The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx

by Arthur Nersesian

  “There will be silence in the chamber!” the mayor spoke up.

  “Traitor!” someone yelled.

  “I said you’d get your day in court, and this is it!” Lyons shouted at Edelstein. “There are many factors that—”

  “Betrayal!” she shot back.

  “You owe Mr. Lyons an apology,” Impellitteri stated. Moses started snickering at the women.

  After more shouts of recrimination, the mayor tapped his gavel and a group of court officers entered. The room soon slipped into silence.

  “We will now put this matter to a vote,” Impellitteri said. “All in favor of the proposed route, please raise your hand.” Three arms rose. “All opposed.” The other three hands went up. It was a deadlock, the resolution would have to go to a larger vote in several weeks. But everyone knew that this had been the only real chance to stop the expressway.

  Robert Moses, the mayor, Lyons, and other members of the board quickly exited through a side door as the housewives of East Tremont glared and booed at them.

  “Your brother beat us! Happy, smart guy?” one of the East Tremont wives snapped at Paul, who was sitting solemnly in the back.

  He looked down.

  “What do you mean brother?” another housewife asked. “He’s my boy’s teacher.”

  “Gilda told me: Paul is Robert Moses’s older brother.”

  “Mr. Moses, is this true?”

  As Paul rose silently and tried to exit the packed meeting hall, he heard others shouting:

  “Yer whole family should drop dead!”

  “Stay outta da Bronx, you bastid!”

  “Give him a break, he lives in East Tremont too!” someone called out in his defense.

  “Yeah, and they spared his house,” another responded. “Big surprise!”

  When he finally got out of the Municipal Building and pushed through the crowd out front, Paul was filled with rage. He walked aimlessly for a while, his heart pounding in his chest. After half an hour he looked up to find himself standing in front of the house on lower Bowery, number 168, the principal of which still technically belonged to him. He started beating on the stone walls of the old building until his knuckles bled.

  Uli followed the legless scorpion kid as he gracefully angled up the long corridor and out through the barren zone that led to the Mkultra. Forty-five minutes later, they reached the first groups of desks that the kid seemed to move right through while Uli stumbled around them. When they came to a spot with a small crack in the ceiling, the kid scurried up along a huge wooden pillar. Uli was unable to squeeze through, so the two had to walk another twenty minutes to a larger hole. Uli began wondering if the boy’s body was defective at all, or if it had merely adapted to this perverse new landscape.

  After traveling a distance on this upper level, they slipped back down to a lower floor, then after yet another stretch, the kid led him back up a level once more. Eventually, Uli lost track of where they were.

  “Can’t we just stay on a single story?” he finally asked, tired of climbing.

  “Some floors are blocked and some sections are real dangerous.”

  “How are they dangerous?”

  “They either do things to your middles or they’re the people who don’t like eating the rats or rations no more.”

  At some point, Uli commented on the absence of rodents.

  “They don’t come this far down, but you’re lucky.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Cause when things first started out, there were a bunch of other animals a lot more dangerous—monkeys and cats and other stuff—but people killed them all off.”

  Uli noticed occasional spaces on walls where signs had evidently been removed. Along the wooden floors, he also observed more freshly painted phosphorescent lines leading into the distance, where he could make out far-off figures that seemed to be aimlessly following them. Uli briefly considered that the futile circles the captives were traversing at least distracted them from their impending starvation. Though he spotted a few rotting corpses as they continued, the roaming zombies soon became sparse and then nonexistent. Soon, too, the desks stopped. Then even partition walls disappeared so that there was only open space and concrete pillars. Swinging forward with his hands, the boy never seemed to tire.

  At a leaky hole in the ceiling next to a steel column, the scorpion kid climbed through to yet another upper floor. Five minutes later, when Uli finally flopped up onto the next level, completely winded, he immediately smelled the harsh aromas of fire and death.

