This Side of Brightness

chapter 5. so slowly time passes

Across from his nest an icicle hangs near the metal grate, held in static, a shaft of ice one foot long exploring its way down toward the tunnel floor. It looks like a stalactite, although he knows stalactites aren’t made of ice, but of mineral deposits. No matter, he will call it that anyway: a stalactite. He wonders how long it might grow. Maybe ten, maybe fifteen feet, maybe all the way down to the ground. He nods to the piece of jagged ice. “Good morning,” he says. “Good morning.” The world, he knows, can still spring its small and wondrous surprises.

* * *

She arrives on the morning of the third snowfall.

A black handbag is all she carries. He is amazed to watch her from the safety of his nest. She moves under his catwalk, a huge fur coat wrapped around herself, open at the buttons, so she looks like an animal that has been sliced longways, from neck to belly button. The coat is old and tattered and yet vaguely beautiful. Underneath, she wears a red miniskirt and high heels. Her hair is threaded with multicolored beads. Some of it stands out in obscene shafts as if it hasn’t been washed in years. She walks in the center of the tracks and, when she gets to the grill facing his nest, she stands in the shaft of cold blue light beaming through from topside. He can see, even from his height, that there are streaks of dried mascara on her face. She shivers in the freezing cold and pulls the fur coat tight.

She looks so much like Dancesca.

Moving toward the tunnel wall, near the mural of the Melting Clock, she looks around furtively, then squats and lifts the flap of her fur coat, careful not to soil it.

Treefrog doesn’t want to watch as she pisses, so he quietly pulls down the zip of his sleeping bag and swings his feet onto the floor, careful not to step on any pellets of ratshit. He tugs on his boots, ties the laces with numb fingers. At the end of his bed, Castor stirs, and he reaches out to stroke her with both hands. Castor arches her back and nestles up close to him.

He moves quickly through the darkness of his nest toward the catwalk, and before he swings himself down he touches the carcass of the traffic light: Take it easy, don’t crash.

The beams are cold; he can even feel the chill through his gloves as he swings down, twenty feet in all, toward the ground. He hits the tunnel gravel with hardly a sound and looks to see the woman stand up and adjust her skirt, a puddle of steaming piss at her feet. She glances toward him and sniffs at the air, but Treefrog pulls back into the shadows.

“Who’s that?” she says.

He pulls himself deeper into the darkness.

“Who the fuck is that? Elijah? That you?”

Treefrog breathes down into his overcoat so she won’t see his breath making clouds.

“Don’t play no games,” she says.

He can almost hear his heart thump.

“Who’s that?” she says again. “Elijah?”

She rummages in her handbag, and he thinks for a moment that she might have a gun, that she may spray bullets around the tunnel, that he might end up with a hole in his head or his heart, or both, that she may even put the gun to her own head. But instead she takes out a pack of cigarettes and cocks her face sideways, lights the cigarette. Her fur coat falls open, revealing a tight shirt underneath, her nipples pointed and at attention in the cold. She takes a step and each breast jiggles minutely. How long, he thinks, since there was a woman down in the tunnels? As she pulls furiously on the cigarette he notices that the whites of her eyes are rolling around in her head. He keeps himself pinned to the dark, and when she starts to move he blows her a kiss.

She steps from the shaft of blue light into long darkness and into light again and then into an even further blackness, where all he can see is the outline of her figure as she moves, hugged into her coat. The tunnel is like a doubtful church, letting in light at strategic points and leaving the rest in shadows. A dog barks above a grate and the woman stops, looks up, takes out a small mirror, and wipes a hand across her cheeks — she must be crying — and he imagines the mascara stains darkening her face.

He slithers along behind her on the same side of the tracks.

The woman walks in the hard-packed dirt. Her high heels leave tracks. Treefrog wipes his hand across a runny nose and then lifts his head at the sound of a noise. Two pinpoints of light appear in the distance: the upstate train. He darts a look at the woman ahead of him. She has her head down as she walks. Treefrog’s heart jumps. The sound of the train grows louder, and suddenly his throat feels dry.

“Don’t,” he whispers. “Don’t.”

She lifts her head and stares long and hard as the headlights bear down. She moves nearer to the tracks. The train horn blasts loud and sparks flare from the underside of the carriage and the noise is deafening and he thinks that she is going to stand in front of the train — to clutch it to her chest like a massive bullet — and he shouts, “Don’t!” but the shout is drowned by the howl of the engine. He covers his eyes, and when he looks again she is simply standing by the track, staring up at the windows, letting the Amtrak rifle past.

