The Railroad

by Neil Douglas Newton

  Like any good New Yorker, feeling the pulse of the City, I had my plan of action worked out immediately. I would walk eastward to the other side of the island, getting as far away as possible from the towers. I knew it would be bedlam on the subways as all of the Wall Street area tried to make it to trains, buses, ferries and water taxis at once. I wouldn’t let myself get caught up in the chaos.

  Chapter Two

  As I made my way through the lobby, I was playing my route home in my head, trying to anticipate the areas most likely to be congested. There had to be some way to avoid them.

  I was almost through the doors and to the street when I heard someone call my name. Peter Krauss was a balding man in his thirties. We had shared a few jokes in the bathroom but I’d never felt any kinship toward him and was certainly not in the mood for him just then.

  “Mike!” he called. “Are you going to take the subway?”

  I grimaced. “To be honest, Peter, the subway is going to be a mess.”

  “Come on! Just ride with me to City Hall. I’m going to get off and walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. Maybe I can get a bus or call my wife to come get me.”

  “I’d really rather not get on the subway.”

  “It’s only two stops.”

  I considered it; I’d made it downtown with no problem. “Let’s go see if there are any signs down in the station. Maybe they’ve closed the trains.”

  “I guess we can walk to the bridge. Let’s go down anyway, and take a look.”

  I wondered for a second why I was going against my own instincts but Peter looked so panic-stricken that I felt some odd need to help him; I started walking down the subway stairs into Bowling Green station “Okay, we’ll see.”

  There were no signs in the subway; the trains seemed to be running smoothly. Two stops, I told myself. What could happen?

  We took the one stop to Wall Street with no problems. Peter gave me an “I told you so” nod and I relaxed. We began to talk about the office as the train pulled out of the station on its way to Fulton Street. We’d just gotten into a discussion of budgeting when the train did something no other subway car has ever done in my experience as a New Yorker: it jerked to a stop with enough force to practically knock me over.

  The shock was profound; I righted myself and took stock of the situation, becoming increasingly aware of my fellow riders. Each of us looked from one to the other, searching for an answer to this unexpected break in our proper routine. I knew that two planes had hit the Twin Towers separately and the conclusion I’d been avoiding hit me full force. Someone had planned it. Was someone now sabotaging the subways, perhaps cutting the power? The possibilities poured through my mind in a rush: someone had sabotaged the electrical systems; someone had set off a bomb somewhere in the subway system; someone had blocked the tunnel; someone was going to board the train and…

  I stole a few furtive glances at my fellow passengers and noticed they were doing the same thing. No one wanted to lock eyes; that would have made our disaster too real. Instead we stared around each other, catching small glimpses of the people near us.

  I numbed out and went into New York mode, a state hard to explain to anyone not from the City. People think New Yorkers are hard and aloof, but what they really are is overloaded. When you’re thrown back on your own devices, you start thinking of what you can do to fix things and everything else is tuned out. I immediately thought of my escape route. All of us knew about the third rail, where it was, how to avoid it; I’d seen signs for years in every car I’d ever been in showing that it wasn’t safe to leave the train without the aid of transit crews. But I knew if things got bad, I’d simply leave the train and walk back to Wall Street, hugging the right side of the tracks.

  I stole some more glances around me. Who was thinking the same thing I was? I wondered. Was someone else going to suggest it? Should we leave now? I glanced at Peter who simply gave me a confused look. No one moved and there was little conversation.

  That was until the smoke started drifting in. That was the best way I could describe it, like being a block or so away from a fire and having some of the smoke drift into your house. As things began to go slightly hazy, I lost my sense of security. Other people had seen it too and were looking around, starting to shuffle like cows in a pen, whispering to each other.

  It is possible that I might die. There was the thought that I’d been avoiding and it came into my mind without any preamble. It was just there. Yes, people die in situations like this. Like on the news. I had the stark realization that I could be a statistic, just like one of those people in earthquakes in South America or in auto accidents. That those people who never had been real to me before actually were real, was a horrifying thought. I imagined someone reading about me in a newspaper or hearing about me from someone who knew me after I was gone.

  I looked at my fellow passengers once more and wondered if a group so ordinary could be a group that could die. And it occurred to me that groups that die in tragedies always seem ordinary to themselves. Oh shit.

  Someone began singing a spiritual. At first it shocked us all in the closed space, but soon a few others joined in. I listened, slightly uncomfortable till one man shouted, “Stop that! They’re going to get us out.”

  “Pray to Jesus,” answered another man.

  There was an electric silence that followed; we all stared at each other. I felt the shock along with everyone else; some of us had spoken spontaneously; it was a violation of the rules that guided our lives. People who spoke with no apparent reason were automatically insane. I could see in everyone’s eyes that they had registered how strange it was. Oh God.

  We were in deep shit; I knew that. Only desperation or shock could make a New Yorker act that way. Not attracting attention was what we all strove for in our daily lives. How stupid that seemed now.

