Innocence: A Novel (9 page)

The cool night seemed to be growing colder. The dirty-yellow moon floated low, slowly sinking down the sky. Out on the river, a boat horn blew three times, so melancholy that it might have been sounded in memoriam of lives lost in those waters.

I began to look for a place to hide before first light—but moments later I found instead two men who wanted to set a living thing on fire and, denied their original victim, settled on me as an acceptable substitute.

ON THE DEEP SILL OF THE BIG CORNER WINDOW IN
the curator’s office lay a folded newspaper. As I waited for the girl to discover whatever she might be searching for on the computer, I picked up the daily and, by the ambient light of the city, scanned the headlines: plague in China, war in the Middle East, revolution in
South America, corruption in the highest levels of the U.S. government. I had no use for such news and put the paper down.

Having taken what she wanted from the computer, Gwyneth pocketed the memory stick and switched off the machine. She remained in the murderer’s chair, evidently brooding about something with such intensity that I was reluctant to interrupt her train of thought.

At the corner window, I gazed down at the cross street that bisected the avenue on which the library fronted. I could see for several blocks.

Emergency beacons flashing but without siren, a police sedan glided past on the avenue and arced left onto the cross street. No engine noise or squeal of tires rose to me, as if the panes of leaded glass were a window on a silent dream. When I had come to the city eighteen years earlier, it had been a brighter place. But in these days of electricity shortages and high energy prices, the buildings weren’t as brightly lighted as they once had been. As the car receded along the shadowy canyon of high-rises, the murky quality of the night conjured the illusion of an undersea metropolis in which the sedan was a blinking bathysphere descending an oceanic trench toward some deep enigma.

Although the illusion lasted only a moment, it disturbed me to such an extent that a shiver of dread became a shudder, and my palms were suddenly damp enough that I needed to blot them on my jeans. I don’t see the future. I don’t have the ability to recognize an omen, let alone to interpret one. But that specter of a cold, drowned city resonated with me so profoundly that I could not lightly dismiss it as meaningless, yet I didn’t want to dwell on it.

Assuring myself that what had really spooked me was the police sedan, I turned from the window and spoke into the darkness where the girl sat. “We better get out of here. If you’ve stolen something—”

“I’ve stolen nothing. Just copied evidence.”

“Of what?”

“Of the case I’m building against the murdering thief.”

“You’ve been in here before, at his computer.”

“Several times, though he doesn’t know it.”

“But he was chasing you.”

“I came into the library an hour before closing time and hid in the nook behind that painting. Fell asleep and woke after midnight. I was climbing the south stairs with my flash when the door opened above me, the light came on, and there he was, as shocked to see me as I was to see him. First time he’d seen me in five years. He never works so late. Besides, he was supposed to be in Japan another two days on business. I guess he came back early.”

“Five years. Since you were thirteen.”

“The night he tried to rape me. The worst night of my life, and not only for that reason.”

I waited for her to explain that curious comment, but when she didn’t, I said, “He’s above you on the stairs, you run, and you fake him out so he thinks you left the library.”

“Not that easy. He chases me down the stairs. He’s fast. In the hallway, he catches me by the arm, swings me around, throws me to the floor. He drops to one knee, arm pulled back, going to punch me in the face.”

“But here you are.”

“Here I am because I have a Taser.”

“You Tasered him.”

“A Taser doesn’t drop a guy as hard if he’s really furious, if he’s hot with rage and flooded with adrenaline, totally wild. I should have given him another jolt or two after he went down and I got up, but all I wanted was away from him, so I ran.”

“If he recovered that quick, he must really hate you.”

“He’s had five years for the hate to distill. It’s pure now. Pure and potent.”

She got up from the chair, a dark shape in a darker room.

Stepping away from the window, I said, “Why does he hate you?”

“It’s a long story. We better hide until they open in the morning. He’s not as smart as you might think a big-time curator would be. But if it dawns on him that maybe I’ve been here before at night and that maybe I didn’t leave the way it looked like I did, he’ll be back soon.”

In the first soft flare of her flashlight, the girl’s painted face appeared both beautiful and eerie, as if she were a character in an edgy graphic novel in the manga style.

