story © 1999 Ria-angelo
December 7th, 2001
7pm
"It's a living..."
The familiar half-laugh, half-sigh eases out of the phone from a half-thousand miles away, and it's like Dave is right here in my living room. "C'mon, Meg, tell me the truth. You're NOT just doing this cause of the Turtles?"
"Gah," I wince, then go sarcastic on the recovery. "Sure, Dave, I came all the way to the City and got a job wading through half the spit in Manhattan all day, just cause I think I might catch a glimpse of some comic book mutants who call themselves Ninja Turtles."
Dave waits for me to take a breath and launches a line back at me. "That's the reason you told me you snuck out of your Mom's house at 4am when you were thirteen. As I remember it, you took a two-day-old bike 75 miles to Haydenville, Massachusetts - where you thought Mirage Studios was."
He's got a point, I think. "Dave. Emphasis on the fact that I was thirteen at the time."
"All right, all right. I believe you. So long as you're writing that novel when you're off-duty..."
"Of course I'm still writing it. There's gotta be a reason for me to come back to the apartment, with all that fantastic life going on outside my window. And I can't get rid of the apartment, what else would I spend my paycheck on?"
"With your job?" Dave sniggered. "Lots of expensive perfume."
"So that's what the Emeraude was for."
"Just call me your little birthday elf!"
The joke behind the bottle of green perfume hadn't been lost on me. If he hadn't also sent the signed back issue of Manbat with my birthday package, I might have been upset. "Actually, Dave, the tunnels aren't so bad this time of year. A lot of it's frozen, and there's this one section where it's like a mini-waterfall of ice. Reminds me of a fanfic one of my friends wrote back in - "
"Meg?"
"Yeah?"
"You're talking about sewer ice."
"Yeah..." I shrug, lean back against the kitchenette counter. "Don't worry, I get out enough to know the stuff at Rockefeller Center's a lot less colorful."
I hear Dave scratching his beard, the wiry hairs sounding like static across the line. "Listen, I've got a few days' vacation next month. You got floor room?"
"You askin' for guided tours of the town?"
"I'm on my knees."
I decide to believe him. "It's a deal. You wanna come babysit me, I'll get you your exercise."
"Hoo boy."
"Bring your 'blades."
We hang up a bit later and I frown at the laptop screen in front of me.
Eric whistled silky waves in from the seaweed-clogged beach.
"So what?" I ask the screen.
My fingers betray me.
Tense, he caught sight of a rounded shadow approaching from behind. "Michaelangelo?"
"Gah."
My fingers hit shift+control+home, highlighting the line. "Delete," I chirp.
Time to get out, get some inspiration. It isn't fair that, as my fanfic-writing friend had said, all my creativity descended into the sewers of New York a few years ago and hasn't come out since. Maybe Dave's right and I should get a new job...one that has nothing to do with heroes or shells or fighting -
Damn! My job!!
I start grabbing parts of my DPW uniform from around the apartment. There's about fourteen pieces to the thing, half of it in the bathroom, still drip-drying from the morning. Keeping an eye on the wind-up alarm clock on the back of the toilet, I strip out of my running clothes, shower, and get into the first layers - long underwear, turtleneck, wool pants, knee-high nylons and heavy socks. I look like I'm going for a hike in the Himalayas... The rest of the layers, including our thick fluorescent waterproof overalls, will wait in my pack until I get to our station.
I take the subway, my equipment and ID in the backpack I've worn since high school. Most nights I use the ride to think about the story I'd worked on after my run that day, but not this evening. Dave's question is rattling at me. No, I tell myself. The Turtles aren't the only reason I got a job working underground. I've been in love with Manhattan's underground world long before I saw the green guys' cartoon - at least since watching the Children in the TV show Beauty and the Beast back in grade school. And I do need a steady job to keep the bills at bay while my rejection slips pile up - one that isn't too repetitive, and still leaves 'scope for the imagination'.
Dave just doesn't understand all that - he's still at his parents' house so far, working at the Greater Schenectady Performing Arts Center as lighting staff. It's an early break for him, half a year out of college, but we both know Broadway is a must-see for when he comes down for the promised tour.
Besides, I continue as a grocery-laden white kid takes the seat next to me, if you were just doing this to chase Turtles, you would have given up a long time ago. Manhattan DPW crew isn't the easiest job in the world to hold onto, though the fight to keep it appeals to my feminist side.
The guys who hired me couldn't believe I wanted to go all the way down. Most of the new guys, they'd said, are happy just guarding the open manhole and the topside equipment on the street. "How else am I gonna get to see any action?" I'd asked. And kept asking, and insisting, once my six weeks of training were up, until they gave in and let me on the deep tunnel crew 'for a trial'.
