Filed under: art/writing
A fat, brown R. norvegicus heaved herself over the sooty rail into the brash of the man-made canyon. The bulge of her abdomen said she would give birth in the next day or two in some warm nook under the station. Ivy League rat pups carrying a number of infections that would kill inbred lab strains in a week. Given life and fleas during parturition. Acclimated to the vibration of approaching steel. Born to thrive off of the crumbs of Starbucks cranberry orange scones, hamburger buns discarded by the carb-conscious, and spilled vermicelli from the Vietnamese joint in the mall around the corner. Compared to albino clones destined for neoplasm and regulatory sacrifice, these were Nature’s favored children and Regina loved watching them before getting on the train home.
The dam looked up from the brown clump she’d been nibbling before human ears could pick up the chucks and grinds of the oncoming train. She was gone before the engine hit the bend and the wheels began to shriek, metal rasping metal. The Red Line had screamed her way into Harvard Station for the last three decades and no one had the inclination to silence her.
A blast of high-pressure blew black strands free from under Regina’s scarf and into her eyes as the cars flew past like a flip book of sullen and somnolent ghosts. Having waited for this train daily for a year, she knew where to stand. As the train came to a halt, the second door of the third car opened before her. She stepped aside to let three confused tourists stumble out, consulting digital maps and cursing the lack of signal. When they made their way out of the station, they’d see the lights strung like cobwebs in the skeletal winter oaks; and they’d admire new snow blanketing the lawns of the campus and roofs of brick buildings older than their home towns, and clinging to the Euclidean muntins with their peeling paint; and they’d pause to stand on warm grates in sidewalks; and they’d wrap their scarves around their faces like humid gags; and, for a moment, they’d forgive New Englanders for all of their rudeness, because they would understand that the layers of clothing that kept them insulated from the cold also kept them insulated from each other.
Regina stepped into the car. Hours after the rush had subsided, the concentration of passengers was unsubstantial. An Asian couple holding hands and gazing at vague points by their boots. A middle-aged man with a glistening scalp and underbrush eyebrows reading a tri-folded sports section. A black kid with large headphones bobbing his head and mouthing lyrics. She remained standing by the door.
As the train pulled away from the station and into the system of tunnels under the city, the glass became black. She inspected her consumptive reflection in the dark window. The fluorescents gave her normally tawny skin a sallow tinge. Cheekbones, jawline, brow accentuated by artificial lighting reflected in glass before a moving wall of earth. Eyes of deep brown turned black in their sockets under the arches of her eyebrows. Had her lips not concealed her teeth, it would have been the face of a skull draped in a forest green wool, chasing her through the depths of Cambridge.
Someone had told her that suicides in New England peak around Valentine’s Day. When the days are shortest, you wake up in the dark and you walk home in the dark. February is howling wind and perpetual night. The snow is dirty and hard. Too many months of short strides and downward gazes in the dark let you forget the tingling of sun on skin and the green of young spring leaves. When these things are forgotten, it becomes easier for paper hearts to remind you of things you cannot have. And so, she imagined, this is how the red of saccharine love becomes clots of sanguine in bathtub drains and on bedroom walls.
With a grinding and unenthusiastic announcement, the train pulled into Central. The rhythmic clang of a Salvation Army volunteer’s bell came suddenly with the opening of the doors. He stood by his scarlet easel that suspended donation pot and wreath, and swung the brass bell like a pendulum from his shoulder. Eyebrows got off. Two men wearing the navy blue, polyester coats that typically denoted “union member” got on and sat facing each other at the far end of the car, legs spread, tan work boots splashing the dark, rubberized floor with melted snow and clumps of sand. Their Southie voices were amplified by beer. The one in the Red Sox cap laughed and clapped his knee. The couple stared. The kid bobbed. The doors closed. The bell died.
She thought of her rats. The PI had been hoping to conclude this round of experiments before Christmas — three weeks from the holiday, and their tumors weren’t large enough to harvest yet. He would be going home to Minnesota and Regina would spend Christmas week sacrificing rats, taking biopsies, and making slides alone in the lab with the miniature tree in the corner, lab-mates’ stations dark, the hum of the bio hood, white bodies with thoracic incisions and cardiac seeps, and pink eyes staring deadly at her through clear, plastic shrouds.
* * *
Evan Berthold exited the maze of concrete through the libraries. The concentration of students increased exponentially as finals approached. Clusters of them around tables with bouncing knees, worried-at bottom lips, and exposed bits of scalp or scabs where pressure gave way to compulsion. He stood by the door to prepare. He wrapped a thick, cream colored scarf around his neck twice and lay the ends flat against his charcoal sweater. He buttoned the single-breasted, houndstooth coat and popped the collar as added protection from wind. Took the dark, knitted cap from one coat pocket and matching gloves from the other. Tugged over the ears and past the wrists. Messenger bag filled with reams of cryptic writing and slim books of dense ideas slung across his body, and nestled in the small of his back. He checked for his wallet in the right pocket of his coat.
