The Transit Authority
A short story for Columbus Day
A green “NYC Parks” placard labels the sawtooth oaks on the median outside my building. At the top of the metro stairs, I recalled going to Williamsburg only twice before, both times before I moved to Crown Heights. A 41% battery will get me there and back, I thought, but I need to preserve power.
Every time I wait at the Kingston Avenue station, I forget about the pink graffiti palimpsesting the subway map on the Manhattan-bound platform. Back up the stairs I walked, and back down to the Brooklyn-bound side for an unobscured view of the subway system map. Groggily, I decided to ride all the way into Manhattan then take the L back into north Brooklyn from 14th Street.
As I double-checked my route, I noticed something moving. A snake on the map? In it? I started. The primary and secondary colors within the frame crossed over one another, rearranging. I shifted my standing position, inching left then lurching right, feeling for the spot where the optical illusion should disappear.
Reestablishing my perspective didn’t change the slow-motion frenzy of red-green and blue-orange worms, wriggling slowly like the wires of a Calder mobile dancing in the wind.
Floating vitreous debris, not even when stirred up by the light-headedness of a skipped breakfast, could produce an illusion this vivid. Writhing life flattened into concentric mirrors. Mesmerized, I watched the transit paths rearrange themselves on the map, rotating like a lie algebra projection. As I stared into the pinwheel that had moments ago been a map, I observed the representations of the N/Q line and the J/Z settle into a shape indescribably intimate. The new shape slowed its pata-dimensional rotation to a standstill. At the moment when its nauseous undulations halted, I felt a rush of relief surge up my spinal column, akin to painkillers kicking in. The incongruous shape the route lines had formed fit like a key into some section of my memories, to a place deeper than memory. The benign, perhaps even benevolent, novel geometry viscerally touched my limbic system, force-filling my lungs with awe. A singular thought instantaneously explained this vision: behind that plexiglass sheet on this dank underground platform was still a map, but no longer of Brooklyn and Queens. I looked upon a map of my own soul.
The northbound 3 screeched toward the station. I tore my gaze away from the metaphysical manifestation baffling me on the subway wall. To catch my train into Manhattan, I needed to run back up the stairs. Down the platform on the other side, I landed just as the opening train doors announced their uptown destination.
I sat alone in the nearly empty train car. The tracks rushed by, their CASH-CASH-CASH blurring to a buzz. An elderly man on the other end of the car squeezed a wooden bead up his dreadlock.
A bizarre vision had just offered itself to me between the stainless-steel frame casings of an underground wall-poster. Had I really seen my own soul? To what end? Anxiety took me then. Perhaps a higher power had disclosed this soul-diagram to me. Had I had been neglecting my soul? Was visualization a precursor to repair? I feared inexplicable jeopardy, up to and including some sort of reified damnation.
A man boarded at Nostrand Avenue holding a book, the word ‘Marvelous’ peaking between his fingers. Guessing the rest of the title provided a distraction from my internal distress. As the man sat down, I glimpsed it: Marvelous Money Management. I returned to my own thoughts, doubting my first-reaction’s description of those worming subway lines, despite the thought’s clarity and salience. My soul? Why should I assume such a definitive meaning? Why should I assume there was any such part of a human life, of a human being? I needed to reexamine my memory of that haunting visual phenomenon.
The next stop was Medgar Evers College. Some additional faces entered the train car, one burying itself in a copy of the Post, others absorbed in phones. What I felt mattered was to reflect on the cause of my experiential aberration. Most likely the problem lay somewhere between my corneas and my visual cortex. Why did the memory fill me with conflicting emotions of calm and worry? The only thing I could tell myself for sure was I knew didn’t understand I had seen. I conceded to myself I didn’t even understand the meaning of the word I had reflexively assigned it. My soul? Does such a thing exist?
At the Eastern Parkway stop, two women entered the train. I assumed they were nuns by their modest head-coverings and simple clothing.
I never approach anyone on the train. Anyone who approaches me wants money, and I am broke enough for one. Always I sit on the train in silence out of respect for the categorical imperative of Kant, and because I consider myself a decent human being. However, there’s something about witnessing an impossibility inches from one’s face that can bring a person to desperations severe enough to venture beyond beliefs about even ethical responsibilities.
I normally never approach anyone on the train. And yet, if I were going to, these holy sisters would be the type of people who might understand that I, a person who never speaks to anyone on the train, need just enough compassion to help absolve me of the feeling that I’ve begun a descent into madness. And, I reasoned, if anyone knew how souls typically present themselves, it would be the deeply religious.
