Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me(22)

We finished the pie. I looked at Oliver’s watch and saw that it was almost three thirty; we’d been here three hours. Oliver signed an advance copy of Hallucinations—“You will be the only person in all of Iceland with this book”—and I gave her a copy of one of mine. “For Bj?rk, with gratitude,” I signed it.





THE WEEPING MAN


I left work one night at five fifteen and headed west on Fulton to catch the uptown 4/5 at Broadway. The sidewalk was packed thick with commuters. I felt weary and aggravated by the slow pace of the crowd. “Come on, people,” I muttered under my breath, “let’s move.” Just as I said this, I noticed something not right: a young man, two or three people ahead of me, crumpling. A building caught his fall. I came to his side. He was pale; his face contorted; he clutched his arm. He was dressed in a suit, as if he had just left his office on Wall Street. “Are you okay?” I asked. “Are you sick? Do you need help?” I wondered if he was having a seizure. I felt for my cell phone in my pocket, ready to make a call.

He didn’t answer. He was Asian and, for a moment, I wondered if he didn’t speak English. I repeated myself: “Are you in pain? Do you need help?”

“No, I’m okay,” he said, and then began weeping. I looked around, not sure what to do. Passersby were watching. The young man stood and began walking slowly, still weeping all the while. I stayed by his side.

“You sure you’re okay?” I asked. “If I can do anything to help—”

He nodded, so, though reluctant, I went on my way, taking the steps down to the subway station. When I rounded the corner, I saw he was behind me. Our eyes met. I slowed my pace so he wouldn’t lose track of me in the crowd. He followed, through the turnstile and onto the platform. He looked so distraught, his face a rictus of pain. I had a bad feeling, I just did, frightened that he might do something to harm himself. He came and stood next to me; he cried quietly but didn’t speak.

Fortunately, a train arrived immediately, and I ushered him onto the car. Commuters rushed through, pushing their way in, pushing hard; you can’t believe how crowded a subway car can be at rush hour.

He grabbed hold of a pole with both hands, so tightly his knuckles went white. He began crying again. The subway car was packed so tightly that I was pressed right against him. I told him my name and asked his. “Kenneth,” he mumbled, saying it with derision.

“What’s going on, Kenneth?” I whispered.

He took a deep breath. “It’s all gone wrong!” he spit out. “My entire life.”

Had he lost his job? Lost a fortune? Gotten his heart broken? I didn’t ask. I put a light hand on his shoulder and let the train’s hum answer him.

We rode in silence for a while.

He looked up at one point. “You’re a good person,” he said brusquely. He tried to say it nicely, I could tell, but somehow it didn’t come out that way; it sounded like a mean accusation. It was actually sort of funny. I couldn’t help but smile.

“Listen,” I told him, “I have had days like the one you are having.” I told him how sometimes I used to go out to the pier at Christopher Street when it was empty, just to have a cry. “It’s hard.”

The car was packed tight yet completely quiet but for the sound of a young man in a nice suit and tie, crying. I looked around and saw alert, concerned faces—people not wanting to intrude but at the same time listening.

An Indian woman seated nearby caught my eye. She mouthed to me: Is he okay? Does he want to sit down? I asked Kenneth, but, no, he wanted to stay put. The Indian woman squeezed through and joined us. There we were, three strangers steadying ourselves on the same subway pole. Pressing up against us from all sides, it seemed, were hundreds and hundreds of subway riders, in this car, and in the next, and in the next, in both directions, like a long retaining wall that keeps a whole mountainside from sliding down.

She asked Kenneth if he had a place to go, people to be with tonight. He was going home, he answered. He had to get off at Grand Central to get the train to Yonkers. She offered to go with him. He refused her help—No, no, he said—but she insisted she would be happy to go.

I thanked her. “I have to get off at the next stop. You’ll make sure he gets home safe?”

“Absolutely.” She introduced herself to him, her voice like a song.

The subway stopped at Fourteenth Street–Union Square. I wished Kenneth well and thanked the woman again and stepped off.





A Touch-Up





NOTES FROM A JOURNAL

9-16-12:

In Brooklyn, waiting for the subway back to Manhattan at the Graham Avenue stop, I happened to see a somewhat older man—nice-looking, bald, maybe fifty-eight, fifty-nine—do a double take as a young woman walked by in a short skirt. He looked over and saw that I’d seen him seeing her. He smiled. “Do you think she knows how pretty she is?” he said to me.

She was just far enough away that she couldn’t have heard him.

I watched her, retreating with her friend; she was a knockout, at least from the back, she really was. “I’m not sure. Why don’t you ask her?”

He shook his head. “Nah, too old for her.” Pause. “I’ll tell another one that tonight.”

“A date?” He nodded, and as if in preparation for whatever he had going on later, he began doing a waltz—one-two-three, one-two-three. This was the sweetest thing to see, like that time I saw the actor on the subway practicing his lines, a rolled up script in one hand. The man kept dancing. The subway came. At the far end of the platform, the girl and her friend got into one car. Here, the waltzing man and I got into another.