Last Night In Central Park

Russell Hastings checked his wristwatch. It was a few minutes past eleven p.m. Central Park was cloaked in the darkness of an unseasonably warm October. He had just under seven hours left on his graveyard shift. A bag of sandwiches and a large thermos he stole from his grandfather years ago filled with diet soda sat at his side.

"Why the hell is it always me?" he growled to no one in particular and lifted his foot from the accelerator pedal of the cranky electric cart.

He liked the stillness, the pure emptiness of Central Park but resented the fact that he was assigned to the shift more than any other of the Park's sanitation crew. Politics. It was always politics. He hated that shit and was not at all skilled, like the others who constantly stroked the night supervisor.

He picked up his cell. "I'm all right, honey"

"You were so angry this morning. I got worried," his wife of thirty-seven years said in her sweetest voice.

"It's my God damn fifth time this month."

"Sorry, honey. Sometimes I forget."

"I know. It's just that I don't know how to suck up to that prick Davidson."

"As long as you're okay."

"I have your sandwiches, your raisin oatmeal cookies, and soda. I'm pissed but fine. I'll see you, Ava, and Julie in the morning."

"Ava's at her friend's house this week."

Russell also forgot. His estranged daughter had been living back home for over a month. She was recently separated from her asshole husband of three years. Too much to remember, he thought, blew his wife a kiss, and hung up.

"If I were going to murder that chickenshit Davidson, how would I do it?" he said, poking his bare toes against the accelerator, a game he played often to see just how much pressure he had to exert to make the crap utility cart jump. "Strangling is too slow, and I don't own a gun. But, you know, I do own a bat. With gloves, no fingerprints? Hmmmm."

A squirrel jumped up on the front hood of the cart.

A smile crossed his face. The first of the day. "Here you go, Irv," he said and slowly handed the animal one of the cookies, his usual offering should Irving appear.

Irving hesitated, twitched from side to side, and finally grabbed the cookie with both paws, jammed it into his mouth, leapt up on top of the electric cart and disappeared into the night.

"Ungrateful savage," Russell muttered and drove once more around the Great Lawn, then headed south behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the grand old centerpiece of Central Park and circled below the Central Park Zoo off 64th Street before looping back up to the Great Lawn.

It was just after midnight when he finished the second tour of the grounds. He had picked up dozens of empty soda bottles, three T-shirts, a torn bra and baseball cap, and too many condoms. Nothing unusual. He drove to where the East 79th street entrance from Fifth Avenue to the Park fed into the oval of the Lawn and switched off the electric cart.

The massive apartment buildings that surrounded Central Park, jewel of Manhattan, twinkled around him. A wall of money and power that could be heard around the work.

He polished off a sandwich and half of the soda, took a long overdue piss, climbed back into the cab, leaned back, and was asleep in minutes.

Russell Hastings had arthritis in both knees, was forty pounds overweight, and according to his doctor, the fifty-eight-year-old was well on his way to diabetes.

This bothered Russell, though not as much as his dreams. They had cursed him since his childhood cat died of unexplained circumstances. It wasn't until Shadow passed at just under six years old that the family realized the devastating impact it had on their youngest son. Replacing the cat with a kitten was a failure, as was adding a puppy to the Brooklyn family of five.

Hasting accepted the curse for what it was: punishment for failing to feed the adorable creature as his mother had told him to do more often than he cared to recall. Shadow never got really sick as much as it seemed to the vet that he was uncommonly old for his age and simply was tired of living.

As Russell Hastings sank deeper into the black hole of his fears, he came upon Shadow's skeleton lying in a thicket of shrub and tall grass. He twitched from side to side, his eyeballs jumped around under his eyelids, looking for a safe place to hide. But there wasn't.

Russell Hastings awoke in the sweat he had experienced several times a year since the Shadow he loved died.

"Wished I had killed it instead of starving it to death," he said, trying to rouse himself further from the stranglehold of his dreams. A gulp of soda and wiping the sweat from his forehead and neck brought him one step back into the present.

Except, not really.

"What the..." the old man said, stumbling out of the cramped utility cart.

The oval expanse of the Great Lawn featuring ample space for six softball fields was gone. Vanished. Replaced by a dense stand of trees that blocked out the vision of the tall West Side apartment buildings standing at attention on the other side of Central Park.

Russell came around to the front of his cart and followed the headlights as they lit up a wall of old birch and pine that rose forty or fifty feet into the black Central Park night.

"Still dreaming," he concluded. "Not enough I'm cursed for the ignorance of once being a four -year-old, and now this shit."

