Here again. I know this place better than most.
    A sort of welcome announcement blares from the speakers this morning: “Attention passengers: This is the train to Penn Station. You may [unintelligible speaker noises]. To transfer to [hissing sounds] … [human voice speaking unrecognizable language] … last two cars. Once again, [more unintelligible speaker noises] across the platform. Thank you for riding with us.”

#

    Guy 1 on train car 7420: “Can I look in your bag for the tickets?”
    Guy 2 on train car 7420 [Hands him a tote bag]: “Go ahead.”
    Guy 1 [Starts digging in the bag, makes a face of disgust]: “Ugh, there’s like ketchup everywhere, dude.”
    Guy 2: “So, what’s your point?”

#

    Two conductors on their ticket check-up runs, east to west and west to east on the peak train, meet in car 7408 and strike up a conversation.
    “Hey,” says the younger one.
    “Hey,” answers the seasoned man. He is wearing a bright orange construction vest over his blue uniform for no apparent reason.
    “How’s it goin’?” asks the younger one, and he strokes his prophetic beard.
    “Better day to be outside.”
    “Yeah.”
    “I’ve been entertaining myself,” the older one volunteers, “by counting sorries.”
    “What’s that mean?”
    “Ya know, like counting sheep, but not really. I come and announce ‘Tickets! Tickets, please,’ and I see’em scrambling with their freaken phones or patting every pocket.”
    “Ah, yeah, lemme guess… They forgot,” and the younger man makes air quotes. “They forgot to activate the tickets, right?”
    “Yeah, and they’re like, ‘Sorry,’ ‘Oh, sorrry,’ and if they’re broads, they make their cutie faces, and I just think, ‘Too much lipstick on that mug.’ I’m too old for that. And they’re like, ‘Sorry, sorry,’ ‘Sorry, my phone is slow,’ you know, ‘Sorry this, sorry that.’ All that sorry crap. Never fails.”
    “My favorite is ‘The app isn’t working.’ I’m like, ‘Dude, I can see your screen.’ They say this to my face, these guys in jackets and ties, and the ladies going to Macy’s or whatever.”
    The seasoned guy nods and laughs, but he also looks aggravated.
    “What about the woman who says she’s outta battery?” the bearded one goes on, “and ten minutes later, boom! I pass by and she’s playing Candy Crush? Oh, I guess she charged it.”
    A sigh comes out of the other man’s entire expression: “People. What are you gonna do? Seventy-three, so far, today.”
    The older one startles himself out of his thoughts. “Are you watching the series tonight?”
    “Hell yeah, but we’re supposed to go to my wife’s brother’s. The guy has an opinion about everything, but you know…” His voice trails off.
    “I hear ya. I’ll probably go down to the bar.”
    They tip their hats and walk away toward opposite cars, thinking that nobody heard them.

#

    One guy unlocks the screen on his phone and starts watching an old TV sitcom, playing the underscore of tinkling percussion and melting saxophones and its fake laughs; another guy, across the aisle, unlocks his phone’s screen and plays heavy metal music, even louder. He stares out the window.
    A third guy in the row ahead of them stirs and looks back at them, but no one reacts or says anything. He shakes his head, and he gets up and shows his size (clearly, he is a gym rat), and he asks the heavy metal guy: “Do you mind putting on some headphones or something?”
    The heavy metal guy nods, pushes his graying long hair back, and he just turns off the music. He still stares out the window.
    The TV show guy, a late middle-aged man who is wearing a t-shirt that seems too tight for his middle section, turns to the heavy metal man and says, loudly: “Too bad! That was a great song!”
    To which the heavy metal guy responds: “I agree, but I don’t think everyone wants to hear it, just like I don’t want to hear your show.”
    Awkward silence ensues, save for the laugh tracks.

