31 Hours

by Masha Hamilton

  NEW YORK: 4:13 A.M.

  MECCA: 12:13 P.M.

  “Hey, Hirt. Wake up, Sonny, c’mon.” The cop rapped his nightstick on the base of the subway seat, and Sonny Hirt, slouched on his right side with the graffiti-etched window for a pillow, squinted open one reluctant brown eye.

  “Officer,” he said in a phlegmy voice, then cleared his throat. “How you be?”

  “You know the drill, Hirt. No vagrants sleeping on the subway. Move it.”

  “Vagrant? What you mean, officer?” Sonny Hirt allowed for an indignant tone as he sat up, stifling a yawn. “And I ain’t sleeping. Wouldn’t be safe, sleep here.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s right. I just takin’ a little commercial break before game time.”

  “Sure.”

  “Or a chat at the water cooler, you could be calling it. Man who works on Sundays be entitled to a little breather. By the way,” Sonny rubbed one stubbly cheek, “can you spare any?” Even half-conscious, he slipped into his shtick so easily; he was a master, a preacher with purpose, if he did say so himself. “If you ain’t got it, I understand, ’cause I ain’t got it. But if you have a dime, a quarter, a piece of fruit—”

  “C’mon, c’mon. On your feet,” the cop interrupted.

  Sonny sat up and groaned, though he wasn’t unhappy to be cut short. He wasn’t quite ready to start spinning yet, anyway. He pulled his fingers through his mustache and beard. “Bones gettin’ too old for this job,” he said. “Gonna have to retire soon, move myself to Puerto Rico. Then you gonna be missing me.”

  “Hmmm,” said the cop, though he smiled a little. Sonny didn’t know him well enough to remember his name, but all the cops knew Sonny Hirt; lots of the regular commuters did, too. He’d been panhandling on these subway lines for nearly a decade now. Some of the teenagers who got on at Jay Street or Canal he remembered from when they were tots. These days they rode without their mommas, and they called him Mr. Hirt, and they laughed, but it wasn’t mean laughter. How could anyone take offense at Sonny, who shuffled up and down the subway cars, politely doing his job, delivering his familiar spiel? The riders sure didn’t mind, and the cops cut him slack, mostly speaking, if they caught him taking a little nap during downtime.

  Every now and then, some newcomer in blue with a shiny nose and water sitting back of the ears would come down on him a bit. Shoo him away. Tell him he couldn’t, wasn’t allowed, a public nuisance. Even threaten to ticket him, usually in a loud, attention-getting voice. And what trouble was Sonny causing, after all? He was doing a job. A public service, if you thought of it, because it allowed folks to feel a little better about themselves as they headed toward whatever sins awaited them. Used to be, when the cops toyed with him, heat would shoot through Sonny’s body from head to heels, like the Long Island expressway running right through him, and he’d have to work to keep his hands still and the fire clean from his eyes. Their smug looks, the conviction that they were better than ol’ Sonny—when after all, real criminals were right aboveground slitting throats and selling drugs to kids. Besides, this was his place, the subway; they were the visitors.

  But less and less was bothering Sonny as the years went on.

  “Knew me a little Puerto Rican girl once,” he told the cop now. “Mmm-mmm. She were quiet, but she could move.” He rubbed his scalp underneath his yellow ski cap. “Them days,” he said.

  “Uh-huh,” the cop said.

  “Should’a stayed with that girl, but you know how it is. Tough for a man like me to be giving up the freelance and be committing to a steady life, that’s what she always said, and I guess she were right some.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Coraly. Sweet Coraly.” He shook his head, feeling a pit in his stomach that came either from remembering Coraly or from hunger. “Sounds like I made her up, but she were real, all right,” he said, tugging the ski cap down to cover more of his ears.

  “Here’s real for you,” the cop said. “Don’t let me catch you sleeping on the subway again. Not any day, but especially not today. Not today, Hirt. Ain’t no halfway house for the homeless, and we’re on alert, so follow the rules.”

