Nick Bones Underground Read online

  Nick Bones Underground

  by Phil Cohen

  © Copyright 2019 Phil Cohen

  ISBN 978-1-63393-922-6

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters are both actual and fictitious. With the exception of verified historical events and persons, all incidents, descriptions, dialogue and opinions expressed are the products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  REVIEW COPY: This is an advanced printing subject to corrections and revisions.

  Published by

  210 60th Street

  Virginia Beach, VA 23451

  800–435–4811

  www.koehlerbooks.com

  DEDICATION

  No one has seen more of the evolution of this book than my wife, Betsy Gamburg, who can recite whole chapters by heart.

  It is to Betsy, whose dedication to my writing, and to me, has kept me going, that I dedicate this book.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1 Meeting Destiny

  Chapter 2 Man On The Half Bench

  Chapter 3 Questionable Deeds

  Chapter 4 My Man

  Chapter 5 Smart Boys

  Chapter 6 Sex Machine

  Chapter 7 Skeleton In The Closet

  Chapter 8 The Rationality Of All Things

  Chapter 9 Maggie

  Chapter 10 Bob Dylan-Not

  Chapter 11 Big Gray Lady

  Chapter 12 Finger Of Fate

  Chapter 13 Velvet Underground

  Chapter 14 Woman With The Knife

  Chapter 15 Information Squeeze

  Chapter 16 Psycho Path

  Chapter 17 Root Beer

  Chapter 18 Sex Talk

  Chapter 19 Tough Sonofabitch

  Chapter 20 Rebbe's Gifts

  Chapter 21 End Of Eternity

  Chapter 22 To Oz

  Chapter 23 Cold And Gray

  Chapter 24 Funereal Maggie

  Chapter 25 Farewell To Abe

  Chapter 26 The Chemist

  Chapter 27 Big Bucks

  Chapter 28 Home Invasion

  Chapter 29 The Key

  Chapter 30 Rising From Ashes

  Chapter 31 Feeding The Monkey

  Chapter 32 In The Flesh

  Chapter 33 A Favor

  Chapter 34 Farewell

  Chapter 35 Together

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  CHAPTER 1

  MEETING DESTINY

  IT WAS THE MIDDLE of February, and I was biking my daily five laps around what remained of Prospect Park in Brooklyn. The park, like the world around it, teetered on the brink of the abyss. Economic collapse had devastated New York City, causing a shutdown of most city services, including the subway system, all but paralyzing the city. Much the same level of disruption rippled throughout the rest of the country. Recovery from what had been coined “The Great Debacle” became all the more difficult because of nefarious behavior by our computers. It was not quite an artificial intelligence revolt as much as machines running amok, unleashing chaos among the people who birthed them into this world. They no longer could be trusted to do what they were built for, a trait that felt eerily human.

  Why bike the park in the bloody middle of February? A reasonable question.

  Not long before New York City collapsed, I found myself on a table in St. Murray’s emergency room under the care of cardiologist Murray Levine, the doc who saved my life. My heart quit in front of the half dozen students still willing to abandon the STEM building to study religion across campus.

  I lay on the hard-tiled floor wondering if my time was coming to its uncelebrated end and, if so, whether the heaven I suddenly wished existed awaited my immortal soul so I might visit with the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Moses Maimonides, and my maternal grandmother—unless for my great sin I was doomed to the other place. In that case, I’d run into Richard Nixon and that lousy antisemit who sold me a crappy used Oldsmobile in college. One of the students in my History of the Faiths of Humankind class whipped out her phone and summoned the medics, who brought me to the attention of the aforementioned Dr. Levine, a nice-looking fellow, as best as I could tell through his mask. He kept reassuring me, “You’ll be fine, Professor.”

