As far as blackouts go, this one went relatively unnoticed. In fact, it’s debatable whether you could even call it a blackout, considering it lasted for only a few milliseconds, an amount of time which is practically imperceptible to humans.
If you happened to be up during this co-called blackout when it struck at 3am on a work night, you may or may not have noticed the lights flicker, or your TV dim and then brighten, or the animals, the ones that are sensitive to these sorts of things, begin to howl and cackle and meow.
Most people were, of course, asleep, and didn’t notice a damn thing. But for those poor souls with electronic alarm clocks, the power went off for long enough that, when it came back on, a dismal, blinking “12:00” was all the clocks could manage.
---
Greg was one of those poor souls who had an important meeting later that morning. So when he casually cracked his eyes open and saw the flashing numbers, he began to panic. At first the panic was distant, obscure, trapped somewhere between the world of waking and the world of sleep. But then it began to fester, to spread, first into his mind, and then rather quickly, to the rest of him.
“Fuuuuuuuck,” he moaned to himself.
He pulled his arm out from underneath his body and looked at the wrist watch he always wore to bed.
7:45.
“It doesn’t seem late,” he tried reasoning. But his brain transistors were not yet firing at full strength. He was still unsure of what day it was – did he have a presentation today or had he already done it?
“No!” he suddenly realized. “The presentation is today.”
He propelled his legs off the edge of the bed and disappeared into the bathroom.
---
Somewhere else in Brooklyn, Leah was awoken by construction that seemed to be perpetually taking place outside of her apartment.
“Fuuuuuuuuck,” she moaned. For a moment she was livid enough that she swore to write to the City about the construction, the way it was creating a nuisance in the neighborhood, creating an unsafe environment. But then the burden of wakefulness made her forget about this plan and she became more concerned what time it was. After all, she had an audition to get to.
Without her glasses, she had to squint at the funky digital alarm clock that sat on her dresser. What one moment had been just the dim blur of a yellow box, became a mother figurine wagging a finger at her son who held a cookie behind his back. The unusually large wagging finger moved at the tempo of real-world seconds. Above the pair of characters, she spied the flashing digits.
Confused, she rubbed her eyes and sat up in her bed to get a better view of the clock. Then, when her original analysis had been confirmed, she opened the laptop which always sat perched on the side of her bed.
7:50 said the little, much more reliable, computer clock.
“Crap crap crap,” she said. Just like that, three times, in quick succession.
Growling in discontent, she threw herself off the bed, stumbled over the sheets which followed her halfway across the room, and flew towards the bathroom.
---
Greg’s wet hair dripped onto the wooden floor as he stood over his computer with a towel wrapped around his waist. One errant drop landed on the “x” of his keyboard and slipped into cracks between the letters.
“No no no,” he muttered to himself. As he checked his work email he saw a request sent by his manager at some point after he had already left work the previous day. The email attempted to project warm feelings and good will, and the manager expressed relief that he had “caught you [Greg] before you [Greg] left for the day.” This email, from the manager who always managed to leave at least an hour before everyone else and who was exceptional at knowing very little but delegating a lot, asked Greg to make some last-minute changes to the presentation. “They shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes,” said the email, as Greg recited it in his manager’s voice, using his manager’s physical mannerisms. The more he embellished the message, the more frustrated and unnerved he got.
He glanced at the clock – 8:00 – and with his towel still wrapped around his waist, he sat down in front of his computer and began making the requested changes.
---
Leah showered quickly, so quickly that when she was stepping out of her shower and onto the bathroom rug, she wasn’t sure if she had washed her hair. She rubbed the steam off the mirror to look at herself.
Wet hair, so at least that was taken care of. Her eyes were still puffy, a symptom of sleeping on her stomach with her face crushed against the pillow. She loaded her toothbrush up with paste and began brushing her teeth and combing her hair. This was a technique she had perfected while at her last job, the one in which she was practically a slave laborer, working long hours for very little pay, and justifying it all to herself because it was a job in the “entertainment industry,” which was, after all, the industry she wanted to work in. At some point she could no longer reconcile an acting career that was focused on making connections and building relationships but which never created any actual acting opportunities.
Someone knocked on the bathroom door.
“Hello?”
“Hey,” said Leah, “it’s me.”
“What are you doing here?” said the annoyed voice, the voice of one of her five roommates in the six bedroom/one bathroom illegal loft they all shared.
“Sorry!” shouted Leah, over the sound of the running water, over the muffle of toothpaste lathered in her mouth. “I overslept.”
“But I need to use the bathroom.”
“I know! Just one second.”
Leah half-assed the rest of her morning hygiene, leaving her teeth half-brushed and her hair half-combed, and then turned to open the bathroom door.
The door wouldn’t budge.
“Are you coming out?” asked the roommate on the other end.
“I’m trying!” answered Leah. “I think the door is stuck again.”
The roommate knocked on the door, as if that was going to help the situation, and then proceeded to push her weight against it. But it seemed to be true – the door was stuck. This was not surprising considering the entire apartment, including a second floor perch where Leah’s room was fixed in a corner with interlaced piping crossing at the ceiling that was a mere six feet off the floor, was built over the course of four weekends. The door hadn’t been cut evenly (you couldn’t worry about such details when you were building a loft over the course of four weekends), and though it tended to work most of the time, sometimes the combination of heat and steam made it warp just enough that it would get stuck.
