Hold the train. I could make out his latecomer’s face, as the doors tintinnabulated and converged. He was smiling. This was the train he needed to catch. This was his quarry. Never mind hindrances that developed, the door being closed, the conductor shuttering his window, the train beginning to move, Hold the train. I wish he’d said something more compelling, such as Behold, the Lord maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, turneth it upside down, scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof.
I looked up from the Apologia, saw him smiling. I knew right away. I didn’t want to know. But, like I’ve been trying to tell you, my heart was crenelated with scars of foreknowledge. He was making for that spot where the plates of the two cars abutted. A bisection of chains to keep away the foolhardy. The train lurched forward, I saw the smiler disappear out of the region of my peripheral vision, like a bird of air lifting off. He wore a smile, he grabbed for the chain, got one leg up, his shopping bag went under, there was a silence, there was exertion, he fumbled for the bag slipping down between the cars, there was a span of blackness, there was the third rail, and then he was tumbling after his possessions, down there. Between platform and train. Holy God. The Apologia fell out of my hands. When my sons are grown up, I would ask you, O my friends, to punish them. Just as I saw him lifting off, as in falconry, out of the margin of my weak eyes, I was up off the bench, the train jumped, and there was that awful hydraulic exhalation that means this conveyance is not going to move for a while, this train has met impediment upon the tracks. The entire system of trains, all the hundreds of miles of it, all Gotham knew at once what it had done; its daily imaginings again included gristle, sinew, marrow, plasma. There had been an incident.
Since I was a strapping young man of well over two hundred pounds, closer to two-fifty, to be honest, I was a kind of missile being propelled forward, when the train stopped, ready to squash just about anything or anyone. I fell across the two-seater there, into the lap of a woman. She was irritated at first, she didn’t know where we were, in the circle of creation reserved for dismemberment and sorrow, the realm of severed limbs, of triage, and she pushed back against my commodious bulk, Move, goddamit. I said, Hey, excuse me, I’m really sorry, hell. Then the woman in whose lap I had parked my large, soft posterior called weakly across the car to an MTA employee who powerlessly inhabited our car, standing nearby, Is someone on the tracks? The older woman stared across the car at the gathering of official presences outside, at the crowd beginning to gather around our train. Iknew he was gonna do it. A small Hispanic boy said, clutching at his mother’s hand, What happened? What happened? What happened? His mother shook her head.
A long two or three minutes we were locked inside, in our stationary subway car. There were faces pressed up against the outside, a wall of faces, and these faces would look down into that space under the train, never satisfied until they had apprehended why, and then their faces would knot uncomfortably at what information they now possessed. I resolved that I wouldn’t be one of these people, one of those who had to see. When the door at the end of the car was at last opened from the platform by a man with a high-visibility vestment, people filed off, and the announcement began to cycle on the P.A., lasshnnrnd genmhhnhnssbrs… What a processional, all of us filing out, Before him went the pestilence, burning coals went forth at his feet, by arrangement of Excellent Destiny, the woman I had nearly crushed touched me on the arm, beside me now, in the queue, Do you think he’s all right?
I thought, since I experienced trauma as a convulsion of the imagination, Who’s the guy’s mother and what did he have for lunch and did he ever drive a hydrofoil and did he ever feed a dolphin and how old was he when he lost his virginity and did he know the difference between a coniferous tree and a deciduous one and who was his favorite Yankee and did he know the table of the elements and how many women did he love and who were they all and are they all happy and did they do the things they wanted to do and did he have a kid brother and did he ever play a musical instrument and what is the woman he was meeting thinking right now and what is his mother thinking and is his head separated from his neck or his leg separated from hip, his inner organs like stew upon the undercarriage of the express? Of course, I knew the answers to these questions and knew the answers to others, too, through my sophisticated foreknowledge, even if my step was unsteady, even if I felt like I might pass out. I made reply to the woman; I said poetical words that had only recently occurred to me, Ihave a couple of tickets to the Knicks, they’re about to lose to Philadelphia, but I won’t tell you the score. I was going to sell one of the tickets anyhow.Let’s make something good out of something bad. I had never ever asked a woman out before.
The emergency guy at the door remarked, Let’s get a move on, pal, we got a situation.
My wife, because that’s who she was, my solace, my destiny, my respite, because that’s the substance of what I am telling you, detrained, but she froze on the platform, shoulders trembling suddenly as she held a pulped tissue to her nose, and crowds surrounded us, a gathering of disgruntled New Yorkers, getting home late from the office, or trying to get home late, while down the stairs came the paramedics, with their stretchers. In every part of this story, the stretcher-bearers eventually come. To my wife, I said, No big deal, if its too sudden. I’d understand. I just don’t feel right tonight. I don’t feel like being alone.
What kind of woman was she? What kind of woman was it who called to me from that calamity on the Seventh Avenue line? What kind of woman do I love now, with a fealty that will not cease, not till my occluded arteries send their clots up to the spongy interiors in my skull and I go mute and slack? I love the kind of woman whose hair has gone gray in a not terribly flattering way, the kind who doesn’t even notice how she keeps having to buy larger jeans, the kind who likes big cars because she doesn’t like to be uncomfortable. I love this woman because she is gifted with astounding premonitory skills: no matter how uncertain, how despondent, how lost her mate feels, no matter how dire the circumstances, she nonetheless predicts that Everything will be roses.
She gave me her number. On the fortieth day of our acquaintance, I proposed.
Soon I was living near the water in the Bronx. Not far from City Island. What I loved about that part of the world was how the swamps persisted long after the city planners had tried to do away with them. Co-Op City rising out of the swamps, the cattails and the trash, the Bruckner Expressway kids actually attempting to fish in the rivers — unwor-ried about hepatitis, unworried about PCB’s. Old unsteady docks, skiffs that leaked, a clustering of powerboats, all in the shadow of low-cost housing. My wife and I were newly-weds in our little place with the screened-in porch in back and the quarter acre, and I had just got this job on the retail desk, where I attempt to persuade regular folks to gamble away their meager savings. Every day since I was trained I had known I was going to lose my job, and sometimes for weeks at a time I wouldn’t allow my wife to touch me because I was so disgusted with who I was, with the bands of useless pork on me, with my fulsome breasts, with my joyless prognostications.