Fantastic Metropolis

Whenever I take the train at New Haven, I mind my own business for the hour-and-forty-minute run to Penn Station, and I assume that a passenger seated next to me is going to do likewise. By avoiding eye contact I ward off conversation, so I didn’t get much of a look at the fellow who slumped down next to me that evening. I did get the fleeting impression of something rumpled and highstrung. A bowtie askew. Wispy reddish hair over blinking, puffy eyes. Fiftyish. I could now go on with my business. My pen homed in on every student error like a smartbomb. I used the ride to Manhattan to finish grading papers for my once-a-week night class in Intermediate Spanish at Hunter.

I had been slashing at someone’s ha morido and substituting se murió when my unkempt neighbor’s odor began to assail me. A mix of stale sweat, whiskey, and rotting gums. I try to practice a Zen-like discipline that the crowded Japanese employ of shutting out people around them. (I’ve seen them on TV-strangers in a hot tub, both sexes together, deadpan, totally naked!) But something the man did struck me more forcefully than his smell. It was his copycat gesture of suspending a pen over a page of a spiral notepad which he’d yanked from inside his jacket.

My stiletto jabbed automatically at _soy_s that should have been _estoy_s (students these days making little distinction between states of permanence and transience) as I commanded myself to pay no attention to the scribbling pen beside me. In my younger days we used to fail students for committing a string of errors in grammar, but now it was supposed to be what they said, not how they said it that mattered. As to my neighbor’s odor, I hoped for some relief as we at last began to roll out of the station and the air-conditioning kicked in.

Not much time elapsed before his first deliberate intrusion into my “space.” As my pen came down to expunge, for the hundredth time, some erroneous feminine ending, my fellow passenger’s voice deflected my aim:

“Excuse me, sir, but would you mind giving me your opinion? Which is right, regrettably or regretfully?”

Now how the hell was I to know? “That depends on the context,” I offered. Distracted from my papers, I took note for the first time of the people across the aisle-two well-dressed business types, and in the row in front of them a mother coaxing an irrepressible son back into his seat. I also scanned the notepad in my neighbor’s lap, but as soon as he saw me looking, he slapped his hand down over it like a figleaf.

“I can tell you part of the context,” he replied-not so much coyly as defensively, as if I, not he, were the intruder! “‘Regrettably, I have to admit,’ or should it be ‘Regretfully, I have to admit’?”

What was I going to say, “That depends on the context” again? No. A quick way out suggested itself. “Why not simply say,” I advised, “‘I regret I have to admit,’ or ‘With regret, I have to admit’? Either form should do for any context.”

“An excellent solution,” he answered. He had a squeaky little voice that he tried to make strong, but he didn’t have the lung-power to do it. “It’s important to think of form in relation to context, isn’t it? Circumstances dictate what is the right way and the wrong way, don’t they? I had a wonderful English teacher once who put me straight on that score. The rest of my education in life contradicted her, however.”

“Contradicted?” I instantly regretted opening my mouth and encouraging him to go on.

“Yes. There’s right and there’s wrong. Period. Context be damned. Always wearing the dinner jacket in the jungle outpost, you know?”

“Oh.”

“I can see you’re an English teacher. It’s always been a difficult subject for me, but I’ve always loved English. No one else stands for correctness.”

“But you just said that your education in life-” I felt like biting my tongue for responding.

“An appropriate correctness,” he added.

I nodded and turned back to my papers. Why tell him I taught Spanish and prolong a rather inane conversation? The sky outside my window was growing dim, my neighbor’s smell seemed to be fading a bit, and the intense yellow reading light from the panel overhead helped focus my mind on work. Still, out of the corner of my eye I noticed how tightly the man gripped his pen and how fitfully, in brief little bursts, he seemed to etch things rather than write them into his pad.

“Advise, please,” he assaulted me, just when I’d comfortably settled back into my task. “Normalcy or normality? Which is it, Professor?”

I hadn’t the faintest idea. Either sounded okay to me, but somehow I couldn’t tell him that! “Again, it’s a matter of context,” I temporized.

Grudgingly, he appeared to select a minimal snippet of context. “‘Departing from,’” he said. “‘Departing from’ normalcy or normality?”