I tell them all I have a boyfriend upstate, to keep them off my back, but my coworkers are pretty much convinced I'm gay. The only other woman I've met on deep crew was a 40-year-old Hispanic woman working up on 68th Street on the big gas line bypass in September, and she had been gay. That was the only thing really going for me, that I'd turned down her overtures just as neatly as I had my coworkers'. Maybe Dave will let me talk him into playing 'boyfriend' instead of 'honorary brother' for a few hours while he's here, just to show them? I think, showing my pass and climbing aboard the off-duty number 6 train. Henry's the only one there to join me - we're a bit late.
The operator is Ned, an older black man who never minds talking with me about the tunnels. He surfs me and my fellow workers from the Brooklyn Bridge stop and on to the work site every night. I'll miss him when we're done under Battery Park City.
He takes us real slow, as usual, through the curve of the abandoned landmark City Hall station, he and I admiring the arches in the soft gaslights' glow.
"Don't forget, it's folks like us built this place. Them suits and tourists admire, but we know how to do it again."
Henry snorts. I smile at Ned.
"Thanks," I say a few minutes later, as the doors open to let us into the halogen and fluorescent-cone world of Station 1174 F.
The rest of the team's already here, suited up for the night's shift. I see Bruce, working relief for the afternoon shift, looking nervous where he sits by the generator. "Hey, buddy," I say, strolling over as I snap the straps of my coat around the oversized wool sweater I wear. "What's up, tonight? Looks like you got the jitters."
"Can't light up til shift's over," he mutters, tapping the Camels in his left breast pocket. His other hand's drumming an agitated pattern on the generator box. "Not until they're done checking for leaks. Looks like minor damage so far, but... Two more hours and I'm outta here!"
"Damage?" I echo, listening for the hiss of leaks over the muffled percussion of his fingers.
"Tunnel collapsed, some sort of wreck in the subway under the WFC."
"Yikes - the World Financial Center?" That's right over our heads... "How bad?"
"Just a lot of smoke and some building damage. Most of the blast effect went down here."
I shudder, looking up, breathing a quick prayer of thanks that no one was hurt. Chase it with a prayer that the tunnels, weakened, won't collapse on our heads. I think briefly of my mother. I've never told her how risky this job I've got is...
Jim's flashlight kicks on suddenly, sweeping the eight of us in the station. "Let's move. Silko?"
"Comin'," I answer, grabbing my gear pack. I follow him and Bruce and the other five going into the big pipe we've been working on this last week, wondering how much of what we've accomplished is going to have to be redone as a result of the collapse, and how much new damage is going to need attention.
The tunnel's a long one, and all the way I'm listening above the shuffling of our heavy boots and the rub of plastic gear for the whine or hiss of escaping gas. Leaks... just one of the dangers so emphasized in training. There'd been thirteen in my training class. Six had been scared out of making it to actual duty.
For half a minute my mind paints the dark scene into an urgent comic book image, wandering over the lines of Raphael's arms, bulged with tension and beading sweat as he breathes just under his panic, blocking the hissing gas line with one palm and knocking a frantic code on the pipe wall to his brothers. "Hear me. Come on, guys. Hear me! "
"What's that, Silko?"
"Huh? Nothing. Just listening for gas." I blush. Kevin, whose butt I've been following as we crawl, glances back with disgust and spits on the floor of the tunnel. If I'm careful... The beam of my headlamp warns me where not to place my gloved hand as I crawl past the spot a moment later. I grin; a small triumph.
Graffiti blares images around the edges of my teams' backsides. How do they get all the way down here? I wonder for the millionth time. I wonder, too, if I'll ever glimpse tunnel art that's undeniably by a Turtle's hand.
Dammit Meg - stay focused! In A.C. Farley's comic, Chet had managed to keep his job despite his haunted memory of dropping four baby turtles down into these sewers. But I'm sure not Chet, and this is no comic book. Here distraction means more than concerned shouts across a walkie-talkie.
The site hasn't been badly disturbed - we spend the night shoring up a few weaker spots in the wall and go back to our expanding and replacing work, keeping the monitors going to alert us of any leaks. The worst thing that happens is Chuck getting some dirt stuck in his eye when he has his goggles off, trying to fix his contact lens. Jim gives him a warning and barks the rules at us against wearing contacts down here.
We come out a little after four am. Still a couple hours til dawn, and it'll keep staying dark longer for the next few weeks. I stay underground til five, riding the trains, watching people, from businessmen to rough-looking kids, thinking about the ones who live down here. Another thing I don't tell my mom about doing. She wouldn't understand that I keep my wits about me and just make sure there's always people around, and a place to run. My uniform keeps most trouble away. Topside near Times Square, I come up with a small crowd into the colder air of the above-ground winds. I aim for the aging brownstone just up the street from the subway exit, its fifteen stories dwarfed amid the crowd of modern architechture.
