“FBI. Officer Sarkisian speaking,” Uli heard, recognizing his own voice.
“And what did Paul Moses say?”
“I don’t know. I only know what I heard.”
“Okay, I do remember an older male voice rambling on nonsensically about radioactive material that had been released throughout Manhattan, via a series of sneakers.”
“And then what?”
He had no idea who was speaking. He had bandages or a blindfold over his eyes.
“—on the phone as long as I could as we tried tracing the call, but it was evident that I was talking to an elderly male who may have been senile. When I asked him if he knew the date or year, he thought that Impellitteri was mayor. Then he said something about the Cross Bronx Expressway and Robert Moses. We could only determine that he was calling from Brooklyn before he hung up.”
“What did you do then?” Uli didn’t recognize the voice.
“This was the same day that the Weather Underground had blown up a brownstone in Greenwich Village, and we had been getting prank calls all day. Hell, we had gotten calls like this for months after the George Metesky bombings. We had no perceived threats. The Russians didn’t work like that. No one did.”
“So what happened next?”
“It was a solid week before a physician at Roosevelt Hospital made the first reports: Myron Cohen, a seventy- two-year-old newsstand vendor at City Hall, had suffered third-degree flesh burns. The fallout must’ve dropped right on his head. Over the next three weeks there were burns, bleedings gums, fevers, a sudden spiking of leukemia cases before someone at the EPA finally went out with a Geiger counter—”
“There’s no reason for this to continue, we know all about—”
Uli opened his eyes, gasping for breath. He was in a bed surrounded by strangers. Every part of his body was either numb or in pain. Two IVs were dripping into his arms and he had bandages wrapped around his limbs and face.
“Where am I?” He tried but was unable to rise.
“Under arrest at a small Pigger detention infirmary in the Bronx, Nevada. I’m Erica Rudolph,” said an attractive middle-aged woman who looked like the actress Donna Reed.
At that moment someone Uli recognized entered the room. It was Ernestina Erics, his old supervisor from Pure-ile Plurality, a community service organization with ties to the Pigger gang.
“But I remember seeing Vegas,” he said sluggishly.
“Miss Rudolph called me at our P.P. office,” Ernestina said strangely. “She heard we were friends and thought it would be nice if you woke up to a familiar face.”
“How did I get here?”
Miss Rudolph filled Uli in on the details: “Someone reported that a body had been dumped on East Tremont Avenue, presumed dead. When our morgue wagon came by half an hour later, they found you stretched out unconscious on the pavement, severely dehydrated.”
“Third-degree sunburns cover more than seventy percent of your skin. It’s clear you got stuck in the desert,”
Ernestina added. He had been in a coma for five days and was recuperating in a small room that resembled an attic.
“Fuck! How the hell can I be back here?” he groaned.
“I remember some kid in a VW Bug picking me up on the highway … I got out!”
“In addition to your burns, you have dysentery and you’re severely malnourished,” Miss Rudolph said. “It looks like you’ve lost over fifty pounds since you fled several months ago.”
“What now?”
“You’ve been convicted in absentia for several murders and have been sentenced to death.”
Uli knew that there was no point in disputing the charges. When he tried to sit up again, he felt a surge of excruciating pain and passed out.
He woke up several hours later when Miss Rudolph began to wash him and change his bandages. Ernestina Er-ics, reclining in an armchair, was the only other person in the room.
“You okay?” she asked. A man in a ski mask stepped into the room, but Ernestina waved him back outside.
“I just can’t believe that after all I’ve been through, I’m back in Rescue City. And if I’d been found in Brooklyn, Staten Island, or Manhattan, I’d be safe.”
“Your crime report says that you were last seen in handcuffs in a car with Chain and Underwood,” she told him. “It says you somehow got free and killed the two of them.”
“Does that sound likely?”
“Poor Patricia Itt had her right arm severed as punishment for the killing of Daniel Elsberg,” Ernestina said softly.
“I know she was innocent.”
“What year is it?”
“Early 1981.” After a pause Ernestina asked, “What was it like down there?”
“Give me a break. I know why you’re here.”
“Why?”
“Standard interrogation technique—good cop, bad cop. You’re the only Pigger I know who I actually liked, so it’s obvious they’ve brought you here as the good cop.”
“Not everything is as it appears,” she whispered. “Just sit tight.”
Though bothered by her cryptic remark, Uli felt some degree of trust toward this woman.
“What happens once you’re dropped down into that sewer pipe?” she asked.
“Oh God,” Uli sighed. “I don’t even want to think about it … All those sad people down there.”
“What people?”
“The ones Shub gave that Mnemosyne to and plenty of others. It doesn’t work, or at least it doesn’t work for the vast majority of them.”
