Nick Bones Underground

by Phil M. Cohen

Who pays taxes in the Underground? Was the reach of the federal government that long and powerful? Was there even an economy down here beyond instant coffee at usurious prices?

  “Okay, it’s Shelley then. Do you know where I might find him?”

  He swept his hand about the room at the mixed multitude before me. “Look around. Any of these degenerates look to you like he’s a Shelley?” Judging it a rhetorical question, I neither scanned the room nor responded.

  “Do you know if he’s nearby?” I asked.

  “Am I his mama?” he said, leaning his face so close to mine that the odor of life in the Underground momentarily choked me.

  “Might there be someone here who could help me find him?”

  “Hey!” the barista shouted into the room. “Anyone here know where this guy can find the Tax Man?”

  Someone in the back howled, to general laughter.

  One of the customers in the rear, the image of the Ayatollah Khomeini, rose from his table and approached me, eyes seemingly filled with wrath, a black turban resting on his head.

  “What do you want from Wolfie?” he asked.

  “I’ve got some questions about a mutual acquaintance,” I said.

  “You’re new here,” he said, giving me the once-over.

  “Fresh from Upstairs,” I said.

  “Figured. The new guys all got that same look on their face like they’ve got no idea what they walked themselves into, except some face in a drone scamming them out of money.”

  I nodded. “True.”

  “As far as we can tell, there is no real person behind that face. It’s all drone,” he said. “How long you been down here?”

  “Maybe half an hour.”

  “A newbie. We don’t take to newbies so easy down here,” he said. “You never know what a stranger from Upstairs wants. They got all kinds of agendas. When newbies come, sometimes residents disappear.”

  He looked me over again with irate eyes. “We protect each other down here. You never know when someone’s got a vendetta. Too many people disappear and then we hear about bodies scattered here and there aboveground in an alley or in the river. We do our best to protect ourselves. We’re not always successful, and, like I say, people go away and they don’t come back.

  “All we want down here is to start over, reboot our lives,” he continued. “Whatever was in the past, we don’t care down here. We all have a story that we want to leave Upstairs.”

  “All I want from Shelley is information about a mutual acquaintance.”

  “How’m I supposed to know you’re telling the truth?” he said.

  We thus arrived at an impasse, my honest face and professorial word insufficient to support my claim. I reached into my shirt pocket.

  “Easy there, fella,” the ayatollah said, raising an arm.

  “No worries,” I said, slowing the speed of my hand. “Just going for my phone.” I pulled it out to show him my university ID. “See? I’m a college professor. Of world religions. How dangerous can I possibly be? I’m going to beat you with a yarmulke or a rosary, maybe some worry beads?”

  He took my phone and looked at the picture of me from better days, eyes far less darkened by time. I observed him experiencing a moment of enlightenment.

  “Whoa! You’re Nick Bones, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “Nick fucking Bones,” he said.

  “Yes,” I answered a second time.

  “That goddamn private detective. That case with the skeleton in the closet went viral. We got a fucking celebrity!”

  “True,” I said, meaning “that goddamn private detective,” not the celebrity part.

  “Why do you want to see Tanzer?” he said.

  “He might have information about someone,” I said.

  “That someone got a name?”

  “Shmulie Shimmer,” I said. I took a sip of the coffee, which now tasted like old socks, and gnawed at my chocolate chip cardboard while he pondered.

  He handed me my phone. “The drug guy, right?”

  “The very one.”

  “Holy shit,” he said to the crowd. “Nick Bones here come to the Velvet Underground looking for the fat drug guy.” A few heads nodded, and a few voices grumbled something approximating that they were impressed.

  “Well then, you’re okay,” he said. “If you’d like, I’ll take you to Shelley myself. Gratis, even.”

  “That’s very generous,” I said, happily experiencing no sense of danger in an offer coming from a guy dressed as history’s most notable religious dictator.

  “There’s not a whole lot to do down here,” he said. “The guys and I, we spend a good couple of hours a day here in the Outtaluck. But we’ve pretty much run out of stories, and no one new’s come in to freshen things up lately. How many times can a fellow play backgammon or mah-jongg?” He returned to his table, grabbed his jacket, grabbed me by my sleeve, and headed to the door with me in tow. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you the way.”

  As we began our walk down, the tunnel lit by the occasional bulb, I said, “I don’t get it.”

  “You don’t get what?” he asked.

  “Everyone says this place is hell on earth. So far I haven’t seen anything like that.”

  He smiled. “Hell on earth, yeah, that’s the rep we want.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “We like that people believe crime down here is out of control, and we do everything we can to maintain the illusion.”

  “Who likes it that way?”

  “We all do. It keeps us safer. Keeps the tourist types away. The Committee does most of the work. Our security’s their main job in the day to day.”

  “The Committee?”

  “Our government.”

  “The Velvet Underground has a government?”

  “How else would you have it?”

  I admitted I wouldn’t have it any way, just that it came as a surprise that a place I’d just heard of a couple of hours ago was organized.