I followed her into the reception lounge, marveling at the ease of our regard for each other, wondering if it might strengthen into friendship. However, if my own mother eventually became unable to endure the sight of me, an amicable relationship between Gwyneth and me was unlikely to last any longer than the moment when, by an accident of light, she glimpsed my face. But I would have liked a friend. I would have loved one.

I said, “We don’t have to hide here in the library through the night.”

“He set the alarm, and if we trigger it, he’ll know I was still here when he left. I don’t want him to know that yet.”

“But I have a way out that isn’t wired into the system.”

Phantoms of the library, we descended to the basement, and as we went, I succinctly explained how I traveled through the city unseen and unsuspected.

In that lowest level of the building, at the hinged cap to the storm drain, which remained open as I had left it, Gwyneth said, “You never go by streets and alleys?”

“Sometimes but not often. Only as far as necessary. Don’t worry about storm drains. The idea is a lot scarier than the reality.”

“I’m not afraid,” she said.

“I didn’t think you were.”

She went down the ladder first. I followed, pulling shut the lid and securing it with the gate key.

The confining dimensions of the tributary drain did not seem to concern her, but nevertheless I explained that it would shortly take us to a much larger tunnel. Shoulders hunched and head lowered, I led her along the gradual downward slope, my mood especially felicitous because I was able to help her. It felt good to be needed, no matter how humble the service I provided.

The smaller pipe entered the main one at the level of the maintenance walkway, three feet above the floor of the bigger drain. With the flashlight, I showed her the drop-off, the sweep of floor below, the high curve of the ceiling.

For a moment we stood there, two dark shapes, finger-filtered flashlight aimed well away from us, so featureless that we might have been mere shadows separated from the people who cast us.

Gwyneth took a deep breath and then said, “It doesn’t smell like I expected.”

“What did you expect?”

“Bad odors. All kinds.”

“Sometimes there are but not often. A big rain washes all the soot and filth down here, and for a while there seems to be as much stink as there is water. Even toward the end of the storm, when the city’s been rained clean, you wouldn’t want to bathe in the runoff, but it doesn’t smell much anymore. When it’s dry like now, there’s usually just the vague scent of lime or, in the older passages, the faint trace of the silicates in the clay used to make the bricks. If they don’t clean
out the catch basins frequently enough or if something dead is rotting in one, that can be foul, but it’s not a major problem.” In my eagerness to share my subterranean world, I was close to babbling. I reined in my urge to be a docent of the drains, and said, “What now?”

“I need to go home.”

“Where is home?”

“Tonight I think maybe it should be on the upper east side, where there’s a view of the river. It’s beautiful how sometimes the morning sun scatters gold coins on the river.”

“ ‘Think maybe’?” I asked.

“I have choices. More places to go than one.”

She gave me an address, and after a moment of thought, I said, “I’ll show you the way.”

We dropped off the service walk to the main floor of the tunnel, so that we could proceed side by side, each with a flashlight. The blackness was not merely darkness but a reduction of darkness, so thick that it seemed to congeal around the twin beams and press those narrow cones of light into even narrower cones.

As we ascended the barely perceptible slope, I glanced at Gwyneth now and then, but she kept her promise and did not look toward me.

“Where do
you
live, Addison?”

I pointed behind us. “Back there. Farther. Deeper. Rooms that everyone has forgotten, where no one can find me. Rather like a troll, I guess.”

“You’re no troll, and never say you are. Never. But you live by night?”

“I live from dawn to dawn, all day every day, but I go out only at night, if I go out at all.”

She said, “There’s not just danger in the city by day. There’s beauty, too, and magic and mystery.”

“The night offers much the same. I’ve seen things that I don’t understand but that nonetheless delight me.”

THINGS THAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND BUT THAT
nonetheless delight me …

Two weeks following my arrival in the city, after I had been saved from fire by Father and taken under his protection, we were out on a mission in the hours when most people sleep most deeply, and for the first time I saw a ledge-walker.

