Coming for you
DEBORAH ROGERS
1
I hate this. This half life. This half foot. So I come here to forget. To the subway. To just sit and imagine all of the things. All of the netherworld places beneath my feet. The warrens and laneways and sewers and tunnels and secret entrances and exits. The underground people pulling their underground carts into even more underground places. The rats and snakes and blind feral cats lurking and leaping and scuttling. Along and beneath the hot iron tracks, way down below through the cracks in the walls and the holes in the ground.
I come to ride the trains. Late at night when there are not too many people around. When I can get a fix on who exactly is in the car. When there’s enough empty space to escape if I have to.
I get on anywhere and just sit and let the train take me away. I like the slipping and sliding on the blue plastic seat, the push and shove of the stop and start, the jerking and rolling, the thump of the wheels on the track. I like how no one looks at me and I don’t have to look at them. I like how I can forget who I am and who I was meant to be and the gaping canyon between the two. I like how I don’t have to think about the present, future, or past. Especially the past.
I ride and ride and ride. Sometimes for hours. I ride until the stale air tightens my face and the strange heartbeat of the train quiets my mind. I ride until all the thinking and dark thoughts abate. That’s the goal anyway. Because if I’m honest, he never really goes away. My constant unwanted companion, who tumbles around my skull like a lone sneaker in a dryer, the rubber fixing to blister and melt in the heat of the barrel. He never lets go of me and I never let go of him. We are Siamese twins. Bound together by the crimes he committed against me and my soul.
But at least here on the train I can sit and pretend he does not exist. And pretending is better than nothing. Pretending is all I’ve got and I want to hold on to that for as long as I can.
I know the night’s journey will end at some point and that I can’t ride the train forever. After a few hours I will have to return to the real world above, where he does exist, and eventually I will, raising myself up from the seat to stand on my one good foot and steady my cane in my hand and clap myself out of the subway car and up the stairs and back into the savage world.
But for now, I am here, thinking and not thinking. For now, I can let myself breathe.
Tonight I count the number of people in the car with me. Three. A gray-haired woman in a fluoro jumpsuit and Birkenstocks sits opposite. A regular guy in blue jeans and a bomber jacket leans against the pole thumbing through his phone. A girl too young to be out this late on her own stands by the door staring into the flying darkness. I can see her face in the reflection and she catches me looking. She casts a sudden bold look at me over her shoulder as if to say what the hell are you looking at? I wonder what she sees in return, this woman with a cane in her sensible navy trouser suit. There goes one hell of a broken human being? A survivor? Am I survivor? Or did I really die back there in the woods?
I glance away and she returns to the window and the dark tunnel walls flip by.
Above me, someone has scratched the words Pound Town into the ceiling of the subway car. I imagine a youth in a hoodie teetering on top of the seat, arm hooked through the railing, stretching with a knife to carve those words into the steel. Maybe his friends goaded him on. Or maybe he was a loner like me and simply wanted the world to know he existed. I wonder if he ever returns to admire his work. If he stands amongst the rush hour commuters, quietly triumphant, holding his secret close.
The train pulls into a stop. I glance up, as I always do, checking for who’s about to get on, and see them. A sea of expectant faces waiting on the platform. There are so many of them, so many faces, that I cannot possibly catalog each one. My heart pulses in my throat. The doors open and in comes the rush. All those chattering faces push their way in and fill up the car, swallowing up all that nice empty space. A well-to-do crowd in suits and tuxes and sequined dresses. In they come, pushing and laughing, fanning themselves with programs, diamante chandelier earrings swaying and winking. In they come, squeezing in on the seat beside me, standing around and over me, pressing in on all sides.
My throat goes tight. It’s not safe. I’m no longer safe. Three has become dozens, all crammed together. They are too close. Everyone is too close. He is here. He is everywhere. I have to get out.
I wake up on the cold hard floor. In front of me, shoes, lots and lots of shoes, all pointing in my direction. Polished black oxfords. Brown leather loafers. Strappy Jimmy Choos. High heels and kitten heels. A pair of battered Birks and an overgrown toenail.
I am flipped on my back. People loom over me.
“You dropped like a stone.” A bald, rotund man in a blue sweater crouches next to me then tries to steady himself as the train rounds a corner. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I thought you were dead.”
I turn my head. My cane’s a few feet away. The Birkenstocks woman is eyeing it up. Take it, I want to say, go on, just take it, but I can’t seem to speak, and now the man is lifting me to my feet and telling everyone to make room and the train stops and there’s a swoosh of the doors and he ushers me across the threshold and onto the platform and we stand looking, me leaning on him, at the train waiting to depart.
“Don’t miss it,” I say.
“Oh, there’ll be another one shortly.”
But he wants to get on, I can tell. The doors close and he loses his chance. Instead he guides me to a row of seats, lowering me into the second to last one.
He hands me my cane. “Is there someone I should call?”
From the corner of my eye I see a flash of gold, his wedding ring, thinned by time, tightly wedged into the crease of his chubby digit.
I shake my head. “Not really.”
He sits down. “What happened back there?”
