The Briar Archive

3. City Hall Station

City Hall Station

“You fall asleep and wake up in a forest made of glass.”

Grim

In 1981, I had a new wife, a new baby, and had just started at the Times. Howard had me cut my teeth by writing for the city desk. I hated it. I was eager to root out corruption and graft and all the injustices that were strangling an already suffocating city, to save the world by writing “real” stories, but the Times had plenty of writers with more experience, more seniority, and more talent. Howard may have taken me under his wing, but there was no way he was going to throw me into the mix fresh out of college.

“You want to take on the Machine?” he had said. “Then you need to become a mechanic. You can’t take on the Machine if you don’t know how it works.” And the city desk, he insisted, was the best place for me to learn.

He was right, of course, though it took me a while to come around to the idea. But after two years of research and shared by-lines, I knew the Machine inside and out. There was a web that connected every single aspect of the city. And whenever a strand of that web started to vibrate, I usually knew which spider was responsible.

While I wrote stories about municipal elections and the finer points of local fiscal legislation, Isabella worked from home. She had a monthly column in L’Officiel, which she wrote in between diaper changes and breast feedings. I did my best to help with Sebastian, reading to him and giving him baths while Bella napped on the couch beneath a blanket of lookbooks and clothing sketches.

By no means was I going to win father of the year (or husband of the year for that matter), but I was a decent father. Though I should have been around more. I wanted to be, but more than that, I wanted to write. Every chance I had to camp out at the records office or stalk lawyers down at the courthouse, I was there. Still, Bella humored me. She loved being a mom and liked that I was passionate about something.

By the time Sebastian was five, I was working closely with the city police on a number of stories. Most involved reports of missing children. 98% were runaways, and the police never looked much further into their whereabouts than that (a worthwhile story in and of itself), but after Etan Patz disappeared in 1979, the city was in a panic over missing kids. Their faces had begun showing up on milk cartons, and parents all over America were on edge over “stranger danger.”

The last thing a grieving parent wants is to answer a reporter’s questions, and I had several fathers and one truly terrifying mother blacken my eye for my trouble. One man even broke my nose so that I spent a miserable afternoon in the ER scribbling into my blood-stained notepad. When one of the paper’s lawyers insisted I press charges against the father and sue him for medical expenses, I politely told him to pound sand. How could I fault this man, teetering at the edge of sanity because his son had disappeared? The lawyer grew agitated with me, so he went to my editor. Harold wasn’t nearly as polite as I had been, and the matter was dropped and never discussed again.

My work on these stories made me overly protective of Sebastian. I called home or his school several times a day, wanting to know exactly where he was, what he was doing. I had seen the pain on these parents’ faces, and I knew I would die of heartache if I ever saw that look on Bella.

After a dozen cases, I understood the true horror of what these parents were going through. Up until then I had thought the worst pain for a parent would be the death of a child. But I was wrong. The death of a child, while truly horrible, is a finite tragedy. There is no ambiguity, no uncertainty in its finality. But when a child goes missing, parents must consider both sides of a terrible coin. On one side of the coin lies fear, the terrible fear that the child is dead—or the fear that the child is alive and enduring unimaginable suffering. But on the flipside to that coin there exists a second and, I believe, even more torturous countenance: hope. Hope that the child will be found alive and unharmed.

The longer a child remained missing, the less likely such an outcome existed but the harder parents clung to that possibility. Hope was a cruelty that lingered for years, a dark thing whose tentacles wrapped so tightly around one’s heart that it made every beat an agony. The only hell greater than enduring the death of a child was enduring a lost one.

That realization concept hit me hard when I began investigating the disappearance of a ten-year-old boy named Brandon Lachmann. At first, the police dismissed him as another runaway. In the months prior to his disappearance, he had been withdrawn from friends and family, skipped school habitually, and on the day he vanished he had left a bizarre message on his parents’ answering machine telling them he’d been planning his “escape” for months. Brandon’s parents, Jim and Susan, said that he had taken to wandering the city but that they had always found him in a park or library, alone, writing stories. Recently something had been troubling the poor boy, but they insisted he wasn’t suicidal and that he had a stable home life.

I asked if I could read some of his stories with the hope that I could find a clue to the boy’s mental state. They hesitated at first. Brandon loved fantasy and science fiction, played Dungeons & Dragons, and enjoyed making his own role-playing campaigns. For those under the age of thirty, this may seem like fairly normal and healthy behavior for a ten-year-old boy. But in the 80s, such things were frowned upon by most of the country because many believed, absurdly, that those hobbies led to devil worship. There were even several national campaigns to prevent kids from engaging in such “blasphemous” behavior.