I inspected my appearance. I could not see ‘mentally disturbed’ being the look I exuded. My gray hoodie, blue jeans, and white tennis shoes were clean, and I didn’t smell (not that if I did, I could smell myself).
To reiterate, I never speak to anyone on the train. And yet, who else could share a clue with me about the metaphysical world slipping through the veil of perception besides these two Christian nuns, sitting right across from me, who likely spend their days praying for the truth of the spiritual to be revealed to them through scripture.
I felt I had built up nerve enough by then, so I stood up to confront them with my strange question. The two nuns also stood up and left the train car at Grand Army Plaza. I had worked up my courage for nothing. No answers from the holy students of whatever meditative contemplation happens within the closed walls of abbeys.
I remained standing as the train car filled further.
The business-casual woman with chestnut-colored hair, scrolling, now, in the seat under me, hearted a post of the Manhattanhenge sunset, overlaid by Italic script, reading “Nourish thy soul.”
I, who pride myself in never talking to anyone on the subway, spoke at her. I said, “Hi, excuse me.”
She looked at me and removed one AirPod. She has taken out her AirPod, I thought. Now I’m the creep, the random subway addresser, the man overflowing with issues to share, who asks women to remove their AirPods so they can soothe his idiotic insecurities. It was too late to back out now. This conversation was happening; I needed it to happen.
“Can I ask you question?”, I said. She looked at me. I realized immediately the question’s superfluity. I had already asked a question; for her to say ‘no’ would be to admit a contradiction: a ‘no’ response would be a logically invalid answer, one necessarily disproving itself. I had forced her into ‘yes’ whether she consented or not. I had proposed the equivalent of the logician’s least interesting question: ‘Are you lying?’, a self-demonstrably and a priori useless interrogative where ‘no’ is the only logically admissible response, whether the responder is a liar or a truth-teller.
She responded with silent eye contact, her left AirPod suspended between thumb and forefinger. I refused to force my words on her further without positive acknowledgement.
“What is it?”, she said.
“What is the soul?” I kept my question short and to the point. Omitting context allowed for a more open-ended response. No, I waffled immediately, I had better clarify. I added, “What is meant when speaking of a person’s soul?”
She looked down. My question had been too probing, too direct, too reliant on personal interpretation. This isn’t subject matter people discuss on loud, mechanical subway rides through Brooklyn. She set her AirPod on the empty seat beside her. The woman reached one hand down and pulled off her right flat, exposing a thin, flesh-colored no-show sock. She scrunched her knee up to her breasts. I braced my abdominal muscles for an incoming self-defense kick (which I would have deserved for unloading psychological baggage on a complete stranger). She did not extend her leg in violence though. She pointed an index finger to a small tear at the heel of her sock. “This,” she said without smiling. “This is the sole.”
Quietly, she slid her Tom’s shoe back onto her foot, restored her AirPod into her right ear, and picked her iPhone back up off her lap. Scrolling once more, her pose forgot me instantly, as if I had said nothing.
I felt too embarrassed to speak further. A sound from the other end of the car intensified, louder and louder. I looked toward its direction to see the gesture of a hand. I was being beckoned. A man with cornrow braids wearing white sweatpants and a Zoo York brand track jacket waved and hissed for me.
I sat next to him. “Look man, I dunno whatchu thinkin, askin a white woman bout Soul. You think she gon know a thing bout Soul?” He paused then, as if allowing me space to respond, which I didn’t, not understanding yet where he was going with this. “If you want to understand Soul, you not gon understand where the greats Ray Charles, an James Brown, an Aretha Franklin came from less you start with Blues.” He granted me space to reveal my own ignorance. I stared at him silently befuddled. “Listen to Howlin’ Wolf. His first album, ‘Moanin in the Moonlight,’ established the direction Soul would take, back in 1959, before anyone considered Soul its own genre. You lookin for Soul? You’ll hear its influence wailin outta that record.”
He continued chatting how he had found a rare Ma Rainey ‘78 while crate-hunting at Alberto and Sons, back when that record store was still in business. At the Atlantic Avenue stop, he invited me to attend his DJ set at what sounded like someone’s house party in Canarsie. He told me a street address twice quickly before he hopped off the train. I jotted it into my phone after the doors shut.
