I couldn’t call a rideshare because it might expose an enormous lie upon which my entire existence depended.
There were also several smaller but equally important reasons. My phone was dead. Even if it weren’t, my bank card had only nineteen dollars and thirty-four cents on it as of this morning—certainly not enough for a car, or a hotel. I had an emergency credit card, but the card company texted my mother promptly after each transaction, and I was desperate to avoid the scenario in which my mother called to ask me why I needed a car to Brooklyn when, as far as she knew, I ought to be asleep in a dorm room.
The truth was I had deferred my college acceptance by a year. When I’d first visited the college after my acceptance, I’d seen seven people sobbing hysterically on the library steps, and I’d gone home with a dozen different pamphlets on mental health. I wasn’t suicidal, I told myself, or at least I wasn’t yet.
Later that summer I decided to defer. Considering the scale of the whole fraudulent operation, it was shockingly easy to pull off—all I really had to do was send out a few emails. By some miracle I’d amassed enough in scholarships to cover my entire tuition, but the various foundations were more than happy to put off their charity for another year, and the admissions office cared even less. Even making my own living arrangements, the idea of which had given me serious insomnia for the last month of the summer, ended up being something I was able to resolve over a few days. There were plenty of places that wouldn’t rent to me because I had no credit score or cosigner, but there were just as many places already inhabited by two or three, or even six or seven people, who were just desperate to fill a room before next month’s rent was due. It only took a few hours, and I was set to live with a self-described “comedian stargirl” named Georgie and a stern-looking conservatory student named Tashya, who was from Slovenia. That was all I could find out about her online—that she was from Slovenia. Her social media gave away nothing else, not what instrument she played or who she was friends with or even how old she was, which I thought was really weird until I felt obsessive, like I was the weird one, stalking a stranger across five different social media platforms. Anyway, when I met her, the first thing she told me was that she played piano.
Now I was here, and everything was happening very fast. It made me dizzy. Though the fraud had slipped out of my head and exactly into place, it seemed constantly on the brink of collapse. I had a perpetual pinched feeling above my sternum, like my whole life was about to lurch out of my grasp, like it didn’t belong to me.
I couldn’t call a rideshare.
“Hey, look, I can call you a rideshare,” said Constant, when I had been quiet for too long. My stomach plunged. He said it like it was nothing, and I didn’t know if was an empty offer, or if he was really just nonchalant about a seventy-dollar rideshare that could easily surge to three digits on a night like this. I didn’t like what either might say about him.
“No,” I blurted, so fast it was rude. But my mother had drilled these two things into me: that honesty was better than dishonesty, and that it was better to give a gift than to receive one. Gifts had to be reciprocated; they carried expectation and aged like debt. You should never accept a gift you could not afford for yourself, just like you should never give a gift to prove a point. I couldn’t bear the idea of accepting a rideshare from this stranger with the absurd name. Besides, I didn’t want him to have my address.
But I also couldn’t think of what else to do. I could wait in the station until the trains were running again, as they were bound to, eventually. But now that I was outside in the uncanny blue air, the idea of waiting downstairs in the dark was unbearable. If I knew the city better, or if my phone weren’t dead, I could try to walk to my apartment, which would probably take all night and which I was frightened to do for obvious reasons and because I hated when rats swarmed out from the mountains of trash. Also, it was a hopeless endeavor without a map.
I was paralyzed with indecision, like maybe if I stood still for long enough everything might oblige by sorting itself out. Constant was watching me with his hands in his pockets. He didn’t seem all that perturbed that I’d snapped at him and was perfectly content to watch me struggle. I was reaching a critical level in the amount of emotion I could take in at once, and I was sure to snap again, or cry, if he kept looking at me like that, so calmly.
“Or I’ll walk with you,” he said. “If you want.”
My mouth was already opening to say no. I wasn’t sure I wanted the company, but I did seem to need it, phoneless and so late at night. It was still a gift he was offering, but at least it seemed to both our disadvantages. I could lose him at any time, I told myself, if he turned out to be annoying.
