You would never expect it to happen.  Then when it does, you wonder why it doesn’t happen more often.  How have you lived in this city for years, and today is the first day you’ve experienced it.  The subway — the F — the same train you ride every morning and every evening.  You go underground with your flimsy little card, ready to swipe.  But the train is not running.  Not today.  And just before you groan, you realize that there is no yellow tape.  Only cops, ten of them at least, guarding the turnstiles.  This hold-up has nothing to do with construction.

Fellow commuters are buzzing about you, and that’s what they interpret it as: a hold-up, a wrench in the wheel, a roadblock in their ritualized Manhattan-bound sojourn.  They’re folding their papers, tucking them back into their leather bags.  You’ve got to be kidding me, right?  Isn’t that what they say?  There will be no relaxing on the way into work this morning.  It’s time to map an alternate route.  Perhaps walk a few aves to the R, or schlep all the way to the Atlantic-Pacific hub and take one of those spider legs to Wall Street, or Times Square, or wherever each and every one of them is destined.

But you don’t know what happened with the F.  And you’re reluctant to approach one of the police officers because you don’t want to be that person — the rubbernecker without a view, essentially, because you can’t peer down onto the tracks themselves.  You’re not granted access to that second staircase beyond the swipe-in point.  Out of the ten officers, five of the men look like they could be your uncle: tall, quiet eyes, with gin blossoms on their cheeks from the night before.  You don’t blame them; if you saw this kind of shit every day, you’d find an easy way to lull your mind just the same.  Let them be, you think.  Don’t interrupt them in their states of duty.

So you ask a man, passing by, as he makes his way out of the rat maze, Is the F running?  Or is it just a problem with the G?  Neither, he says.  Someone’s on the tracks.  Your reflex squeaks, Are you serious? And what can he say but, Yeah.  Immediately, you’re ashamed.  You want to redact your comment.  Someone just ended his life and all you can say is, Are you serious?  You sound like a preteen from a 4pm sitcom.

You follow the crowd to street-level, where everyone is busy with their cell phones, dialing away: I’m going to be late to work.  The F-train is down.  But, what about the man on the tracks, you think.  There is a man down, too.  But, maybe it’s not a man.  Maybe it’s a woman.  Why did your thoughts, automatically, assume that the jumper was a man?  Didn’t you learn somewhere that more women are likely to ponder suicide attempts, but more men are apt to actually carry-out the mission?  Ah, fuck it, you think.  Still, it could’ve been a woman.  It could have even been a child.  And perhaps there wasn’t a jumper at all.  Perhaps there was a fight and someone was shoved onto the tracks, that unlucky person never attempting to land in the line of a barreling F-train.  What time did it happen?  Do they not bother to mention these incidents on the news?  Did the conductor see the victim?  Did they hit the breaks or was it too late?  Dead? Alive?  What happened?

Pull yourself together, that’s what you must do.  There was a reason you didn’t ask the cops.  You can’t think of it now, but there was.  All you know is that you can’t go on with your day if your head’s teeming with question marks.  Put your ear-buds in, turn on your iPod.  Listen to something upbeat—the Cure, maybe—derail your own thoughts.  You can do this.  You’re of that generation, the up-and-coming that witnessed the conception of viral culture; you handle mass communication with dexterity, you know how to ignore the sidebars and grab a hold of the meat, what matters at this moment.  You can surely harness your own thoughts.  Try to focus on the work that needs to be done at the office.  Think of paper and binder clips, e-mails, after-work plans.  A good night’s sleep at the day’s finale.  Ready for tomorrow.  When there won’t be anything on the tracks.  Just an F-train running.