The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx

by Arthur Nersesian

  Paul was awoken from a long nap by noises coming from the yard. Leon and some kid were feeding scrap metal into the big chopping and grinding machines.

  “What exactly are you doing anyway?” he asked when Leon was done.

  Leon gave him what he called his “twenty-five-cent tour.” The yard, which appeared to be just a big pile of junk, was actually an organized arrangement of various types of metal. Down the center of the yard was a small metal-processing system with assorted machinery, including a hydraulic compactor, a small crane, and great sheers for tearing up large pieces of scrap. Much of Leon’s time was devoted to simply maintaining his outdated equipment.

  “You okay?” Uli asked, timidly approaching the beaten man.

  “My fall dey da, Play-o war me don rink and I egnor im.” When the man looked up, Uli saw that his tongue was sticking out of his bleeding mouth.

  “Where’d you come from?”

  The man pointed at the ground and muttered something else. Uli didn’t know if this poor fellow was mentally deficient or just suffering from a speech impediment. He sensed aspects of both.

  “How’d you escape?”

  “Play-o sho us.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Doe know, roun ere.” The man rose and started walking off.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back.”

  “Back where?”

  “E-low, Mku-tra,” the guy replied, pointing downward. “You com ew, or you ge kill.”

  “But we’re out,” Uli replied. “We’re free!”

  “De uders righ.”

  “About what?”

  “No un can cross da fleg-ethen. Das where de odders die.”

  “The what?”

  “The fleg-ethen, the fleg-ethen.” He pointed out across the sand.

  “You mean the desert?”

  The man shook his head no.

  “Don dree da wada.”

  “What water?”

  “You see.” He moved off in the direction of his assailants, further out into the endless desert. Uli followed at a distance as the sun continued to rise. Soon, he spotted the other two men several hundred yards ahead on their hands and knees. But a minute later, when Uli looked again, they were gone.

  Upon reaching the area where the two guys had vanished, the injured man knelt down and began fumbling around in the sand. To Uli’s surprise, the guy pulled open what appeared to be a cellar door on the desert floor. Uli watched as he stepped right into the ground and vanished as well. Uli approached cautiously and found a rectangular door the same beige color as the sand. He pulled the door upward and looked inside. Metal rungs lined the edge of a dark square chute; about twenty feet down, a massive fan was anchored beneath the grating of the floor. He considered climbing down to see exactly how and where this entrance connected to the rest of the subterranean chamber, but staring into the darkness below, he feared an ambush. He slammed the door shut and looked around—dry emptiness.

  His mouth felt as parched as the surrounding desert. He put a pebble on his tongue, something to form spit around, and started walking back in the direction of the blue flame, toward gracefully contoured mountains.

  41

  A boxy skyline ran the length of the hurricane fence along the edge of Leon’s scrapyard—stacks upon stacks of large wooden crates buried under the melting snow. Each crate was about three feet wide and five feet tall.

  “Why don’t we just scrap these?” Paul asked.

  “We can’t.”

  “Why, what are they?” Upon closer inspection, Paul saw that each had a small black screen and a large hole toward the bottom.

  “Fluoroscope machines for shoe fitting. You put on a shoe and you can see it on the screen.”

  “Where’d you get them?”

  “Some guy dumped them here because they got some kind of radioactive crap in them. I called the government to get rid of them, but they didn’t do shit. Then I wrote some letters. They keep giving me the run around, so I’m just going to take them out some night and dump them in the river.”

  “They’re radioactive?”

  “Yeah, cause your bones turn up on the screen. You can see how well your foot fits in the shoe.”

  “Aren’t you worried about getting contaminated by the radioactivity?”

  “Nah, I spend hours listening to the radio and never reacted,” Leon kidded.