“It’s a pretty long walk,” I said slowly.
He shrugged. “I don’t mind.”
I took a good look at him. I didn’t shy away from his eyes this time. They were wide and greenish, as strange and liminal as the rest of him. I didn’t know who he was or where he’d come from, but at least, out of the two of us, he knew where he was going.
The apartment I rented with Tashya and Georgie was in Brooklyn—thirteen point six miles away, four hours and fifty minutes by foot. Constant was sure we could do it in less. “I’m a fast walker,” he said. “The GPS always underestimates me.”
But I was still wary. What were we supposed to say to each other for four hours and fifty minutes? I wasn’t a fast walker—my legs weren’t nearly as long as his.
Then we were off. For the first few minutes I said nothing. All I could do was stare at the sky. I felt the unnatural light in my ears and my chest. The distant billowing smoke caused the terrible and beautiful blue to move like an aurora borealis. Beneath it, the city was balmy and illuminated, the best of summer in New York. I had learned this from Georgie—that deep night was the only bearable time during the wet heat of New York City summer, rat season, which lasted well into October or even, recently, November. Georgie had lived here all her life and detested every season: rat, construction, Seasonal Affective Disorder, and allergy. It was part of the comedy set she’d failed to perform.
But Constant couldn’t keep quiet for long. “So what brings you so far uptown, Brooklyn girl?”
I was startled. “I’m not really from Brooklyn,” I said, feeling like I’d tricked him.
“Okay,” he said cheerfully. Everything about him had that loping cheerfulness, even the way he walked. He strode with his hands in his pockets and a certain buoyancy, like he was less prone to gravity than me. “So where are you from then, Ocean Sun?”
The question made me the opposite of cheerful. I didn’t know how to answer it. I hated when people asked, because they might have meant any number of things: where I’d moved from or where I’d emigrated from or where I was born, where my parents grew up or where their parents lived and died, where I’d arrived and where I called home and whether I was ever leaving. Sometimes the question was friendly and sometimes it was not, and it was almost impossible to know what he meant.
“I don’t know,” I said. Even I could hear how despairing I sounded. “Where are you from?”
“Jersey, mostly,” said Constant. “But now I live up here, for school.”
We kept walking. I got that feeling again, like the city was disappearing behind me as soon as I’d passed by, and the skyscrapers ahead were being rendered just as we approached them. I felt like I was dreaming. There were so many things I didn’t understand. Who had built the skyscrapers, and how? Who was Constantine to appear like Virgil in this infernal city?
“So,” said Constant, “are you like a ghost, or what?”
“What?”
“It’s cool if you are,” he said. “I don’t mind. No questions asked.”
I was so tired. I’d slept better since I’d arrived in Brooklyn with all my lies intact, but I was still tired all the time. I could feel the hours of sleep I’d lost this summer hanging over me like a thick, wet weight.
“But you’ve already asked so many questions” was all I could think of to say.
“Oh,” he said, and reflected on this briefly. “Well, starting now.” He seemed to mean it.
I felt suddenly terrible to disappoint him—to say that there was no quest or departure from the ordinary, that this was not a beginning. I couldn’t be sure if I was dead or alive, but either way I was unextraordinary.
“I’m not dead,” I said, but I didn’t sound all that convincing, even to myself.
“Oh,” he said, and paused. “Oh, okay. It’s just that when I saw you in the station, you asked me if I was dead too, so I guess I assumed. I’m not either, by the way.”
“Not what?”
“Dead,” he said. “I’m also still alive. I guess we’re short on the supernatural element tonight. It’s the sky. The light makes everything seem a little bizarre. But why did you think I was dead? And why too?”
I couldn’t believe I’d been worried that the walk would be silent and awkward. This onslaught of questions was much worse. He was relentless. “I thought you were done with the questions,” I said.
