Somewhere between Fulton/Nassau and High Street, New York became a great blank. Thursday, August 14thwas the autobiography of the void, the first mugging of the 2003 blackout. Wall Street was unconscious. The whole city was a giant eclipse, the work of massive shadow puppets. Humidity was invading human pores, pouring in through cracks in windows and doors with underbites. But the streets clanged with the manual labor of human words, words thrown into the air to make up for the collapse of the world. And for some people, that was enough to make it through the day. For others, language would have to be re-invented underground, to describe the space between darkness and the absence of light.
The C train came to a dramatic and bizarre halt. For passengers, the death of inertia came suddenly. Even rock stars couldn't overdose this fast, one passenger thought, adjusting the back of her blond highlights in semi-darkness. When she saw the light of day again, she was going to take a taxi to that director's house and get drunk on Kir Royales. Maybe her boyfriend would eventually get the hint. If not, she'd just have to leave this centripetal city and go back west where the land was rugged and tangible like a boxer's face and the air was smooth and fragile like a robin's egg.
Dressed in cargo shorts and flip-flops, a crew t-shirt and a coral necklace, Ethan Mills wasn't supposed to be riding the New York subway. He was supposed to be snuggling with Kendra Banks, the girl with the same Anapestic meter, a girl who sent him IM's for a whole month, tantalizing his 19-year brain with cropped nude portraits, dropping sexual innuendoes in their late-night chats like unexploded cluster bombs. Finally, she invited him to New York for the weekend. He hopped on the SEPTA with a change of clothes, remembering to bring some wet. When he found her fifth floor apartment in Grammercy, Kendra Banks opened the door, smiling. She hugged him, welcomed him inside, and then drew his attention to two ripped prizefighters pounding the shit out of each other, sparring in the middle of her living room. What are they doing, he asked, and who are they? Oh, she explained, they're fighting over me, and you're next. Winner takes all, if you know what I mean.
A short Arab man, dressed in a navy Caftan, grey linen pants rolled up to the knees, brown slip-ins, white Kufi cap and satchel, leaned over passengers to glance at the MTA map. This subway is dirty, he thought. The last C train he took stopped at 14th street, and then, without warning, turned into an uptown train. He didn't understand how a subway could just change directions like that. It was whimsical. This C train has to be better. But when the lights went off seconds later, he knew it was a sign. Paris was only a flight away. He'd been in New York less than a week and already he felt rejected and abused by the city's mood swings. Even his last girlfriend hadn't been that mercurial.
Dressed in baggy jean shorts, a Big Stock New Era Stüssy Ballcap and his fave 555 Soul t-shirt for good luck, he was starting to get restless. Usually, the lights go back on. But nothing was happening: the only thing you could hear were people sweating in silence. And he had to meet his homeboy in forty minutes at the Flushing Avenue stop. What the fuck is going on, he asked his girlfriend in Mandarin. Why aren't we moving? She squeezed his arm. It's okay baby, she said in English, just give it a sec. Until then, we get a few more minutes together, and I'll take it, cuz it's with you. Her words were tonic. She always knew what to say when he felt down on the world. She was a pharmacopoeia in a jean miniskirt, and he loved her for it.
Once it became clear she had invented a romantic fight club for her own gratification, Ethan ran out of her apartment, he needed to feel the sidewalk underneath his sandals, to breathe polluted air. Outside, the sun was boiling his blood on 23rd street so he followed the musky staircase underground on 8th avenue. It was the mouth of the underworld, the land of shadows, and smelled like piss and unwashed hair, but at least it was a portal, at least he was getting away from her, and the next thing he knew, he'd jumped over the turnstile, run inside the subway, and curled himself into a human ball, heading toward Brooklyn, and when the train stopped in the tunnel like someone halting mid-sentence, he felt like New York was cheating on him again, abandoning him in media res. The air was so heavy he could barely breathe, he could feel the humidity filling up his lungs like a nerve agent. And it was right around this time that the darkness became a movie screen for hallucinations he didn't have tickets for.
She didn't understand. She got on the Manhattan-bound C train at Fulton Street/ Broadway Nassau with two suitcases and the burgundy satchel her Mum had brought from New Delhi. She'd been following directions like a good tourist. So what was wrong with the NewYork's subway system? Why was this train going east? She had to catch an Amtrak to Chicago in exactly two hours and now she was headed towards Brooklyn again. She knew Brooklyn, there was no mystery left there, she'd been staying in Williamsburg for ten days now and had already said her goodbyes. Today was the day she was supposed to leave, the day she put June, July and August into a crude band of self-adornment, bending the beginning of her odyssey and its finale into a perfect silver bracelet like a mnemonic goldsmith. If history was a serpent, she would make it swallow its tail. And those spaces between places and identities, she would fill them up with her stories of Seattle and New York, she would reseal and reconnect the ruptured circles of her summer. It would be like first-aid for stale metaphors. Today was supposed to be the beginning of a new life, the end of her exile as a single woman, a class reunion with her old life. And it was, but only as an embryo of simile.