  “Tell me, officer,” Sonny said, “you ever have your own Coraly? The one so good it hurts to remember? Who might’a changed everything if you’da realized in time?” The cop didn’t speak, but his expression changed from a man sucking a lemon slice to one with honey on his tongue. “Maybe that’s something we all had,” Sonny said as the train pulled into the Broadway-Lafayette station. “We all just human, after all.”

  As he headed out of the car, the cop held the subway door and turned back to Sonny, his voice slightly gentler. “Hope you were listening. Don’t get your ass in trouble, not today.” Then he stepped off, one hand slapping his holster, the thumb of the other stuck into his belt.

  “Stand clear of the closing doors, please,” a computerized woman’s voice intoned.

  As the doors slid shut, Sonny breathed in the contained subway air. Now that the cop mentioned it, Sonny could see that the place felt off balance, unusually tense. What most folks didn’t know about Sonny was that he had this certain awareness. Sometimes when a man or lady handed Sonny a quarter or two, just as their hands grazed his, the world seemed to grow hushed and then some vision appeared in place of their faces or an odd scent would command the atmosphere. It meant something gone, or about to be.

  Every time it happened, Sonny would shudder and shake his head—he didn’t want to know more. He’d have to move on, quick, without his usual “God bless.” Otherwise the image would stop him in his tracks. Trying to voice a warning would be useless, might even get him arrested. But the feeling came on so strong sometimes that he couldn’t work the rest of that day. He’d go to a coffee shop where they knew him and nurse a cuppa, wrapping his fingers around the thick white mug until they stopped shaking.

  Yes, his chosen profession had its bad days, even given its relative freedom. One of the worst parts, besides the premonitions, was running up against so many folks busy putting out dissatisfaction, or anger, or fear—all fueled by some surplus or absence of longing. Sonny had developed a theory about longing. In moderate doses, it was healthy, like a bit of salt sprinkled on a good meal. But too little meant a person had given up on life, while too much turned a body mad and desperate. If the passengers Sonny passed on any given day were filled with what he thought of as a longing imbalance, an anxious buzz began ringing in his ears. Sometimes he developed food-poisoning symptoms, turned dizzy and sick to his stomach. He wished he weren’t so sensitive, but there it sat.

  Other drawbacks were more mundane. Train delays, for instance. Some were scheduled, such as track work. Others fell in his way unplanned, like four or five weeks ago, when somebody dropped with a heart attack on the subway train ahead of them, bringing them to a halt for a good half-hour. And there stood Sonny, trapped in a single car, tick-tock-tick-tock, leaning against a closed door, watching the newspaper-reader sigh and refold his pages, the mother rummage in her bag for something to keep the toddler quiet, the tiny Oriental woman close her eyes and lapse into delicate snoring. All the while, Sonny not collecting a dime.

  Taken as a whole, though, it wasn’t bad work, with changing scenery and new folks along with the familiar faces. Those who spent most of their time aboveground didn’t realize how two-dimensional their world was. Besides, he didn’t have to serve people, and he didn’t have to answer to a boss. He hadn’t managed too well at any job with either of those requirements.

  Sonny glanced out the subway window at the graffiti rushing past: illegible names, indecipherable drawings, puffy superhero writing. Warnings, all, from another world. It was still too early to clock in—practically no customers yet. He could make use of the premature wakeup call to go to his sister’s and take a shower, try to wash off his apprehensions along with the street dirt. It had been a week since his last shower, and staying clean was important in this job. A challenge, for sure, living and sleeping in
rat territory, but if you started to smell bad, you got fewer handouts—or your salary dropped, as Sonny preferred to think of it. He’d seen it time and again, those poor suckers who allowed themselves to become rank on the way to becoming stupid. People shed liberal guilt, lost sympathy, turned away in disgust.

