Once the train left the platform, we jumped down onto the tracks and sprinted after it. The goal was to get to the next subway station before another train caught up to us. We called the sport “trainchasing,” even though it was really the train behind us, not the one in front, that concerned us. The G train came at intervals of fifteen minutes, which seemed like more than enough time to run the half-mile to the next station. But the trains never ran on time, so we couldn’t be sure a train wouldn’t catch up to us, and run us over. That’s what made it fun.
The G, or “Ghost line,” seemed the ideal subway track for trainchasing. It was the one line that did not touch Manhattan at any point, snaking instead between the Gowanus Canal and Forest Hills. As a result there were no commuters and few late-night revelers. Often when we’d emerge from the tunnel and jump onto the next platform — our jeans dripping brown sluice water and our sneakers making soggy, gasping noises — no one would even be there to see us.
The Transit Authority ranked the G lowest on their list of lines to renovate, so it was unsupervised and poorly maintained. If the earth were to reclaim it, few in Manhattan would notice. Many in Brooklyn and Queens would cheer. Toxic, rust-colored stalactites hung from the tunnel roofs and several generations of paint chipped off the station walls, revealing a rotted, green-boned structure underneath. The sickness about the place only added to the exhilarating strangeness of our adventures there.
In those first days a successful chase, no matter how low the mortal risk, left us giddy and numb. It didn’t take long for me to realize, however, that this feeling couldn’t last. As we celebrated our first run, gibbering nonsense and galloping about with interlocked arms, I noticed a funny expression on Jane’s face. She looked triumphant but unsatisfied, and it became clear that I would have to go further in order to keep up with her. The G, frankly, was too safe. Before long, its thrills would grow as dull as its tracks. And sure enough, I soon found myself conquering an alphabet of new subway lines, chasing trains past more and more stations at a time. None of it was my idea, but I can’t pretend I didn’t go along willingly. It was fun at first, the most fun I’d had since childhood. So I’m probably just as guilty as anyone for what happened.
When it all began I was living alone in an apartment in Greenpoint that I had first rented while I was still a medical student. I had abandoned my residency at the hospital but since my lease wasn’t up for another seven months, I stayed put. My friends at medical school assumed that I had moved back home, and I wasn’t talking with my parents then, so it wasn’t long before I had created for myself a life of quiet anonymity. On weekends I explored the city, occasionally forcing myself to initiate casual conversations with strangers. And I slept. A lot. I told myself that I was trying to make up for nearly a decade of sleep deprivation, but I’m not sure if that was the whole truth. I lived like this in the hope that my old, lab-coated, self would gradually grow unfamiliar to me and slough off, like a scab. It almost worked.
I had found work at a toy factory where, for eight hours each day, I poured boiling liquid rubber into molds shaped like a child’s head, torso, and limbs. These body parts were assembled into a Billy doll, a popular and expensive toy for young boys. Billy had his own Saturday morning cartoon, called “Billy and the FunTime Friends,” and even his own theme song.
Billy looked like an ordinary two-foot-tall red-headed boy, but the feature that distinguished him from other dolls were his hands: they felt realistically human to the touch. How they did this was a marketing secret, but after a few weeks at the company I determined that they used a silicon pad for the palm and foam tubing for the fingers and bones, all wrapped in a polyethylene skin. The hands could be molded into realistic human grips and contortions. Once I snuck onto the assembly line to touch the doll’s hands. The advertisements didn’t lie. Its form molded itself to the shape of my own hand. And the synthetic flesh was warm — warmer than the finished product, as if it were animated with the heat of its creation.
I was reminded of Andrew Mascarenhas, my lab partner in anatomy class. We named our cadaver Morris. During dissection, Andrew would hold Morris’s palm with one hand, while he used his other hand to perform the incisions — the way a mother might hold the hand of a child who is being given a shot. It was a joke between us at first but after a while it must have felt natural, even reassuring, to Andrew, since he began to do it absent-mindedly. When I questioned him about it he would only give me a thin, toothless grin. He said that he wanted Morris to know that we didn’t mean any harm. I was relieved when, in the third week of class, we removed Morris’s hands, and Andrew started acting reasonable again.