#

    Car 7822 is almost empty at that hour. There’s a man reading a magazine; a young man who looks like a college student, playing with his phone; two women sitting together and chit-chatting about how Black Friday did not bring the kind of deals of Black Fridays past, and a person wearing a large hoody from an oversize green denim jacket.
    The train is crawling somewhere between Jamaica and Woodside. A poster sign on one of its walls reads “STAY AMAZING.” The train is making the kind of noises that trains make. Passengers just seem content to exist, but then a woman screams the kind of primal cries that send a current through the back of a person’s neck.
    Several passengers stir and some stand up. The person with the hoody doesn’t even look up and one of the two women stays sitting, frozen. Those who have stood look at each other as the screams continue and get louder.
    “It’s coming from the bathroom,” one of the Black Friday shoppers says to the man who had been reading.
    He hesitates but heads toward the front of the car, where the bathroom is. He is still holding open his National Geographic, with a cover that says, “8 Billion.” There’s more banging and they all hear the woman scream and say some words: “Don’t do this to me! Don’t you do this to me, Eric!”
    The magazine-holding man slides open the bathroom door, which is unlocked, and out comes a man. He is stumbling as if his body is made of rubber and, after some steps, falls over. He drops onto the magazine man’s feet; his eyes roll into the back of his head and he starts convulsing.
    The skinny woman that follows him out of the bathroom is yelling and comes right at the magazine man and starts banging his chest and screaming indistinct words, like she’s choking in her own saliva. He drops the magazine on the floor to grab her by the wrists.
    “What is it?!” the magazine man yells at her. “What the heck is going on?!”
    “He’s dying! He’s dying! He can’t do this to me!” she says to the magazine reader. And then she turns to the man on the floor: “You can’t fucking do this to me, Eric!”
    The woman squirms and frees herself from the magazine reader’s grip. She starts flinging her body against the interior of the train, like she wants to bust out. She runs erratically, back and forth down the aisle, and then over the body and to the front of the car and she opens the door to the other car as if to go toward it, but she stands in the space between the two wagons, looks up
and yells at the overcast sky. “Don’t let him die! You fucking hear me?!”
    The magazine man looks like he is having a bout of vertigo and needs to hold on to the handles at the top of two rows of seats, and that’s when the hooded person gets up and says in a flat voice, “He is OD’ing. He is fucking OD’ing on the train from Jamaica. That’s like a song.”
    The hooded person turns around and walks very deliberately toward the back of the car and out the door, into the next one. The frantic woman keeps screaming and flinging herself at surfaces, saying what she dreads: “He’s dead. He’s dead. He’s dead.”
    The magazine man looks at the young man with the phone in his hand. The young man averts his eyes and sits down and starts playing with whatever he has on the screen. The magazine man speaks to the two women.
    “What are we gonna do?” the one standing says to him. “My God.”
    It sounds like she is calling the magazine man “My God.”
    “I’m gonna turn him sideways so he doesn’t choke,” the godly magazine guy says.
    The woman who had been silent chimes in, “You do that, you do that,” and she gets up and walks toward the frantic woman and speaks to her like she’s a toddler: “Come here, baby; come here…”
   “No, fucking no!”
   “We’re going to get help. We’re going to get help, sweetie.”
    “No! No!” the frantic woman yells. “It’s too late! This shit was bad, and it’s all my fault,” she wails. “I wanted to do something nice for him after the Bing. He was coming home.”
    “What’s the Bing, honey?” the consoling lady says.
    The frantic woman rolls her eyes, shakes her head, looks at the magazine man, as if he knew what she was talking about, as if everybody knew.
    The back door opens and two conductors arrive, a man and a woman. The woman has a two-way radio. The guy identifies himself as the conductor and says his coworker is the assistant conductor. The hooded person is behind them.
    “Anybody here know CPR?!” the main conductor yells.
    People stare blankly.
    “Anybody?!”
    “I thought that was your job,” the magazine man complains. He is squatting next to the limp man, who has started gargling and is slightly twitching.
    “I open and close doors, and I collect tickets,” the conductor says.
    “Now what?” says the woman who was standing.
    “Take your radio and call for help,” the hooded person says.
    The assistant conductor takes her lips to the radio’s mic opening and presses the push-to-talk button. It’s like she’s talking into an ear, putting lipstick all over it.
    “Clint, copy me? Copy me, Clint?” Some indistinct noises come from the other end. “Can you ask on the speaker if there’s someone who knows CPR? Send them to Car 7872 toward the middle of the train. We have a passenger in need of medical aid. Over.”
    “Roger that,” the voice comes through the radio.
    The announcement follows through the speakers, which this time come through loud and clear, and the message sounds like a jolly invitation for whomever is up to it: “Ladies and gentlemen,” he starts. “We have a medical emergency in Car 7872, which is five cars from the front of the train. We are in need of someone who can apply cardiopulmonary resuscitation in a
jiffy. If you are that special person, your assistance will be greatly appreciated,” the speaker man says. “Thank you for riding with us and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
    They stand there waiting and watching the man slightly twitch, with all the noises of the train filling the void. “Those are just squeals and rail joints,” the conductor says to no one and for no discernible reason. “Friction. Just friction.”
    The car’s back door opens and in comes a harried woman, her hair bun half undone; she is carrying a collection of paper shopping bags with logos from Bergdorf Goodman and Dolce & Gabbana. She announces that she is a pediatrician and, seeing the man on the floor, heads straight toward him. “I need room,” she says.
    Everyone moves, and the standing woman shopper cheerfully volunteers to hold her bags. They open a semicircle for her to squat down and do her work. The frantic woman is not frantic anymore. She’s sitting by the front door with the other woman shopper, who is patting her back.
    “Did someone call 911?” the doctor says.
    “Oh shit, no,” says the conductor.
    “I got it!” yells the woman shopper who had been helping the frantic woman.
    She pulls out an enormous phone, and dials.
    She tells the operator that there’s a man twitching and unconscious, and that his lips are turning blue, and that a woman doctor started giving him CPR. She tells the operator what car number they are in, between what stations they are. And she listens. Then she turns to the formerly frantic woman.
    “Honey, she’s asking if he was taking drugs.”
    The conductor laughs and the doctor gives him a disapproving look, even though she’s pumping the man’s chest, up and down.
    “What was he taking?! What was he taking?!” the caller insists.
    “It’s smack!” the formerly frantic woman says. “Oh shit, I feel my heart, like getting out of sync.”
    “She says smack,” the woman tells the operator.
    “Yes, yes, a pediatrician is giving him CPR. Yes, yes.”
    She turns to the formerly frantic woman. “What kind of smack, she is asking.”
    “Hell do I know,” says the formerly frantic woman.
    When the train finally pulls into the Woodside station the other woman shopper signals through the window to the cops and emergency medical technicians that this is the car and they follow, and when the door opens, the doctor says, “He still has a pulse. Someone take over, please.”
    The rest was a blur of people in uniform coming into the train car, telling the passengers to get back to their seats, and the conductors making announcements over the speakers about delays. One of the officers asks the passengers who was with the guy. When they turn around to look, the formerly frantic woman is not there.
    “She bolted,” says the young man who had been playing on the phone all along.
    They strap the unconscious body onto a gurney and wheel it out without telling anyone whether he’s going to make it. The doors close, and the train lurches forward, then slows down, then starts its move toward the tunnel, squealing and bumping at a steady pace. When the doctor grabs her bags and starts walking away from that car, the other passengers clap.