Beyond his reflection in the exit doors was darkness punctuated with the glow of yellow lamps suspended from high poles and sides of buildings and office windows of dedicated geniuses with their brown and crisp potted plants and labs filled with the next generation that would neglect plants in favor of chalk. A storm was approaching and large clumps of flakes were beginning to drift on the other side of the glass. They lingered in the air like frozen feathers and settled on the shoulders of passing students and scientists and clung to sidewalks already covered in the re-frozen grit of sand and that afternoon’s melt. The drifting snow gave way to the pattern of his coat and he focused on the image of his own face in the glass, smeared with the fingerprints of undergrads too hurried to aim for the word PUSH on the frame of the door.
Dr. Berthold was an aloof man of 31 years. His grandmother said it was something in the water in Madison that made the boys grow so tall, but his suspicion was that genetic material from his now-dead father caused him to be 6’3.” Similarly, he had inherited a narrow frame, large nose, small chin, and insistently straight hair that extended from his scalp like hay-colored quills. He could blame Wisconsin for the accent, though. For someone who looked and sounded very much like a mid-western farm boy to be a professor of mathematics usually came as a surprise.
He brought a finger up to his nose and pressed the bridge gingerly. It was still sore but not bruised or swollen. He was right to have not called the police. The time was better spent on research. He took the bend of grey steel in his hand and pushed. Heavy air forced its way inside and he stepped out into the icy down. The cold felt good on his nose.
Flakes clung to The Big Sail on all sides wherever they touched the frozen black curves of its surface. Geometric planes arching up into the limitless sky, webbed with rounded sheets of steel. The sculpture was supposed to be reminiscent canvas tugging huge ships through the sea, captured in a single moment, and anchoring the court. Berthold thought the five-legged mass looked closer to an oddly bound Togliatti surface than organic billows. A strange intersection of art and algebra.
He walked briskly through the gauntlet of concrete and glass, carried by the raw efficiency of long legs and practical shoes. Past bare trees catching puffs of snow on their branches and hanging icicles — glistening and ochre under the tall lamps. Past the abandoned tennis courts and their dusted, chain link enclosures. Left on Ames Street.
Follow the sidewalk — avoiding the groups of students walking shoulder-to-shoulder, hands in pockets, exchanging tense phrases in Korean, Russian, and Hindi — until the intersection at Main. Turn right — glancing up to check for irritable people driving luxury cars through the snow — cross Ames. Follow the sidewalk. Descend into the station.
Berthold bit the middle finger of a glove and pulled his hand free to remove the wallet from his pocket without stopping. Pressed the leather bulk to the black, plastic rectangle on the turnstile. The Plexiglass gates parted. He knew where the doors of the train would stop and came to a halt on the precise point he stopped on every evening.
* * *
The second set of doors of the third car opened at Kendall. A tall, thin, stooped man got on and sat on the edge of the seat immediately next to the doors without looking at Regina or the other passengers. He removed his hat revealing a spectacular mess of spiky gold hair graduating down to sideburns framing his long and unshaven face. He looked like he wanted to curl up into himself like a snail shy of the sun — shoulders tucked forward and up, head down, elbows on knees, and hands clutching the mass of knitted material under his chin.
“So ah says tah him, ‘It ain’t my fault you keep cloggin’ up the plumbin!’ An’ he says tah me, all uppity-like, ‘I wouldn’t be cloggin’ tah plumbin’ if you union pricks did half ah the work I pay you to do.’ So I punched him,” the man in the ball cap said.
“Fahkin’ ovah-educated types. Spend all day with their noses in books and can’t use a plungah when they clog up the shittah!”
The long-faced man sat back on his bag and, alarmed, looked over at the conversing men in their work boots and blue coats. Despite his obvious nervousness, he had the expression of curiosity that illuminates the faces of intelligent men. As he was turning back to center, Regina smiled at him. A rivulet of blood ran from his nose and onto the white scarf tucked into his overcoat.
“Your nose is bleeding,” Regina said quietly, touching her upper lip.
The man brought the back of his hand to his nose and pulled it away, covered in a slick of crimson. His face grew pale and pinched. He stuffed his clean hand into each of his pockets apprehensively and, coming up with no napkin or tissue, pressed a glove to his nose.
“Oh! No, here, I have a tissue,” she said, rifling through her sizable purse, pulling out a neat plastic envelope of Kleenex.
She stepped forward and held the open pack out to the man. He took one and held it under his nose. A poppy of blood bloomed on the tissue within seconds. He pulled it away. A small pool collected in his philtrum, his stubbled chin was streaked, and it dripped freely onto his scarf. He glanced at the tissue and then up at Regina, clearly nauseated. The damp tissue was wavering in his shaking hand.