  The next day, Paul went back outside with his bifocals and a screwdriver set. He counted 103 shoe-fitting machines in all. On the back of one, he found a diagram that indicated precisely where in the box the radioactive material was stored—in a small lead cylinder—and it showed how to safely remove it without getting exposed. He remembered some things about radioactive elements from his college studies. He knew Marie Curie had died of radioactive exposure, as had her daughter. He had read that a professor at Yale, a physicist, had died from radioactive poisoning while doing research for the government in New Mexico.

  Early the next morning, after dropping Bea off at school, Paul traveled downtown to the main branch of the New York Public Library, where he turned a ten-dollar bill into a bag of nickels and proceeded to photocopy every document he could find dealing with radioactive material.

  That evening, he and Leon split a six-pack and ate meatball Parmesan sandwiches while watching a college football game. Leon, however, wouldn’t stop talking about the Dodgers.

  “This is the Bronx,” Paul said. “I mean, if you were from anywhere else in the country, I could understand your love of the Dodgers, but we can walk to Yankee Stadium from here.”

  “You know what? Yankee Stadium may be in the Bronx, but they should just dump it on Wall Street, cause that’s where those pin-striped bastards belong. You go to a Dodgers game and you’re rooting for working-class guys, and that’s all I’ll say about it.”

  The junkman went out to his truck and came back with a fresh bottle of Scotch. He twisted the top off and poured two glasses.

  At halftime, Paul asked, “What would you say if I told you that the stuff in those old shoe gizmos is a distant cousin of what they dropped on Hiroshima?”

  “So?”

  “The radioactive material in each machine isn’t powerful enough to really hurt anyone, but I know how we can make it so that no one ever drives down that fucking highway again.”

  “How?”

  “We can dump the radioactive granules from those cylinders on it late one night, then inform the authorities anonymously. It’ll be impossible to clean it up, and no one is going to drive over a radioactive highway. They’ll be forced to bury the entire stretch under concrete.”

  Leon looked at him in silence for so long that Paul grew nervous. “What are you thinking?”

  “That the next time a fucking community begs its leaders to move a highway a few blocks south, someone’ll say, Remember East Tremont. ”

  “There you go.”

  “On the other hand,” Leon added, “judging by what happened to the Rosenbergs, you’ll probably fry.”

  They kept drinking until Leon went to bed and Paul passed out in his armchair.

  The next morning, Leon headed out to work as Paul sat in the kitchen over a cup of coffee and scribbled notes, considering his new project as though it were an engineering student’s assignment. Gradually, though, he found himself focusing on Lucretia’s death: It was the perfect murder they had gotten away with. He tried returning to his plan: what to do with the cylinders. A moment later, Lucretia’s face came to mind and he started weeping. He opened the bottle of Scotch, but put it down after a sip and again tried returning to the problem. Yet thinking of Lucretia—the delicate way her long fingers caressed his back and shoulders and ran through his hair, and the idea that no one would ever touch him again—led him to intense sadness, which eventually brought him to fury. He tried wiring the voltage of her cruel death to the engine of his action.

  By the end of the day, repeating They fucking killed her under his breath obsessively,
Paul attempted to walk it off, but then he passed by her old house, which he hadn’t spent a night in for nearly a week. He stopped at the very spot where they had found Lucretia’s body and thought, They got away with it.

  He moved several blocks further toward the Cross Bronx Expressway, and when some portly fellow passed by staring at him, Paul shouted, “What are you looking at? You smug son of a bitch! Did you do it? Did you fucking do it? Did you?” The man sped away before Paul could knock him on his fat ass.

  He stood on the overpass above that contemptible expressway cursing down at cars and waiting for pedestrians to pass. When a dark green squad car pulled up, one of the cops asked him if he was okay.

  “You didn’t care when they killed her and you wouldn’t care if if I jumped right onto this fucking pit!” he babbled furiously.