#

    An older couple walks in at the Carle Place station. Not the usual commuters: Her hair is all puffy and artificially curled and her dress has sparkles and colorful shapes. He is wearing suit pants, suit jacket, a wide striped tie, and his silver hair is neatly combed over, as if every remaining strand was carefully placed where it belongs.
    They’re in the middle of some argument before they even board the middle car.
    “That’s not what she said. That’s not what she said,” the woman insists. “She did not call you mean. She said what you said was mean-spirited, you hear me?”
    “That’s all the same, or even worse. And who cares? There are too many bums trying to get us to carry them on our backs. Let them go sweat it out like the rest of us.”
    He rushes into the row of seats that face each other and gestures for her to get in and take the window seat. He is going to guard the aisle.
    “You don’t work anymore, Clarence. You have been retired for a while.”
    There is a silence that is like the time in which a cauldron takes to boil.
    “The gall of you to say that, goddam it,” he says in a shaky voice. “You know full well that I busted my ass all my life, and I did it for you and the kids. I earned the title of working man, and I am damn proud of it.”
    “Whatever,” she says. “You didn’t only do it for us.”
    The train pulls into the Floral Park station. No one gets out. A woman pushing a stroller walks in and goes to the seats by the door to the back car. The announcer cautions people to stand clear for closing doors. The doors close, open, close. The train starts again.
    “One good thing, we’ll be in time for the matinée,” the man says. He is calm again.
    She turns away toward the window and looks at the blurry treetops of Queens Village, going away and away from the train.
    “What?” he says. “What is this about now?”
    She turns toward him.
    “You know what this is about. It’s the same thing that it’s always been about.”
    His face looks as if he has swallowed something bitter. He turns to look at strangers scattered in seats across the aisle. He appears to have discovered that the others have been there, and he looks at them with disgust.
    “That was more than 20 years ago, Felicia. I was a younger man then. When are you going to drop it?”
    “Never. I am taking it to the grave.”
    “For fucks sake,” he says. “That’s on you.”
    They fall silent and the clickety-clack of the wheels on the tracks becomes running commentary on their lives.
    Out of nowhere, she speaks.
    “Jeezus, why did you pick these stupid seats where we’re facing back, ass first, just seeing things go away from us? It’s fucking dizzying.”

#

    Many people stand up while the train is traversing the tunnel and the conductor is mindlessly announcing their approach to Penn, their final station. The train is moving and the doors are closed. The aisles are narrow; some stand awkwardly, their heads bent, in that tight space between their seats and the next row. The arrival is a laggard rolling of metal on metal until the last inch of the train has platformed; a discarded can rolls through the aisle, bumps into a guy’s shoes and bounces under the seats, leaving a foamy trace of Mountain Dew.
    The vitiated air of the station clashes with the stifled mass coming out of the train car and passengers dismount with a sudden urge to walk and get on escalators. I remain, unseen and unheard, considering what it’s like to have places to go and things to do; what it’s like to have a past and some notion of the future. Time refuses to fold away for me. I only linger.
    Once more, here is the horrifying loop of the now. I have nowhere to be but here, no place to go, no one to see. I am free of nostalgia. I do not dream. I have no notion of who I am. I have no imagined self, only this trickle of consciousness.
The doors are closing in and other passengers, who are still alive, are choosing their seats.

###

---

Víctor Manuel Ramos is a bilingual writer and journalist. The characters in his fiction often inhabit the physical and cultural landscapes of the Dominican Republic, where he spent much of his childhood, and the New York City neighborhoods where he came of age. His novel, La vida pasajera, won a literary award, and he has published two short-story collections in Spanish. His fiction has appeared in Apogee Journal, Popshot Magazine, Contrapuntos, and others.