Metropolis A NOVEL
MONTE SCHUL Z
METROPOLIS
“Are you hungry?” Marco asked, as we meandered through the market of vegetable carts and fruit stands surrounded by steam vapor with no obvious origin. “Not just yet,” I replied, though the aroma of cooking aroused my interest. “There are many indulgences down here, but potatoes grown in the catacomb pits and eaten by everyone are a food of the divine.” “How do you mean?” “Well, Julian, nothing should be able to grow underground but mushrooms, yet it does. Tomatoes and carrots and beans, too.” “But you do have mushrooms, don’t you?” Marco laughed as we dodged through a cloud of black tobacco smoke. “Yes, hundreds of sorts. Almost sprouting on our heads. And they’re very good. Most of them. A few are poisonous, of course. I thought of feeding some to my stepfather, but the ice pick was easier. Maybe that was a mistake. Black Tartárean. Don’t eat them. You’ll be very sick and die slowly. It’s disgusting to see.” “Thank you. I’ll try to remember.” Looking about at the variety of merchants and customers, I was curious. “So, how do people pay for what they buy at these markets and those shops we passed? Credits? Are there banks down here?” He laughed even louder. “Yes, one or two, depending on the season, but hardly anyone has credits. Mostly we barter. Let me show you.” Marco stepped by a gathering of children chanting melodically from the Book of Song over to an old woman in a velvet cape and shawl seated on a stool beside a wooden pallet stacked tall with baked bread. I followed, trying to avoid knocking over one of the little kids. He said to her, “Hello, Sonja.” She brightened. “Marco, my dear. I see you’ve been scarce lately.” “No, just roughing about. I’m too popular to hide out. My public won’t stand for it.” “I’m sure that’s very true, Marco. You’re a rare gift, indeed. What brings you to me now?” “I’d love to engage a loaf of your magical bread.” “Of course.” She intertwined her hands as if in prayer. “And to offer?” Marco drew a small emerald bottle from his jacket and handed it to her. “It’s Fina glass. I found it floating in the upper river. You see it has a cork?” She plucked at it until the cork worked loose. “Very lovely. But this cork is older than I am. It’ll need a fresh one if I hope to hide my fermented béchar which you know I love. For that I can only offer you half a loaf.” 17 0
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Marco shrugged. “Done.” She took a large knife and sawed the small loaf in half and gave Marco his portion. “Don’t forget to share.” Marco nodded and tore off a chunk which he handed to me. “Try this. Sonja is a sorceress.” I smiled at her and ate a healthy bite and agreed. “It’s quite marvelous. Thank you both.” Marco ate a piece of his own and led us off to another cold corridor marked by a seascape painted on the limestone wall and a signboard that read:
I create the world through my travels As we wandered into the shadowy passage lit by tiny glowing green lanterns, Marco told me, “Too many of you sneak down here to go vagabonding in the dark just to escape the moral climate of above. I have to say that’s not appreciated. You get a choice to be anywhere. Those who live below do not. You have to respect the difference.” I found the very idea of intrusions into this underworld to be somewhat remarkable. Particularly since I’d never heard anyone mention having done so. I wondered if it was one of those secrets we’re not privy to until we are. I asked Marco, “Where does everyone sleep? I see markets, but no beds. There must be thousands of people in the undercity. Where do they all fit?” “Mostly in the lower catacombs. Caverns. Many, many holes in the tunnels. Some find space in the back of the arcades. Sort of all over. It’s not comfortable. There aren’t houses or apartments underground, if that’s what you’re asking. Water is scarce now and then. The sewers flood. We’ve experienced horrific epidemics of more diseases than you could hope to count. Cruel and impossibly virulent. People get sick and spread it. There are only a few doctors, so lots die. Thousands, actually. It’s not easy here. In fact, sometimes it can be pretty awful. We just make do with what you forced on us if we don’t choose to be shipped away or murdered.” “I’ve never had any idea this was down here at all. Freddy and I thought it was just sewers and rats.” “A filthy shadowland?” 171
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“I wouldn’t say such a thing.” “Well, it’s not.” “I can see that.” We crossed out of this passage into another chamber, now with iron ladders ascending to the ceiling above with hatches and the rattling of railcars. I presumed we were beneath a metro station, precisely which one I had no idea. I also smelled hot coffee from somewhere close by, and a bitter odor of Maranthian pipe tobacco. Enjoying his bread, Marco said, “I’m taking you to meet two dear friends of mine who’ll help you understand this undercity. Our barricades and potatoes are a moral stance. We’re not just street kitchens and conspirators, Julian, not just subterranean hovels of artisans and pauperism. There’s a history of ‘here’ that belongs to your story above. Jews and Jesuits coexist in this world. Dialectical dishonesty, Peter told me, is the root of many evils in