Innocence

Shortly after dawn, I took refuge in a dilapidated barn on an abandoned farm, where the house had burned down and had never been rebuilt. Mice were the rightful tenants of the barn, but they were not too frightened of me, and I assured them that I meant to stay only a few hours.

Mother had included the essentials in the backpack, but also a half dozen chocolate-pecan cookies that she had made herself and that were my favorite.

7

ON FOOT BENEATH THE CITY, I ARRIVED AT AN INTERSECTION where abruptly a rumble rose, the underground thunder of a train, which was the only utility routed deeper than the storm drains. On the rare occasions when a section of the subway flooded, water was pumped up to these tunnels. Before the turn of the millennium, they had pumped it to the sewer lines; but a calamitous backflow once gushed filth through two miles of the subway, requiring weeks of decontamination by hazmat teams, and the existing design was reconsidered.

A city is half beast and half machine, with arteries of fresh water and veins of foul, nerves of telephone and electrical cables, sewer lines for bowels, pipes full of pressurized steam and others carrying gas, valves and fans and filters and meters and motors and transformers and tens of thousands of interlinked computers, and though its people sleep, the city never does.

The city nurtured me and provided me with a secret haven for which I was grateful, but I continued to be a little distrustful of it, and sometimes afraid. Logic insisted that, in spite of its intricacy, the city was only an accumulation of things, buildings and machines and systems, that could not develop an awareness or intent. Yet often it seemed that, though I remained unknown to the people of this place, I was known by the city itself, and watched.

If a city had a life separate from its citizens, then it must have a capacity for both kindness and cruelty. As a creation of men and women, it surely shared their evils as well as their virtues.

The rumble of the train passed away beneath my feet, and beyond the intersection of enormous drains, I turned left into a tributary that sloped upward more than the main tunnel. The passageway lacked elevated service walks, and its dimensions required me to proceed a considerable distance with shoulders hunched and head bowed.

I was so familiar with these subterranean avenues and alleys, I might have found my way without the flashlight. But although I ventured out only at night and lived days in the depths, I was born for light and yearned for more of it than my circumstances allowed.

I came to an open cove in the right-hand drain wall, like half of a cylinder, made of curved concrete blocks. It was five feet in diameter, seven feet high, rather like what you’d find if you took the cover off a manhole, except that a manhole was deeper, wasn’t open on one side, and remained accessible only through the top.

Overhead, a heavy iron lid featured a recessed nut along the perimeter. From my backpack, I removed the one tool it contained: a foot-long iron rod with a T handle at one end and something like a socket wrench at the other. When this gate key engaged the nut and turned it, a rim latch in the lid retracted from the manhole frame, allowing me to push upward, swinging that cover open on its hinges.

My father’s father had appropriated that tool from a street-department truck years before his death. That gate key was the most precious thing I owned. Most of the freedom of movement I enjoyed, such as it was, would be lost if that tool was lost.

After returning the gate key to a zippered compartment of my backpack, I held the flashlight in my teeth, grabbed the frame of the manhole, and drew myself through the open lid and into the basement of the city’s central library. All was silent, as should be the case in such a place, the air dry but not arid, cool but not cold.

In this first hour of a Sunday morning, no one would be in the great building. The cleaning crew had gone. The library remained closed on Sundays. I should have the place to myself until Monday morning. I intended to pass only a few hours within those walls, however, before going elsewhere to resupply the larder in my bunker.

The climate-controlled basement was enormous, a single space with rows of massive columns fanning out toward their tops to create graceful limestone vaults. Between the columns, metal cabinets stood on foot-high concrete plinths. Some of the drawers held ordinary files, but others were wide and shallow to accommodate blueprints as well as small stacks of publications that, brittle with age, couldn’t bear their own weight and would rapidly deteriorate if piled high.