Ethan Mills felt the muscles in his neck tense up. He wanted to be the only man in her life, at least, until he stomped out her apartment, screaming in the hallway, telling her she was a reality television whore, until the fatal moment when he smoked all that wet by himself in the stairwell. When he finished it, he realized he'd gone too far, swallowed too much embalming fluid and Angel Dust, he shouldn't have come to New York, his world was caving in, splintering into shards, cracking apart like a shattered windshield. He shouldn't have trusted a woman with 2,000 friends in her Face Book account. That should have been the first clue. Philly, his college, his family in Fairfax, Virginia, his two best friends at UVA and George Washington—he was so far away from everything that made sense, that gave his brain stability. The rage and the despair he felt right now wasn't him at all, but he couldn't keep it straight, he couldn't keep it all in, she was fucking other men, she was playing him, playing all of them, for entertainment, for self-esteem, for web ratings. His anger was a jabbing pulse now, his hands were trembling like a rice cooker lid. He bit down on his knuckles, hunched over, he dug his front teeth into his skin until he tasted blood. It reminded him of warm salt.
He didn't understand her. Sure, they were having problems, like any other couple, but the more she drifted away from him, the more he wanted her to stay, even if he secretly agreed with her, even if he really wanted her to move back to Portland. But as long as they are sitting next to each other, he wanted her to touch his arms with her palms, he wanted to rest his head on her lap, while she stroked his temples and dragged her fingernails on his skull the way he liked. The further away she was, the more he needed to taste her mouth, the more he needed her teeth to clamp down on his neck. They were too young to forget the way bodies intersect like cross streets, like city maps, like the infrastructure of wet palms. But then, out of the blue, the subway went in neutral, everything got dark like a Senegalese village surviving on petrol lamps and imported candles, they sat for thirty minutes, and he wondered if they were going to die right there, stuck under the East River, their bodies slowly rotting in a subterranean morgue. A few minutes later, the emergency lights went on in the train, and he noticed a guy in cargo shorts standing up, breathing hard, groaning, screaming, pounding the doors with his fist, yelling get me the fuck out of here, I can't breathe. Get me out of this fucking train. He wrapped his own arms around his girlfriend and hoped she didn't notice the smell of fear in his pores. Two men, one Chinese and another Arab, stood up, and walked toward the boy in flip-flops, trying to coax him, sweet-talking him like patient lovers. He strained his neck, turning sideways to see if the boy was listening.
The blood was in his mouth now, sticking in the spaces between his teeth like a full-bodied wine. He punched the subway door with his fists, he needed to get out of this fucking train, he needed to get outside, even if he had to run for miles down a subway tunnel, he didn't fucking care anymore, he couldn't breathe. Suddenly, the emergency lights turned on, blood was dripping down his forearms in biomorphic shapes, covering his chest in drops of lucent primary red globs that Miró would have loved. Ethan Mills was barefoot now, the coral pieces of his necklace scattered on the ground like his sentence fragments. All the passengers were staring at him, wide-eyed with horror and confusion. A man in a blue tunic and skull cap started taking slow gentle steps toward Ethan. Are you okay? He asked in a French accent. Can I help you? Ethan turned his head, his breathing was labored and irregular, blood was coagulating on his lips, in the corners of his mouth, he snarled his teeth, started pounding the door again with his mutated fists trying to break out using just brute force. What? Stay away. Stay the fuck away from me, he said. I wanna get outta here. I want to get off this fucking train. Then a Chinese guy in hip-hop clothes, his temples covered in band-aids, stood up, Yo, take it easy, all right? He said. You're gonna be fine, you're just a little injured, he explained, pulling down his blue baseball cap. You need to just take it slow man, we're gonna cut out soon. But Ethan felt threatened, he saw two adults, two grown men, a Chinese dude and some Arab guy, they looked nothing like him, they were compact, tight-bodied and smooth like Tokyo DJ's, they were impeccably foreign, calmly handsome, like anointed Saddhus, and they were closing in on him, coming together from each direction like hands clapping in slow motion. He panicked.
She loved her boyfriend because she didn't know how to forget him. He was a flawed hero, the only kind of man she could love. And besides, he was X in a Stüssy cap. Fists pounding on glass. If she had it her way, she'd spend every single day, every waking moment next to him, to keep their vibes colinear. When they were together, they were madcrazybeautiful, everyone said so. They were their own energy field, changing the magnetic attraction of things. He turned to her, kinda pouty, then asked her, why aren't we moving? Someone was moaning, I can't breathe, the voice said. She squeezed her boyfried's arm. It's okay baby, she said, just give it a sec. She loved him like a scar, like the signature of accidents, like the blessing behind an old wound, like a flesh souvenir that leaves an imprint on your body, marking your cells forever, brandishing your skin with a logogram, with a blood haiku. Love was a deep cut, throbbing in your skin like a syringe that digs right into the marrow, invading your bloodstream like a sterile needle. She loved the darkness, it was a room all to themselves, a love affair in the subway.