The only people I spent much time with out of work were my two neighbors, Suki and Jane. They had moved to Brooklyn several years earlier from Songnam, South Korea. Songnam is a satellite city of Seoul, connected to the city center by Line 8, or the Pink line, of the Seoul Metropolitan Rapid Transit system. They said that the Pink line was only constructed in the last decade and, like most of Seoul’s subway lines, it was pristine and expeditious, though usually crowded. The motto of the SMRT was “For More Happiness of Citizen, For More Pleasantness.” Suki and Jane could not believe it when I told them that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority had no motto. Jane frowned and crinkled her eyebrows as if I had insulted her intelligence.
We worked only several blocks away from each other, and before long I was meeting Suki and Jane after work so that we could take the subway home together. I would greet the girls reeking of liquid rubber — a sharp, heady smell not dissimilar to the odor of trashcan fires — at the studio of the artist Boris Fontaine. Fontaine, with his trademark bouffant hairdo and skinny leather neckties, made a series gigantic painted woodcuts that he called “The Realm of Frantic Danger.”
His woodcuts followed the adventures of two twin albino children, Peter and Susan. The twins appeared to be almost identical. To identify them, one had to know that Susan had the slightly shaggier hair and Peter had the eyeglasses with tortoise-shell rims that magnified his eyeballs to the size of his fists. Defenseless and morose, our two heroes battled grotesque, and often perverse, monsters in the forests and mountains of the mythical land of Androstenonia.
Fontaine sold the woodcuts at exorbitant cost to luxury hotels and banking corporations, as well as major art collectors, across the world. He divided his work among a large consortium of young artists, most of whom were female immigrants from Asia. He had hired designers, choppers, saw handlers, sanders, drafters, carvers, painters, lacquerers, woodworking apprentices, interns and a cook. It was crucial that the girls all performed their jobs proficiently since Fontaine himself rarely visited the studio; he was constantly touring with his traveling staff to exhibitions abroad.
Suki was in charge of smoothing operations, using giant sandpapering machines to smooth the huge slabs of wood to the exact contours prescribed by Fontaine. Jane was more accomplished: she carved the malicious Limnoids, prominent creatures in Androstenonia’s watery regions. Pale, eyeless hobgoblins with thin grey skin, the Limnoids floated face-up in swamps like lily pads, their limbs sprawling underwater. To defend themselves from intruders their skin was equipped with a fine hypersensitive down that detected any fluctuation in the water level. When a Limnoid’s cilia sensed movement, the beast, suddenly alert, would jolt up and attack. The Limnoids did not care whether the unlucky intruder was amphibian, beast, or child. Suki and Jane were enthralled with Fontaine’s work, and talked about “The World of Frantic Danger” obsessively on our train rides.
Part Two
We first trainchased during the blizzard of February 2003. Suki said that it never snowed like this in Seoul, and I replied that it never snowed like this in New York either. I was once told that when snow falls in small flakes, it sticks, whereas big flakes tend to melt. During the blizzard flakes fell as fine as sugar crystals and as fat as cheese puffs, but it piled up wherever it landed. Parked cars disappeared from the curbs, replaced by vague white mounds. Some of these mounds, when you brushed off all the layers of snow, would leave nothing beneath but wet cement.
When I arrived at Fontaine’s studio on the day of the blizzard, Suki was already ready to go, dressed in a thick raspberry coat with paisley lapels, puffy ermine earmuffs, and a red hat with little snowmen holding hands around its perimeter. The fingers of her purple mittens were lined with translucent sequins; the five lines of sequins merged at her wrist, spinning into a delicate spiral pattern like a seashell.
“I’m ready but she isn’t,” she said, tilting her head in the direction of Jane who, under the critical gaze of Fontaine’s executive assistant, was touching-up the face of a sleeping Limnoid. “Is it true about the snow?”
Jane, I saw, was completing the first panel of a new triptych. It depicted a scene in which Peter had to wade across a shallow pond crowded with floating Limnoids in order to save Susan from her kidnappers, a savage pack of wood-dwarfs, who held her captive on the far bank. The skies were purple and ominous, and hairy yellow weeds sprung from the bottom corners of the frame. Most of Fontaine’s scenes ended with Peter and Susan attacked by some goblin or other and left for dead. It was unclear from the triptych’s first panel whether the twins would survive this particular adventure.
