CHAPTER 13

VELVET UNDERGROUND

I’D RETURNED TO BROOKLYN late, and I went to sleep immediately. Now, I was sitting at my kitchen table, sipping tea, working on a bowl of oatmeal, thinking about the place Esther suggested I visit. A wealth of information about the Velvet Underground lived on the Internet, what with rumors, conspiracy theories, and alternative facts propagating on social media. Suspicions that much of it was, in fact, disinformation ran high. In a world in which everyone and everything was exposed to burning sunlight, the nature of the Velvet Underground somehow managed a heavy veil of secrecy.

“Are you insane?” Maggie huffed. “You’re going to the Velvet Underground?”

“I thought I’d go after my morning class. I’m free the rest of the day,” I said.

“Do you know anything about the VU? Anything?”

“Don’t know much,” I said. “That’s why I have you.”

“Well, let me tell you, Nick. The Velvet Underground is the place everyone who’s no one goes. I mean everyone. Well, except Mingus, who prefers roosting in our building,” she said.

“You mean the prophet Ezekiel,” I corrected.

“Yes, his high holy prophetness.” She paused as if unable to wrap her intelligence around that strange development. “It’s been used by the homeless for a long time. For years. But since the GD and the end of so much train service, vacating so many tunnels and stations, the Velvet’s population has skyrocketed. It’s got the highest murder rate in the city. People go down there and are never heard from again. Or their corpses float up on the shore of the Hudson River, or some other spot.”

“Yes, well, that sounds bad. But what can you tell me specifically?”

There was some unusual electronic noise, as if Maggie were working on machinery.

“The information is confusing and contradictory. I see that much of its reputation stems from one source called VU.com, which other sources then nabbed like it was free candy. The Velvet Underground, apparently, occupies the spaces made up of connected unused train platforms and tunnels, and older tunnels unused for decades. And, as you know, Nick, there is a great many of those, resulting in an entire city beneath the City. As best as I can ascertain, it’s a sinister, lawless place filled with the denizens of the deep, Nick. Denizens!”

“How many people live down there?” I said.

“No source seems to know for certain.”

“I’ve got to go down there and find this Tanzer. I’ll make my way Uptown after class this morning.”

Having finished my breakfast, I placed the bowl and cup in the sink, and collected what materials I needed for the class.

A weird strangled mechanical noise poured out of the speakers as if Maggie were choking on my disobedience.

“I’m strongly advising against you doing this thing,” Maggie said in the voice of an old woman who’d smoked two packs a day of unfiltered cigarettes for too many years. “There’s a communications block between the Velvet Underground and the surface. I don’t know how that could possibly happen, but so it is. I won’t be able to communicate with you when you’re down there. If you should need my help, you’ll be up the creek. Don’t do it, Nick. Please.”

“I’ve got to,” I said.

A moment passed. Again the sound of electronic whirring rained from the speakers.

“Then forget you,” Maggie said hoarsely with a finality not to be denied. “If you’re determined to put your life in danger against my considered advice, in a place where I cannot reach you, then I’m off to Paree to play with Gary. Don’t be surprised if I never return.”

Maggie had never been that definitive before.

“Okay,” she said. “Not forever. But don’t expect to hear from me until tomorrow.”

With that declaration, static surged from the speakers. A whooshing sound followed as if a poltergeist had left the room at breakneck speed. A virtual tantrum. Okay. No problem. Screw her. I was alone. I could handle that.

I worked my way into Manhattan and taught the five students enrolled in my class called The End Times According to the Religions of the World. When class was over, I made my way from the Village to Grand Central Station on foot.

Pre-GD, my walk up Sixth Avenue was bliss. Watching the changing neighborhoods, observing the endless parade of humanity, enjoying the smells, the food, the colors, the oddball characters one would encounter—for this people treasured New York City.

But no more.

The Great Debacle had transformed the Big Apple into the Little Prune, a dangerous, colorless, odorless, helpless mess. Now the streets offered little more than the occasional hot dog vendor—as people still had to eat—and he was always packing. People still lived and worked in New York, but the City had lost its sheen, its buoyancy, its life force. And with our AI technology gone awry, we all began to walk and bike once again. That seemed a good thing; perhaps a certain degree of civility would return.

