Excerpt from Vagaries

And then—

The train is being evacuated, car by car, because a man has been hit. I thought I’d been so lucky to get a seat on the 6 during evening rush hour; I’d shoved just a little as I made my way through the congestion, the small and dull crowd of a two-year-old pandemic. I rise from my seat when, over the loudspeaker, the conductor says, “This train is out of service.” I sit again when the sliding doors don’t budge. The tattooed woman sitting next to me realizes at the same time I do that the conductor is right beside our train car in her little compartment. The strap-hanging German family of four and the teenage couple huddled over an Android cell phone realize, too. Together, we hear the important buzz of the conductor’s radio, we hear her say, “No, I don’t know how that even happens.” The car is mostly silent. A woman with a startlingly symmetrical face nods along to headphone music, not looking up. On the other side of the little door, the conductor is saying into her radio, “In between… No… Yes, in between the car and the platform.” A chubby woman whispers, “We hit someone!” Twelve other people whisper the same thing. A dark-haired girl in private school dress turns to her neighbor and says, quite desperately, “How am I going to get home?”

Half of a sliding door opens, as if the train car is mid-blink. I stand. We march, single-file, onto the platform. Men in uniform mingle with the train’s evacuees. A paramedic shouts—I am quietly taken aback by his profanity—“Get the fuck out of the way!” I hurry. Too short to see much through the crowd, I can at least tell that the man who’s been hit—I glimpse an open jacket and soiled white undershirt—is now laid out on the pavement, receiving chest compressions and other attention. Every one of us has to pass him to reach the turnstiles, the heavy exit doors. I count two women filming, cell phones held high above their heads. The crowd spurts up the station stairs. We make hard lefts and rights, dodging sirens.

On the sidewalk, it’s wet. I park myself under an awning to think. People still stream up the stairs of the 28th Street station, looking like fish spawning, gasping air. A deliveryman approaches me, gesturing over his shoulder at the mess of emergency vehicles on Lexington.

“Was there a fire?”

I become the bearer of different bad news.

Another man, this one in business attire—a navy suit—wants to know what’s happened. I tell him, “The train hit someone,” and he turns away, murmuring, “Was he pushed, or did he jump?”

Four paramedics dash out of the station clutching a stretcher—This seems to bode well—one of them shouting, still, four letter words to clear the crowd.

“Is the train running?”

A woman’s voice. I can’t tell if she is accented or just old.

“Not right now,” I say. She reminds me of my mom: wrinkled in all the same ways, small. I think she will be able to weather the news. “Someone was hit,” I say.

She scrunches her face. She is wearing knitted and embroidered things: a nubby, magenta scarf around her neck; an odd, colorful hat, like a Bukharian yarmulke, atop gray braids.

“I’m going downtown,” she says. I say, “Same.”

I notice she is holding a full-length mirror in a plastic grocery bag, the kind of mirror you hang on the back of a door. Two-thirds of it protrude from the plastic rather awkwardly, and—now she has joined me under my awning—I can see myself from waist to neck, there in her arms.

Shortly, she says her name is Alicia. She is from Australia, though she’s lived in New York for two decades. She’s traveled widely. Once, she was propositioned by a ship captain—she has to wonder why he picked her, out of her gaggle of girlfriends. She must have been very beautiful, she supposes. She turned him down.

She lived for a summer in the Berkeley hills. She took a long bus ride through Canada. The lone passenger, she thought the driver might rape her. Instead, he dropped her off somewhere in the snow.

She is losing her grip on the mirror and removes it from the plastic bag, passing me a handle so that I can slide the bag back over the glass from the bottom.

She had four children by an American man before they divorced. She did not remarry. All her suitors commented on her daughters’ feet or hair, and she couldn’t bring herself to chance it with a stranger who might touch the girls while they were children.

I can’t get the mirror to enter the bag at the proper angle—it is a tight fit. I think the bag might split at the seams, and then what?

There is something about her—“There is something about me,” she says. “I have good taste.” When she goes to a flea market, she asks the vendors what they really want sold. The moment she picks the item up, someone else appears and asks after it—every time, guaranteed. There is just something about her. She must have been an artist in a past life, she muses, or a Jew.

“I’m a Jew in this life,” I interrupt. The bag is finally in place. I loop one of its handles around her wrist.

“Really?” She isn’t sure. “I would have guessed Middle Eastern. Or Italian? But the masks don’t help, I guess. I really can’t see you at all.”

I say I think I’m Russian, but I’ll take the compliment.

She stares. “You’re like my daughter. She lives in Brooklyn. You’re an artist, aren’t you?”

I contemplate my torso in the woman’s mirror—the torso of a Middle Eastern-Italian, Brooklynite, artist Jew. I say sure, and I realize my fingers are sharp from cold. We have been standing here for some twenty minutes.

The woman asks if I think the trains will be running now.

“Maybe now,” I say.

“I’m going down there,” she says.

“I’m not,” I say. “I mean, I wouldn’t,” but she has to go, and we part ways.

-

The next day, I prompt my class of undergraduates to call to mind some stranger they noticed on the street or subway. “Now speculate about that person’s backstory. Make a fiction of their real life. Write them into a story.” One student raises his hand, objects. “I don’t notice people on the street. I mind my business.” Minorly horrified, I tell him, “Get out of my classroom and come back when you’ve noticed someone.”