Colum McCann - This Side of Brightness

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.