He walked back to the cart and reached in for a pack of cigarettes he always had at the ready when he felt himself slipping into a reality his doctor felt was a simple dream. Leaning against the cab, he watched the car lights flickering down Fifth Avenue in front the museum's lush grounds. The Great Lawn behind him, his vision included the 69-foot-high, 3000-year-old Obelisk, known by some as "Cleopatra's Needle," which was the oldest man-made object in Central Park and the oldest outdoor monument in New York City.

It took half a dozen deep puffs before he regained his composure.

He raised his arm, and with the tip of his right index finger, reached out to touch the high back wall of the museum over a football field away.

"Gotcha," he mused, tracing the imagined outstretched finger along the roofline of the massive edifice to art and wealth that the city possessed in unparalleled abundance. He pinched off what remained of the cigarette and set it onto the dashboard for later.

"Okay, you fat, lazy bastard, let's get back to work," he said and turned around.

He steadied himself and walked to the other side of the cart and reached out with that same index finger until it came into contact with the peelings of a white birch. He jumped back, then tried again.

It was as real as the museum.

"So, not a dream," he whispered, as if giving away the secret of his new circumstances might end it, and him, at the same time.

He picked his cell from his pocket and took photos of the stand as far as his headlights could reach. He dialed his wife and left a message. He went back to the cart, shoved the pack of cigarettes into his pants pocket, grabbed the shovel every cart had as a utility tool, and walked closer to the stand. He scanned the wall of living wood until he found a narrow breach and carefully squeezed his way into the maze.

"Wow," he muttered, inhaling deeply. The forest scent was powerful and immediate and slightly intoxicating. He took a few more deep breaths and suddenly felt relaxed, less fearful, and less curious.

He gently pushed his hand against a few trees. They swayed but quickly stiffened.

"The lawn at this location must be about a hundred seventy or eighty feet wide to the other side of the oval path and open view of the West side," he reasoned, stumbling between trees and narrow openings in the cloying thicket. "Whatever the fuck this is, it should take maybe, ten minutes, even at my fat old pace to get to the other side. Not a big deal."

Finally, he looked down at his watch and was surprised to see that over a half hour had passed. "Something's wrong here," he said as if it was the first time it struck him that he had passed into an alternate space.

There was no reception on his cell. A dead zone, he reasoned.

The earth underfoot was soft and yielding instead of the hard matted dirt of the Great Lawn that had been pounded down by a million tourists and ball players over the decades as one of the park's favorite places for residents and tourists to hang out.

"Maybe punishment for flunking out of the Cub Scouts after a few months," he said with a near laugh. "So, which way is out?" He turned a few times to get a better fix on his location. Three hundred and sixty degrees later the cramped space he had wandered into hadn't changed. "I'm too old for this shit."

His right foot caught under a thick, exposed root, pitching him forward against a handful of saplings that broke his fall, though couldn't protect his ankle from twisting badly. He rolled against a row of tree trunks and steadied himself, examining his scratched face and torn shirt. He carefully removed his right shoe, which only heightened the pain. A deep-blue swelling had already compromised his right ankle.

"Now what?" he said, checking his wallet, keys, and cash. Nothing lost in the fall but the ability to save himself.

The dampness of the ground was already spreading across his buttocks, snaking its way down the underside of his pants, when a familiar face broke through the dense undergrowth. He focused his flashlight. "Have you been following me?"

The little beast sat on its haunches and took in the larger creature who had fed him over the years. He jumped a few feet, then moved very slowly toward one of the larger creature's limbs and held out a fragment of cookie in his paw.

Russell Hastings forgot the predicament he was in, the sudden shooting pain exploding in his right hip, and held back tears as he reached out and opened his massive hand under the squirrel's paw. A tiny piece of cookie fell into his palm.

"Irving, I couldn't imagine a better friend to have than you."

He slipped the crumb into his mouth and returned his open hand to where Irving was squatting. Time passed as the distance between man and beast narrowed. As Irving took in the risk of his surroundings, the little creature slowly made his way to Russel's fingertips, sniffed a while, and climbed into the man's outstretched, open hand and wagged his tail in slow, graceful swoops.

"Just the greatest," Russell said as a deep chill rushed through his body.

Beverly would know what to do, he reasoned.

He had been too hard on her recently. He felt terrible every time he barked at her, and she responded with understanding love. It was just that in the last few months his memory was getting hazy, and facts and faces and the right words took more time to access.