I read a few snippets of Brandon’s stories, and, yes, I saw evidence of a troubled, confused child hidden within them. But I also saw signs of a child filled with incredible imagination and hope. He had reimagined several mundane landmarks in New York City (which he dubbed Shard City) as fantastical places of wonder within his stories, but one stood out to me when I saw it: the abandoned City Hall subway station. I felt a pull as I looked at the name, the same kind of pull I’d felt when I first saw the name of the New York City Lunatic Asylum.

The station wasn’t a tourist attraction or even commonly known about among most New Yorkers back then. It had been closed for over forty years. But I knew how to get there and a small part of me hoped Brandon did too. A larger part, however, hoped that a ten-year-old boy would have enough sense to not go wandering beneath the streets of the city.

I made my way down to the abandoned subway station. It wasn’t easy to access but I’d written about the “mole people” of Manhattan years prior and knew my way around the darker corners of the downtown subway system. Back in the 80s, passengers had to get off the Lexington Avenue Local at the Brooklyn Bridge stop, but if you knew the right conductor, you could stay on and make the slow loop through the dark station. And if you happened to be walking between cars at the right time you could basically step off onto a maintenance platform. I made sure to have fresh batteries in my flashlight and an old penknife my father gave me when I was a boy. It was impossible to know what I would find lurking down there.

During my research into the place, I had seen photos of the old station, but they didn’t do it justice. The station had a vaulted ceiling of green and white tiled arches and art deco styled glass overhead that let natural light filter down into the station. The sunlight coming in created stark contrasts with the shadows, making everything outside of the lighted areas practically invisible.

My footsteps echoed off the walls. Water covered most of the concrete platform, and my splashing reverberated into the darkness as I walked. Yet with every splashy step, I could hear whispering in the echoes, like ghosts of old travelers still chatting while they waited for their train.

There was a haunting charm to the place, and I could see how it might stimulate a young boy’s imagination. But the damp, cavernous station wasn’t exactly hospitable. If Brandon had come down here, I doubted he would have stayed for very long.

A few yards farther in, I found several sheets of his drawings on the platform. He’d been here. I called out to him, knowing it had been months, but hoping against my common sense that he’d call back. Down in the track pit, the grate of an old drainage tunnel had been removed, and in the stagnant water beyond were more sheets of paper. More drawings. I climbed down and over the tracks, aiming my light into the dark of the narrow tunnel. A trail of paper led to what looked like a mound of garbage clogging the far end of the tube. Against my better judgment I slid into the cold, black water and waded in.

I trained the jaundiced beam of light on the darkness, the pile of trash coming into focus. It appeared to bob up and down, above and below the water, but the more I watched it through the narrow beam of light, the more it seemed not to bob, but somehow disappear and reappear. There and then not there. Like it hadn’t made up its mind what it was or if it wanted to stay.

There was a rumble. Tiny ripples formed in the water of the tunnel where I was kneeling. I turned back and saw a light growing from the other end of the tube. The rumble grew louder, the ripples taller, the oncoming light closer. The water rose and pushed me to the back of the tunnel, and then the phantom rumbling suddenly stopped. The neck-deep water receded, and I realized my back was pressed against the mound of garbage. But I knew it wasn’t garbage. I couldn’t will myself to turn around. Until I turned around, it could’ve been anything. The thing behind me wasn’t what I feared it was, as long as I didn’t look.

Less than an hour later, the police confirmed that it was the body of Brandon Lachmann.

They didn’t suspect foul play. Their best guess was suicide. Either that, or this troubled boy had experienced an unfortunate accident during an ill-advised sojourn through the bowels of the city. Case closed and on to the next.

The policemen’s workmanlike approach to a dead child beneath their city streets wasn’t born out of callousness. It was a defense mechanism. In a moment of sadness and anger over Brandon, I asked one of the detectives on the case, a Detective Williams, how he remained so unaffected by such a tragedy. He stared at me through a haze of cigarette smoke. “Practice, sadly,” he said. “I was in Quang Tri Province back in ’67 and ’68. That boy will always haunt me. But his ghost ain’t walkin’ alone.”

One of the assistant editors suggested I sensationalize Brandon’s death by blaming it on his “Satanic” pastimes. Thankfully, Howard put a halt to that before I did something that would have required my immediate termination.

I was in tears when I wrote the article.

I came home that evening, changed out of my still wet clothes, put Sebastian to bed, and then collapsed into a weeping mess at Bella’s feet. When I was finally able to pull myself together, I brought Sebastian into our bed and spent the night watching him sleep.