  The silence continued. Only it seemed to curdle somehow now that we’d left our comfortable little bubbles. Peter and I avoided each other’s eyes. I looked again at the door to the car, longingly. Maybe it was only the deer that got caught in the headlights that died. Maybe it was time for me to move.

  Somehow I didn’t. I went into myself again.

  I’d gone somewhere that I couldn’t quite identify. I knew that because my eyes were closed and I was shaken out of a sort of trance when the voice of reason came across the public address system: Attention please. We’ve stopped due to trouble just up ahead. When things clear up, we’ll be moving. Please stay calm and stay on the train. We’ll give you an update as soon as possible. Thank you.

  That was reassuring, or so it seemed; maybe it was just water to a thirsty man; the relief was so great that it had to be truth. I finally got up the nerve to look at Peter again to see his reaction and all he did was shrug. Someone near the middle of the car began speaking, startling all of us after the announcement. “Jesus will guide us all from here. Don’t worry, Just trust in Him.”

  There was silence. Again, someone had violated the no talking rule that governed New York.

  It seemed that, with that last utterance, the floodgates opened and people began to speak. “Pray to whatever god you believe in,” said one young woman.” I smiled at Peter, realizing that I didn’t really know what his religion was. He simply shook his head and told me, “I just want to get out of here.

  A young man in his twenties told us that “he could get us moving”. He smiled, satisfied with himself, and began moving back toward our car’s conductor’s booth. He strutted southward, testing the mood of the crowd. “Yo, man,” someone called. “Let the train crews handle it. Don’t mess things up.”

  The young man waved his hand dismissively. “You want to stay here, that’s your business.” But in the end he parked himself by the door and didn’t move.

  Another announcement came over the PA; we were to do nothing, only this time we weren’t going to move, we were going to wait for train crews to come and escort us off the train. I imagined myself walking in a line behind Peter;
the idea of being out of that car was intoxicating.

  And I suddenly felt impatient wondering when we’d be getting off the train and what they were waiting for. I found I was getting angry; I simply wanted to go where I was going and I was being held back by the same chicken-shit bureaucracy that always held me down in New York. Even in a disaster like this they were simply covering their asses and going by the book. We’d end up dying in here, I told myself, because it would take too long for them to get their asses in gear and get someone down to help us. I’d die just because someone else was part of an inept system full of overpaid clerks. I began to look again toward the back door of the car I was in.

  I looked upward. Somewhere on the street people were moving around, being proactive, getting themselves and others to safety. And here I was, needing help, and no one would even think of me down in the tunnels. I’d just be forgotten because I didn’t happen to be up on the street where I could be seen. They’d never think of me down here.

  And I realized that I was starting to panic. It scared me even more.

  Like most New Yorkers, we didn’t have much trust in the transit authority. What they could and couldn’t do in a situation like this was unknown to us. Would they bog down in a bureaucratic frenzy, leaving us in the train, unable to get clear instructions from their bosses? Were their own communication lines down?

  I wasn’t the only one looking toward the back door. Yet none of us moved. Another New York reality: standing out is bad. People who do odd things are as bad as people who talk out of turn. If I was to simply leave the car I’d be breaking the stasis by which we all lived, causing a scene. Even in this, the direst situation I’d ever faced in my life, I still had my dignity to consider; if no one was going to go with me, I was going to stay. I saw the same decision being made in the eyes of most of the people around me.

  I noticed that the woman across from me was sobbing, quietly. Soon a woman nearby put her arm around her. Surely a rare moment in New York. People were praying now, audibly. Even the tough young man had ceased to strut and seemed as frightened as the rest of us.

  The dynamic was changing quickly. We, the impervious, the uninterested had become a small mob of people stripped bare of our customary apathy. And yet, like any New York crowd, no one screamed, no one panicked out loud. It occurred to me in a strange rush that if the crews came, we’d all move out peacefully, people helping each other down from the train, lending a hand to an elderly person.

  It could have been ten minutes or maybe a half an hour before they made the wonderful announcement. There would be no train crews; they weren’t going to wait to get us out. They were going to save us. We couldn’t move forward; I was sure that most of us on the train could guess that the worst had happened in the World Trade Center and driving into the affected area wasn’t possible. As ominous as that sounded the news we heard was wonderful; they were going to back the train into Wall Street station, behind us. A cheer rose up from everyone and in seconds I felt the welcome motion of backward movement.

  For all of us, this was beyond strange. Trains didn’t move backwards in New York; this wasn’t a commuter railroad where adjustments were made and trains moved in all directions. This was the New York Transit Authority, as unchangeable as the weather. We marveled at the backward movement for about ten seconds. And then the train suddenly ground to a jarring halt that made the previous lurch seem tame.

  Someone screeched and I heard some more praying. Somewhere off to my left someone screamed, “Help me!”. I saw a couple of people who had fallen and were being helped up. Suddenly people were talking, reassuring themselves and others that we’d get out of that train in one piece. People began speculating, loudly, as if to make their speculations real.

  “They’ve reversed the flow of the electricity in the tracks,” I heard one man say.

