Conversations in the Dark
My number 4 train was hurtling north from Union Square at 11 p.m. when it suddenly jolted to a stop, mid tunnel between 33rd Street and Grand Central. From the abrupt way it halted, with a residual ricochet bounce, my fellow passengers and I could tell that we had stopped for reasons that were not going to be easily remedied. All New Yorkers who take the subway have become expert amateur diagnosticians about such failures.
A woman next to me, with whom I started to speak immediately, looked worried, but because she seemed to speak only Spanish, we wound up sporting anxious smiles at one another. She shrugged her shoulders, seemingly indifferent to the situation, but I could tell she was distraught.
The intercom system conveyed the kind of audible spitting that used to result from DJs in the earliest days of rap and “house music”, as they spun records backwards on a turntable. Eventually, a conductor appeared, who came into each car to tell us the situation, as if were attending a revivalist meeting.
“Everybody listen. We are being delayed for a mechanical problem. As soon as we find out what it is, we’ll be moving shortly.” Like a fervored parishioner, I called out, asking how close we were to the next station. “I anticipated that question,” he responded. “We’re in the middle of the tunnel. We can’t walk there.” His words sounded biblical in their profundity. We watched him amble into the next car to make the same announcement, his Walkie-Talking sputtering gibberish as he passed.
I was grateful for his calm and comforting demeanor because I could feel the rising panic inside me—that atavistic, caveman response to being trapped in the dark. It is a panic resulting not from a charging herd of woolly mammoths, but from the modern-day assaults of subway life in New York. We do not live in a primitive society, but we do live with a primitive subway system. Why, for instance, are car doors locked on certain F and A and D trains so that if a fire were to break out or a gunman to appear or a madman enter we cannot get out?
I have been known to panic in the middle seat of a crowded flight and in the elevator of my apartment building when it got stuck between floors. My doorman, a hero forever in my life, pried open the door, violating building policy, to free us in the cab; I rewarded him with bottles of Champagne. On a packed E train that simply stopped one morning, the conductor came on to say, “I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that nothing is wrong with this train. The bad news Is that there is something wrong with the train in front.” I was grateful for his sense of humor (and a PA system that worked). In that scenario, our train inched its way to the next station, just far enough for the first door in the first car to align with the platform. We filed out, person by person, through the train, not unlike refugees at a checkpoint, to our freedom.
Despite the Catholic Church’s proclamation that the state of limbo no longer exists, urban limbo does exist, a state I experienced on that stalled #4 train. The issue about panic/claustrophobia is that it arises and worsens if you think you are the only one experiencing it. A panic increases, in part, out of a fear of embarrassing yourself in front of others. As I looked at my fellow passengers, none of them evidenced outright panic. Some faces expressed annoyance, others a pinch of anxiety, a furrowed brow. Some people manically swiped their phone screens, though there was no reception.
My response always in a stalled train is to talk to people—for distraction, for comfort, to pass the time. I approached a young man standing by the door. He took out his earbuds when I spoke to him, but he was virtually uncommunicative. I thought maybe he’d had too much drink or that he was outright unfriendly. But as I came to know him from watching him during our half hour underground, he assuming a kind of bas relief effect against the blackness outside the windows, I could tell he was quiet because he was experiencing fear.
My best conversation took place with an elderly black man who was reading a novel by Brad Seltzer. He was seated by the door. I squatted beside him and asked, “What are you reading and what’s it about?” He immediately and eagerly began to recount the plot, something about a fictitious but corrupt, incompetent, and criminal U.S. president against whom a plot for ouster had formed. Alas, the story was too familiar in real life to serve as much distraction for me, but I am grateful to that reader for spending so much time away from his book to talk to me about its plot.
I was on the train because I had just come from a dinner party hosted by a friend. She and her husband, after 39 years in New York, are returning to her native Memphis, to begin a new life where she began her life. Despite her success as a public relations executive, with her own business, and a lovely apartment in Brooklyn Heights with what I call a river-sliver view, she is leaving.
“I hope I’m not making a mistake,” she said candidly during her farewell toast to us all at the restaurant. Many of us shouted out bromides I hear from others who leave the city. “New York will always be here if you want to come back.”
We are sad to see her leave. Yet, I think many of us at that table the other night looked to her with a certain envy, for her courage to go elsewhere and live a different life and live it, likely, better, with full-on river views, in a home with more than a Pullman kitchen and bedroom able to fit a Queen-size mattress.
No city, even one that purports to be the world’s greatest is immune to failure. Think ancient Rome… There are great people in this city, though, some sitting as close to you in the subway as the next seat, or that conductor whose voice provides some reassurance that all will be okay. But the city’s transportation infrastructure is failing and has failed and a comforting conversation cannot fix that.
After thirty-something minutes, the train started up, hissing its way to Grand Central, where most of us got off, more tired than when we had boarded one express stop earlier. I said goodbye to the reader and expressed hope that the plot turned out the way we both wanted. To my surprise, many passengers stayed on the crippled train, willing to risk another ride northward on it.