The next day, I submitted my story on Brandon and then requested a couple of days off. Howard approved, but he said he was moving me back to the city desk when I returned. Everyone needed time away from such tragedies if they wanted to maintain their sanity, and Howard could see that mine was getting a bit frayed at the edges.

Bella agreed to let Sebastian stay home from school that first day, so I planned to take him to the library. He liked to sit for hours while I read to him, an unusual feat for a six-year-old, but he stored all that energy until right before bedtime. Since it was unseasonably warm for early February, I thought a walk would make the night go a bit easier.

But as we walked toward the library, we passed a used bookstore and we ducked inside. I asked the woman behind the counter if she had any books published by Ackerly Green.

“Hmmm . . .” she murmured as she flipped through a hefty book cataloging their inventory. “No, sorry. The only book we had by an imprint connected to Ackerly Green was The Forest of Darkening Glass, An Unbound Adventure, and we sold that a couple of years ago.”

I thanked her, then collected Sebastian from the fantasy section and headed outside.

The Forest of Darkening Glass. I recognized the title from my conversations with Mr. and Mrs. Lachmann. The book had been Brandon’s favorite to the point of obsession. I could relate. After that day in the Octagon, I had to force myself to keep the Book consigned to the periphery of my mind. Had he been drawn into the same strange web that had caught me in the asylum?

Sebastian and I made our way to the library. As we found a quiet corner inside, I wondered what his favorite book would be, when he’d find it. Would there be a story that he would obsess over the way I had when I was a boy, the way Brandon had? Brandon’s obsession had stemmed from a lack of social acceptance. I wanted to spare my son a similar fate. I wanted Sebastian’s love of books to come from a sense of joy, a desire for wonder, rather than being simply a way to escape a world in which he felt he didn’t belong. I knew what it was like to be one of those kids, the ones who feel different because they don’t like what they’re supposed to like, feel how they’re supposed to feel, enjoy doing what they’re supposed to enjoy doing. Those who have been forced to sit on the outside and enviously look in, only to find something there on the outside more interesting and relatable. Even those who, as in Brandon’s case, feel their only option is to sit nowhere at all.

We browsed the shelves until he found a copy of the Berenstain Bears book, Bears in the Night. I sat in an old leather chair and put Seb on my lap. His hair was mussed from his hat, and his cheeks were flushed from the cold.

“Is this your favorite book?” I asked.

He nodded and opened to the first page. “I like their fingernails.”

“Oh,” I said with a laugh. I wasn’t sure why that was something he would be drawn to but attempting to understand the mind of a six-year-old was, and is, too great an undertaking.

“Do you have a favorite book, Dad?” he asked.

“I do.”

“What’s it called?”

“Actually, I don’t remember.”

“What’s it about?”

“Well,” I said, “I don’t know. I don’t remember anything about it.”

Sebastian gave me such a strange look, as if I had just told him I had clouds for breakfast.

“Why not?”

I shrugged my shoulders and said, “No one remembered the books but her.” In that moment, I wasn’t even aware I was speaking. It wasn’t until Sebastian asked another question that I suddenly realized what I had said.

“You mean there’s more than one book?”

“What? No . . . I mean . . . maybe . . . ”

“Who’s her? Do you mean Mommy?”

“No, no . . . someone else. I think.”

And then something strange happened. I started to remember the story in the unnamed book. I began to speak, to answer his questions, to tell him the story. How, I don’t know. I only remember his face looking up at me in rapt attention, the smell of leather, the cold on his skin. He was missing one of his two front teeth, his cheeks ruddy from the wind, his beautiful eyes so bright and eager. I can remember his face so vividly.

But for the life of me I can’t remember anything else. Somehow, in that moment, in that library, I knew the story of my favorite book, after decades of not knowing. Then, somehow, in the immediate moments that followed, I forgot it again just as easily. It was as if the sights, sounds, and smells of that moment pulled at a single thread of memory, slowly, carefully drawing it out until, finally, under the memory’s impossible weight, the thread snapped.

I stopped to catch my breath, thinking Sebastian might have a question or comment as he often did whenever I told him a story. He said nothing. I thought he was lost in contemplation, but he remained too still, too silent.

“Seb?” I asked. “Buddy?”

He didn’t answer. Right away, I knew something wasn’t right. I could already feel the story . . . no, the memory of the story was gone, as if it were an image illuminated by a chance beam of sunlight peering out from between storm clouds. Now the clouds were thick, and the image was lost once again.

Seb then looked up at me and said, “Daddy . . . I smell rain.”

Those were the last words he ever said to me.