I walked until I stumbled, and when I stumbled it was forward. My hand reached over a ledge, beyond which was the space where the train would arrive. I did not know whether one was arriving at that exact moment, but if it had, my head and shoulders were exposed so completely that I would have been severed in half. It would have been a reasonable way to go—quick and painless. I would be missed, of course, but I would no longer have to fake being a regular guy. And perhaps, lying there on the subway platform, I was already receiving the punishment for what I had done, for not accepting the reality of my situation.
This was Dante’s Eighth Circle, the circle of the fraudulent: those who failed to carve out their own salvation. I wouldn’t have to fake it any longer in front of Sue or my friends, who I knew relied on me for the posturing, for pretending that everything was fine. It gave them comfort to see me behave as if nothing had changed. They expected me to persevere. They had put their money on me and spun the wheel. They didn’t know my burden—or perhaps they did, but appreciated that I didn’t share it with them. Which made me, lying there on the subway platform, suddenly realize that if they relied on me for some sense of stability in their world, then it would be selfish of me to let myself go.
That was followed by a second flash of insight. Sue, Arthur, and the others not only relied on me; they cared for me, cared so much that I had a reciprocal responsibility to them—not to wallow in self-pity or throw myself on the sword of my own self-esteem but to stop trying to camouflage my blindness from those closest to me.
The train was coming. I got up and righted myself. I boarded with the others and gasped a sigh of relief. When my knees pressed against a seat, I sat. I was halfway home. My legs were bleeding, but the bleeding from my head, I think, had stopped. People must have been looking at me very much the way I looked at the ruined man I had seen many years ago near the butcher. The train echoed under the city.
The issue of making it back in time for my appointment had by now fallen completely out of mind. I was simply trying to make it back, which seemed highly unlikely. Then I smelled a familiar odor—something light, pleasant, something that had no place down here. I didn’t know what it was.
Where and when to exit was no challenge. The westbound shuttle made only one stop. Recalling a large gap between the train and the platform, I made sure that I took a giant step out onto the platform at the Times Square station. As I was feeling my way out of the car and onto the platform, I bumped into another man. There was again that sense of something familiar. It was nearer to me this time, like a ghost. I asked him where I could find the platform to catch the train heading north up to Columbia, and he told me. I heard some people snicker at my exaggerated movements, and I felt shamefully conspicuous. Still, I moved along with those leaving the train and managed to get down the stairs to the uptown track.
By my now customary query method, I came to an area that I thought was the right platform for the uptown local. I wasn’t sure, though. The express left from the same platform, but it didn’t stop at Columbia. I turned to ask anyone near me whether this was the uptown local to Columbia at Broadway and 116th. A man’s voice—muffled, as if he were trying not to be heard—responded: “Yes, it’s the right platform.” He added that the local was the track to my left.
The train pulled in and stopped, and the doors opened right in front of me.
I worried, very briefly, that after all this I might get a shoelace caught in the narrow gap between the car and the concrete. It would be a fitting ending. That did not happen. Instead, I got on the train and found a seat. The train pulled out.
I was almost completely exhausted. I felt as though I had lost several quarts of blood. And I was semi-delirious. Was this madness? Why had I engaged in this absurd enterprise? I might instead have foregone the appointment with the reader—recognizing that the importance of that particular meeting was largely a creation of my own imagination. Why had I not simply waited with Arthur while he made his sketch of the Seagram Building? None of this nightmare trip would have happened.
As the train made its way north station by station, the thought of my grandmother and my parents forced itself on me. Nothing—neither poverty nor fear of the unknown future, neither disease nor war—had deterred them from their emigration across Europe and the Atlantic Ocean. They would not compromise their hopes or their dignity, whatever the price. So how trivial was my little excursion?
After quite a few stops, the PA system announced mine, and then my weary feet got me to the top of the subway steps at 116th Street. I do not think I was ever happier to find myself back at the university. I felt my way to the iron gates and went through onto College Walk. As I began to make my way, I was stopped by a young man I recognized by smell as Arthur.
“Oops, excuse me, sir,” he said, a slight sardonic emphasis on the last word. Then, in his normal voice, he said abruptly, “I knew you could do it…but I wanted to be sure you knew you could do it.” He had been shadowing me all along. He later admitted that he had in fact not been assigned to sketch the Seagram Building at all.
We were
