On a grey night of a grey month in a darkened corner of lower Manhattan, the Chambers Street – World Trade Center subway station was quiet. The muted lighting created long shadows on the concrete platform that extended farther than a football field. Scattered empty bags and old newspapers lay about. As it was near midnight on a weekday there were few commuters, and fewer E trains. The west side of the financial district didn’t have a night life to speak of, so the only travelers here were people who had worked very late.
I was one of those late night workers. In 1997, I was toiling on a political campaign that was going nowhere, and time was running out. The 14 hour days seemed futile; nevertheless, I was starting my long commute home to catch four hours of rest before starting another one.
A dark, elderly man in a navy blue pinstriped suit and a grey overcoat stood perhaps thirty feet from me near the bottom of a airway. A woman wearing thick glasses and thicker red sweater stood halfway between us, carrying a library bag with papers almost overflowing. A younger man in jeans and a baseball jacket listened to a Sony Walkman farther down the platform, near the only bench in sight. Near him stood another man, perhaps middle aged, with a pockmarked face. He wore a light green parka.
I was standing on the other side of the bench, a comfortable distance from baseball jacket youth and pockmark man. I carried an old leather shoulder bag, filled with more work than I needed to be carrying, but there had been little time for clearing clutter in my day.
Between me and the other two men, on the bench, sat a heavily bearded, hulking figure, enveloped in a brown army coat. His thick dark hair hung, damp, almost to his shoulders. His hands rested on his knees. He wore jeans with stains and tears. He sat on the front edge of the bench, leaning forward so starkly that it appeared he might pitch onto the concrete platform. He wore thick dark brown leather boots that stretched up to mid-calf, covering the bottoms of his jeans. I noticed that his left leg was bent in at the knee, under the bench, and the right one jutted out in front of him.
Then I saw the blood.
On his right leg, at the roof of the boot, thick, dark fluid had collected, like jelly from a jelly donut. The blood stain stretched up his pants leg from there, to just above the knee. The blood was moving, slightly, slowly, like hot lava.
“Jesus,” I heard myself call out.
The bleeding man didn’t react, but the others on the platform did. The woman in the red sweater lowered her spectacles and appeared concerned about my outburst. Pockmarked man looked annoyed. Baseball youth seemed mildly amused. The black CEO type looked guardedly on alert.
In New York, strangers avoid speaking or making eye contact. Smiling at a stranger or starting a conversation with one is suspect behavior. One gets used to the etiquette, and it becomes second nature, like a horse wearing blinders. Don’t look at the man to your left or the woman to your right. Don’t apologize if you cough; just look at the floor.
I was a native. I knew the rules, knew that I had violated them as surely as if I had spat on the platform. I wanted to apologize. I swallowed the impulse. I dropped my heavy bag. I took a single step toward the man on the bench. I waved toward the others, then insistently pointed my finger at the leg.
“He’s bleeding,” I called out.
At first, the reaction was muted, as if there were moments of denial or at least instincts of avoidance. But as I looked around at each, I saw building sentience, recognition, responsibility. They all began to move.
Like a ballet on a subterranean stage, my comrades swung into positions. New Yorkers came out of their New York closets and began to work in tandem. Pockmark swiftly strode over towards the man on the bench. Baseball fell in at his side like a special assistant. CEO bounded up the stairs, calling “I’ll get help,” as he went. Red sweater shouted across the platform. “Is there a doctor or a nurse? Is there a doctor or a nurse?” As she shouted, others appeared from the outer reaches of the long concrete span, supporting characters.
Pockmark looked to me. “Help me,” he said quietly. He turned to the man on the bench, leaned in close, close enough that I imagined he could smell the full measure of the man’s hard life. “Are you hearing me?” he asked.
The injured man nodded his head gingerly.
“We’re going to lay you down on the ground,” Pockmark said to him, calmly but assuredly.
Red sweater came over, pulling her arms out of her red sweater and laying it on the cold concrete floor. The garment seemed larger off of her, like loaves and fishes. Pockmark nodded to me and we reached out toward the disheveled man on the bench, each taking an arm, now shifting our hands, one under the shoulder, one below the elbow. His coat was soft.
We lowered him in one motion onto the sweater. Pockmark placed his hands on the man’s shoulder blades. “You should lie back,” he said. The victim obliged and lay back on the hard floor. “We need to elevate his leg,” Pockmark muttered, yanking off his parka and stuffing it under the man’s head. I looked around for an object to elevate the leg and all that I saw was my shoulder bag. After a brief hesitation I retrieved it. I reached out and lifted the leg by the boot. There was blood on my hands.
CEO came down the stairs from the subway entrance. “Fucking idiot,” he muttered. He looked at us as he walked over. “He said there was nothing he could do. I told him a guy was dy – a guy was hurt bad down here, and he left the booth, said the phone didn’t work.” He walked over near the rest of us. We were in a circle around the bleeding man. CEO took off his dark coat, and he stepped forward, and he gently paid it over the wounded man like a blanket.