“Yeah, out of respect for your passing. But curiosity is the first sign of life, my friend. So what’s going on here? Why are you stranded in the middle of the night? Are you running toward or running from? Are you throwing something incriminating into the river? Are you trying to get a look at the coyote at Central Park? Because I am too. Are you under any influences? Wait.”
He stopped and squinted at me. All at once he was serious; it was the first time I’d seen his strange face without that persistent cheer. His eyes were piercing. They seemed to pin me in place, like I was taxidermized.
“You weren’t doing anything stupid, were you?” he said. “Because death by third rail has got to be the worst way to die. Well, specifically death by pissing on the third rail. Did you know all six hundred volts go up the stream of your urine and zaps you right in the—”
“No!” I hadn’t been there to jump onto the third rail, though of course I had thought about it, sitting there in the strange and blurry dark. Sometimes, in some moods, I couldn’t stand on any sort of raised thing—a platform or a scenic tower or a bridge—without wanting to jump. After all, how else could I check if I was already dead?
“No,” I said again, and when he kept squinting at me, I added more waspishly, “Sorry, not your flight risk. Or ghost, or whoever else you look to for an adventure.”
“I’m the flight risk, I think,” he said, so matter-of-factly it didn’t occur to me until later to ask what he meant. But the awkwardness had passed, and we started walking again. “So what the hell did you do in your past life, to wind up at the 125th Street station in the afterlife?”
“Nothing,” I said.
And this was exactly the problem. I’d been alive for nearly eighteen years, and I didn’t have anything to show for it. It seemed I hadn’t accomplished much at all. For my whole life, my mother had impressed upon me the importance of getting admitted to a good college—so I’d done the requisite extracurriculars and advanced placement classes and even a few low-contact sports. But then I got accepted—and it was so anticlimactic that I felt both that I’d worked toward a scam, and like I had nothing else to work for at all. I deflated like a balloon. Any motivation I’d ever had fled so quickly I wasn’t even sure I could even remember how it felt in the first place.
“Isn’t that what most people do?” I continued. “You do some good things and some horrible things, but mostly you do self-serving things, and before you know it, your whole life has gone by and you have nothing to show for it.”
“And that isn’t tragedy?” His voice was perfectly neutral—I couldn’t tell what he was thinking at all. It was too dark and he was too tall for me to see his face. Our pace had slowed; we were wading through a block of rustling, overflowing trash. Things had grown more nightmarish, not less.
“It’s not good, either,” I said. “It’s just—meaningless. But people aren’t motivated by purpose, I think. Not most of the time, not most people. Most people are motivated by comfort, and security.”
“Huh,” said Constant. “I disagree.” But he didn’t say anything else, as if he thought that was enough. In a way it was, because I liked that he was unafraid to have an opinion. Having opinions intimidated me: defending them, staying consistent to them, admitting you were wrong about them.
We passed another subway station. Constant stopped walking. He stopped so abruptly I smacked straight into his back. He was as tall and solid as a wall. I bounced off and almost fell to the curb.
“Speaking of self-serving things,” he said. “Do you mind if we stop at this station for just a few minutes? I have to go back down for, ah—something. But I promise it’ll be quick.”
I was wary. “Why?”
“I don’t care about good or horrible things,” he said. “I don’t care about self-serving things either. I just want to do something that lasts.”
This station was completely dark. On the way down the stairs we turned a corner and suddenly there was only the faint red light of the exits and the distant, ambient blinking coming from the tunnels. Constant turned on the flashlight on his phone, which didn’t help much. Everything looked bizarre and lacking in perspective, like a video game with ancient graphics. I couldn’t see obstacles—poles, turnstiles, gates—until I nearly ran into them. So I inched along, worried I’d launch myself off the platform and straight onto the tracks. This seemed like exactly where Constant was headed. He walked to the edge of the platform and stood there looking down.
Then he spun around to face me again. “Look,” he said, and opened his enormous windbreaker. He held it wide open but didn’t take care to point the light, so I couldn’t see what he was showing me.
