A Fiction Excerpt: Traveling From Brooklyn - NYTimes.

com

26/10/2014 11:01 am

http://nyti.ms/ZymSKw
N.Y. / REGION

NYT NOW

A Fiction Excerpt: Traveling From Brooklyn

By LYDIA DAVIS

OCT. 17, 2014

This is an excerpt from Lydia Daviss Traveling From Brooklyn, which will
appear in Tales of Two Cities, a collection of stories about inequality in
New York edited by John Freeman, to be published next week by OR Books.
Ms. Daviss latest book is Cant and Wont: Stories (Farrar, Straus and
Giroux).
THE KIND OF TRAVELING I do most, these days, is on the subway,
going no farther than from Brooklyn to Manhattan, or, even worse, from one
part of Brooklyn to another. From Atlantic Avenue I might go to Borough
Hall, from Court Street back to Pacific Street, from Borough Hall out of
Brooklyn to Canal Street, from Grand Street back down to Atlantic Avenue,
and so on. Sometimes the subway car is so full that I have no room even to
open a book, and sometimes so empty that I look up at each station to see
whether a dangerous person might be entering the car or a safe person leaving
it. Usually the ride gives me a chance to rest: I read, look at the people around
me, and recover from whatever it was, at home or away, that I just went
through. I may also try to prepare for whatever I may be about to go through,
but it is always easier to work out what has just happened than what might
happen, so when I try to prepare for what is coming, my mind tends to
wander, and then I daydream, sometimes about what great or small things I
may do at home, and sometimes about leaving home.
Once, when I was on the B train traveling from Pacific Street in Brooklyn
to 14th Street in Manhattan, something happened that stopped me from
daydreaming or reading. I was waiting for the train at the Pacific Street
station. When the train drew in, a crowd of teenagers burst out of the train
shouting, screaming and pushing, which is the way teenagers often behave in
the neighborhood of Pacific Street and only seems violent to me because Im
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/nyregion/story-excerpt-traveling-from-brooklyn.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Page 1 of 5

A Fiction Excerpt: Traveling From Brooklyn - NYTimes.com

26/10/2014 11:01 am

not one of them. They were so jammed together I could hardly make my way
among them.
After I got onto the train and sat down, and while the train was still in the
station with its doors open, a few girls poked their heads back into the car to
continue making fun of an odd-looking woman sitting across from me, a very
thin creature all in black, eyes clotted with thickly blackened eyelashes under
a high black hairdo, dressed in a black suit with black net stockings. I had seen
her before on this subway line. Her bearing was always arrogant, but today
she seemed frightened as well. All she did, though, was look straight ahead of
her, which meant she was looking almost straight at me.
The doors closed, the train left the station, and I took out of my purse an
essay on free will that had come to me in the mail that day from a friend.
The next station was DeKalb Avenue, which was the last station in
Brooklyn. The woman in black got off. The train started up again and moved
on toward the Manhattan Bridge. Before it went above ground, I looked up
from my essay because four teenage boys came through the car walking
toward the front of the train in single file, cursing loudly. This in itself, though
it made me nervous, was not very unusual. Then, as my eyes dropped to my
page again, there was a sound of something heavy being slammed against the
glass section of one of the doors. I looked up. I did not see that any of the boys
was holding anything, so I did not know what had slammed against the glass.
The glass had not broken. The passengers just sat still, though they were all
watching. When the boys returned a little later, striding with long steps in the
other direction, still cursing loudly and banging the doors as they came to
them, I kept my feet in close under my knees and my eyes down on my
reading, afraid of provoking them.
I went back to my reading, though I was on the alert, and for a minute or
two everything was quiet. As the train moved aboveground, however, the door
to my right, toward the back of the train, slammed open and 10 or 12 people
came lurching through it in a tight bunch looking scared. I immediately stood
up.
Someone shouted, Get the baby out of here, and people made way for a
young woman pushing a stroller down the car toward the front of the train as
other passengers hurried in front of her and behind her. I hurried along with
them without waiting for an explanation. I stopped in the middle of the next
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/nyregion/story-excerpt-traveling-from-brooklyn.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Page 2 of 5

