You (You #1)(11)

“HELP!”

“It’s okay, I got you. Gimme your hand.”

But you just scream again and you look like that girl in the well in The Silence of the Lambs and you don’t need to look so freaked out because I’m here, offering my hand, ready to pull you up. You’re shivering and staring down the tunnel and your head’s filling with fear when you need to just take my hand.

“Omigod, omigod I could die.”

“Don’t look that way, just look at me.”

“I’m gonna die.”

You take a step forward and you know nothing of railroads. “Stay still, half the shit down there can electrocute you.”

“What?” And your teeth chatter and you scream.

“You’re not dying. Take my hand.”

“He’s making me crazy,” you say and you block your ears because you don’t want to hear if my train runs off the tracks anymore. “That singing, that’s why I fell.”

“I’m trying to help you,” I insist and your eyes pop. You look down the tunnel and then up, right into my eyes.

“I hear a train.”

“Nah, you’d feel it. Gimme your hand.”

“I’m gonna die.” You despair.

“Take my hand!”

The homeless dude croons as if we’re a nuisance he’s got to outsing pick it up pick it up pick it up and you cover your ears and scream.

I’m getting impatient and an engine will come on these tracks eventually and why are you making this so hard?

“You wanna get killed? Because if you stay down here you will get run over. Take my hand!”

You look up and now I see a part of you that’s new to me, a part that does want to be killed and I don’t think you’ve ever been loved the right way and you don’t say anything and I don’t say anything and we both know that you’re testing me, testing the world. You didn’t get off that stage tonight until the last person stopped clapping and you didn’t tie your shoelaces and you blamed the world when you tripped.

Pick it up pick it up! Engine, engine, number nine

I nod. “Okay.” I reach down with my arms, palms up. “Come on. I got you.”

You want to fight. You are not easily rescued but I am patient and when you are ready, you wrap your hands around my shoulders and allow me to save you. I hoist you, loose sneakers and all, onto the yellow danger zone and then roll you onto the dirty gray danger-free concrete and you’re shaking and you hold your knees to your chest as you scoot backward into the part of the green pole that faces inward, the safe place to sit, to wait.

You still don’t tie your shoelaces and your teeth chatter more than ever and I scoot closer to you and I point at your useless, flat, nonathletic sneakers. “May I?” I ask and you nod.

I pull the laces tight and tie them in double knots the way my cousin taught me a hundred years ago. When the train sounds down the way, your teeth stop chattering, and you don’t look so scared anymore. I don’t have to tell you that I saved your life. I can see in your eyes and your glistening, grimy skin that you know it. We don’t get on the train when the doors open. That’s a given.





6


THE cab driver was reluctant at first. I guess I would be too. We look crazy from the near death of it all. You’re a fucking mess. I’m so clean that it’s almost disturbing, pimp-clean to your whore-dirty. We’re a true pair.

“But the thing is,” you say, going over the recent events for the umpteenth time, your legs folded under, your arms flailing as you speak. “The thing is, at the end of the day, I couldn’t live if that guy wasn’t gonna stop singing. I mean I know I must have seemed crazy.”

“Nuts.”

“But I had a bad night, and at some point you have to set rules, you know? You have to say, I will not put up with this. I will die before I continue to live in a world where this guy will not stop singing and polluting a shared environment.”

You sigh and I love you for trying to spin this into some sort of strike against complacency and what fun it is to play with you. “Still, you were pretty drunk.”

“Well, I think I would have done the same thing sober.”

“What if he’d been singing the Roger Miller version?”

You laugh and you don’t know who Roger Miller is but most of the people in our generation don’t know and your eyes narrow and you stroke your chin and here you go again, for the fourth time. Yes, I’m counting.

“Okay, did you ever spend a summer working on a ferry?”

“Nope,” I say. You are convinced you know me somehow. You have said you know me from college, from grad school, from a bar in Williamsburg, and now, from the ferry.

“But, I swear I know you. I know I know you from somewhere.”

I shrug and you examine me and it feels so good, your eyes hunting me.

“You just feel close to me because you fell and I was there.”

“You were there, weren’t you? I’m lucky.”

I shouldn’t look away but I do and I can’t think of anything to say and I wish the cab driver were the kind to babble intermittently.

“So what were you up to tonight?” you ask me.

“Working.”

“Are you a bartender?”