“Oh, sorry,” he said. “Wait, I have another flashlight.” He rummaged around, then extended something toward me in the dark.
“It’s heavy,” he warned.
Nonetheless I dropped it. It was the size and shape of a brick. It fell right through my hands and crashed to the ground, where it began to scream. The high, shrill beeps filled the station. It flooded me with dread.
“Ah, shit,” said Constant. He bent to inspect the loud flashlight. He fumbled with it for long minutes while I shifted from foot to foot in the dark. I hadn’t realized how closely I’d been listening for the scutter of rats or the footsteps of murderers until all of a sudden I could hear nothing but the flashlight. Then, just as suddenly, it went silent, and I was blinded by light.
“Shit,” Constant said again, and swung the light away. I was still seeing stars. When I looked at his face, there was only a ball of light, like a Magritte painting. The light was so bright that when Constant pointed it down the platform I could see all the way into the tunnel; it was bright as an incoming train.
“It’s a Geiger counter,” said Constant.
“Pardon?”
“The flashlight,” he said, waving it; the light swerved violently. “I mean, it’s a flashlight, obviously. But it’s also a Soviet-era Geiger counter. Look.” He held it toward me, butt first. I had to blink several more times for my vision to clear enough that I could see a dense block of Cyrillic print, and above it an ominous meter with a single twitching needle.
“I think it’s just old,” said Constant. “I don’t think there’s radioactive sludge in here.”
The Geiger counter let out a final whine of complaint, to remind us we could never be sure. We looked at it dubiously.
But in its light I could finally see the inside of Constant’s enormous windbreaker. His waistband was lined with cans of spray paint: vivid blue, tomato red, lime green. My stomach sank. I wondered if I’d ever make it back to Brooklyn. Constant shot me a wicked grin. He spun around and launched himself off the platform, onto the tracks, so fast I couldn’t even scream.
“No time to tag like a citywide blackout,” he said. “You coming?”
I peered over the edge. He was standing right in the gutter of the track; at his feet, I saw torn Takis bags and plastic bottles and rotting fruit and puddles of human and animal urine. I felt my gag reflex changing the shape of my nose. Constant, if it was possible, grinned harder. He offered me a hand.
I didn’t take it. “I don’t like rats.”
“Who does? They won’t hurt us.”
His hand hung awkwardly between us.
“Don’t you trust me?” he asked.
I really didn’t. My confidence had fled into the dark. “Why do you have a Soviet Geiger counter?” I asked. “Do you do this a lot, this whole graffiti artist shtick?”
“You mean, do I bring girls into dark subway stations and seduce them with my artistic prowess?”
“Do you?”
“If you come, you’d be the first,” he said. “Jump. I’ll catch you.”
I didn’t jump. I sat down on the yellow line, the bumpy platform digging into the backs of my thighs, and slid slowly down. I felt full of repulsion, or fear, or panic, or excitement. There was a knot in my throat. My heart was beating very fast. I didn’t trust him, but I had already followed him all this way; what was I supposed to do—turn back? I slid off the edge. But the distance was farther than I’d thought, and halfway down, when my feet still hadn’t hit toxic sludge, I made a choked little noise not unlike the Geiger counter.
His arms came around me, solid and stronger than I expected. I yelped again. I was against his chest with the Geiger counter poking chunkily into my back; he was the largest person I’d ever been in physical contact with, and I had a bizarre sense that in his arms I looked like an altogether different species of human. His mouth was briefly, conspicuously close to mine.
Then he set me on my feet. “Sorry,” he said. “You were about to land in a puddle.”
“It’s okay.” But I sounded squeaky and breathless, and I didn’t know where to look. I focused on the spray paint cans in his waistband. Bright orange, sunflower yellow, slate gray.
“What are you going to paint?” I asked.
He grinned again: wicked, crooked, wide. He motioned for me to follow him. We went onward, into the dark.