  He liked his sister’s place, a third-floor walk-up in the Bowery, on a little side street that was so far resisting the neighborhood’s fix-up mood. Her husband, Leo, said they could afford better now and wanted to move, but Ruby was stuck on the area, and Sonny agreed. The Bowery was the city at its best—excepting, of course, for the subway. High-rise condos were on the way, no denying, but so far the fancy shops hadn’t crowded everything out. Poor people weren’t an extinct species yet. Still room for the occasional flophouse, under thirty bucks for a night, and where else on the island could you find that? ’Round the corner from Ruby’s, the Bowery Mission folks served up inspirational hymns and three meals a day, just like they had since the 1800s. Squeezed between a tattoo parlor and a restaurant-supply store sat Steve’s, a slop joint offering a cuppa for just a buck. If Sonny came in when the pot was near empty, they gave him the dregs for free, sometimes even throwing in a fresh roll. The people who spent four dollars for their coffee and needed choices of flavors and asked for soy milk instead of cream—those folks were farther uptown. In the Bowery, an outsider still felt at home. A bum could find a bed. And a passerby could still inhale the sweet scent of weed, come most nights. Bhang, an old Rasta had taught Sonny to call it, and though Sonny didn’t smoke himself, he did enjoy catching a whiff as he passed. The scent of freedom.

  The only problem with his sister’s place was Leo. Leo felt ashamed to be related to someone in Sonny’s line of business and couldn’t keep that to himself. Sonny preferred to visit when Leo was out showing a client some overpriced condo or a fixer-upper, trying to persuade them that New York real estate wasn’t priced for kings or working some new math to convince them they could spend more than they could afford. That meant daylight hours, when an apartment or a townhouse would be showing well, the sunlight spilling in, and Leo could pretend there were no shadows at all, folks desperate to believe that, anyway. Timing his visits to avoid Leo meant a shower usually cut into Sonny’s own workday and wages, but what could you do?

  Sundays were generally plenty busy for Leo, but it was too early still for clients to be house hunting. So maybe Sonny would ride instead to Coney Island, where the F train poked its nose aboveground after Church Street and he could peer down into a passing cemetery and turn philosophical if he wanted, or just catch himself some daylight from the comfort of the subway car. Maybe he’d head uptown to Columbus Circle, breathe in the perfumed women, and try to snag a left-behind newspaper so he could catch up on world events, some crisis in China or London that was moving across the world at light speed and might be just the thing that was affecting the mood today in Sonny’s underground home office at what he considered the center of the earth.

  One thing for sure: even if the mood belowground seemed as sour as meat gone bad, he didn’t want to go above to walk aimless streets. It was too cold, the kind of acid wind-cold that bypassed your clothes and gnawed at your bones. The kind that brought a bitterness with it, as if it were taunting you about what might have been but wasn’t, what could have happened but didn’t. When you should have touched this or smelled that and you just let it slide on by, like you had forever.

  You didn’t have forever. You wanted to believe the food would always taste good and the body keep on working fine enough and the trains always run, more or less on time. You wanted to believe there was no danger you couldn’t scuttle from, and there never would be. That you’d always have another chance to set things right, figure it out, concentrate hard, kiss someone soft on the hollow at the base of her long neck, beg her to stay. But it wasn’t true. One thing Sonny Hirt had been around long enough to learn: forever was a nasty lie, a red line across a neatly written page, a giggling kid with a needle in his arm. Forever was an opiate that blurred your vision and sidetracked you from doing what needed to be done. Forever was more deadening by far than the Bowery’s bhang.

  NEW YORK: 7:12 A.M.

  MECCA: 3:12 P.M.

  Vic arched her back, spun in a tight circle, and lifted her forehead as if to permit God to plant a kiss there. She felt the tip of her careless ponytail reach halfway down her back and was aware of the small beads of sweat that gathered in the tiny teardrop indentation above her lips. At a cue from the music, she spun around and sank to her knees, head lowered as if in prayer, then sprang up, extended again. You are not human, she told herself. You are a flower, blooming, with the power to push away the earth itself. With this vision in mind, she turned a leap into a glide. She heard Alex, watching from the third row of the theater on the Lower East Side, clap his hands. This was only rehearsal, but she made a brief, silent prayer to bring this same energy to the opening night.

