Another train goes by.
“One was, like, three years ago,” says Mel, trying to be helpful, “and the other was ...” His hand hangs in the air, waiting for his mouth to complete the thought.
An awkward silence fills the room as it dawns on everyone that this may not be a fit topic for discussion.
“And the other was just before the thing with your little girl,” Mel says quickly, trying to finish the thought and move on to something else.
John G. stares at him for a long time without speaking. His eyes are like lightbulbs with the filaments burned out.
“I didn’t go looking for them, Mel,” he says quietly. “They jumped in front of my train.”
“Hey.” Mel throws up his hands. “No one said it was your fault, G.”
John G. carries his radio along the outdoor platform, heading for his train. The sky opens up above him like God’s eyelid. Everything is strange now. The world is different, but all the people keep going on as if nothing has changed. The maintenance workers in orange-and-yellow vests clean out the garbage bins. A man with his body cut in half pulls himself along on a dolly with wheels. A young black guy in a business suit gets on board with a briefcase and a copy of the
Haiti Observateur.
Two pale white guys wearing Sikh turbans follow him. John G. is having trouble putting it all together in his mind. Less than a half hour ago, he was ready to jump in front of a train himself. But something inside him won’t let him cross that threshold just yet.
By eight-fifteen, he’s in the motorman’s cabin, a space as dank and narrow as an old phone booth. He takes out the picture of his wife and daughter that he carries in his wallet and sets it on the ledge in front of him. Ernest, the conductor, gives the all-clear signal; he’s about to close the doors. John G. pushes down on the metal handle, letting air into the brakes, and the train lurches forward, beginning the long trip through the heart of the city.
There’s relief in the ritual and routine. Seeing the same faces, making the same stops. He’s getting through life minute by minute these days—scrounging for reasons to keep going.
Most of the ride through the Bronx is aboveground, taking him over the rough topography of his childhood. Tar roofs. Wide streets. Spanish churches, gas stations, and lots filled with garbage and old tires. Some days it’s like a roller-coaster ride. The rise up to Gun Hill Road, the steep drop before Pelham Parkway, the wild curve into Bronx Park East.
But just before the Third Avenue-149th Street station, the train suddenly plunges down and darkness swallows it like a mouth. He’s in the long tunnel. Cheap fun-house lights flash by
on the left. A baby cries in the car behind him. Though he’s been making this trip every weekday for two years, that fast descent always fills him with dread.
As he snakes past Grand Concourse and then 135th Street, his worst impulses begin to crowd him. Go ahead, the voice in his head says. Hop off at 125th Street. Go smoke some crack on Lenox Avenue. Let the passengers fend for themselves. This train is out of service.
But it’s not so easy to quit. As he pulls up to the next platform, he sees a tall, exhausted-looking Hispanic woman, done up in a red-and-white striped dress and lacquered hair, cradling a sickly child in her arms. A working mother bringing her daughter to the doctor or day care. Maybe a secretary on Wall Street or a receptionist.
He pictures her in a cramped Morningside Heights apartment, trying to put her makeup on with the baby screaming in the next room. Botanica candles on the windowsill, slipcovers on the couch, framed baby pictures on the bedroom dresser. The bathroom so clean and white you could go blind turning on the light in the middle of the night. If she’s got a husband, he’s probably off doing the early shift at the garage or the loading dock, with the pork sandwich she made for him in his lunch box. Not rich people, but not poor either. Just clinging to one another and dragging themselves into the future. And a life he should have had.
Grinding the train to a halt, John G. feels obliged to get her wherever she wants to go.
Pressure, pressure. Stay on schedule. His eyes are tired and his head is starting to ache. Just outside the Times Square station, he gets a red signal and a call from the master control tower. “You got a twelve-seven. You’re being held because of a sick passenger in the train up ahead.”
“How long’s it going to be?”
“When we hear, you’ll hear.”
It’s as useless talking to supervisors as trying to probe the mind of God.
God. For some reason, he finds himself thinking a lot about God this morning. Why does God do things? Why does God make trains stop? Why does God take the life of a child?
There’s an angry pounding on the door of his cabin.
