimate businesses. Your average Fort Greene resident doesn’t even know the spots are spots, and the weed they move—passable-to-pretty-good, parceled out in twenties and fifties—probably represents less than half their gross. The video store has a Cult section, which in my opinion is the mark of a decent video store.
Fort Greene is a gourmet market, like my former school, and herbgates of any description are ill equipped to compete in either product or discretion with the dealers cribbed up in quiet garden apartments on the treelined blocks of South Oxford and Cumberland, Clinton and Lafayette. Needless to say, they’re not on the corner with a sock full of nicks. They’re sitting in their living rooms, checking their e-mail. And in a steel canister right next to the espresso machine, they’ve got three different kinds of superbad name-brand designer bud, ranging in price and quality from outrageous to otherworldly. The knuckleheads on Myrtle have no idea these people exist, and neither would I if Karen weren’t a weedhead.
Some kids associate a certain perfume with their mothers, or maybe the smell of a homecooked meal. For your boy, it’s General Tso’s Vegi-Chicken from Kum Kau on Washington Ave and a fruity, trichome-laden Cannabis Cup–winning indica/sativa hybrid called White Widow. And thus, with my first conscious breath I was able to deduce the presence of Wren 209, even before getting a firm handle on where I was.
What I was came easier: hung over like a motherfucker. My head throbbed with a bonerlike intensity; my mouth felt full of cotton. And for good reason: I opened my eyes and found my lips stuck to Dengue’s carpet by a gum of drying drool. I attempted to knuckle the crust out of my eyes and learned that my arm was immobile, fast asleep above my head. I groaned, rolled onto my back, and saw Billy and Karen sharing the couch, Fever reclining in his chair. All civilized and shit, like the three of them were about to convene a meeting of their monthly book club.
Karen uncrossed her legs, smoothed her skirt, recrossed them the other way. “Good morning,” she said, though it was clearly nothing of the kind unless we were having an eclipse. I dragged myself into a sitting position, leaned back on the arm that wasn’t full of pins-and-needles, and beckoned for the herb.
I took a hit, and felt the pressure in my head decrease like somebody inside had spun a wheel. Ain’t a hangover been invented that a little White Widow and a greasy plate of diner eggs can’t solve.
“What I miss? You kids friends now?”
The upper half of Karen’s body bent away from Billy’s until she was practically lying sideways across the arm of the couch, a real couples-therapy move. “I wouldn’t go that far.” She flicked her eyes at him the way a serpent flicks its tongue. “I’m glad he’s out of bed,” she said, like it was some kind of big-hearted concession, and folded her arms over her chest.
While I was watching her, Fever leaned forward and gangstered the spliff out of my hand. For a fat blind man—well, you know.
“Welcome to Thursday,” he said, falling back into his seat. “You’ve been gone almost twenty-four hours.”
“What about you?”
“I outweigh you two to one. I was only out for—what? Twelve?”
“Fourteen.”
“Did we see the same things?”
“You saw what you saw,” said Billy, staring at me like he knew what I was thinking—which would have been a hell of a trick, since I wasn’t sure myself. He was all thawed out now, that much was clear, and something I could not pinpoint shined in his eyes. At first I took it for that worn serenity you sometimes see in people who know they should be dead. Then I realized I’d stopped flexing all the face-muscles in charge of hostility, and he was shining at me. A mild version of that fifteenth-floor threshold nausea gripped me, I guess because I’d just stepped into the present.
“Did you see me?” I asked. “In that hotel room—I felt like you saw me.”
“It’s possibl
e.”
“Actually, it’s not.”
Karen was chucking eye-daggers at all of us. I seemed to be the only one who noticed.
“That guy, Esteban. How did he . . . ?”
“So you met Esteban.” Billy dropped his head. “I wasn’t as strong as I thought. That’s how.”
The last of the joint vanished into Dengue’s airplane hangar lungs. “Ay, but you was plenty bumbaclaat strong for a while, bredren. Yuh still ’ave dat obeah wisdom inna yuh head, and now yuh home wi’ family an’ ready fe mash down di wicked mon once and fe certain, like wi done plan. Di hour fe strike dat blow soon come. Jah-Jah carry yuh back widdin de nick a’ time. Take a look at this shit.”