“I’m not sure.”
Another train pulls up and he tries not to look.
“Go on,” I say. “I’m okay now. Thank you so much for your help.”
“Someone should stay, make sure you’re okay.”
“Please, I’m fine.”
He hesitates and casts a look of longing at the train.
“Go on, sir. Please.”
He gets to his feet. “Well, if you’re sure. My wife is waiting for me at home. Take care.”
He hurries across the platform and ducks through the doors and stands looking at me through the glass as the train pulls away.
2
“You dropped like a stone.”
I think of those words as I emerge from the subway. I’m shocked that it has happened again. I do the math in my head. Five weeks since the last episode. Three months before that. Seven months before that. They are becoming more frequent. I should be getting better by now but I’m only getting worse.
I pause to catch my breath at the top of the subway stairs. Stairs are the worst. Especially steep ones like these. I have to take them one at a time, steady my weight on the cane, haul myself up to the next one, all the while ignoring the pain shooting through my useless semi-foot. That’s what they actually call it. A semi-foot. I nearly laughed out loud when I first heard the physical therapist say it during our sessions with the railings.
“That’s right, Amelia, lead with your semi-foot.”
They like to do that, the helpers, re-label disabilities and items to make them seem like less of a lack. Like my cane. They call it a device. An “assisted living device,” to be more precise. Like the word “cane” is somehow derogatory.
Whatever its name, I’m still not used to my cane and the balance it requires. Three years since we were first introduced and I still make rookie mistakes. Like not taking enough care to ensure the rubber
stopper at the bottom doesn’t slip into a crack. Only last week, I careened face-first into the pavement right outside the courthouse.
Still, there are benefits. No one seems to bother a woman with a cane. If anything, people give me a wide berth because of it, as if I’m blind and they’re worried I might walk straight into them. Once someone even tried to give me money.
I carry on to my apartment. I never take the same route home twice in a week. That could mean getting off a different subway stop and then taking a bus, or walking a few blocks (despite the pain), or getting back on the subway, or taking a cab. It’s exhausting, constantly being on guard, thinking of the logistics for every journey home. But it’s safer that way.
Outside it’s as dark as ink and must be close to 1 a.m. And cold. Soon it will be fall. I don’t like fall. There are too many reminders in the fall. In the fall I lose my hair. Strands litter the shower floor, stick to the bathroom walls, my pillow, the collar of my black woolen coat. It comes away in my fingers and fills the teeth of my comb. Not clumps exactly, but enough to worry that I might be afflicted with some strange form of seasonal alopecia. Enough to be concerned that the bald patches might never grow back. But they always do. In spring the molting stops and my hair renews. Grayer and more wiry than before. But at least it grows back.
“You dropped like a stone.”
I think of myself lying there on the floor of the subway car, people staring at me, the Birkenstocks woman coveting my cane, the husband man helping me. At least there is still one kind soul in the world.
I reach the corner of 13th Street and 3rd Avenue and pause there. I can’t decide which route to take. Every route seems risky tonight. The episode on the train has really shaken me. Get a grip, I tell myself, so I choose left and skirt the empty basketball court and cross the road, then double back on the opposite side of the street and head east down 11th and into the alleyway. The alleyway is a narrow access path squeezed between two remodeled tenement buildings. It gives me the creeps but it’s well-lit and will bring me out onto the avenue and into the postage stamp playground where I can take cover near the hedgerow to study my apartment building from afar.
I reach the playground and pause at the hedge to look at the building. It’s a small eight-story walk-up, red-bricked with iron balconies and fire escape ladders, a former pencil factory converted into apartments back in the 1980s.
I scan the exterior and count four floors up. The new tenant in the floor below has put flowerpots and yucca plants on their balcony. I swear under my breath. Anyone could be hiding there and I wouldn’t know it. And from there, they would only need to unclip the fire ladder and climb to my balcony directly above. But there’s nothing I can do. People can’t stop making their homes look nice just because of me.
There’s a sudden movement to the left on the ledge outside the second-story apartment. I tense. Then I see the flick of a tail. It’s only the cat, the no-name cat that nobody seems to own. I’ve seen it before, leaping from one balcony to the next or launching itself from the fire exit ladders to the floors below or above, like some kind of crazy ninja feline. One day that thing’s going to slip and tumble headfirst right onto the pavement and its acrobat days will be over.
My eyes shift to my own apartment. The living room lights are on. I look at my watch. Just before two. The lights (two twenty-dollar floor lamps I bought on sale from Home Depot) are set on an automatic timer, and go on and off in pre-scheduled two-hour increments. A ruse so anyone outside would think there was someone home.
The windows are closed and both sets of venetian blinds are the way I left them this morning, hanging down at a precise midway point in the windowpanes, the slats open on a half-inch incline so the internal lights in the apartment shine through to the outside.
I wait there for at least twenty minutes, watching for movement inside the apartment. There’s nothing. No one is in there. I am safe.
I emerge from behind the hedgerow and cross the road and head for the building, all the while fighting the urge to return to my hiding place in the playground to check on the apartment again.