“Come on, boy! Give us some speed!”
He tries to radio back to the control tower, but all he gets is a blizzard of voices and static. No answers.
There’s too little air in the cabin. He throws open the door, just so he can breathe. A car full of riders stares back at him. Men in dark suits. Women in running shoes and silk blouses. Young people on their way in the world, determining the value of the dollar, the price of doing business, the cost of living.
“Why is it like this every goddamn morning?” says one of them, a weak-chinned white guy in tortoise-shell rimmed glasses and a khaki poplin suit. He stands under the ad for Dr. Tusch, hemorrhoid M.D.
What does it say in the procedure book? John G. tries to remember.
BE CAREFUL NOT TO IGNORE YOUR PASSENGERS. WHEN YOU IGNORE THEM, EVEN FOR A LITTLE WHILE, THEY THINK THAT YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN THEM. AND IF THEY THINK THAT YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN THEM, THAT IS WHEN THEY ARE GOING TO CAUSE YOU AND THE SYSTEM A PROBLEM
.
“I’m sorry, sir,” says John G. “It’s beyond my control.”
The weak-chinned guy turns to a friend of his, a young man with a face as pink and round as a baby’s bottom. “See? They only get idiots to do these jobs.”
John G. stands there with his eyelids throbbing. Should he take a swing at the guy? After all, he’s got nothing left to lose. On the other hand, this job is the only thing between him and the abyss. Everything else that marked his place in the world is gone.
He struggles to decide for a few seconds and then goes back to the motorman’s cabin.
Beyond my control. He looks at the picture of his family on the cabin ledge.
By the time he gets the train rolling again, it’s seven minutes behind schedule. More pressure. His head feels as if it’s filling up
with helium. Pillars flash by like tiger stripes before his eyes. He forgets where he is for a few seconds and when he comes to again, the tracks are curving and Ernest, the conductor, is announcing the next stop is Fourteenth Street. John doesn’t remember Thirty-fourth.
He looks down and sees the speedometer reading fifty-three, fifty-four, fifty-five. Brake shoes scream on rusty corroded tracks. The car rocks dangerously from side to side. Ghost stations, local stops, graffiti swirls, work crews. They all go rocketing by. His eyes barely have time to register them. There’s too much going on. Some 120 yards outside the Fourteenth Street station, he sees the yellow signal. Then the green over yellow indicating the tracks are about to switch the train over to the local side. But something’s wrong.
There’s someone on the tracks beyond the switch.
He blows his horn but the figure doesn’t move. A man waving his arms. Beckoning. Come on. Do it. Run me over. One part of John G.’s brain is denying it, telling him this isn’t happening. He blinks and the man is gone. But when he blinks again, the man is back, waving him on with both arms. Blood rushes out of John G.’s heart and runs straight into his head. Stop. You’re about to do it again.
The train comes hammering around the bend at sixty miles an hour, spraying the air with steel dust. There’s no time to decide which of the visions is real: the beckoning man on the local tracks or the empty space. He just has to act. His eyes jiggle in his skull. Instead of slowing down to wait for the switch, he keeps going at maximum power onto the express side.
But then the darkness breaks and he sees he’s made a terrible mistake. Another train is sitting directly in front of him at the station. The white-on-red number 3 on the last car grows like a bloodshot eye. He reaches for the emergency brake but it’s too late. He’s going to crash. A screech like a buzz saw cuts through his ears. Lights go out in the car behind him. Bodies whiplash against the sides. Voices cry out. In the nearing distance, he sees people backing away from the edge of the platform.
They’re thinking subway crash. They’re thinking bits of twisted
metal, torn concrete, and body parts found among the debris. They’re thinking last moments before life slips away amid terror and confusion.
But at the last possible second, he throws the brake and the mechanical track arm hits the trip cock on the undercarriage. Instead of stopping short, the train slows and bumps hard against the back of the number 3.
There’s a jolt and the whole train shudders. John G. looks up and sees a shrunken old Asian woman staring at him from the back window of the 3 train. She looks less scared than sad, as if she somehow understands what’s driven him to this point. The radio bleats.
