“Nobody.”
“Don’t give me that Odysseus bullshit. Your hands are soft. You’ve got a lot of pigment in your skin so you’ve must have a job up above. Where do you come from?” said the bleached bully.
“I’ve been trying to figure that out myself. Where am I?”
“You’re in the Hive, headquarters for Dig City, dumbass.”
“The name’s Eddie.”
“That’s better. I’m Cray, second-in-command of the underground empire. Now, what were you doing trying to penetrate our periphery?”
Street stories had always made this place sound like a romantic world of diligence and determinism, and here I was in the blanched heart of it enjoying an audience with a washed-out bureaucrat. “I just dropped into a duct. I wasn’t trying to penetrate anything.”
“Listen here, Edgy, overworld agencies may call us subversives, but we’re only down here to spurn the surveillance and computer networks they use to scan every action of the defeated, yea-saying, conformity-bent society upstairs. It’s our inalienable right to be indistinguishable, and so we hold the tunnels.” I thought someone should remind Cray that his whole scruffy cooperative had been held hostage by a lone, disgruntled hacker, but his delusion was not mine to disabuse. “Of course, we’re left pretty vulnerable to demented drones like Miss Spinks. However clumsy your impregnation, Eggy, you just managed to save the movement.” Pushing a piece of paper across the desk at me, Cray said, “This is the Dig City immigration form. Fill it out completely and we’ll consider your status.”
I had won Spinks’s game and she had reopened the gates to Dig City. Now they wanted me to be their first new customer. “That’s very kind of you, Mr. Cray, but I’m not certain I actually want to immigrate.”
“You don’t get it, do you? You already have. You’re here. Your current classification is illegal, as a matter of fact. Hero or no, you barged through our borders.”
“But it was an accident.”
“Involuntary impregnation? You think US Gov’s INS would buy that? Come on! Take this form to your cell and we’ll put it before naturalization in the morning.”
A contingent of border patrol agents, the same thugs who had wrested me out of Spinks’s death clutch, appeared in pale gray uniforms. Drunk, stoned, enervated, what could I do but endure the compulsory hospitality?
I was assigned to a compact domicile. They called it a cell, but not in the prison sense. Constructions of papier-mâché over chicken wire formed compartments along tunnel walls like the reticulated cells of a honeycomb. Walls were bare, furnishings spare, and the low ceiling left space to stand up but not to stretch arms overhead. Using the narrow bed as a bench, I pulled down a little ledge from the opposite wall. There was a keyboard built into one end and a little monitor imbedded in the wall. In order to stand up, I had to close the improvised desktop. In Dig City, I surmised, problems were worked out more or less horizontally.
I sat staring at the information form for a whole hour. And then another. I had been left empty by the Spinks ordeal and shell-shocked by the hara-kiri King, but I would have to make up a good story or the fanatics who ran Dig City might never let me leave. Without my wallet, I did not have the Swift ID on me, but I would never say Corrente. Even if I told my birthplace and date, it would be just as good as surrendering the surname. Since that run-in with Apple Jack at Adelle’s, I had resolved not to imperil my parents. I had been lucky to make my getaway from the arcade without getting them in a mess of trouble, but if I ended up in the news, even from afar, I knew I could be the death of Pauly and totally screw over Merry. They thought I was dead, and that was for the best.
There was a rap at the door of my cell. It was a pale, homely lady from immigration. Sitting there in the little cubicle with the work ledge down gave me all the semblance of a busy and productive member of this bastard community, and you would think she would be impressed to meet the genius who had defeated the transvestite menace, but she just frowned and said, “So you don’t have to go around looking like a bus driver.” She tossed a change of clothes on the cot and left.
I traded my grubby driver’s uniform for gray fatigues and lay down to try to sober up. I found my attention straying to ceiling and floor, wondering whether air ducts might swiftly dispatch me from this new indenture to Cray and his cracked cadre. I puzzled out the opportunities for escape: Spend a few days in this arrogant underground, pretend enthusiasm for the revolution, and then slip out through the sewage system, for instance. Although the bus was toast and the wallet had been lifted, my career profile was looking up. If I managed to get out and up and come back to life above as Eddie Swift, I would have a good alibi at the company’s inquiry: “Abducted by underground crazies!” It would make a great tabloid headline. Besides, I could always get a job with one of the rival lines. I had met enough operators in diners and filling stations for references. Now that I was actually of eligible age, all I had to do was replace the ID and I was in like Flynn.