  He followed the kid for another twenty minutes until he began tripping over something hard and crunchy on the floor. He flicked on his dimming flashlight and saw that this area, which looked like it had once been a massive filing room, was covered with carbonized bones and burnt body parts. They were spread between rows and rows of empty filing cabinets stretching for dozens of yards at three-foot intervals. Reaching down, Uli realized that fueling this improvised crematorium were the contents of the filing cabinets. Where does the smoke go? And for that matter, where does the oxygen down here come from? There had to be circulation vents somewhere, but Uli hadn’t seen a single one.

  They climbed across the various filing cabinets until they reached a long wall marking the end of the floor. The kid seemed to know the entire place inside out. Arriving at a spot that appeared completely random to Uli, the boy slipped up the side of the wall and squeezed past a panel of wood in the ceiling. Uli pulled a burnt-out filing cabinet over and used it as a stool to climb through the ceiling and into an abandoned tunnel that might have once been an air vent.

  The kid struck a match and lit a candle, revealing that his father had created a secret nook here for his sad family. A skinny middle-aged woman, deathly pale and feverishly thin, was staring past Uli, sitting in her own waste.

  “Hello,” Uli said, to no response. Something was moving under her filthy shirt. To his astonishment, he saw a small baby’s head wiggling out—it was suckling on her flaccid breast.

  “That’s my brother,” the scorpion boy said. “I call him Baby.”

  “I don’t understand,” Uli thought aloud. “The entire Rescue City is suffering from some kind of infertility plague—but here in this sealed dungeon babies are being born?”

  Instead of responding, the scorpion kid reached into his mother’s shirt and pulled his brother out. Uli was horrified to see that the body seemed to be little more than a long tail resembling a pink tadpole, but with little flapper arms. It couldn’t be more than a few months old.

  Over the course of the next hour, Uli helped the kid clean them both off as best they could and wash down the floor of the little nook.

  The malformed baby indeed felt feverish. Uli inspected the red dots along his tubular body but was confident it was only a rash, not chicken pox.

  “What should we do?” the kid asked.

  “Let’s get them back to the storage depot. The water and air are better. They’ll recover more quickly.”

  Uli carried the skinny salamander baby while the kid put a rope around his mother’s wrist and tied the other end to his own. Slowly they made their way back into the Sticks. Because it was no longer possible to move up and down through the various levels, they chanced it and stayed on the first floor—the Lethe level—moving cautiously around the many desks and occasional decomposed bodies.

  When they reached an area with desks piled so haphazardly that it became difficult to traverse, the kid asked Uli for help moving his mother.

  “Maybe I can give you a hand,” they both heard.

  The dark outline of a man approached and lifted the mother in the air, so that Uli was able to grab her arms and together they moved her over the desks.

  “Now, maybe you can help me,” the man suggested. He was fully dressed in clean clothes. His shaved head and handsome face were covered with light stubble—a new arrival.

  “How?” Uli asked, holding his ground, ready for a fight.

  “When you passed t
hrough here earlier, I thought I heard the kid say you guys know a way out.”

  “What we found is little more than a hunch.”

  “A hunch is more than I got.” The man had a rigid charm. As Uli conversed with him, the boy and his family lagged slowly behind. “You have a clarity of mind that’s rare down here,” the guy said to Uli, attempting to make small talk. “May I ask what you were in your life?”

  “I was never affiliated with either gang in Rescue City, if that’s what you mean.” He wanted the man to go away, but since he looked fairly strong and wasn’t being violent, Uli figured he’d let him ramble on until he just grew tired and left.

  “Me neither.”

  “You seem like a nice guy,” Uli said, “but I’ve learned not to trust anyone down here, and I’d advise the same of you.”

  “Where are my manners?” the guy asked, extending his hand. “I’m Tim Mack.”

  “Paul,” Uli responded, and shook the man’s hand.

  “By the look of your beard, it appears you haven’t been here very long either,” Tim said.