“Normality!” I said with conviction. That which neither of us knew couldn’t possibly harm him.

“I admire your certainty!” he responded. “One strives to achieve certainty one’s entire life, but one is betrayed by ‘context,’ by one’s blindness to reality. Reality hides from us, lies to us, deceives. … Look at these people around us, for example. Do you think they are capable of giving as clear and definitive answers as you can? Forget it.”

“My expertise is limited,” I mumbled.

“But timely!” he shot back. “Quite timely. My own expertise is nonexistent. One goes through life thinking one knows something, but then …”

I grunted in agreement and shrunk back into my papers. As much as I hated to admit it, however, my curiosity had been piqued. The man was a living hangover, but middle-class, well-spoken. What sort of document was he so painfully scratching out? A lay philosophical essay? Apologies to a wife who had left him? A letter of dismissal to an employee? Didn’t he really want to be asked what he was writing? For some reason he had to play peek-a-boo with me. Let him pursue his little game by himself! I had no desire for a part in anyone’s amateur head-theatricals. I could have sat elsewhere, I suppose, but my rudeness would have been obvious-and besides, the train was packed, so why give up a good window seat?

Just when I thought he’d become oblivious to me, maybe fifteen minutes after his last big question, he shattered my concentration again. “Pardon me,” he pestered, “but how do you spell ‘relief.’? Is it l.i.e. as in lies, which I’m familiar with, or l.e.i. as in Hawaiian leis? I doubt I’ll ever get to see Hawaii.”

I hesitated, trying to remember the spelling rule.

“Oh yes, you want context,” he blurted. “How about, ‘You will breathe a sigh of relief,’ et cetera.”

“You don’t need context for spelling, unless you’re dealing with homonyms and such.” I looked at him quizzically, full in the face. His eyes seemed glazed, his mind far away. It was a peculiar game of peek-a-boo he was playing.

“That’s right. Spelling’s either right or wrong. It’s the one thing that doesn’t depend on context.”

“Not very much, no.”

“I want this letter to have perfect spelling. It’s important, don’t you think, how one presents oneself? We all feel the same fundamental passions, but style is what distinguishes the poet from the guttersnipe. All my life I’ve attempted to cultivate style.”

I had to agree with him. I straightened the set of papers on top of my attaché case, arranging the case more squarely upon my knees. My students’ disregard for formal considerations always made marking their papers a grinding chore. Still in all, I held my tongue, not wanting to entice my too-willing neighbor into disgorging further gobbets of conversation. “The spelling rule is ‘i.e. except after c.’ L.i.e. is correct,” I announced.

“That’s another great thing about English,” he replied. “There are some rules that can’t be bent no matter how slippery the circumstances. English is not in the least like life, Mister-I mean Professor … what did you say your name was?”

For reply I bent over my papers and scribbled a rule for changing “z” to “c.” There was an obsessive quality about him which I did not like. I tried to dismiss him from my mind. “The plural of pez is peces!” I wrote, underlining so brusquely that my ballpoint tore through paper like a knife slitting a throat. And what did I find on the next meathead’s paper? “LUCES,” I scribbled, “not luzes!!” I wanted to add, “you idiot!” — but contented myself instead with two sharp thrusts to form the periods in the double exclamation points I tacked on as a sign of my annoyance. My pen cut right through into the still-innocent paper just below. I felt myself trembling and stopped to take a deep, deep yoga-style breath to calm down.

I began wondering whether my students gave a damn about those painstaking pen-squiggles that filigreed the semi-literate papers I returned to them. Why, then, had I continued marking papers for twenty-five years if I didn’t believe that my efforts were worth the trouble? What if I lost faith, listened to what experience seemed constantly to be telling me? I’d often had the fantasy of hiring myself out as a mula, carrying drugs from South America into New York, making fifty thousand dollars a trip, living high in Barcelona or Ibiza. Would I really do it, I wondered? Or would I just sink into a pit of depression from which the beauty of Spanish grammar alone preserved me?

As I drifted from fantasy to escapist fantasy, I noticed that my work-rate had slowed to the point where any more dreaming would keep me from getting through my papers. I didn’t even care, that was how deeply I had sunk into reverie. But then came the voice of my neighbor to snap me out of it:

“Excuse me, Professor. Just one more item. Last time I’ll bother you. I promise.”

