He starts to run, half-remembering a pay phone he’d once used way down at the other end of the platform for another hassled conversation with his ex. Yes, I sent the check already. No, I can’t take him next weekend... What will she say about this time? I knew it! I knew I couldn’t leave him alone with you! You’re such a fucking thoughtless asshole! He grabs the phone’s gummy yellow receiver, the rusted coil slithers, and then red and green wires spill from the chrome mainframe. Broken! Of course!
He drops the receiver in disgust and charges toward the stairs, blood throbbing in his cars. He pictures Ben alone on the train, a wan frightened child in a forest of strangers. Would he think to look for a policeman or another responsible adult? Who knew what his mother had taught him to do in an emergency? He was a fragile kid at the very best of times, and the divorce had shaken him badly. He’d cowered in his bedroom when his parents fought and had turned shy and withdrawn after the split: “a bully magnet” according to his kindergarten teachers, easily buffaloed away from the more popular toys. Sussman imagines a stranger taking the child’s hand and leading him off the train at some unknown stop, saying Mommy and Daddy are waiting for him there. He leaps up the steps two at a time, the slap of concrete on the bottom of his loafers stinging the soles of his feet.
You’re taking your son for the weekend? One of the other guys in sales gawked at him Friday afternoon. Jesus, I never even knew you’d spawned.
He stops a second on the landing to catch his breath, his belt buckle digging into a flabby roll. He’s terribly out of shape these days, from eating junk food on the road and skipping the gym for weeks on end. You think somebody’s going to give you their account because you’re the most relaxed rep they’ve ever met? he’d asked one of the newbies just last week. He swallows and sees the token booth a football field and a half away. No awards for the best excuse. He who hesitates is lunch. He makes another run for it, his lungs already straining, his knees audibly squeaking. He realizes he’s become the stick figure from Ben’s drawing, chasing the giant wheel rolling down the hill. He lifts his thighs and digs for all he’s worth. The future has narrowed to this barren gray stretch of concrete from here to the token booth.
But when he gets there the booth is empty. A small beige bag blocks the trench under the glass. For a second, he sees himself like Willem Dafoe on the poster for Platoon, falling to his knees as an enemy’s bullet rips into his chest.
No. He doesn’t even have the luxury of despair. Every wasted second holds the potential for disaster. What’s the next stop on the train? His eyes find the map on the wall and start desperately searching for the right artery through Brooklyn. Up until this second, he’s never bothered to study other routes besides the ones that take him back and forth to Manhattan.
The wilderness. Though he was born here and has been renting an apartment in Windsor Terrace for two years since the breakup, this borough is still the unexplored wilderness to him. Threatening swatches of Fort Greene and Williamsburg have only been glimpsed fleetingly through car service windows coming home from work late at night. He sees the train cuts through Borough Park and pictures mirthless bearded Hasidim glowering down at his boy. The stops have unfamiliar names like Church Avenue, Ditmas, Kings Highway. He sees “Avenue X,” and somehow the starkness of those black letters on the bland beige background strikes terror into his heart.
He runs up the stairs for the street, drenched in sweat, his arteries beginning to constrict.
But the world above ground is oblivious. Just minding its own business and acting like this is just another peaceful Sunday morning on Fifteenth Street, by the park. The sidewalks are empty. Birds sing in the trees. Copies of the Sunday New York Times sheathed in blue plastic lie undisturbed on the doorsteps of prim Victorian-looking brownstones and limestones. How can the people upstairs still be sleeping, or having drowsy rollover sex, or scratching their butts on the way to the bathroom with a hangover, when his whole life is falling apart? How can they be so complacent?
He reaches for his cell phone but knows before his hand even touches his pocket that the thing is still sitting on the bedside table, where he’d deliberately left it this morning, so for once he wouldn’t be answering calls about work instead of spending time with his son. He imagines it, blinking dumbly, its battery life slowly ebbing away. Fuck. Now he can’t even call 911. Shouldn’t there be one of those old-fashioned red fire department call boxes on this street? This is a nightmare in broad daylight. This is the beginning of a tragic story in the newspaper. He keeps seeing Ben’s stunned little face pulling away from him. His heart squeezes and he feels a dull pain beginning in his left shoulder.
The wheel is rolling down the hill faster, picking up momentum. Blame. There must be someone else to blame. It can’t all be his fault. At work, he’s always had a talent for handling pressure and delivering in the clutch, but this is too much for anyone to carry. He pictures Ben surrounded by a roaming wolf pack on the train, a bunch of dead-eyed little thugs demanding the brand-new Game Boy Advance he had with him.
“Somebody help mee,” his voice jiggles as he pounds on down the sidewalk, heading for Eighth Avenue, looking for someone, anyone, to make a call for him and stop the trains.
He sees a doughy-looking woman, gray hair sticking out from under a Yankees cap, on her way to the park with a saggy-faced mastiff on a leash.
“Cell phone?” he calls out to her.
She looks at him blankly. The pitch. He has to make a pitch to her, to sell her his terrible need.
“Excuse me.” He holds his hands out, beseeching. “Do you have a cell phone I could borrow? I’m having an emergency. My child is missing.”
She tugs down on the bill of her cap, not meeting his eye as she starts to pass, a time-honored urban tradition for dealing with street crazies.
“Stupid bitch!”
A part of him is appalled, he doesn’t say this sort of thing, but he can’t stop himself. The wheel is spinning out of control. His whole life is on the brink of nullity, of meaninglessness, of total annihilation.
He sees one brownstone without a Times on its doorstep and decides the people inside must be awake. Maybe they even have children of their own. He runs up the stoop and starts ringing their buzzer.
“Hello?” A groggy female voice comes out of the intercom.
Automatically, he finds himself trying to picture her, like he’s making a sales call. He sees a woman no longer young, not nearly old, on her first cup of coffee of the day. The type he could trap on the phone back when he was in telemarketing. He sees her in a flannel bathrobe, trying to make pancakes, moving around the kitchen with a three-year-old dinging to her leg like a little koala bear.
“Hi,” he says, trying to modulate and sound reasonable. “I’m sorry to be bothering you. Something terrible has happened. I lost my child on the subway and I need to call 911.”
“Oh.”
For a moment, time stands still and the wheel stops turning, leaving him suspended at the top of the arc, rocking in the breeze. Everything depends on that one syllable. He tells himself that only someone who’s known the joy and pain of childbirth could say “oh” in just exactly that way. Only someone who’s stayed up at a feverish child’s bedside until the bleak morning hours, with a damp washcloth and a dropper full of Children’s Tylenol could draw the word out just so. Only someone who’s filled a bathroom with shower steam at three a.m. for a croupy cough could be this empathetic. She understands. She knows he’s telling the truth. He’s going to close the deal with her. People are good. People are compassionate. This is a borough of neighbors, not a chilly collection of anonymous souls piled on top of each other in teetering stacks like Manhattan.