  “It’s basic,” he said. “But it works to give a voice to the folks down here. It prevents this place from turning into a Hobbesian jungle, an every-man-for-himself, which is pretty much what it’s become Upstairs. In fact, the Committee does far more than protect us from predators from the Upstairs. We’ve created a bit of, well, not a utopia, but a haven from the abject poverty, the government, and the machine mischief. Down here we have our machines more or less under control.”

  As he said that, a hoverboard whisked by carrying a woman dressed in military gear wearing a brown beret. Right afterward an old nineteenth-century two-person rail car followed, the two occupants pumping up and down, maintaining a reasonable speed.

  We reached a divide in the tunnels. Pointing, the ayatollah said, “This way.”

  “What’s your name, by the way?” I asked.

  “Real name’s Lenny, but down here everyone calls me Brick.”

  “Brick it is, then,” I said.

  Walking on, I observed children, ages six to eight or so, gathered for classes amid rows of chairs and old-fashioned blackboards in front of which a teacher instructed his charges in math, English, and other subjects. A few shops sold the basics, including a food market with sparse offerings, another shop selling Zaps and assorted sundries. And to my surprise, in the middle of the narrow walkway, plunked down from the old days, was a three-card monte game. However, its leader and two shills were primitive bots whose agility at dealing the cards was rickety and their patter mechanical.

  “Come on, all of you monkeys,” one of them said to no one in particular. “We will give you the chance to take us for our money.”

  “Yes, for our money,” the other said.

  The dealer laid down three cards face side up, two jacks and a queen. “All you have to do is find the queen,�
�� it said as it turned the three cards upside down and shuffled them about slowly and clunkily.

  “I know where it is,” said one of the shills, laying down a fifty. And it pointed at one of the cards, which the dealer turned over—a jack.

  “Oh,” all three said simultaneously.

  “You try,” one of the shills said to me.

  “I’d rather not,” I said, and attempted to walk off.

  “Go on, give it a try,” said Brick. “I’ll stake you.” He placed a fifty on the table.

  The dealer once again shuffled the cards. Usually the player got screwed up following the queen and identified a jack and lost his money. But the card’s path seemed obvious, and I pointed at a card, which the dealer turned over. It was the queen.

  “Oh,” said the dealer again and slowly handed me the fifty and my winnings, all of which I tried handing to Brick.

  He took his original fifty-dollar bill and pocketed it.

  “You keep the rest,” he said. “You earned it. Maybe you’ll need it. You never know.”

  I pocketed my winnings and walked on.

  The three bots looked befuddled, trying the game again among themselves. A moment after we continued our trek, I turned around. The table and bots were now far away, as if we’d been walking much longer than a minute.

  “Time and distance seem unusual down here,” I said.

  “It’s hard to explain, but you’re correct. Somehow in the shift of civilization underground we’ve been gifted, if you can call it that, with a kind of Einsteinian revolution. Time and space sometimes seem to merge into the strangest shit. It’s kind of like we’re floating in a new space.”

  None of this seemed terribly logical, but logic didn’t rule everything.

  “So, life down here for you guys, what’s it like?” I asked of my escort.

  He stopped and faced me. “We like to say life started here as better than nothing,” he said. “Which is what most of us had Upstairs. Nothing. Not a damn thing. Things began crapping out before the GD. After all the banks failed and the stock market tanked, and the machines went berserk, life just caved for so many of us. People who can maintain a living up there rarely come down here.” He patted me on the shoulder. “Like professors with tenure.” He thought for a moment.

  “We’ve got a few eccentrics who appreciate the underground life for itself. Tanzer’s one of those. He’s no poverty case. But mostly we’re good old-fashioned poor folk, abandoned by the world.” He scratched beneath his turban as he resumed walking. “These days mere survival’s not a bad thing. But I think we manage more than that. The craziness in the air helps.”

  “How do you eat?” I asked, reminiscing about the quality of chocolate chip cookies.

  “A tricky business, getting food, but we do okay. No one’s hungry. We have some underground hydroponic farms. And we trade with the Upstairs, outside of the city mostly, some places nearby where farms continue to exist.”

  “What do you trade?”

  “You’d be surprised. There’s lots of junk around from the old days.”

  “Like?”

  “Abandoned objects pulled apart for their materials, like the scrap business from the old days. It takes work, but it feeds us.”

  “How many of you down here?”

  “We don’t count. But we’re more than you might think. Several thousand at least, spread over a network of tunnels where trains no longer run.”

  “And crime?” I asked, thinking of Maggie’s uber-pessimistic analysis of life underground.

  “We’ve got it down here, of course. But we have our own ways of justice to handle things. We take care of crime ourselves. Contrary to our PR, the level of the usual things like robbery, rape, murder, and the assorted other mayhems are lower here than Upstairs. And virtually no suicide. Don’t know why that is exactly.” He looked directly at me. “You packing?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “I bought a Zap before I climbed down.”

  “Not a bad idea,” he said. “They don’t do much, but they do pack one good wallop.” He pulled a pistol from his jacket to show me his own protection. “Just in case,” he said. “We’re relatively peaceful down here, but we’ve got our moments of anarchy.”