“Is it true that the snow is so high you can’t even see the cars?” asked Suki, tugging at her coat’s drawstrings.
I watched as Jane carefully stenciled furrows in the baggy skin above the Limnoid’s nose, right where the eyes would have been on a human face. It looked like a large cyclopic socket that had sagged without an eyeball to fill it. Under Jane’s blade the wood seemed slick, almost slimy. I thought this must have been a mark of great talent. Indeed, the edge of her knife seemed an extension of the sharpness that defined not just her personality, but also her physical appearance. Her shoulders pointed up like arrowheads; her eyebrows darted back in thin diagonals; her straight black hair spiked at a widow’s peak on her flat forehead and coursed backwards into a neatly-cinched ponytail; her ribs jutted out like knives under skin so taut that it resembled Billy’s polyethylene casing; and she wore snug sweaters that clung tight to her small elastic breasts. You could even distinguish discrete outlines of cartilage if you looked closely enough at the knees of her black leather pants.
“Hey!” Suki shouted. “Are the trains still going?”
“Of course,” I said.
Suki, on the other hand, was like one of the little snowmen that circumambulated her hat: a confusion of ovals. Though not exactly chubby, she was rounded-off at every corner. When I saw her approaching from afar, the combination of her wide round head and her bouncing gait looked like several basketballs being dribbled simultaneously by an invisible Globetrotter. She looked best when she laughed; the corners of her mouth would inch up parabolically, and the corners of her eyes would creep down, so that the two features nearly joined in the middle — a mirthful ellipse. She looked worst when, disappointed or confused, she pouted, her face melting off her jaw and right down her neck.
Jane finally joined us, Fontaine’s executive assistant having approved her Limnoid.
“Make some nice boy-dolls today?” she asked me.
“Yes, thank you,” I said, eager to change the subject. I gestured blindly at her woodcut. “Do Peter and Susan survive this time?”
“I can’t tell you just yet. But I will say that my Limnoids do, the poor babies.” She brushed past me and bounded out into the glaucous dusk.
The whirling snow engulfed us. Suki pinwheeled her arms in slow motion, as if trying to caress each snowflake. At the street corner two floating streetlamps cast green light over the stairway leading down to the subway station. An even slope of mush, mottled brown and yellow, hid the stairs. As the girls rushed by me, I inched down the slope sideways, my gloved hands squeezing the sidebar that, under normal conditions, I would not have touched, not even through the proxy of my glove.
In the stagnant air of the subway car I found myself crammed up against Suki, her head neatly lodged in my armpit, her breasts warped against my costal arches. Jane stood in front of me, immobile. I noticed with some awe that her head was the only one in car that the train’s rumbling lateral motion did not set nodding. Such a calm bearing, I thought, surely indicated an impressive degree of poise; but there was also something menacing about that head, motionless among the bobbing heads of the tired commuters. It seemed like part of the train’s own architecture.
At the stop where we transferred to the G train, a cheerful voice announced that subway service in Brooklyn had been discontinued indefinitely but that the station would be kept open so that passengers could stay the night if they were far from home. Most people laughed and fled into the blizzard, forgetting to put on their hats and gloves, or no longer caring. But we heard the clicks and shudders of another train so we ran headlong to the G platform anyway. We made it just in time to catch a glimpse of the train’s blurry taillights before they disappeared into the tunnel.
Part Three
Suki trumpeted air through her nostrils and mouth at the same time. Jane flattened her mouth into a fine purple line and bent over to tie her black suede boots. I noticed that even her behind seemed to come to a sharp point.
“There’s even snow on the tracks.” Suki was enraptured, her purple fists full of powder. Snow fell in packets from the grates in the sidewalk overhead.
“We can make little snow angels,” said Suki. “And keep them in our freezer until the spring.”
“The walk home shouldn’t be too difficult,” I said, in my most intrepid voice.
Jane swung around, her eyes a hard black dazzle.
“Let’s walk,” she said, pointing to the tracks. Suki and I stared silently at each other’s feet. Jane had issued a challenge: it was clear that she didn’t mean outside.
