F Train

On a slow-moving train clacking softly beneath the city, time itself decelerates to a shuffling idle. Cars creep forward along the rails, heavy with somnolence, barely making headway against some unseen resistance. Pale bulbs float past the windows like buoys. Passengers sprawl from bench seats, absorbed in private reveries and memories of brighter moments. The last station recedes into history toward the time of the pharaohs. The next station is a temporary religion, a prayer for rebirth that might receive no answer from the sky-god, whose presence underground is increasingly doubtful.

At the mid-point of the gently rocking car stands the diminutive Bernadette, sturdy as a medieval warrior. Having surrendered her seat to an elderly Chinese woman laden with red plastic bags full of produce, she surveys her fellow travelers with a calculating eye. Nothing escapes her vigilance. A young Haitian couple with squirming children and a stroller heads further along the line. They will remain firmly on the train, as will the glossy Russian girls, dressed up like super-models, riding home to Brighton Beach. A congregation of nodding fedoras form an irreproachable barricade, nor can relief be expected from an L-shaped block of sleeping Mexicans, for whom another long day of bitter restaurant service is mercifully at an end. Wedged singly among the patchwork of ethnicities, young corporate foot soldiers hide behind newspapers and trade rags, unable to refocus their eyes after so many hours spent poring over bright displays of market data.

From among this fragmented infantry of cubicle jockeys and terrorism survivors, a shining forehead rises abruptly, alerted by the discrete discharge of a hidden gadget. Something in the arching perplexity of his brow and the rapidity with which a tasseled loafer brushes across his knee suggests a potential vacancy, a hole in the dense array of exclusive comfort. But then the loafer settles back into place, the hole seals over. A tiny phone flips open from his pocket as the train emerges into the evening air, its wheels shrieking with the outrage of underground confinement.

Bernadette looks down at her oversized shoes. Minutes pass, and when the doors open at Smith and Ninth, she's on the move.