Under Roosevelt Park

[snurri]

Under Roosevelt Park
Originally uploaded by Snurri.

"On November 17th, 1972 a squad of the Dead Donkey Eaters gang was taking a daytime shortcut through the old subway tunnels under Roosevelt Park when they came upon an unseasonal (it was summer at the time) formation of icicles suspended from the ceiling. The air in the tunnel was temperate save for the area nearest the ice, where Dead Donkey Eater Cedric Bell reported that the smell of hot chocolate penetrated his frozen nose hairs. . . . Using one of Swenson and Sing's maps of the area, the gang determined that the source of the moisture and cold must be located on the 1400 block of West Stewart Street--location of the Rostov Ice Plant, which had stood abandoned since shortly after the Exile. The entirety of Roosevelt Park had fallen off the (rapidly shrinking) power grid two years before, and yet in the warehouse cellar the Dead Donkey Eaters found a cold storage chamber which appeared to be working. Not only that, but its outer door was frozen shut; it took the gang the better part of a day to chip away the three inches of ice on its surface, and even after that they were unable to get it open. In the end the entire gang assembled in the warehouse, some fifty of them, aided by a half-dozen members of the Roosevelt Park branch of the Gemini Society. They were forced to remove the door entirely in order to gain access to the chamber. . . . Inside, they found the frozen corpse of one Robert Priest, an exile from the former suburbs. (This was only determined days afterward, when the body was sufficiently thawed for identification to be retrieved.) In addition, they found the work which had apparently consumed Mr. Priest's final days, and which he must have completed only shortly before his death: a miniature reproduction, in ice, of a landscape which in all likelihood existed only in the mind of its creator. Gleaming in the light from the Dead Donkey Eaters' helmets, the ice reflected streets of cozy little houses, candy shops, and human figures which were so lifelike that some described them as 'unnatural.' . . . 'There was a pond, with a hockey game being played on it,' Cedric Bell said. 'I kept looking back at it, because out of the corner of my eye it seemed like they were moving. So I kept my eyes on it for a little while, to convince myself I was imagining it; but instead I started to hear the sound of the skates, and the sticks hitting the ice, and boys shouting. I never played hockey--never even watched it, really--and all of a sudden I missed it something terrible. I realized that pond might not even exist anymore, and if it did, there was no way for me to get to it. . . . One of the guys started shaking me, then, and asked me why I was crying.' . . . The reactions of the Dead Donkey Eaters and Gemini Society members fell entirely into two camps. Most were overwhelmed by a flood of nostalgia and loss so severe that afterwards some of them spent days huddled beneath blankets, shivering, amid 80-degree temperatures; but a few were angered by the carvings, calling them dishonest and manipulative. 'It was the work of a delusional personality,' said Manuel Charcot, the noted 'Mathmagician' whose theories of dimensional-parabolic travel were popular until his apparent disintegration in 1988. 'The past which he has tried to reproduce here, regardless of its technical merit, is a bourgeouis fantasy of a time when existence was simple and safe and free of suffering; a time which never existed. It is a child's vision. Had Mr. Priest dared to depict the interiors of those safe and warm little houses, the picture would have been quite different indeed.' . . . Cedric Bell maintains to this day that Charcot was complicating the matter. 'This was just a guy who was homesick. I like to think that maybe he'd never carved anything before that--that he was just some guy who worked in an office, and one day he couldn't get home. So he found a way to bring home to him. What he made, it made me feel something. I don't think I'll ever forget it.' . . . Shortly after what Charcot referred to as 'the Bobbsey Twins' postcard world' was exposed to the open air, it began to melt--whatever magic had sustained the cold storage chamber seemed to have dissipated, and within two days Priest's work was lost forever. . . . The melted remains play a part in the stories of traveling children's entertainer Diana Kurlansky and her family; the magic water is supposed to have been the origin of the Salamander Cops, who are supposed to police the sewers to promote safety and decency. 'Maybe the magic in that ice was made of dreams, and maybe it was made of memories,' the story goes. 'Either way, when Sergeant Olm drank the cool water, he became possessed with the need to clean up Salamander City.' . . . Other, more cynical storytellers have speculated that Priest's undisciplined magic, once unlocked from the ice, was responsible for the rise of the 'crocfather' Mad Green and his ilk." (p.372-4)