"It will be dawn in five hours. Davidson will have already been alerted to my not checking in every hour. And according to protocol, he had to call the police if I missed two consecutive check-ins. Maybe all this was his making," Russell considered.

"Shadow, are you here?" he heard himself say, and was more frightened at what he said than where he was. "The cat's revenge. Tracking me down and setting this trap. I never liked that little shit anyway. Maybe Davidson is Shadow reincarnated?" he said in a wave of delusionary relief, dulling the imagery of his daughters, their birthdays, as he slipped into darkness, uneasy with the irony that Davidson would get the credit for saving him.

"Aunt Lydia believed in reincarnation. I joked about it as a kid, and now it's reached out to claim me," he said and turned around toward what he believed was the direction he had come from as blackness closed in around him.

"Over here, officer," the young girl said, clutching the baby in her arms. "I was out for an early morning walk with my baby and spotted the cart. It's empty."

Both officers radioed in the time and license of the cart and examined the inside and gave a quick look over the expansive Great Lawn that spanned out to the west side of the park. Three joggers were running north along the far west side of the pathway. "We never got an alarm from Sanitation," one of the officers said to the young woman.

By nine a.m. the entire area was an investigation scene cordoned off with yellow police tape that kept onlookers and the curious at bay. Beverly Hastings was driven in from Brooklyn by a police car.

When they showed her the cart, she said, "It's not my husband. He's all right. Lost, but not missing. He hasn't smoked in years," she said after one of the officers pointed to the fresh half-smoked cigarette on the dashboard.

The disappearance had no criminal markings. Russell Hasting's personal belongings, his thermos and sandwiches, along with two soft-core porn magazines, were found on the front seat of the cart.

There were no signs of a struggle. The cart was intact, and all but the shovel was missing, which was thought to be taken by somebody who probably had first discovered the empty cart. By evening only a few police remained to guard the boundaries of the incident.

The same woman with the same baby came by the next morning, greeted the policeman, and stared absently at the empty cart. "Poor fellow" she said as if she had lost some personal connection. "What's that?" she said, pointing to the middle of the Great Lawn.

Suddenly police from neighboring precincts were swarming over the remains of Russell Hastings and what was later identified as a small squirrel found dead not a foot from the deceased's head.

An investigation into the investigation was immediately launched that proved from the drone footage to a half dozen officers that walked the space the day before that the man and the animal were not there when they first walked the lawn. Several reporters who had broken through the cordoned-off area came forward and confirmed that the man and the animal were not there the day Russell Hastings went missing.

The investigation wrapped up weeks later as an unsolved missing person's case. Pranksters, the public had been led to believe by the highest political authorities, had hidden the body and returned it the next day, without the cell phone but what looked like the remains of a pack of cigarettes in Hastings' jacket pocket.

The fact that Russell Hastings still had his wallet and forty-six dollars in cash as well as a fine wristwatch was never addressed. Carl Davidson was suspended for a week without pay and demoted for failing to follow a critical safety protocol.

Beverly Hastings was brought back to identify the body. Before she could get close enough to see the details of her husband's face, she was so overcome with grief she had to be hospitalized.

"I want autopsies of both," the local precinct commander demanded as the embarrassment and outcry at the incompetence of the Parks and Police Departments raged.

Russell Hastings was found to have a broken ankle and severely fractured hip. The squirrel was sent to the Animal Medical Center, the world's largest nonprofit animal hospital. The animal was unhurt, not ill, and young enough to cast doubt on why it died. The remains of a raisin oatmeal cookie were found in his stomach that was later identified by the deceased's children as what their father took each time he was assigned to the graveyard shift.

The shovel found a few yards away from the body belonging to the Department of Sanitation was examined by forensics.

The story was front page news for weeks as skeptics, conspiracy theorists, and UFO enthusiasts made the most of the unexplained.

"My Lord," Caroline Albright said, after reading about the incident some weeks later. She started to write a letter to the New York City Parks Department from her room in the New Jersey assisted care living facility where she had been since her eighty-fourth birthday.

She was a native New Yorker, respected historian, and taught American History at New York's City College. She was an authority on the design, construction, and topology of Central Park.

She never completed the letter but died in her sleep days later.

Part of the letter she began to write suggested that, had anyone thought to check the archives of Central Park's darkened history, they would have easily spotted a similar occurrence where one, thirty-eight-year-old, Lionel Cummings, Jr., one of the Park's maintenance crew, had died under similarly suspicious circumstances from that same spot in the Great Lawn exactly a hundred years to the day earlier.