Subway Love (16 page)

“When? Now?” Jonas asked. Laura sat quietly, holding his hand.

“No, man . . . early in the morning. I mean early, like first-thing early.”

“I didn’t bring my camera . . .” Jonas started to say.

“Never mind. I have one here. You can’t go home tonight,” Max said. “I need you.”

“We weren’t planning to,” Jonas said. He felt his face heat up.

Max scooted along the seats and sat down right beside Jonas. He lowered his voice, though the one other guy in the car was fast asleep and looked like he had been for forty years. “I’m going to bomb this train tonight, and when it comes out of the layup, as soon as it hits daylight, as soon as it crosses the El, you’ve got to get the pictures.”

Jonas started to interrupt him, but Max kept talking. “You’ve got to be there right on 149th Street. It’s the best spot, and you can’t miss. You can’t go back. They’ll break up the train as soon as they see it, and then, car by car, they’ll buff. You understand?”

Both Jonas and Laura nodded.

“But why don’t you just do it?” Laura asked him.

Max pulled the camera strap over his head and off his shoulder. “I can’t. Here.” He handed the bag to Jonas. “Take this. I’ve rigged it up with a battery on the advance. I can’t be there. They’ll be watching. They’ve got real cops now on the rails, and they’d bust me the minute they saw me. But a white boy with a camera, a white boy that looks like you — they wouldn’t know what to make of you.”

Jonas took the bag. “You rigged it?”

“Yeah, just hold down the release. Make sure the battery is attached. It will shoot and keep shooting. Just hold your frame steady and get the whole train. Got it? Get the whole train, that’s the key.”

Jonas poked his head inside the camera bag. “Oh, sure. That’s easy. It’s got an automatic advance, OK? You rigged it? Yourself? Wow.”

“Automatic release. Advance. Whatever you say. You’ve just got to promise. Time is running out,” Max said. “Anyway, I gotta go. I gotta drop this off, get the rest of my paint and my crew, and come back.”

Max leaned over and spoke directly into Jonas’s ear. Then he bumped him on the shoulder and stood up again. “Hey, it’s been real,” he said to Laura. “Peace.”

When the train stopped, Max jumped off, and he seemed to fade. The night filled in the space around him. The one streetlight on the platform was broken. He was in shadow, barely visible.

“Just promise me,” he shouted to Jonas from the platform.

“I promise,” Jonas called back.

“We promise,” Laura added.

JONAS
had no intention of not seeing Laura again, even if it meant meeting her on the subway in the middle of the night for the rest of his life; living on a diet of Chinese takeout; raising their children to be careful of the third rail; growing old and dying with nothing but an MTA MetroCard in his pocket. There had to be a way to make this work, to make this right. To make it real, more real. They had to stay on track. It had to work. It just had to.

He had held Laura’s hand in the darkness; he watched her steps carefully, and together they climbed back inside the empty subway car. Max had explained exactly how to get inside a car with no electricity, and he had empathically suggested they find a money car, the cleanest by far. Plus, he’d explained, writers don’t go for them, because no one ever sees those cars, so the work bums and cops don’t bother checking them, because there’re no writers to bust. “You’ll be alone there, all night,” Max had assured them.

The early-summer night brought a coolness, especially in the tunnels. Jonas could feel Laura’s skin rise into goose bumps.

“Here.” He took off his jacket and slipped it around her shoulders. The money car had no seats, just benches like tables, for counting money, Jonas figured. It was empty, but it kind of looked like a hospital room, with canvas platforms and cabinets. It
was
clean. They lay down on the benches.

Time is a funny thing. The way it lingers and hangs around when you’re bored, and the way it moves faster when you need more than is given. Jonas wanted to know every part of Laura’s body, touch every inch of her skin, and kiss her so deeply he would devour her and so be vanquished. The union of their bodies, his into hers, and hers engulfing his, brought him to the completion of his existence in a way he had never known before.

And when they were consumed and then completed, when they pulled away from each other but stayed close, it was as if he could feel the minutes and the seconds ticking by, slipping away, taunting him. They rested side by side, his jacket beneath them, their bare legs entwined.

“You can’t go back to that house,” Jonas told her. He felt her smallness beside him, her femininity, her beauty, and anger grew inside him. “You have to tell your father. And you have to tell him tonight.”

Laura was quiet.

“If I could do something, shit, if I could do anything — but I’m stuck. It’s crazy. I love you. You can’t go back to that house. You have to tell your dad.” Jonas tried to sit up, but the bench was too narrow. He put his feet on the floor and stood. “You have to promise me, right here and right now.”

Laura started to cry.

“Oh, God. I’m sorry.” Jonas got on his knees. “Oh, fuck. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. Oh, God. I would never . . .”

“No,” Laura told him. “It’s not that. I’ve just never felt like this before. I feel your love,” she said. “It’s like I can really feel it.”

Jonas was so relieved. He smiled. “C’mon. You’ll catch a cold. We have to get dressed.” Jonas handed Laura her clothes. “You need to tell your dad. Can you promise me?”

“What if he doesn’t care?”

Jonas wrapped his arms around her. “Is that what’s stopping you from telling him? Are you afraid he won’t do anything about it?”

Laura nodded. “Maybe.”

“You can’t protect him from the chance to protect you,” Jonas told her. “Please promise me you’ll tell him.”

“That’s a lot of promises for one night,” Laura said.

