The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx

by Arthur Nersesian

  While they worked, Tim kept steering the conversation to his life in Rescue City. “The place has turned into open warfare; I figured I’d have a better chance of survival if I tried to get out. I just want to put it all behind me.”

  “Put what behind you?”

  “First the bombing of Crapper headquarters, then the retaliation killings of a bunch of Pigger officials. And finally the brutal slaying of those two beautiful P.P. workers.”

  Uli remained silent and looked down at his feet.

  “I know that a lot of people in Rescue City have done a lot of awful things, which is why they were sent there,” Tim said, “but I was never a political type.”

  “Someone told me about the Crapper headquarters being blown up and some woman mayor getting elected,” Uli said, playing dumb in an attempt to extract some details about the latest developments. “But I haven’t heard much else.”

  “Things have gotten a lot worse.”

  “Worse how?”

  “Somebody apparently blew up the sandbags holding the sewage back from Manhattan. The city’s now flooded with shit.”

  Uli shook his head in despair. All hope that the place would become a more civilized society once the Crappers took over was gone.

  36

  In 1955, just as Leon had repeatedly vowed, it happened again: The Brooklyn Dodgers won the National League pennant. The Subway Series kicked off in Yankee Stadium and, just as most people had predicted, the Dodgers duly lost the first two games. Then, surprising everyone, they won the next two at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. Back in the Bronx, the Dodgers lost their third game, but they won the next—so it was an even three to three. It all came down to the tiebreaker, to be played on the Yankees’ home field. Paul and Leon watched the game on a small RCA set. With each hit, Leon would jump in the air and his dogs would bark. But with each progressive inning, Paul kept thinking, You’re only setting yourself up for a big fall. Soon, though, it was the bottom of the ninth and somehow the Dodgers were still in the lead. Despite his declared loyalty to the Yankees, Paul found himself rooting for their crosstown rival. When the game ended with a Brooklyn victory, both men jumped in the air and hugged like school boys, then they finished off all the remaining beer and passed out. Around 1 in the morning, Paul woke up, turned off the TV, and drunkenly walked the long stretch of empty blocks back home. The entire time, he kept asking himself, “Dodgers won the World Series?” It sounded so unbelievable.

  “Look, I’m not forcing you to do anything you don’t want to do,” Uli began his talk to the scorpion kid while Tim was sleeping. “So if you don’t want to do this, you and your family can leave and I’ll somehow figure it out myself. But if you help us and we escape, I promise that the first thing we’ll do is get your mom and brother to a doctor. And I’ll do everything I can to try to find your dad.”

  “So what exactly should I do once I’m up there?” the kid asked testily.

  “I’m going to tie some twine to your waist. I want you to climb as far as you can up that shaft so I’ll know how high it goes. And I want you to use the string to measure the narrowest parts.”

  “And then I’m done?”

  “After you come out and we review what you saw, you’re all done.”

  “Okay.”

  “But first I want you to train a little cause this is going to be tough.”

  “Train for what?”

  “Climbing and lighting candles in total darkness and other stuff.”

  “How and where?”

  “Well, I want you to practice using these big hooks, but the only thing to climb around here is the tower of desks in the silo. We have to be very quiet cause we don’t want to alert any of the crazy miners.”

  When they went to the silo, Uli noticed fresh blood splattered around. Boxes had been knocked down and metal rods caked with blood suggested there had been a major struggle. After a brief search, Uli locate two bodies: The guy he called Dave and an elderly miner appeared to have been strangled to death. There was no sign of any other miners in the vicinity.

  Using the open area as a training zone, Uli instructed the boy on how to climb the desk tower.

  “I don’t need these,” the kid responded. He set all the equipment aside and zipped right up the pile of desks like a chimpanzee. “How’s this?”

  “You’ve got to use that rope belt and clip into each new perforation as a safety precaution, in case you fall.”

  “What’s a perfation?”

