Shuteye for the Timebroker (11 page)

Underground

The girl came hurtling out of the faraway blot of darkness and down the radiant tiled corridor at me, crucified on a dirty white square of light.

The air was filled with a roaring like the bellows of slaughtered mechanical gods.

Before I had time to register more than a flash of her frightened face and awkwardly contorted form, she was past me, and the train ground shudderingly to a halt.

I was standing at the very end—and edge—of the platform, so I was even now with the first car. My wingtip shoes overhung the stained concrete by less than an inch, but the train actually brushed them lightly before I could pull back. I was that startled by the apparition of the girl pressed up against the grime-smeared window of the lead car.

While I stood transfixed by what I had seen (or imagined I’d seen), the doors nearest me—and along the length of the train—opened with a noisy rolling clatter.

I’ve often thought—-in years of subterranean travels—how much this opening of doors resembles the way impulses propagate down a nerve, as if the subway were the fibers of something sentient, thinking vast and inconceivable thoughts, of which humans are merely the chemical messengers.

Everywhere down the long, impatiently waiting bulk of the train, people exited. Everywhere, that is, except for the first car, the car I stood beside. No one came through any of the three sets of doors set into its length—most certainly not the girl I had briefly seen.

I thought this was odd. True, the first car always had an inexplicable tendency to attract fewer passengers than the others. But it shouldn’t have been entirely empty at this hour of the morning. Was there something the matter onboard? Was I going to be putting myself in jeopardy by getting in? What about the girl I had seen? Was she the victim of some assault whom everyone had abandoned? Or—and why did I imagine this?—was she the reason the car was empty?

All these thoughts rattled through my head in the time it took the hungry train to disgorge its old riders and swallow new ones. Then I heard the doors begin to roll shut, saw them inching out of their slots, and I knew the train was chafing to be gone.

If I didn’t move now, it would leave without me.

How would I ever learn the story of the girl pinned to the window like a dead butterfly?

Did I even want to learn it?

Yes, I thought, I did.

I tossed myself through the narrowing doors, feeling them snap at my coattails.

Inside I caught a pole with my free hand (briefcase swinging in the other), spun around halfway, and fell into the gray plastic bench against the inner wall.

As the train roared off, I saw that the car was indeed empty, except for one small figure at the front end (and, I assumed, the driver, ensconced in his little coffinlike cab up front; however, I had not noticed him in his window when the train pulled in, since the drivers tend to keep their cabs dark for better tunnel vision, and also since I had been so shaken by the sight of the girl; for all I knew the cab could be empty and the train a driverless rogue).

The other person in the car with me was, of course, the girl I had seen as the train surged into the station.

From my new perspective, the girl was even more dramatically positioned. Only now the window was obsidian black, shot through with an occasional blue tunnel-light.

Her arms were raised over her head as she gripped the narrow ledge above the door. (I knew her fingers would come away filthy from such a hold, since I had often stood that way myself.) Her legs were braced wide apart, to accommodate the unpredictable rocking of the train. The X of her body seemed pasted to the graffiti-sprayed wall. As I watched, she pressed her young loins against the door as if to burn a hole in it with the force of some fervid desire compounded not of sex, but of some even more primal urge.

She was dressed like a million others girls: flat shoes, black stretch pants, a white shirt hanging out to below her slim hips. Her shoulder- length hair was an unusual color, though: icy blond, almost platinum. The black headband she wore across the top of her skull and down underneath her fall of hair only accentuated the startling color, and I could picture her choosing it for just that reason.

With that confident—and usually false—sense of certainty that we sometimes get as we consider strangers, I felt that she had to be a student, either late high school or first year of college. Why she was standing in such a strained and dramatic fashion, though—that I couldn’t say. Was she high, I thought, so early in the morning? Or was she only emotionally distressed? Perhaps she stood as she did just for the hell of it. As I said, I often stood and gazed out the front window myself, watching the lost, dark miles of track go by, wondering when the last time was anyone had set foot on any particular spot. I especially liked watching as the train pulled into the stations, seeing the assembled commuters sprawled chaotically like chess pieces shaken out of their box.

Now that I had seen how bizarre a person framed in the lead window could look, however, I doubted I’d be doing it again soon.

Deceleration tugged at me as my thoughts wandered all around the girl in this fashion. The train was slowing for the next stop. I looked intently at the girl—whose face I had not seen well from the platform—wondering what she would do now, if this was perhaps her stop, and would I learn any more about her.

But as the train ground with screeches and shivers to a halt she remained immobile, a martyred saint out of some medieval triptych, still glued to the wall.

The doors rumbled open, and I waited for fellow passengers to stream in, since this was usually a busy stop.

But no one else got into my car.

By the time the doors closed and we got under way again, I had decided. I couldn’t just sit there and not ask if the girl was okay. Her whole posture bespoke some tremendous agony or anxiety, which was obviously communicating itself to everyone on the platform and keeping them out of this particular car. (Everyone except me, of course. And why was that? Some special affinity for the girl, since I had so often been in her position? I found it hard to say.)

I stood up in the swaying car, clutching my briefcase in one hand and a strap in the other. (What an anachronism, to call these metal, shovel-grip arms “straps”—but the city is made up of many such layers of new reality over old terms.)

I moved awkwardly down toward the front of the car.

The girl didn’t turn until I was right behind her.

Then she swung around stiffly, as if she had to fight to make her muscles obey her.

I saw her face.

Maybe it could have been beautiful under different circumstances. Now it was distorted by a mixture of emotions: fear, rage, terror, grief, uncertainty.