  “Actually, I’ve been here for a while. I just cut it every few weeks,” Uli replied, not wanting to reveal anything about himself.

  “Are you worried about this mental degeneration that seems to have afflicted most people here?”

  “It seems to miss some of us, thank God,” Uli said. Glancing around, he suddenly realized he was alone with the nutcase. “Hey, kid!” he shouted, but there was no response.

  Dashing back into the darkness with Tim following close behind, Uli discovered that the kid and his family were nowhere in sight. Without the scorpion boy, there was no chance of escaping.

  “You!” Uli knocked the bristly man to the ground and jumped on him. “Where are they?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You distracted me while someone grabbed them!”

  “I swear to God I didn’t.”

  Leaping to his feet, Uli left the man on the ground and rushed back in the direction from which they had come. After searching through the twinkling darkness, he eventually found the mother’s tattered shirt on the ground. His flashlight illuminated distinct tracks from what appeared to be at least four people. They were clearly dragging something. Unswept by wind and not muddled by other creatures, the tracks were easy to follow over the filthy wooden floor. At one point they vanished, and Uli looked up to find a hole in the ceiling. He was able to climb up to the next level where the tracks resumed. He followed them until he heard sounds in the distance. As he closed in, he saw there were five large men—a small hunting party. One oaf was half-dragging, half-leading the naked mother behind them. Over another man’s shoulder was the salamander baby who was making slight barking sounds, seemingly in pain.

  “I’m hungry now!” said the man holding the mother’s rope.

  “We got to cook them first,” advised a short, obese troll-like man who appeared to head the expedition. As Uli drew closer, he could see the scorpion kid hog-tied upside down and strapped to the troll’s back. He seemed to be unconscious.

  Noticing a four-foot section of pipe sticking out from the ceiling, Uli pulled a desk over, leapt up, and yanked it loose. He shadowed them for another ten minutes until they came to a large rupture in the floor. Uli decided this was his best chance. The three biggest men went down first, then the mother and kids were lowered into the hole by two other hunters. Uli raced forward and walloped one across the head, cracking his skull.

  “They got Slammer!” shouted the second man before Uli attacked him with the pipe.

  The three large men on the lower level grabbed their fresh meat and hustled off. Jumping into the hole, Uli glimpsed a bonfire across the vast room—this was their camp. He watched as the three remaining captors, apparently believing the attack was coming from a larger group, began scurrying through the darkness. Uli sprinted after them and slammed his pipe over the lead troll’s skull, but then the other two immediately realized Uli was all alone. One man knocked him down. Bigger and stronger than Uli, they started punching him. A few other tribe members lumbered over from the bonfire and joined the fight. They began kicking him from all directions. One man grabbed his arm and twisted it behind his back.

  “I want his other arm!” one of them bellowed.

  Suddenly, a gun shot rang out; then a second.

  “Shit, I got hit!” one troll gasped.

  The group immediately scattered, leaving Uli with the beleaguered family. Tim emerged from the darkness holding a pistol.

  “How many more bullets do you have?” Uli asked, panting.

  “Three, maybe. Why?”

  “Cause they’ll probably come back.”

  Tim wanted to grab the little family and run, so Uli untied the unconscious kid and gently smacked him until he came to.

  “We’re lost and they’re coming after us. Which way should we go?”

  The kid glanced across the large floor and mumbled the quickest route back to the Sticks. After twenty minutes of running without any sign of being followed, they began to calm down.

  “I’m sorry,” the kid said to Uli. “They grabbed us from behind. I should’ve stayed with you.”

  “It worked out okay,” Uli said. “We now have a new member of our little group.”

  They eventually reached the Sticks and headed down the tunnels into the storage facility. Behind the mountain of crates, hidden from clear view, they fashioned a relatively comfortable bedding area for the ill mother and her baby. Tim, who hadn’t eaten since leaving the catch basin, chewed down a box of stale crackers. Uli bathed the salamander child in a tub of cool water to bring down his fever. Then he applied some topical creams for the rash and gave him both antibiotics and vitamins. He instructed the scorpion kid to keep giving his brother and mother water—they appeared severely dehydrated.

