When a man returns to a sober state after days of all kinds of drunkenness, he greets a canyon of throbbing echoes. People are shaped by these returns to canyons, and art is made by the words we scream down into those canyons. Sitting in that subway, pallid as peasants, we looked like a band of mimes racing towards the edge of a great gorge, dying to scream.

We tubed under the river and broke under Manhattan. More riders buckled themselves in. Two women beside me suffered together over domestic issues. A homeless man sang a tuneless thing and took in over five dollars. A food deliveryman held a steaming bag and tapped his foot. A group of thirtysomethings laughed and swore that their stories were true. The fluorescent lights purred and sleepiness started to tug on me.

Then, right in front of everyone, a mother slapped her child. I watched it at standard speed, but I remember it now in a series of slowed still frames. The other passengers looked stunned, and stared stunned at the floor in thoughtless horror. For a moment, I hoped the slapped child would stand up, grow a foot taller and ten years older, clear his throat and yell to us all: “Yes! Another mother just slapped her child and gave to the world a new broken rider!”

I rode into Harlem. Most of the white people had gotten off. I sat up straight and looked across the train and saw my reflection on the plastic gray panel. I laughed inside. My reflection looked so serious. I closed my eyes.

Somewhere higher in Harlem, I fell to sleep, but I didn’t dream. A metal rattling bell woke me. I was the only one left. All of the gray faces were gone, so the silver walls didn’t seem to squeeze so tightly anymore. The doors were open and the platform was quiet, so I made my exit.

I thought I was alone until I heard him whistling. The booming natural reverberations made it difficult to tell where he was, but finally I saw the tail of his coat down at the other end of the platform. I walked towards him without making a noise.

I saw his violin case before I saw his face. He stopped whistling for a second and wiped his teeth with his shirtsleeve. Then he turned to me and smiled. I smiled back.

He had a warm, dirty look. Everything he wore seemed older than me. I imagined if I patted his shoulder, dust would cloud out.

Without warning, like an old friend, he said, “Just you and me and the rats.”

His voice and words made me sad, so I sighed. He took a step towards me and  barreled into my eyes, like my father would when he’d begin to lecture me about school. I couldn’t take it, so I looked down. A newspaper stuck to the sticky concrete floor showed a photograph of the president wearing a cowboy hat. A fuzzy voice began to announce route changes. I hate changes, I thought.

“I hate changes.” I said.

“Some do.” he replied. He leaned his head against a tiled column. A gear in me shut down. He wiped his teeth again with his shirtsleeve.

“Doesn’t matter.” I concluded.

He was looking around the subway platform. I thought I’d turned him off, until he turned back to me and said, “Are you still asleep?”

I could feel my lungs shrink a little. He leaned closer to me. I could smell garlic. He drank a deep breath as I silently pushed the record button on the tape player in my pocket.

“Inspiration is only a push,” he said like it was a secret. “It’s irrelevant. Everything ever done required inspiration.”

He smelled like moist bread. I nodded. He continued.

“Look at any family,” he bid me. I turned around casually, but we were the only two in the station. “Children—they didn’t always exist, did they?”

“As what? As living things?” I asked.

“That couple—they made those children, didn’t they?”

I turned and looked around. I wasn’t sure what he meant. “Most likely,” I guessed.

“Those children—they’re a small army.”

“Okay.”

“And the parents command them.”

“Mm hmm.” 

He leaned back and we looked at each other for a few seconds without speaking, until he exhaled the words, “You’re not serious.”

My face warmed. “You said the children were a small army. I’m listening.”

“How old are you?” he asked, rubbing his cheekbone with his fist.

“How old do you think I am?”

“Twenty-five… or eighty.”

“I’ll be thirty in a week. Why eighty?”

He straightened his back, then slumped over again. “What do you think you might do this year?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, lightening as he reminded me of my grandfather.

“Let’s clarify something.”

“Okay,” I said, sliding down to sit on the cold concrete.

“A nation is inspired to build an army,” he said making a circle with his hands, “But once an army of soldiers is created, those soldiers must be convinced to fight and possibly die for a purpose.” I nodded and reached into my pocket to make sure my tape player was recording. 

“Inspiration is a chestnut,” the old man said abruptly. “It isn’t enlightenment. Inspiration is prodding. Murderers are inspired to commit murder. Racists are inspired to hate. Kids—children—are inspired to make money.”

“I wouldn’t argue with that.”

“Inspiration is the ‘how,’ but it’s the ‘why’ that keeps me up.”

“I agree,” I said.

“Because you listen only to the surface of words.”

“Why do you say that? I’ve heard everything you’ve said,” I replied, tilting my head with unease.

He looked past my eyes and into my head, and seemed to be able to see the rusty, squeaky workings of my brain. My eyes were only a window. Then, like before, like my father, he composed himself and spoke squarely. “You’re a machine.”

He sent the words right at me. I turned away, trying to deflect the blow. I reached into my pocket to see if my tape recorder was still running, but the old man’s hand grabbed mine, through my coat, and squeezed. Three more gears shut down. I was growing numb and more expressionless by the minute. With his other hand, he held up his violin case. “If one is serious about music, he becomes music. He does not simply memorize notes.”

Though I didn’t feel threatened, it felt odd to have a stranger holding my hand so firmly. A wind touched our faces and the old man let go and looked down into the tunnel for an oncoming train. Nothing. Everything became still and stuck.