Another knock and I thought it must be the disdainful matron back to harass the captive rescuer, but when I opened the door I was blinded by an apparition of underground loveliness. Radiant at the entrance to my cell stood an ivory Aphrodite. Fair features struck me as somehow familiar. I rubbed my eyes and focused on her porcelain forehead: escaping from under her infantry cap, a single brunette curl made a boldface, upside-down question mark.
“Are you Freddie?”
“Yes,” I said. “I mean, Eddie.”
“I’m Jocy.” The first lady of Dig City removed her cap and a great cascade of black hair spilled over her shoulders like the confluence of two dark, mysterious rivers. “Would you like to come to the canteen with me?” she said.
Was this just a joke, the cruel caricature of kindness towards the scorned stowaway? Although still sore from Cray’s party-line spanking, I would not turn Jocy down. She was older than me, maybe forty—a sexy forty—but with a delicate complexion preserved by sequester from the sun. For someone who was practically royalty, Jocy did not seem the least pretentious nor, for that matter, very regal in bell-bottom jeans that flattered long legs and flared to the floor. I followed her through Dig City’s corridors and silently imbibed delicate breezes that smelled of hyacinth and minerals.
Most of Jocy’s subjects were nothing short of fluorescent. Latinos lost their fabulous tans, Asians faded ghostly gray, and while some Africans got blacker, most mellowed to a freckled, earthy brown. At the canteen, Jocy and I measured scoops of hot cocoa and dehydrated mini-marshmallows into earthenware cups, filling them up with steaming jets from a faucet. “The water flows from a hot spring,” she said, “but simple necessities like light and air don’t come naturally down here.” Jocy dipped her biscotti—real biscotti, looted from a North End factory at the beginning of the Great Devaluation and preserved in its original packaging—and took a bite. I endeavored to emulate her method, but the sagging wand all at once collapsed and fell to a flaccid heap on my slacks. My fly got splashed with a soggy umber splotch—and the liquid seeping through was fucking hot! I held tongue, lap, and pride while trying nonchalantly to mop up the slop with a napkin, Jocy delicately sipping and nibbling her own stash on the side. Mother Merry, I thought, would have liked Jocy a lot.
In the next tunnel over from the canteen, we sat beside each other on a bench in front of an old Norge coin washer, I with a standard-issue towel around my waist, bony knees awkwardly crossed, while on the other side of the circular glass pants twirled in their underwater dance. Jocy filled me in about Vitamin D supplements and long physical education sessions under sun lamps in the gymnasium Levis had constructed out of the four-lane tunnel. She had been born underground to one of the first subterranean squatters. Jocy had not realized she was different from most children, presuming all movies shot on the surface to be science fiction, until her fourth-grade English class read “All Summer in a Day.” Bradbury’s story had seemed like her own vivid, if plaintive, biography. When she came to understand tha
t in fact the vast rind of the globe implied the existence of people who did not enjoy shelter from the fabled sun or unpredictable meteorology, Jocy was overwhelmed by a sense of pity. She became involved with politics at DCU and was elected student body president. This early experience with domestic diplomacy assured that, once she earned her bachelor’s degree, she was destined for the executive staff, where she eventually married Levis, the maximum leader.
“By the way,” I said, “where is the chief?”
Jocy shrugged. “Trying to get his head out of his ass somewhere. You would think Levis might have been at work on the Spinks crisis, but he goes on these benders and leaves Cray to runs things while he’s away. What do you think of Cray?”
“Cray? He’s a real son of a—”
“He’s my brother by the way.”
“—Gun.”