Father was educating me in the ways that our kind must operate in a great city, teaching me the subterranean maze, the techniques of stealth that allow us the next thing to invisibility, and how to get into and out of essential places with all the grace of ghosts who can walk through walls.

By means that I’ll explain later, he had obtained a key to the food bank operated by St. Sebastian’s Catholic Church. Because the church gave away the food to those in need, and because the key had been freely provided to Father, we were not stealing when we entered the food bank after hours, to resupply our larder.

On the night of which I write, we exited the building into the alleyway behind it, where we discovered a power-company truck parked atop the storm-drain manhole that was the nearest entrance to our underground haven. The two workers were apparently in the transformer vault that lay behind the truck, from the open cover of which rose voices and a shaft of light.

Before we could be seen, we hurried toward the continuation of the alley in the next block, where we hoped to find another entrance to the drainage system. This required us to cross a brightly lighted six-lane street, which we were loath to do even though the great majority of our fellow citizens were abed and dreaming.

Father scouted the way, found no traffic, and motioned for me to follow him. As we approached the island separating the six lanes into three westbound and three eastbound, I saw movement four stories above the street, a man walking on a ledge. The sight halted me, for I thought he must intend to jump.

In spite of the cool weather, he wore hospital blues, or so it appeared. The ledge was not wide, but he walked it with a casualness that suggested that he didn’t care about his fate. He peered down into the street, whether at us or not I couldn’t tell, but also tipped his head back to gaze up at the higher floors of the buildings across the street, as though searching for something.

Realizing that I had halted at the island, Father stopped, looked back, and urged me to hurry.

Instead, I pointed to the walker on the ledge. “Look, look!”

I thought now that the man in blue wasn’t reckless, as he had first seemed, but confident, as though he had walked tightropes in circuses the world around. Perhaps the narrow ledge posed no serious challenge by comparison to the death-defying feats that he had performed far above admiring audiences.

A taxi rounded the corner a block away, the driver glorying in the speed that daytime streets did not allow. The flare of headlamps reminded me of our perilous position. If the vehicle had been instead a police patrol car, a man and a boy in hoodies, bent under backpacks, running into an alleyway at that hour, would have invited pursuit.

We were of little interest to the cab driver, who no doubt lived by
a hear-no-see-no-evil code. The car sped past without slowing as we dashed into the mouth of the alley.

There I hesitated again, looking up, as the walker turned the corner of the ledge. He stepped nonchalantly from the north wall of the building to the east wall, seemingly unconcerned about a misstep, as if he could walk on air as readily as on stone.

When he moved with such agility from the street to the darker alleyway, I realized that he was no jumper, that he was one of the Clears. His light had not been evident in the brighter street, but here in shadows, he glowed up there on the ledge.

I had seen Clears in unusual places, doing peculiar things, but I had never seen a Clear walking a ledge before. Of course, back then, I hadn’t been long in the city.

How to describe a Clear to those who can’t see them? The light of which I speak is not a searing beacon but a soft glow, and it has no locus but radiates evenly from them, head to foot. I once referred to it as
inner
light, but the word implies that they’re translucent, which they are not, being as solid in appearance as anyone. Besides, their clothes shine as softly as their skin and hair, as if they are refugees from a science-fiction movie in which they were irradiated in a nuclear incident. I call them Clears not because they are transparent, but only because the first inexplicable beings that I saw, as a child, were the Fogs, and when next I saw two of these radiant people together in a moonlit meadow, the name that occurred to me was Clears, for they seemed to be the antithesis of the Fogs.

They were not ghosts. If they were anything as simple as spirits of the dead, Father would have called them that. He could see them, too, but talking about them made him apprehensive, and he routinely discouraged any line of conversation involving either the Clears or the Fogs. The man on the ledge and others like him weren’t interested
in haunting anyplace or spooking anyone. They didn’t rattle chains or turn the air cold by their presence, or toss furniture around the way that poltergeists were supposed to do. They were not anguished or angry as ghosts are reported to be. Sometimes they smiled and often they were solemn, but always they appeared serene. Although they lived invisible to nearly everyone, I believed they were as alive as I was, though their intentions and their meaning were unknown to me and perhaps unknowable.