  “The metal holes in the sides of the tracking.”

  “But there are no holes in these desks.”

  “Well, pretend there are.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” the kid said after he completed his first ascent up the tower while clipping his belt into imaginary holes. “I’d like something else.”

  “What?”

  “I want my mom and brother.”

  “They’re already here.”

  “I need them up in that hole with me.”

  “You mean in the utility closet?”

  “Yeah. They’re both small and they can fit in there. It has this long flat ledge inside where they can wait.”

  “But they’re still sick. Why would you need them in there?”

  “They’d be safe and I could watch them.”

  “I’ll keep an eye on them for you.”

  “If you want me to do this, then they have to stay with me.

  We almost got killed when I took them out of our home.”

  Nodding his head, Uli reluctantly agreed. He just wanted this to be over with. He spent many hours over the next few days drilling the kid on the fine points of climbing elevator shafts.

  “Since you’ll have a candle attached to your head, you’ll need to keep your head tilted back so you don’t spill hot wax on yourself.”

  “You sure all this needs to be done?” the kid asked, covered in sweat.

  “The more prepared you are, the better your chances of surviving and escaping,” Uli said for the third time that day.

  After a final round of training, Uli deemed the kid modestly prepared for the challenge.

  “Shouldn’t I come down when I’m halfway done with the food and stuff?”

  “No, cause it will be a lot easier to come down than it will be to get back up.”

  Uli waited until Tim took a nap before launching the kid on his great quest. The work of the newcomer had made a difference, as the kid didn’t require any lubrication to enter this time. Uli lifted the mother and brother through, then passed along the various supplies.

  “Listen,” Uli warned up to him, “don’t try anything heroic. If something looks scary, just get out. I’m not expecting you to rescue us. All you’re doing is what we call reconnaissance. You’re just checking out the landscape, then you’ll come back here and we’ll work out an escape plan together.”

  “Okay.”

  “And if need be, I can reach in and hand your mom and brother food and water. You don’t have to come down for them, understand?”

  “Thanks.”

  “Take care of yourself, pal,” Uli said. Reaching into the tight space, he shook the nameless kid’s hand and listened to him scamper up and away.

  Over the ensuing hours, Uli watched the jerky ball of twine as if it were a clock and found himself feeling increasingly excited as it dwindled ever thinner. When the three hundred feet of twine was about to run out, Uli attached a second ball of twine to its end.

  Uli wondered what he was going to do next. Even if the kid returned to say that he had climbed right up to the desert floor, Uli knew he couldn’t convince any of these homicidal miners or memory-challenged inmates to collaborate on an actual escape plan.

  Two loud gunshots snapped Uli from his thoughts. He raced out of the closet to find a pair of miners beating Tim, who was desperately trying to fight back. The small-caliber bullets Tim had pumped into them had slowed the men down but apparently missed their vital organs. Uli jumped up and kicked one of the guys in the neck. T
he other dashed down into the service corridor with blood dripping from his chest.

  “I can’t believe it,” Tim whimpered. Blood trickled from his ears; his skull appeared to be fractured.

  “I told you the miners were insane,” Uli said.

  “Not them … you!” he said, grimacing. “You killed her … and I went through all this … just to … to get you …”

  “What?”

  “And you … got me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh dear … I didn’t mean to hit the bags … but they wouldn’t give me the drug unless—”

  “There’s the fucker!” A large miner wielding a rod suddenly came barreling out of an overhead cave.

  Uli dashed into the dark entrance of the Convolution. Crawling down into the ever-narrowing tunnel, he knocked into one of their steel digging rods, which he grabbed as a weapon.

  He squirmed backwards into a small tunnel that would only allow one man at a time. There he was able to hold the miners at bay.

  “Just wait him out,” one of the men said. Two hours later, as Uli began wondering how long this would last, a massive vibration rocked the whole area.

  “Earthquake!”

