Joe envied him. As much as he loved the house, he didn’t live here by choice. If he could have gone, he’d have been outside in a heartbeat, living in a glass house with the ceiling open to the sky. But he couldn’t.
Joe turned off the fireplace and walked past the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with leather-bound volumes and passed a large oil painting of a girl in a gauzy white dress. He found Edison waiting in the front hall, holding his leash in his mouth, next to an umbrella stand made from an elephant’s leg. Joe made sure that Edison got outside in the sunlight and fresh air every day — he wasn’t about to force the dog to stay in his underground prison all the time. Like everyone else in New York, he’d hired a dog walker.
They closed the door and walked along the planks to the elevator. The house sat in the middle of a long tunnel. Both ends of the tunnel were capped by giant metal doors accessible only by entering the eight-digit code and using the key in Joe’s pocket. Near one end of the tunnel was an elevator that would take him up into the famous clock at Grand Central Terminal. He also knew of a fourth exit — a secret passageway behind the bookcase in his bedroom that he’d discovered quite by accident — but he rarely used it because he had to scramble through it on his hands and knees.
He pressed the button, and the elevator doors opened automatically. Since he was practically the only one who ever came down here, the elevator was where he’d left it.
The doors opened on an antique birdcage elevator of curling wrought iron. The wall beyond was visible through the metal lacework. This contraption was older than Joe, his mother, and probably his grandmother.
He tried not to think about it. With Edison at his heels, Joe stepped inside and pulled the metal grate closed, before moving the elevator lever to the side. He had to hold it in position all the way up, or the car would stop.
Stone walls slid by. He imagined poking his finger through the fancy iron, pulling back a bloody stump. Elevators had come a long way in the last century. Now they had safety features, like walls and extra cables. Even with those safety features, twenty-six (blue for two, orange for six) people per year died in elevators. What’d those numbers been like when they built this behemoth?
As usual, though, the creaky old elevator functioned flawlessly, and the doors opened onto a tiny room with a spiral staircase. At the top of the stairs he lifted a hatch and climbed out with Edison close behind, carefully closing the hatch before turning to the next door. It opened into the round information booth underneath the clock in the center of Grand Central Terminal.
“Good afternoon, Miss Evaline,” he said to the cheerful black woman sitting on the chair there.
She gave him a quick nod before returning to dispensing rapid-fire advice to a lost traveler. She had an extraordinary memory and was unfailingly polite and patient even as she had kindly refused him admission to the information booth over and over until he’d gotten his paperwork in order to move down below.
As always, his eyes were drawn upward to the giant rounded ceiling, background now restored to greenish blue with Zodiac constellations painted on it. It was the only night sky he ever saw anymore.
No self-pity.
He glanced toward the square pillars standing along one side of the concourse and at each of the large staircases flanking the giant room. One set of stairs led to a giant American flag and a restaurant, the other to another restaurant with no flag. He’d eaten at both.
Straight ahead in the hall, people darted back and forth like ants across the polished marble floor. Some headed to the giant information board that listed scheduled trains. Others walked down to the train platforms. He and Edison wove through them to the interior hall leading to the Grand Hyatt Hotel.
Unlike the terminal, the Hyatt was modern. It made no attempt at old-fashioned architectural style, just dark glass walls and a flashy silver front at street level. Functional, straightforward, uncomplicated. Its only nod to color was the red slash through its logo. Joe remembered these details from when he’d checked in, six months before.
Joe had to take a few deep breaths to cross through, because one side was a wall of glass lit by sunshine. He could deal with windows, but only if they weren’t too big and had substantial frames. He pulled open the heavy door and stepped inside the opulent lobby, the genteel patter of a fountain the only sound, the room empty but for a few seats occupied by well-dressed travelers.
He and Edison headed straight to the wooden coffee shack housing Starbucks. Tiffany already had his coffee waiting. Service with a smile, every afternoon.
A spray of freckles danced on the bridge of her nose when she smiled. The distinctive pattern of those freckles set her face apart from anyone else’s on earth. He tipped her, bought today’s New York Times, and sat to read it. His new daily routine — the refuge of the unemployed or the early retired — crossword puzzles.
He scanned the lobby for Leandro. Some afternoons, if Leandro was free, he would join Joe for coffee. After giving up on the battle for the house, he’d been surprisingly sensitive to Joe’s condition.
No Leandro today, which meant Joe had nothing to distract him.
According to the New York Times, his erstwhile company was doing well without him. On the day Joe had freaked out, Sunil Raghavan, Pellucid’s chief financial officer and Joe’s best friend at the company, had managed to get Joe back to his room and then cabbed it to the NYSE himself in time to watch the chief executive officer ring the bell that Joe, as chief technology officer, was supposed to have rung.
Joe had retired that very day. The new CTO still called him with questions, and every month or so the other executives mounted a campaign to persuade him to come back. What use was a man who couldn’t even go outside?
He was grateful that one of the Gallos, probably his friend Leandro, had run down a fiber-optic cable to wire the underground house for Internet. Joe’d hooked it up to a couple of Wi-Fi routers so that he had Internet all over the house and for some distance into the tunnels outside. Being fully connected gave him access to a giant trove of time-wasting media.
A woman in black spandex pants and a green jacket jogged across the lobby. She passed the escalator and sprinted down the stairs, auburn ponytail bobbing. He counted to ten (cyan, blue, red, green, brown, orange, slate, purple, scarlet, and cyan plus black). She was probably outside by now, running down the dirty sidewalk, buildings leaning in toward her, hundreds of people jostling against her. He willed himself to think of something else, to calm his breathing, to still his racing heart.
He’d tried to go outside again, several times. Each time he’d reached the bottom of the escalator, he’d known he would die if he took another step. The psychiatrists labeled his feelings a panic attack. An attack of panic. True, but not useful. It failed to capture the intensity of the experience, how his brain short-circuited and drove him back from the door.
He’d always trusted his brain, but now it was betraying him.
No one could tell him why. In the first days, he’d grilled the doctors and scoured the Internet, searching for a reason why he was incapacitated if he tried to do something he’d done every single day of his life — go outside.