C Train Uptown

In the months leading up to my move, I was really big on facts. I watched all the movies, I read all the books, I followed many Phoebe Buffays and Mindy Lahris online. I wanted to be like them in every literal and spiritual sense from their humor to their clothes to the razors they used to shave their legs.

My mom fussed over my belongings instead. How much I could fit in my suitcase, and how I could leave all my books back at the apartment. She was really big on sentimental stuff and all that because when she was 21, she moved to America leaving behind her wedding dress, her journals, and me. I told her that I’d be purchasing new books — much to her dismay, being as cost effective as she was — and would soon have filled my studio apartment in Newark with them all. I’d just become proficient in English. It was only right; I’d been in America for close to three years now.

Unlike the glamorous characters pinned up in my brain — my mother would kill me if I ever pinned or taped things directly onto the wall — I couldn’t quite afford to live in New York City like I wanted. I couldn’t yet live the life that I’d built up for myself in my imagination since I was a teenager in Aleppo twirling my pen between my fingers thinking that I’d be the next Joan Didion writing furiously away while staring down at Central Park from my 6th floor apartment unit. I’d be writing in English of course. I hated the idea of translators.

The job I got that even allowed me to move to the east coast had absolutely nothing to do with writing, because unlike the novels I’d read, I was an asylum seeker with realistic expectations and refugee shoes to fill. My mom had raised me with enough of that sense, at least, though she lacked the structure of keeping my imagination in control.

For three years, I lived with my mother in Chicago, saving up each penny from every birthday, holiday. And here I was.

In New York, like everyone else, I never got to work on time— my job at a restaurant where I wasn’t quite a waitress, but the person who led people to their tables and then left them alone for their meals. Hostess, I was called, set up in a skirt (and tights because I told my boss that I was Muslim), without any rights to the tips. The real reason I wasn’t getting to work on time at exactly seven o’clock (for the breakfast shift) was because I kept exiting out the wrong side of the subway. Often, I ended up several blocks away, or on the NE side rather than SE. It made a really big difference.

Today I was determined to make it right on the dot so that I could show my manager the emphasis of growth that I had harped on about in my interview. I even studied the map the night before. It was autumn and I had been in Newark for four weeks. I’d been commuting to New York City for my hostess job for two weeks, and I had never been on time.

Most of my coworkers were native New Yorkers, or at least their parents were, and in some cases the novels I read to prepare me for this city helped me make conversation, but usually there was a visible disconnect unrelated to language between myself and them.

When I told them I was from Syria, their faces pinched and contorted like something out of a circus routine. I told my mom about it expecting she’d laugh and laugh as she often did over the ‘White people shenanigans’ but she yelled, “Do not talk about it! They can already see it on your face.” And then: “Listen, aziz, are you praying?”

During the interview, my manager had asked if I was planning on living in New York long term, even though I hadn’t told her that I wasn’t a native and was using my uncle’s cell phone for the interview which still had a 917 area code. New Yorkers were funny like that; they could always tell if the person they were talking to was a phony transplant or had roots in Brooklyn for the past seven generations.

Everything was well that morning — I’d taken an earlier train into the city to give myself time to get lost stepping out of the wrong exit once more, or for getting 5th Ave - 53rd St confused with 7th Ave - 53rd St. What was not well was how delayed the trains were.

As per the instructions in the paper about transit safety, I stayed as far back from the yellow line as possible. This was the autumn of young children falling to their deaths because of a new trend called “subway surfing” and women getting punched by assailants who would then casually walk into crowds of hyper aware bystanders. It was the beginning of the war in Gaza, a new beginning of something else instigated on our lips like a spice burn. The moment before revolution it seemed. Everyone was holding their breath. These were large enough emotions to swallow, and the fear of becoming another statistic in a transit related accident had no audacity to be so high on the list of my concerns. So every morning, my back was against the wall, waiting for the C train to take me uptown.

I’d learned about the world renowned MTA, but when I started using it, I learned that it was world renowned if the world existed anywhere else but the east coast of America. The trains were dirty and people didn’t mind. They mindlessly followed rats on the tracks with their eyes. The buses were rotten and people didn’t care. If my mother was here, she’d be appalled.

“After Godliness comes cleanliness,” I would hear her say several times a day in my head. “Did we leave our country to live in filth?”

The conditions disgusted me too, but I assumed it would take some time to gain the indifference it took to casually throw down a piece of bread for the rats.