“Okay, shoot.”

He blinked at me furiously. A flange of his nose twitched out of his control. I could only guess that in his twisted way he was about to reveal the contents of his letter-as if my genuine indifference had made him want to confide in me.

“Good-by,” he said.

“Where are you off to?” I joked. “Hawaii?” I couldn’t imagine him leaving right then, unless he’d got sick and tired of my coolness and had decided to find a seat somewhere else. The next station, after all, was at least twenty minutes away.

“No. Hawaii is ruined too,” he said. “Ecosystem is shot, you know. Some snakes from Guam got in years ago, and they’re killing all the native birds.”

“Too bad.” Ibiza, too, must be ruined by tourism, I thought. “It’s the story of the Garden of Eden,” I quipped.

“Eden? Yes!” he hissed. “We have exchanged an eternity of bliss for an eternity of well-deserved punishment.” Then he added, his tone meek and mild once again, “M-my question was about the word ‘good-by.’ What I wanted to know was the spelling of ‘good-by.’”

“Oh.” My gaze traveled to his lap, to what appeared to be a clean copy of the letter he had been continually reworking. He made no attempt to conceal it this time, but I was not even interested enough to give it a second glance.

“The word good-by,” he asked, “is context-independent, is it not? It doesn’t matter in the least what went before?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, then, is it g.o.o.d. hyphen b.y., or g.o.o.d. hyphen b.y.e.? Or is it g.o.o.d.b.y without the hyphen-or b.y.e minus the hyphen?”

“That’s simple,” I said, lying. All those variations had never occurred to me. One was as good as another, I thought. “It’s the first one: g.o.o.d. hyphen b.y.”

“You’re sure?” He looked at me as if I were the very fount and spring of knowledge.

“Positive,” I said with all the authority I could muster.

“Then there’s only one good-by, correct? It can not be subject to confusion and ambiguity?”

“Correct.” I had told him what he wanted to hear. I was a teacher, wasn’t I? How could I not know the right answer? I watched aslant as he finished off his letter. I was resolved not to show any curiosity.

“Thank you,” he said effusively. “I’m truly grateful to you, Professor.”

As I turned back to my own little cross, my pen menacing another one of those eternally recurring, ineradicable, genetically rooted errors, I saw my fellow passenger push up out of his seat. His notepad fell to the floor.

“Your notepad!” I said.

“It’s okay,” he answered. He stood above me, neither reaching down for his booklet nor turning to step out into the aisle. His right hand reached carefully into his left jacket pocket. I thought he must be looking for his ticket.

Stunned, I watched as he drew out a revolver. For an instant he pointed it up at the ceiling. Then he lowered it and fired. He fired and fired. Time came to a halt for me. The shots rang out in quick succession. I witnessed only the killing of the two business types across from me. The one in the aisle seat was the second one shot. He showed a look of surprise before his head jerked back and pieces of his skull spattered his partner, who was already crumpling behind him against the window.

I don’t know exactly when the screams started. Maybe after the whole thing was over. All I do know is that after dispatching the men, my neighbor reached over the seat in front of them. He shot the harassed mother and her frisky child at point-blank range, with only a split second’s duration between shots. I could, of course, see neither of them, thank God.

Next, I was sure, would come my turn. I didn’t even have time to lift my attaché case. I half intended to hide behind it, half to lunge out at him with it. I wasn’t given the leisure, however, to discover whether I was a hero or a fool. His gun hand seemed to swing back toward me, but then it suddenly stopped. He aimed down over the seat-cushion doily in front of him. He fired into someone’s head. A man, a woman? I didn’t even know. Then he looked at me, quizzically-as if troubled by some other still unsolved grammatical question.

A split second later the barrel of his revolver was deep in his mouth, and I saw a pink geyser spring out from the back of his head.

He fell on me. His blood ran over my face, over my jacket, over my papers. I pushed at him, but he fell on me again. I heaved against the weight of him, but he flipped and landed on top of me yet again. His body seemed to cling to me, and my skin prickled with horror.

I tasted his blood in my mouth. And through the screams that filled my ears and my lungs, I could hear myself dictating to him the proper spelling of good-by.

Copyright © 2001 by Daniel Pearlman.