Her skin was blotchy from crying. Her lips were tightly compressed, her chin dimpled with the effort. A lot of my uncertainty about her looks stemmed from the sunglasses she wore. (Yes, now I remembered her visage striped with blackness through the window.) Darker than an abandoned station, hugging her pronounced cheekbones, they concealed her eyes entirely, making her face largely a mystery.

“Leave me alone,” she said grimly, barely moving her lips to utter the warning.

“Listen, miss,” I said. “I don’t normally bug people on the subway— no sense pushing the wrong button and getting shot. But you look like you could use some help.”

She barked, a noise I hesitate to call a laugh. It was more like a hysterical, indrawn sob.

“You can’t help me. I’m dead.”

Her words hit me like a runaway train. The fetid underground air seemed to thicken as she spoke, until I felt I was going to choke. The train passed over a gap in the power rail and the overhead lights went out for a second, like a candle in the wind, leaving the wan glow of the emergency bulbs to fill the car with a sickly orange hue. The noise of the train’s enormous passage suddenly changed to a sitarlike whine, and I heard in my head, of all things, the Beatles singing:
She said, she said, I know what it’s like to be dead.

The memory of the familiar song restored me a little to myself, serving as a reassuringly mundane touchstone. What kind of person would say such a thing? She didn’t look crazy, so she had to be really distraught.

“Don’t talk like that,” I said, “even as a joke. It’s wrong. You’re no more dead than I am.”

Again, she barked, a sound too harsh for such a young throat. When she’d turned, she had dropped her arms to her sides, and now one hand wrung the other, as if it were a washcloth that had to be squeezed dry.

“All right,” she said bitterly. “If it makes you feel better, I’m not dead. Maybe I was just never born. That would explain it. I feel like part of this train anyway. I’ve been riding it since I was a kid, going one place or another. Sometimes it seems I’m down here more often than I’m not. Do you know how that can be, mister? Is time different down here, maybe? You think that’s it?”

She seemed to be calming down a little—or was I just deluding myself? She still stood taut as a bowstring, almost ready to snap. Perhaps if I humored her, I could get her to sit down, at least.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I never thought about it that way before. Perhaps you’re right though. Sometimes you read a page in your book, look up, and you’re halfway across the city. Other times to go a few blocks down here can take forever.”

She nodded rather too violently, as if what I had said confirmed her worst fears. A tear leaked out from under her glasses and crawled slowly down one cheek. I wished I could see her eyes.

“Forever,” she said after a few seconds, looking as if she wanted to spit. “Jesus, how I hate that word. It’s so fucking big and cold. It’s like a stone in my stomach.”

She left off wringing her hands and laid them both across her stomach. She bent forward violently, as if someone had gut-punched her. It was as if she were the magician’s assistant in the sawed-woman trick and something had gone wrong and now she was feeling the toothed blade pulled back and forth across her soft flesh.

“Hey,” I said, really concerned now. “Why don’t you sit down for a minute?”

She unfolded herself gradually-—as if the pain were receding, or perhaps had been only remembered—with an immense effort of will and energy. She looked straight at me. At least I think it was straight at me. Those damn glasses made it almost impossible to tell. She could just as easily have been looking over my shoulder at some nightmare vision conjured up out of her own brain.

Suddenly I felt that maybe, in looking at her, I was doing that also.

“No,” she said, now somewhat more self-possessed. “No, I don’t want to sit down. I want to stand here and look where we’re going.”

With that she turned again toward the window set in the door and practically mashed her face up against it, as much as her glasses would allow. I wanted to say:
If you’ve ridden this train so often, surely you know where you’re going.
But something kept me from speaking.

I wondered what the driver beside us—if he could hear us through the closed door of his cab—thought of our crazy conversation. I wondered what I thought of it. Was it worth pursuing? Shouldn’t I just leave this poor distressed kid to her private sorrows and move to another car? What right did I have to intrude?

I was just turning to go when her voice brought me back.

“Hey, mister, it’s lonely in this car. Won’t you look out with me?”

I hesitated. Then I heard myself saying, “Sure. If you want me to.”

She didn’t say anything to that, so I assumed it was OK.

I moved beside her and she shifted to give me some room at the window. It was a tight squeeze and our hips ended up touching.

Her clothed flesh was as cold as the water that dripped from the station ceilings in winter. Her touch seemed to suck the living heat from my body.

But I couldn’t find it in myself to desert her.

Together we stared at the scene hurtling by, as if it were some television broadcast from hell.

Just beyond the door was a small platform extending out a few inches. Three or four weak-looking chains were strung across the edge of this precarious ledge. They were all that would hold you back from falling onto the tracks if you stepped out.

But I had no intention of stepping out. Why had I even briefly considered it?

Beyond the nose of the car the tunnel was a claustrophobic, stygian alley, relieved here and there by puny lights outlining emergency exits to the surface or certain inscrutable valves and switches. The train’s own headlights barely diminished the overwhelming darkness that continually rushed forward at us. The track was littered with random rubbish: paper cups, spikes, boards, pipes, rags. I wondered how the drivers could stand to confront this senseless, monotonous, utterly ugly vista hour after hour. What must it do to their souls?

And to the souls of the passengers?

Suddenly, without warning, my perceptions of the scene flipped ninety degrees. The tunnel, instead of being horizontal, became vertical.

It was an endless pit. And we were plunging straight down it.

I witnessed our heart-stopping fall for countless seconds, sweat beading my brow, my pulse racing. My hand clutching the handle of my briefcase ached.