Jonas remembered his commitment to Max. “Oh, shit. Right. We have to get up to the El.”

They dressed silently, shyly, and made their way out of the car, holding hands.

The sun was rising outside; tiny slivers of light made their way through cracks in the ceiling and the dusty grate above. The trains would leave the yard by six thirty in the morning. It had to be nearly that now.

Jonas gathered Max’s camera equipment, and took Laura’s hand. “Look, if we get out there and we’re all alone again, if one of us disappears, or we both do, we’ll meet back at the station. I’ll be there every Saturday night until you show up. OK? OK?”

They stepped out onto the platform between the cars and headed back through the tunnel.

“He’ll make me live with him,” Laura said. “My dad. He’ll make me leave there.”

Morning was making itself known, the closer they got to the fencing. They would have to climb up and make their way across the platform. They could hear voices in the distance, the conductors checking their cars.

“I know,” Jonas said. “That’s what I’m counting on.” He boosted her up.

“You’ll really wait for me?” Laura asked. She looked down toward him.

“Laura,” Jonas said. “Look, no matter what happens, you have to take care of yourself.
I
don’t matter, and
we
don’t even matter. You matter to me and you have to matter to yourself. Promise me you’ll tell him about Bruce. And then we’ll meet again at the station when you get back. At Fifty-ninth.”

“I will. I love you,” she said.

“I know. I feel your love,” he told her. “I can actually feel it.”

It would bring them together again. He was certain of it.

A
tripod would have helped immensely, Jonas thought as he set up the camera. He made a makeshift stand out of a cardboard box and a piece of wood that he found on the platform. He checked the light and the film. With a few tester shots, he made sure the battery was attached and working. Just as Max had predicted, the train came out of the tunnel. It was magnificent, like a magical dragon from a fiery pit. The burner, Max’s piece, was five cars of a twelve-car train; the entire surface of all five cars, including the windows, was backwashed in baby blue, like a perfect summer sky, and dotted with white clouds so light and puffy they looked like the whole train might melt into the sky. The
M
was outlined in black, so deep and solid it seemed to be cut right into the steel of the train, and it was filled with green fading into orange into yellow. The
A
was the same, followed by the
X.
MAX. He had used his real name. Off to the right side, mostly on the fifth car, he had painted a three-dimensional tear, with cracks stemming from the edges, as if the whole train were about to break into pieces.

Know how to live with the time that is given you,
was written in luminous deep purple coming from inside the three-dimensional painted crack.

Jonas turned to say something to Laura, to grab her around the waist and laugh with her, but he knew she was already gone. He had lost sight of her as soon as they pulled themselves from the tracks and touched the pavement.

The camera clicked away — thirty-six shots in fifteen seconds — capturing the whole train, frame by frame. Steel had turned to sky. The masterpiece flew across the top of the city. Jonas imagined a crowd gathered on the platform, early-morning commuters on their way into the city. He could see businessmen, nurses, teachers, cleaning women, kids on their way to school. He could almost hear one person clapping, then another, and another, until everyone on the platform was applauding. Even below, down on the street, people stopped what they were doing, stopped their conversations, stopped their cars, to witness this incredible piece of art, this majesty of style, before it rushed by and was gone.

“Toss it to me!”

“What the hell —?” Jonas spun around.

“Toss it to me, just the film,” Max said. “Not the camera. They’ll notice the camera.”

“Who?” Jonas asked.

“Just toss it!”

Jonas wound the film in the camera until it was safely back inside its cassette, then opened up the back of the camera and tipped it out. He tossed the film over to Max.

“I can develop it,” Jonas told him.

“So can I,” Max said. He was moving fast. “But, hey, thanks, man. I owe you one.”

NICK
had tried for two full months to get his friend to come out on a Saturday night. He’d even agreed to hang out on the subway with him a few times. One Saturday they rode back and forth on the 4, 5, and 6 trains until two in the morning. Now Nick was following Jonas down his block.

“I’m organizing an intervention. Just thought I’d tell you,” Nick said.

“I thought you weren’t supposed to tell the person. I thought the element of surprise was an important part of an intervention.” Jonas untwisted the leashes, hand under hand, when the two dogs stopped to sniff at the same trash cans. “Is that why you’re stalking me?”

“Well, it’s not officially organized yet,” Nick answered. “And I’m not stalking you. I’m coming along for the ride . . . or the walk, as the case may be.”

Jonas made twenty bucks a day per dog whenever someone in his building went away and wanted his services.

“Maybe you want to weigh in during the planning stage,” Nick said.

“Don’t worry so much about me.” Jonas stopped when the dogs stopped. He reached in his pocket for his plastic scooper bags, but the dogs kept walking. “False alarm.”

Nick followed. “I’m not so much worried about you as terrified. You can’t keep waiting for her. She either isn’t coming or never did.”

Jonas stopped. “You still think I’m crazy.”

“Kind of. Maybe it’s all the weed.”

Not likely.

All four stopped at the corner, waiting for the light to change. Casper, a whitish Shar-Pei–Lab mix sat down on the curb; as soon as he did that, Jengo, an overweight boxer, sat down next to him.

“Oh, crap. They hate to move. C’mon, guys. Let’s go.” The white walk light came on.

“I’m not crazy, Nick, but I don’t know. It’s so long ago, I’m forgetting. Maybe you’re right.”