  We passed another outdoor class, this one of adult learners. A half dozen souls sat on folding chairs arranged in a semicircle, spellbound by the speaker, a young clean-shaven fellow with a ponytail dressed in an outrageously colorful Hawaiian flowered shirt who was leaping about like a deer on steroids. Another photo of the Kobliner Rebbe, much larger than the one in the Outtaluck, graced the wall affirming his messiahship, those hypnotic, electric eyes shining upon the group like a desert sunrise. A class on the ways of the Schmeltzerites.

  “Your inner spiritual essence will expand as you meditate on selections of the teachings of our rebbe, Yitzi Menkies,” the speaker said with the assuredness of the converted. The handful of attendees had before them selections from the writings of Yitzi Menkies, the founder of the Schmeltzerite heresy. “Try this,” he said. He closed his eyes, stopped pouncing, and breathed mindfully. “Close your eyes and repeat after me.” After a pause and a cleansing breath, he chanted, “Schmeltzer’s got it right, the moon by day and the sun by night.” The gathered minions repeated the line over and over in a soothing tone. It would not have surprised me if in that meditative moment, the speaker surreptitiously went among his audience and picked their pockets.

  I quickly pressed on, not terribly curious to hear the guy in the flowered shirt explain complete rubbish to a bunch of down-and-outers. As a historian of the Kobliner Hasidim, the predecessor of this bunch, I knew the Schmeltzerite teachings quite well, most of which were second-rate riffs on New Age malarkey.

  As we walked past, Brick said, “These guys are sprouting up all over the place lately. They kind of spruce up the place.”

  “I don’t understand how all of this is kept secret. I was told I’d be passing through the gates of Gehenna itself, a veritable Garden of Earthly Delights,” I said, referencing Hieronymus Bosch’s famous dark, imaginative depiction of the underworld in which humans found their ultimate justice in numerous violent ways.

  “Like I say, that’s how we prefer it.”

  “But preferring and doing are two very different matters,” I said. “In my experience these days there exist very few genuine secrets. Crap spills out all over the place.”

  “Ah, but there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,” Brick said.

  “Not sure what you mean.”

  “I mean even if you’re not aware of it, there’s a war on, up against down. A lot of it’s waged in secret. Both sides have lots of ammo. We hope we have more than they, in part because we work harder at it. We care a great deal more about our safety than they care about our destruction.”

  “Still not sure what you’re getting at.”

  “I know the world of information seems to have become an open sewer for all to suck up, even for those with the barest knowledge of technology. You want to know something? Just press a few buttons or, better, ask your machine to do it for you. If you’ve got half a brain you can weed out what’s true from what’s false.”

  I nodded. I too figured it was nearly always possible to separate the truth from the crap.

  “If you know what you’re doing, and you know your way around the darker and deeper levels of the Web, there are ways to cook things, ways to create very false information that carries the whiff of the truth, even to the most delicate of noses,” Brick continued, now seemingly in an argument with himself. “Down here,” he said, “we create, we divert, we obfuscate, and we’ve become quite good at it. Most of the Upstairs believe the very thing you were told and accept it as gospel. Keeps them the hell out of here.”

  “Who does all of this work?” I asked.

  “I do, for one,” he said. “Before I made
my way down here, I worked at computers Upstairs. Artificial intelligence. I worked for the City, and I was good at it. Well, maybe too good at it. My algorithms suddenly sprouted free will and made a mess of a few important things. My job disappeared along with so many others. So now I’m down here subsisting on whatever we can throw together, and laboring to make sure as much as possible remains in stasis. We are masters of several levels of the Web, including the parts ordinary citizens never visit. When I’m not hanging out at the Outtaluck playing mah-jongg, I’m at the Committee Center doing what I can to keep us safe from intruders. I’m not bad at it. Your misconception demonstrates our success.”

  Behind me I heard a low rumbling and the strains of “I’ve been working on the railroad.” I turned and saw another two-person rail car speed by on the tracks, its two occupants pumping hard at the handles each operated, a large canvas bag in the center.

  “That’s the main way we get around down here,” Brick said when he saw the car had attracted my attention. “Gondolas. We call them gondolas. We’ve got a small army of them, and a handful of hovercrafts. They keep us moving all around the Underground. Several go aboveground into the burbs and beyond, usually to do business for us, usually at night.”

  “What do they do?” I asked.

  “They go up and down the tunnels where the trains used to run, delivering stuff, especially messages we don’t want going out cybernetically. We trust our technology to deceive, but we’re still careful with the really important stuff. Some of them serve as taxis. We’re actually quite primitive a good deal of the time.”

  Reflecting on my Maxwell House with Coffee Mate, I understood what Brick was saying; however, not long after the gondola sped by, a small hovercraft flew past down the same tunnel.

  As the walkway opened up into a station, we stopped at a storefront with a poster of The Phantom of the Opera pasted onto the door. Drama in his voice, my guide said, “We have arrived.”

  I had an uneasy feeling about this arrival. The hair on the back of my neck told me that not everything underground was made of velvet. I fingered my cheapo Zap. It wasn’t very comforting.