“It’s OK, a lot of people don’t like the sight of blood. It doesn’t bother me — I see it all day. Here,” she said, sitting next to him, “let me help. Just a nose bleed. Bad one, but it’ll stop in a second. Tilt your head back and pinch. Like this,” she cupped the back of his head and pressed a fresh tissue over his nose, tipping his head back.
She felt the muscles at the base of his skull tighten. He turned a grey eye to her and then stared up at the ceiling of the train car, giving himself over to the care of stranger.
* * *
Feeling embarrassed and utterly helpless, Berthold had let the woman take his head in her hands. The initial discomfort of being touched started to subside when he looked at her face from the corner of his eye. Her mouth was tight — half bemused, half pitying his situation. Eyes round and brown with straight black lashes. Her skin was the healthy tan of people from places beyond Europe and there was a flush in her cheeks. The soft tissue of her breast was pressed to his shoulder through the padding of coats and scarves. Her thigh against his. One breath. Two. He looked at the fluorescent bulbs above his head. Five breaths later, he took hold of her hand and pulled it from his face and pinched the bridge of his nose with his free hand. She shifted away from him, settled back into the seat, and gave him a fresh tissue.
“Thank you, miss,” he said, letting his head fall forward again, and began dabbing at his face with the proffered Kleenex.
“No trouble at all,” she smiled, closed-lipped, and forced a small laugh through her nose, “You alright?”
“Ah, yes. Too much time with the nose in books. Can’t handle blood. Or toilets, I guess,” he gave a subtle nod towards the men at the end of the train car.
“You?” She raised her eyebrows.
“Me. Assaulted by a plumber in my apartment bathroom this morning. I did call him a prick, though, so perhaps I had it coming.”
“Small world,” she smirked and peered over his shoulder at the men.
Although the Asian couple was watching them intently, the men were talking animatedly about sports. Miraculously, they hadn’t noticed the bloodshed at the other end of the car. Regina took the man’s hat from his lap and tugged it over his hair.
“You’re awfully distinctive looking. Don’t want you to get popped again. I’m out of tissues.”
“I think I’ll be getting off at MGH and ducking into another car.”
“Not a bad idea,” she smiled broadly.
* * *
As doors slid open with a hydraulic hiss something hit the window above Regina’s head. Startled by the sound of multiple pounds of flesh striking the train, she sprung from her seat. A swath of bloody striae stretched down the window. Berthold stepped out onto the tiled platform to see a large bird at his feet, sprawling in all directions. Its long, dark neck had folded back on itself. One wing lay stretched out from its body and shuddered. Black, webbed feet thrust out and retracted spasmodically.
Regina pushed past the half-dozen passengers clustered around the animal and knelt by its side. Her green scarf fell forward over her eyes; she ripped it off and threw it aside in irritation. Berthold moved behind her, hands in his coat pockets, frowning, watching reluctantly.
“What is it?” from the Asian woman in her black pea coat, tall boots, and Burberry plaid scarf. Berthold heard someone talking to the driver through the set of set of concentric holes in the back of the car.
Small droplets fell from under the extended wing to the brown tiles. A pool of supernatural scarlet was spreading from the creature’s bill, clotting in the geometric angles of grout. Flakes fell and were consumed by the warmth on the bird’s blood.
“Eh, Frank! Check it aht! Ah fahkin bird hit the cah!” the plumber in the Red Sox cap proclaimed with unabashed zeal.
Regina spread her hands out over the animal like a faith healer, an inch above its bent and gore-mottled feathers. The snow was heavy now, and was sticking in clumps to the animal’s back and wings. Slipping down the back of Regina’s pale green, quilted coat and nesting in the curls of her dark hair. Melting on Berthold’s warm cheeks and catching in his lashes and the folds of his spattered cream scarf. The driver approached through the haze densely falling snow, puffy, dark, and shapeless in thick, winter garb.
“Hey, lady, birds is dirty,” the kid had taken off his headphones, “They’s got Lime Disease. Don’t go gettin’ ticks. It ain’t none uh yo bidness.”
She touched its wing and the animal flinched. Its neck jerked, impotently, to the side and its bill gaped open. It gasped and exhaled quickly. Small red bubbles burst from its nostrils. Agonal breaths. She covered her mouth. Thick drops oozed where bubbles had formed. It didn’t take another breath. Berthold put a bare hand on her back when her shoulders began to heave like waves under the quilted padding of down. She leaned into his long thighs, hiding her face from death.
“Eh, Frank! Get the fahk ovah here! It’s ah fahkin dead swahn!”
“Actually,” Berthold said, the snow in Regina’s hair melting under his palm, “it’s a Canadian Goose.”
