Breathing

I walk to the farthest end of the station—where you can stare deep down into the bowels of the subway.    I position myself directly next to the bumpy yellow line.  The same line that a drunk man daringly crossed weeks ago.  I close my eyes.

He tumbled onto the track landing on his back where he lay for a brief second as if to play dead.      He picked up his satchel that he had tossed down before him.   The whole station pauses, and watches.  He crosses the first rail, then the second—the third he trips on and gently he falls onto his back.  Persistent, he picks himself up and starts again.

The women call to him: “Sir, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”  …Brilliant observation.

In some stations the above ground doors will breathe with the entry and exit of a train.   The train, like a piston, pushes gasps of air—that must go somewhere.  So it rushes up and out of the station—exhaling the doors open with its entry, and inhaling them shut with its departure.  A gust of train wind.

He’s halfway across, the southbound tracks lay before him.  He stands to catch his breath on the concrete island that separates the incoming from the outgoing.   You can feel the train coming, the doors upstairs are probably slowly exhaling open, the ground rumbles slightly. He steps down and continues.  Across the third rail—his jacket wipes a clean spot on the rail coated with brake dust.  The train is getting closer, the air rushes, the ground trembles, the women get louder: “Sir, the train is coming.  I don’t think that’s a good idea.”  He steps between the first and second rail.

I close my eyes, and choke.