  An ambulance was called and he was carted off to the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital, where he was diagnosed as suffering from acute paranoia with suicidal tendencies. Following several days of observation, the diagnosis was downgraded to clinical depression, yet still with suicidal tendencies. When the doctors finally learned that Paul’s breakdown had been triggered by the recent loss of his wife, the diagnosis was further reduced to acute depression.

  Two days after Paul’s disappearance, Leon called the station house to file a missing-persons report. The police informed him that Paul Moses had been taken to Bellevue for a seventy-two-hour observation.

  Paul, meanwhile, requested to stay at the hospital. He was given a steady dose of Thorazine and daily counseling with a rotund, pointy-bearded psychiatrist named Seth Greenwich, who quickly took a liking to him.

  “I don’t think I was ever happier,” Paul said about his marriage. “I mean, I had really given up on life. My wife, my little girl, they brought me back from the edge. And what happens, she goes out and gets killed.”

  In a soft, almost dreamy voice, Greenwich asked, “Has the pain diminished at all?”

  “If anything it’s gotten worse,” Paul said. “I keep asking myself why I’m still breathing and she’s dead. I warned her that I was cursed. But I was selfish so I married her. Now she’s dead and I … I’ve lost all desires, I can’t sleep, eat … I can’t do anything. I just keep thinking that some asshole killed her.” He made no mention of his brother.

  “Paul, I checked the police records, and after a thorough investigation they classified it as an accident.”

  “It doesn’t really matter. All that matters is she’s gone. I can’t stop thinking about it. I guess I’ve just gone crazy.”

  “You’re not crazy, Paul,” Greenwich replied, touching his patient’s arm. “I have a wife and she means the world to me. And if she were to die, I’d be sitting where you are now.”

  “Believe me, I want to get well. I want to clean all this out of my head and raise my daughter and enjoy what time I have left.”

  “Look, we’ve tried several different drugs and you say they’re not working.”

  “They just blur the pain.”

  “There’s only one thing left, but I’m not going to do it unless you really want it done.”

  “A lobotomy?” Paul asked.

  “Of course not. Electroshock therapy. It basically neutralizes certain brain cells; supposedly it takes the edge off.”

  “Isn’t it painful?”

  “A little, but it’s done over a period of time. Most patients who I’ve seen after electroshock are calmer.”

  “Will I have a different personality or anything?”

  “Maybe a little memory loss, but that’s it.”

  “Well, I’m this close to stepping in front of a subway, so let’s do it,” Paul said.

  He was wheeled into electroshock twice a week, and eventually, after three months, he found himself thinking about nothing. Although his memory had indeed suffered a little, on the whole he was able to function better. When the treatments ended, he was finally released and set up with outpatient counseling.

  Morning seemed to last forever as Uli retraced his steps across a dry riverbed. Noticing some birds circling ahead of him, he moved forward toward them. Several larger birds appeared to be picking at some dead animal in the distance. As he drew closer, he saw that the birds were digging into the fresh corpse of a coyote. He wondered if he should try to tear off a piece of the carcass or at least drink some of its blood. Even just a few drops of moisture in his mouth would be heavenly.

  Approaching the dead animal, he thought he glimpsed a clear blue pool of water off to his left. He figured it was the water that the stranger had warned him not to drink. After just a few steps toward it, he saw the bodies. Two forms, both disheveled older men, lay still on the banks of the pond. Some kind of large bird, perhaps a vulture, was digging into one of their necks. A third body floated face-down in the water. This had to be what the speech-impaired man was talking about—the mysterious Phlegethon.

  Uli stared at the water and realized it was completely still; it seemed to have neither source nor drain. He dipped his finger in the liquid and tasted a single drop. At first it seemed okay, but moments later a burning sensation spread across his dry tongue, compelling him to spit out what little moisture had accumulated. The stranger with the speech impediment must have singed his tongue.

  Uli sat in the shade of a huge rock several hundred feet from the toxic pond and thought, At least I’ll die under a beautiful sky. Eventually he passed out.