The nicest people to me were the Arab uncles who worked at the convenience stores. No, bodegas. They always gave me extra food and called me kind names as if I were their child.

I went to eat lunch with them because I didn't like the food at my restaurant and I liked speaking Arabic.

The train was due to come in three minutes, but twenty five minutes had passed. There was no possible way I’d get to work on time, so I tried to text my manager that there was an unforeseeable delay, however, because I was underground and still working with my family’s plan on my cell phone, the message wouldn’t send. It also had to do with the fact that there were at least two hundred people on the thin platform now.

There was a loud outburst from my left and because there were so many people, it took time to find from whom the noise was emitted. I found it to be a bald man with a red face, in black slacks and light brown shoes. He swore colorfully, but I wasn’t startled. American soldiers in Syria casually swore in front of us. Our babies were spewing swears as their first words because of it.

“I hate this place!”

It was quite petulant for a grown man to say, but many people around him agreed. A week ago, I would have questioned why this man was going uptown when Wall St was in the Financial District down south. But I knew better now.

“Fi Di,” I mouthed.

Ten minutes later and it was getting worse on the platform. People were bumping into each other restlessly, faces pinched into their signature New York features when something was disagreeable or someone smelled bad.

It made me sort of nervous. Angry New Yorkers shoved onto one sliver of a platform, in Penn Station no less. Some were standing awfully close to the yellow line, several peering over the heads and shoulders of people taller than themselves to stare into the dark tunnel as if that would magically allow the train to arrive.

I thought that they sort of looked like beggars.

I liked my job because it was easy and I got to people watch. The restaurant was pretty upscale considering it was in the upper west part of Manhattan where people who pushed strollers either had babies in there or puppies. We didn’t get many homeless people that asked around for food or change. On my breaks, I stood outside with whatever busboy was also on break, watching him smoke a cigarette because all of them did. It was sort of a prerequisite to work there that you had to be a smoker. Most of the busboys weren’t all that cute, but I’d never stood so close to a man of marriageable age.

Despite the amount of people, the brisk air on the platform did nothing. Penn Station was not an insulated building, much to the disappointment of myself and the junkies that littered Moynihan Hall. It was a cold autumn morning, but the promise of uncharacteristic warmth loomed in the air for the afternoon.

More people were getting restless. I, however, was well equipped with a decent imagination. To drown out the complaints of more red faced men with receding hairlines and weirdly quirked mouths, I raised the volume of my music and put my headphones over my hijab.

I was a fresh eyed writer; my imagination was my best feature. I’d survived 26 years with it. When I wrote, there was hope. There would be no more writings of wars and fascists and Islamist governments. I would write about what I wore and the color of my coffee and attractive boys with large eyes and kind voices.

To be a writer was to imagine planes and universes that failed to exist outside the inexplicable boundaries of a human’s brain, universes that were not my own. To be a writer was to be someone else, to exist in times that could never be reached, not feasible with all limbs and sanity intact. Even when not actively writing, a writer was writing. The prerequisite to allow ink to flow from the pen was a dream.

Since moving to Newark, I’d been dreaming plenty, but had little time in between the knee bouncing anxiety and forced social calls with coworkers to sit down and process my thoughts to write. Two nights ago I came home tired to the bone, and when I sat on the floor to write, nothing of substance came out. The notebook and laptop remained totally void of writing.

But the panic hadn’t set in just yet. It was far too early to see results.

I knew New York would bring me some sort of inspiration. That’s what it was designed for, the purpose of its preposterous existence. It gave people like me, who had lived in their own bubbles, the nerve to make something out of nothingness. Art, I mused.

The red faced man was groaning again, inaudible to me, but I saw him encouraging other people to join in. People were permanently bent over to gaze into the tunnel. Across the platform, a man was setting up his speakers and cleaning the reed of his saxophone. He sat down and started playing, startling nobody.

Was it better to be an artist or a writer in the city? Not just this one — any. There was of course the undeniable claim that all those that expressed themselves were “artists.” Writers and musicians could stake claim over the word, but hand to canvas artists would just be “artists.” I thought the right thing to be called instead of “artist” was creator, so that the actual artist could be possessive about the word that only should have belonged to them.