On my walk up Sixth Avenue to Madison to Grand Central, not one three-card monte game tantalized me, no one selling faux Rolex watches approached me, no deranged fanatic wishing to convert me to the temple of this god or that demon tempted me. Only deserted buildings where businesses of every imaginable type once sold anything the heart desired. I passed a shop advertising Zap Lazar Pistols at a quite reasonable price. Though hardly a fan of any weaponry, a voice inside suggested I purchase one as a safety measure, which I did. I placed it into a pocket and forgot about it.

I entered the vast hall of Grand Central Station. Where throngs had once hustled to catch trains running just about everywhere, where the aroma of food, coffee and ambition filled the air, I was met instead by a tepid and enervated crowd milling around, looking aimless. With no difficulty I negotiated my way through, found Track 42, took a breath, and prepared to enter. Before I could pull the door leading to the track, my phone pinged loudly. I removed it from my pocket and was met by an image of Marlene Dietrich still bearing the three Hebrew letters spelling truth on her forehead. At the bottom of the photo in large, bold-faced letters read the words, Don’t do it, Nick. Please.

But I did it.

***

I returned the phone to my pocket and pulled open the door to Track 42. I entered upon a clammy and silent space that smelled of the past. Esther had instructed me to walk to the end of the long walkway where I would find a narrow black ladder leading onto the track. No light illumined my way, and I walked down like a blind man, my eyes adjusting. At the end was the black ladder. I lowered myself onto the idle tracks, and, using the flashlight from my phone, I sought the entrance Esther had promised would be nearby. But the pin light from my phone did not reveal the entryway. I looked in an increasingly widening arc, but saw nothing that resembled a doorway down.

“Would you move out of my way?” a voice behind me whispered sharply. I nearly jumped out of my shoes. I moved as fast as a cat on fire. Then, cautiously, I turned to see a silhouette as it rushed past me. I aimed my light at the shadow’s back as it stopped in front of me and leaned down. He yanked up a door that just a moment before I’d been standing on. A dim light rose from the opening, and I heard vague noises below. Cautiously, the shadow stepped down into that faint light and disappeared. The door clanged behind him, and once again I stood in darkness.

Two can have at this, I thought, aiming the light at my feet, and saw a shadowy door handle. I bent and pulled. With little effort it yielded, exposing a narrow circular staircase beckoning me into a pallid, smoky world.

From my own research and from Maggie I had learned that the VU consisted of abandoned subway stations, which were all of them. Many of those underground spaces were quite large, as they had served as the intersection of several train lines, replete with shops of various kinds. There were some forty-eight of these station complexes spread throughout all the boroughs, save Staten Island. A good bit of space with which to build a vast criminal underground.

I climbed down the sixteen steps and at the bottom of the staircase attempted to get my bearings. At that instant, I missed Maggie more than I thought possible.

On the wall in front of me hung a sign that read, Welcome to The Velvet Underground. On the right of these words was the painting of a giant banana, peeled halfway, a replica of the Andy Warhol art that graced the Velvet Underground’s first album. Someone’s got a sense of humor, I thought.

What did I expect? The gates of Hell, perhaps? Giants ready to crush the life out of me? The end of civilization as I might have liked to have known it?

But two minutes on, life and limb remained secure, and nothing that lay before me matched my mildest imaginings.

It wasn’t the Ritz. The musty smell of old basement, of air insufficiently circulated, permeated the place. Sparse overhead lighting created a shadowy ambiance. Nonetheless, an unmistakable warmth filled the tunnel. That was peculiar. The tunnel was dark and dingy and apparently endless, running two ways, but it wasn’t desperate. I did not behold a crime-infested, Wild West anarchy. No world of zombies. No gang of semi-human, bent-over mole people those of us living aboveground believed formed the Underground’s lifeblood.

Instead, the Velvet Underground had a cozy, even familiar feel to it. Almost like a small town in the Midwest. Maybe not the best-kept small town, but nonetheless a place that projected a sense of intimacy. The very air projected the feeling that we were all part of a dream, under the rules of a dream reality. Objects seemed far away; then suddenly they’d close in. Time seemed to stretch and shrink. Yeah, here was a world that, in part at least, seemed in soft focus—like velvet.

As my eyes grew accustomed to the murky light, I could make out vague signs of civilization: signage directing one to different locations, Beethoven’s Ninth filling the air, strong food aromas, maybe falafel, and the complete absence of angry noises of the mob one might expect in a reputed hellhole.