It was only a few minutes before two transit police officers came hurrying down the stairs, but it seemed much longer. Pockmark said we shouldn’t take off the boot. The blood was thick on his upper calf. He was breathing but he didn’t speak. I found myself gazing at his chest, watching to see if it kept rising and falling.
“Do you think he’ll be okay?” Red sweater was now grey blouse, and she was shaking and her eyes were damp.
“Son of a bitch is cut deep,” said baseball.
“His vitals are okay, not great,” said Pockmark.
“Here comes someone,” shouted CEO.
The transit officers came over. There was an older man and a younger one. We stepped back automatically and allowed them to move in to take charge. The heavyset man spoke into his radio. “White male, serious trauma,” he said. “ETA on rescue?”
“Rescue ETA approximately ten,” answered a female dispatcher.
The veteran shook his head. “Tell them to expedite,” he barked.
“Ten-four. Expedite rescue.”
The officers were operating under the same trepidations we had. They didn’t seem to want to take any additional steps, such as removing the man’s boot, for fear they might make matters worse.
“What’s your name?” the woman asked the wounded man gently.
He looked at her, big, dark eyes. He didn’t answer, but he seemed to try and force a smile.
“How long has it been?” the younger officer asked, looking around the circle at all of us.
I looked at my watch. “About twelve minutes,” I said. “He was here the whole time. I noticed after about four minutes.”
“It’s lucky you did,” said Pockmark. “I didn’t.”
“We were minding our own shit,” said baseball. “Don’t feel guilty.”
“The poor man,” said the woman who’d donated the red sweater. “Such a hard life.”
“Isn’t it true?” said the elderly man in the rich suit. “The hardest cases have the worst luck.”
“Is he shot?” I asked the older cop. He shrugged.
“I don’t know,” he said, “Could be, or stabbed, or drunk, and he cut himself somehow.”
There were more crackled noises from the concrete stairway, and two emergency rescue workers descended the steps. One carried a large plastic case, the other a long canvas bag. We moved our circle back to make room for them.
They knelt around the victim, as the senior of the two transit policemen called out blood pressure and pulse numbers. The plastic case opened out and revealed gauges and tubes and electrical devices and tools. One of the rescue workers took out a heavy pair of scissors, turned to the lying man, and started cutting down the side of the boot on his right leg from the top toward the bottom. He kept cutting along the bottom until he was able to slip the ruined footwear off without any effort, and he tossed the boot to one side. The pants and the sock that had been hidden inside the boot were black with blood. The other man put a rubber strap around an upper arm and studied a gauge. Blood began pooling on the concrete around the injured man’s leg.
The man with the gauge reached over and unzipped the long canvas bag. Inside was a stretcher. He and his partner skillfully lifted the man and slid him to the stretcher, which they then raised into the air. Metal legs and wheels opened below the stretcher. They moved toward the stairs. In the background, I heard the muted roar of an approaching train.
In what seemed like only a moment, the two men and the patient vanished up the stairs. On the bloodstained concrete in the middle of the broken circle of onlookers was a long men’s coat, a green parka, a red sweater and an old brown shoulder bag.
We looked around at each other, CEO, pockmark, red sweater and I. We shared trepidations: our belongings had been donated with kindness, but they had done their jobs and were no longer needed. It was as if the gods were giving them back to us, though we all had presumptions that they were the worse for wear.
The business executive stepped forward and reached down, but it wasn’t his overcoat he picked up. He retrieved the red sweater. He shook it straight, shook it three times more, folded it carefully, and then tenderly handed it to the young woman, who nodded. “Thank you,” she said. Pockmark reciprocated with the older man’s coat, holding it out to him like a coat check clerk, the shoulders spread. The older man nodded, and slipped first his right arm then his left into the sleeves of the coat. Pockmark picked up his own parka and tucked it under his left arm, while I grabbed the strap of my bag and hung it over my shoulder. There was a thick streak of blood down one side, where the leg had rested. I turned the bag around so the streak faced in.
The uptown E train was pulling in. We looked at each other. Pockmark shook my hand. The train stopped. A moment later, the doors opened. We all got into one car and we sat down in scatted seats in the nearly empty carriage.
The doors shut. We exchanged a last round of glances and nods, and then we dropped our heads and went back to acting like New Yorkers. The train started up. Outside the windows, the station walls sported huge mosaics, depictions of eyes in assorted colors and emotions. The words World Trade Center slid by.
I am still left in the dark about the stranger who brought those people together for a fleeting moment of teamwork. I don’t know if he lived or he died, and I imagine none of my teammates ever found out, either. I called the next day, but got nowhere. I meant to pursue it, but I never got around to calling again.
Not quite four years later, that space filled up with concrete and rebar and steel beams, trash and remnants from two vast skyscrapers, sealing the place like a tomb. It was five months before the refuse was carted away.