I sat with this information for another two stops, about Blues and its relation to Soul. As much as I could readily acknowledge the history of twentieth century music as very much my jam, I noticed despair creeping over me again. I had known an insane experience, viewing what I thought was the shape of my own soul on a subway map. As I reflected on my latest interaction, I began to resent this outgoing turntablist, not for any offense he had done to me, but as a critical technique to affirm the real identity of my own paranormal experience of nine stops ago.
Yesterday I would have eagerly begun mentally preparing for a weeknight trek out to hear his set. But thirty minutes ago, I had seen a portal open over windowless, tiled concrete, and, on the other side of it, my own soul. Or something.
At the Hoyt Street stop, a mother pushed a bulky stroller into the car with an older child at her side. The child had an asymmetrical undercut and a vintage Ghostbusters tee. I stood up to give away my seat. The child kept asking “Where we going? Where we going?” with increasing urgency. The mother may have whispered a response, but I couldn’t hear it.
At Borough Hall, four minutes passed with the train doors stuck open for no apparent reason. I took my phone out and opened Reddit to distract myself. A seething ventpost on the front page enumerated the unacceptable behaviors of a fiancée. Rather than trying to parse it all out and decide for myself who was at fault, I restored my phone to my back pocket. I realized it was not really the content of thought-provoking stories that I craved, but only the comforting backlight of retinal distraction itself. My impulse to open an app on my device was reflexive, not deliberate. I lifted my own heavy contemplations back into my attention.
After the Clark Street stop, the train passed underneath the East River. I reconsidered: What is the meaning of a person’s soul? I felt this had to be somehow crucial to my vision. I don’t know why I saw what I did, and maybe it was related somehow to skipping breakfast (and dinner the night before as well). It had been a hallucination. Was I cracking up? Maybe I need a therapist. Finding a professional to diagnose me could ensure I didn’t have some disease of the mind. Hallucinations are not normal— one does not catch psychosis like the flu. I decided to relegate clinical prognoses to the medical experts. Even so, seeing clearly something that isn’t real, which can’t possibly be real, sets off alarms. Not only because it could mean something wrong with my eyes or, more likely, wrong with my head; it could also mean something wrong with my soul.
What is a soul? Is a soul something that can reach out to its owner and trigger alerts if something’s the matter with it? If the throat or the liver sustain an ailment, one feels pain or sickness. In the former case, nerve endings register the pain of inflammation; in the latter case, splanchnic nerves generate wooziness. The soul doesn’t have such connections to the nervous system.
Then again, I reasoned, René Descartes believed the soul was literally part of the nervous system. His view was that the pineal gland sat as the seat of the soul. The pineal gland has no double in the brain’s morphology, unlike the rest of our dual-hemisphered cortex. Impressions that come in from the “doubled eye” or the “doubled nostril,” he reasoned, must unite somewhere to produce the singular experience of thought. Logical enough for his time, but conscious thoughts do not light up the pineal gland in brainscans. We know now that the pineal gland only produces melatonin, the neurochemical for falling asleep. I certainly wasn’t sleepwalking while I stood on the subway platform staring at what should have been a four-foot MTA map. I was tired, I could grant that.
As my train screamed into Wall Street, I considered how strange it was that Descartes should have associated the process of thinking thoughts with the possession of a soul. After all, what does ideation prove about the existence or nonexistence of a spiritual nature?
At Fulton Street, three men entered the back of the traincar from the gangway end-doors. The first, their smiling leader, held a vihuela around his chest; the second man, desperation in his eyes, held one maraca in each hand; the last one, skinnier than the other two, but similar enough to be their brother, clutched a tarnished brass trumpet. They all three wore wide, silver-embroidered sunhats that barely fit through the gangway doors.
I sighed and rolled my eyes. They announced themselves and began to play a song. Two measures into the introduction, my eyes teared up in pain. These men, in their matching traditional dress, had written a Mariachi arrangement for “River” by Joni Mitchell. A knot in my stomach suggested dry heaving. Never should this song have been played at a tempo that sped-up; the trumpet bursts were inappropriately upbeat. Their vocal harmonizations only made it worse. Had they transposed the song into a major key? October is obscenely early in the year to play Christmas music.
I have a rule: I only give to musicians. Not to the break dancers, not to the poets, and not to the women’s-shelter storytellers. No matter what the style of music, if I have any change smaller than a ten, I will donate. Karaoke machines and Bluetooth speakers do not count. I have this rule, and I follow it. When the youngest man rattled his trumpet case from bench to bench, I dropped in one dollar.