The Ambassador rooted through the side-pocket of his chair, brought forth a mangled newspaper. It was the previous week’s New York Straphanger, a four-page broadsheet published by the MTA. Graffiti writers have been subscribing for years, as a way to stay up on enforcement issues.
“‘Coney Tunnels to Be Filled, Sealed,’” I read aloud. “‘Transit Authority President Anastacio Bracken announced that the City will fill and seal a number of unused tunnels originating beneath the Coney Island Train Yard and extending north through parts of Brooklyn. These tunnels, originally built in the 1920s and unused since the track reconfigurations of the 1950s, run beneath current train lines. In a statement, Bracken cited ‘potential structural issues,’ if the tunnels were not dealt with now. ‘This is a preventive measure,’ he stressed, ‘but one best taken immediately. Disruption to normal service will be minimal,’ blah blah blah.” I folded the paper, chucked it atop the coffee table.
“You know what this means,” Dengue declared. I looked to Billy, since the Ambassador obviously wasn’t talking to me. But my father just sat there, staring at nothing. It was Karen who reacted.
“I can’t believe I’m sitting here listening to this,” she said, and stood. “Guess what, guys? It’s 2005. 1987 has been over. Get a fucking late pass.” She glanced around for something to do, somewhere to go. Options were limited. She stalked over to the sink and started washing dishes. Karen can make anything an act of fury.
Nobody spoke. My mother scrubbed and splashed. I wondered what she’d do when she finished, imagined the three of us sitting in silence all night while Karen turned Dengue’s lair sparkling clean out of pure ire.
Finally, Fever jerked his thumb toward the sound of running water. “Your wife’s objections aside—”
Karen’s voice cut through the air the way that one dish soap on the commercial cuts through grease. “I’m not his wife. We were never married.”
“Mom, for Christ’s sake, can’t you come sit down?”
I almost never called her that; it was like pulling out the elephant gun. She dropped the sponge into the sink, dried her hands on her skirt, and took a few steps toward the couch.
“Fine. You can all trade ghost stories. Hold on, I’ll build a fucking campfire.”
Dengue’s palms flashed. “Go ahead, Billy.”
My father rubbed his temples with both hands, like the memory was a genie he had to coax forth.
“The night Amuse died,” he said, and then looked up, a wince tight on his face. “The night you were born and Amuse died. There was . . . we encountered . . .”
He threw Dengue’s gesture back across the room.
“We got chased deep into a tunnel, like I told you,” Fever picked up. “Then we climbed into a lower one. We found a ladder—”
“Two ladders. We climbed down two levels.”
“Right. Two ladders.”
Billy leaned forward, left hand wrapped around his right wrist. “It was one of the first tunnels, for the earliest lines. Much older than the ones Bracken is talking about in the paper. Nobody had disturbed the earth before that, Dondi. Not here. Not in the history of history.”
“Motherfucker, why don’t you just tell it?”
“No. Sorry. Go ahead.”
Dengue scratched at his beard. “Something was down there,” he said at last. “Something evil. We were in its house, and it was looking at us. Looking into us.”
I tried to take that in, and failed. “You were on acid.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Billy said. He nodded at Fever. “Tell.”
“I dropped in before the rest of them,” said the Ambassador. “And the first thing I noticed was the temperature. Usually, the tunnels get warmer the deeper you go. But this was like a meat locker. And then there was the smell.”
Karen spun away from the W racer she’d been toying with. “Here we go. Tell him about the smell. Was it sulfur? Brimstone?”
“Strawberry incense,” Dengue said.
“Boom. What fuckin’ sense does that make? Right?”
“At first it was pitch black,” Billy said. “But after a few seconds, we started seeing these faint luminescent streaks, all up and down the tunnel. These forked staffs, like lightning in a photograph. I didn’t know what they were then, but I do now: the roots of dead trees. Elders, like El Purga, that the builders destroyed. Their spirits were still lingering there, like ghosts. If they’d been stronger, they would have helped us.”
“Goddamn, this is some bullshit.”
