A City of Strangers
It is no secret that New York is the place where all the action is. When you walk out the door, there’s no telling what will happen to you or what you might see. The one certainty is that you will see or hear or participate in something which you did not expect to see or hear or participate in. It is a place of thwarted expectations. It thumbs its nose at your comfort.
Yesterday evening, I found myself in Midtown Manhattan, near Radio City and Rockefeller Center, walking the crowded streets with my parents in tow. They had come to visit for the holidays and we were doing a lil’ tourist thing. We pushed our way through all kinds of bodies. Kids twirled cheap, light up toys that their parents had bought for them. The bright, Christmas lit buildings illuminated the multitude of masked faces entranced by the sound and spectacle of it all.
When the time came, I bid adieu to Richard and Cheryl- those are my parents- and found my way to the BDFM trains.
After waiting approximately 9 minutes, the D train arrived and we packed in.
I found a seat and sat and, a few stops later, a group of women got on and were asking for directions. They were leaning over the bank of seats staring at the map and speaking loudly in the way Americans do. The person sitting right next to me, female presenting and wearing a burnt yellow crop top was helping them out. At first I thought they were all together but, a few stops later, the group of women got off and the woman in the crop top remained.
I put my head down and started reading my book.
Suddenly, I felt a limb on my arm, wildly flailing. I looked up and saw more limbs, all of the limbs, flailing. I looked at the eyes of the young woman in the crop top. They were rolled into the back of her head.
More flailing. A human earthquake was taking place.
The young woman in the crop top was, no doubt, having a seizure and I was, no doubt, the closest person to her.
I tossed my book and got up out of my seat and tried to corral her body which would not be easily corralled. Another woman came to help. The young woman in the crop top’s body- stiff then loose, stiff then loose, stiff then loose- slid off the burnt orange seats and onto the floor.
Upon impact, her light blue surgical mask flew off and her mouth- now light blue as well- was ejecting saliva onto the floor of the train.
“Would she choke on the saliva?” I thought, as I watched it pour out of her mouth. A volcano spewing lava.
I was at her legs now and the other woman made sure that her head didn’t bonk the hard surfaces all around her. A third woman joined and took my backpack to put under her head.
The train crowd moved aside to clear the way for the convulsing body.
Finally, the movement stopped.
The young woman in the crop top lay on her side, her stomach moving rapidly up and down and up and down, indicating that she was getting oxygen.
We were all looking around, surveying the damage. I was shook myself.
The passengers on the train now turned their attention to how to deal with the after-mathmatics of all this. A man stood blocking the doors so that the train couldn’t move. He alerted the conductor that there was a medical emergency.
“Someone call 911!” a voice shouted.
I picked up her phone, which had an active Candy Crush game on the screen, and dialed .
I spoke with the operators, who said that they would send someone immediately to the Broadway Lafayette station downtown tracks. I told them the car number and hung up.
The young woman in the burnt yellow crop top slowly started blinking her eyes.
“Hello? Hello? Are you okay?” a chorus inquired.
She blinked.
“Um. Yeah? I’m fine. Why are you all hovered over me?”
“You were having a seizure.”
“No. No. I was just asleep. Where are we? Why is the train stopped?”
“How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” she said, blinking more and taking stock. “I was just asleep.”
“You had a seizure. Have you ever had one before?”
“No,” she said, confused.
“Are you here by yourself? Is there someone you can call?” one of the ladies asked. She turned to me, “Are you with her?”
“No, no, I’m not,” I said, for a moment thinking about whether this could be the start of an epic romance, sort of akin to the 1990s romantic comedy “While You Were Sleeping” in which Sandra Bullock saves Peter Gallagher from being hit by a Chicago CTA train and then falls in love with his brother, Bill Pullman and his entire family. That movie also takes place around Christmas, oddly enough.
“Well, is there someone you can call?” another voice said.
“Um. My mother.”
One of the ladies got ahold of her phone and found her mother’s number and dialed.
“She doesn’t speak English,” the young woman in the crop top said.
“What language? Spanish?” a bystander asked.
She shook her head.
“Arabic.”
“Does anyone speak Arabic on this train?!” one of the women shouted to no response.
She took the phone, speaking in a mixture of Arabic and English. She was now waving her arms around.
“It’s not my fault, mama!” she said. “I don’t know. I don’t know what happened. They want to take me to the hospital.”
Her mother, rightfully worried about her, was still driving her crazy- a sign that she had returned to some level of normal functioning.
“Ladies and gentleman, ladies and gentlemen, we are being held because of a medical emergency,” said the familiar announcement, crackling over the speakers.
“Why is the train not going?” she asked, puzzled. “Oh my god. Is this cause of me? Is this cause of me? Oh my god.”
The chorus reassured her.
“It’s ok, baby.”
“It’s ok, honey.”
“It’s not your fault.”
Moments later, the paramedics arrived.
I got up and walked the young woman in the crop top off the train. The two other ladies who helped out most directly walked off with me.
We explained to the paramedics what had transpired.
“Ok,” they said, after taking some notes, “she is coming with us.”
The three of us “helpers” looked around at each other.
“Should we…go with her?” we collectively thought.
“There’s only room for one person at the hospital and they are very strict about it,” the paramedic said.
We decided to stay put and watched as the paramedics walked the young woman in the burnt yellow crop top down the platform.
I watched as she disappeared in between the blue steel columns of the Broadway Lafayette station.
We stood idly, shuffling our feet.
“So, uh, what are your names?” I asked them.
“I’m Zoe and this is Mishka.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
“I wish it were under different conditions,” Mishka said.
We stood silently.
Pretty soon, another train came. The three of us boarded it. As we walked onto the car, a man stopped us.
“I wouldn’t walk that way,” he said. “You see that on the floor there? That’s not water.”
We looked up to see a person, half naked, lying on the orange seats, their hands down the back of their sweatpants, groaning.
At the next stop, we switched train cars.
The train carried us over the Manhattan Bridge and back into Brooklyn and the three of us never spoke again.
Anything and everything can happen anywhere but that possibility is more pronounced here, in this place, with all these people. Beauty and terror and are just around any corner, it seems- as ubiquitous as a bodega store. Yesterday evening, I found myself swept up in it- a person’s entire life in my shaking- but not seizing- hands.
And in those moments of panic, there was some kind of calm.
And in all that chaos, there was some sense of order.
The young woman in the burnt yellow crop top will be ok, I tell myself now, sitting in my apartment a day later writing this. She eventually made her way home to her mother in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, I try to reassure myself, though I do not know for sure.
I eventually made my way home, too.
After all of that commotion, I just got on the next train.