At the next stop, Park Place, they did not get off the train, but advanced onward through the opposite gangway to inflict their creativity on the next car.
At 14th Street I had to abandon my meditations to disembark. I needed to get on the L, which is one block east. This means walking underground from 7th Avenue to 6th Avenue. Fortunately, an extra swipe isn’t required. A swarm of people exited the train beside me; I shared their strides, their breath, and their mutually unspoken resentments. I wondered as I walked if each person in this organic mass, of which I am part, has a soul like mine. By this I did not mean endowed with permanence beyond the impermanent, but: Are these others equally, invisibly connected to the architecture of the Metro Transit Authority? I seek glances from the eyes of anyone marching the opposite direction. If eyes are windows to the soul, perhaps some glint of reflected overhead fluorescence might suggest that terrifying laundromat time-lapse animation that had produced its own becoming for me 65 feet under the Chabad Lubavitch World Headquarters.
Everyone here looks down when they walk. The bathroom-tile walls along this stretch cannot amaze even the most Midwestern of tourists.
Street musicians play sometimes in this tunnel’s nadir, guitar cases open for falling coins. Today, there was no music. A fundamentalist with a “Jesus Will Return Jn 14:3” sign hunted prey down here today, eye contact his whiff of blood. Troubled by my hallucinatory terrors, I allowed him to speak to me.
I find street preachers repetitive at best and hateful at worst. Today’s otherworldliness felt so imminent, though, that my vulnerability had opened me to anyone’s perspective.
“The kingdom of heaven is at hand,” he said to me, not shifting his large sign.
“What is the soul?” I asked him.
“The soul is that part of a person that persists after death,” he said, fully ready for this question, as if he had anticipated me. “If a person accepts the Lord Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior, then after death, a person’s soul will rise again, caught up together with other believers in the clouds when Gabriel toots the rapture trumpet. Any who rejected Jesus Christ while alive will find their soul cast into the lake of fire.”
I thanked him for his far-too-familiar babblings and tried to walk away.
“Brother,” he said, “I can tell something troubles your soul.”
“I saw a vision. I’m not sure what to make of it.”
“Let me pray for you,”
“No,” I said, pulling away. “That won’t be necessary.”
“What is your name?”
“Bart,” I told him.
“Pray with me, Bart: Lord,” he said, grabbing my arm with his free hand so I could not leave, “I pray for Bart. Please show him the way to salvation. I pray this in Jesus’ precious name, Amen.”
“I have to go now,” I said, breaking free from his arm. No useful answers from single-track lunacy.
I hurried toward the L platform and made it down the stairs just as the train pulled in. Hopping aboard, I seated myself next to a Hispanic woman counting out beads on a rosary. Her lips moved silently, and her eyes were closed.
I needed to gain some perspective on the vision I beheld this morning. Up until then, I knew I would withhold any mention of the telescoping worm-window to my dad when I met him today. I doubted that decision now, as my disposition worsened from talking to these strangers today.
At the Union Square stop, a pair of teenagers giggled onto the train, blabbing to one another about a Midtown comedy show. One of them wore a K-pop shirt with Hangul lettering. I turned my head away as they snapped a selfie together under an advertisement panel. The white flash of their cell phone camera smacked the side of my head.
What do I believe about the soul, I thought. Why had I associated it with that self-inverting yantra wheel on the subway station wall?
The expression “to bare one’s soul,” refers to extreme emotional vulnerability, on a stage, in heart-wrenching poetry slams, or in late-stage cancer vlogs. How did public acts of emotional exhibition become associated with this elusive part of the self? Does feeling intense emotions bring a person closer to a state where they believe they have a soul? Or a state where other people believe they have a soul? And would that remain just as true for extreme irritation as for extreme melancholy?
The doors to the 3rd Avenue stop opened and shut, admitting a pair of men arguing. One of them, with bald-shaved, spherical head and southeast-Asian features, wore long, orange sheets of cloth, wrapped over his shoulders and waist. The other man wore a high-visibility vest over a grease-stained orange t-shirt and a hard hat carabiner-clipped to his work pants. In the throes of an established disagreement, the monk insisted: “A person has no essence; there is no permanent part of a human, any more than there is permanence air in a breath of wind felt for a moment.”