He sits on the ground and puts his hand to his heart and closes his eyes and says aloud to nobody, “Thank you, thank you.”

She moves on once more in the tremendous cold. Treefrog follows behind at a safe distance, all the way down to the cubicles at 95th Street. The cubicles — concrete bunkers once used by the railway workers — are set in a long row.

She doesn’t even flinch when Faraday comes out from his solitary cell and stares at her. Faraday, in his filthy black suit, lets out a low whistle and she ignores it, swings her handbag like a weapon.

“Hey, honey,” says Faraday.

“I ain’t your honey.”

“You sure look like it.”

“Fuck you.”

Her voice is high and shrill and uneven, and Treefrog is sure she is sobbing.

“Yes, please,” says Faraday. “Fuck me please.”

And then she steps through the orchard of garbage outside the cubicle where Dean the Trash Man lives. Light spills in behind her and she goes tiptoeing past the mounds of human feces and the torn magazines and the empty containers and the hypodermic needles with blobs of blood at their tips like poppies erupting in a field — in her black high heels she moves like a dark, long-legged bird — past the broken bottles and rat droppings and a baby carriage and smashed TVs and squashed cans and discarded cardboard boxes and shattered jars and orange peels and crack vials and a single teddy bear with both its eyes missing, its belly nibbled by rats. She keeps on going among all the leftovers of human ruin.

Dean comes out of his cubicle when she passes. He wears a rescued pince-nez and shoves it to his eyes and watches her go. Dean licks his lips, and there is a smile on his face as if he might one day collect her too.

An old piece of newspaper catches on her foot and wraps around her ankle, and she carries the page for about twenty yards. Treefrog — hidden way back in the shadows — thinks of headlines sweeping down into her ankles and being carried the length of the tunnels forever, but she kicks off the paper and reels on toward Elijah’s place. She must have been here before, thinks Treefrog, the way she moves, the way she never looks over her shoulder.

She stops outside Elijah’s cubicle where the ground is clean and free of rubbish. Papa Love has planted a tiny tree in the hard-packed dirt, and she rubs her hands along the brown deadness of its branches. Catching her breath, she stands in the shaft of light and then shouts, “Elijah! Hey, Elijah!”

She looks up and down the row of concrete cubicles.

“Elijah!” she shouts again.

Treefrog can tell she’s crying, and he wants to stretch out and touch her, but as he steps out of the shadows Elijah emerges from his cubicle. He rubs his eyes and looks across the tracks to where she stands by the tree. Treefrog tucks himself away in the dark once more.

Elijah steps across the tracks and takes the woman in his arms, and she collapses into his shoulder and sobs. She pulls back the hood of Elijah’s sweatshirt and rubs her fingers over the scar on his face. Elijah shoulders her to his cubicle, kicks the door open. It swings drunkenly on one hinge.

Treefrog sits outside and waits.

After an hour Elijah comes out of the cubicle and pisses against the wall like a dog marking his territory. He punches his arms toward the roof of the tunnel in delight. Treefrog turns and walks back down the tunnel to his solitary nest. He takes out the photograph of Dancesca and his daughter, throws the photo up and down in the air, catching it with both hands before it hits the dirt floor.

* * *

Chilblains. Hands so big from the cold and damp they feel like they could burst their gloves.

* * *

He will find out later that her name is Angela. She was living in another tunnel, downtown, between Second Avenue and Broadway — Lafayette, a subway station, a hundred yards from the platform, with trains going past every few minutes, no light from grills, all noise: a vicious tunnel, the most vicious of tunnels, the worst in Manhattan.

She was there for six months, sleeping on a rain-bloated mattress. Vials were crumpled into pieces in the pockets of her jeans. One night she fell asleep on the mattress in a walled-off hole by the edge of the tracks, no more than five feet from the trains. The noise had become nothing; it was like the sound of her own rhythmic breathing. She sucked down the steel dust that hung in the air. While she was sleeping four men with bicycle chains came down from the Broadway-Lafayette end. They kicked her awake and dragged her up by the hair. She’d never seen them before. She screamed and one of them shoved a sock in her mouth. They ripped her T-shirt and wrapped her arms with the bike chains, tightened them so they left a bracelet of oil on her wrists, bent her over, and took their turns. They whispered a world of obscenities in her ear.

