Dim Red and Sometimes Dim Blue

A story about a man in the subway.

I felt sick. I fell onto my hands and knees and retched tarry bile thinly onto the floor of the train car. I heard a woman nearby inhale sharply.

“Just ignore him,” a man said to her. “He’s just some random junkie.”

“So that’s who I am,” I thought. I felt steadier now that I knew who I was.

I got off at the next stop. The air was hot and rubbery in the station but I pulled my coat tighter around me anyway. Where did that reflex come from? I tried to remember, but couldn’t. With my head down, I started towards the other end of the platform. I heard the train doors closing and the train pulling away. I didn’t look back, but I knew it was going into an underground tunnel that would be very dark. “It’s dark everywhere but here,” I thought. “This subway stop is the only oasis of light in a darkened world.”

After the train was gone, the air got a little cooler. Everything relaxed. I almost started to feel comfortable. It was very quiet. There was no one else on the platform. At this time of night, there probably wouldn’t be another train for twenty minutes or longer, I thought. I let the quiet drape itself over me like an extra layer on top of my coat, a doubled shroud.

When I got to the end of the platform, I realized I had gone the wrong way. There was no exit here, no stairs leading up to… what? I tried to remember, but couldn’t. “There must be something up there that’s worth returning to,” I thought. I looked up and saw a closed-circuit television displaying my own hunched, disordered form to me. I quickly looked back down. I was worried that if I kept looking, I might see myself stripped to the skin, the camera discovering how unshaven I was, and how beneath the dark swirls of hair, there were tattoos I didn’t remember receiving. Beyond the screen, I saw a metal walkway leading off into the darkness of the tunnel, the one the train had come from, not the one it had left into. There was a gate across the walkway, blocking access, but it would be easy to hop, even in the condition I was in. I knew, of course, that I could turn around, that surely there was an exit at the platform’s other end, but I knew also that I had reached a point in my life where I could no longer retrace my step. I had lived that way too long, I felt. Now, it would be unbearable. I would have to throw myself onto the train tracks and lie there until something happened. There was really nothing else to do. I hopped the gate.

Near the entrance in the tunnel the wall was covered with graffiti tags, but they became sparser as I went further in. There were alcoves every few feet, just large enough that I could imagine fitting myself into them. The light from the platform guided me at first, but then it faded, and became only something dimly behind me, in my past, and I had to grope forward in the dark. Here and there a little diode stuck out of the wall dully glowing, usually red, but sometimes yellow or green. As my eyes adjusted, these lights became enough to give certain edges of things some slight amount of definition in the darkness. Eventually, I reached a ladder bolted to the wall. I hesitated. It wasn’t something I had been expecting. I had imagined, rather, that I might come across a bonfire burning in some dusty amphitheater, and that I could follow the smoke upwards to a new and secret home. But, as I reflected on it, I realized that this was never going to happen. My path was downwards.

And so I went down, I climbed down the ladder through a narrow concrete shaft into a space of humid, low-ceilinged corridors. Here, there were more diodes, which mostly glowed dim red, and sometimes dim blue. The air was rank. I kept stepping on things that felt gentle and soft and very wet. I kept stepping on old newspapers, too, gossip magazines, greasy napkins, rotten cardboard, tissuey, sodden religious pamphlets. In my exploration, I found what felt like a door that had been boarded up very recently, and several more that were shut with sturdy padlocks. Finally, I found a particular door, which wasn’t locked, and opened when I tried it. It was in something like a corner, a place where the corridor turned. The floor wasn’t quite level, something had eroded and made it slope downwards towards this corner. It formed a depression where something with an alkaline smell has pooled. As I opened the door, I was standing in this pool. A light came on, shining at me, and it blinded me. I stepped back and let go of the doorknob. The door swung immediately shut and there was no more light. I blinked and waited for my eyes to recover, then tried to open the door again. It wouldn’t. My hand rattled uselessly. It was locked now.

Later, I was in a small stony room with water dripping into a bucket behind me. There was a chair I was sitting in. I was in front of a table with a lamp and a telephone on it. There were no windows. I was still underground, of course. I had shut the door. The phone rang, and I picked it up.

“The press gang comes and takes the boy away. The boy’s dog barks at the press gang, but they take him away anyway. The boy’s dog doesn’t know what to do,” said the voice on the other end.

“What should the dog do?” I said. It felt strange to speak.

“The dog can’t do anything,” said the voice.