Brooklyn
Content
A Fiction Excerpt: ‘Traveling From Brooklyn’
By LYDIA DAVIS OCT. 17, 2014
This is an excerpt from Lydia Davis’s “Traveling From Brooklyn,” which will appear in
“Tales of Two Cities,” a collection of stories about inequality in New York edited by John
Freeman, to be published next week by OR Books. Ms. Davis’s latest book is “Can’t and
Won’t: Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
THE KIND OF TRAVELING I do most, these days, is on the subway, going no farther than
from Brooklyn to Manhattan, or, even worse, from one part of Brooklyn to another. From
Atlantic Avenue I might go to Borough Hall, from Court Street back to Pacific Street, from
Borough Hall out of Brooklyn to Canal Street, from Grand Street back down to Atlantic
Avenue, and so on. Sometimes the subway car is so full that I have no room even to open a
book, and sometimes so empty that I look up at each station to see whether a dangerous
person might be entering the car or a safe person leaving it. Usually the ride gives me a
chance to rest: I read, look at the people around me, and recover from whatever it was, at
home or away, that I just went through. I may also try to prepare for whatever I may be about
to go through, but it is always easier to work out what has just happened than what might
happen, so when I try to prepare for what is coming, my mind tends to wander, and then I
daydream, sometimes about what great or small things I may do at home, and sometimes
about leaving home.
Once, when I was on the B train traveling from Pacific Street in Brooklyn to 14th Street in
Manhattan, something happened that stopped me from daydreaming or reading. I was
waiting for the train at the Pacific Street station. When the train drew in, a crowd of
teenagers burst out of the train shouting, screaming and pushing, which is the way teenagers
often behave in the neighborhood of Pacific Street and only seems violent to me because I’m
not one of them. They were so jammed together I could hardly make my way among them.
After I got onto the train and sat down, and while the train was still in the station with its
doors open, a few girls poked their heads back into the car to continue making fun of an oddlooking woman sitting across from me, a very thin creature all in black, eyes clotted with
thickly blackened eyelashes under a high black hairdo, dressed in a black suit with black net
stockings. I had seen her before on this subway line. Her bearing was always arrogant, but
today she seemed frightened as well. All she did, though, was look straight ahead of her,
which meant she was looking almost straight at me.
The doors closed, the train left the station, and I took out of my purse an essay on free will
that had come to me in the mail that day from a friend.
The next station was DeKalb Avenue, which was the last station in Brooklyn. The woman in
black got off. The train started up again and moved on toward the Manhattan Bridge. Before
it went above ground, I looked up from my essay because four teenage boys came through the
car walking toward the front of the train in single file, cursing loudly. This in itself, though it
made me nervous, was not very unusual. Then, as my eyes dropped to my page again, there
was a sound of something heavy being slammed against the glass section of one of the doors.
I looked up. I did not see that any of the boys was holding anything, so I did not know what
had slammed against the glass. The glass had not broken. The passengers just sat still,
though they were all watching. When the boys returned a little later, striding with long steps
in the other direction, still cursing loudly and banging the doors as they came to them, I kept
my feet in close under my knees and my eyes down on my reading, afraid of provoking them.
I went back to my reading, though I was on the alert, and for a minute or two everything was
quiet. As the train moved aboveground, however, the door to my right, toward the back of the
train, slammed open and 10 or 12 people came lurching through it in a tight bunch looking
scared. I immediately stood up.
Someone shouted, “Get the baby out of here,” and people made way for a young woman
pushing a stroller down the car toward the front of the train as other passengers hurried in
front of her and behind her. I hurried along with them without waiting for an explanation. I
stopped in the middle of the next car, holding on to a pole and looking back into the car
behind, but as soon as a fresh wave of people came hurrying into that car from the car
behind, looking scared, I ran on into the next car forward.
No one knew exactly what was happening, though I heard the word “knife.” Somewhere near
the back of the train, I thought, those boys had to be doing something awful, but how many
people they were hurting, I didn’t know. I knew only that a lot of people were scared, and
running, and I imagined that the boys were coming forward from car to car. As more people
hurried forward into each car, I kept running and stopping until I reached the very front of
the train, right next to the motorman’s compartment, where I suddenly saw that by doing this
I had possibly put myself into a trap. Through the open door of the compartment, I watched
the conductor and the motorman muttering to each other, the conductor bending over the
motorman and the motorman looking straight ahead at the tracks.
The train was now creeping out onto the bridge. An older woman stood by herself blinking
and blurting out fearful remarks in German. A small Hispanic woman cried into her
boyfriend’s arms. I was shaking. I felt sick.
The conductor and the motorman took turns speaking into a shortwave radio, saying over
and over again, “Command center come in,” but no sound came back from the apparatus. At
last the motorman stopped the train at the approach of another train coming in the opposite
direction on the next track, and the two men signaled through the window. They then
shouted to the driver to try and get through on his radio and tell the command center they
had an emergency and needed the police and the E.M.S. to meet them at Grand Street. That
was the next station, on the far side of the river.