  “You pissed Xolotl off and now we’re all fucked!” a miner shouted down at him. The rest of the miners slithered back up the tunnel toward the Mkultra. Without thinking, Uli wiggled out of the cave and followed in the same direction, hurrying toward the utility closet. In the dimming candle light, he spotted something billowing out of the little doorway. It wasn’t until he actually touched it that he realized it was coarse hot sand, different from the rest of the dirt he had seen underground. He screamed for the little family to hang on as he frantically started digging the room out. He found a long flat board and used it as a shovel, only to see more sand pouring down through the rectangular hole. An hour later, Uli admitted to himself that there was no chance the mother or salamander baby could still be alive.

  It took a whole day of pushing the sand deeper into the storage area before it stopped cascading down into the little utility closet. When Uli was finally able to reach up into the rectangular hole, he felt around and managed to grab the mother’s foot. He pulled her out first, and then her sad salamander baby. Both were dead, as he expected.

  Soon, though, he located some cutting tools and continued expanding the sides of the rectangular hole. Before long Uli was able to slide into the first chamber after slathering himself in grease. Immediately he realized that the kid had lied. Once he squeezed up past the narrow entrance, the shaft was much wider than he had been led to believe. Uli smiled. At his tender age, the kid had deliberately misled Uli so that he would have exclusive control of this possible escape route. That was why he had wanted his family in there. The bad news was that inside the corridor, sand was packed as tight as a brick. Uli tied a rag over his mouth and scooped sand down into the utility closet until it was full. Then he squirmed back out and hauled the fresh mounds of sand into the storage area.

  After steering and pushing the sand down and out for another day, Uli crawled up through the corridor until he found the straight vertical shaft. Here, he discovered that the kid had lied yet again. There was clearly enough space for him to climb up. But Uli couldn’t figure out what he was actually seeing. Staring up hundreds of yards of shaft, he made out what appeared to be a flickering ceiling of flame. It was as though he had dug all the way to the sun. If I try climbing up there, I’ll be burnt to a crisp. Observing the bluish fire for about twenty minutes, he considered abandoning this project and heading back to the catch basin.

  At that moment he was startled by a distant voice yelling down to him. “Help me, Uli!” It sounded like his sister, Karen.

  Peering up the narrow chute, he wasn’t able to discern anything through the curling flames. “How’d you get up there?” he called to the voice.

  “Help me! I’m stuck!” Uli heard, and he knew he had to get up there as quickly as possible.

  37

  “The circumcision”—as his neighbor Robert had called it—was a longitudinal line, a no-man’s-land running several blocks wide across the middle of the Bronx. This barren stretch of the borough held the artifacts of a once thriving community. Everyone in East Tremont waited anxiously to see what kind of apocalypse would devastate the southern end of their beloved neighborhood. Weeks and months passed—nothing.

  Living right on the boundary, Paul and Lucretia would hear windows being broken at night. People, probably kids, were rooting through the empty houses like vengeful ghosts. Months passed without so much as a single building being demolished. When the remaining members of ETNA who hadn’t been evicted sent a letter to Robert Moses’s office asking if the abandoned area could be either guarded or fenced off, they were duly ignored.

  One morning in 1956, without any warning, a massive wrecking ball started slamming into the sides of one of the apartment buildings down the block. Soon a small cloud of dust covered the area. A gang of workmen besieged the place with all the annoyance of an occupying force. Jackhammers pounded constantly. For the next six months or so, the sound of demolition and the smell of brick and concrete dust filled the air. The work began at 8 a.m. sharp and sometimes continued until 7 at night. Squads of dumptrucks and bulldozers carted off the piles of stones and rubbish. With them came the battalion of surly workmen holding red flags at major intersections. It was as if a wall had partitioned the neighborhood in two. They would block the pedestrian and vehicular traffic, sometimes for hours, not allowing people to cross different sections of the sprawling construction site.