The construction laborer questioned him “If there’s no permanent part of a person, what do we have? You’re saying we’re just bodies? Machinery?”
“You have sickness one day, health the next,” the monk said. “Strength when you are young, frailty when old. Attributes of the body wane and wax like phases of the moon.”
“We have minds, I have memories have my parents, my girlfriend, my dead grandmother, God rest her soul. Those aren’t phases.”
“Your identity resides in the machinery of the brain. The equipment ages, memories fade and pass away. As the body dies, the light of perception extinguishes and goes out.”
“All this,” the laborer gestured in the air, “I can’t believe it’s for nothing, and it just disappears. I’m gonna remember this. I hang on to every good memory through tough times like thirst chugs water. Through death too, I don’t care.”
“But it will not be you who remembers,” said the monk.
“It will be me,” insisted the laborer. “I was impaled, ten-eighths inch rebar, through my gut. When I was in the hospital, my abdomen got infected. They had to rush me to intensive care. Removed three feet of my lower intestine. I knew, during surgery, I was going to die. My memories were all I had. Now, I’m convinced, I don’t think you lose those. And I don’t care if you lose this body, lose this brain. That’s not the only parts of you. There’s got to be… There is… something beyond that stuff. Those are just the parts you’re aware of. There’s more to a person than that. More to a person than the parts you know about.”
They both exited the train at the 1st Avenue stop, still discussing the ramifications of industrial accidents on consciousness.
I wondered after they left about the various legends of humankind spanning time and cultures on the existence, under various names, of a less-material personality double.
As we crossed under the East River again into Brooklyn, I noticed sitting across from me a college-aged woman with chin-length hair whose spaniel poked its head out of her heather-gray Public Radio tote. She held an index card-sized pill pack. She popped out a tablet and dropped it into her mouth, dry. The distinctive interface of a text conversation reflected off the window behind her.
I wondered about the dog. Do domesticated animals have souls? I refrained from asking her, and I despaired of getting back any opinion ever with truth behind humanity’s endless speculations on the topic.
At the Bedford Avenue stop I disembarked for the final time. Walking up the stairs into sunlight shocked my eyes. I asked myself sardonically if the bubble-lettered graffiti at the sunny street level would soon rearrange itself as well. I might at least have some fascinating conversations with these stainless-steel storefront roll-up doors.
I looked around for North 7th Street. After a ten-minute walk, I could see my father already standing outside the museum where we had agreed to meet.
“They’re closed,” Dad said.
“What do you mean?”
“Sign says the museum closed permanently. I tried calling you, but you probably had poor signal.”
A taped-up printout inside the darkened door confirmed my dad’s statement.
“We can get Peruvian about two blocks from here,” he said. “I’m getting hungry anyway.”
So, I had come all this way, out to Williamsburg on an hour-long train ride, one transfer, three-dollar fare, and the museum my dad had planned our day around was not even a museum anymore. Go figure.
The restaurant looked a bit on the pricey side. It was not the type of place where I could afford to order take-out.
My dad asked for the white peach pork chop. I had the golden beet tiradito. He asked me if I was streaming any worthwhile Netflix shows. I was, but we didn’t share any shows in common. I told him about a sci-fi comedy I had gotten six episodes into the first season. I began describing one of the jokes in the last episode I had seen. The build-up contained a literary reference to a book I had read. I had read this book, not for school, but because I recognized it as a classic of Western literature. As I recalled the joke to him though, I became more and more embarrassed repeating it, as I realized that the punchline was purely scatological.
Dad told me about a Western murder mystery he had finished. As he described the mini-series in more and more depth, I tilted my head realizing it sounded less like a hard-boiled thriller and more like hardcore pornography.
The server brought our drinks out.
I almost began to admit to my dad the story of my vivid, waking hallucination; however, I decided to take the conversation in a different direction.
I asked him, “What do you think about the soul?”
“You getting religious on me?”
“No, but every religion expounds a different idea of what it means to have one. But what is it actually? Do you think it exists or is it just an extrapolation of the dream self.”
“Dream… self?”
“I saw this idea in a cartoon,” I said. “You have, you are, a persistent subject in your dreams, while the objects in your dreams change from night to night. The continuous personality who sees it all when you’re sleeping, throughout your lifetime: maybe that’s your soul. What if, when you die, you stay permanently in dreamland, and you continue in a dream life where you never wake up?”