Before me sat a wide screen. When I came within a few feet of it, it lit up and the words VU Cover Band filled the screen. After a moment the words faded, and four anemic, lifeless figures appeared. Then the figures morphed. One transformed into a pretty good replica of Aretha Franklin and the other three a backup band. Aretha looked directly at me and said, “I welcome you to the Velvet Underground, Dick.” Then she began to sing, “I Say a Little Prayer.”

At times even I felt the need for a bit of the old spiritual palliative, even if the gift was given by a virtual singer who kind of got my name right. Surely this was one of those times.

Before I could move on, Aretha still serenading, echoes traveling up and down, a drone the size of a cigar box flew in front of my face. Hovering like an obese and noisy hummingbird, the thing hissed. On a small screen, a fuzzy woman wearing an olive-green beret stared at me unblinking.

“Officer Christine Lanton,” said the face, a badge now filling the screen. “What are you doing here?” A perfunctory and confident question, Officer Lanton made the sort of polite query one might expect from a cop on the streets of London.

I told her I was looking for someone, not ready to give up the name.

“You have the password?” she asked.

I recalled immediately what Esther had told me. “Palindrome,” I said.

“Anything else?”

“Madam, I’m Adam,” I replied.

“Good enough,” she said, looking me over one more time, the drone sinking to my knees and then rising again to my face. “That will be fifty dollars,” the voice said.

I looked at the drone and asked, “How do I pay?”

“Your UniPay app will suffice.”

I withdrew my device and opened the app. I pressed it to the screen, a bit too hard at first. The drone rocked slightly.

“Not so close,” Officer Lanton said.

I pulled the phone back and a bright light flashed.

“Thank you,” she said. “You might try that place down to the left.”

And the drone rose nearly to the ceiling, around twenty feet, wobbled a bit, righted itself and flew off.

To my left, some fifty yards down, I saw a green-and-white sign that in the distance resembled the formerly ubiquitous sign for Starbucks. Once upon a time in Manhattan, Starbucks proliferated like radioactive mushrooms, one on nearly every corner, always a long line. The last Starbucks aboveground closed around a year earlier. Who in New York City could afford a triple caramel macchiato anymore? Or even want one?

As this spot came recommended by the local constabulary, I walked in that direction. But the walk once again became a strange, disorienting passage. The ground tilted this way and that, and at one point I had to lean against the wall for balance. The few people who approached me from the opposite direction turned their heads toward me as if in slow motion. Then, as soon as they passed by, they seemed to speed up and disappear.

Closer on, I observed that this shop wasn’t exactly a Starbucks. In place of the familiar innocent longhaired mermaid was a longhaired woman with large bare breasts. And in the outer circle of the sign, in place of the familiar words Starbucks Coffee, read the words Outtaluck Café. To my knowledge, this coffeehouse had not yet achieved franchise status aboveground. But here it stood, located beneath Track 42 of Grand Central Station.

With every hair on the back of my head bowing furiously to the Lord above and my beating heart protesting, I pulled open the door and entered.

My word.

A gallery of manly types filled the room. Crammed into all corners, big men, little men, bald men, hairy men, tattooed men, hairy-chested men, all dressed in bright colors, sitting in quiet conversation. Japanese flute music conveyed a mellow and meditative mood. A photograph of the Kobliner Rebbe, long beard and mysterious smile, looked sagely down upon the men with his hypnotic eyes, beneath, in Hebrew, the words The King Messiah Forever. Men were playing backgammon, chess, checkers, poker, pinochle, mah-jongg, cribbage. Some sat alone, vaping. The general air of familiarity filling the room suggested this was a regular haunt. Were I to encounter this cohort in the heart of Midtown pre-GD, I’d have thought I’d stumbled upon a reunion of the Village People preparing to break into a rendition of “YMCA.” Just a little perspicacity showed me that my first encounter with the civilization of the Velvet Underground was not a gathering of murderous mole people, but a gang hanging out at a gay coffee bar. Fitting enough, I thought.

I bellied up to the bar.

“Whaddaya want?” asked the bald, large-necked and bearded fellow behind the counter. Tattoos ran up his bare arm and onto his neck.

“Just some information, please.”

“You want information, you gotta buy.” He allowed the impact to sink in by humming a few bars of something indistinguishable while he wiped down the counter. “So whaddaya want?”

Looking at the menu on the wall behind him, I said, “I’ll have a decaf skim latte.”

“Nope. No espresso,” he said.

“Then why is it on the menu?” I asked.

“People expect it to be there,” he said. “We haven’t had espresso beans since before two Christmases ago.”