  Paul and others felt a strange relief as the last homes were leveled and the rubble was trucked away. But then the dynamiting began. It turned out that the expressway was to be sunken into the earth and the bedrock had to be made consistent. For the remainder of the year, the area residents would hear periodic booms followed a few seconds later by a trembling of the earth. The mini-quakes took their toll on building foundations, resulting in an appearance of fine cracks along everyone’s walls and ceilings. Gradually those cracks grew bigger.

  It was in this period that Paul and his wife first heard the little coughs coming from Bea’s room upstairs. When Lucretia dashed in that first time, she found the child struggling to breathe. Lucretia and others in the area began sealing their windows and ventilation ducts at night, but a fresh skin of dust was always there at the end of every day.

  After thirty years, even Abe Hoff moved, leaving the Moses family as the only people still living on their side of the block. One by one, many of the little stores along East Tremont Avenue—the social hub of the neighborhood—started going out of business.

  Uli climbed back down out of the rectangular hole and headed into the Mkultra where he collected six metal wastepaper baskets. He stomped them flat, then molded them around his limbs, back, and head. He gathered as many bottles of water as he could find and shoved them up into the rectangular hole with the six crushed metal baskets. After carefully angling himself back up through the tight space, he tied the metal into a tight bundle and tethered it and the bottles to his belt loops.

  It was a monstrous climb. Uli heaved himself roughly a foot at a time, resting every couple of hours. At one point, secured by ropes hooked to the metal track, he stopped altogether to take a long nap. When he awoke, he called out for Karen but got not reply.

  Uli knew after some unmeasured length of time that he was getting close to the top because he began to feel the heat from the strange flames above him. In one small nook near the top of the shaft, he noticed a blackened indentation like a relief sculpted into the concrete wall. His stomach churned and bile rose to his throat. The crisp contours of a face above the jaw were all that was left of what Uli presumed to be the poor scorpion kid. In the bottom of his pocket, Uli found the two mercury dimes he had snatched awhile ago from a desk drawer. He placed them in the tiny sockets where the eyes had once been—the only honor he could pay to the deformed youth.

&
nbsp; After another half hour of climbing toward the ceiling of flames, one mystery was solved. A large pipe carrying propane, methane, or some other flammable gas that ran above this entire chamber—buried roughly ten feet below the desert floor—had exploded. Beyond the raging torch rising from the broken pipe, Uli could make out a sliver of blue sky—freedom.

  It was a sunny day on the planet earth. Uli wondered how the kid could have ruptured the thick pipe, but it only took a moment to realize that this wasn’t what had happened. There must have been a gas leak. The candle affixed to the top of the kid’s helmet must have touched off a dense cloud of gas, bursting an opening through the tons of sand sealing the top of the deep elevator shaft.

  38

  Crime rates in East Tremont exploded. People who used to leave their doors open suddenly found themselves getting burglarized. Those who would spend their summer nights sleeping out front on their porches to catch the cool air were awakened by muggers. Morrisania, near where Leon lived, went from being a modestly safe area to altogether treacherous. Though Leon was a hulking brute, his tiny mother seemed to be a lightning rod for criminals. Usually they just grabbed her purse and ran. She only kept a few bucks on her anyway. One afternoon, though, she had just withdrawn a hundred dollars from the bank and was walking along the street with her purse pressed to her chest. When some teenage punk tried to grab it, she held on with both hands. It became apparent that she wasn’t letting go, so the mugger started slugging her. She finally released the purse when she fell, but the furious juvenile continued beating and kicking her. She made it to the hospital, but died two days later from internal hemorrhaging. For Leon—as Paul soon saw—his mother had been his primary companion.

  Nice houses once worth a pretty penny were soon sitting empty in a buyer’s market. Apartments that had attracted lines of potential tenants sat unoccupied as landlords lowered rents even further. Where Crotona Park had once been the southern border of a good neighborhood, the dividing line moved all the way up to East Tremont Avenue.