It was so cold that first day that you might have imagined that birds could have frozen on the air. There was two feet of snow on the ground. Even Manhattan was quiet. I saw Marco trudging through the snow from a distance, a solitary man who had spent most of his day dipping into garbage cans. He was wrapped in two or three coats and I thought it funny that he placed his boots in the footprints I had left in the snow. I knew him from the past couple of weeks when I had hung out by the tunnel entrance, trying to get to know the people who lived underground. He came right up to me and said: "Brother's freezing, brother's goddamn freezing."
His tongue trotted through his mouth as if it might be keeping him warm. "Come on down the nest, brother," he said to me, "we'll get a fire going."
There are certain moments in your life when you simply just go with your gut.
I had already talked to Marco quite a lot, but always "topside," in the safety of light. I had a good feeling he wasn't deranged or dangerous or violent, and his conversations were always quite brilliant, some might say schizophrenic.
In the cold I could feel my palms begin to sweat. "Come on, brother, you coming?" he asked. I nodded. We went down a steep embankment and crawled into a hole in the tunnel gate. "Brother don't be scared," said Marco. I had to blink in the darkness. The railway tunnel was high and wide. Snow was falling through the grates in the ceiling. The light filtering through in shafts lit up weird murals on the walls. A few rats scampered underneath the murals. I watched Marco as he walked like a tightrope artist across a catwalk, 15 feet in the air, all poetic fluidity to his body.
My gut was in my throat now and I knew I could never walk across, but he dropped a ladder from his "nest" and then, leaning down over the wall, he put his hands under my armpits and, with tenderness and strength, he hauled me into his elevated room.
No way out. I was in his world. I stood in darkness, trembling, until Marco lit some candles.
Room and man were used to each other - it was a place of jumbled genius. A flute lay on his bed. Newspapers were piled on the floor. Two dirty shirts were wrapped around each other, iced over, so that the sleeves touched each other almost lovingly, on a clothesline. The smell of human faeces came faintly from a back cave. Marco jabbered endlessly as he lit a fire - there were conspiracy theories, snatches of poems, bits of history, talk of Japanese tea ceremonies, films, books, madness, the bits and pieces of one man's wounded life. Later in the afternoon he played a Donal Lunny tune on one of his wooden flutes. I was amazed.
"I'm like Orpheus, brother," he said, "charming the birds from the tunnel trees."
When I left he helped me to the tunnel floor, asked for nothing, neither money nor a return visit. He simply thanked me for listening. It was my first afternoon in the tunnels and it amazed me, this world of brutal magic.
Here are the facts if such things exist: There are 800 miles of tunnels in New York. They were built by Irishmen, Italians and African-Americans, many of whom lost their lives in their construction. Steam tunnels, underground cellars, subway tunnels, railway tunnels, bunkers, lost passageways, abandoned tubes. Nowadays, the people who live underground are derisively called "The Mole People".
There are between 2,000 to 5,000 living underground in Manhattan. A good 75 per cent of them are AfricanAmerican males. In 1987 a child was born in one of the tunnels, but (as far as is known) no children live there now.
Every year the New York city police pick bodies out of the tunnels - some have died after being hit by trains; others are fried by electricity; others have needle marks on their wrists, necks, crotches, thighs; some are prostitutes who have turned the wrong trick. There are weird and untrue stories pedalled in the media about people whose skin has taken on a grey pallor because they never see the sunlight.
But facts are mercenary bastards, no fathers or mothers or homes or history to them, and they say little about life underground. In truth the tunnels are ambiguous - like the breath of rot that is sometimes raised by a thaw.
The tunnels can be stunning in their beauty. Under Riverside Park, in spring, the cherry blossom leaves blow down into the tunnel and gyrate in the light. Huge murals, including Goya's Third Of May and Salvador Dali's Melting Clocks, have been painted on the walls. Cubicles are ranged along the side of the tracks. Some of the occupants have electricity piped down and, in Penn Station, one man has a giant collection of home videos which he watches.
Just two miles away there is Grand Central Station, where a labyrinth of tunnels is home to nightmarish visions of people huddled under platforms, living in the worst imaginable human filth. And four miles downtown in the Broadway Lafayette tunnel the vision is one of malevolent darkness in which addicts sometimes lie down in their own shit and piss. I have seen an addict blithely stick a heroin needle into his neck and then fall backwards onto a sodden mattress.
