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