“How many were down there?”
“God, it seemed like hundreds, maybe more. They’re living on C-rations and recycled sewer water.”
“Why don’t they get out of there like you did?”
“Something destroys their memories,” he explained. “It’s an Alzheimer’s nightmare. They just wander around lost and naked and prey on each other or starve to death.”
“Why didn’t it affect you?”
“It might’ve been that drug that Timothy Leary gave me to take into the sewer.”
“You mean Leary from the Verdant League?”
“Yeah, he put two syringes in a helmet I was wearing. He claimed his crazy Indian spirit told him to do it. So I injected myself when I climbed out of the pipe. Why do you care about this?”
“My sister Angelina and her husband John bought a passage out about seven years ago. So did some others I knew,” she replied sadly. “You’re the only one I’ve met who’s ever come back to talk about it.”
“That might’ve been before they put up the netting in the sewer. Your sister might well have made it out.”
“How exactly did you get out?”
When Uli thought about all he had gone through, he simply smiled. “I explored deep into this dark underworld called the Mkultra. Some poor kid died helping me. I wiggled up through the back of an elevator shaft to a ceiling of fire, and … and I somehow climbed around it. I landed on the desert floor in the middle of fucking nowhere and some half-crazed black guy shot me up with some kind of hallucinogenics. After experiencing crazy visions, I eventually stumbled onto some fucking highway and got picked up by a kid in a VW, only to wind up back here in Pigger custody waiting to be executed.”
Seeing that he desperately needed to rest, she said she’d speak to him tomorrow. She turned off the light and left.
As tired as he was, Uli couldn’t sleep. Something, someone was pushing back into his head, and he knew it could only be one person. He closed his eyes and saw Paul running down Court Street in Brooklyn. It was just minutes after the old guy had called the FBI—him—and reported what had happened. Paul was heading for the RR train to God knows where. Racing down into the subway station, his stiff legs got jumbled and he found his large brittle frame collapsing, rolling head over heels down the steep stone steps. He felt his ribs crack as he hit the bottom landing.
“You okay, mister?” some high school kid asked, staring down at Paul.
Wit
hin five minutes, a transit cop arrived. Blood was dripping out of Paul’s mouth and nose, and pain was shooting through his arms and ribs. Twenty minutes later, to his horror, an ambulance was rushing him back to a hospital in Manhattan.
An intern looked him over, gave him some pills, a shot, took an X-ray, and then wheeled him into a charity ward with three other men. He had two broken ribs, a broken arm, and a slight concussion. The good news was that neither of his legs were injured, meaning he’d be able to check out of the hospital sooner. Since he was a veteran and had no money, and desperately wanted to get the hell away from Manhattan, he was told that he could get outpatient treatment at the V.A. hospital in the Bronx.
After nearly a week, shaky and alone, he checked out and took a cab up to the V.A. hospital. During the intervening days, all he could feel was an intensifying guilt: How could I have been seduced into constructing such a thing? What the fuck was I thinking? He sweat through the night, begging the nurses for painkillers, sleeping pills, anything to knock him out.
One morning, he opened his eyes from a black sleep and couldn’t believe what he was seeing: Sitting in front of him, smiling, was his brother Robert Moses.
“Hi, Paul.”
Although he was just a little younger than Paul, Robert could still have passed for late-middle-aged. He was grinning pleasantly, as though it were 1916, before Paul had ever gone to Mexico, as though fifty-four years hadn’t passed and there hadn’t been a million little cuts and stabs that had turned his world into living hell.
“For starters, this is for you,” Robert said, holding up two wrapped parcels. He handed over both of them. “This is a tape recording of the opening ceremonies of the Robert Moses Niagara Power Plant on the St. Lawrence River. I remember decades back when you wrote that study for Con Ed. Remember, you were dying to build the generators? And this is a biography of me.”
Paul was so overwhelmed he couldn’t even speak.
“One of the nurses here is a cousin of one of my drivers. He told me that you took a bad spill and were laid up, so I said, Tell Rockefeller he’ll have to wait! I’m going right over to see my brother Paul—”
“You fucking cocksucker!” Paul finally erupted. “You awful fucking Hitler cocksucker!!!” With his good arm, he grabbed the hardcover book and hurled it right into Robert’s face.
“What the hell …?” yelped Robert, grabbing his nose. Blood came trickling down.
“Because of you, it’s all fucking ruined!” Paul shouted as Robert rushed out of the room. “This whole city has been destroyed, all dead because of you, you dirty motherfucker!!!”