When Angela gagged, they took out the sock and vomit streamed out after it, but they kept on going. She remained silent after that. One of them licked his tongue at her lobe and stole a gold earring with his teeth. He leaned down in front of her with the little hoop of gold on his tongue. She didn’t have the energy to spit in his face.

Bent on all fours, she pleaded for mercy, closing her eyes to make them anonymous. When they finally left they threw down fifty cents each and told her to buy some candy — a Mounds bar, they said — and they laughed all the way out of the tunnel.

Angela couldn’t walk for two days. The mattress stank. She used a stuffed elephant for a pillow. Its pinkness was ribboned with blood. In the subway trains, commuters rushed by, shadows in the windows. She looked at the shadows and watched them go and reached up and twirled the one remaining hoop in her ear.

She was found by a man named Jigsaw, who said, “Shit, Angie, I’ll kill the motherfuckers did this to you.”

Jigsaw leaned down and held her real tight and he stank, but she let him hold her anyway. He had ropy arms. Later he bought her some hot coffee and a sandwich she couldn’t eat. He stood in front of her with his tongue lolling around in his head — she called him Jigsaw because his mind had gone to pieces.

“Leave me alone, Jiggy.”

“No.”

“I don’t want to talk to nobody.”

“You’ll die here like this, sister.”

“That sounds nice.”

“Shit, girl.”

“I mean it, it sounds lovely, I’d like to die, it sounds like strawberries, it sounds delicious.”

“You gone crazy, girl.”

Jigsaw let Angela be and melted into the yellowy darkness — the tunnel punctuated with electric lights — and she came topside through the emergency manhole, out onto a traffic island in the middle of Houston Street, stumbling along in the snow with her body parched and her head imploding. She sat weeping in a bus shelter until a teenager with a nose ring took pity. He put his arm around her shoulder and took her to a police station in the Bowery. She was surprised at his smell of aftershave. It was alien to her, deep and sweet and lengthy.

A cop brought her inside a small interrogation room with the brightest of desk lamps. The room was warm. She sat with her hands limp and asked for the desk lamp to be turned off; it was hurting her eyes. A second cop twisted the neck of the lamp and pointed it at the floor, and a yellow spot of light remained imprinted on her retinas. She couldn’t sit for longer than five minutes on the chair. She tried to write a report, but the cops said she had been asking for it, that’s what you get for being a whore, that’s just the way it is, you were looking for it, sister, why’re you wearing a miniskirt and thin little panties?

“I ain’t a whore.”

“Look, we’re not stupid. You look like you’re flossing your goddamn ass.”

“Don’t look at my ass.”

“Don’t worry.”

“Don’t look at my legs. I told you I ain’t a whore.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I ain’t! I’m a dancer.”

“A dancer?”

“Yeah, you got a problem with that?”

“A dancer! Shake your thing for us.”

“You’re just motherfuckers, that’s all.”

“A dancer!”

She stuttered then and said, “I ain’t a whore.”

When she pushed open the door of the waiting room, the boy with the nose ring was gone, but the scent of him was still there; she hauled it down into her lungs. One of the cops followed her to the front of the station and said, “I believe ya, sister.” And then he smiled and said he was sorry for what happened, that he’d make a trip down the tunnel, he’d write a report, she should come back the next day; and he gave her twenty dollars from his pocket. She hung her head, stuffed the money in her handbag, walked out of the station and through Greenwich Village in a daze, until she remembered her old friend Elijah living uptown, and she ducked down into the subway at Astor Place, changed at Grand Central, changed again at Times Square, came all the way to 72nd, walked down the road to Riverside Park and through the hole in the chicken-wire fence at the entrance of the railway tunnel, powdering herself with the remnants of her crack vials as she went, poking her finger around the containers. Then she came up the tunnel, stepping in her black high heels. If, at that time, Treefrog had made a map of the beats of his heart, the contours would have been so close together the lines would almost have touched one another in the steepest and finest of gradations.

* * *

Climbing back into his nest, Treefrog lies down with Castor at his side. So many winter hours in the tunnel are spent in sleep. Not an ounce of noise around him. From the bedside table he takes out the last of his remaining ganja and rolls himself a small joint, pinches it between thumb and forefinger, and pulls hard.

