My name is Andrew Erics. I lived, once, in a city called New York. My mother is Terrie Erics. She’s in the phone book. If you know the city, and you read this, find her. Don’t show her this, but tell her I love her, and that I’m trying to come home. Please.
It all started when I decided, around the time that I turned twenty-five, that it was time for me to give up taking my backpack in to work. It would make me look more mature, I thought, if I weren’t lugging around a book bag everywhere like a high school student. Of course this meant that I had to give up reading in the subway in the mornings and afternoons, since I couldn’t quite fit my paperbacks into a pocket. A briefcase would have been out of line, since I was working in a factory, and messenger bags always seemed a little, I don’t know, fruity to me. Too purse-like for my liking.
I had an mp3 player, which helped pass the time for a while, but when it broke – it would shut down at the end of every song if I didn’t skip to the next track manually – I gave that up too. So every morning, I’d sit in the metro for a half-hour that dragged on endlessly, with nothing at all to do but watch my fellow passengers. I was slightly shy, so I didn’t like to be caught at it, so I’d surreptitiously watch people. Interestingly enough, I quickly discovered that I wasn’t the only person in the world who was uncomfortable in public. People covered it up in various ways, but I learned to see through them. I divided them up into categories in my head. There were the fidgeters, who couldn’t get comfortable, constantly moving their hands, shifting their weight, moving their legs closer to the bench, then further. They were the most noticeably nervous types. After them were the fake-sleepers, who’d take their seat and practically close their eyes in the same second. Most of them weren’t really sleeping, though. The real sleepers shifted more, came awake suddenly at stops or after loud noises. The fakes just zoned from the second they sat until the moment the train pulled into their stop. Then there were the mp3 player addicts, the occasional laptop people, the people who traveled in groups and talked too loudly. The cellphone junkies were either very popular or just completely unable to shut up for more than two minutes at a time.
Just as people-watching was threatening to get unbearably boring, I found my first incongruity. A middle-aged looking man, brown-haired, average size and weight, and dressed casually. Oddly enough, he seemed almost too normal. He had no remarkable features, no mannerisms, as if he were designed to fade into a crowd. It was that which led me to notice him – I was intentionally trying to see how people acted on the subway, and he didn’t act at all. Didn’t even react, either. It was like seeing someone sitting in front of the television, watching a documentary about fish. They aren’t excited, aren’t engaged, but they aren’t looking away either. Present, but not accounted for.
He was on the subway in the afternoons. It was more than a month into the people-watching experiment before he caught my eye, because I didn’t catch the same subway everyday, and didn’t consciously sit in the same car when I did. I saw him for the first time on a Monday, I believe, and for the second time on the Thursday of the same week. He obviously did catch the same train, and sat in the same car – in the same seat, even. OCD much? I thought at the time. Since he’d caught my attention so much the first time, I watched him more avidly the next. He was, frankly, downright unsettling. He didn’t do anything at all. He sat there, expressionless, head straight, no matter what happened. A woman with a wailing child entered the car and sat right behind him, and still nothing. He didn’t so much as turn his head or frown in annoyance. And that kid was %@$@@#@ loud, too.
By the time the subway reached my stop, I found myself queasy, and when I exited the car my hands were shaking like I was having a nicotine fit. Something about that man was *wrong*. He was, I thought, some kind of freak. A sociopath, maybe, one of those quiet guys who it turns out has a dozen women’s heads in his freezer, the first victim his mother.
I found myself intentionally dawdling after work in the afternoons, stopping to browse in kiosks in the mall near the subway even when I didn’t intend on buying anything. For a couple weeks, I avoided catching that subway, and when I found myself at the stop when it was pulling in, I made sure to choose a train-car as far from the one I’d seen him in as possible. Then, one morning, I saw another person who set off the same warning bells in my head. A woman, just as plain-looking, just as out of place in hustle and commotion around her. The moment I recognized her, I realized later, was when my obsession began. My people-watching, which had began as a bit of a hobby to stave off boredom, became something of a religion to me. I couldn’t enter a subway or ride a bus without finding myself examining everyone, filling out a mental checklist in my head. Plain clothes of solid colors, no brands? Check. No expressions, no casual glances out the windows or towards other passengers? Check. No bags, purses, or accessories? Check. Check, check, check, we’ve got another. I started calling them the Strangers.
I didn’t see them everyday, even after I started taking the metro more than I needed to, even when I found myself riding buses out of my way in the evenings. But they were there, often enough. Seeing one would set my teeth on edge, make my palms sweaty and my throat feel dry. If you’ve ever given a speech, you might recognize the feeling. Even though they didn’t pay me the slightest bit of attention, I felt like I was on was on display for them. I could see them, plain as day. How could they miss me?
