Josh and Tom and I walked out drunk and dropped Tom off at the ferry for Jersey. Josh and I walked back uptown. The city was naked, unprotected from the dusk. A woman sat in Battery Park reading a paperback by the glow of a generator-powered searchlight, as though some breach in reality had beamed her from her couch. Posh Tribeca restaurants had been turned inside out onto the streets; the patrons standing with their wine, the workers playing cards by candlelight. In the tight maze of West Village streets cars rolled gingerly through intersections. They seemed human somehow, deferential, alive to the rights and needs of other cars and pedestrians especially. In my inebriation I wondered: had we, as a race, transcended traffic lights? Had the remorseless rhythm of green-orange-red, green-orange-red, beaten so deeply into our psyche that we’d finally developed the instinct to yield? People sat on stoops and drank, or stood outside of bars and drank. Josh was supposed to go to a party but what did that really mean anymore? He made some calls and plans were made to meet in Union Square. At Lafayette and Spring we came upon the darkened stairs to the subway, suddenly neglected and irrelevant. A yellow caution tape stretched across the entrance.
"Let's go in," Josh said brightly.
"OK."
It was hot down there, and quiet. Stupefyingly quiet, the way only a very noisy thing can ever be. Yet something beat gently at the silence. What was it? Something that hadn’t ever been heard. Water dripping somewhere, echoing out the tunnel.
It was dark too, very dark, but for a faint glow: by some pointless quirk of backup power the green circles with the yellow arrows beside the turnstiles were lit and pointing, like it was the morning rush.
I took out my Metrocard and held it in the pale light. I looked at Josh for a beat. And I swiped it through the slot like any other day.
BING! went the machine. GO said the little screen. The punch line to a nonexistent joke.
Josh went through and ran up and down the pitch-black platform, yelling to wake the dead.