And there were other definitions of the word “writer” which I called myself even though writing pharaohs of the Bukowski variety would disagree with me because it wasn’t always “bursting out” of me. Sometimes I sat for hours staring at my blank screen, but that wasn’t because I didn’t have words, but because they didn’t always exist in the perfect scientific way that brought together linguists and romantics and believers. The English language — rather every language that could dare to exist — had never been enough for storytelling. It took frustration and fatigue to force the words together, like fusing atoms to create elements outside of the organic order. For the White man to speak on how I self flagellated to churn out a half decent poem or story — well there had to be some laws against that.

In that case, if Bukowski’s word was law, Harper Lee and Khaled Hosseini, both of which went on a long hiatus following the success of their works, were not writers.

Were ad writers “artists” by today’s standards?

It took more to write than to sit down and churn out the next great American poem or novel. It took experience, and that’s what I was here to do.

In Chicago, there wasn’t much room for new experiences. My community was too loud, too politically startled with no concepts of individuality. There were Muslims in New York too, hence the support to move out here.

“Muslims and Jews both,” my mother said approvingly. “Your siblings and your cousins. You must make good with them.”

While the train delay persisted, my mind wandered. The angry business people went back down the stairs. Some resurfaced on the other side to board the A train instead which was now running on a different schedule and line. Some, however, didn’t resurface. I thought they might have booked Ubers.

My message was eventually sent when the people left. Jess, the restaurant owner replied, “Take your time!!!! It’s wild out there!!!!!” alongside a few emojis. These delays were normal to New Yorkers and I wondered if, in some sick Stockholm Syndrome type of way that they were actually comforting.

What I learned in three weeks was the difference between express and local trains and what to do if your seat was wet and that it was acceptable to lean on the closed train door and that nobody would sit next to me on the subway unless absolutely necessary from 50th street and up, but anything downtown was fair game.

A woman in red slacks sighed so visibly, she caught my attention. I lowered David Bowie and listened to her and her friend, who twirled a faux diamond encased vape between her fingers. “Someone probably just killed themself.” Then she shut her phone and walked to the stairs. “You still got the Lyft app?”

My uncle was an MTA worker for thirty two years before he retired and moved to Chicago. He had the habit of telling me the news because “nobody else will” but his pessimistic view led to the severe fear in me of irrational situations. One of these situations were accidents that realistically I knew couldn’t happen to me, even when comparing the ratio of heinous crimes to normal life in the city. He told me about rapes and men throwing acid on their wives for not laying with them. He told me about people getting pushed onto the tracks so that they met their death, and always people strangely close to my age. He told me that the NYPD didn’t give a damn about me in the subway, the same way they didn’t care about the homeless, which, by the way, had risen to 350,000, and most of them were immigrants from places where I grew up. I’d looked it up when I got my new laptop a week ago with my very first paycheck.

“You thought it was bad in Syria,” he said. “Wait until you see America.”

He said it in English so it was more like a threat.

I knew these extremities wouldn’t happen to me, but it was debilitating to think about. My uncle was the only prominent male role in my life, my mom’s brother, so he was invited to anything and everything. He went out with us wherever we did. It got to a point where every time I saw him, I mentally counted how many murders he spoke about in one sitting.

“Seven,” I told my mom. “Seven in one hour. That’s not normal. And he laughed about it!”

“It’s good to have a man looking out for you, Mehrab. A placeholder until you get a husband.”

“I do hope my husband and I will have more to talk about than homicide. What are the numbers for wives murdering their husbands?”

He also told me these numbers when I spoke to him on the phone every other week because it wasn’t enough to just ask me how I was feeling in a strange city, but when I complained to my mom, she’d ask, “Are you praying? Mehrab, are you praying every day?”

The overhead announcement came then. Crackly. “Trains going uptown are experiencing severe delays. There are ongoing track and overhead repairs. Trains will resume shortly.”

Somehow this news was worse than if someone had jumped in front of the train. The angry red men became angrier and redder. They stormed down the stairs. You’d think they’d be happy about missing work for a valid reason totally out of their control. Their bosses would understand, just as mine did.

The announcement came every five minutes, so the newcomers on the platform turned on their heels without waiting long. I was sure there were bus routes they could take. Or they could walk; New Yorkers loved to do that despite the weather. Work was of utmost importance to these people.

Several people, like me, decided to wait. They didn’t shiver in their large coats like I did, nodding their heads to their music. With the men and women in slacks gone, I was left to wonder where the rest of these non corporate confirming people were going? Not to school — it was a Saturday. The girl in front of me could have been my age. She had hot pink hair and bangs that finished curling out in the middle of her forehead. Her headphones were white with cat ears, and her bag absolutely saturated with various pins from what I assumed were pop culture references. At the bottom of her bag strap, right by the buckle was a keffiyeh pin.

