Colum McCann - This Side of Brightness

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.