“That sounds scary,” said Suki, leaning off of the platform to look into the tunnel. “Besides how much danger there is, it’s filthy and there are rats all over the place.”
Exultant and mindless, I decided to follow Jane — even if it meant leaving Suki alone at the station, howling in inarticulate fear. At least she would have company. Others had refused to leave the station and now sat on the wooden benches or on the damp concrete. Some of them rested their heads on their hands or against the tiled wall; closing their eyes, they began to hibernate.
“OK,” said Suki. “OK, I’ll come.” She crinkled her face so the corners of her mouth and the corners of her eyes inched as far away from each other as possible. Under that complicated configuration of skin and shifting muscle, I thought I could detect something resembling a leer.
Jane jumped down onto the tracks, right off the middle of the platform, and we followed her. No one interfered with us except for one young red-headed boy, who was dawdling unattended at the end of the platform. His nose, a flattened ace of clubs, poked out from under a blue hood. He wanted to join us. Suki told him sure, come along. But he didn’t move. He only pointed at us, his mouth half-open like an imbecile. We waved at him until the tunnel swallowed us up.
As soon as the darkness was on us, the girls, wordlessly, took my hands. I gripped them back, hard. Jane’s was dry and rough, like terracotta. Suki had taken off her mittens and her palm were clammy. It felt a lot like Billy’s.
“I think,” said Suki, “that many rats crawl about this tunnel.”
“There may be people too,” I huffed. “Whole civilizations of albino underground people whose eyes have mutated so that they can see in the dark.”
“Don’t forget about the Limnoids, who float face-up in the still puddles of melted snow in the sewage gutters and between the tracks.”
Jane giggled breathlessly; Suki started softly to weep. I tried to focus on the path ahead of us. Further along, spaced several yards apart, dim yellow lights twinkled from the posts that lined the tracks. We began to flicker in and out of view, as if lit by a strobe light.
All at once metal plates began to shift and grind and the tracks trembled. On the adjacent track a southbound train appeared around a corner I didn’t know existed. Its two white rays, crossing and leveling, put into relief the tunnel’s every steel bolt and turquoise wall tile, and colored the girls a ghostly pale hue. The noise set us shaking — even Jane. Afterwards the tunnel air rang with a loud hiss that drowned out the girls, whom I noticed, as soon as my eyes readjusted to the semi-darkness, were speaking quickly and with great emotion.
When after several minutes we still hadn’t reached the next stop, we broke into a run, but stopped after a few paces when we noticed a commotion up ahead. In the other lane of the tunnel, where the train had just passed, a man was screaming at us, his arms beating madly.
“Allo there!” he said. I could just make out a white headband and striped sweatpants as the man sprinted past us. “You’ve almost made it!” he shouted to us. “Good luck, friends!”
Part Four
So began a new period of my life in this city. I now spent my weekends entirely with the girls, trainchasing for hours at a time. We found new routes and new subway lines, daring them all except the long underwater tunnels that crossed the East River. We determined the schedules of each train, figured out how fast we had to run after a train to avoid being caught by the one behind us. We popped up to the surface only to eat greedily, our bugged eyes dilating in the sunlight. Above ground, we rarely made eye contact with each other. We walked like strangers whose paths had an uncomfortable tendency to converge.
Underground we were a single unit. We held hands. And I always stood between the girls. This made me feel like I was leading our expeditions, even though I was in fact being tugged on the one side and tugging on the other.
Whatever apprehension I felt was subdued by Suki’s greater fear, and my new intimacy with Jane. If I showed any hesitation, Jane would laugh her nasal, stuttering laugh, and pinch my waist. That didn’t necessarily make me less afraid of being smashed up by a train, but I was at least distracted by more pleasant fantasies. Suki also pinched me, but she pinched too hard. One time, at the long, sloping segment between the Broadway-Lafayette and West 4th Street stops on the F line, I pinched Suki’s thigh back in revenge. She cried bitterly. It took several light, conciliatory pinches from Jane to calm everyone down.