Above his bed his socks hang from the clothesline, a long multicolored line of neckties — blue ties, red ties, paisley ties, torn ties, magenta ties, even one from Gucci — all strung together with a series of perfect knots. The ties loop from one end of the dark nest to the other, sixteen altogether, each of them rescued from garbage Dumpsters. In a few places the line is nailed to the top of the tunnel so it doesn’t bow to the ground too much. Treefrog takes off his shoes and hangs his socks on the clothesline. The socks are stuffed with sweat. After an hour they begin to ice over, and it looks to him as if another man’s feet are dangling in midair.

“Heyyo,” he says, “heyyo.”

He moves to the back cave with the candle and reaches up to the shelf where he keeps his maps. He has hundreds of small graphs and one giant map on a sheet of art paper, carefully rolled and precisely tied with a shoelace. Treefrog spreads a plastic bag on the floor so the paper doesn’t get covered in muck. He opens the shoelace and unrolls the map. The one thing he hates is having to use the eraser, but it is necessary when he gets a new reading. Here, the bedside table, rising up to a plateau. A long butte for his mattress. Circular mounds for the rise in the dirt floor. A cave for the Gulag. All elevations marked in tiny increments. Delicately he scrubs out a contour and widens it for a new reading he made of the cave wall this morning after the woman’s visit; he may have been wrong, his hands were trembling after he saw her.

He bites the top of his glove to unfreeze his fingers, brings blood to them, works for hours, then falls asleep. When a rat tiptoes across his genitals he wakes and is disgusted to find that he has left a bootprint on the edge of his map.

Moving out from the back cave, Treefrog wipes sleep from his eyes and sits on the side of his bed.

In a giant plastic bag he keeps all the leaves from fall.

The leaves are brown and brittle to the touch, though their outside edges are a little damp where they have started to mulch. Treefrog rubs them between his gloved palms, crumples a few in his fingers, and sprinkles them equally around the fire pit — a ring of rocks with a dome of old ashes in the middle. He tears a yellowed New York Times into thin strips and curls them around the leaves. Near the bedside table — one leg supported by books but the whole table still a little drunken — he reaches for his pile of kindling.

He breaks eight little twigs in his fingers, makes a tepee of them around the newspaper, and lays some bigger twigs above them.

When the fire is lit and leaping, Treefrog reaches into the Gulag and unwraps some ham from its aluminum foil. He rips up one of the slices for Castor, tears it into nice little chunks — just enough to keep her happy and enough to keep her hungry. He pours a small amount of milk in a pan and puts the pan on a grill above the flames. Prometheus Treefrog, the fire stealer! Come down, lovely eagle, and consume my liver for eternity!

He touches the pan with his right thumb and then his left, sits back against the mattress, and waits.

As the milk begins to heat he strokes Castor, fingers a knot of mud from under her belly, throws the mud from hand to hand. She keeps her head cocked toward the pan, and when the bubbles begin to appear Treefrog pours the milk into a small bowl.

Castor laps at the milk delicately, noses over to the plate of ham, and sniffs around.

“Good girl,” he says, “good girl.”

Treefrog reaches for his bottle of gin. He drinks deep, then carefully cracks two eggs into a pan. A long hair from his beard drops and he picks it off the unbroken yoke with his right finger, imitates the movement with his left. He lays a slice of cheese over the eggs to melt. Treefrog eats his breakfast on the catwalk, using a hubcap for a plate. Looking along the tunnel, he remembers the way the woman had stepped near to the rails. She was so lovely, in her fur coat and red miniskirt. Gorgeous legs, long legs, magazine legs. She reminded him so much of Dancesca. Treefrog smiles and lets some bread soften against his tongue.

