"Introducing Dean"
Excerpted from:
NIGHT INTO DAY
a novel by Ryan Lewis Merritt
The train tunneled into the darkness, and Dean looked up at the board, ticking off the number of stops until Brooklyn. The train was full, standing passengers pressed together in jagged lines, staggering like drunks as the train rocked around a series of tight bends and righted itself again.
He had forgotten to bring something to read for the nearly two hours he would have to ride, door to door – something he always tried to avoid in Westchester, or on any other commute, knowing what happened when his mind was left free and unengaged; how, despite any distractions that might flare up in immediate range – a screaming passenger, a passing neighborhood scene, an argument or conversation nearby – his focus would always wrap back around to the dark, painful center that had been its axis for the past nine months.
He still felt the fading shock of coming across his engagement notice in the basement, like the shaky, unsettled feeling you have after a near accident while driving, a brush with something more powerful than you. He had read in a self-help book how, when surviving a break-up, you had to be like a tightrope walker – not looking down or looking back, but concentrating on the simple things that will get you across to the other side. The book was filled with little analogies like this, most of which seemed to make sense to him but all of which, ultimately, he failed at translating into his life.
He leaned back in his seat as the two women on either side of him rose to get off at 21 Street-Queensbridge. They were almost in Manhattan. Leaving Queens, accelerating out of the tunnel, he would always feel a distinctive shift, as if the world was getting bigger and he was getting smaller. The restless pace that always made Forest Hills seem like another time zone, the games at the West 4th Street Courts and Rucker Park when he was younger that would test him, break him down, the speed and force and skill of the players so far beyond anything he ever found on his home courts. And how it felt coming back home to Queens, exhausted but exhilarated, like coming down from a mountain.
There was a rushed exodus of passengers at Rockefeller Center, everyone around him rising and pressing past thick crowds of people waiting to board. Dean stayed in his seat as passengers with swollen shopping bags, whole families of riders came pushing on, filling up the space all around him until every part of him – his arms, his legs, his feet, his hands – was pressed into some part of somebody else.
It had been years since he’d ridden the subway. With Suzanne, he was always above ground, in cabs and black luxury cars, travel time clocked in efficient minutes, the entire city and its neighborhoods at a speed and perspective he’d never seen them. He remembered her on the phone, looking, blank-faced, out the window as she listened, tapping out pins and emails on her BlackBerry, always reaching over, finding his hand and holding it as they made their way through traffic. He was always amazed by her ability to multitask, even with love. It made the moments when it was just them, late at night in bed, in the shower, in the kitchen early mornings, that much more intimate – to have her just to himself when it seemed like the entire world wanted her, or at least the dozen clients that kept her on speed dial.
The train stopped and purged passengers again, their replacements filling in around him. As the train regained momentum and accelerated back into the darkness of the tunnel, he heard the next stop announced: West 4th Street, and felt a twinge of nervousness in his stomach, the same feeling he would get years ago, at fifteen, sixteen years old, when he would leave the calm of the train and climb up the flights of steps that led to the street and the courts.