My dad indulged the thought experiment. “You’d be facing tougher pressure to select smart dream-choices and get things right. How you act in dreams, you remain stuck in those consequences. I don’t know many dreamers aware enough to manage that skillfully.”
“I was thinking about it because I ran into this street preacher today on the way here.”
“He tricked you into starting a conversation with him, did he?”
“Normally, I avoid these guys, but a phrase he said stuck with me: a clumsy definition of a thing I’m not convinced exists; he said, ‘The soul is that part of a person that persists after death’. Maybe that dirty card has a swipe or two left in it.”
My dad said, “No one has ever come back to confirm whether awareness fights on past zero brain voltage. Admittedly, studies on consciousness have yet to resolve the mystery.”
“You don’t have to believe in the existence of a divine or all-knowing supreme being for persistence to mean something. Regardless of the materiality or the immateriality of an infernal torment complex within the earth's core. Regardless of the reality or unreality of a bliss planet hosting family reunions on gold-plated construction materials— you don’t have to answer any of these for some things to persist.”
“Namely?”
“Any graffiti not powerwashed off; social media posts— at least those hosted by companies with rigorous backups; unrepaired acts of vandalism; published books, music albums, or adequately archived newspaper articles. Most of the things we leave behind after death are just trash, literal garbage: sewage, plastic containers, candy wrappers— even if they’re in a landfill, they’re present somewhere— and this includes less material things like hurt feelings, awkward memories, photos you didn’t realize you photobombed. We have always something left behind us. Is the soul the best of all that? Leaving behind a funny joke, or a tune stuck in someone’s head, or just a smile on someone’s face.”
My dad looked grave. He said, “Everyone who remembers you also dies eventually, and all these traces, whether online, or in someone else’s memory, or even etched in stone… none of that lasts forever. The idea of the soul, at least the traditional idea you get from church, is that the soul is immortal. Forever. The bad news is: you have global warming, only getting worse. You might say we have another hundred thousand, one thousand years, maybe even a hundred years. Eventually the earth becomes uninhabitable. And even if the scientists are wrong, and we get a little extra time as a species, you have an upper limit of around one billion years when the world’s oceans have all evaporated, their water vapor escaping the atmosphere. If you keep going, our sun eventually ages into a red giant, expanding to where earth’s surface temperature becomes too hot for any life to survive. That’s coming around 3 billion years from now. If you’re still optimistic, the Sun, as it dies and nebulas, will keep growing to the point where it swallows up Earth around 8 billion years from now. So nothing’s forever. Everyone dies. Everything dies. It all ends, sooner or later.”
The server brought our food out around this time.
“Mmm, looks delicious,” he said unwrapping his utensils.
“That’s a pretty long timeline,” I said after taking a few bites of my beets.
My dad, digging into his pork chop, added “Don’t think that interstellar space travel will save humanity either. Eventually, even the last proton in the universe will decay.”
Lunch stayed pretty quiet after that. My dad asked me about going back to school. This was a long-standing disagreement between us. He wanted me to take night classes, while I didn’t see the point.
We didn’t have any other plans that day. He said his flight would begin boarding in six hours, so he was going to retrieve the luggage he had entrusted to his hotel front desk.
I didn’t see how the whirling metamorphosis of a subway poster into a mystical map of my own soul fit into our discussion, so I left without mentioning my morning.
As we left, we walked down the street together for another block. “I love coming to New York,” he said to me. “I’m glad you’re doing all right.” He described bragging about me to a stranger wearing a Hard Rock Café shirt at his airport gate last night.
I told him the bank where I worked chose to enroll me in a training program to become a loan officer.
After another pause, I said, “It’s heavy stuff, the heat death of the universe and all that.” My dad looked distracted. Someone on the other side of the street yelled the word “WEST!” over and over, with escalating volume. “Here’s where I have to split,” I said. “Lunch really hit the spot.”
I looked up and behind me as I descended the station stairs. My dad had his glasses up by his hairline, squinting into his phone. He had mentioned calling for a rideshare to take him back to his hotel. With the older generation, these things are never easy.
Inside the Bedford Avenue subway entrance, a toothless beggarwoman sat upon a sheet of cardboard next to the metrocard machines. I slid my pass at the turnstile, leaving her unwashed body odor behind me.
The next train would arrive in 8 minutes, according to the programmed announcer’s voice. My phone battery was at 4%. A rat climbing the subway track walls feasted on a blue M&M. As I sat, I decided I would schedule myself a doctor’s appointment tomorrow morning.