The New York subway system has more stations than any other transit system in the world, and they operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week—at least theoretically. All of this made it just about the most difficult place to innovate, or clean. The tracks were extraordinarily dirty. I was terrified. I was sure I could hear rats, their nails scratching closer to us. I couldn’t believe we were in the developed world. The flashlight caused wavering shadows, and it was difficult to tell what were rodents, what was loose trash, and what were worse things living in the dark. I was almost jogging to keep up with Constant, who seemed entirely unperturbed by the grime, like he had done this many times before.
As I scrambled after him, he told me about the Geiger counter. His father was a nuclear engineer and his grandfather was a hoarder, and all his life his apartment had been filled with Geiger counters that his grandfather found in Eastern European pawn shops and brought home as gifts. They had Geiger counters from Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania, and Serbia. “He had this idea that my dad collects them,” Constant said, “which I guess he does now. And now my grandfather is dead, so we have to keep all the Geiger counters. Sentimentality really complicates everything, doesn’t it?”
“Are there cameras down here?” I asked. “Should we cover our faces?”
He tried not to laugh. Immediately I felt terrible. It would have been better if he’d laughed outright—I felt more humiliated that he tried to hide it. “The power’s down,” he reminded me. “But we’re just going a little farther. If there’s a train outside the station, we’ll tag that. If not, we’ll just tag a wall.”
“A train?”
“Sure,” he said. “Everywhere under this city, the trains must be stuck on their tracks. They’ll be evacuated by now. A golden opportunity, Ocean. It may never happen again in our lifetimes.”
I was startled to hear him say my name. I realized I hadn’t said his yet, aloud.
He stopped all of a sudden. “Alas, no trains here tonight, I think. It’s okay. We’ll do this wall. The good thing about the subway tunnels is that they’re all already covered in paint. You never want to tag a blank wall, Ocean, and you never want to cover someone else’s artwork. Other than that, you can do anything you want. What color?”
“What?”
“What color do you want?” he asked. “You can have the red, if you want, since it’s your first time. For luck.”
He offered me his hip, jutting toward me so the red can glared at me. I took a step back and almost fell over. “I think I’ll just watch.”
“Sure,” said Constant. “Next time, then.”
He shook his can vigorously, and then began to paint.
For several long minutes I couldn’t make out what he was painting. He seemed to be blocking out large areas in beige—odd, blobby shapes that didn’t resemble numbers or letters. I kept watching and watching and feeling more unmoored, unable to recognize a single thing. Then he painted another stroke, and all of a sudden I knew what he was painting.
“That’s New York,” I said. “That’s the city.” Suddenly it was obvious. There was Manhattan, and Brooklyn, and Queens. He finished the South Bronx and added Central Park. The map was enormous. In another few minutes it looked done to me: he’d painted Prospect Park and Washington Square Park and the East and Hudson Rivers; there was the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge and Williamsburg Bridge; he added beaches across the bottom of Brooklyn and at the Rockaways, and then Governors Island and Roosevelt Island and Staten Island. But he wasn’t done. He shaded in light topographies and added smaller, square parks. He firmed up the edges of the islands and adjusted the shape of the financial district.
Then he stood back and squinted at it. He was perfectly still for several minutes. Down the tunnel, I saw two rats break from a hole in the wall and sprint across the tracks, their tails streaking behind them.
“And now the fun begins,” said Constant. He pulled out a vivid blue canister with a narrow tip. “What I usually do is start with the longest line,” he said. He shook the canister several times and held it high above his head, at the highest tip of Manhattan. “That’s the A, which goes thirty-two miles from Inwood to the Rockaways.” He sprayed a thin line down the west side of the island, across and down Brooklyn, to the narrow isle at the bottom of the wall. The blue line was smooth and stern, and followed all the right swerves; he didn’t once hesitate, and the line didn’t falter. Watching him, I really did feel more faith in the transit system than I had my whole time in the city.