“You have drip decaf?” I asked.

“Nope,” he said.

“Mint tea?”

“Nope.”

“Then what do you have?”

He reached below the bar and brought up a jar of Maxwell House that looked like it had been around since the 1950s. He clunked it on the counter, then stared at me.

“Okay,” I said. “Maxwell House it is, then. You don’t have soymilk?”

He reached once more below the counter and produced a jar of powdered creamer. “Here you go,” he said.

“Not much of a stock,” I said.

“You come back and visit us sometime, maybe you bring a case of soymilk and some nice espresso beans. Till then it’s Maxwell House and powdered shit. When you’re lucky. You want tall or grande?”

I ordered the grande with powdered shit. He took a paper cup from a pile of them, filled it with water, put it in a microwave oven and pressed some buttons. When the bell rang, he took it out, put in a teaspoon of instant coffee and a spoon of white powder, and handed it to me.

I thought better of asking for stevia.

“Ya want a cookie with that?”

“I’d rather not,” I said.

“You want info, you want a cookie,” he said.

“What do you have?”

And for the third time he reached below and came up with a bag of what appeared to be chocolate chip cookies. “How many you want?”

“One?”

“Minimum’s three.”

“Three, then.”

He shoved a mitt into the bag and took out three unpleasant-looking round things with brown dots throughout, which he dropped onto a paper plate. Next to the plate he put a thin napkin.

“That’ll be forty-five bucks,” he said as if it were the most natural thing in the world to charge a king’s ransom.

I produced my phone again and slid it over to him on the bar in the hope I’d be compensated in the future.

“Cash only,” he said.

I reached into my pocket and produced a fifty. I said, “Receipt, please.”

He looked as if I’d insulted his mother. He let the bill lie untouched. Feeling not a little intimidated I proffered another five. He put both bills into a cash register built circa 1955. He handed me a handwritten receipt, which I shoved into my pants.

“Man’s gotta make a living,” he said, running a cloth over the bar in preparation for whoever else with a dollar—many dollars, actually—the wind might blow in. “Ain’t none of these ingrates helping me pay the rent.”

He pointed to the many manly men playing manly games.

“These bozos’re just a bunch of chiselers needing a place to kill an afternoon. Every afternoon, really.” He tossed the towel over his shoulder and asked, “Now, buddy, I’m all yours. What can I tell ya?”

“I’m looking for Wolfman Tanzer,” I said, sipping brown swill already grown lukewarm.

“You mean Shelley Tanzer?”

“I heard he went by the name Wolfman down here.”

“Nah. Nobody calls him that except maybe some new guy fresh down from the Upstairs like you. Down here he’s Shelley. Shelley does my taxes. Wolfman don’t do taxes.”

Who pays taxes in the Underground? Was the reach of the federal government that long and powerful? Was there even an economy down here beyond instant coffee at usurious prices?

“Okay, it’s Shelley then. Do you know where I might find him?”

He swept his hand about the room at the mixed multitude before me. “Look around. Any of these degenerates look to you like he’s a Shelley?” Judging it a rhetorical question, I neither scanned the room nor responded.

“Do you know if he’s nearby?” I asked.

“Am I his mama?” he said, leaning his face so close to mine that the odor of life in the Underground momentarily choked me.

“Might there be someone here who could help me find him?”

“Hey!” the barista shouted into the room. “Anyone here know where this guy can find the Tax Man?”

Someone in the back howled, to general laughter.

One of the customers in the rear, the image of the Ayatollah Khomeini, rose from his table and approached me, eyes seemingly filled with wrath, a black turban resting on his head.

“What do you want from Wolfie?” he asked.

“I’ve got some questions about a mutual acquaintance,” I said.

“You’re new here,” he said, giving me the once-over.

“Fresh from Upstairs,” I said.

“Figured. The new guys all got that same look on their face like they’ve got no idea what they walked themselves into, except some face in a drone scamming them out of money.”

I nodded. “True.”

“As far as we can tell, there is no real person behind that face. It’s all drone,” he said. “How long you been down here?”

“Maybe half an hour.”

“A newbie. We don’t take to newbies so easy down here,” he said. “You never know what a stranger from Upstairs wants. They got all kinds of agendas. When newbies come, sometimes residents disappear.”

He looked me over again with irate eyes. “We protect each other down here. You never know when someone’s got a vendetta. Too many people disappear and then we hear about bodies scattered here and there aboveground in an alley or in the river. We do our best to protect ourselves. We’re not always successful, and, like I say, people go away and they don’t come back.