They went on trying to make contact themselves, and they seemed to reach the command
center but could not make themselves understood, yelling into the radio that one car was
covered in blood. The more often they said the words “police,” “emergency,” “assault” and
“stabbing,” the more restless the passengers around them became.
The train was moving very slowly over the bridge and then stopping above the water. It stood
still more than it moved. The passengers in the front of the train alternately kept quiet and
broke out in questions and complaints. As the motorman continued to move the train
forward, a few feet at a time, the conductor, a large, red-haired man not in uniform, stood
next to the motorman’s compartment with its open door, patiently answering some of the
passengers’ questions. Then, like a priest, he laid his broad hand for a moment on the head of
the German woman and then on the head of the Hispanic woman and then on mine.
Word came that the police were on their way, and the train started forward again. It crossed
the bridge and went underground. When it came within sight of the Grand Street station
platform, it stopped in the tunnel and waited again until some policemen appeared under the
bright lights ahead.
The train drew up only as far as the catwalk at the mouth of the tunnel. The conductor lifted a
seat next to the first door and turned a switch that opened that one door. He explained that
none of us could leave. We all argued. The platform was right there and we could be out of
the train so easily, and the station too.
Six policemen climbed in over the railing that ran alongside the catwalk, and after them a
heavyset emergency medical service orderly in a short-sleeved white shirt and black pants,
carrying a doctor’s bag and a stretcher. The policemen and the orderly disappeared into the
next car, walking back toward the rear of the train.
I did not have to wait long before the four boys were brought handcuffed into the car. I
watched as they were searched. Near them, a tensely grinning boy was examined by the
orderly, who pushed up each of his eyelids with a fat thumb and shone his flashlight against
the pupils of his eyes. When the four boys and the victim had been taken out onto the
platform, the conductor closed the door and the train pulled all the way into the station. Now
the passengers were asked to leave the train immediately.
Instead of waiting for another train, I went upstairs to the street, where the sun was shining,
the air was fresh and cold, snow was piled up against the curbs, and police cars and an
ambulance were parked at odd angles to the subway entrance.
The four boys were there too, being searched again. Both the policemen and the boys seemed
tranquil, but the policemen were cheerful, whereas the boys were glum. A policeman sitting
inside a squad car told people through a loudspeaker to move on, and although I felt I had a
right to stay and watch, I moved on.
By LYDIA DAVIS OCT. 17, 2014
This is an excerpt from Lydia Davis’s “Traveling From Brooklyn,” which will appear in
“Tales of Two Cities,” a collection of stories about inequality in New York edited by John
Freeman, to be published next week by OR Books. Ms. Davis’s latest book is “Can’t and
Won’t: Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
THE KIND OF TRAVELING I do most, these days, is on the subway, going no farther than
from Brooklyn to Manhattan, or, even worse, from one part of Brooklyn to another. From
Atlantic Avenue I might go to Borough Hall, from Court Street back to Pacific Street, from
Borough Hall out of Brooklyn to Canal Street, from Grand Street back down to Atlantic
Avenue, and so on. Sometimes the subway car is so full that I have no room even to open a
book, and sometimes so empty that I look up at each station to see whether a dangerous
person might be entering the car or a safe person leaving it. Usually the ride gives me a
chance to rest: I read, look at the people around me, and recover from whatever it was, at
home or away, that I just went through. I may also try to prepare for whatever I may be about
to go through, but it is always easier to work out what has just happened than what might
happen, so when I try to prepare for what is coming, my mind tends to wander, and then I
daydream, sometimes about what great or small things I may do at home, and sometimes
about leaving home.
Once, when I was on the B train traveling from Pacific Street in Brooklyn to 14th Street in
Manhattan, something happened that stopped me from daydreaming or reading. I was
waiting for the train at the Pacific Street station. When the train drew in, a crowd of
teenagers burst out of the train shouting, screaming and pushing, which is the way teenagers
often behave in the neighborhood of Pacific Street and only seems violent to me because I’m
not one of them. They were so jammed together I could hardly make my way among them.
After I got onto the train and sat down, and while the train was still in the station with its
doors open, a few girls poked their heads back into the car to continue making fun of an oddlooking woman sitting across from me, a very thin creature all in black, eyes clotted with
thickly blackened eyelashes under a high black hairdo, dressed in a black suit with black net
stockings. I had seen her before on this subway line. Her bearing was always arrogant, but
today she seemed frightened as well. All she did, though, was look straight ahead of her,
which meant she was looking almost straight at me.
The doors closed, the train left the station, and I took out of my purse an essay on free will
that had come to me in the mail that day from a friend.