On weekends the tunnels were filled with trainchasers. Most were older — in their thirties at least — and fit. They wore headphones connected to minuscule mp3 players and at platforms they would hold two fingers to their throats to check pulse-rate. I once saw an infant harnessed to the back of one of the men, his tiny helmeted skull nodding lifelessly to the rhythm of his father’s pace. These older trainchasers acted courteously towards us but rarely extended more than a simple salutation, consumed as they were by their workouts. They waved and smiled but generally they avoided us. They seemed to regard us with a haughtiness tempered, at times, by suspicion. They didn’t want their secret to get out.
One day Jane presented us with three spandex jumpsuits–one orange, one gold, and one silver — with matching gloves. I liked the gold suit but Jane said that I had to wear the silver one because it was the largest. Suki was thrilled to have the orange one.
“This is what trainchasers really enjoy!” she said, marveling at her orange-striped arms and legs. “To have uniforms that let you run faster and stronger.”
“I thought you would like it,” said Jane, looking at me. “It’ll be safer, and we’ll be by far the most fashionable trainchasers around.” She might have winked.
I winked back, unaware of what joke she was letting me in on. I didn’t quite see a reason for the jumpsuits, but if it made the girls happy, I would not object to wearing one. With the suits, trainchasing began to feel less terrifying, and more like a sport. But if we were all contestants, I wondered, how did you win? And what would happen to the losers?
We raced as fast as we could, so fast that we sometimes let go of each other, but never for very long. Occasionally one of us would trip and land in puddles, our sticky-gloved hands gripping the iron pipes that ran alongside the track like handlebars, which always vibrated, no matter how far away a train might have been. I was the fastest runner, but got winded the easiest: I only kept pace with Jane because I had longer legs than her. We never let Suki fall too far behind us, except for when we would get overly excited.
“Watch out for the Limnoids!” Jane would yell. “Beware the Gnomes and the Brainworts!”
“The puddles are thick with Father Henrys,” I’d yell back, “and they’re starving!”
“Wait up!” Suki would shriek. “I fell and — ah — my shoulder!”
We sought out busy underground intersections, like the one under Grand Central Station, or at Borough Hall. In these places we would wait for a train to roar past and chased it without knowing its line, its schedule, or its direction. When we hoisted ourselves up onto a new platform, the people waiting there regarded us with sideways glances and often shuffled away. I think if I were still a medical student and saw three neon spandexed forms emerge from the tunnel, I might have done the same.
After work during the week, we thought nothing of chasing to our G stop when we had just missed a train. In fact, we chased as long as we didn’t see or hear a train coming. We knew that at a flat sprint it was no more than four minutes between stops; running made more sense to us than sitting on the platform with the rest of the idle civilians. We vaulted through the tunnel, strobe-lit in yellow, and emerged into the white florescence of our stop, Nassau Avenue. We didn’t stop running until we threw open the door to our apartment building, as if racing through an imaginary finish line.
The snow turned to slush and bled into the sewers; underground the culverts drained but never fully dried up, leaving scattered pools of urban loam. In the world above, Jane finished her Limnoid triptych. The Limnoids had indeed slaughtered the twins, but not because Peter’s careful wading had disrupted the surface of the pond; he had, in fact, made it across and rescued his sister from the wood-dwarfs. But the twins had ill luck on their way back through the pond. Just before they reached the friendly shore a pregnant Limnoid began to undergo labor, thrashing about in animal pain. Stirred from their reverie, a dozen monsters devoured the astounded children.
I told Jane that I thought her use of color in the final panel was particularly strange and beautiful. The light blue water fused with the sky through the medium of the children’s blood, tinged a deep reddish brown. And Jane’s jagged carving of the Limnoid’s birth gave it a fierce, and oddly human, spirit. I told her that if the murder of little Peter and Susan spared the newborn Limnoid from being cannibalized by its elders, I wouldn’t mourn the twins’ deaths too greatly. She thanked me with a long embrace. Her eyes fluttered, gleaming like flashing knives. I felt closer to her then than ever before, and I think she felt the same way.
Part Five
We were standing beneath the Fulton Street nexus, where nine different subway lines intersected, when I decided that, the next time we were alone, I would ask Jane to go trainchasing with me alone. Suki would understand, I thought. It had become clear that Jane and I had reached a new level of understanding.
