I made it down into the cavernous main area of the station, which I knew was both broad and complex. I was aware from my sighted experience that I would have to find my way to the crosstown shuttle train to Times Square. The shuttle would take me west to a change to the uptown Broadway train, which would then take me some seventy blocks north to Columbia. It gave me a sinking feeling. I asked someone how to get through the central hall to the shuttle area. He probably thought I was drunk, but he told me anyway. I still had my arms out, as if sleepwalking.
Being told directions is one thing; following them when you are blind is another. I knocked into benches, suitcases, briefcases; into people who had their backs to me. I stumbled on coffee cups that people had placed at their feet. Somehow, the skin on my shins got split open; I felt blood wetting my socks. My knees seemed to be swelling, probably because I had banged them so many times. I wanted to be both dead and alive, but alive only if I could get out of that pit.
Fortunately, I recalled some landmarks from my days with vision, and travelers around me answered my questions and turned me in the right directions. By this method, bumping into people and asking questions, I made it to the general area where I could take the shuttle train crosstown to Times Square. When I hit a turnstile, I reached into my pocket for a token, felt around the turnstile for the token slot, and paid my fare. A small thing, but it was huge to me.
I was walking toward the track when I bumped head-on into an iron column. My arms, which had been held out like a zombie’s, had missed it completely and it was my face, instead, that met it. Blood came down my forehead. I swiped at it with my forearm. It hurt, but worse than the hurt was the idea that everyone would see me bleeding. I wished that because I could not see people, they could not see me.
I swung around to get away from the column. My forehead was still bleeding, but I think it had stopped a little. The smell down in the subway was greasy and oily. It made me feel dirty. I started to shuffle, little by little, toward the platform area. I again had my hands out. I dipped my toe into empty space and was suddenly greeted by a terrifying sound—to my left a train roared toward my probing leg.
I lunged backward, changed direction slightly, raised my arms once more as I pushed onward. They hit something soft. It was a woman’s breast.
“Pardon me!” this woman said.
“Oh God,” I said. “God, I’m sorry, I can’t—I didn’t see you.”
“That’s a first,” she said.
“I’m terribly sorry.”
“It’s all right. In my line of work, it happens, though never like that.”
“Oh,” I said.
“But you’re not bad,” she said. “You look like a nice boy.”
“Oh.”
“Are you?”
“What?”
“Nice.”
I thought about what to tell her, what version of myself I should reveal. I didn’t know, actually, if I was a nice boy or not, good or not, decent or not. I thought I was all those things, but it was as if this affliction was somehow bringing me down, was spoiling all the goodness in me into darker things. I thought again of the market in Buffalo and the blind beggar I had seen there with my mother. The entire scene repeated itself to me now. He was a sickly looking man, with peeling scabs on his hands. He wore ragged clothes that seemed to fall off him, and his eyes were not covered—they were marked with black specks, as if they’d seen fragments of a grenade. When he held out his hand to me, my mother drew me close. Now, battered and lost in the subway, I was becoming that man.
“Well, you seem nice,” the woman said. “A nice young man. There’s a cut on your head.” She put her hand to my forehead.
“It’s nothing.”
“Are you sure?”
“No.”
“Hmm.”
“I have to get going,” I said.
“Good luck. It’s always the hardest, at first,” she said cryptically, “but then it gets easier, I think.”
She continued on her way.
Rocked by my frustration, I nonetheless was still feeling lucky that my encounter with the woman had not turned out as badly as it might have. That feeling lasted only until, walking a bit more quickly, I slammed into a baby carriage. I fell onto the concrete and felt as if the ground would not let me up. I think the mother caught the baby. She said something very quickly, which I could not understand. It sounded angry. I couldn’t blame her.
When I got to my feet, I apologized. I said I was sorry for knocking into her, for knocking her baby down, for not being able to understand what she was saying, for not being able to see where I was going. I apologized for my poor condition, for being stuck down here. It was my fault.
Well, it was my fault. I had been trying to make it back up to Columbia, but it was becoming more than clear that that wouldn’t happen. And it seemed as good a time as any to apologize to everyone for my general failure. To my family, who, though they didn’t like the idea of my going back to the city, suffered it because, at least partly, they must have believed that I could make it. That was all done now. I had tried and failed—it happens. The image of my admired senator from New York, Herbert Lehman, and the image of John F. Kennedy—they were being washed away. They had for so long fooled me into thinking that anything was possible. I’d been a very young man then. But I was