The front steps have only two sets of footprints in the dusting of snow, both leading inside, through the bullet-proof doors and into the pre-lobby space. "It's Meg," I say into the speaker there. A second later I grab the handle as it buzzes, and slide into the lobby. "Mornin', Tom. Gonna come watch the sunrise today?"
"Ain't it still snowin out there?"
"No... Looks like we just got a flurry or two since last evening." I shrug. "The clouds are gone now. And it shouldn't be too bad a commute."
Tom squints his watery nightwatchman's gaze at me - there's something about him that always reminds me of a grandfather. "Clouds or no clouds, it's too cold for these shoulders." He rolls them carefully, showing off his natural percussion with their pops and cracks and snaps. "Don't freeze up there, girl. Couldn'tcha wait til summer?"
I smile back and wave from the old copper-edged elevator doors. "I'll tell you all about it tomorrow morning."
The old lift, stinking of dryer sheets and strong antiseptic, can only take me as high as the twelfth floor without a special key. I don't mind the extra hike. Stepping out, I round the elevator shaft and take the painted concrete stairs three and a half floors to the highest door.
It leads out to the rooftop, nestled humbly among the skyscrapers near the Square, the black tarpaper broken by pipes and vents of all kinds. I walk to my perch, dusting a few brave flakes from the wooden box at the front corner of the old hotel, and sit down happily. The brickwork is lit by the towers and streetlights that helped earn Manhattan its reputation as the City That Never Sleeps, feeling proud to be part of that tradition.
Leaning out over the eastern end of 44th Street, I can see the Avenue of the Americas with its Christmas-wreathed streetlights to my left, already the traffic there is becoming a steady stream. This afternoon I'll head north along that street toward Central Park, jogging past the back side of Rockefeller Center, and go food shopping along Second Ave north of the Queensboro. For now, I just lean my back against the cold bricks of the corner and watch the spires of St. Augustine's Church beyond the far side of the roof. Its bells wake any tenants still asleep in the apartments every morning at nine a.m. Pretty soon, above the spires, the sunrise will edge the shadowed corners of the towers with pastel brilliancy, and slowly warm the City.
It isn't the best view of dawn - I like watching it through the magesty of St. Patrick's Cathedral from the Atlas Statue at Rockefeller, or from the dramatically medieval ledge of Belvedere Castle in Central Park, too - but neither place is nearly as safe as this roof, and can't match the feeling here of being home.
On this roof, especially when Tom doesn't come up with me, I find it easiest to picture the Turtles nearby. Raph comes to mind first this morning... Raph's stayed out again, long after his brothers sought the refuge of the dark tunnels, brooding over his City like a Romantic gargoyle. No one sees him. He moves like a shadow, a wraith, and they're never quite quick enough to notice the shape of him leaving his mark on the world - when he bothers to leave one. A sketch of a rose on some bricks here, a girl rescued from thugs in a stinking alley there... Is this a just world?
I leave Raph to his ponderings pretty quickly, though - he always gets too heavy without some action to liven up the scene. Leo, on the other hand... I half-close my eyes and imagine him calling the dawn with his dance, the way the best stories describe him in training. He moves across the tarpaper of the rooftop, the fluid intensity of his thousand-tempered twin blades flashing reflections of the sky through his concentration. Leo drives himself like a fast car, cruising the flow and circle and energy of his katas with unforgiving passion to his most efficient, beautiful, sweaty perfection. I can admire that, I can pity him for his struggle to vanquish emotion with motion. I know he'd hate being pitied.
I think about sharing the view with Don or Mike, what I would say - I think I'd point out how the steam is rising so white it's painful to look at now, in its tendrils against the brightening sky. Don rests his chin on the tip of his bo, telling his brothers about the countless pipe-vents the steam escapes from, what the steam is for, how it gets there, what happens when it vanishes into the thin winter air. As for Mike, I don't see him sitting still for the sunrise or his brother's talking, he's always so full of energy. For my part, I'm too sore from work to do any goofing around, but... With a somersault Mike vaulted himself upside down and started parading around on his hands. His brothers ignored him while he pretended to fall off the edge every few minutes, or leaped back and forth between the roof and the church's pigeon-crowded spires. I've tried to picture Mike sitting still like I can with the others, but I only see it if he has a video game in his hands, or he's scribbling
in a notebook, or zoning in front of the TV. Not outside in the open air. Not with anyone to show off in front of. Mike's someone to run with, dance or cook or make a scene with.
After awhile I can see the top edge of the sun through two of the distant skyscrapers. It's only a sliver of the whole sun, a thin rectangle that reflects between the glass. It makes me miss the view of the Valley I'd had from my college dorm room. Up there you could see the whole sky. Dave had lived next door, then... But, and at this I grin, he never woke up in time to watch sunrises.
When the lower edge of the sliver appears, I get up and stamp my numb feet, dust off the butt of my overalls, and head back downstairs to my apartment.