  I rested on his table connected to this thing and that, assured the doctor’s healing ministrations had saved me. I was not insensitive to the fact I had avoided my one business meeting with the Angel of Death, who, upon learning I’d live to teach another day, took an abrupt U-turn, seeking more fecund ground elsewhere, his generally being a packed day. In the quiet and—let’s be honest—the rapture possible to someone at the moment he’d escaped death, I took an oath. No more poisons masquerading as food. No more cigarettes. No more indolence. Daily would I sweat. And eat local. Vegetables mostly, and just enough of them.

  I attempted keeping my exercise pledge indoors. I purchased a sophisticated bike system that offered wind, sound, even aromas, and included detailed virtual-reality bike rides from all around the world, courtesy of Google Maps projected onto a seventy-two-inch screen. But pedaling in front of my giant Sim-Screen dressed in boxers and sneakers did not engage my imagination, not even when the bike opted for unrequested junkets to off-world destinations like Mars, courtesy of Google Mars. The illusion, with high-def, real-time images, could not recreate the authenticity and excitement of biking outdoors— the polluted breezes, the ups and downs, the odd smells, the crater-sized potholes, encounters with unexpected people and things, the great unpredictability of it all. Despite the increasing collapse of the city’s infrastructure and decreasing law and order, I bought a bike and carried on outdoors.

  Almost two years on, my near-death pledge had become the single abiding feature of my life. Every day—and I mean every day—I dragged myself outside to be among the decay, the debris, and the poisons suspended in the air. As long as there was no snow on the road and the temperature remained above twenty degrees Fahrenheit, with filters thrust into my nose, helmeted, goggled, my neck wrapped in a wool scarf, swathed from head to toe in Gore-Tex and looking like a fugitive from a ninja movie, every day for twenty-one miles I biked the park.

  That frigid day in February I met my destiny.

  It was twenty-two degrees. A thick, gray mist covered the earth like an unwelcome blanket. The rocks, trees—everything was monochromatic. As always, I forced myself into that fog. Pure force of will kept me out there humping that icon of disrepair ringing the park, always hoping that the exertion would minister to all my needs, helping me transcend my grim state.

  From time to time, the effort eased the gloom, and diminished my lethargy. I could look the world in the eye and get on with my day.

  CHAPTER 2

  MAN ON THE HALF BENCH

  AT THE END OF my second lap, I observed an old man sitting on one of the park benches. Half a bench, actually, the other portion of the over-painted wood-and-concrete structure having long ago fallen into the void where things went, unrecovered. You couldn’t miss the old guy. Except for the odd jogger, a couple of dog-walkers, and two cops in an armored police car tooling the park, no other human being ventured out that afternoon—save for this codger, erect as a yardstick.

  There he sat, staring off into the cosmos, the unfiltered sun raining skin cancer down upon him. Every time I passed this old fellow, he nodded ever so vaguely toward me. Why should I care about this wisp of
a man wrapped in a gray overcoat? My only job was to pump away, doing my best to lose myself in my meditations, my daily moment of private worship, awaiting the emergence of endorphins that would, if they did their magic that afternoon, push out the pain and chill, and leave me momentarily energized.

  Ah, my daily moment of private worship.

  I confess I no longer engaged in the act of prayer. I hadn’t for some time. In different parts of my life, prayer—both the act of it and contemplation about it—had consumed me. I retained striking memories from my teenage years of smooth-cheeked boys and men wearing long, unruly beards in various stages of graying, all davenning, praying, with vigor. They would bow up and down, human engines powering a divine machine, eyes closed with orgasmic power, addressing their Father in Heaven with words like, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God the Lord is One,” and “When everything comes to an end He alone will rule,” and “Every soul praises you, O Lord,” and so on and so forth, making these and so many more claims of equal or greater absurdity.

  No. I prayed no longer. But my act of riding circles around the park, day in, day out, replete with dressing rituals, breathing rituals, rituals of movement, rituals of sight and sound, leading to exertion and sweat, occasionally capped by a meditative mood that, when will and grace combined, would persist for a couple of hours—this formed a kind of religion at least comprehensible to my colleagues over in Anthropology.

