Chapter 44

William, who admitted to having no last name, was of slightly less than average height, with dark hair, a rough complexion, and a certain quality of nondescriptness about his face and features.

Until one met the eyes. These were at once both black and pierced with light, aloof and penetrating, as if possessed of some underworld knowledge that rendered all waking truth both poignant and, in the end, utterly meaningless. Once seen, though the rest of the face remained difficult to recall, these darkened orbs were indelibly burned into memory---fierce, desperate, and dying. Restless, fearful, weary of the crumbling bridge that so narrowly separates life from death...

He had not always been this way. Though his childhood had been tragic enough---abandoned shortly after birth, stored like some kind of hazardous waste in orphanages and foster homes, moving on as he became a troubled adolescent (and who wouldn’t be?) to jails and juvenile detention centers---it had not killed him, and that at least was something. He had run away (escaped) at the age of sixteen, and like so many other lost souls without hope or guidance, had gravitated to New York City to be tried by the relentless hell-fire of the streets.

But unlike most, he had survived. Here, through various underground activities, ranging from petty theft and burglary to trafficking narcotics, he had somehow managed to keep body and soul together. And no one seemed to take much notice of one more suspected junkie, living in abandoned buildings and selling small quantities of marijuana, cocaine, and whatever assorted pills he could buy, make, or steal from dockside warehouses. He was left alone for the most part, and aside from the odd roughing up by the police, given tentative permission to exist.

But as he unknowingly turned the page on his twentieth year (for the date of his birth was known to no one, and his childhood but a blur of pain and abuse without names or numbers for reference), and as he found his heart still beating, his lungs still demanding air, and the various hungers of life giving him no chance to cease his restless moving, a small miracle had occurred. Someone noticed, and more than that, fell in love with him: a fifteen-year-old Chicano girl named Kathy.

Their meeting was chance enough, and would have passed like so many others, but for the small compassion that still lived in him. Finding her tearful and alone on the front steps of a tenement, in which her alcoholic father had beaten and fondled her for perhaps the thirtieth time, refraining from actual rape only because she screamed so loudly and the walls were thin, William sat down beside her, gave her his bandana to wipe the blood from her ear, and offered to take her to a public health clinic that he knew. When she declined as the result of a questionable immigration status (and a desire not to return to the even more brutal life of Guatemala City), he had given her an ounce of marijuana, along with spoken directions to the condemned building in which he slept on the floor on a mattress of flattened cardboard boxes. If she needed anything, he said, he would try to help.

The next day when he returned to check on her, he found that her father, aided in his spiritual pilgrimage by a fifth of tequila, had fallen from the fire escape, and was now in a City hospital pending deportation. That was why she had not returned to their room, but remained on the front steps, freed from one hell but confident that another awaited her, which no doubt it did: she had no money, and would soon be evicted.

William had bought her breakfast, stolen her a jacket and scarf, then brought her to his mansion of rats, fallen plaster, moldering walls, and warmed by a kerosene heater which only smoked dangerously toward morning.

After waiting for three days to be put to work on the streets, she found to her amazement that he neither demanded she sell herself to others or perform sex tricks for him, and had not put a hand on her except in awkward comfort and reassurance. That night she gave herself to him, they made sweet and tender love; and he had done something even more inexplicable. He had cried, and promised to protect her with his life against the bitcheries of poverty and despair that he knew so well.

From that time on they were inseparable, living where they could, doing what they had to do, to survive. William was not, in fact, a junkie, though he came as close to the line without crossing it as any human being ever could. But for Kathy’s sake he gave up hard drugs almost completely, finding that with her he no longer needed the barbiturates to sleep, injected amphetamines to feel alive in the night, or alcohol to keep the spiritual agony from killing him. Without the world’s help, or even its consent, he pulled himself and his young woman up out of the gutter, and as she had done for him, gave them both a reason to live.

But then Armageddon had come, oblivious to his, and everyone’s, agonies and ecstasies, bitter triumphs and long defeats. The War, that had been building for centuries from Man’s ignorance, and inability to overcome his instinct for violence, finally broke out. The satellite lasers had protected the City for a time, keeping the first wave of missiles off them, for perhaps an hour. But it didn’t take a genius to know that New York’s famous minutes were numbered.

So through the crash of panic-stricken people, trying to evacuate or merely crying, ‘Oh, my God!’ while still others who had not seen or heard the broadcasts stood about in a daze and tried to understand what was happening, William took Kathy and sought out his friend, Dr. Wilhelm Krause---the black pessimist, partly insane. Looting, too, had broken out, but it was halfhearted, so that even the police, grim soldiers of the street, showed little inclination toward retaliatory violence. The City, for all its noise and seeming activity, was in a strangling state of shock.

William found Dr. Krause---whom he had met while hospitalized with hepatitis (from a rusted syringe)---in his basement laboratory, sunk ninety feet below the ground, side-cut into solid bedrock at the base of gigantic Mercy Hospital. For among the towering sky-scrapers, some reaching over two hundred stories, it was not uncommon for their foundations to sink another tenth that distance. And along with the subways, bored farther and farther beneath the level of the streets, they formed the literal New York underground, a silent world unto itself, a still, protected inlet in the heart of the maelstrom.

When William burst in upon the aged Krause, the latter did not at first seem to recognize him. For though he had been preparing for this day for many years, now that it had come, his mind and heart were simply overwhelmed. He found himself unable to act, or even think. It was really happening, not in theory, not in the lecture hall, but in damnable and undeniable reality. The unspeakable, of which he had spoken for thirty years, had happened at last. There was something he was supposed to do...

Slowly his weary eyes and mind focused, his German courage rallied, and he saw before him the young man he had once caught trying to steal morphine from the hospital storeroom. In a moment almost of nostalgia, he recalled the incident. He had not called security or the police, had not tried to confront the sick and desperate youth, but said simply, ‘Go back to your room, son. No, I’m not going to turn you in. We’ll talk about it later.’ And to the young man’s astonishment they HAD talked, on several occasions and for hours at a time. William found in the aging and alienated recluse a friend, and the closest thing to a father that he would ever know. When he had spoken of his life, Krause listened attentively, as if finding in the bitter tale of poverty and poor health, pursuit and persecution, a note in harmony with his own struggle amidst the viper-filled pit of unenlightened human nature. Upon William’s release he had shown him his laboratory, and explained what it was for. And he had told him to come, if this moment ever arrived.