On this day, like any other, he would walk the two blocks from his apartment to the subway station on the neighborhood’s rubbish strewn shopping avenue. Some days he would try to count his steps from the stoop to the station’s entrance, so as to eventually compare this route to the one that went around the block, past the Chinese laundromat. He would think about counting but never get past the first few steps, well aware by then that he would never walk the alternate way even if it meant saving a few minutes on a rainy day. Instead he would walk past the coffee shop, either slowing his step to look in the window and greet the friendly owner or purposely avoiding it altogether, depending on his mood. Then he would walk past the old men who stood in front of the ‘No Pork Hot Dog’ sign on the window of the pizza joint and wonder what they found to talk about every day and if they noticed him walking past them at the same time each morning.
Finally he would descend into the subway station, hoping a train would come neither too soon nor too late thereafter, allowing him to reach his preferred spot towards the front but not forcing him to wait so long that it would be filled to the brim, in which case he would prefer to be late to work. When that happened he would marvel at the tenacity of those who slid liquidly into spaces that seemed not to exist. Standing just outside the doors, he would actually enjoy the train’s delay as it allowed him to scan the faces of the unwilling contortionists and hear the occasional muffled rant from deep within the car. He would search for the images flashing behind the aggrieved eyes of those packed inside, the enumerated justifications for the worthiness of a life lived in this way. The baby’s face while napping, the wife’s kiss, the dog’s smile, a mother’s embrace.
When that train would finally pull away, he would lean over the edge of the platform searching for the next one and marvel at the bent bodies of others doing the same in sync along the station, an anxious underground ballet. Then he would feel for the subtle breeze blowing from within the tunnel signaling an oncoming train, and close his eyes just before the gust hit his face upon its arrival. He would wait patiently by the doors for the rare passenger who exited at his station, finally making his way into the car in search of the most comfortable place to stand with a newspaper in one hand. He would prepare his legs for the sudden jolt of departure by separating his feet into a stable stance, then look around in search of those who apparently never learned about inertia and were surprised when they were nearly knocked over, gasping in disbelief as they reached for something to hold on to. This would anger him, would seem an affront to his assimilation of this routine not to mention to the obviousness of movement. But it would dawn on him that it was precisely the routine that dulled one’s sense of movement, made one forget that this tin box was not a magic portal but a moving chunk of metal epically battling friction within the guts of the city. Sometimes it was the world outside the grimy windows that did the moving and the train went nowhere, in the way that life in the city seemed to rush past in streaks while he stayed stuck. Sometimes direction itself was a victim to routine, as when he would move to the opposite side of the train when the crowd flooded in at the busier stops and forget that he had done so, preparing himself for a jolt that came from the wrong side of his body and winding up embarrassed but pleased with the surprising freedom of being unaware.
Between paragraphs of his own reading he would enjoy glancing around at the literature in others’ hands, reading as many lines as he could manage without drawing too much attention. Sometimes he would become engrossed in these half stories, these in-between accounts, and would then have to combine or complete disparate thoughts once the person flipped the page or exited the train…The dachshund’s round belly… A full memory channel with smells, tastes and even feelings … within this circle, things must be kept moving. Equally engrossing were the pieces of alien conversations whispered or shouted between couples and groups of friends, often in languages he could not understand. These stories would amuse him enough that later he may try (unsuccessfully) to remember where he had read or heard them. A constant cacophony of distant voices aching to become a cohesive choir. Furtively shared reading begot an intimate familiarity, as though the writing were done by the reader, as though this thing they were reading, this choice, were like a diary entry opened to the world. Without a book, only so much could be surmised about the woman with short red hair and square-framed glasses. But if her face was partly hidden by a romance novel, a yoga instruction manual, or the day’s tabloid, a different kind of bond was created. Once or twice he would witness someone in the sacred act of finishing a book, he would notice them reaching the end and he would focus on their eyes until they moved past the last line on the last page, the split second when they passed the last period and perhaps flashed through the entirety of the story, as one supposedly does in the moment before death, and finally looked up snapping out of that universe and back into the crowded train, back to being completely surrounded by people and still feeling utterly alone. The efficiency of the subway depended on these mysterious variables.