“All we want down here is to start over, reboot our lives,” he continued. “Whatever was in the past, we don’t care down here. We all have a story that we want to leave Upstairs.”

“All I want from Shelley is information about a mutual acquaintance.”

“How’m I supposed to know you’re telling the truth?” he said.

We thus arrived at an impasse, my honest face and professorial word insufficient to support my claim. I reached into my shirt pocket.

“Easy there, fella,” the ayatollah said, raising an arm.

“No worries,” I said, slowing the speed of my hand. “Just going for my phone.” I pulled it out to show him my university ID. “See? I’m a college professor. Of world religions. How dangerous can I possibly be? I’m going to beat you with a yarmulke or a rosary, maybe some worry beads?”

He took my phone and looked at the picture of me from better days, eyes far less darkened by time. I observed him experiencing a moment of enlightenment.

“Whoa! You’re Nick Bones, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“Nick fucking Bones,” he said.

“Yes,” I answered a second time.

“That goddamn private detective. That case with the skeleton in the closet went viral. We got a fucking celebrity!”

“True,” I said, meaning “that goddamn private detective,” not the celebrity part.

“Why do you want to see Tanzer?” he said.

“He might have information about someone,” I said.

“That someone got a name?”

“Shmulie Shimmer,” I said. I took a sip of the coffee, which now tasted like old socks, and gnawed at my chocolate chip cardboard while he pondered.

He handed me my phone. “The drug guy, right?”

“The very one.”

“Holy shit,” he said to the crowd. “Nick Bones here come to the Velvet Underground looking for the fat drug guy.” A few heads nodded, and a few voices grumbled something approximating that they were impressed.

“Well then, you’re okay,” he said. “If you’d like, I’ll take you to Shelley myself. Gratis, even.”

“That’s very generous,” I said, happily experiencing no sense of danger in an offer coming from a guy dressed as history’s most notable religious dictator.

“There’s not a whole lot to do down here,” he said. “The guys and I, we spend a good couple of hours a day here in the Outtaluck. But we’ve pretty much run out of stories, and no one new’s come in to freshen things up lately. How many times can a fellow play backgammon or mah-jongg?” He returned to his table, grabbed his jacket, grabbed me by my sleeve, and headed to the door with me in tow. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you the way.”

As we began our walk down, the tunnel lit by the occasional bulb, I said, “I don’t get it.”

“You don’t get what?” he asked.

“Everyone says this place is hell on earth. So far I haven’t seen anything like that.”

He smiled. “Hell on earth, yeah, that’s the rep we want.”

“I don’t follow.”

“We like that people believe crime down here is out of control, and we do everything we can to maintain the illusion.”

“Who likes it that way?”

“We all do. It keeps us safer. Keeps the tourist types away. The Committee does most of the work. Our security’s their main job in the day to day.”

“The Committee?”

“Our government.”

“The Velvet Underground has a government?”

“How else would you have it?”

I admitted I wouldn’t have it any way, just that it came as a surprise that a place I’d just heard of a couple of hours ago was organized.

“It’s basic,” he said. “But it works to give a voice to the folks down here. It prevents this place from turning into a Hobbesian jungle, an every-man-for-himself, which is pretty much what it’s become Upstairs. In fact, the Committee does far more than protect us from predators from the Upstairs. We’ve created a bit of, well, not a utopia, but a haven from the abject poverty, the government, and the machine mischief. Down here we have our machines more or less under control.”

As he said that, a hoverboard whisked by carrying a woman dressed in military gear wearing a brown beret. Right afterward an old nineteenth-century two-person rail car followed, the two occupants pumping up and down, maintaining a reasonable speed.

We reached a divide in the tunnels. Pointing, the ayatollah said, “This way.”

“What’s your name, by the way?” I asked.

“Real name’s Lenny, but down here everyone calls me Brick.”

“Brick it is, then,” I said.

Walking on, I observed children, ages six to eight or so, gathered for classes amid rows of chairs and old-fashioned blackboards in front of which a teacher instructed his charges in math, English, and other subjects. A few shops sold the basics, including a food market with sparse offerings, another shop selling Zaps and assorted sundries. And to my surprise, in the middle of the narrow walkway, plunked down from the old days, was a three-card monte game. However, its leader and two shills were primitive bots whose agility at dealing the cards was rickety and their patter mechanical.

