The train was almost empty. It was late in the evening, that tired, uncertain hour of the night that marks the end of one day and the beginning of the next. Pages of the morning newspaper were still crawling slowly down the aisle, ignored and forgotten. At the far end of the car sat a security guard in his blue uniform, head resting heavily on his hands as he tried to stay awake. A few seats away from him was a well-dressed, serious woman in her 30s deeply engrossed in a copy of Bonfire of the Vanities. In front of me sat a young couple who got on at Jackson. The guy was boyish-looking with crew-cut blond hair; I couldn’t see the girl, but they sat silently, tightly holding hands, leaning against each other. The only other passenger was an overweight, gray-haired nurse sitting across the aisle from the couple and me. She had her arms folded and stared out the window with a hard, unpleasant concentration.
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I must have dozed off or been daydreaming, because when I opened my eyes there was a man standing near the doors who hadn’t been there before. He was tall and middle-aged, wearing one of those beige trench coats you see in old spy movies. A white shirt, yellowed with age, and an ugly, faded tie gave him the look of a ne’er-do-well businessman. A beret sat oddly on his head, tufts of reddish hair peeking out around his ears. His face was red too, redder even than his hair, and there was something disturbing about the way he was standing, actually leaning, with all his weight against the silver guardrails that separate the seats from the doors. That’s when I saw the blood.
In front of me, the young couple was watching all this with mounting distress. I saw the girl–she appeared to be around 17–look at her boyfriend with a wordless question: should we do something? He shrugged. The train sat at Clark and Division for a minute or two but the layover didn’t help the man gain his bearings. He stood weakly, chin on his chest, one hand clinging to the rail, the other hanging limp and useless at his side.
They looked back at her blankly without answering.