  35

  As Tim slept and the kid tended to his family, Uli returned to the utility closet. Digging his chisel into the hard stone, his mind drifted back to Paul and Lucretia. They tried to regain a semblance of a normal life, but their community was being torn apart piece by piece. Neighbors weeped openly in the streets. They heard other couples fighting in their apartments about where they would go after eviction.

  Miss Dombrowski and the old folks stopped sitting out front on warm nights. The few neighbors who still spoke to Lucretia mentioned having trouble sleeping. It was as if the people in East Tremont were suffering the effects of a protracted battle that was bypassing the rest of the city.

  On his way to work one day, Paul saw a sign taped to the Kearnes’ door. In big red letters it announced, If you do not vacate within 5 days, legal action will be taken. When he looked through the windows, he realized the place was vacant. All their furniture was missing. The couple who had been so helpful in getting Paul his job had moved on without a word. Paul learned from a remaining neighbor that James Kearne had transferred to another school out in Jackson Heights, Queens. Lucretia burst into tears when she learned that May, her dear friend of many years, had left without even saying goodbye. The entire block, which used to be filled with families and children playing in the streets, was soon empty.

  On January 1, 1954, New York City took title of the last scattered parcels of real estate in Section Two of the expressway. Despite this, some of the poorer and older families stubbornly hung on, living illegally. Increasingly terrifying edicts from the city were taped to doors and lampposts. More threats of people losing their possessions or being thrown into the street followed. The elderly were the last to go. Many were foreigners—widows and widowers who had fled countries ruled by emperors and czars. They were just trying to wait out their remaining time. But one by one, before the city marshal arrived, they too seemed to just vanish.

  Through one of her old friends, Lucretia learned about the plight of a family who had lived directly across the street all her life. The Orecklins had a disabled child and owned a nice single-family home that the father, Cecil, had fastidiously
maintained over the years. They’d had their place appraised a few years earlier at twenty thousand dollars. Robert Moses’s office offered them eleven thousand. When Cecil argued that they were dramatically undervaluing his property—something any outside land assessor could verify—he was told that this was a one-time offer, take it or leave it. Without any alternative, the Orecklins had absorbed the loss and moved away.

  While the little family recuperated, Uli tried to explain the Sticks to Tim, cautioning him about the insane miners below who had already killed one of his compatriots. Then he showed Tim the hole in the utility closet. Eager to get out, the stubble-headed man made it his personal mission to hammer through the narrow stone walls, almost never leaving the little closet. After a few days, when the salamander baby’s red dots started clearing up and the mother seemed to be improving as well, Uli softly asked the scorpion kid if he was ready for his climb.

  “I don’t want to leave them alone yet.”

  In preparation for the kid’s ascent, Uli weaved a small body harness out of ropes, like a window washer’s safety belt that the boy could tie around his narrow waist and broad shoulders. To protect against a fall, he’d be able to hook the sides into the eyes of the metal track running up the elevator shaft. Uli also wired the lantern he had scavenged to the top of the helmet. He calculated that if the candles weren’t tipped over, they’d each last roughly an hour while wax drained safely out the back.

  Hunting through the storage depot, he located a bag for holding C-rations and three water bottles that could all be strapped to the kid’s back. This would give the boy enough supplies for roughly two to three days. He also found several large balls of twine that he could tie to the youth in order to mark the height of his climb.

  “I know you don’t want to leave yet, but I thought maybe we could do a bit of preparation.”

  None of it looked comfortable, but it all fit. The kid let out a deep sigh, clearly regretting ever having agreed to this. Uli knew he was going to have to convince the kid of the importance of the climb, but before Uli could start in on him, the boy said he really needed to be left alone with his family. Uli gave him the space, then resumed helping Tim in the closet.