* * *

A church on Park Avenue. Christmas. A choir sang. They entered together. They had never been in a Catholic church before, but they liked the singing; it drew them in. Dancesca adjusted her hair. He held Lenora in the crook of his arm. The child was six months old. It was 1976. She still only fit between the length of his hand and his elbow. He leaned down and kissed the child’s forehead. His hair was short and he had no beard. He opened the zipper of his ski jacket, and then he touched Dancesca’s wrist. She nodded. They went to a back pew. The singing was lofty and beautiful. The priest was drinking from a chalice of wine. The choir sang on. Around them the pews began to empty. The people were walking toward the altar. He and Dancesca looked at each other, suddenly nervous, unsure of the ceremony. They followed the line toward the altar and began to imitate those around them. He put out his tongue, and the bread was placed gently by the priest. The priest touched Lenora on the forehead and smiled. Walking back down along the aisle, he could feel the strange wafer soften and stick to the roof of his mouth. He reached in with his forefinger and scraped a little of the bread off. A tiny piece remained on his finger. He placed the sliver in his child’s mouth. An old woman in a head scarf stared at him, eyes wide. He could feel his cheeks suddenly flush. He had done something wrong, he didn’t know what. For the rest of the service he kept his head bowed and pulled his child close, cradled her. When the service was finished they walked, head-hung, embarrassed, out from the church, but when they were far enough away, up Park Avenue, Dancesca burst out laughing and the sound of it erupted around him. At a row of parking meters, he handed Dancesca the child. He stood up on a meter — it was his trick — balancing on just one foot. He felt wonderful and ridiculous and alive. He could still taste the bread in his mouth. They walked to their apartment together, turned the key in the door, stood by the heater, put their arms around each other, and kissed, their sleeping child sandwiched between them.

* * *

When noon threatens, Treefrog rises from bed and switches a red coffee can from hand to frozen hand. There is no water left in his yellow canister, so he drops all the way to the gravel and saunters along between the two railway tracks.

Far down the tunnel, he passes the cubicles. An array of graffiti spiders its way across their doors. ELIJAH IS KING. SAILORS AT SEA. GLAUCON WAS HERE, ’87. FUCK YOU. On Faraday’s door, beneath the suspended toilet seat, are the words ALL I WANT TO DO IS SIT ON MY ASS AND FART AND THINK OF DANTE.

Treefrog stops and blows a kiss to Elijah’s door, where the woman must still be sleeping.

Under 94th Street there is a giant kitchen area with a campfire grill in the center. MOCKINGBIRD DON’T SING. LLCOOLJ. TROGLODYTES! I THINK, THEREFORE I AMBLE. WE ARE NOT MILITIA. NY SUCKS. An overcoat is hung out to dry on a long steel cable. The area is all darkness, punctuated by the beams of light coming from the grills. The shafts bear down, blue and white and gray, upon the graffiti and the murals that Papa Love has painted on the tunnel walls. The murals are spread out every hundred yards or so, rats running under the faces of Martin Luther King; John F. Kennedy; Miriam Makeba; Mona Lisa with a penis in her mouth; Huey Newton being crucified beside two white thieves, Nixon and Johnson. There is a petroglyph of a bison with USDA BEEF written on the side. Someone has drawn giant pink udders on it.

Fields of cans and bottles and needles are strewn beneath the paintings.

Pulling the overcoat collar up around his neck, Treefrog goes through a hundred yards of tunnel, past the cubicles and shacks. He can tell the time of day by the angle of the light shaft — that and the trains.

He reaches the metal stairs and climbs up to the gate, fourteen steps and always fourteen. Dean’s shopping cart is tied to the gate with a length of barbed wire — four tiny teddy bears are wound around the side mesh of the cart, along with the Star-Spangled Banner, mudstrewn. Four dented Pepsi cans sit in the bottom of the cart, but Treefrog decides to leave them alone; no need to cause trouble for just twenty cents.

He peers out the gate, through the lacy ironwork, to the embankment covered in a foot-high drift of snow. All is silent, few cars even on the curve off the West Side Highway. There are often crashes on the curve, and he likes to remove the hubcaps from the wrecks before the tow trucks take them away.

Treefrog hunkers down on the metal steps, shoves the empty coffee can through the gaps in the gate, and scoops up some snow and packs it down with his gloved fists: right first, then left.

Below the fresh coating of snow he comes upon hard ice. He should spread water on his catwalk and it would ice over and then nobody would come calling to his nest for sure, they would slip and fall and snap their necks and he would be left in peace forever.

He shoves the can of snow into his overcoat pocket and returns along the tunnel, climbs up on the catwalk — he knows he will never fall; he can even do it on tiptoe — and, in his nest, begins to light another fire. Almost out of wood and leaves, he uses mostly newspaper.

The flames rise up quickly.

