Fiction

The yellow light in the lobby moves through the door’s framed glass and out into the street at midnight. It understands my shape on the asphalt out front, with my outline propped delicately over the sidewalk, whose burnished edge looks weirdly razor-like in the glow. My hand is on the glass behind me, and the heat from my fingertips gets pulled off in moist prints on its surface. The door closes with a hard sound, and I take the three steps down slowly. The night is brisk and dry. All along the Seventh Avenue sidewalks, lampposts form a colonnade that guides the eye toward Flatbush Avenue on the right and the Prospect Expressway overpass on the left. Overhead, stars defy the bright communion of the metropolitan night, shining.

  I’m already walking toward Flatbush Ave. when I realize that there won’t be any cabs tonight. I’ve stayed later than I should have, I know: longer than I usually do on nights like these. The walk uptown is long and strange, and there is something about the particular air that settles in the streets at night that fills men with a sense of death or cosmic loneliness. Maybe I should’ve stayed, tried to patch things up. Maybe that’s what she was hoping for, keeping me there so long. I can still go back.

  It’s been this way for three months, but it only feels like a couple of weeks, and it could have actually lasted for a half-century the way it all cycles back on itself. We won’t speak to one another for days, a couple weeks at most, and then she’ll call. Sometimes I call too, but I’ve tried not to these days. She’s sensed it. She doesn’t even pretend to have reasons anymore. And then I’m there, and a cigarette is lit and a cockroach is smashed and a star collapses and we’re screaming at one another as if nothing had changed, as if we were still together. Or we’re so quiet we could both be underwater. The period that Ellie and I were together is most easily remembered as the period where we were breaking up.

 And tonight is the same, but maybe she really does want me to hit the buzzer, to apologize and we’ll go to bed and wake up in the morning baffled and miserable and smiling like machines. On either side of me, the night renders the dignified and crumbling facades of the old brownstones completely obscure. I can still go back. The light inside the slouching afterthought of the Seventh Ave. subway stop is bright and depressive; a light that strikes out against secrets. Inside the turnstile, there is a sort of abbreviated antechamber tiled from ceiling to floor in off-white ceramic with hints of flower-vine patterning at the eye level. An almost life-and-a-half sized wooden bench, wrought with illegible carvings and magic marker scrawl, sits on the landing between two staircases. The left, a sign indicates, takes you to the platform for the Q and B trains running uptown, toward Manhattan, toward home. The right, says another, leads to the same trains running downtown, through Sheepshead Bay and Brighton Beach, past the Aquarium, all the way to Coney Island.

I’m not going back. In this truthful light, I study the blue blood beneath my skin, and I’m filled with the giddy and melodramatic impulse of all true children: to become lost beyond all responsibility. I am certain I will board the next train that arrives, and I’m certain that it will take me downtown, towards disaster and Coney Island. I imagine Ellie waiting up countless hours until she decides that I really have gone home. It’s satisfying enough to know that she’ll be wrong. I erase any thought of rest or reconciliation from my mind. Already it feels as if I’m about to board a spaceship, momentous and apocryphal.

I can hear the nondescript rumbling of the Q moving into the station, and I take the stairs to the downtown platform, where a boy with green slacks, white t-shirt and an olive complexion is standing beneath one of the only working bulbs on the platform. The youth’s hands are in his pockets. He could be about 15, but tall for his age, and he stares past me as if I were invisible. His eyes are black, or appear to be, and his mouth is shut tight. There’s something about his posture that makes him look either highly dangerous or chronically ill. When the train finally pulls in, he never moves. I walk past in silence, watching him. Maybe he has some other agenda. There’s no one in my car when the automated bell sounds and the doors of the train slide shut. Maybe he’ll get the next one. It doesn’t matter. The trains run all night.

We move. The night is indifferent to elaborately vandalized concrete walls of the trench that accommodates the BMT Brighton Line, and the only thing I can see in the window is the reflection of the car’s interior; empty plastic bucket-seats, vertical handrails, rows of leather hoops along the aisle, and my own face. Above the windows, advertisements prod those passengers absent of mind or without any other recourse, “Earn Your GED,” “Give Blood,” and “Ask For Help.” On another, a cheerful blond child is running through the spray on a beach somewhere warm with the caption, “Jimmy Doesn’t Know He Has Lymphosarcoma.”