When the dryer cycle was done, Jocy spared me the risk of fumbling with the machine and humiliating myself further there in my loincloth. Something happened when she removed the pants. A change took place. The cosmos shifted. A massive force stirred. In rats’ days, the precocious, pre-teen obsession had always been with boobs, a phenomenon that was probably linked to the subconscious effects of the by-and-large milk-starved orphans making up our ranks. Nurturing the fixation was Shep, who, perpetuating his Mephistophelean masquerade, was always making great, cupping motions with his hands in mimed enthusiasm for gifted misses. I had played along, mostly as a token to my overall homogeneity scheme: anything I could do to eschew unnecessary attention that would run the risk of starting people harping on my feet. My lazy corroboration contributed to the discomfort when I finally had gotten a load of Merry. With my penchant for pessimistic prescience, I should have expected that the idle banter would come back to get me, although I had never known how I would end up. I was unable to discriminate between boys’ town machismo and the leftover longing for the lady who made me, but in a second in that subterranean laundromat I sat absolved of all that and found myself staring right in the cloaked eye, the heavy-lidded talisman, of my salvation and exaltation. Instantaneously, all those elements of Jocy’s appearance that just moments before had seemed merely attractive—the lean legs, the long black hair, the sinuous smile—became beacons of supernatural luminosity, all trained radiantly on the tight-packed, perky, perilous focal point against which I would gladly have my frigate dashed: her ass.
I never fathomed the marrow of that bland assessment, “ass man,” until the moment when, drooping over the dryer, Jocy rooted my heart from under my ribs with her fantastic back hoe, and then—happy birthday!—not only did I understand, but I embodied, even exemplified, the concept. The buzz that overtook me that second was perilously exhilarating. An aching earnest came over me. Heart beat lustily. I was lucid, alert, understanding. Songs about fat-bottom girls I could not recollect ever having heard boomed clearly in my ears. Mind reeled with shamanistic visions. I thought I had learned everything there was to know about adulthood well before the time I had been christened Corrente, but now an entirely new aspect of maturity had been aroused from deep within my dormant deviance. Here I was, out of my pants, wrapped in only a flimsy towel, the finest lady under earth meanwhile bent boldly over the gaping mouth of the dryer. Would that there had been a whole hamper full of slacks, shirts, and hard-to-spot socks caught in static-electrified crannies just out of reach, that she might have spent eternity in that position and left my ecstasy complete! By the time she came out, flushed, perspiring from the hot blast inside the tumbling chamber, I was a changed man. I was a man. Jocy turned away while I pulled on the trousers and slipped stiffness beneath the elasticized waistband.
Back in slacks, crisp and toasty, having regained a bit of composure, I walked Jocy back to her cell.
“You are very brave, Eddie, plunging right in with Miss Spinks.”
“It was nothing,” I stammered, “really. I didn’t even know I was doing it ’til it was done.”
“I hope there’s some way we can repay you.” Jocy’s little alabaster hand, cool and smooth, brushed against the hair of my knobby knuckles and stoked a long-dormant longing. A bird leapt in my chest, fluttering. What was that dark stirring inside of me? “Sweet dreams, Eddie.”
Back at my cell, I sat at the work ledge and wryly remembered Madame Adelle, Amazing Oracle. She had doubtless gotten a lot done out of her cramped cabinet over maybe two hundred years, so how could I complain about the confines of this cozy chamber? All through the night I seethed with my boner, postponing the inclination to dilute the purity of my revelation by taking the matter into my own hands. I exulted that a woman had distracted me from my Merry mortification. So what if Jocy was completely out of my league and married—to the head honcho, no less? If I wanted the opportunity to see her again, my story had better be a good one.
Anyone who has gone straight through to dawn in a reverie lusting after someone new knows the attendant inspiration cannot be compared. Elated to be alive, I luxuriated in the simple, private satisfaction of connecting ideas and designs while assembling an artificial autobiography that I believed would satisfy the Dig City sentinels. Along with giving me a woody, Jocy had intimated a spin on Spinks and my stumble in: Play it off as a guerrilla action, not a monkey accident. It would do no good for them to make the connection to that tunnel crash, which must be all over the news. In tribute to the maniac trucker, I appropriated his handle for a surname: Eddie King. Haven’t heard of me? Exactly. I claimed to be a VR jockey and Net hacker who specialized in security: cracking ice and leaving no trace. Spinks’s game? I said I had pirated it from her mainframe and played it a thousand times before sneaking into her lair and winning big!
At dawn, a sumptuous fever brought on the fiercest of all primal impulses and thoughts returned to the monumental woman who had saved me from the mother of all complexes. Clasping the mental image of Jocy in bell-bottoms, I understood the lure of the sirens, the legendary allure of Circe. They had used a euphemism for Helen: It had not been her face that had launched those thousand ships. Here was what the poet pined over while he strummed his lyre, the reason for the chase, the battle, the sacrifice. I knew why the stallion reared for his mare, the dog bayed for his bitch, my hips distinctly twitched. I am animal! I am man! Batter me! Bash me! Capsize me! Bang me up against your hazardous reef!
