The Enterprise - 65

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. 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.

The Enterprise - 64

I normally took the 1 or the 9 from Penn Station but they weren’t running so I took the C. When I walked by the 1-9 station on Canal the entrance was yellow-taped and surrounded by emergency vehicles and personnel: cops, firemen, EMTs, walkie-talkies babbling in static. An empty stretcher sat on the sidewalk. At work our new office manager, Caitlyn, instant messaged me to ask if I’d been on the train with the poison scare. She sent me an article about it. Evidently a passenger had reported a substance under the seats resembling wet sugar.

I was out with Steve, going from one bar to another, when Leeane called. She sounded like she’d been crying. She said she was in bed reading. We talked about getting together sometime and she said she’d been way busy with class. 

“And thing is, I’m sort of seeing someone now.”

“Oh OK.”

"I'm not sure how it's working out. He has a six-year-old girl."

She said this and that, she was ambivalent, he was always spending time with his kid. And plus she had drawing class all summer and it was a bitch. I said we could get together and just hang out sometime.

"That would be cool. I want the opinion of a third party," she said. She sniffled.

"Are you OK?"

"Yeah, just you know, a heavy day."

"Nothing really bad heavy?"

"No no. Not at all. Just my drawing class is so hard. And it occurred to me: I'm going to have to be dealing with this all my life."

My brother emailed me to inform me in solemn and oddly formal terms that our grandmother had died. He described the event as “no doubt a blessing,” she having declined the way grandmothers do. I thought of Doctor Robertson, her shrink for many decades, the primary relationship in her life since the premature death of her husband. What they talked about nobody knew. Now nobody would. Nothing ever seemed to change in her psyche—her passive aggression, her neediness, her state of denial. Yet with her kids grown up and gone her treatment at his hands became her life’s work. Her masterpiece. His too, maybe. An invisible legacy. Wonder how he took the news.

When the power went out I thought this is it, they got us again. But deeper this time, not in office buildings but in the place where electrons move through copper wire. We got beers and hung out on the fire escape to watch the sun go down into a rosy haze. I called my mom in Paris. It wasn’t terrorism, she laughed. Just a fuckup somewhere that blacked out the Eastern Seaboard.

In the rush hour home on the A train a man walked into the space between the cars, with it freezing cold and everything—not permitted, dangerou—but he did it calmly and deliberately, like he was just entering a different room at a party. I peered at him through the glass and wondered if he was suicidal, if he might just as calmly step off the edge into the tunnel darkness, how I’d then be obligated to pull the emergency alarm, which in fact hung on the wall beside me bearing slightly complicated directions about remove this and lift that. Yes, I decided. I’d have to pull it. Though no doubt there’d be groans from some onboard, even from some who knew why, people who just wanted to get home on a winter Tuesday night for fuck’s Jesus sake. I’d feel sheepish. But I could surely defend my actions. There’s a man there, a human being. He might not yet be dead. Is our collective inconvenience not justified by getting some EMTs out on the tracks to see if they can’t stanch his bleeding? Yes. It’d be the right thing to do and I’d do it. I’d be the one. I looked at him again and he was checking his phone now. The screen bore a colorful stream of pictures, Instagram perhaps. Just like everybody else.

Took the train from a different station, 15th Street. As I descended onto the platform I wondered how much of a different scene it was. People getting high and fucking maybe. It did feel different though. It seemed like you’d be less likely to get pushed in front of a train by the mentally ill. But these things can be deceiving.

I switched to the crowded A heading back from work, at Canal. I could tell from the platform already that there was a weird situation inside the car, a space not properly occupied by bodies. When I entered I saw it was a Citibike with two teens sitting on it, one on the front wheel, one straddling the seat, the one on the wheel younger, maybe fifteen. They smelled of smoke like they’d just been getting high. I brushed by the younger one to the left with a little difficulty and stood in the little space that was left between them and the end of the car, the seats occupied and a couple other people standing.

It was hard to ignore the inappropriateness of this massive object, the heavy, clumsy Citibike, in this context. It could only have been found or stolen by these guys—there’s no other reason for it to be here. Yet I watched everyone ignore it, so I did too. Then I perceived the young kid trying to get my attention. I pulled a wired earbud out of my right ear, warily, and nodded at him.

“Are you listening to me?” he asked.

I nodded.