It would have to wait, though, since we couldn’t leave Suki here. The three of us were hunched in a dry underpass used by transit police to access the jigsawed tracks in emergencies. Every so often a pack of trainchasers would race past us, whooping with adrenaline and delight. We had just run a particularly difficult route (the serpentine 2 line from Park Place to Fulton St.) and were resting, waiting for a northbound train to inspire us to chase again. It had to be headed northbound since most of the southbound trains passing through Fulton St. did not stop again until they reached Brooklyn, after crossing the widest part of the East River.
Jane stood up and we followed her to the tracks. It was bad timing. As soon as we emerged from the underpass, stopwatches in hand, two trains appeared simultaneously from opposite directions. I spun confused between the slanting beams of light, which narrowed and brightened as the trains converged. Blue sparks crackled from the third rail. It seemed that one more train was coming but I couldn’t tell from where, and now all three converged, hammering the concrete and squealing voltage. In my muddle I ducked back into the underpass. It wasn’t clear to me then whether either of the girls did too. I know now that at least one of them didn’t.
I stood up some time later, half-blind and half-deaf. Highways of twinkling yellow lights extended outwards in every direction, so that the tunnel looked like a city at night seen from an airplane. A vague shadow interfered with some of the lights in my periphery, and out of it a hand materialized. From its soapy consistency I knew it belonged to Suki. She spoke in a sharp, uneven voice that didn’t suit her.
“Jane is gone,” she said.
“Which train?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see her run after any of them.”
“I didn’t see any of the trains at all.”
Jane was too quick, and too clever, to have let herself get hurt. I decided that if she had gone off by herself, she must have had a good reason for it. And she was too fast for us to catch her. There was no use trying.
We followed a track at random where one of the trains had just passed. We jogged a bit, half-heartedly, but soon relaxed into a normal gait. It was strange not to be holding two hands, so I used both of mine to hold Suki’s.
“This is OK anyway,” she said, after we had walked a bit further.
“Yes.” I did not want to upset her.
I tried to imagine what route Jane had taken. Maybe she knew another group of trainchasers, more experienced and daring than Suki and me, that she hadn’t told us about. Maybe she had met them and left us behind. Or maybe she was just tired of us. Or impatient. It had become increasingly difficult to keep up with her. Maybe she was sick of waiting me to ask her.
Suki and I walked on without any sign of platform light. I wondered mildly where we were and began to worry that we had fumbled into one of the underwater tunnels. I pressed up against the wall, straining to hear something, a clue. If we were underwater, would we hear air bubbling up from fish gills, the creaking of sunken privateers, the rotting of jettisoned corpses, a mermaid’s song?
Not hearing anything, I laughed with relief. Several feet behind me Suki joined in — a high hiccup of joy. But it soon occurred to me that the river would not make any noise against a tunnel wall. Only if we were encased in the earth would we hear the sounds of the underground — the metallic racket of the other trains or the cables and pipes that purr like bicycle spokes, hundreds of feet below the sidewalk.
Suki took my hands and led me further into the tunnel’s amber glow. I told her that I thought we might be underwater.
“I don’t care,” she said. “I’m getting tired, though, and I don’t see any beds around here.”
For my part I was hungry and felt as if my pores were clogged with chalk. My jumpsuit was grimy and tattered, showing patches of dirtied knee and elbow. Much of the silver coating had flaked off.
“Don’t be afraid,” I said.
“Don’t you be afraid.”
The light ahead of us was as dim as that behind. We ran for a bit, then cantered, then stopped again.
“Do you want to rest?” she asked. I did, in fact. I was quite sleepy myself.
We hunched into the hollow between the tracks and the tunnel wall.
“Do you miss her?”
“No,” I lied, squeezing her hand. “I think we’ll be fine.”
I felt certain that a train would not pass for a long time. Suki leaned on me, her eyes flapping shut. She nodded and shuddered, and then became very still. This is where I belonged, I realized, right here with Suki, in an abandoned tunnel, under the sea.
I thought she might have fallen asleep when, abruptly, she turned towards me. In a small voice she whispered in my ear.
“Are we safe?”
“Of course,” I said.
“From what?”
