Mackay stepped forward. He still hoped that somehow the situation would unmake itself, that some word or action would occur to show its normalcy and innocence. Just before intervening, Mackay took a last decisive look at the man on the platform. What he saw gave him pause. Although he was a day or two unshaven, there was something rather distinguished about the man’s appearance. His bearing was firm and confident. His features were delicate and more pleasant than otherwise. He was neatly and tastefully dressed in a jacket and tie. His hair was wavy and slightly long in the back like an old-fashioned Middle European musician’s. His eyes were happy, although wide and staring.
“Anything wrong?” Mackay asked the elderly woman. She looked at him in desperation.
When the tall man turned to him, Mackay saw that the man was sturdier and younger than he had appeared at a distance. He was looking at Mackay in blue-eyed amazement.
“You!” he said. As though he knew Mackay and recognized him. “You!” the man half screamed. His cry of recognition seemed to transcend the merely personal. He seemed indeed to be recognizing in the person of Mackay everything that had ever been wrong with his life, which Mackay suspected had been quite a lot.
Out of the corner of his eye, Mackay saw the woman who had been menaced edging away.
“Take a walk,” Mackay told the man sternly. Immediately he regretted the pathetic suburban bravado of his words. In his own ears his voice had the quality of a dream. It was as though, upon addressing the man, he had entered something like a dream state. Events thereafter seemed lit in an unnatural light.
“You are from Doc,” the man said. He spoke with a Germanic accent. At first it sounded as though he had said, “You are from God.” When the man repeated it, Mackay got it straight. “You are from Doc.”
Mackay saw the unnatural brightness of his eyes and the starvation gauntness of his bony face. It was frightening to imagine what kind of life had to be endured behind such eyes. They were without order or justice or reason. For a moment, the two men stood motionless on the platform, facing each other. Mackay listened to the older man’s shrill dreamlike laughter.
“You are an English queer,” the man said to Mackay and attacked him.
When Mackay raised his fists the man slipped easily around his guard. Like an inexperienced fighter Mackay had raised his chin contentiously. The man punched him in the throat and for a moment he could not draw breath. He stepped back in confusion, then quickly decided he was unhurt. The man came at him again.
Grappling hand to hand, Mackay realized with horror his opponent’s strength. His first impression of the older man’s age and fragility had been mistaken altogether As they wrestled, he heard the local train approaching in the tunnel behind him. It was the train for which he had been waiting. Mackay felt himself sliding toward the edge of the platform. Braced against an advertising poster, the gray-haired man was kicking at his legs, trying to hook and trip him. Mackay fought for his life.
As the local pulled into the station, the man tried to shove Mackay against it. When the doors opened, people hurried past them, getting on the train or off it. For a moment he caught a glimpse of the old woman he had thought to protect. She was inside the train now, watching through the window with a disapproving frown. Then he had to turn his head away to keep the madman’s fingers out of his eyes.
Aware of the unheeding crowd, Mackay felt bound all the deeper in his dreaming state. In one of his recurring dreams, he would always find himself alone in a crowd, a foreign unregarded presence, the representative of Otherness. At the height of the nightmare some guilty secret or possession of his would be exposed to the crowd and draw their pitiless alien laughter.
The local gathered speed and pulled away. Mackay began to feel his strength ebbing, subverted by guilt, by weakness, by fear and indecision and lack of confidence. Somewhere in the darkness the next express was on its way. With his back to the tracks, Mackay held on.
They fell together to the filthy platform and rolled over, struggling in the half-light. The platform was deserted now. Distant voices echoed in tiled corridors. Mackay’s assailant struggled to his feet and began to kick him. Mackay tried to dodge away; he was caught and kicked. Unable to escape, he dove at the man’s legs and brought him down.
Again they rolled across the platform. Mackay took hold of the other man’s hair and tried to ram his head against a steel pillar. The man butted him, breaking teeth, bloodying his mouth. Struggling to his feet, Mackay turned to run, but feeling the man’s grip, turned to face him. He knew that was better than turning his back. The tunnel rang with the screech and roar of another train, bearing down on the express track.
Mackay took hold of his assailant’s jacket and tried to bind him in the cloth. The man broke free and got an arm around Mackay’s neck. The man’s body had an evil smell. Driven by terror, Mackay somehow broke the hold and they were face to face again and literally hand to hand. The lunatic was pushing forward. He seized Mackay’s arms at the biceps, trying to gather strength for the shove that would impel him off the platform.
Freeing his right arm, Mackay landed a lucky punch that brought his knuckles hard against the older man’s collarbone. The man raised both hands to protect his throat. Explosively, an empty darkened train roared out of the tunnel and along the express track, passing through the station without stopping.
With his arms free, Mackay hurled punch after punch in panic and desperation. He heard, or thought that he heard, bone crack and felt the contours of his opponent’s face yield to his fists. Sensing indecision in the older man’s movements, he was driven to a blind fury, swinging hard and wild until his arms hung useless at his sides. Many hours later; when both his hands seemed to have swollen to the size of outfielders’ gloves, he would discover that he had sustained multiple fractures in both hands.
Pale-faced and vacant-eyed, the strange German sat down on the platform and shouted. It took Mackay several seconds to realize that the man was shouting for help.
“Help!” the man called at the top of his voice. “Help me someone please!”
Mackay leaned against a signboard, breathing with difficulty. He was so tired that he was afraid of losing consciousness. His vision seemed peculiar; it was as if he saw the dim empty station around him in spasms of perception, framed in separated fragments of time. The disconnectedness of things, he saw, was fundamental. Years later, photographing a civil war in Nigeria, he would find the scenes of combat strangely familiar. The mode of perception discovered in the course of his absurd subway battle would serve him well. He would go where the wars and mobs were, photographing bad history in fragmented time. He had the eye.
At his feet, a bleeding man sat shouting for help. Mackay moved panting toward the subway stairs. There was blood on his hands. When he reached the foot of the stairs, he saw for the first time that the stairway was crowded with people and that many of the people were shouting as well. At first he could make no sense of it.
Then it came to him that the people on the stairs had come down and seen him beating a well-dressed older man. Mackay was wearing his navy peacoat, which was too warm for the weather and his painting clothes. It was March 1965, and his hair hung down halfway to his shoulders. He had grown a beard from the first of the year. The people had been afraid to come down to the platform.