He dumps the snow into a blackened pot and chooses an herbal teabag from the Gulag. The Gulag is four feet in the air and one foot deep into the tunnel wall above his bed, built in his second year underground. It took him weeks to chisel out and smooth down perfectly flat. He laid down a little steel toaster tray in the center, so the food wouldn’t get rock dust in it, and hung a red bandanna in front for a door. He hammered nails in the wall and then meticulously filed the nails down into spikes, so that if rats jumped up and tried to steal the food they would rip their feet to bits on the sharp points. He has never seen a rat make the leap, so mostly he uses the spikes to hang his socks from.

He leaves the pot over the fire, gets back in his sleeping bag, listens to the sibilant wind whistling along from the south end, waits for the gray snow of Manhattan to boil. So slowly time passes, he thinks, if it passes at all.

* * *

On Broadway in the evening, when the snow has briefly relented, he walks along with a bag full of cans and spies her, sitting under the awning of Symphony Space.

With an outstretched arm she holds a tall stack of perhaps twenty paper coffee cups. The top coffee cup almost bows in supplication to the street. He laughs at the sight and listens as she says to passersby, “Spare some change and I’ll dance at your wedding!”

Even when nobody gives her money and her body slumps to the ground and her arm becomes tired and her feet are splayed and her eyes are glazed and the edges of her mouth are carved into two deep sorrowful furrows, she continued to smile and say, “Spare some change and I’ll dance at your wedding!”

* * *

He listens at the door until he is sure that Elijah is not around: easy to tell, since the radio is not playing and Elijah always insists on noise — even when he’s sleeping.

Treefrog toes his way forward, waits, knocks, and hears her moan.

“Heyyo.”

A long silence and a ruffle of blankets, and he nudges his feet against the door and raps on the wood again. Another moan, but he can tell she’s shifting in the bed.

“Get out.”

“It’s me.”

“Who?”

“Treefrog.”

“Who are you?”

“Just me.”

“Get out.”

“Hey, where’s Elijah? When’s he back?”

“Don’t touch me.”

“I won’t touch you. Got a smoke?”

“No.”

“Is today Wednesday or Thursday?”

“Get out.”

“It’s Friday, ain’t it?”

He enters, and she is flat on a mattress in the fabulous dark; he can’t even make out her shape. Electricity must be out. He flicks the lighter with one hand, then the other, holds it over where he knows the bed to be. She puts her arm across her eyes and says, “Get out!”

He can tell that she’s been crying, her upper lip sucked in against her teeth, her fists clenched, her eyes red.

She looks like a sad sandwich between five sets of blankets.

Shoving the lighter into his pocket, he sits down in the darkness on a wicker chair by the bed, puts his feet on a shattered television set with a fist hole in its glass, and listens to her rummage under the blankets. The chair has two short legs, so he rocks it diagonally.

“What’s your name?”

“Don’t hurt me.”

“I won’t hurt you. What’s your name?”

After a long silence she says, “Angie.”

“There’s a song about that.”

“If Elijah finds someone here he’ll kill me.”

“I just wanted to say hello.”

“You said it. Now get out.”

“You look just like somebody.”

“Get out, I said.”

“I just want a cigarette.”

“I have a knife,” she says. “If you come any closer, I’ll kill you.”

“Saw you this morning,” he says. “And I saw you up there on Broadway, too. With the coffee cups. I like that. A big long line of coffee cups. Never seen that before.”

“Out!”

“You look just like a friend of mine. I thought you were her. Hey. Why you crying?”

“I ain’t crying. Shut up and get out.”

“What’s wrong with the juice?” he asks.

“The what?”

“What happened the electric?”

“Elijah’ll kill you if you don’t get out. He said don’t let nobody in here.”

“You’ll have to get Faraday to fix the electric.”

“He that ugly white motherfucker in the suit?” she asks.

“Yeah. Connects everyone up. From the light poles topside. Runs the cable down. Even goes to the other tunnels. He can pirate it off the third rail. Sometimes he steps the electric down with transformers. He’s a genius with the juice.”

“Elijah’s gonna kill him too. He whistled at me. Say, what’s your name again?”

“Treefrog.”

“That’s the weirdest goddamn name I ever heard in my life.”

“I play the harmonica.”

“That don’t explain nothing.”

“Everyone else calls me that. I don’t call me that. I don’t like it.”

He hears her pull the blankets high around her neck. “Motherfuck,” she says, “it’s cold.” There’s a scuffle in the background and she sits up urgently. “What’s that?”