But there are so many different lives led under the pavements of New York that it's impossible to package them in a single metaphor - unless perhaps to say that they are "wounded".
There is Doreen, mother of two, wounded by crack. There is John, a proud and lived-in man, wounded by his years in Vietnam. There is Danielle, a Long Island girl, wounded by years of peddling her body. There is Jose, a Cuban, wounded by exile. There is Tony, wounded by some echoing crime. There is an overwhelming number of men in their 40s and 50s, simply wounded by lack of purpose, as if they've just stepped out of some Beckett play. One or two, like Bernard Issacs (a man who calls himself "Lord of the Tunnels") actually choose to live down there away from the chaos and, as Bernard says, "the intellectual terrorism of topside".
The scars these people bear are the aborigine scars of the human spirit. By day they walk the street and collect cans, or sell books, or beg; by night they're home in the darkness; by the next morning they wake in that selfsame darkness.
There is no running water. No toilets. No comforts. But there is pride and it is sometimes startling how it shows itself - homeless people showering under drips from pipes, a woman dabbing a little stolen perfume over tunnel dust on her neck.
Food is easy to come by in New York. So too is clothing. But that doesn't stop the slander - one of the most patently absurd rumours among New Yorkers (most of whom don't even know about the tunnel people anyway) is that the underground dwellers eat rats.
When I put this to Bernard he erupts in laughter and eventually says, "Rats, yeah, hey, rats, rats with hollandaise sauce."
One of the strangest things that I've learned over the last few years getting to know these tunnel people is how open and purely ordinary they have been. Sometimes I was told to "f*** off" when I knocked on their doors, other times dinner was cooked while we sat and chatted. On successive St Patrick's Days I have decided to stay away from Fifth Avenue and drink instead with the subterraneans. In one tunnel, word went out to leave "the white boy" alone and I was sometimes nicknamed "Irish", as if my country's history of oppression somehow made me all right. I wasn't a "normal" white boy.
But mostly the people of the tunnel just wanted to talk and for me there was an honesty in simply listening.
In truth, I have been scared in the tunnels, so scared sometimes that I was drenched in sweat in below-zero weather. Once a crackhead followed me through 500 yards of darkness. The same afternoon I stepped about an inch away from the live rail - one more step and I would have been carted away in a blue body bag. Another time I was in an abandoned wine cellar where rats were leaping up past my boots. But all of that is fodder for the mill of a place that can still contain all the elements of human beauty - listening to Marco play his flute, waiting for Bernard to prepare a cup of tea, getting kissed on the cheek by Doreen after she told me about her children.
The more I visited the tunnels of New York the more I could see how truly familiar this world was. In fact, one of my finest revelations was realising one afternoon how bored I was down there after sitting for hours with some homeless men and then realising that these men lead the same lives of quiet desperation as many of us do in the "real world".
America has spilled its borders and emptied itself of history in recent decades, but in a curious way the frontier still exists underground. I will lay down my cardboard box here to sleep on and you better not f*** with my patch of land. I'll barter my socks for your pack of cigarettes. I'll burn my shack down in order to get the nails back and then I'll build another. I'll choose my own patch to till in the darkness. Marco once told me that he saw something moving in the distance and he was convinced it was a knife with a man tucked into its sock.
Just as in that ancient frontier there are dangers and visions. But, as with the frontier, there is always a society to drag you, eventually, back into its fold.
The Riverside Park tunnel was recently "cleaned out" by the police under their new zero tolerance laws. Bernard got an apartment in Harlem with help of the authorities. Marco went drifting. Doreen went back out on the streets and I have looked for her but can find no word. Perhaps she is in another tunnel, vainly waiting for her life to manifest itself in some splendid destiny.
But there is always another tunnel in New York, always another place to hide, because the tunnels are the subconscious mind of the city. Everything that the city wants to forget about - its filth, its ruin, its violence, its dispossessed - ends up in the darkness, all of it waiting to get out again, as if in some vivid dream or nightmare.
Colum McCann's new novel, This Side Of Brightness, set in the tunnels of New York, will be published in January by Phoenix House.