They didn’t, though, not in any way that I could tell. And when, eventually, my curiosity overpowered my fear, I decided to follow one. I chose the one that I’d found first, the man in the afternoon subway who always kept the same seat. I got on and took a seat behind him. We rode to the end of the line, and he rose and walked out before I did. Keeping distance between us, I tailed him, but he didn’t go far. He took a seat on a nearby bench, as expressionless as always, and I turned a corner and waited, trying to look nonchalant. After a few minutes, the next metro arrived, and I watched him enter it, and saw him take the same seat. I couldn’t find the nerve to follow him again.
He hadn’t gone anywhere! He just rode the metro to the end of the line, and then what? Rode it back? What possible reason would he, would anyone, have for that? It nagged at me, long after I’d rode a later train back home and tried to get some rest. I couldn’t leave it alone, not until I could make some sense of it. I found myself more than confused – I was downright angry now. Why was this uncanny bastard, this almost inhuman person, riding subway trains back and forth, going nowhere? The mind, I once read, recoils from certain things, because the very sight of them is an affront. Spiders set it off in a lot of people, particularly great big ones. They just look wrong to us, alien. That was the effect the Strangers were beginning to have on me. They offended my senses.
I followed him again the next day, and again the day after that. Every day, for at least a week, the two of us made our silent trips together, though only I knew it. By the end of the week, I was following him for hours, until the last train that stopped at near my apartment block that night. We rode from one end of the city to the other, then back again. I wasn’t people-watching any longer. I was person-watching, Stranger-watching. I didn’t have eyes for anyone else, though peripherally I noticed more than a few confused glances sent my way. Other than that, we two might have been the only two people on the planet, for all I cared.
I lost my job the next week. My manager was kind, and timid, but firm. I wasn’t concentrating, I had no focus. Wasn’t being anywhere near productive. It was actually quite a speech, I think, but I could barely hear it. All I could think about was my new work, my vigil. What would that man, no, that thing, on the subway get up to when I wasn’t there to keep an eye on him? I left work for the last time at noon that day. Normally I’d have started tailing my subject at five-thirty, but I was sure that he’d be waiting for me. I wish, now, that I’d paid more attention to that day. Was it sunny? It was summer, after all. I could have walked around downtown, maybe checked out a few pretty girls. Could have had an ice cappuccino and a smoke at an outdoor cafe and then gone home, put my growing obsession out of my head. Found a new job and taken to reading on trains and buses again.
Instead, I waited. More than one train goes up and down the lines, so I sat in the station for at least an hour until I saw him through a window. I walked into the subway car, and noticed that for the first time my skin wasn’t clammy, my hands weren’t shaking, my heart wasn’t pounding hard. I sat, for the first time, right across from him, directly in his line of sight. Watched for a change in his face. Would he recognize me? If he did, I saw no sign of it, and I was looking hard. We must have made quite a pair, sitting across from one another that afternoon, staring at and into one another. It was hard not to let the building in rage in me contort my face, but with effort I was able to keep as still and as expressionless as him. Inside, I practically screamed at him. React to me, you %@$@@#@ %@$!%%*! See me, damn it. I know you for what you are!
I didn’t, though, and my silent demands weren’t answered, not the first trip around, or the second, or the third or tenth. We rode far into the night together , and at each terminus we got out together and waited. I sat right beside him on the bench, watching him from the corner of my eye, and still got nothing from him. But two could play that game as well as one.
Finally, we made our last trip together. I had him and knew it. Last trip of the night before the trains stopped running. I’d always let him get away from me at that point, because the end of the line is a long way from my home, and the buses stop running at the same time as the subways. But this time, I’d follow him, finally see what he was when the trains stopped running. I’d get some answers, maybe.
The subway rolled on, and the anticipation grew in me. The car emptied out around us slowly, until it was just we two silent watchers below the city. I fought to keep a manic grin at bay, and the subway train slowed to a crawl, then stopped. The end of the line.
The Stranger didn’t move, still didn’t react at all. The car stood still, doors open. I could dimly hear the last few stragglers making their way out of the station somewhere behind us, footsteps echoing in the silence. Nothing. The speaker system dinged to let anyone half-asleep know that we’d reached the terminus. Still nothing. And finally, I could hear footsteps again. A conductor or something, popping his head into each car to make sure it was empty before taking the train wherever the hell it goes for the night. I didn’t take my eyes from my silent quarry.
I managed to see the conductor from the corner of my eye when he finally reached our car. He looked in, his eyes roamed over us, and a puzzled look came over his face. He blinked a few times, and paused. I waited for him to speak, and the moment stretched out, but then, with a slight shake of the head, he left us. There was a car ahead of ours, and I heard him stop to check that too, and then a few minutes later, the train started up again. We rode for a time, and then looped around and the subway was parked. I could see into and the windows of more trains on either side of us, and through their opposing windows into even more.
And then he smiled at me. It was just a small curl of the lip, that would have gone unnoticed if I hadn’t spent the last several hours studying his face. “So,