The Ambassador reconfigured his haunches. “I don’t know about spirits and whatnot. That’s Billy’s department. But there was definitely some kind of misery in there. I could feel it.”
Karen reached into the ashtray, tweezered the roach. “And that’s when they looked up to see a Native American dude shedding a single tear for the vanished harmony of man and nature.”
Billy looked up at her with eyes mooned wide. “Please,” he said. “Enough.” Karen turned her head, blew her smoke, and buttoned her lip.
Dengue exhaled through his nose and resumed. “Everything went black again, all at once. That was when we heard Bracken’s boots on the ladder. And felt . . .”
“The demon,” Billy finished.
Dengue’s lip twitched at the word, as if he wanted to object but couldn’t. “I can’t describe it,” he said, and a bead of sweat slid past his earlobe. “This . . . presence filled the tunnel, Dondi. It was like being set on fire, from the inside. Or no. Pulled open, and stared at. By something looking for parts it could . . . I don’t know. Devour.”
“Recognize,” said Billy. “Recognize and use. Against you.”
“That was when Bracken dropped into the tunnel. And lemme tell you, he grabbed that motherfucker’s full attention. Fast. They liked each other. They connected. We saw this pulse of light, running over his body. I don’t know for how long. A few seconds. And we were paralyzed. Not physically—”
“Maybe physically.”
“—but because there was nowhere to run. We were trapped between Bracken and the tunnel. And then suddenly the light, the pulse, left Bracken and jumped over to Amuse and lit him the fuck up. As if he had light bulbs inside. And Bracken made this awful noise—a howl that sounded like it was being dragged out of him. Then we heard the gunshots, and saw Amuse fall. Bracken shot him over and over—bam bam bam bam bam, until it was just the empty gun, clicking. And then everything went black again.”
“Tell him what happened next.” Billy was clutching at himself, squeezing his thighs, his biceps, rocking back and forth. I worried that this was more than he could handle, wondered how little it might take to push him back into dementia.
“Bracken started laughing. It wasn’t much different from the howl, and it went on and on. If he knew we were there—”
“And he must have!”
“—he didn’t give a shit. I don’t know how long we huddled together on the ground, too scared to move. And numb—from the temperature, not just the fear. I swear to god, the tears froze on our faces it was so cold. Sabor was hyperventilating; he wanted to go over and pick up Amuse, but we wouldn’t let hi
m.”
Billy dug furiously at his scalp, fingers probing the space between two matted vines of hair. “Bracken just stood there, like an animal over his kill. Making that noise. Eventually we walked right past him, and climbed out of there.”
Dengue hunched forward, elbows on knees, and opened his milky, vacant eyes. “Shit was never the same, Dondi. Not just because we lost Amuse. We brushed up against something we were never meant to that night, and we’ve been fucked ever since.”
“The curse of the Immortal Five,” I said. I didn’t believe or doubt it, wasn’t ready to commit. The mere existence of answers where there’d only been emptiness had me teetering, off-balance, like the account possessed a physical weight. As if it were a dense, black marble lodged in my brain.
“You goddamn right,” Dengue grunted.
“We got cursed,” said Billy. “Bracken got blessed, if you can call it that. Every move he’s made since—he’s not acting alone. That thing’s giving him juice.”
Dengue palmed his chin. “Shutting off those tunnels, it’s gotta be some kind of power move—make sure nobody else can get to whatever’s down there. We’ve gotta do something. Before that motherfucker ends up running the city. The country. The world.”
“That didn’t go so well last time,” said Karen, from the carpet’s edge. “Let’s pretend for a minute that you’re right and the source of Bracken’s success is some mystical alliance with a demon—because scumbags and murderers never get ahead in politics on their own, right? Let’s pretend Bracken didn’t just shine a Maglite at Amuse, like I’ve been saying for eighteen years, and you guys really have been hoodooed by some evil spirit that made you go blind, and turned you into a fugitive—and an asshole, too, might as well blame it for that. If that’s the case, then starting some shit when he’s forgotten all about you would be pretty retarded, don’t you think? Or are your lives not fucked up enough? You wanna end up dead or in jail like Andy and Sabor and Cloud? And what the hell you smiling at me like that for, Fever?”
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