All of a sudden the emergency lights turned on. Her boyfriend's eyes were wide like open umbrellas, his nostrils flared, he was nervous, he kissed her hand, lingering on her ring finger, and stood up, walking toward that kid, his face covered in blood, as he tried to push the door open. Yo man, take it easy, all right? Her boyfriend said. Her body tingled because he was too dangerous to ignore, because he was brash and good-natured, because he took risks every day that put their relationship in jeopardy, because he believed people were worth fighting for. And sometimes, when they got in the way of their own magnetic attraction, these people were worth fighting too.
It was identity theft and he knew it. He was imitating a monster he couldn't control or dissociate from, but adrenalin was a cheap high, and he needed to break through the walls and reconnect with the dirty streets and the heavy summer air up above, where the light was collapsing like crumbling cemetery earth. When those grown men began closing in on him like an animal patrol unit cornering a rabid dogo argentino, it triggered something in his medulla that released a swarm of cortisol and insulin into his blood stream, suppressing his immune response, increasing his blood pressure and protein uptake used primarily for muscular coordination, shutting down the production of reproductive hormones, increasing blood sugar levels and turning off his digestive activity. At that moment in time, Ethan's body became a blacksmith, casting its own armor out of the base metal in his spine, his reptilian brain turned on like a primordial flashlight, his pupils dilated, expanding into 45's, into metal-rap radio singles filled with apocalyptic power-chords and dystopic lyrics about human extinction. Ethan was ready to take these motherfuckers down, to do whatever he had to do to fight for his right to breathe bituminous air again, to catch the last pieces of collapsing light in the crowded city streets, streets that were probably now throbbing with traffic jams and clogged chaos like an urban aneurism. Ethan could feel the impatient flow of hormones cycling through his alert body when two men crept slowly towards him inside the subway, offering him false consolation in muted half-tones, trying to turn off the rage in his system, but he knew it was a trick, a deterrence gimmick, an attempt to emasculate him of his savage fight instinct, and once they'd gone too far, stepped over an invisible threshold that separated the human from the animal, the self-controlled, from the ignited fuse, Ethan did what any boy in a punk rock show would have done, he did what any silently raging adolescent pushed into a mosh pit would do, he flailed his arms in small, absurd circles, creating a violent windmill with his fists that drew a red circumference around him, spinning and twirling like a drug-abusing male cheerleader. Ethan became a performative circle of "Dies Irae", and this ignited the fight response in the other passengers, who now saw him not as a thuggish oddity anymore, but as a threat to their own reunion with Manhattan tarmac and chiming ice water, and in groups of two's and three's, the male passengers, construction workers, swift-footed engineers, war veterans, souped-up criminal lawyers, former high school wrestling stars, Anthro grad students, hobos, FedEx deliverymen, plumbers and drug dealers, they stood up, gathering confidence in solidarity, approaching Ethan like street gangs in old movies, they followed the trail of blood, moved towards the center of the train, to center stage, where a boy was high on PCP, hallucinating like a sunburned angel, his shorts, covered in blood, soaked in the sweat of self-defense, his arms, moving faster than human minds or movie reels could spin, faster than electric impulses could fire into virgin brains. Suddenly, he was in danger of becoming extinct and seconds before the first hand reached his throat or seized his wrists, his body shifted gears, and his legs began pushing off the floor. He rammed his elbow in the grad student's eye, running past him, knocking the wrestler down with a head butt, racing to the other end of the car, accelerating, a juggernaut of taut muscle and pulsating hormones, a machine of hyperventilation, a blurry shell of fierce desperation, sprinting at full speed now towards the girl with the blond highlights. She was looking at her greasy reflection in the window, bored with the shiny gloss of her own face. His arms were weapons of flexed steal, the veins, sticking out of his skin like a contour map, like a microcosmic mountain range, like a series of swelling blue scribbles. His blood was pulsing through his rigid arms as he body broke into a blind sprint. His eyes were too large to distinguish civilian from combatant anymore—everyone could see that now. Ethan turned his compact body into a protective armor, his balled fists, turned to bloody metal sockets, his arms stretched in front of him like a delusional superman, pointing them right at her head as he became a series of action blurs, burning in the dead air like a human flame as his legs pushed off the sticky floor, as they accelerated in a perfect trajectory towards her silent and brooding beauty.
About the author:
Jackson Bliss calls Chicago and SoCal home, though he's spent a great deal of time traveling through Europe and Africa, hitting the global dancefloor, so to speak. The recipient of the Sparks Prize in Fiction from the University of Notre Dame where he also received his MFA, Jackson is currently revising his post-9/11 nyc novel about love, culture jamming, double lives, the parameters of public/private art, personal voids, biculturalism, Parkour and Hip-Hop. Jackson is a contributing writer for Progressive Life and Culture Magazine and his work has been published or forthcoming in: 3am Magazine, Right Hand Pointing, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, The Bend, Ink Collective, Writer Advice, Cadence, SoMa Literary Journal, BlazeVox, The Taj Majal Review, Syntax, DJ Booth and Writers Post Journal.
© 2009 Word Riot
