Judgment Day: Part 2

Lost and wandering.  That was the problem.  All these commuters distracted by their laptops and cell phones, cheap paperbacks and old newspapers.  He was one of them, smoky Plexiglas divider or not.  High thoughts and unrealized schemes meant nothing in this great machine.  He was just another guy on the train with downcast eyes and a briefcase.    Maybe he had to make his peace with that.

A college student armed with a copy of Moby Dick had detrained at Silver Spring.  This gave Daryl a clear view of the Style Section brunette.  His constant companion, though she didn’t know it.  She stayed on the train when he got off for work, but they had the same schedule.  Every morning, she sat on the very last bench at the end of the station, reading the Style section from the Washington Post.  Every evening she sat and looked morose, always in the last car.  He’d never spoken to her, but he was worried when she missed a day like one would fret over a sick loved one.  Once, she’d been out for a week, and it almost drove him out of his mind.  Was that grade one stalking?  Perhaps just part of the onset of the madness that was putting worry into his friends’ voices.

She sat in a seat facing Daryl, staring out at the dark tunnel.  In the window, her narrow face looked back, sullen and disappointed as usual.  Outside, her wide eyes had followed the buildings, or stared down at the rushing ground.   In the tunnel, she maintained her stare, moving her head slightly, as if she could still see something out there besides the lights and the endless tubes and wires running along the walls.  Dreaming of a world out there that no one else could see.  Maybe she was just studying the contours of her face and body.  She looked like a lost child in a button-down blouse and a skirt that was way too short for the chilly weather.  Her long hair was loosely tied in two pigtails and she clutched a small purse to her stomach.  She had the haunted look of a girl on the run.

She was a small girl, her clothes often cheap and revealing.  Daryl had made up a history for her and, he was sure, that’s the closest he would ever get; he wasn’t very good at starting conversations. He watched her yawn, covering her mouth with her fist and glancing his way momentarily.  Their eyes met and she held the gaze, a challenge flashing, but he looked away almost immediately.  When he looked again, she had turned back to the window, her reflected eyes looking towards him.  It was easier to hold that stare. Then she closed her eyes and her face went slack for a few seconds, as if she were consciously relaxing all of her muscles.  He saw that survivor instinct in her, a sense of struggle.  Or maybe that was part of his fantasy.

What if there was a spark, an unspoken connection?  What if everything were just a little easier?  He smiled.  The sad, romantic dreams of the common man.  He should have held her gaze the first time.  Defiance in the face of a world that doesn’t have many sparks or unspoken connections.

As he watched her, he settled into the sounds of his commute now that there was nothing outside to distract him.  He listened to the vents sucking air, the hum of the electricity, the rattling of the train as it hit rough spots on the track.  He’d become used to the rush of noise that surrounded him throughout the day.    It was the pulse of the city, something that had surrounded him most of his life.  It was hard to imagine the quality of silence, the world without breath.  Part of his attempt to achieve some sort of inner peace had been to tune into the sounds of the living world, to notice everything, to cast off the familiarity with the background noise and routine.  People got used to that background noise until it went away, until they stopped hearing it.  Daryl felt that was when the soul was in danger, when a person got used to the elements of everyday stress.  Tuning out one part of the world led to a certain zombie-like zen.  Tune out the noise, the pain, and then the dreams.  That would kill the mind.

At the first underground stop, Forest Glen, the station was alive with that background while the PA system broadcasted unintelligible instructions.  There was a power to all those sounds, a key to the fabric of the modern world.  Instead of glazed eyes passing over the details, the mind had to be fit and sharp.  But all these tired people on the train weren’t fit and sharp.  No one else seemed perturbed by the somewhat frantic quality of the voice on the Forest Glen PA system.  It would probably take the average commuter a minute or so to react to a stalking gunman, and then the reaction would only be a pissing, animal panic.