“Isn’t that wild?” he said. “Can you imagine that, building thirty-two miles of track? Then I add in the C and the E.” The three blue lines converged in Manhattan but split at both ends, like braids unraveling. “When they were designing the subway map, the one they have now in all the stations and train cars and websites, one of the artists rode every single line with his eyes closed and drew the curves and lurches in the routes blind. It’s a very poetic idea, but when I tried to do it, this extremely small angry girl tried to steal my headphones.”
“From your ears?”
“No, from my lap. I had them out so I could hear the conductor.”
“But if there are already maps in the trains and the stations, why vandalize the tunnels?” I asked.
“Because my maps are better,” he said simply. “And good maps outlast bad ones. Look.”
He started on the next-longest line, the F, which was bright orange, and around it added the B, D, and M. “The problem with the maps now is that they put all the local and express lines under the same color, and don’t separate out the different routes. It’s a terrible system. New York is full of terrible systems, but it’s also full of people trying to make them better. Like us.” He quirked an eyebrow and motioned the canister at me. I shook my head. I was sure I’d ruin his map. “Still no? All right, you can do the stations, if you want, after. Those are just dots. Anyway, it’s not really that much more trouble to draw all the lines. But the transit authority won’t do it and they won’t let anyone else do it. Hence the vandalism.”
I couldn’t tell if he genuinely meant the things he said or if it was all talk. He really liked to paint the maps on subway cars, he said—“On them, inside them, it doesn’t matter: that’s where most people see it, and share it, and use it”—but of course this was also the most logistically difficult to execute. Inside the tunnels, the risk was lower, but so was the reward. “It’s a good place to practice, though. I can almost always do a whole map in under thirty minutes now.”
The red stretching far into the Bronx and into Brooklyn, the green making its efficient way, the yellow splitting toward the beaches. I knew the whole of the city was only three hundred square miles, but it was like he was painting the world and everyone in it. This was where I lived now, there was my life on the wall of a subway tunnel, put there by someone I didn’t even know.
His phone died in my hand. We rearranged ourselves so that I could hold the Geiger counter while he added in detail, and as he was handing the light to me his features came together, all at once. Suddenly I knew his face, could see it in my head if I closed my eyes, could pick him out of a lineup or a crowd. I’d never forget it again. I realized that I really did like it, the quirk of his eyebrows and the hollows of his cheeks and the great plane of his forehead. When it came together it had this aesthetic quality, like his face was something he curated.
“What?” he asked. “Why are you staring at me?”
“I’m not,” I said, and he grinned as I felt my cheeks grow hot. He turned back to the wall. My hand shook; the light from the Geiger counter wavered and the train lines seemed to move, uptown or downtown, toward Manhattan or away from it. Every few seconds I looked at his face again; I couldn’t help it. Every time I looked I found something new I liked, as if it had appeared from nowhere. I liked the fullness of his bottom lip and the shape of his jaw. I liked his strange hairline and the way the hair fell into his eyes and I liked the way his face was a bit asymmetrical, unevenly divided by a slanting nose. Constantine Brave, I thought, again and again, until the words rearranged by themselves: Constantine the Brave.
“You want to do the last line?” he said, just as I blurted, “I was thinking about jumping, a little bit.”
“What?” he said.
“What?” I said.
This was the problem with deciding not to kill yourself. After you tried once, the idea stuck there like a hangnail. But if life was like a burning house—if the air became black with smoke and the ceiling was collapsing and living there became unbearable—you could always walk out the door. No one could ever blame you. You’d never keep a lobster from jumping out of a boiling pot, unless you planned to eat it.
He looked at me squarely. His face had changed again: his angular, robust features were as prone to severity as they were to cheerfulness. He made me feel scolded, though he’d said nothing at all. I was mortified. I couldn’t believe the words had just come out of my mouth. What kind of person walked around announcing to strangers that they had suicidal ideations? I did not think well of suicidal people, and I was sure no one else did either. I felt depressed by this, that Constant might not think well of me. I had never told anyone so directly, not Georgie or Tashya, not my own mother. No one but Constantine Brave, here beneath the city.