It’s not the first apartment I have lived in since the incident. There were four more prior to this one. On average I have shifted every six months. To stay ahead. To stay safe. When I have exhausted all the possible combinations of routes I can use to get to an apartment, I know I’m at risk of developing patterns and routines that could be detectable, so the only solution is to move again. Constantly shifting is exhausting and totally at odds with my nature to want to stay in one place. But I do it because there is no real alternative. I’d rather be a moving target than a sitting duck.
I reach the door to my building. It’s a push code button type of lock where you key in a combination, but I’m smart enough to know that although this door is meant to be the first line of defense, it’s really no defense at all. People can easily slip in behind someone else. Tenants can (and do) give out the code to friends and relatives. So I never trust it. The only real first line of defense is my own apartment door.
Before I key in the code, I glance over my shoulder to study the street. Empty. I slip inside and push the door firmly behind me until I hear the nib click back into place.
The stairwell is to my left. Empty and well-lit. Four flights of stairs are beyond my current capabilities, so I take the elevator instead. An old-fashioned Otis elevator with a scissor gate that no one else bothers to use. It stammers upward to my floor and I walk the six footsteps to my apartment door. I pause and listen as the elevator staggers back down to the ground floor. Someone is playing Xbox in one of the apartments above. A moan of a siren a few streets away.
I push my keys into the dead bolts in my door. There are two of them, state of the art, titanium models. I do not trust potentially corruptible tradesmen so I installed them myself, something I have become very good at from watching YouTube clips.
I unlock the door and stand on the threshold, listening. It’s more than listening really. Sensing is a more accurate description, using my gut to get a read on the energy in the apartment, to detect whether someone is in there, invading my territory, filling it up. Tonight there is nothing. But this does not mean I can relax. No way. Now the real work begins.
I’m bone tired and desperate for sleep. I have a full schedule at work tomorrow and need to be on my game. But there’s a detailed checking process I must follow before I can even think of going to bed. By now my Home Depot lights are off and I keep it that way. Leaving the front door open, I step inside. Back at the start of all this, after the incident and long stay at the hospital, when I first went to live on my own, when this process of checking began, I faced the dilemma of whether to leave the front door open while I checked the inside of the apartment. A dilemma because someone could sneak through the front door while I was deep in the apartment and carry out a blitz attack on me. But if I locked the door behind me before I checked the rest of the apartment and there was someone inside, it would mean I would be trapped in the apartment with them. That’s when I came to realize that a good checking strategy was as much about escape as it was about entry. So when I moved here three months ago, the first thing I did was carefully map out the escape routes. Should the worst occur I have three available options:
Flee out my front door. Activate the building’s fire alarm on the landing. Bang on everybody’s doors. Shout Fire! People come running. Attacker scared off. It’s my number one strategy because with my foot how it is, I could never outrun the potential attacker. I could take the elevator, but by the time I got to the ground floor, he would be waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs and I’d be as good as dead.
Climb out the living room window. Get onto the balcony. Unhook the fire escape and make my way down to the next level’s balcony and fire escape and so on until I reach the ground. Not easy with my foot but I can do it. One time my neighbor caught me practicing. Mr. Lee from apartment 5b. He’s been kind enough to look the other way ever since.
&nb
sp; The last resort. Not so much an escape strategy as a final solution. Shoot the fucker in the head with my Glock 19 9mm compact semi-automatic pistol that I keep in the side table next to the sofa.
That’s it. Only two escape routes out of the apartment, and one last resort, but at least I have a plan.
I cross the living room floor and check that the large window overlooking the balcony is firmly locked, that the venetian blinds have not been touched, that no dust has been stirred. After that, I hang back behind the window frame, look out the window and onto the balcony, and study the dark street below. All clear. I lower the venetian blinds and adjust the slats until they are closed all the way, then walk the circumference of the room, checking that nothing’s out of place, that the armchair and sofa have not been sat on or moved.
I head to my bedroom and check the window there. The latch holds firm, the way I left it this morning. The blinds are the same, too. I look around and check that nothing has been moved and it all looks okay. I pause and study my bedroom closet, or what’s left of my bedroom closet. I removed the doors when I first came here. The thought of someone hiding inside made me on edge all the time, so I took them off.
It’s tidy, with just the bare essentials to aid a clearer view. Everything from my old life is gone. All those frivolous dresses, too short and pretty for me now given my cumbersome foot. Not a high heel in sight, either. Now it’s all about sensible orthopedic-adjusted shoes. Serious career pant suits and blazers. Besides, it’s easier to get away in flats and trousers than a skirt and kitten heels.
I scan the racks. Two pant suits, one gray, one navy, both with matching blazers. Two neatly pressed white shirts. A beige raincoat and gray knee-length woolen coat complete the collection. Resting on the shoe rack below are two pairs of flats, black and black, and two pairs of Nikes with a special orthopedic insert, my gym bag next to those.
In the three cubby holes to the left, two sweaters and one hoodie sit neat and snug. Below that, a pair of jeans and sweatpants. My workout gear occupies the final cubby.
Coming for You Page 1