Rage is Back A Novel by Adam Mansbach

Author:Adam Mansbach
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin USA
Published: 2012-11-09T22:00:00+00:00

9

ccording to the Ambassador—who, when he’s out of glue, has been known to deliver impromptu lectures of considerable scholarship—the underground has not always inspired fear. In ancient times it was safer than topside: the site of mankind’s early, womb-like dwellings and the haven to which death would return him. Mining was considered a dirty business when it started, a kind of rape; special rites of absolution were performed at the outset of any expedition. With the rise of science the metaphor changed, and the nurturing mother became a vast brain from whose recesses knowledge had to be extracted in the name of progress. That dovetailed nicely with the needs of industry, and soon the planet was being hollowed out and restocked with sewers and trains, water mains and electrical lines.

The modern city required a level of coordination between its visible and submerged halves that made the idea of people living underground plausible again. But who would populate it, now that the subterrain was so tainted by both the ascendant heaven-and-hell cosmology and the fact that it was full of things we didn’t want to see? Laborers and slaves, naturally. And thus the underground came to symbolize the silent oppressed, always threatening to breach the bright surface. Your boy H. G. Wells imagined a future in which mine workers degenerated into a depraved new race; Chuck Dickens and Vic Hugo envisioned sewer-dwelling classes totally severed from the world above, their very existence un-guessed-at.

The mythic journey to the underworld is typically embarked upon alone, but there are exceptions. Like the drunken Athenian duo of Theseus and Pirithous, whose idiotic plan to kidnap Persephone ended in tears. Or my man Odysseus, who brought all his sailors on a roadtrip to the Kingdom of Hades that was more an excuse for Homer to relate the fates of the Greek heroes after Troy than a portrait of hell.

Or me, Billy and Dengue, whose Sunday morning began with a cab ride to the meatpacking district, and continued with a squeeze through a chain-link flap cut from a razor-wire-topped fence. From there, we clambered through a trash-strewn lot, into the alley alongside an abandoned brick building. A wooden door with a dangling padlock opened into a small room. A man slept loudly in one corner, atop a swirl of newspapers and clothes. In another was a jagged hole, chopped through the cement floor. The top rungs of a rusty ladder breached the opening.

We climbed down into a stagnant, pissy near-darkness, and started walking: along the ledge of one train tunnel, then through a service door and down a spiraling flight of metal stairs, into another. Then up to the catwalk.

Billy led the way and I led Dengue, who managed to keep up surprisingly well. What light there was fell in narrow beams, and seemed exhausted from the journey. I’d been forbidden to bring a flashlight. “Cops carry flashlights,” the Ambassador had said, and that was that.

Tunnel is one of those concepts you think you understand, but don’t—not until you walk through one.

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