In the morning I was summoned back to the Hive. Clutching my masterpiece of mythomania, I stalked the sloped streets of the underground city. By the time I arrived at that bleached monument of minimalism, I had a whole new attitude for a winning interview. I handed my immigration form over to the hag who had delivered my britches and was admitted to the empty Hive.
Waiting there in isolation, I was thinking about how nice it would be to stick around for a while. What if I could set up a solid life in Dig City as, say, a social philosopher, publishing gritty tracts for the local rags, perhaps settling down with a pretty little Pollyanna? Here I went, feeling all tender and earnest. To be part of a family! There were serious matters at hand—and I could be involved.
When it comes to technological progress, there is a sort of societal yin and yang: entrepreneurs like myself whose ingenuity tends toward abstraction combined with those whose enterprises consist of concretion—in Pauly’s case, excretion. While Pauly had made his billions at the rate of about a dollar per flush, I foresaw a future in more esoteric modes. Overnight, I had gotten an idea that the dynamos and generators of the overworld could adequately supply sufficient energy for every mole man, woman, and child. Dig City’s current attitude was too frugal. Anyone could tell from the bounteous buzz of street lamps and the incessant hum of the MBTA’s train lattice that there was more than enough juice.
I had expected to see Cray, but instead a drawn man in sunglasses entered and sat at a term. Instead of a regular monitor, it had a touch screen for Braille text and tactile tables. I was wondering who he was and whether he was aware that I was there when he sighed, as if reading my mind, “I’m the sorry sucker who gets
to triage immigration applications.” He lowered his shades to rub his eyes and I saw by the sockets that he was genuinely blind. You could tell by the burnt-out bulbousness. “My name’s Terry, and I’m Dig City’s Minister of Information. And you’re Eddie King, who it just so happens got lucky and disarmed the time bomb ticking over this city for weeks.”
Although I had already made up my mind to stay in Dig City, I figured I might as well play hard-to-get, a pose that had been denied me all those years as serf in one or another syndicate. “What’s the big deal with information?” I challenged. “For a community founded on ideals of anonymity, you sure are keen on spying.”
“What I do is not spying,” he replied. “I prefer calling myself a seer. Let me tell you: What happened with Spinks could happen again. She was post-paranoid, period. Spinks thought everyone was out to get her, and she knew she was indestructible in that spot beneath the Ted Williams tunnel. If the riddle had been stored in any of her networked data, we would have cracked it, but Spinks knew that. She decided on a self-detonating technique that would let any lucky old schmo— uh, that is, hero—end her desolate siege.” I was about to tell Terry that he was wasting his breath with the recruitment routine, that I had decided to stick around for a while, when the self-styled seer abruptly stood and two stony-faced guards entered. “Upon review of your immigration forms, it has been determined that you are unfit for citizenship.”
My heart sank. “Why?”
“I haven’t been able to verify your history. It was a hell of a night in Dig City. The Spinks thing was only half of it. There’s a very fragile balance in the underground right now, and we can’t take chances with rogue vigilantes. So long, Eddie King.”
The guards holding my arms, I staggered through the main tunnel. Abject, abstracted, I retraced the dizzying sequence of steps that had propagated my enchantment with the underground mission. The process had involved several stages of shedding skepticism while reverting to an infantile submissiveness before the domineering characters who ran Dig City. There had been something sisterly about the immigration matron’s brusque down-dressing, a fraternal felicity to Cray’s arm-twisting. As for Terry’s tough-luck lecture, maybe this was the way you were supposed to feel when crying “uncle”: bruised, bested, grateful to someone stronger than you, a little sadistic, who teased and tortured. I had not met such a compelling cast since the Nec, and I coveted their constraints. I wanted to be dominated, damn it!—at least in the sibling, simpatico sense. Perhaps it was not patrimony I had always been after, but just the simple, kindred Doppelgänger: a brother or sister to worship, burn out on, and spurn; someone to smack and, in turn, be smacked. Half a decade earlier, I had gotten labeled Corrente, and yet those parents had been unable to offer me what I really wanted: a kid brother, big sister, or just a cousin, inventoried but not indexed, caretaken but not taken care of. With such a kin to take care of me, I might not have become such a morose only child.
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