“I thought I was already dead,” I reminded him.
“Why’s that?” he asked. “How many times have you almost died?”
I couldn’t answer. He was still staring at me in that hard, stern way. I squirmed. I wondered if he knew his face could do that, make people squirm, if he practiced it.
“Look,” he said, “I know. I know, okay? It’s all just awful, isn’t it? Just the concept of it all. You wake up and go to school even though having a degree hardly helps you get a job anymore, and then you wake up and go to your job that pays too little to repay the loans you needed to go to school in the first place, and every day you have to do all these tedious little things like wash your face and unload the dishwasher and squish into ancient subway cars with a thousand strangers. All of it’s exhausting, and none of it even matters. It’s all meaningless, the ways we keep ourselves busy on our rock circling our sun in what must be, like, the backwater of the universe.”
Suddenly I felt like I might cry. “It’s kind of a bad place,” I said.
“Just awful,” he agreed, and grinned at me. “And it’s still better than nothing at all.”
How did he know? How could he, for sure?
“Is it?” I asked.
“I think so,” he said. He handed me the last canister of paint: light slate gray, for the shuttle between Grand Central and Times Square.
I took it, slowly. It was still warm from his hand. I shook it a few times, half-heartedly, so the pea bounced reluctantly inside.
“Straight and true, right across,” said Constant. “Some-times you just have to see where life takes you, even if it takes you to an unfortunate place.”
“Like into the bowels of the city?”
“Especially the bowels of the city.”
I shook the can again, with a little more conviction. The tinny noise ricocheted down the tunnels. It came back to us, carried on another, deeper rumbling.
We froze, like rats.
“Turn the flashlight off,” said Constant. I clicked the Geiger counter and blinked hard, surprised by the sudden absence of light, the way it swallowed the whole world, all at once.
The rumbling continued, not close but not very far. We were not completely in the dark. Down the tunnels, like jewels, were red and green signal lights, and behind us, the lights from the station. The power was back on.
“Oh, fuck,” said Constant, and turned to me. He put his hands on my shoulders and spun me toward the station lights. “Listen, Ocean. You and me, we have to run, okay? Ready?”
“What?” I yelped.
He shoved me forward. “Go!”
I lunged forward, only just caught myself, and sprinted. I had to, because Constant was right on my heels, and he was very fast. We ran. I hadn’t run so fast since I was small, pumping furiously for the last leg of an elementary mile. It didn’t feel like I was running from anything, because Constant was so close and enormous behind me that he may as well have been the world, but I must have known that we were about to be crushed flat by a train. My heart was in my throat and beating against my eardrums. There were flurries of movement at my feet: the rats too seemed to know something had changed, that the respite was over, that the city would never be so dark again. I had a terrible vision of landing on one as I ran, its body bursting like a juice box beneath my toes.
Finally Constant hoisted me up the service ladder and onto the ridge of the tunnel, along which we ran the last several feet until, at last, we were back in the station. He dragged me to a bench and we collapsed onto it just as a train whooshed by, running and running past us, until it had disappeared out the other end of the station. It didn’t stop.
“Well,” said Constant, panting, “maybe you can catch the next one.”
We slid down on the bench until we were slumped against each other, my shoulder against his. I was suddenly, hideously aware of my body. I was sweating, and breathing so hard I was dizzy, but I couldn’t pull my sprawled, clammy limbs in. I was still catching my breath, heaving lungfuls of subway air. I liked the feeling of it, the breath in my body. My arm was against his arm. And then all I could think about was his arm, which was so much longer and broader and firmer than mine. My breathing, no matter how I concentrated on it, refused to slow.
“I’d like a copy of your map,” I said to him, eventually, when I could.
“Sure,” he said. “It’s twenty for the PDF, or fifty for an eight-by-eleven print, and ten dollars more if you want me to mat it. Plus shipping.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, all right—”
“I’m kidding,” he said. “Give me your email, I’ll send it over to you.”