He tried to make out the words echoing over the station’s speakers, but nothing sounded human down in the underground stations.  The doors closed just as quickly as they had opened, and he was left with a feeling of concern.  Like a dog’s reaction to the tone of voice.  These were days of constant security emergencies so, even if the commuters had heard something, it wasn’t worth noticing.  So soon after a tragic, historical event, yet the power of the images had already been lost.   He turned his attention back to the Style Section girl.   His lopsided, romantic fantasies about her had to be unhealthy, but they were loads of fun.  He flipped on his sunglasses so the car looked like it was lit by a late evening twilight, then he closed his eyes and tried to clear his head.  Enough was enough with the one-way thoughts.  Tonight wasn’t the right night to stare hard at some poor girl and conjure up strange masturbation fantasies.

Her stare at the darkness of the tunnel, or the darkness under her eyes, was just too much to think about.  He ached for her, or so he thought.  Realistically, he knew, he was aching for any sort of social interaction.  Always a bad sign, there was no question of that.  Once you enter the pit of despair, it would be hard finding the secret exit.

The worst part was, despite all his whining about his lot in life, any break in the daily pattern was shocking and painful.  Perhaps because it was unimaginable that anything could ever really happen, even in a world where bombs and madmen ruled the prime time.  Or maybe it was because he’d really become settled and all his errant thoughts were simply the sign of an inactive mind in need of a hobby or a proper family.

When the train braked suddenly, there was no exhilaration.  No sense of change.  There was only a quick jolt of fear, followed by confusion and horror that something so dependable wasn’t working right.  From a hazy mind straight to panic, like everyone else.  There wasn’t too much time to form coherent thoughts as he flew forward,  his hands flailing against the tinted Plexiglas and doing very little to break his bone-jarring collision with the plastic divider.  The lock on the door to the driver’s booth popped open and he jerked violently to the side as the thin door slammed hard against the frame of the dividing wall.  There was a sort of shuddering that traveled through his body, momentarily making him feel as if he were somehow connected to the brakes trying to stop the train.  Then he grabbed the handle of the door, fumbling with the cold metal.  A scream built up in the back of his mind but it dwindled to a breathy, trapped animal moan by the time it hit his throat.  The door popped open and swung loosely, settling in the center of its arc.

Then, a moment of silence.  Not even that.  It was a heartbeat of silence, just like the seconds before a serious adrenaline rush, right before instinct takes control.   It felt like a lifetime passed him by in that moment.  Then people were screaming.  His sunglasses had him nearly blind and he tore them off, stumbling through the door and into the aisle that ran the length of the car.  He stared forward into the next car, where people had risen from the seats and rushed to the doors.  Others were doing the same throughout the train.  The Style Section girl, hollow-cheeked, turned wide eyes towards him and it seemed as if the two of them were motionless amidst a tilting world.

He opened his mouth, though he couldn’t hope to be heard over the panicked screams of his fellow commuters.  He reached forward and pulled her out of the seat and she fell against him, terror flaring in her face.  The other passengers, pitched into a violent and blind panic, pushed them away as they crowded around the three exits facing the tunnel’s emergency lights.   He hauled the girl back to the seat beside the driver’s booth and slammed the dividing door shut, then he turned to the emergency door at the end of the car, the dark tunnel stretching out beyond it.

The girl grabbed his arm, “What is this…an attack?”

“It’s something bad,” he replied “I think we jumped the tracks.”

“Oh my God,” she said through a grimace, looking down at the floor as if she could see rails and wheels.

He shook his head, his hand on the emergency latch, when the PA system clicked on and a piercing, high-pitched alarm filled the car.  The alarm cut off abruptly, replaced by the steady hiss of an open microphone.  Everyone in the car had stopped screaming, some of them dumbly looking up at the speakers in the ceiling.  All were ready to receive commands from the voice of authority, but that voice didn’t come.  Instead, a man spoke, at first slow and slurred, then wild and screaming. It sounded like the driver, but it was hard to tell.  The driver’s voice had been flat and monotonous when he was announcing stations and destination.  In the background, panicked voices seemed to echo.  “My God,” the voice said, “I’m so sorry…I’m – “

The lights in the car flashed several times, then winked out.  The lights in the tunnel followed, launching everything into inky blackness.