If You See Something, Say Something...

by John Fox        

          In the spring of 2002, I took the Brooklyn-bound F train. I was heading home after spending twelve hours in NYU’s library, where I had been researching my thesis on philosophical literature. Sometimes, after six or seven hours of studying in a carrel on the twelfth floor, I would look up from my book and see a plane crash into the Empire State Building. It never happened, of course. But I saw it time and time again, wondering each time how I would act differently, spinning out heroic storylines. The vision haunted me as I descended the slick subway stairs and used the rail rats as sensors for the approaching train – they disappeared moments before I saw the headlights gliding down the tunnel.

The train was packed, even though it was after rush hour. As the compartment swayed and vibrated, the tight-packed bodies rebounded off each other. Luckily for me, I had managed to find a seat, offering a vantage point that made me notice two duffel bags sitting next to a center pole. One was blue vinyl and the other black. Since they were surrounded by a dozen shoes, each betraying their respective owner’s class, I just assumed that the bags belonged to one of the pairs of shoes. I assumed this until the Delancey stop, where a huge crowd disembarked to switch to the J and Z trains. All the shoes left or sought more comfortable positions near the sides of the train. No one took the duffel bags. They just sat there in the middle – lonely, unaccompanied, bulging. When I lived in Israel for six months, abandoned bags were a metonym for bombs. Any abandoned backpack, whether covered with Hello Kitty stickers or Hebrew script, required the attention of the squad. After watching multiple bomb threats where the squat robot blasted an innocent-looking bookbag with a muzzle reminiscent of a shotgun, the connection between lonely bags and bombs was seared into me.

Even so, I didn’t leap and point. Maybe because Israel was so different from America, although the events of the previous year should have disabused me of that notion. All I did was look around, trying to solve the puzzle. A businessman in a blue suit across from me didn’t keep quiet. After glancing from the bags to the crowd and back to the bags, he asked: “Whose bags are those?” No one answered. Everyone looked around. “Whose bags are those?” he repeated again, louder. The car was silent. His eyes darted like a captured sparrow. “I’m switching cars,” he announced, and sprang up and tried to squeeze out the door, but it closed on him. He raised a hand to pound on the glass, but thought better of it. Instead, he strode to the far end of the car, where he glanced back sporadically, face contorted with fear. A few other people vacated their seats and joined him. The rest of us swiveled our heads in bewilderment.

Although it probably would have been wiser to join the man in the business suit who had fled, I decided to tap the shoulder of the man sitting next to me. He was a small Asian man who I remembered was standing around the pole before he took a seat two stops ago. Of everyone in the crowd, he was the only one who wasn’t making eye contact, who seemed completely disengaged from the event. “Excuse me,” I said, leaning over and touching his shoulder, “Are those your bags?” I pointed at the bags with my other hand. He slid out of his seat and put a hand on each one to affirm ownership. He obviously didn’t speak English. Everyone exhaled relief. A bomb diffused by hand gestures.

Two white men with guts obscuring their belt buckles sat down. “Good way to get seats,” one of them joked. “I’ll have to remember that one.” The black woman sitting next to me laughed, then sobered. “Isn’t it sad we’ve come to this though?” she said. “Isn’t it sad?”

John Fox is a Master of Professional Writing candidate at the University of Southern California. Previous publication credits include fiction and nonfiction in Connecticut Review, The Quarterly Conversation and
Writers' Journal.