  He was awoken a little while later by a bird’s screech and the sound of scrambling. He opened his eyes just in time to see a large, bearded black man in a loincloth lofting what appeared to be a burning trident into the pond. As soon as the spear hit the water, the fire expanded in every direction, turning it into a pool of flames.

  “Holy shit!” he gasped. The large man then noticed Uli and dashed right up to him. With his last bit of energy, Uli caught his arm and flipped him to the ground.

  “Just as I thought—you’re trained in self-defense,” the prone man observed. “Who are you with, the army or Justice Department?”

  “Neither,” Uli replied, struggling to keep the guy pinned to the ground. “I mean, I don’t really know.”

  “You’re probably Justice. Well, you’re definitely the guy who blew up my family.”

  “You’re Plato the leader?”

  “Plato Bomber,” he introduced himself. “They called me that cause everyone thought I blew up that hole from the basin into the Mkultra, but it was already there when I arrived. I just took credit to get their support.”

  Sensing no threat, Uli eased off him. “There was a leak in the gas pipe that exploded when your son got near it.”

  “He gave birth to the great blue feather then?” Plato was referring to the flame. His hippie-dippie way of talking reminded Uli of the Burnt Men in Rescue City.

  “Yes, your son and I were trying to help each other escape. He had your wife and other son with him. They all died in the blast.”

  “They all died and you lived—good deal.”

  “I promise you it just turned out that way. We were working together.”

  “I know, I’ve already seen the proof.” Plato glanced down in grief. “What right have I to complain? I had children, only to abandon them when I couldn’t look at them anymore. My wife’s brain was eaten away … and my two kids looked like the offspring of fish.”

  “You should be proud of your son,” Uli said. “He was smart as a whip, courageous, and he took great care of his mother and brother.”

  “I guess he took after me in some ways, but not in others.” Without another word, Plato turned on his heels and began ambling away.

  Too exhausted to follow, Uli lay back down and quickly fell asleep. Roughly an hour later, the man returned, this time carrying a knapsack and a canteen of water.

  “I tried to work with the others,” Plato began, presumably referring to the band of strangers Uli had seen earlier. “Each member of my six-man team was supposed to go in a different direction to find a w
ay out before returning to me. Instead, they ran off and drank from the lake of fire, where half of them died and the survivors scurried back down the hole—”

  “Can you help me get back there?” Uli interrupted.

  “Don’t you want to get out of this place?”

  “I’m starving and dehydrated and …”

  Plato opened his knapsack and dumped its contents before Uli. There were two boxes of crackers, a tin of Spam, and a container of brown water that looked like it had come from the Mkultra. When Uli reached for the water, Plato caught his wrist and said, “We have to come to an agreement first.”

  “What agreement?”

  “You want to escape and I need information.”

  “What information?” Uli asked.

  “Information to find a way out for everyone else stuck down there.”

  “You already found a way out of the Mkultra.”

  “Yes, but to where? Death in the desert? I need to find a way out, and for that I need you.”

  “I don’t know any way out.”

  “You got out of there very quickly, so obviously you’re pretty smart,” the man noted. “Did you follow my lines to the stairwells?”

  “What stairwells?”

  “The ones behind the walls. The lady in the Sticks knows all about them,” Plato said hesitantly.

  “What do you know about her?”

  “I know not to trust her. She’s with them, but I don’t think you are. Though you might be and not even know it.”

  “With who?”

  “Maybe the CIA, maybe some other agency, maybe those Feedmore creeps, I don’t know.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Look,” the man said, pulling a large gun from the knapsack, “I’ll help you, let you eat, drink, get some strength back, but then I’m going inject you with a drug.”

  “Where did you find drugs?”

  “Where do you think? They evacuated quickly and left everything behind. I didn’t want to use it, but if experiment number 6,232 works, you’ll save yourself and everyone else,” he replied.

  “What does it do?”

  “It allegedly heightens intuition through memory hallucination.”