Part 13 Unperson #3
Lead-acid batteries aren’t used much anymore—lithium-ion ones are much more environmentally friendly and are also rechargeable—but they are still used for machinery that requires industrial-level electric power, like cars, trucks and portable concrete mixers.
This battery, of course, was dead.
But I didn’t want it for electrical power.
I wanted it for its acid.
The sulfuric acid inside it.
Twenty minutes later, crouched in a corner of my concrete box, I poured some of the battery’s sulfuric acid against the wall.
Sulfuric acid is highly corrosive by itself.
I needed mine to be even more caustic.
So I ignited it with Oberov’s butane lighter.
The acid sizzled and bubbled as it ate into the concrete wall, giving off a foul acrid smoke.
My glasses acted like safety goggles, which was helpful.
I tried to breathe more shallowly—I didn’t want to knock myself out.
I knocked myself out.
I woke ten minutes later.
‘Damn it,’ I said to no-one.
I didn’t have time to waste.
I lifted my Patagonia jacket’s fleece collar up around my mouth and nose, and I tried again.
The acid ate into the smooth concrete and as it did, I started chipping away at it, using one of the four legs of the cement mixer as a chisel and one of the castor wheels as a hammer.
A small hole began to open in the concrete wall.
At first, it was just a tiny crater, but as I chipped away at it and splashed it with more hot sulfuric acid, it got wider.
And so I got to work, using the lighter as sparingly as I could, since (a) I wanted to conserve its fluid and (b) because using it meant using precious oxygen.
After two hours, at around 6:30 a.m., I broke through the wall—
—to be met by a darker body of concrete.
I’d come to the newly poured slab.
It was semi-solid, filled with bubbles and crusting.
This was as weak as it would ever be, but also solid enough for me to tunnel through.
Get going, Sam. You’re running out of air.
I made my first chip into this darker body of newly poured concrete with my ‘chisel’.
It fell away far more easily than the wall of my box had. I didn’t even need to use acid on this stuff.
‘Hell, yeah . . .’ I said aloud.
I chipped away at it in total darkness.
As I did, I flung the concrete chips back into the other end of my box. I heard them land on and around the bodies of the two Oberovs.
After forty minutes, I ignited the lighter—it was far brighter than my watch’s light—and saw that I’d created the beginnings of a hole that would be wide enough for me to fit through if I lay on my stomach and belly-crawled.
I flicked off the lighter and, breathing as shallowly as I could and working in pitch darkness, I set about chipping further into the concrete slab, carving a tight tunnel through it.
TUNNELLING
I’m not going to describe every chisel-strike of that night and the following day.
Suffice it to say, I did it for a long time. In absolute blackness.
Lying on my stomach, chiselling away.
Chip-chip-chip.
Chipping at the crusted dark concrete.
Sweeping out the crumbs by hand.
Tossing them back into the original box.
Then I’d belly-crawl into my tight tunnel again and chip-chip-chip some more.
Ten hours . . .
Then twelve . . .
Then fifteen . . .
By then, I’d worn out three of my ‘chisels’—the legs of the little cement mixer—and was onto my fourth and last one.
Then, on the first strike after I’d started using this last chisel, I struck the hard outer wall of the pit—indeed, of the whole construction site.
My heart pumped faster with hope.
I checked my watch.
It was 7:00 p.m., December 31st.
In the world outside, New Year’s revellers would be heading to parties and parks and, of course, this being New York City, Times Square.
It was getting harder to breathe.
I wondered if I’d got my oxygen calculations wrong.
God, it’d suck to run out of air so close to freedom.
Confronted by this second, more solid outer concrete wall, I grabbed my battery again, shunted it down my tunnel, and poured its sulfuric acid against the outer wall. Then I heated the acid with the jet-flame lighter.
It ate away at the exterior wall.
I resumed my chiselling.
Chip-chip-chip . . .
Two more hours of digging.
My twenty-two hours were almost up and I was gasping for air now, really feeling the diminished oxygen levels in my confined space, when my chisel unexpectedly punched through the outer wall—
—and a thin beam of light and a rush of air whooshed into my tunnel and washed over my face.
It was super cold but I didn’t care.
I inhaled it greedily.
Cool, glorious, oxygen-rich air.
I slumped with relief.
I’d done it.
It still took another thirty minutes—using my last drops of heated sulfuric acid—to cut through that outer wall, but I finally made a hole big enough and slid out through it, tumbling into the dirt trench outside.
It was 9:30 p.m. Nearly a whole day had passed since I’d been entombed.
I gazed up at the night sky. It had never looked so beautiful.
I was exhausted and hungry and covered from head to toe in concrete dust. It was under my fingernails, in my ears, in the corners of the lenses of my glasses. My fingers were filthy and bloody.
But I was alive.
And back in the game.