  In one bundled-up mass, I was collectively the rabbi, the cantor, the congregation. I preached, I hummed melodies, I sang, I attended to the great wisdom pouring from my lips. The park was the synagogue, and my bike was the pew. I was a solitary multitasking worshiper-cum-leader.

  And God? Always a good question.

  I finished the ride, walking the bike to cool down, enjoying the cardiovascular lift. I passed the old guy again and felt his eyes root on me. He was, I figured, observing me in all my sartorial strangeness. I sought to walk by him and reenter my own little world unbothered by elderly men seated on elderly benches. But instead, his eyes compelled me to halt, turn around, and regard him.

  He smiled in a toothy and familiar way. I thought he was going to cluck like a chicken as did so many in the city these days, hospitals attending to the mentally ill being nearly nonexistent. He leaned toward me. In a tone filled with familiarity, even intimacy, he said, “Hello, Nicky.”

  No one had called me that since I was seventeen when I decreed myself an adult and demanded to be called Nick or Nicholas, or occasionally St. Nicholas. Nobody called me Nicky except relatives or old friends, neither of which was in large supply.

  I halted and looked him over. Beyond his coat, I could see little. His hat came down to his eyes. His nose bore the scabs characteristic of men and women exposed to the sun’s increasingly damaging rays. Loose skin gathered around his chin, reminding me of a turkey that survived one Thanksgiving too many. He was pale as an ancient ghost. His ratty overcoat—once upon a time it might have fit him—hung clownishly. Above his mouth, a patch of white hair masqueraded as a mustache.

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t recognize me, do you?”

  I struggled to place his voice in the text of my life. But his words had squeaked out in the tones of old age and disease, masking the younger voice I might have once known. Something familiar emanated from his face. But I couldn’t morph him back in time.

  “No, don’t recognize you,” I said.

  He bent toward me some more, and in a triumphant tone declared, “I’m Abe Shimmer, Shmulie’s father. You remember me, no?”

  I remembered him, yes.

  I whispered those words that come when truly surprised. “Holy shit,” I said.

  For a moment, the air between us lay still as a corpse.

  “Been a long time,” he said. A cliché, yet true.

  “Yeah. We’ve been out of touch,” I answered lamely. For thirty years.

  “Yes, out of touch. I’d say.” He looked at the ground as if studying a blade of brown grass or the mud on his shoe. “You know about Shmulie, of course,” he said, a note of pain thinning his voice.

  A middling-sized boulder plopped into the center of my gut, and I had to pull hard to breathe.

  “Who doesn’t?” I said. “Your boy’s more famous than Al Capone.”

  He waited eight full beats and said, “Fame like that I can live without.”

  A faux pas, I realized. “Sorry. You must feel terrible about Shmulie.”

  “Yes, terrible. But you get used to feeling terrible. The feeling takes up residence in your soul and never leaves. Not used to Shmulie himself. Him no one ever gets used to. How can anyone, even his father—especially his father—ever get used to him and what he did? Such a brilliant chemist, and he made that awful thing instead of helping people. Uch!”

  I placed my bike against a tree and pulled off my helmet.

  “All those poor souls in those hospitals lying like meat in a freezer at the supermarket. They might as well be dead,” he said. “They’d be better off dead. I can’t tell you how many times have I thanked God his mother wasn’t alive to see what finally became of her son. She knew about the drug and the victims, but not the end, not the trial and everything else. By then she was, may she rest in peace, fortunate to no longer be among the living.”

  Wincing, Abe pushed himself up from the bench, his left arm pressing on the cement armrest. He was bent at almost a forty-five-degree angle from the waist up, leaning slightly leftward. Yet, he conveyed a counterfeit sense of forward momentum, all that remained of a robust middle age.

  “Maybe we can walk over to your place and talk?” he asked.