  “No that’s not possible,” someone answered. “I studied transportation engineering at NYU.”

  A debate started. Then a couple of small arguments. I could feel the pulse of the car rise, as each of us tried to distract ourselves from what was happening. “What do you think?” a skinny dark haired woman asked me.

  To my surprise I laughed. “Not much, to be honest. Sorry. I think we’re going to get out.”

  “Really?” she moaned, moving closer to me.

  Then we heard the truth. Please keep calm, the PA told us. There’s a failsafe mechanism in the trains that automatically makes the train lose power when it moves backwards. It may take us a few more tries but we’re going to make it into the station. Right now we’re building up power again.

  Suddenly I began to doubt again. They were trying to keep us calm because something worse was happening and they didn’t want anyone to know. The train simply was broken and the power had been tampered with.

  And then the train moved smoothly backward again. We all looked back, towards the safe haven of Wall Street station. No one said a word as the train moved. I watched the windows, desperately hoping for the sight of station lights, the platform, anything.

  Another lurch, the lights flickered and people began talking again. More people told us to pray. I had to wonder, over the beating of my heart, if they were right. Another teasing ten seconds and the train started to move again.

  It took perhaps four more tries before my wildest dreams were answered; I saw the window opposite me fill with the lights of Wall Street station. A hush fell over the car, broken by the occasional, “Ah” or “I knew they’d figure it out”. After what seemed an eternity the doors opened. We walked out slowly, quietly, into a world just a bit more bright than our subway car. Whatever substance was causing the haze that had been in our car had drifted into the station as well. We walked through a ghostly, smoky world where stairs, platforms and people were only barely seen. I mounted the stairs expecting the smoke would blow away once we came to the street.

  Only this seemed to be a part of the station I’d never seen. Instead of leading us up to the street, this set of stairs left us inside still. I’d been in stations, like West Fourth Street, where platforms hovered three deep over other platforms, each one serving a different train line. I’d never known that Wall Street had a section like that. It was a disturbing revelation because, somehow, something rang disturbingly false.

  I was pondering the mystery, looking for some more light and a way out of the tunnel when I looked up. And saw a strange sight: a traffic light hanging from the ceiling of the subway tunnel. It took me a few seconds to absorb the information, leaving me totally confused.

  And then I saw the light change. It changed from red to green. Green for go, like I’d seen all my life. Like something that was part of my blood. We were outside and it was darker than any night I’d ever seen in New York City. The light said go and there was no traffic to heed it.

  Peter was beside me. He was looking ahead, probably still trying to figure out where he was and how to get to the street. “We’re outside,” I said.

  He squinted at me through the haze. “No we aren’t.”

  “Look,” I answered, pointing up at the traffic light, swinging slightly in a soft breeze we could hardly feel. Everything was still.

  “Fuck,” was all he said.

  We all stood there for an eternity. I heard motion behind me as other passengers made their way up the stairs to confront the same unreality that I had faced. There was no explanation; it was night when it should have been day. Had the terrorists put out the sun?

  And then someone called to us. “Over here. Come here!”

  It was as if a door opened out of the darkness, into another dimension; a man’s shape was outlined in the bright light. The rational part of my brain told me it was a lobby door. But it seemed more like a dreamscape where a demon beckons you from the only lighted door on a plain of utter darkness. I ran and then so did everyone around me. I could barely see them.

  We came through, suddenly engulfed in light. I looked at Peter and saw what looked like grayish dust on his face.
He looked like a young man cast as a senior citizen in some cheap high school drama production where there’s no money for decent makeup. I looked at my hands and saw the same dust there.

  “There’s a bathroom downstairs.” I got to see the man who’d brought us out of the dark. Despite his sandy blond hair, he still looked very New York. His accent matched. “Go down and try to get yourself cleaned off.”

  Cleaned off? I followed the herd down the stairs to the basement. Even there I saw a faint hint of the haze. I found myself in an incredibly ugly old basement. We milled around, waiting for those who’d come in an earlier group to finish cleaning themselves as best they could at the few sinks available. “What is this stuff?” Peter asked me, gesturing at the dust on his hands.

  “I don’t know.”

  Unsatisfied, he turned to the doorman who’d brought us to safety. “What happened? What is this stuff?”

  The man took Peter’s measure, looking him up and down, wondering how much he could handle. “It’s from the buildings. From when they collapsed.”

  Peter stared at the man for what seemed like forever. “That’s crazy. Why should I believe you?” he snapped.

  “I’m telling you the truth.”

  “I wish I had the Bible with me. Then we’d see if you were telling the truth.”

  I stared at my co-worker. I hadn’t realized how traumatized he was until that moment. “Peter…” I started.

  Our host cut me off. “I’m a minister. You can believe me.”

  “I already do,” I chimed in. And I did. Somehow it made more sense than anything I’d experienced so far. New York tends to make you accept things quickly.

  Peter stalked off to the bathroom. “What do you really think this stuff is?” I asked the minister.