“If you want, I can make your earbuds wireless,” he declared, making a snip-snip gesture with his fingers. “Just cut ‘em off.”

I shook my head and smiled. “Nah, I’m good,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

At this point I expected I don’t know what. Laughter. From him, from both of them—derisive laughter. It was funny after all. Here I am, the only person left in the world wearing dumbass wired earbuds. The kid says, lemme help you out. I can make ‘em wireless. Snip snip. It was funny what he said and I waited for him to laugh. He did not.

“OK,” he said airily, and looked away. As though he’d I dunno, just offered me a stick of gum. Nothing in his demeanor indicated that he was the least bit insincere. His friend didn’t react, or wasn’t paying attention. At the next stop the older kid threw an empty plastic bottle out onto the platform just as the doors were closing. It just missed a woman walking by and clattered around on the concrete. A small insolent gesture. The younger kid didn’t seem to watch or care.

At Jay Street I said excuse me as I got back out and that was all, I was out on the platform with everybody else, just switching to another train.

A man sat on the train at the end seat near by the pole and the door where I was standing. Rush hour home, everyone so close you can read their thoughts. I wondered if maybe something was up with him and I felt bad for thinking so but sure enough he began to babble. I took out my earbuds to hear what he was saying. But it wasn't words, not even in another language. Just sounds. Vocalizations, high and low, with the cadence of speech. Maybe only he knows what he's saying and we're like cats or dogs who hear but cannot understand.

In the Jay Street station I could smell bleach before I started climbing the stairs out. On the landing halfway there was an MTA employee with a bucket and a mop, cleaning something unspeakable. I walked as far around it as I could and emerged in the pitiless light of downtown Brooklyn, trash blowing down the street.

Google Maps told me to cut down a walkway and across a little urban park, a square hidden away from the streets. There were trees and benches and even a few people sitting. It seemed desolate. Lost and anonymous. A public space you’d find in some Second World city. I asked myself if I liked it or hated it. I liked it.

TROOPS

I understand, am understanding, do understand.

I walked up the ramp to leave the 4th Street station, lost in my earbuds, Winterland 1974. A man waved to me frantically, imploringly. I scrutinized him and tried to assess the situation. He seemed stuck in the turnstile somehow, straddling one of the tripod arms in mid-rotation. Did he need my help? In a flash I decided not. But of course that assessment was self-serving. I didn’t want to approach this wide-eyed stranger and disentangle him from the teeth of this machine. If that’s even what he wanted. I thought in fact he wanted something else. The mechanism seemed to be turning a bit. And even if it wasn’t, it was absurd to think he couldn’t clamber over it, or under. Yet he still appealed to me fiercely, arm outstretched. I turned away to exit one of the other gates a little farther down. I looked over my shoulder. He was still there and seemed to be watching me. If he does get free then surely he’ll run up behind and clobber me in the skull, I thought. Kill me. Surely he’ll kill me. What else could he possibly want? Before I reached the stairs to the street I turned around again. I didn’t see him anywhere.

The squawking of the conductor sounded angry almost. Of course you couldn’t understand a word. Passengers stepped on tentatively, stepped off, some stayed. No one knew where we were going but Brooklyn.

TROOPS

a doctor’s expression could change to one of deep concern

TROOPS

Francine believed with all her heart that the altar was Calvary and that again Jesus was offered up for sacrifice.

TROOPS

The nurse looked and clucked in horror.

There’s a turnstile at Houston Street where the readout is gobbledygook, just an unbroken string of near-alphabetical symbols like from some Nordic language. I’m often behind someone who balks at the sight of it, their MetroCard prone above the slot, then zags into the correctly functioning one at left. I go straight through and use it anyway. Nothing happens. Nothing doesn’t happen.

TROOPS

We moved on. A lark or finch called as I planted my tired feet into the dust.

A woman down at the end of the subway car was ranting and raving. She was enormous and wore voluminous, loose-fitting cotton clothes, thin fabrics that looked like they’d tear or fall away like something molting off a beast. In fact her arms were inside her pants legs, stretching the gauzy material like she wanted to explode. I wondered if she was going to spill her giant breasts out of her top as an affront, a provocation. And then what?

TROOPS

He could see I was in a vulnerable position.

TROOPS

When intelligent people read, they ask themselves a simple question

TROOPS

these instruments will serve your children and your grandchildren in the future.

TROOPS

and he was in such pain that he was unable to swallow or take any food.