“Come on, all of you monkeys,” one of them said to no one in particular. “We will give you the chance to take us for our money.”

“Yes, for our money,” the other said.

The dealer laid down three cards face side up, two jacks and a queen. “All you have to do is find the queen,” it said as it turned the three cards upside down and shuffled them about slowly and clunkily.

“I know where it is,” said one of the shills, laying down a fifty. And it pointed at one of the cards, which the dealer turned over—a jack.

“Oh,” all three said simultaneously.

“You try,” one of the shills said to me.

“I’d rather not,” I said, and attempted to walk off.

“Go on, give it a try,” said Brick. “I’ll stake you.” He placed a fifty on the table.

The dealer once again shuffled the cards. Usually the player got screwed up following the queen and identified a jack and lost his money. But the card’s path seemed obvious, and I pointed at a card, which the dealer turned over. It was the queen.

“Oh,” said the dealer again and slowly handed me the fifty and my winnings, all of which I tried handing to Brick.

He took his original fifty-dollar bill and pocketed it.

“You keep the rest,” he said. “You earned it. Maybe you’ll need it. You never know.”

I pocketed my winnings and walked on.

The three bots looked befuddled, trying the game again among themselves. A moment after we continued our trek, I turned around. The table and bots were now far away, as if we’d been walking much longer than a minute.

“Time and distance seem unusual down here,” I said.

“It’s hard to explain, but you’re correct. Somehow in the shift of civilization underground we’ve been gifted, if you can call it that, with a kind of Einsteinian revolution. Time and space sometimes seem to merge into the strangest shit. It’s kind of like we’re floating in a new space.”

None of this seemed terribly logical, but logic didn’t rule everything.

“So, life down here for you guys, what’s it like?” I asked of my escort.

He stopped and faced me. “We like to say life started here as better than nothing,” he said. “Which is what most of us had Upstairs. Nothing. Not a damn thing. Things began crapping out before the GD. After all the banks failed and the stock market tanked, and the machines went berserk, life just caved for so many of us. People who can maintain a living up there rarely come down here.” He patted me on the shoulder. “Like professors with tenure.” He thought for a moment.

“We’ve got a few eccentrics who appreciate the underground life for itself. Tanzer’s one of those. He’s no poverty case. But mostly we’re good old-fashioned poor folk, abandoned by the world.” He scratched beneath his turban as he resumed walking. “These days mere survival’s not a bad thing. But I think we manage more than that. The craziness in the air helps.”

“How do you eat?” I asked, reminiscing about the quality of chocolate chip cookies.

“A tricky business, getting food, but we do okay. No one’s hungry. We have some underground hydroponic farms. And we trade with the Upstairs, outside of the city mostly, some places nearby where farms continue to exist.”

“What do you trade?”

“You’d be surprised. There’s lots of junk around from the old days.”

“Like?”

“Abandoned objects pulled apart for their materials, like the scrap business from the old days. It takes work, but it feeds us.”

“How many of you down here?”

“We don’t count. But we’re more than you might think. Several thousand at least, spread over a network of tunnels where trains no longer run.”

“And crime?” I asked, thinking of Maggie’s uber-pessimistic analysis of life underground.

“We’ve got it down here, of course. But we have our own ways of justice to handle things. We take care of crime ourselves. Contrary to our PR, the level of the usual things like robbery, rape, murder, and the assorted other mayhems are lower here than Upstairs. And virtually no suicide. Don’t know why that is exactly.” He looked directly at me. “You packing?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I bought a Zap before I climbed down.”

“Not a bad idea,” he said. “They don’t do much, but they do pack one good wallop.” He pulled a pistol from his jacket to show me his own protection. “Just in case,” he said. “We’re relatively peaceful down here, but we’ve got our moments of anarchy.”

We passed another outdoor class, this one of adult learners. A half dozen souls sat on folding chairs arranged in a semicircle, spellbound by the speaker, a young clean-shaven fellow with a ponytail dressed in an outrageously colorful Hawaiian flowered shirt who was leaping about like a deer on steroids. Another photo of the Kobliner Rebbe, much larger than the one in the Outtaluck, graced the wall affirming his messiahship, those hypnotic, electric eyes shining upon the group like a desert sunrise. A class on the ways of the Schmeltzerites.