His office being equidistant from two consecutive stops, he would choose whether to walk uptown or downtown on this given day, also depending on his mood. If he chose to walk uptown he would stroll across less crowded blocks and past the pungent smoke of chicken being prepared for the day’s shawarmas in one of the Rafiqi food carts. If he walked downtown he would have to avoid the throngs, amble past the fruit stand with the ugly Indian man, meander around the table where the sad old African sold knock-off purses and step over the gas lines that fed the thirsty buildings. This haphazard decision barely seemed of consequence, but he would try to imagine a day when it might, would try to infuse this with a significance that small decisions lacked.
He would remember the time he and his mother barely missed their usual bus headed upstate, only to see the same bus on the television screen later that night, a mangled carcass of metal in the bottom of a ravine. He would imagine how he might feel that same tenuous relief, that fragility, after learning of a terrible fate of this particular train between this stop and the next. He might imagine himself lucky and wonder about whether his knowing to get off that train might have been a sign from a guardian somewhere he couldn’t see or imagine. Maybe his mother would be watching over him somehow, maybe she could communicate some strange urgency that would prevent him from some adverse fate. He would remember the people who said they felt a strange need to avoid work when the buildings came crumbling down and wonder how many other times they’d felt that urge before but wouldn’t remember because only correct premonitions are worth remembering, and the wrong ones weren’t premonitions after all.
He would turn the corner at the old church building now repurposed to house a fire sale by a failing clothing retailer. He would try to avoid the appropriately rotten gingko fruits that lay smashed on the sidewalk in front of its entrance, their curious smell of sewage emanating boldly from the concrete. He would recognize the delivery-men unloading their trucks, the Super rattling open the freight entrance, the secretary punctually smoking a cigarette in front of the building, the furniture store cat indolently giving life to the window display, and then he would enter a building that for years would remain faceless to him.
He would wonder if these moments added up were to be his entire life.
Once inside the office he would open his window, sink into his chair, check the phone for voicemail, power on his computer, check his email and glance at the news headlines before beginning his work. Every now and then he would step towards the window to look down at the street below. There the world moved at an equally predictable pace, and from this vantage point, from where every element seemed so delicate and every trajectory so limited, fate seemed a reasonable proposition. Every movement was rigged by a larger context and transformed into something preordained, even the unexpected. From there he would witness past, present and future.
A couple argued loudly on the wet sidewalk below, moving back and forth between each other like two atoms bound by inexplicable energy, pushing and pulling, coming and going, engaging in and braking from a reassuring embrace. The man bounced around feverishly, stepping on and off the sidewalk as he argued, his words rising above the street but their meaning getting lost somewhere in the drone of the city. The woman watched in embarrassment as he stepped into the street and held up traffic, still arguing. She yelled for him to stop it, true desperation in her pitch. The man seized on this fleeting power and laid down flat on his back in the middle of the street, his arms stretched out wide like he was making a snow angel on the grimy asphalt. Cars bottled up the entire block, but no one honked their horns, a strange display of respect or just plain awe. The delivery van at the front of the line tried to navigate past him, but the man scooted himself like a crab in order to block it from going around, savoring this moment of control, his own personal tiny Tiananmen Square. Eventually people grew tired of the spectacle and laid on their horns. Satisfied, the man got up and sauntered back to the sidewalk, where the woman awaited in obvious defeat. Whatever point he was trying to make, he had made it. They exchanged a few more words, clinched each other like two tired boxers, and then, just like that, walked off in opposite directions. Their desperate gestures seemed choreographed but their goodbye poorly rehearsed. Their stories got mingled with all the others on the street.
Closing his window now, the man would go back to work at his desk, not before looking up at the clock on the far wall. The truth had been ticking away.