“What the fuck happened there?!” asks the voice from the master control tower.
“There was someone down on the tracks,” he says.
There’s a pause and then static. In the car behind him, he hears people straightening themselves up and weeping in relief, trying to adjust to life at an angle. The voice on the radio comes back again.
“Eight-one-five, there’s no report of anyone on the tracks,” it says. “You been seeing things?”
John G. says nothing. He tries to picture the figure he saw on the local side, but there’s no afterimage in his mind. Only black space. He knows now he can no longer control himself.
“Eight-one-five, you just missed killing about two thousand people,” says the voice on the radio. “I hope you’re happy.”
He stumbles numb out of the cabin and looks around. The scene in the car is a low-budget disaster movie. No one looks seriously hurt, but some people are still on the floor crying. Others are trying to clamber back into their seats with bloody noses and disheveled clothes. The guy with the weak chin stands by the door with his glasses knocked sideways, ready to get off and go about his business. John G. stares hard at him and then ducks back into the cabin. He finds the picture of his wife and daughter on the floor. He puts it back in his wallet and walks the length of the train back to where the Hispanic lady in the striped dress is sitting with her daughter. They’re cowering in the last car under
an ad for Audrey Cohen College. It says:
It’s never too late to become what you might have been.
He kneels before them and looks into the child’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” he says.
The woman cannot speak. The child tries to bury her head under her mother’s arm. John G. rises and opens the back door. And without another word, he drops down onto the tracks and disappears into the darkness beyond.
2
You’re losing them, Jake thinks. Absolutely losing them. Especially the lady in the front row of the jury box. With the frizzy blond hair, the Chanel scarf, and the Upper East Side address. Barbara something. She doesn’t want to hear some fat probation supervisor explain the reporting system. That’s not how you’re going to win her over, Jake tells himself. She wants that human touch. She wants drama. She wants someone she can root for. You’re thinking
Court TV.
She’s thinking
L.A. Law
and
As The World Turns.
So Jacob Schiff for the defense plants his feet by the balustrade on the left side of the courtroom and tries to find a way to psych himself back into this trial.
The witness, a coagulated puddle of a man named Jack Pirone, has just blown a hole through the middle of Jake’s case.
“So according to your records, Mr. Pirone, my client showed up for his appointment as scheduled, December thirteenth. Is that correct?”
“I have the date right here,” says Pirone, chewing hard even though he doesn’t appear to have anything in his mouth.
There goes the alibi, thinks Jake. He’d just put a girl named Shante on the stand to say she was with his client that day in Virginia; therefore Hakeem Turner, potential NBA rookie of the year, could not have been the one firing the shots from a red
Jeep Wagoneer that killed a young drug dealer on East 129th Street.
“A moment, please, Judge.”
Jake circles back to counsel’s table, looking for something.
“He lying,” mutters Hakeem, who somehow looks even larger and more threatening in a green Italian suit than he does in shorts on a basketball court. “He’s a lying motherfucker. Kill ‘im. Tear his heart out.”
Jake puts a hand on Hakeem’s thick shoulder. Cool it. Something hard moves under his palm. Jake picks up the yellow legal pad covered in red scrawl about Pirone’s grand jury testimony.
“Rip his throat out,” Hakeem murmurs.
Jake tries to smile reassuringly as he returns to the podium. Remember: chin down, mouth relaxed. When you smile, you’re a handsome dog, his wife tells him. When you frown, you look like a pit bull.
“Now, Mr. Pirone,” he says, setting his feet as if he’s about to try a three-point shot himself. “It’s true, is it not, that as a supervisor you don’t actually see the clients who come into your office, do you?”
Pirone, who must weigh at least 280 pounds, shifts the fedora and files on his lap. “I know what’s going on in my own office, Counselor,” he says. “I been with this agency almost twenty years.”
“Well, then you’re aware that my client had a special exemption allowing him to go out of town. Like on days when his team was playing in other states. Right?”
“Yeah, but this wasn’t one of those days.” Pirone’s jaw keeps working. “Not according to my records.”
“And your records are always correct. Is that right?”
“Far as I know.” The left side of Pirone’s mouth turns up.