“A rat.”

“I hate rats.”

“You should get a cat.”

She shivers. “Elijah don’t like cats.”

“You want some more blankets?”

“Yeah.”

“I got some extra,” says Treefrog. “Back in my place. Gimme a smoke first. A smoke for a blanket for the barter man.”

“I don’t got none.”

“I saw you smoking this morning.”

“You promise you’ll give me a blanket?”

“Yeah.”

He feels a cigarette land in his lap and he searches in his overcoat for a lighter, snaps it aflame, pulls the smoke down deep into his lungs, continues rocking the chair diagonally in the darkness.

“Thanks, babe.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Thanks, Angela.”

“It’s Angie.”

“I like Angela better.”

“You’re an asshole,” she says. “Motherfuck, it’s cold. Ain’t it cold? You ain’t cold? I’m cold.”

He rises up from the wicker chair. “Don’t go nowhere,” he says. “I’m gonna get you a blanket.”

He goes to the door and looks across the tunnel to the fading light from the grill. “It’s snowing,” he says, after a moment.

“I know it’s goddamn snowing.”

“I like it when it snows. The way it comes down through the grates. You seen it?”

“Man, you’re crazy. It’s cold. Snow is cold, that’s what it is. It’s cold. That’s all. Cold. This is hell. This is a cold, motherfucking hell.”

“A heaven of hell,” he says.

“What you talking about now, asshole?”

“Nothing.”

He walks down the tunnel, beating his arms around himself to stave off the wind that howls down from the southern end. In his nest, he finds his extra blankets in huge blue plastic bags beside his books and maps.

Angela, he thinks, as he walks back down toward the cubicle, carrying a blanket for her. A nice name. Six letters. Good symmetry. Angela.

* * *

He sees her at the tunnel gate one evening, so stoned that her eyes roll around in their sockets. She tugs him by the sleeve and whispers to him that she used to dance in a club in Dayton, Ohio.

“A little shithole there, outside of town,” she says. “I used to do my face with the nicest makeup. There was two platforms. One girl on each. One night I was onstage and I look up and see my father coming in, you know; he sits himself at a table at the back of the club. My goddamn father! He orders himself a beer and then goes to giving the waitress a hard time ’cause he paid five dollars and only got a plastic glass. Sitting there, just staring up at me while I was dancing. I was scared, Treefy. I thought he was gonna get up there on the stage and hit me like he always done. I wasn’t dancing, hardly, I was so scared. All these men were booing and hissing from a table. And then I look down, and my father, he’s gone changed the angle of his chair; he’s looking at the other platform, at the other girl. Licking his lips. So then I decided. I danced the finest dance I ever done in my life. I swear all heads were turned at me, excepting him. He’s just drinking and staring at the other girl and never once looks at me. And when I go out in the parking lot he’s waiting for me and he’s drunk, and he says, Girl — I’m twenty-two and he’s still calling me Girl — and then he asks the name of the other dancer and I says, Cindy. And he says, Thanks. And then he leaves in his old gray Plymouth and leans out the window and says to me, That Cindy girl sure can dance. That’s what he said to me. That Cindy girl sure is a dancer.”

* * *

He dreams that night that she is standing in his liver. A red-brown wall rises in front of her. She has been given digging instructions by Con O’Leary, Rhubarb Vannucci, Sean Power, and Nathan Walker.

She knows how to stand with widespread feet, one behind the other, and how to use all the economy of her body. She chunks away at the wall of his liver, scooping and bucketing out the sickness and disease, so delicate with her shovel that he doesn’t feel a thing. Angela scrapes all the residue from him, and when a spot is clean she leans across and kisses it, and it sends a shiver through the rest of his body. All the filth comes away at her feet and she buckets it out of his liver, and when she has the gland completely clean, when the buckets are empty, when he is cured, they dance around his liver together in an ecstatic twirl, their eyes closed, round and round and round, Angela with her colorful beads bobbing in her hair. Then there is a sucking sound and they are blown upward through his body and out his mouth and she stands in front of him, smiling, all the bile gone, even from beneath her fingernails, and she reaches out and touches him softly, moves along his chest, plucking at his hairs, and her fingers go down further to where she opens his fly with spectacular delicacy; there’s not an ounce of pain in his liver, it’s a beautiful dream. Every now and then a dream can be impeccable in the tunnel.