the metropolis. We don’t allow it in these tunnels. Here, civic law and moral imperatives are the same. Our children are taught that from baby school. Up there,” Marco pointed to stone roof over our heads, “your alphabet is jumbled. Words have less meaning because you’re told day by day how cold is hot and healthy is sick. Peter says that life above is a façade of folly and delusion.” “So, you blow it up?” “Peter believes that sometimes violence is liberation from the status quo, and he’s not a violent boy at all, by nature, but insurgency is not graceful. Peter’s helped us design incendiary bombs disguised as apples and plums. If we chose to do so, we could even set earth mines in certain catacombs and exterminate most of the central metropolis. Peter says there’s a crash of realism and idealism implied in that prayer recited in your cathedrals and every trench across the Desolation: ‘God save us all.’ One day, he told me, while your gaze above is turned by money and power, your beautiful cathedrals will tremble at our voices.” We were strolling now through a fog of curiously aromatic smoke past theatrical stages and polished tables where Hadijien fortunetellers flashed the tarot cards, and a troupe of brown-skinned Chálian midgets danced a minuet, and musicians in vibrant-hued provincial costumes performed folk melodies for pregnant women and hollow-eyed infants, and a firebreather entertained 17 2
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a queue of customers at a fruit peddler’s cart of limes and oranges. If there were such a thing as subterranean royalty, I wondered if it might be found with entertainers who seemed so beloved here. I asked Marco once again, “Where is Draxler?” “Close by, Julian. Don’t press the issue just yet. It’s not time. We have more to show you, so you’ll understand what all this means.” “I’m more than willing to do so, Marco. Believe me. I’m only wondering.” Wandering along, we passed a wine merchant and a pork butcher and a busy haircutting salon side by side with a hothouse of orchids and rare amethyst-tinted prismic flowers my mother would have gushed over, and a flourishing Tree of Life with golden leaves suspended in a tinted glass chamber among a flurry of chirping parakeets. A curiously theological offering. “Our idols down here are not only mud and rainwater,” Marco told me as he plucked a peacock feather from a bouquet hosted by someone whose face was painted like a death’s head and seemed oblivious to Marco. Walking away from her, he told me, “That was Fiora Piña, a notorious thief and griffo weed adept. She trades recipes for brilliant intoxications with addicts from Cordier Street. I just stole from her what she had obviously stolen from some poor sucker up above. She won’t miss it. Stealing like that is considered fair down here. Life is precarious. Tomorrow might not arrive.” We left those arcades and markets just as we’d come upon them, passing once more into a dark corridor. This labyrinth of understreets was astonishing in its fluidity, because for every passage we took, I saw three or four more we hadn’t chosen, yet might have. How huge was the undercity? I never knew, only that its subterranean network of byways seemed prolific and endless. Without Marco as my guide, I’d already have been lost and forgotten. “I’m bringing you to my teachers, Castor and Pollux, who’ll tell you more than you’ll ever want to hear about all of this, I promise. You see, Julian, no one has lived here forever, except those two, and we can’t be sure how long even they’ve lived underground. The farther down we go, I’ve been told, the more impossible it becomes to ever surface again. The absence of light is a binding factor, or so they tell us. No one really wants to find out.” That was interesting. I wondered how deep the underground went. Were the tunnels and catacombs excavated and dug out, or true primordial caverns 17 3
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discovered accidentally by these itinerant wanderers? How far was one willing to be lost to find a new home? “But let me show you one more thing before we go see Castor and Pollux.” From another connecting chamber, Marco veered us off in what felt like an irregular direction, inconsistent with the painted murals that guided us along, and then on through a narrower tunnel of mud and dampness again. I had to hunch over to avoid scraping my skull on the limestone above and stumbled briefly as we knelt to keep firmly on our path. Back in the arcades and markets, noise was constant – voices, music, clattering of carts and iron, screeching babies. Here now, I heard nothing but us scuttling along, scraping and shuffling through this cold limestone passage. The air was colder still and had a curious odor, sort of musty and stale, and oddly dry. Marco spoke as we descended slightly at a narrow bend. “Have you ever wondered where we go when we die, Julian?” “Of course. Who hasn’t? Heaven? The Elysian Fields? Or Lourdes Memorial? Maybe Larchmont Gardens for those of us who aren’t war heroes.” “What of these people down here? Where do you imagine for them?” “I wouldn’t know, I suppose, because I really couldn’t have conceived of anything like this. It’s all a great surprise. Not just sewer men and perhaps some beggars and