He was standing there in front of me with his back to me. His right hand cupped his left, and he leaned backwards like he was looking for rats in the ceiling. Outdoors, he would have resembled a man looking for shapes in the clouds.

He turned and faced me, then took a giant step towards me and smiled.

“Can you accept that you are an ugly thing?” he asked.

“Ugly?” Another gear shut down—the gear, it seemed, that controlled my right eye, because it started to blink wildly.

“Yes. Can you accept that?”

Everything inside was bending and snapping.

“I am not judging you, son.”

“Then—” I could hardly push the words through my lips. “Then what are you doing?” My face was scrunched together, squeezed and twitching, far out of any known realm of conversation.

“I am only observing you.”

“You don’t know me at all,” I mumbled.

Out of his wide grin, the missile was released. “Of course I do. If I were your age again, we’d be twins. You, my friend, are an escapist. You read clever books. You have intellectual discussions with your intellectual friends. At home, you try to hypnotize yourself, but you call it meditation. You blame corporations and the government for the problems of the world, and privately, you consider yourself superior to everyone in every way.”

I swallowed, then blinked, and then loosened my jaw. I looked at his nose because I couldn’t look at his eyes. I wanted to push him onto the subway tracks.

“But…” he added, “you count for very little. You are almost nothing at all.” He said this particularly warmly, as if this conclusion would thaw me. But I was already inoperative. I had overridden the system. I had achieved a complete shut down. New inner machinery would have to be ordered and reassembled. The old equipment would remain abandoned in quarantine forever, and the reason for its collapse would never be investigated.

“It is extraordinary to hear things which your mind cannot accept, isn’t it?” he added. I couldn’t move, and he leaned closer. “The question you must ask yourself is—why do you assume a better life exists elsewhere?”

“I don’t.” My words were smaller and thinner than air.

We stood facing each other, like two friends who had already said goodbye but remained standing together waiting for a train. Across the tracks, another train arrived. A handful of riders fled the train, climbed the stairs, and spread onto the streets.

“Right now,” he said, “there is a spaceship on its way to Saturn.” I was a mindless statue. “We stretch out into space for millions of miles, but we have great difficulty venturing within.”

I had picked a spot on the far wall. A cracked tile had my full attention. “I’ve offended you, but what is you?” he asked, wiping his teeth with his shirtsleeve.

I exhaled and broke my stare. I was searching for an excuse to leave when the old man suddenly wrapped his arms around me and pressed himself against my chest. Jolted by a mix of panic and delight, the forsaken machinery within me began to whir. The tips of my toes and fingers thumped as blood turned the corner. Images of surgery, slaughter, shock treatment, detonation and deep-sea drilling flashed through my head. “Stop thinking,” was all he said. “I’m just hugging you. Hug me back.”

So I did, though I squeezed him lightly at first. But after a few seconds, a colossal wave of strange passion caused me to tighten my arms and squeeze that old man like he was a big tube of toothpaste. I had never held my grandfather so tightly.

My mind traveled to Saturn and back.

The hardhearted sleep in caves, I thought. The callous and cold folks of the city, like me—we only come out to fund our hibernation. The wide-eyed, warm hearts, like this old man—they roam, and they give cities their spirit. Meanwhile, I sit at the back of the cave waiting for lost stories to wander in. But I get impatient, so I burrow out with a pen or a tape recorder, hoping to stumble through a beam of inspiration, but I’m always disappointed. I frown at the gray patches of the world, then I retreat back into the cave.

We held each other for longer than I thought I could stand.

When we split, of course, we were less like strangers, and more like cousins. I looked at his eyes and didn’t think before I said, “Yeah, I’m asleep.”

He bobbed his torso to and fro, like a drunk, and spread his arms wide. “Wonderful!” He took my hand and pulled me to the edge of the subway platform and said, “Do you see that?” and pointed down to the tracks.

“See what?” He could’ve meant a million things.

“The third rail. It carries six hundred volts of electricity. Do you think that’ll be enough?” he asked.

“For what?”

He laughed, unzipped his violin case carefully and removed the delicate instrument. “In 1810, Beethoven wrote in his diary—‘It is necessary that this year reveals to all men what is in me!’ In that same year, he wrote this.”

At that, the old man laid the hairs of his bow upon the taut strings of his violin and made music emerge.

The sound of his violin grew to the edges of every corner, filling the underground fortress with echoes, as if the walls were made of singing birds. The piece was new to me, but he could’ve played the most hideous section of any repugnant song and it would have slain me. (The cave was that empty.) I would’ve closed my eyes, but I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He swayed like a boat’s mast. His mouth hung open, and silent words spilled out. I could hear his tiny gasps and brisk inhalations. When stretching a note long into majesty, the skin to the sides of his eyes would fold into many wrinkles. This moment, I thought, would please the ghost of old Ludwig. 

“My friend…” he whispered while sustaining a note, “the sleeping painter paints with gray.”

I closed my eyes. I imagined the sight of a painting buried in a dumpster. I imagined reaching up, grabbing the edge of the frame, and pulling it out. I imagined shaking off the litter and wiping it clean with a newspaper. I imagined carrying it inside, up many flights of stairs, and wiping it again with a paper towel. I imagined that beneath the grime was revealed the gray ruins of hopelessness. Then I imagined rolling up my sleeves and making the decision to unpaint the painting, to find color, and to begin again.