  Moving as sharply as she could, Vic shot forward from the waist and then reversed the motion, thrusting her pelvis to grind with another of the dancers—a redhead named Leslie, though Vic thought of her at this moment not as a woman but as pure form. She and Leslie twirled apart as a third dancer laughed on cue in a shrill way that still sounded eerie to Vic, even after all these rehearsals. The unnerving laughter was Alex’s signature. She remembered him talking about what this choreography meant to him—“It’s about how we cross boundaries for love. How we torture ourselves, we’re desperate with longing, but we’re all essentially and finally alone, forced to define personal integrity individually and, and—” Here he threw up his hands in frustration over the impossibility of translating the dance’s passion into mediocre words—“that’s the impulse. That’s all.”

  Alex was a genius. She was thrilled, at age twenty-three, to be part of his company, even if he wasn’t as widely recognized yet as he should be.

  “All right, kids,” Alex called from above. “Something isn’t quite right in that one spot right before the culmination. You know what I’m talking about, Glenn and Vic. You two almost collide.” He slapped his hands together and said the last word with comic drama.

  Glenn, the only male in the company, playfully brushed Victoria’s arm. “We have to save our colliding for offstage, Vic, honey,” he said, and she laughed as if it were amusing, and then he said, “But seriously, you want me to back up at more of an angle?” and she said, “Doesn’t that put you to the wrong side of the audience?” and Alex said, “You two, block it out again, will you?” their voices falling over one another in the hollowness of the theater like drops of water splashing into a glass as Alex said to the air, shaking his head, “Can you believe we’re still messing with these details, and we open Tuesday night?”

  “How about if I go here?” Vic asked Glenn, sliding one direction, and Glenn, moving another, answered, “Sweetie, that is so going to work,” and Alex said, “You are beautiful, people. Beautiful!”

  After another few minutes of this cacophony of conversation, Alex clapped his hands. “I need to dash out and pick up another container of helium for the balloons,” he said. “So you have fifteen minutes, kids, while the cat’s away. Everyone sip on your bubblies and breathe, breathe from the stomach, and then, my gems, we’re going to run through it a few hundred more times.”

  Leslie, the redhead, groaned. “You’re such a perfectionist, Alex. Who requires their dancers to come to practice at this hour of the morning? You, you, and only you.”

  “I get you fresh—” Alex began.

  “And the work’s the best,” Leslie interrupted, using a singsong voice that made it clear this was Alex’s typical line.

  He just laughed. “If you get everything absolutely right when I’m back, we’ll do it just twice more, so how’s that for compromising? In that case, you’ll be out of here by 10. But it’s got to be right because I heard through the ubiquitous grapevine that the Times is sending someone opening night, giving us poor second-classers a ch
ance at a life-altering review.” He turned and, with a wave over his shoulder, bounced up the stairs. He was a bit heavier than any of the dancers could afford to be, but he still moved with admirable agility.

  Vic leaned over to rub her calves and then went to get her water bottle out of her bag. Leslie might complain, but she didn’t mean it—they were all slaves to Alex’s vision. Vic loved him for many things. But one thing she didn’t love him for, she thought as she took a long sip from the bottle, was that she’d been so busy she hadn’t had time to see, or even speak with, Jonas in a week. Maybe more. She’d tried to call a few times and hadn’t gotten through. She was starting to ache for the guy. She pulled her cell phone from her bag and headed to the one section of the theater that seemed to get decent reception.

  “Where you going, girl? Another phone call?” asked Glenn. She waved her hand at him.

  The phone rang oddly for a moment and then went to voice mail: “It’s Jonas. You know what to do.” Should she leave another message? Would she start to seem pathetic? That was one thing she’d never been. She stared at the phone, then hung up. It was early; he was probably still asleep. She needed to stop by her mom’s after rehearsal—she had to see how Mara was holding up. After that it would be late enough even for Mr. Sleepyhead. So after that, she’d call Jonas, and keep calling Jonas until she roused and reached him.