The Violinist

I’m a substitute teacher at a very expensive private school in the Upper West side of Manhattan. I commute in every day from Highland Park, New Jersey.

Usually I have to be in by 8:00 in the morning. But last Friday was special — my boss didn’t want me in until 3rd period, at 9:30. I get on the train at 7:44, scheduled to get in to Penn Station at 8:36.

I spend most of the train trying to write a Facebook message to a writer I’ve been trying to meet. I don’t really notice that we’re definitely late. It’s 9:00 and we’re still not at Penn Station. I see one guy right by the door who has a nice watch, and every so often he looks at his watch, and the movements of his head say, “ugh, can you fucking believe the NJ Transit?!” The guy next to me was just playing chess on his phone, biding his time. Everyone was tense.

I think it’s 9:20 when we get there. This hour-long train at rush hour on a Friday is 45 minutes late.

And by the way, when you get to Penn Station 45 minutes late on a work day, there’s nobody standing there saying, “oh, sorry.” Nobody gets a free ticket. There’s no announcement, no apology. It’s just, “here we are. We’re letting you out now.”

So it’s 9:20 when the doors open. And we all rush to take the elevators up. And when you commute into Penn Station, every day there’s a moment when you remember what Penn Station is. You feel literally like a mouse. The ceilings seem like they’re about two feet above your head. And just to remind you of your situation, the main lobby has pencil drawings of the old Penn Station, of the big open spaces, which were demolished to make way for Madison Square Garden.

So I get out of the late train, take the elevator up into the cramped station, and I go to swipe into the C train to get to work. But as I’m going, I hear a voice over the loudspeaker:

“there’s been a massive power outage, and the E trains are not running today. Repeat, the E trains are not running today.”

Now that doesn’t necessarily concern me, because the E train isn’t the C train — it’s not the train I need. But they’re connected, so I think it might impact me. And I don’t want to swipe if my train’s down, because a swipe costs $2.75. So I wait. And I wait. And I swipe. And almost as if the person on the loudspeaker had been watching me swipe, he comes back on:

“Aaaand severe, I repeat, severe delays are expected on the C train.”

So my train was 45 minutes late. My subway has severe delays. I think about taking a taxi up to work but I’m like, “fuck that, I’m not paying for all this.”

And then I start to think about infrastructure. Because this voice coming over the loudspeaker isn’t like the voice you’re used to hearing: “everything is fine, please take train X instead of train Y”. This voice sounds like a person, talking to another person. Specifically, the guy is saying, “hey, conductor” — he’s actually saying the word “conductor” — “something something something about the C train.” The fourth wall is now broken.

And it’s times like this when you remember that infrastructure is actually created by people. It’s not something that just runs all the time. There’s a story going around that Citgo, an oil company owned by Venezuela that owns a bunch of infrastructure in the US, is selling a big stake to Russia. So Venezuela is bad enough, but now Russia will be controlling a big chunk of infrastructure in the US.

So I’m thinking about all this- about how the fourth wall sometimes breaks down, about all this absurdity around me. And other people around me seem on in this too. And it feels — I know this is a stretch — but it feels a little bit like just after Trump won. I was on the NJ Transit, going home to Highland Park.

After Trump won, people stopped sitting with their faces forward. People consoled each other. People remembered they were human. We stopped playing our own role in infrastructure — because we are part of this built infrastructure, if we let ourselves be. It takes something like that to jolt us out of it.

And now, in Penn Station — when the NJ Transit was 45 minutes late, the E train was down, the C train was down, the guy on the loudspeaker was talking like a normal person — it felt like we were on the precipice of one of those moments. We were hovering on that moment.

And as I’m walking down the long underground hallway to the 1 train — because I can’t take the C — I see a violinist. Her name is Susan Keller — it was printed on one of those official banners the MTA gives to really good subway musicians. And this woman is incredible — so incredible that I almost start to cry.

And in this world of absurdity, it’s almost as though the violinst in the subway is not the soundtrack to the rat race. She’s not the thing you hear as you’re trying to get to work. She’s the center of the universe. This world that I think is about to create itself in the basement at cramped Penn Station, with the delayed trains and the power outage and the broken fourth wall, could create itself around the music of this person. The people who walk quickly in straight lines to their jobs could stop, and gather around her, and be in that moment together.

I don’t know how to express that in the moment. I want to set up camp and listen for an hour, or wait for her to stop and ask for a hug. But I don’t do any of that. I put two dollars instead of one in her violin case. And then it’s over.

And I go on my train, up to the 1, and I get up to Upper West Side, and I look at all the nice buildings.

I was scheduled to get to work at 9:30, and I thought I’d be hours late. When I got there, it was 9:56. Which still felt a little bit good. Because you know what? In exchange for this absurdity that almost birthed a new world, almost birthed a new compassionate, anarchist, musical world for one second in the basement of Penn Station, it’s worth being 26 minutes late.

And I go to the front desk. And my boss tells me, “we didn’t actually need you for third period — that was just a cushion. Your first class is fourth period.” I had fifteen minutes before it started. I didn’t miss anything.

And I don’t even remember the music Susan Keller was playing. But I remember her name.