Something was wrong at the 191st Street station. Reflective tape barricaded one stairwell entrance, and an orange-vested MTA worker, wearing a black woolen hat with earlaps and puffing out great gusts of breath steam, stood at the center of a teeming mob of disappointed passengers. Pushing into this congregation of the confused, we made our way near enough to overhear the worker, who in the most blasé tone possible announced that the subway was out of commission going downtown, and directed us to a nearby bus stop for a shuttle to 125th Street, where we could reboard the train. He parried all questions with a shrug, and rewound his spiel for the next party.
A bit stunned, Oona and I trudged with the others in the direction of the bus stop, two blocks down Nagle Avenue, on Broadway. The chaos there was more appalling than at the stairwell. One shuttle bus was loaded and just embarking, full with seated and standing passengers to such a point that I could hear its carriage sigh unhappily, promising breakdown in a mile or so. Another hundred passengers waited, in a streaming, hive-like circulation around a pole on which was taped a hasty, Magic Markered sign promising shuttle service at fifteen-minute intervals. A scene to crush your heart.
“What happened?” Oona addressed this as a kind of local petition to the five or six aggrieved passengers milling nearest. As in a street incident involving wreckage or fire trucks a volunteer explainer emerged, a middle-aged Hasid with curved shoulders draped in a long, soiled scarf, and bearing twin shopping bags like a milkmaid’s yoke. He seemed drawn to Oona as another dressed in black.
“Somebody said the tiger again,” he told her.
“They still haven’t caught it?”
He made a sour face under his beard, as though tasting the civic ineptitude. “If it stays so far uptown, what do they care? Five, six times I’ve been forced to get off and switch to the bus.”
“Really?”
He nodded, widening his eyes: really. “They claim it’s tearing up the track. But then an hour later the train goes right through. A convenient excuse, that’s all. So let it devour a small-businessman’s livelihood now and again. People like distraction. They live on it, gobble it up.”
I had to interrupt. “You’re saying they… encourage the tiger?”
He shrugged. “Tolerate maybe. Encourage maybe. It’s not mine to say. What they don’t do is catch.”
“Thank you,” said Oona. She nudged us away before I could ask more.
“I don’t completely get that man’s theory,” I said. “If there’s really a tiger, then why would he call it an excuse?”
“Well, the MTA could be opportunistically lying about the tiger’s whereabouts, I think that was what he meant.”
“Where do you suppose he’s getting his information?”
“Same as me, Chase. He’s just repeating what he’s heard.”
“Please don’t be so short with me. I think I dislocated my shoulder.”
“Don’t whine.”
“Now I’m completely sure you brought me out today as some kind of esoteric punishment,” I said. “I only don’t understand what I did wrong.”
Oona gave me a knifelike look. “You’re a little confused, Chase. I brought you with me for protection. I was scared to come up here alone.”
How quickly we’d become invisible to each other. I saw Oona Laszlo now, as if in a visionary flash, almost as if she were a blazing chaldron set before me. Pale, not so much dressed in black as feathered in it like a wounded bird, tinier in the white canvas tennis shoes she’d selected for the hike to Noteless’s Fjord than I’d ever seen her before, blinking her mascaraed eyes at me with a self-loathing which, if I let myself truly take notice, never subsided. A sort of elegant fragment or postulate of a person, but not whole, not entirely viable, certainly not credible waiting to board a shuttle among all these stolid brown-faced citizens whose depressive rage hovered smoggily overhead, a communal rain cloud formed of a loathing so much readier, so much less curdled in irony. Of course Oona again made me think of Perkus, and of course again I wouldn’t say so. I roused then what was best in me, what made me worthy of her or Perkus or anyone else who’d ever called to me for protection, and stuck out my expert arm and hailed an empty taxicab pointed downtown. It was hardly a miracle-this was Broadway, after all, never mind the high triple digits-but it felt like a miracle, one I’d summoned personally, in the manner of a quarterback’s Hail Mary pass.
We plopped exhausted and relieved into the cab’s backseat. The heater got my nose running and I snuffled happily. Even before Oona gave the driver her address we sped off, putting the grotesque scene of the bus stop behind us. We wouldn’t be missed-more shamblers redirected from the subway were arriving there, in waves.
“Well, you got your cab ride after all.”
“You want to make me feel guilty, but I can tell you’re as happy as I am.”
It was true, Oona was exhilarated, we both were, at the escape. If some standard of austerity, indicated by Noteless’s unforgiving aesthetic, had seemed to require a pilgrimage to his artwork by public transportation, then it was as if with the taxicab I’d wooed Oona back from that grim brink.
I couldn’t keep from gloating. “It’s amazing how passive people get in the face of an authority figure like that bully in the orange vest. He told them to go and wait for the shuttle, and they were all doing it, like sheep.”
“No doubt about it, Chase, those people would totally all hail cabs if they only had your iconoclastic courage.”
“I’m just saying we were locked into some kind of collective trance.”
“And then you recalled that you had a hundred dollars in your wallet, et voilà.”
Oona’s assault was fond, a sting with no venom. In one gesture I’d reclaimed her affection, and been forgiven my obsession with Perkus, too. I suppose I’d bargained for that forgiveness by surrendering Dust to Fjord. Our surrogates had canceled each other. In the delicious seedy security of the taxicab I felt I’d passed tests, survived fjords, ghettos, tigers. Even my shoulder felt better. My lust flooded back, too, the pang I’d felt earlier, of unfinished bed-business between us. Now I crowded Oona, in a pleasant way, and put my nose in her hair. The city seemed to be parting for us, the lights green in easy sequence, our cab already rounding Central Park’s northeastern shoulder.
“What are you doing later? And by later, I mean pretty much anytime starting immediately.”
She squirmed, also in a pleasant way, but farther from me. “I have to work. I want to get some impressions of Urban Fjord on paper while they’re fresh.”
“You sound like you’re working on a serious book for a change.” My jealousy wasn’t too real, but I didn’t mind striking the note.
“Oh, I didn’t get where I am today working on serious books. If I ever write a serious book you’ll be the first to know, Chase, I promise.”
“So why not risk an impression that’s… less than fresh?”
She used both hands to push me away. “I have to work, really.”
“Okay, okay.”
“Honestly, I have a lot on my plate.”
“I’m glad you’re being honest.”
“Fuck off.”
We’d pulled up to her building, at Ninety-fourth and Lex. The place had taken on a certain aura for my being excluded from it, and I turned my back to the entranceway and faced the street instead, not wanting to stare like a tourist at the pyramids.
“Don’t sulk,” said Oona. “Maybe I’ll call you later on. What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Well, I heard there was this fabulous crater on Thirty-fourth Street, I thought I’d wander over and have a look.”
“Nice.”