  “Of course. Of course, Abe. I’m right off the park.”

  “Yes. You’re in the book. I looked you up.” There was no book anymore, but old linguistic habits died hard. I still claimed, for instance, to dial my telephone, even though rotary phones had long joined the void, and in any event, my computer, Maggie, did it for me.

  Thus, we walked to my apartment, Abe hobbling along, brought low by age and disease and grief, stopping now and then to catch his breath.

  I slowed my normal hurried pace out of consideration for my visitor, for the memories his presence evoked, and because of curiosity. Why appear out of the mists today?

  This encounter resurrected my past. I had never sought to escape it, just leave it far enough behind to bury memories best left to the archaeologists to uncover some eons past my time. But that old man on the half bench returned me to my personal antiquity, and I was dazed.

  He did not set out to upset my equilibrium. He must have had his own personal reason for his appearance. Why come after all these years?

  CHAPTER 3

  QUESTIONABLE DEEDS

  SHMULIE SHIMMER WAS MY childhood study partner, my chavruta, as they say in the yeshiva world, and my best friend. For five school years we hung together in Midwood, Brooklyn, like a pair of argyle socks blowing on a backyard clothesline.

  Shmulie and I abandoned the neighborhood immediately after high school. We believed our lives lay outside the confines of Orthodox Judaism and the interior of Brooklyn, that we could make lives for ourselves in the world without encountering the spiritual death the rabbis at the yeshiva promised would be the fate of anyone who ditched the pristine world we’d been privileged to occupy.

  We wished to escape what we saw as a sexually repressive, narrow-minded world that espoused a conservative God-centered philosophy. We had similar reasons for leaving but wildly different destinations. My adolescent critique of Orthodox Judaism was not as nuanced as it might have been. Still, any regrets I might have had, existential or intellectual, were long ago swallowed by that space of college, graduate school, marriage, child, and the career I built for myself in the secular world.

  And face it. In the 1980s, the secular world was seductive. What we saw from a Brooklyn window enticed two sex-a
nd-knowledge-starved yeshiva boys. The temptation was all the greater since the Orthodox community kept reminding us of our talents. We had little difficulty applying those talents for wider purposes than our teachers would have preferred. Yeah, we were geniuses Shmulie and I. We could handle what in Midwood they called our neshama, our spirit, our soul, our inner spiritual essence, as the Schmeltzerites, that new sort-of Hasidic sect, called it. We could handle things about as easily as a blindfolded child could handle a Mack Truck going downhill.

  We’d both sought our measure of greatness in the secular world. I became an intellectual of sorts, and Shmulie a criminal of note—of very great note. Of very, very great note. And since, in this material world of ours, fame was the sole criterion by which we judged greatness, and since fame was often measured in deeds of questionable repute, Shmulie took home the blue ribbon.

  Everyone in the city with his head aboveground had heard the name Shmulie Shimmer. Shmulie Shimmer, the renegade Orthodox Jew. Shmulie Shimmer, the inventor of Lerbs, the most interesting and destructive designer drug ever ingested by modern humans.

  For some six months running, he’d been a major news item, appearing in every possible medium when walking to and from his trial. He took obvious pleasure in his notoriety as he exited the courthouse bearing a smirking arrogance that to me was pure evil.

  Which it may well have been.

  Where evil approaching perfection originated is a mystery, but like art and pornography, once observed, its presence is palpable.

  As Abe and I walked toward my apartment on Garfield Place, I stole a glance at the shrunken old man.

  Abe Shimmer was born in 1940, the son of a large Hungarian Jewish family and the only member to survive Hitler. His parents found an order of nuns willing to take him. Once conditions became toxic for Hungarian Jews, the good sisters raised him as a Catholic, keeping him alive at great personal risk. A devout Catholic Abe may well have remained, save that his uncle Walter, his father’s brother who’d immigrated to the States before the war, sought him out at the end of 1946 and brought him to America.