The L Train
The city is surprisingly quiet. She expected something different, something more like what you see in the movies; bustling crowds, musicians, buskers lining the tiled corridors of a metro. She didn’t realize that the L train runs above ground and every stop is a simple wooden platform with a roof for shade. It must be extremely cold in the winter. She imagines passengers stomping freezing feet, hunched over, breath rising in columns of white smoke, like when the Vatican announces a new Pope.
The trains are quiet too. People scroll through their phones, some listen to music—she sees one man doing a crossword. No one looks at each other. Everyone seems to be pretending they are invisible. Like the games children sometimes play.
He is the only one to get on at the stop.
Even from a quick sideways glance, she can see that he is teetering on the edge of reality and a world he has created. She notices his shirt right away. It is a soft, smooth green and with his cream pants and grey tattered sneakers he looks like a quirky and highly intelligent professor of philosophy. Or an artist. Or a writer. His glasses are square and brown and a closer look reveals they are being held in place by a string tied around his head. His pants are stained and his shoes have no laces. His hair is chopped too close to the skull in some places and is generally unkempt but she notices that it is the loveliest colour, especially against the green of his shirt.
She looks at her fellow passengers and feels a ripple run through the train. Everyone is silently calculating the risk. Is he harmless? Will he create problems? Where will he sit?
Despite the many empty seats, he doesn’t sit. Instead he stays by the door and reaches up to hold the metal bar that runs along the roof. He grips it in one of his large freckled hands and lets his arm stretch out to hold his weight as he lifts his feet off the ground and bends his knees until he hangs there, dangling, swaying with the motion of the train. He stays suspended in air like that for a minute, and she senses that he is looking around at the passengers searching for a reaction.
No one looks.
He switches hands and dangles again from the bar. After a few seconds he grabs it with both hands and pulls himself up in quick spurts of strength. She feels another ripple. The man across from her meets her gaze. His teen-age daughter can’t hide her disdain for the man in the green shirt. People further down the aisle shift in their seats, readjusting the energy in the car to accommodate his strangeness, his unbalance, and their own fear.
He is invisible.
He stops his exercise and stands motionless. A wave of crackling energy from the passengers who are silently willing him not to sit near them, rushes through the car.
She also feels uncomfortable, unsure what will happen if he sits next to her. She feels, or imagines she feels, that what he really wants is to be seen. He must sense this from her and he moves down the car and sits two seats away.
As he passes her, she can smell him in the hot, heavy air.
She doesn’t look up. Instead she abides by the silent agreement to ignore the man in the green shirt with the lovely coloured hair, and his own story of what brought him to the edge.
He sits, with his back leaning against the corner, and takes a tennis ball from his pocket. He tosses it up with one hand and quickly snatches it from the air with the same hand. Another trick.
No one looks.
He tosses the ball a few more times. Eventually he puts it back in his pocket and leans down over his legs with his elbows resting on his knees. He stares into space, and breaking the agreement, she looks at him and he lets her. She wonders if his brothers worry about him. One brother in particular, the successful one, who is a doctor. The one that everyone is impressed by and comfortable in his presence. He does his best to make it that way, a sub-conscious effort to balance the pendulum his brother swings in the opposite direction. Stirring up fear, embarrassment and even antipathy in almost every person, in every space he enters. Both of the brothers change the air around them. One smells like leather and wool and soap and the other like stale cigarette smoke and the sweat and grime of days spent crisscrossing the city and hanging from train hand holds, trying to become visible again.
Two stops later he gets off.