He grinned at me. It was so companionable; it was nice to sit there with him, alive. The station was just as grim and dirty as before, but now, several hundred yards away, there was a spot we’d slathered in paint, better for us having been there. I felt relief, welling like tears. Could Constant be right—that this was not the afterlife? The tedium was not eternal yet. He pulled out a marker and rolled up his windbreaker to offer me the wide space of his forearm. My breath caught. I gave him my email.
“Cool,” he said happily, rolling his sleeve back down. “So what now?”
What now? The great question. My breath rushed forth again, like a dam had broken. I flushed with vertigo; my head spun and began to throb with lack of sleep.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Four in the morning exactly,” said Constant.
This filled me with dread. The unluckiest time, a malevolent hour. In Chinese the word four sounds like the word death, a coincidence that fills the number with awful luck. I was superstitious in a visceral way, and shivered whenever I saw someone wearing a white hat or stepping firmly on a sidewalk crack. I thought it was better to err on the side of caution. To be anywhere but the safety of my bed at four in the morning seemed like taunting fate.
“I guess I should take the next train that comes,” I said, although I didn’t exactly want to leave, either.
Constant didn’t say anything. I was afraid to look at him. I was afraid to find him relieved, glad to see me go. It worried me that part of me hoped he would ask me to stay.
“Okay,” he said. “The adventure continues another day then, Ocean Sun.” He got to his feet. “It was real good to run into you. I’ll send you that map.”
He saluted me, and without another word, he turned on his heel and began walking toward the exit. I couldn’t believe it. “Constantine!” I blurted, before I could stop myself.
He turned back. He was grinning, of course. I was mortified. I didn’t know what to say. I’d lost something, face or footing, by calling to him instead of calling his bluff. I suddenly felt about a hundred years younger than he was, though I didn’t even know how old he was. I didn’t know anything about him, except his name.
“No one else calls me that,” he said.
“I didn’t know that,” I said, the only thing I could think of to say. “I don’t know anything about you.”
He cocked his head to the side like an ostrich. He walked backward until he was in front of me again, less than a foot away. “I’m Constantine Brave,” he said. “Most people call me Constant and some people call me Brave, but you can call me Constantine. I’m imminently a philosopher. I live with four roommates and about seventeen Geiger counters up in Hamilton Heights. I like to paint, sometimes, where no one else can see. And I’m very pleased to meet you, by the way. I don’t know if I’ve said that yet. And now I’ve got to run, but I’ll catch you again in this life and the next one.”
He stuck his hand toward me. It hung there until I remembered I was supposed to shake it. His hand enveloped mine; he shook firmly. My arm bounced like a noodle. He kept grinning until I grinned back.
And then he ran, his windbreaker flapping behind him, his paint canisters ringing like bells long after he was gone. I was dizzy and warm. I realized I was still holding the light slate gray can, for the shuttle that I’d never put on the map. I felt a swift and enormous impulse to jump back onto the tracks and dash once more into the tunnels, just to paint that last line. I hated the feeling of an unfinished thing, like a scab waiting to be picked.
With Constant gone, I once again felt barely substantial, a ghost beneath the city. I stood up. All the blood rushed to my head. My legs had fallen asleep and threatened to give out beneath me. I sat back down.
Constantine, I’d said. I liked the way it had felt on my lips and the way my tongue moved around the syllables; I liked the way it sounded out loud. I hadn’t even meant to say it. In my head I’d been thinking of him as Constant the whole time, but it was Constantine that fell out of my mouth.
The train came. It was almost entirely empty, but not quite. I wondered if the people already aboard had been stuck there the whole time, or if they had waited, like I had. I got a good seat, next to a pole against which I could lean my head and close my eyes. First the world had been moving too slowly, and now it was moving too fast.
No one else calls me that, Constant had said. I thought about that the whole way home, clutching the spray paint canister tight against my chest.