People did that here too, concern themselves with things that had nothing to do with them. Before I came to America, I’d heard about it all. The younger generation took to the streets whenever possible. My mother insisted that when I came there, I wouldn’t be joining in on them no matter how much my collective Arab patriotism drew me into the crowd. Other people can do it, she told me, but you can’t.

“The other people” was a way for her to say the Americans, but the specific type of American that could get away with anything — those with permanent resident statuses or passports or White people. Her fear was a match struck by her brother who was telling her that Arab girls were getting their hijabs ripped off their heads and that it was post 9/11 all over again. Nobody would be able to rip mine off anyways, I told her, it’s pinned down.

“Just stay away from them. They’re not like us.”

The girl with the pink hair was leaning against the pillar, leather jacket making a crunching sound every time she rose back to her full height to stretch and then leant again. Perhaps she was killing time before a hostess job too. The pink hair didn’t matter, the city cared little about appearances unless they did. The boy leaning against the pillar to the right was playing on his phone, making huffing noises every few seconds. A child was asleep on her father’s arm a few ways from me, tattoos on his neck crawling up to the back of his shaved head. On the other side of the platform, a skinny man hobbled over to the saxophone player, dropping a few dollars into his hat and murmuring to him. The song immediately changed to one that I recognized.

This was New York. There were murders and rapes and people being set on fire and the homeless, but this was New York, and I was just getting my footing.

I was imagining coming home to a cooked meal and children. I was imagining striking up a romance with one of the busboys. I was imagining myself, wrinkled and profound like Eve Babitz.

On the other side, an announcement that the A train was arriving and to stand back from the yellow line. Instinctively, I pressed my back to the cold wall. The man who tossed a handful of dollars into the saxophone player’s hat inched closer to the yellow line. I noticed that he was dressed nice, also in slacks, his beard so freshly lined that I could see the white bordering the wiry hair from across the room. He held a bouquet of red roses in his arm, cradled like a baby. There, a smile on his face.

And before he stepped in front of the train, I swore he smiled directly at me.

Despite the statistics, I learned that New Yorkers did not know what to do when someone killed themselves in front of you by jumping in front of the A train. My screams mixed with the rest in the suddenly hollow, blitzed platform. The parents were the first to move, throwing their children over their shoulders and sprinting out, holding their hands over the little one’s eyes.

“Oh God oh Jesus oh God oh God.” The pink haired girl in front of me was on the ground with her hands over her headphone covered ears. Previously standing close to the tracks, she was now teetering on the edge of it with every rock of her body. I didn’t know what I was doing until I felt the tension in my arm from how hard I dragged her away by the hood of her jacket. She coughed and looked wildly up at me.

I was still screaming.

The doors of the A train opened briefly and some people escaped, but the doors shut again when people on the platform shouted at the conductor. There was deep red on the windows, other grey matter on the walls.

The scene was so ridiculous and filmy. Between my screams, I giggled.

Luckily the tracks were so deep that I couldn’t see the body unless I craned my neck over. I assumed the body was where many people were standing, frozen to the ground. Amongst them was a teenager with silver braids, headphones loose between his fingers. There was blood on his neck.

“Mama. Mama, someone just died. Oh God, someone just jumped in front of the train.” The pink haired girl sobbed into her phone. I didn’t realize she was holding my hand until much later.

My own phone pinged then. I slowly looked down at it. Jess had written, “Got Ken to cover you. Hopefully you can make it for the brunch rush.”

The NYPD ran past me and my hijab ends flew into the air and onto my face. They grabbed people and shoved them towards the nearest exit. One of the officers looked at me but hesitated in reaching. Instead, he pointed behind him. “The exit,” he said slowly like he knew I didn’t know good English.

I wanted to call someone too – it seemed like everyone was on the phone. So I did.

Jess answered. “Hi, did you get my message? Do you think you’ll be able to come in? I can try to get someone else, but I really need the help today. My party of 3 turned into a party of–”

My mouth was dry. I giggled again. “No,” I said.

“What?”

“He died.”

There was a clatter of plates, one of them busboys dropping them into the sink. “Sorry?” Jess shouted over the noise. “Who died?”

“He just jumped.”

Like the existence of cursed languages and limits, I had no English words to describe what had happened and what I was feeling. I might have continued laughing.

