Underworld

They went down to the van, the nuns and five kids, and they set out to distribute the food, starting with the hardest cases in the projects, just outside the Wall.

They rode the elevators and went down the long passageways. Unknown lives in every wallboard room. Sister Grace believed the proof of God's creativity eddied from the fact that you could not surmise the life, even remotely, of his humblest shut-in.

They spoke to two blind women who lived together and shared a seeing-eye dog.

They saw a man with epilepsy.

They saw children with oxygen tanks next to their beds.

They saw a woman in a wheelchair who wore a Fuck New York T-shirt. Gracie said she would trade the groceries they gave her for heroin, the dirtiest street scag available. The crew looked on, angry. Gracie set her jaw, she narrowed her pale eyes and handed over the food. They argued about this and it was Sister Grace against everybody. Even the wheelchair woman didn't think she should get the food.

They talked to a man with cancer who tried to kiss the latexed hands of Sister Edgar. She backed rapidly toward the door.

They saw five small children being minded by a ten-year-old, all of them bunched on a bed, and two infants in a crib nearby.

They went single file down the passageways, a nun at front and rear, and Edgar thought of all the infants in limbo, unbaptized, babies in the seminether, and the nonbabies of abortion, a cosmic cloud of slushed fetuses floating in the rings of Saturn, and babies born without immune systems, bubble children raised by computer, and babies born addicted-she saw them all the time, three-pound newborns with crack habits who resembled something out of peasant folklore.

They handed out food and Edgar rarely spoke. Gracie spoke. Gracie gave advice. Edgar was a presence only, a uniformed aura in regimental black-and-whites.

They went down the passageways, three boys and two girls forming one body with the nuns, a single swaybacked figure with many moving parts, and they finished their deliveries in the basement of a tenement inside the Wall, where people paid rent for plywood cubicles worse than prison holes.

They saw a prostitute whose silicone breasts had leaked, ruptured and finally exploded one day, sending a polymer whiplash across the face of the man on top of her, and she was unemployed now, living in a room the size of a playpen.

They saw a man who'd cut his eyeball out of its socket because it contained a satanic symbol, a five-pointed star, and Edgar talked to this one, he'd popped the eyeball from his head and then severed the co

Gracie dropped the crew at their building just as a bus pulled up. What's this, do you believe it? A tour bus in carnival colors with a sign in the slot above the windshield reading South Bronx Surreal. Gracie's breathing grew intense. About thirty Europeans with slung cameras stepped shyly onto the sidewalk in front of the boarded shops and closed factories and they gazed across the street at the derelict tenement in the middle distance.

Gracie went half berserk, sticking her head out the van and calling, "It's not surreal. It's real, it's real. Your bus is surreal. You're surreal."

A monk rode by on a rickety bike. The tourists watched him pedal up the street. They listened to Gracie shout at them. They saw a man come along with battery-run pinwheels he was selling, brightly colored vanes pi

Gracie shouting, "Brussels is surreal. Milan is surreal. This is real. The Bronx is real."

A tourist bought a pinwheel and got back in the bus. Gracie pulled away muttering. In Europe the nuns wear bo

"Granted, he may be gay. But this doesn't mean he has AIDS."

Sister Edgar said nothing.

"All right, this area is an AIDS disaster. But Ismael's a smart man, safe, careful."

Sister Edgar looked out the window.

A clamor rising all about them, weary beeping horns and police sirens and the great saurian roar of fire-engine klaxons.

"Sister, sometimes I wonder why you put up with all this," Gracie said. "You've earned some peace and quiet. You could live upstate and do development work for the order. How I would love to sit in the rose garden with a mystery novel and old Pepper curled by my feet." Old Pepper was the cat in the motherhouse upstate. "You could take a picnic lunch to the pond."

Edgar had a mirthless i

Then Gracie was out of the van. She was out of the seat belt, out of the van and ru

All sounds gathered in the dimming sky.

She thought she understood the tourists. You travel somewhere not for museums and sunsets but for ruins, bombed-out terrain, for the moss-grown memory of torture and war. Emergency vehicles were massing about a block and a half away. She saw workers pry open subway gratings in billows of pale smoke and she knew she ought to say a fast prayer, an act of hope, three years' indulgence, but she only watched and waited. Then heads and torsos began to emerge, indistinctly, people coming into the air with jaws skewed open in frantic gasps.

A short circuit, a subway fire.

Through the rearview mirror she spotted tourists getting off the bus and edging along the street, poised to take pictures. And the schoolkids going by, barely interested-they heard shootings all the time out their windows at night, death interchangeable on the street and TV But what did she know, an old woman who ate fish, still, on Friday, begi

She had a raven's heart, small and obdurate.

She heard the yammer of police cars pulsing in stalled traffic and saw a hundred subway riders come up out of the tu