A Fiction Excerpt: Traveling From Brooklyn - NYTimes.com

26/10/2014 11:01 am

car, holding on to a pole and looking back into the car behind, but as soon as a
fresh wave of people came hurrying into that car from the car behind, looking
scared, I ran on into the next car forward.
No one knew exactly what was happening, though I heard the word
knife. Somewhere near the back of the train, I thought, those boys had to be
doing something awful, but how many people they were hurting, I didnt
know. I knew only that a lot of people were scared, and running, and I
imagined that the boys were coming forward from car to car. As more people
hurried forward into each car, I kept running and stopping until I reached the
very front of the train, right next to the motormans compartment, where I
suddenly saw that by doing this I had possibly put myself into a trap. Through
the open door of the compartment, I watched the conductor and the
motorman muttering to each other, the conductor bending over the
motorman and the motorman looking straight ahead at the tracks.
The train was now creeping out onto the bridge. An older woman stood by
herself blinking and blurting out fearful remarks in German. A small Hispanic
woman cried into her boyfriends arms. I was shaking. I felt sick.
The conductor and the motorman took turns speaking into a shortwave
radio, saying over and over again, Command center come in, but no sound
came back from the apparatus. At last the motorman stopped the train at the
approach of another train coming in the opposite direction on the next track,
and the two men signaled through the window. They then shouted to the
driver to try and get through on his radio and tell the command center they
had an emergency and needed the police and the E.M.S. to meet them at
Grand Street. That was the next station, on the far side of the river.
They went on trying to make contact themselves, and they seemed to
reach the command center but could not make themselves understood, yelling
into the radio that one car was covered in blood. The more often they said the
words police, emergency, assault and stabbing, the more restless the
passengers around them became.
The train was moving very slowly over the bridge and then stopping
above the water. It stood still more than it moved. The passengers in the front
of the train alternately kept quiet and broke out in questions and complaints.
As the motorman continued to move the train forward, a few feet at a time,
the conductor, a large, red-haired man not in uniform, stood next to the
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/nyregion/story-excerpt-traveling-from-brooklyn.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Page 3 of 5

A Fiction Excerpt: Traveling From Brooklyn - NYTimes.com

26/10/2014 11:01 am

motormans compartment with its open door, patiently answering some of the
passengers questions. Then, like a priest, he laid his broad hand for a
moment on the head of the German woman and then on the head of the
Hispanic woman and then on mine.
Word came that the police were on their way, and the train started
forward again. It crossed the bridge and went underground. When it came
within sight of the Grand Street station platform, it stopped in the tunnel and
waited again until some policemen appeared under the bright lights ahead.
The train drew up only as far as the catwalk at the mouth of the tunnel.
The conductor lifted a seat next to the first door and turned a switch that
opened that one door. He explained that none of us could leave. We all
argued. The platform was right there and we could be out of the train so
easily, and the station too.
Six policemen climbed in over the railing that ran alongside the catwalk,
and after them a heavyset emergency medical service orderly in a shortsleeved white shirt and black pants, carrying a doctors bag and a stretcher.
The policemen and the orderly disappeared into the next car, walking back
toward the rear of the train.
I did not have to wait long before the four boys were brought handcuffed
into the car. I watched as they were searched. Near them, a tensely grinning
boy was examined by the orderly, who pushed up each of his eyelids with a fat
thumb and shone his flashlight against the pupils of his eyes. When the four
boys and the victim had been taken out onto the platform, the conductor
closed the door and the train pulled all the way into the station. Now the
passengers were asked to leave the train immediately.
Instead of waiting for another train, I went upstairs to the street, where
the sun was shining, the air was fresh and cold, snow was piled up against the
curbs, and police cars and an ambulance were parked at odd angles to the
subway entrance.
The four boys were there too, being searched again. Both the policemen
and the boys seemed tranquil, but the policemen were cheerful, whereas the
boys were glum. A policeman sitting inside a squad car told people through a
loudspeaker to move on, and although I felt I had a right to stay and watch, I
moved on.
A version of this article appears in print on October 19, 2014, on page MB11 of the New York edition with
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/nyregion/story-excerpt-traveling-from-brooklyn.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Page 4 of 5

A Fiction Excerpt: Traveling From Brooklyn - NYTimes.com

26/10/2014 11:01 am

the headline: Story Excerpt: Traveling From Brooklyn.

2014 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/nyregion/story-excerpt-traveling-from-brooklyn.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Page 5 of 5