Underworld

The intimacies we Ve come to share, the belated exchange of childhoods and other ferocious times, and something else, a firm grip of another kind, a different direction, not back but forward-the grasp of objects that bind us to some betokening. I think I sense Marian missing in the objects on the walls and shelves. There is something somber about the things we've collected and own, the household effects, there is something about the word itself, effects, the lacquered chest in the alcove, that breathes a kind of sadness-the wall hangings and artifacts and valuables-and I feel a loneliness, a loss, all the greater and stranger when the object is relatively rare and it's the hour after sunset in a stillness that feels unceasing.

We walk along the drainage canal past tree trunks limed white- white against the sun.

The earth opened up and he stepped inside. I think it felt that way not only to us but to Jimmy as well. I think he went under. I don't think he wanted a fresh start or a new life or even an escape. I think he wanted to go under. He lived day-to-day and step-to-step and did not wonder what would become of us or how she would manage or how tall we grew or how smart we became. I don't think he spent a minute thinking about these things. I think he just went under. The failure it brought down on us does not diminish.

This is how I came across the baseball, rearranging books on the shelves. I look at it and squeeze it hard and put it back on the shelf, wedged between a slanted book and a straight-up book, an expensive and beautiful object that I keep half hidden, maybe because I tend to forget why I bought it. Sometimes I know exactly why I bought it and other times I don't, a beautiful thing smudged green near the Spald-ing trademark and bronzed with nearly half a century of earth and sweat and chemical change, and I put it back and forget it until next time.

They said, L.S./M.ET-Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco. Lucky Strike, in quotes, they said-"It's toasted."

The planes come sparking out of the mountains to the south, glinting in the haze as they approach in a long line to make their landings, and I see the open-steel truss of the waste facility at the end of the road. I park beneath terraced gardens that send bougainvillea spilling over the pastel walls. My granddaughter is with me, Su

I drink aged grappa and listen to jazz. I do the books on the new shelves and stand in the living room and look at the carpets and wall hangings and I know the ghosts are walking the halls. But not these halls and not this house. They're all back there in those railroad rooms at the narrow end of the night and I stand helpless in this desert place looking at the books.

I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.

Her name is Esmeralda. She lives wild in the i

The nuns have been trying to find her.

Sister Grace, the younger of the two, determined to track and catch the girl and get her to a relief agency or to their convent in the middle Bronx, somewhere safe-examine her, feed her properly, get her enrolled in school.

Sister Edgar, seeing a radiant grace in the girl, a reprieve from the Wall's endless distress, even a source of personal hope, a goad to the old rugged faith. All heaven trembles when a soul swings in the wind- save her from danger, bring her to candles and ashes and palms, to belief in the mystical body.

The nuns deliver food to people living in the Wall and nearby, the asthmatic children and sickle-cell adults, the cases of AIDS and the cocaine babies, and every day, twice a day, three or four times a day, they drive their van past the memorial wall. This is the six-story flank of a squatters' tenement on which graffiti writers spray-paint an angel every time a local child dies of illness or mistreatment.

Grade talks and drives and yells out the window at dogs doing doody in the street. She wears a skirt and a windbreaker, she carries a can of Chemical Mace. Old spindle-shanked Edgar sits next to her and feels the aura of the streets and thinks herself back into another century. She is cinctured and veiled and would not know how to dress otherwise and would not be here at all if the children were healthy and the dogs middle-class.

Grade says, "Sometimes I wonder."

"What do you wonder?"

"Never mind, Sister. Forget it."

"You wonder if we make a difference. You can't understand how the last decade of the century looks worse than the first in some respects. Looks like another century in another country."

"I'm a positive person," Grade says.

Edgar has a high-frequency laugh that travels through time and space, a sort of cackle frankly, shrill and dank-she thinks the dogs can probably hear it.

"I know there's a laborious procedure you have to follow," she says, "in order to attain a positive state of mind. It's a wonder you have strength left over to steer the car."

This pisses Gracie off and she rails a bit, respectfully, as the van approaches the salvage operation of Ismael Murioz.

A mass of junked cars, a pack jam, cars smash-heaped and jack-knifed, seventy or eighty cars, shamefaced. The nuns look instinctively for a sign of Esmeralda, who probably spends her nights sleeping in one of these cars. Then they park the van and enter the derelict tenement, climbing three flights of crumbling stairs to Ismael's headquarters.

Edgar expects him to look wan and drawn, visibly fragile. She thinks he has AIDS. It is a thing she senses. She senses dire things. She stands at a distance, studying him. An affable sort of human shambles in a tropical shirt and slapdash beard-he's in a lively mood today because he has managed to rig a system in the building that produces enough power to run a TV set.