The hospital room began to fade. Uli envisioned Paul struggling for months with his arm in a filthy cast, unable to get a good night’s sleep due to the broken ribs … Then a few months later, when the extent of the radiation clusters was fully realized, Manhattan was declared a disaster zone. All residents in the southern half of the borough were forcibly evacuated. Uli could see Paul in a slow-moving line with many other seniors, applying for temporary housing until the contamination was cleaned up. The old man was being wheeled up a ramp out at JFK Airport, onto a plane with others who had been accepted into Nevada’s Rescue City project.
Uli’s final image, the terminus for this singular memory, was eighty-one-year-old Paul Moses, an ancient stick of a man, sitting on a bench in Coney Island, Nevada. Uli saw himself and remembered a previous chapter in his life, when he was a tired, short-term inductee to the community service group Pure-ile Plurality. He had plunked down on the same bench, and the older man offered him some rugelach. Uli promptly fell asleep, inadvertently leaning up against the old man who had also dozed off. Resting head to head, something had happened. It was as though the nerve endings from the older man’s shiny scalp had fused with Uli’s uncombed hair: Memories shot into his skull, to slowly gestate and ultimately unravel during his comatose state in the sewer.
“I know where he is! I know who did it and where he is!” Uli shouted out from his bed.
The guard wearing a ski mask came to the door and called back, “You did it, and you’re going to die for it, pal.”
Uli smiled. Strangely, he felt more at peace than he had in a long while. At least the memories of Paul Moses were finally out of his head and, he knew, gone for good. Soon, I’ll be gone too, he thought, and closed his eyes for a deep, relaxing sleep.
Also available from Akashic Books
THE SWING VOTER OF STATEN ISLAND
by Arthur Nersesian
*The first installment in the FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES series 272 pages, trade paperback, $15.95
“Nersesian’s extravagantly imagined dystopia relies—as did those in Philip Roth’s Plot Against America and Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union—on an alternate, counterfactual history.”
—New York Times Book Review
“A sharp, strange read: Imagine William Burroughs and Philip K. Dick sharing a needle.” —Kirkus Reviews
SUICIDE CASANOVA
by Arthur Nersesian
368 pages, trade paperback, $15.95
“Sick, depraved, and heartbreaking—in other words, a great read, a great book. Suicide Casanova is erotic noir and Nersesian’s hard-boiled prose comes at you like a jailhouse confession.”
—Jonathan Ames, author of The Extra Man
“Nersesian has written a scathingly original page-turner, hilarious, tragic, and shocking—this may be his most brilliant novel yet.”
—Kate Christensen, author of In the Drink
“A tight, gripping, erotic thriller.”
—Philadelphia City Paper
MANHATTAN LOVERBOY
by Arthur Nersesian
203 pages, a trade paperback original, $13.95
“Best Book for the Beach, Summer 2000.”
—Jane
“Best Indie Novel of 2000.”
—Montreal Mirror
“Part Lewis Carroll, part Franz Kafka, Nersesian leads us down a maze of false leads and dead ends … told with wit and compassion, drawing the reader into a world of paranoia and coincidence while illuminating questions of free will and destiny. Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal
THE FUCK-UP
by Arthur Nersesian
*Original Akashic Books edition with chapter illustrations, available only through direct mail order or www.akashicbooks.com
274 pages, a trade paperback original, $20
“The charm and grit of Nersesian’s voice is immediately enveloping, as the down-and-out but oddly up narrator of his terrific novel slinks through Alphabet City and guttural utterances of love.”
—Village Voice
EAST VILLAGE TETRALOGY
four plays by Arthur Nersesian
240 pages, a trade paperback original, $14.95
“Award-winning playwright Arthur Nersesian has woven an effective dramatic form through four plays, each quite funny in its own way.”
—Evangelina Borges, Trying Time Press
“Take four observational pieces, add a healthy dose of tongue-in-cheek humor, and tailor them into the play format and you have a collection which earns remarkable distinction.”
—California Bookwatch
BROOKLYN NOIR
edited by Tim McLoughlin
*Winner of the Shamus, Anthony, and Robert L. Fish Memorial Awards 350 pages, a trade paperback original, $15.95
Brand-new stories by: Pete Hamill, Arthur Nersesian, Maggie Estep, Nelson George, Sidney Offit, Ken Bruen, and others.
“Brooklyn Noir is such a stunningly perfect combination that you can’t believe you haven’t read an anthology like this before. But trust me—you haven’t. Story after story is a revelation, filled with the requisite sense of place, but also the perfect twists that crime stories demand. The writing is flat-out superb.”
—Laura Lippman, winner of Edgar, Agatha, and Shamus awards
These books are available at local bookstores.
They can also be purchased with a c
redit card online through
www.akashicbooks.com. To order by mail send a check or money order to:
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The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx Page 25