“I am going home,” I said. Then I hung up and wrenched my hand from the girl. She stared at me as if I burned her and I didn’t know what to do in response to her big watery eyes, so I patted her head like I would a dog or a child and moved.

I made it a few steps before I vomited.

Oh this was a mistake. Oh God, this was a mistake. What had I done?

Nobody died by jumping in front of trains in the city romance movies I devoured. If people did die, they died in meaningful ways like getting shot by their lover’s husband and drowning in their million dollar pool to show the effect of infidelity, jealousy, and the American dream. What was the significance of this death?

Even all these miles away from Aleppo, I could not escape the raw scent of mortality.

The police officer that hesitated in front of me walked by again. I called out to him. When he turned, I was immediately distraught by how similar he looked to my uncle. “Khaal, he is okay?” I asked. “The man. He is okay?”

At once, the officer replied, “Yes, of course.” And then continued gathering people to move them away. Yellow tape was suddenly in my vision and finally, finally, someone touched my arm and dragged me down the stairs. It was an old man with a cane and surprisingly strong grip. He was calm. Later I’d see he left bruises on my arm.

“It happens,” he was telling everyone. He was telling me. He was telling the boy with blood splattered on his neck. “And it’ll happen again.”

In Aleppo, people died by airstrikes and bombs. In Gaza, too. Their misery was unmeasurable, but their faith in numbers even more unimaginable. People did not kill themselves in Gaza or Aleppo or Morocco or Iran, not really. It was one of the most gravest sins to take away life that God had given you.

But they died in large batches at once at a time, as did Americans that fell from buildings and onto train tracks and from poison and from cutting themselves and from overdosing. There was, always, death around me. Self inflicted, America said about the Arabs, but did they not look at their own people? I could have accused the decrepit Americans of being godless, but in the end, weren’t they suffering from the same acute misery in a different language?

It was always the old men that pulled us out of the rubble. War torn and diffused. It was always them.

Before I sold my brand new laptop to some random person on the internet, I did a final Google search. In 2023, almost 40,000 Americans had killed themselves. In the coming holidays, 10,000 more were expected. If they anticipated the deaths, couldn’t the American government provide provisions to denounce the senseless violence and cast a safety net? It was already understood that the Arab and Black and Brown people were beneath White Americans – did the families know the same logic was being used for their dead?

I returned to Chicago one week later. The TSA gave me a hard time but I think it was because they thought I was on drugs because I couldn’t stop shaking. I kept hearing the sick crack of the man’s body hit the front of the train as if he were right behind me. On the plane, I heard wheezing. In the air, I heard screaming.

“Oh, they’re all sick,” I told my mom and uncle, scarf halfway off my head with one foot in the door.

I’d demanded from myself composure, but lost it the moment my mother greeted me with a fierce hug. I didn’t tell her anything but she knew because my uncle had recited it off CNN.

“We watched the news for three days straight,” she said in Arabic, a wry smile on her lips. “It was the Twin Towers all over again.”

Because, yes, 9/11 was the only deciding monument of an event that dictated our lives forever.

“They’re all sick and miserable and I hate them,” I cried. I think I was referring to the Americans.

“I worked with some of them,” my uncle said loudly and maybe even proudly. “The drivers of those trains. Ya Rab, they never get over it. They quit their jobs. Some of them kill themselves too. Shell shock.” He hummed thoughtfully.

Everywhere I went, I brought death. The bombs in Aleppo rained because I had the misfortune to exist. People dived onto train tracks because I needed to go uptown to my job.

Later that following summer, I used the remainder of my restaurant wages to check myself into an Illinois state facility for mental wellbeing. I told my mom and uncle that Muslims were there, of course they were. There was a support group for anyone that wore a headcovering of any kind. “Make nice with them all. The Muslims and the Jews,” my mom said firmly. Since the incident, my mom looked more weary. “They are your siblings and cousins. And pray. Mehrab, life is meaningless if you do not pray.”

I didn’t pray for the man that died for a long, long time. It was a sin, what he’d done. When I did, I couldn’t stand back up. He’d smiled at me like they did in Syria when they knew their deaths were imminent.

I wondered if the man died on impact or if he felt the crack of his bones that I heard. I thought about the pink haired girl with the keffiyeh pin who should have just minded her own business. The uncles at the bodegas who should have let me pay for my own food. I even thought about the dirty rats on the tracks. I envisioned them feasting on the remains of the dead man.

I did not ever return to New York.