Transfer at 42nd Street

Issue 145

New York 2023

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If you’ve ever frightened a large crowd, you’ve felt the shiver. It is the shiver that’s triggered when a vast, shapeless mass of eyes begins to stare in fear, all at once, just at you, and when you’re not quite sure what comes next, because the moment feels a bit too ripe. Simply by your presence, the crowd that surrounds you is repelled, disgusted, alarmed, which is always, well, a dramatic scene to watch. Nevertheless, even though the crowd outnumbers you, even though you feel small against all the unblinking stares, you do spot in the individual eyes the unmistakable look of potential victims—and people who feel like potential victims give you the most remarkable expressions of fear, as I do know from experience. But forget about that frightened crowd. Forget about those potential victims. Consider, instead, the often forgotten perspective of the culprit, my perspective, in fact, the person who sparked all that fear.

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Several years ago, I was riding an uptown express with a friend in Manhattan when our train stuttered to a stop, leaving us in a darkened limbo between stations. Not only were we already late, but we needed to transfer trains at 42nd Street, and the New York subway system doesn’t exactly excel at making up lost time. After a short delay, we eventually lurched forward, with more coal presumably having been shoveled into the engine.

In a rare moment of transit foresight, this subway line was constructed with an easy connection between the express and local. I sometimes even entertain the fanciful notion that somebody planned this connection in advance—it requires a mere stroll across the platform to change trains at 42nd Street. As long as you’ve given the proper incantations to the right deity, won the lottery that morning, and timed the orbits of the planets just right, then you can step off an express and onto a local without delay.

On this day, the doors opened, and we sprinted across the crowded platform, with her route slightly to left and my route slightly to the right. Because I reached the express train before my friend, I took a large step into the carriage and then turned, right as the doors began to close. For reasons that I won’t even pretend to understand, my friend shoved her handbag forward like a joust, wedging it between the two partially closed doors. There are countless things that you should strive to avoid doing in the New York subway system—and this would certainly be one. My reaction was to push the handbag, hers was to pull, yet both of those efforts were pointless, since the handbag was more inside than outside. Eventually, she screamed, “JUST TAKE IT! JUST TAKE IT! TAKE IT,” a few more times than it is necessary to write. The bag dislodged into my hands, the doors closed, and the train, as it is said, left the station.

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Do I need to continue? Can’t you foresee the ending? What comes next is, I believe, rather predictable, once you consider the dynamic on the subway and the crowd that surrounded me. Mary Shelley has even written a line that fits my purpose:

…but I had hardly placed my foot within the door before the children shrieked, and one of the women fainted…

With the bag in my hands, and the train jerking forward, I turned around and immediately grasped what everyone had watched. And you can imagine it, too, once you imagine the perspective of the crowd that surrounded me, once you imagine that every seat was full, that the aisles were packed, and that everyone had just heard a woman scream “TAKE IT” and watched me yank her handbag away.

Now that we were moving from 42nd Street, the train, I couldn’t help but notice, took on a rather lopsided feel, with nearly everyone shuffling away from my position and bunching together, providing me with a luxurious amount of space. It is incredible how people look at you when they are trying desperately not to look at you.

For the monster in the carriage—that would be, of course, me—there was still a potential problem. Although the instinctive reaction of nearly everyone was to step away from me, the last thing I needed was one good Samaritan to give courage to a cascade of misguided vigilantes, and I could sense, in two men a few feet away, a pause to decide whether they wanted to somehow intervene. It was a recognizable look of shifty calculation—which is another thing, incidentally, that you shouldn’t do on the New York subway. I think it was reasonable of me to conclude that I couldn’t explain that the handbag belonged to my friend while we rode a moving train in rush hour—that’s asking people to disbelieve their eyes, and actions in these circumstances are based more on reflexes, adrenaline, and simple decisions from the gut, with the wonderful conclusion that the more monstrous that I happened to look, the more that I looked like someone who really did just rip a woman’s handbag away, the more that I looked unpredictable and dangerous and furtive, the more likely it was that I would be left alone. Because this story takes place in New York, however, I only received those shifty looks and a hilarious amount of space to myself.

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Recognizing that a shift in perspective reshapes the meaning of a situation isn’t a new observation. And one benefit of a good narrative—or one reason to argue relentlessly about the importance of narrative—is that you learn how to inhabit different perspectives. An old man. A young girl. An outcast. A character who is shamed or victorious or pathetic. A character who is guaranteed to inspire loathing in everyone that you know. Is there a character—or even a specific person—that you would be reluctant to inhabit? Don’t forget the truly monstrous, the ever-changing target of universal social hatred—a perspective that is perhaps the most vital to remember.

I thought of the occurrences of the day. What chiefly struck me was the gentle manners of these people, and I longed to join them, but dared not. I remembered too well the treatment I had suffered the night before from the barbarous villagers, and resolved, whatever course of conduct I might hereafter think it right to pursue, that for the present I would remain quietly in my hovel, watching and endeavouring to discover the motives which influenced their actions.

Although my story doesn’t predate impulsive judgements, it does predate the mobile camera era, thankfully, so the most knee-jerk and atavistic and primal thoughts in that train remained in the train, back in that analogue age when both proper and improper readings of a situation could be forgotten, so that everyone inside that train—absolutely everyone—could go home feeling righteous about what they knew to be true.