hideouts, you know? I guess we weren’t intended to consider the undercity, except to hear the name and then forget it, like unicorns and spacemen. Rumors, and nothing more. Don’t you agree?” “Maybe.” Marco put his hand up to stop me for a moment. “Be careful here. There’s a slope and it’s a bit steep. And don’t hit your head.” “Thanks.” “I’ll go first.” I watched Marco sit on his bottom and put his legs out, then shove off and down a sandy chute. He disappeared into the dark. He called up for me. “All right. Come on.” Showing great faith in Nina’s squirrely housemate, I sat as he’d done, let my legs sag forward, and took the slide downward. I did graze the back of my head as I slid, but not too heavily, and I landed at the bottom in reasonably good shape. Now Marco fiddled with a small electric lantern I hadn’t noticed until it lit, but when it did, I saw something from my childhood nightmares, something 17 4
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incomprehensible to those of us who pass our lives in sunlight and fresh air. The walls of this chamber and on to the adjoining catacombs were thickly packed with human skulls, an ossuary of immense proportion. Almost an infernal caricature of hell, if you like, except that here the dead were cold and still, a black hive of grey skulls. Marco said, “We’re taught that in the decade or so after the Great Separation, those who died underground were dissolved in pits of quick lime and forgotten. Like nameless troglodytes unworthy of remembrance. I’ve been told they believed themselves to be spineless cowards for running off down here while so many up above were shipped away to who knows where. Those were awful times. But then somehow we did choose to remember.” “Of course. A monument to hell. Thánatos on earth.” “And who could be blamed for choosing this over the trains? I don’t know what I would’ve done. Nobody does.” “I’m sure there was enough shame to go around. Isn’t there still?” “Back then, one of those monsters, I can’t recall which one, voted for establishing ‘colonies of the unfit and the unwell,’ and I guess they did that when they put us on those trains. But down here,” Marco said, his voice quavering, “they left us with colonies of the damned, what some call, ‘a cosmos of catacombs.’ I prefer, ‘the apocalyptic prophesy of our age.’ Let me show you.” He raised his lantern high and led me off where pale grey ivory skulls were stacked so closely to one another there was hardly room for dust in between them. More awful than Doré’s illustrations of Dante. Here, as we walked the long hideous corridor maybe half a mile or more surrounded ground to ceiling by skulls and fragments of human beings, I witnessed that record, the decline of flesh and bone, humanity undone and reconciled to this subterranean cavern, the unfortunate and impure catacombs of our great metropolis. There were thousands of skulls and fragments of skulls, and skeletal remnants, probably hundreds of thousands, a ghastly gallery of the dead, a true monument, even, to eugenical madness and horror. Farther on, I saw more recent skeletons nailed to skulls and decorated like Christmas trees with glass baubles and dried fruit, suspended like ossified saints among antediluvian bones. The deeper into this catacomb we walked, the more I began to suspect we were breathing dust of the dead, resurrected this hour in our lungs. As if we were inhaling the 17 5
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history of a race and its decline and death, its record of demolishment. Who would not believe that to be true? What would my father and mother think? Did they imagine any of this? Or had they known already and decided it wiser to keep the unhappy fact of this undercity grotesquerie from Agnes and me? Back in the catacombs behind us, I heard handbells ringing, an insistent echo drawing closer. “Anchorites from the lower catacombs,” Marco told me. “They burn Ophian incense and sing prayers for the souls of lost pilgrims whose bones haven’t yet been found. They have sheltering camps on the banks of the dark river, Potamus, that flows beneath us to the bottom of the world. Have you heard of it?” “No.” “They say its source is rainwater from iron cells and old mine shafts, leaking out of cracked and rusty pipes in the cold earth of your metropolis, a guilty reward from God for having abandoned us. No one knows if it’s true or not. Castor and Pollux once told me that to those who inhabit the lower catacombs, your moon at night is a dreaming eye, of less substance than ‘dust on the wings of a moth.’ Down below are rumors of transparent children composed solely of light and air, and alchemists brewing liquid fire for rise and revolt, and some mysterious presence in the ancient coal pits.” “Good grief.” “Just stories, Julian.” Marco smiled. He bit off another chunk of bread. “Nothing to concern yourself.” “Thank you.” I had no intention of letting any of this haunt my sleep, though I presumed it would. Once I’d seen the undercity, this breeding ground of torment and odd mythologies, my faith in the elemental firmament of earth, air, fire and water, lost structure and conviction. I hardly knew my own place in the world anymore, as if I ever had. Who was I, really?
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