The next station was DeKalb Avenue, which was the last station in Brooklyn. The woman in
black got off. The train started up again and moved on toward the Manhattan Bridge. Before
it went above ground, I looked up from my essay because four teenage boys came through the
car walking toward the front of the train in single file, cursing loudly. This in itself, though it
made me nervous, was not very unusual. Then, as my eyes dropped to my page again, there
was a sound of something heavy being slammed against the glass section of one of the doors.
I looked up. I did not see that any of the boys was holding anything, so I did not know what
had slammed against the glass. The glass had not broken. The passengers just sat still,
though they were all watching. When the boys returned a little later, striding with long steps
in the other direction, still cursing loudly and banging the doors as they came to them, I kept
my feet in close under my knees and my eyes down on my reading, afraid of provoking them.
I went back to my reading, though I was on the alert, and for a minute or two everything was
quiet. As the train moved aboveground, however, the door to my right, toward the back of the
train, slammed open and 10 or 12 people came lurching through it in a tight bunch looking
scared. I immediately stood up.
Someone shouted, “Get the baby out of here,” and people made way for a young woman
pushing a stroller down the car toward the front of the train as other passengers hurried in
front of her and behind her. I hurried along with them without waiting for an explanation. I
stopped in the middle of the next car, holding on to a pole and looking back into the car
behind, but as soon as a fresh wave of people came hurrying into that car from the car
behind, looking scared, I ran on into the next car forward.
No one knew exactly what was happening, though I heard the word “knife.” Somewhere near
the back of the train, I thought, those boys had to be doing something awful, but how many
people they were hurting, I didn’t know. I knew only that a lot of people were scared, and
running, and I imagined that the boys were coming forward from car to car. As more people
hurried forward into each car, I kept running and stopping until I reached the very front of
the train, right next to the motorman’s compartment, where I suddenly saw that by doing this
I had possibly put myself into a trap. Through the open door of the compartment, I watched
the conductor and the motorman muttering to each other, the conductor bending over the
motorman and the motorman looking straight ahead at the tracks.
The train was now creeping out onto the bridge. An older woman stood by herself blinking
and blurting out fearful remarks in German. A small Hispanic woman cried into her
boyfriend’s arms. I was shaking. I felt sick.
The conductor and the motorman took turns speaking into a shortwave radio, saying over
and over again, “Command center come in,” but no sound came back from the apparatus. At
last the motorman stopped the train at the approach of another train coming in the opposite
direction on the next track, and the two men signaled through the window. They then
shouted to the driver to try and get through on his radio and tell the command center they
had an emergency and needed the police and the E.M.S. to meet them at Grand Street. That
was the next station, on the far side of the river.
They went on trying to make contact themselves, and they seemed to reach the command
center but could not make themselves understood, yelling into the radio that one car was
covered in blood. The more often they said the words “police,” “emergency,” “assault” and
“stabbing,” the more restless the passengers around them became.
The train was moving very slowly over the bridge and then stopping above the water. It stood
still more than it moved. The passengers in the front of the train alternately kept quiet and
broke out in questions and complaints. As the motorman continued to move the train
forward, a few feet at a time, the conductor, a large, red-haired man not in uniform, stood
next to the motorman’s compartment with its open door, patiently answering some of the
passengers’ questions. Then, like a priest, he laid his broad hand for a moment on the head of
the German woman and then on the head of the Hispanic woman and then on mine.
Word came that the police were on their way, and the train started forward again. It crossed
the bridge and went underground. When it came within sight of the Grand Street station
platform, it stopped in the tunnel and waited again until some policemen appeared under the
bright lights ahead.
The train drew up only as far as the catwalk at the mouth of the tunnel. The conductor lifted a
seat next to the first door and turned a switch that opened that one door. He explained that
none of us could leave. We all argued. The platform was right there and we could be out of
the train so easily, and the station too.
Six policemen climbed in over the railing that ran alongside the catwalk, and after them a
heavyset emergency medical service orderly in a short-sleeved white shirt and black pants,
carrying a doctor’s bag and a stretcher. The policemen and the orderly disappeared into the
next car, walking back toward the rear of the train.
I did not have to wait long before the four boys were brought handcuffed into the car. I
watched as they were searched. Near them, a tensely grinning boy was examined by the
orderly, who pushed up each of his eyelids with a fat thumb and shone his flashlight against
the pupils of his eyes. When the four boys and the victim had been taken out onto the
platform, the conductor closed the door and the train pulled all the way into the station. Now
the passengers were asked to leave the train immediately.
Instead of waiting for another train, I went upstairs to the street, where the sun was shining,
the air was fresh and cold, snow was piled up against the curbs, and police cars and an
ambulance were parked at odd angles to the subway entrance.
The four boys were there too, being searched again. Both the policemen and the boys seemed
tranquil, but the policemen were cheerful, whereas the boys were glum. A policeman sitting
inside a squad car told people through a loudspeaker to move on, and although I felt I had a
right to stay and watch, I moved on.
