This Social Union’s situated directly under and could alternately be accessed through the first manhole upon northerly entrance to what’s now known as Synagogue Street, which had been named for the redbrick, steepsteepled church that once shadowed its southernmost terminus: impossible to believe, I know, that at one intersection of History & Joysey not all seven thousand plus residents of One Thousand Cedars had been Affiliated, weren’t almost required to be, that someone or other had once to pay full price for these units, not everyone had an uncle who had pull, or push, whatever weight how he or an aunt’d brought carried water to bear, someone who knew someone who’d execute the due diligence, and that without asking too many questions, or providing too many answers (requiring the recommendations, forms, why in triplicate my W2s?), pushing their applications through the planning tribunal, pulling their relatives, friends, and associates through both loophole and lapse…nu, maybe not an uncle in the sense of relation, though he’s a good friend of the family, now with the auntie wife asleep three floors up aboveground then three floors more up above that at the top gable of their house in its bedroom in bed dreaming of dreams without the interpretation of pills he’s taking his pride with him hard and pulsing below the arches of his immaculately maintained eyebrows on a tour, a surprise inspection of the Underground premises: wrapped in a terrycloth towel provided for patrons with any deposit of valid creditcard, his license, or passport he’s making his way out of the Social Union then through the Hall of Domestic Workers, an expanse forbidding in its sudden and darkening narrowness, lined on both sides with these uniformly small, metalframed photographs of the maids and other sundry employees of Development families who had fallen in the line of duty, become martyred to the profession, each portrait’s frame equipped with the jut of a spike on which a candle’s been impaled and kept burning at all times of Underground day and night in memory of the victim represented on the plaque below both dated and named, though with the smoke from the flames blackening over those plaques and even the portraits, too, eventually all that could be seen of most of these tragic Domestics — fallen upon a broomhandle, slipped to death on a mop — is the staring silver of their memorious eyes, which penetrate through any accretion of soot then into the souls of those like our uncle who must through design pass this way on the ways to their pleasure; the Hall then opening into an impressively spacious anteroom rowed on two of its faces with individual shower stalls walled and floored in tile and glassed, towels also blue, white, and of every fade bruised between hang from gilded hooks, soap dispensers installed on the fundament wall on both sides of its door.