“Your inner spiritual essence will expand as you meditate on selections of the teachings of our rebbe, Yitzi Menkies,” the speaker said with the assuredness of the converted. The handful of attendees had before them selections from the writings of Yitzi Menkies, the founder of the Schmeltzerite heresy. “Try this,” he said. He closed his eyes, stopped pouncing, and breathed mindfully. “Close your eyes and repeat after me.” After a pause and a cleansing breath, he chanted, “Schmeltzer’s got it right, the moon by day and the sun by night.” The gathered minions repeated the line over and over in a soothing tone. It would not have surprised me if in that meditative moment, the speaker surreptitiously went among his audience and picked their pockets.

I quickly pressed on, not terribly curious to hear the guy in the flowered shirt explain complete rubbish to a bunch of down-and-outers. As a historian of the Kobliner Hasidim, the predecessor of this bunch, I knew the Schmeltzerite teachings quite well, most of which were second-rate riffs on New Age malarkey.

As we walked past, Brick said, “These guys are sprouting up all over the place lately. They kind of spruce up the place.”

“I don’t understand how all of this is kept secret. I was told I’d be passing through the gates of Gehenna itself, a veritable Garden of Earthly Delights,” I said, referencing Hieronymus Bosch’s famous dark, imaginative depiction of the underworld in which humans found their ultimate justice in numerous violent ways.

“Like I say, that’s how we prefer it.”

“But preferring and doing are two very different matters,” I said. “In my experience these days there exist very few genuine secrets. Crap spills out all over the place.”

“Ah, but there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,” Brick said.

“Not sure what you mean.”

“I mean even if you’re not aware of it, there’s a war on, up against down. A lot of it’s waged in secret. Both sides have lots of ammo. We hope we have more than they, in part because we work harder at it. We care a great deal more about our safety than they care about our destruction.”

“Still not sure what you’re getting at.”

“I know the world of information seems to have become an open sewer for all to suck up, even for those with the barest knowledge of technology. You want to know something? Just press a few buttons or, better, ask your machine to do it for you. If you’ve got half a brain you can weed out what’s true from what’s false.”

I nodded. I too figured it was nearly always possible to separate the truth from the crap.

“If you know what you’re doing, and you know your way around the darker and deeper levels of the Web, there are ways to cook things, ways to create very false information that carries the whiff of the truth, even to the most delicate of noses,” Brick continued, now seemingly in an argument with himself. “Down here,” he said, “we create, we divert, we obfuscate, and we’ve become quite good at it. Most of the Upstairs believe the very thing you were told and accept it as gospel. Keeps them the hell out of here.”

“Who does all of this work?” I asked.

“I do, for one,” he said. “Before I made my way down here, I worked at computers Upstairs. Artificial intelligence. I worked for the City, and I was good at it. Well, maybe too good at it. My algorithms suddenly sprouted free will and made a mess of a few important things. My job disappeared along with so many others. So now I’m down here subsisting on whatever we can throw together, and laboring to make sure as much as possible remains in stasis. We are masters of several levels of the Web, including the parts ordinary citizens never visit. When I’m not hanging out at the Outtaluck playing mah-jongg, I’m at the Committee Center doing what I can to keep us safe from intruders. I’m not bad at it. Your misconception demonstrates our success.”

Behind me I heard a low rumbling and the strains of “I’ve been working on the railroad.” I turned and saw another two-person rail car speed by on the tracks, its two occupants pumping hard at the handles each operated, a large canvas bag in the center.

“That’s the main way we get around down here,” Brick said when he saw the car had attracted my attention. “Gondolas. We call them gondolas. We’ve got a small army of them, and a handful of hovercrafts. They keep us moving all around the Underground. Several go aboveground into the burbs and beyond, usually to do business for us, usually at night.”

“What do they do?” I asked.

“They go up and down the tunnels where the trains used to run, delivering stuff, especially messages we don’t want going out cybernetically. We trust our technology to deceive, but we’re still careful with the really important stuff. Some of them serve as taxis. We’re actually quite primitive a good deal of the time.”

Reflecting on my Maxwell House with Coffee Mate, I understood what Brick was saying; however, not long after the gondola sped by, a small hovercraft flew past down the same tunnel.

As the walkway opened up into a station, we stopped at a storefront with a poster of The Phantom of the Opera pasted onto the door. Drama in his voice, my guide said, “We have arrived.”

I had an uneasy feeling about this arrival. The hair on the back of my neck told me that not everything underground was made of velvet. I fingered my cheapo Zap. It wasn’t very comforting.