The roommate pushed and Leah pulled, and together, they helplessly attempted to open the bathroom door, the door that would eventually open, but on its own time.
---
At 8:45, while Greg was putting on his suit, he cursed again – he was going to be late, he was almost sure of it. It was now becoming a tic for him, glancing at his watch every few seconds, as if time would slow down or stop altogether, or speed quickly ahead to a new life, a new world, without these presentations and these deadlines and a manager who acted like his friend but always made sure that Greg didn’t rise much in his position with the firm. He hated suits, and he only ever wore them for the presentations, or for the job interviews that offered a hope of escape. But then again, he thought to himself as he glanced at his watch yet again, did he even want to work in this field? Somehow he got pulled in a direction he had never wanted or expected to go in, and now here he was.
He looked at himself in the mirror and nodded away the creeping impressions that were sure to make him even more anxious than he was already. He should have shaved, that was one thing he missed. And now his tie, as he laced it around and knotted it down, just wouldn’t cooperate. He untied it and retied it and began to feel a warmth rising up his back.
8:50.
He began to sweat between his shoulder blades. The tie finally looked okay, and so he turned to go. But as soon as he stepped forward, he felt a tug, heard a rip, and looked down to find that his pocket had become snagged on the edge of a dresser drawer. A three inch tear exposed his naked leg underneath, and in a fury, he began to take his clothes off.
He would have to wear his “bad” suit, the black one he usually only threw on for funerals.
---
Leah was finally out of her apartment and the cool air was a welcome relief after the 15 minutes she had spent stuck in the windowless, ventless, airless bathroom. Her roommate was surely pissed, considering Leah had broken an unwritten but cardinal rule of their apartment – you had your designated block of bathroom time, and you never infringed on someone’s else’s slot.
But Leah couldn’t worry about her roommate, not right now, not with an audition to get to and a train to catch. She pulled out her cell phone and checked the time.
9:00.
Cutting it close. Cutting it really close. It was anyone’s bet at this point, whether she’d make it there by the time she was scheduled to be in front of the casting director.
Her subway was just down the street, which was perhaps the one saving grace of her apartment situation; if nothing else, she could appreciate that she could get to the City relatively quickly and easily. As she approached her stop, she focused on the clicking of her heels against the asphalt, at the sound that echoed down the mostly empty street. The absence of others was striking, as usually there was a stream of people heading to the subway at around this time. Perhaps it was just a few minutes that made all the difference, perhaps if she had been on the street only moments earlier she would have seen the stream, been part of the flood of straphangers. But now, she was alone.
She noticed it from a few feet away. It was one of those blue and off-white MTA posters that announced service changes in as convoluted and indecipherable a manner as possible. Whenever she read these posters, she imagined little gnome-like scribes sitting in some tunnel somewhere, mixing up the trains and the lines and then sinisterly delivering the message to people in a way they would never understand. It was a complete temporal and spatial and linguistic manipulation, and she couldn’t help but feel a little defeated.
This time, she understood as much as she needed to – her train was out of commission. She stood motionless for a moment, staring at the sign, and then belted a primal cry of frustration. She turned on her heels and began to run, towards a new reality that didn’t include her crappy apartment and her angry roommate and the time she had wasted in avoiding the things she cared about.
She ran between the set of warehouses that overlooked either side of the street, in the direction of the next closest subway line.
---
Greg scrambled down the steps and simultaneously pulled his MetroCard out of his pocket. Somewhere beneath him he heard and felt the rumble of his subway pulling into the station, followed very soon thereafter by the screeching sound of brakes.
He pushed his MetroCard through the reader smoothly, patiently, the way you were supposed to if you wanted it to be read by the machine on the first try. This was an art that set someone like him, a native New Yorker, apart from the tourists who kept swiping helplessly, staring at their MetroCards blankly while they tried to figure out which direction the black strip needed to face for it to work.
But something about his momentum was off, and the card reader beeped, the turnstile stayed fixed.
“Please swipe again at this turnstile,” it read.
Somewhere in the tunnel below him, there was the electronic voice of a man.
“Stand clear of the closing doors please,” he announced.
Then there was that painful, shrill sound, the one you heard right before you understood that you were too late, that the subway would be leaving without you.
---
Leah got to the bottom of the stairs just in time to see the red tail lights of the train. They glowed like raccoon eyes before retreating away from her, backwards, into the dark tunnel that run straight and then snaked sharply to the right.
She might as well give up. She would be late. She would get there and the casting director would have someone else in the room – the girl who was supposed to go right after her and who, when Leah was five, ten minutes late, would be called in early. Because of course the other girl would be there already, because the other girl took this opportunity seriously and didn’t allow herself to oversleep, she didn’t keep a stupid electrical alarm clock with a plastic mom shaking her finger at some stupid kid who had a cookie behind his back.
She would throw the alarm clock out when she got back home.
Leah began to pace the platform. She shook her head at herself. Then, sensing somebody nearby, she looked up.
---
Greg stared at the girl in the flower dress pacing on the platform. She looked as disgruntled as him after missing the train. This was their shared New York experience, something most everyone, no matter who they were, can relate to.
He shrugged at her, as if to say “oh well, what can you do,” and she smiled in return.
He turned away and together they stood in the silence of the empty platform. His presentation crept back into his mind, the fact that he would be late and his boss would chew him out. He thought about his ill-fitting black suit.
And then much too soon after the last train had left, another one pulled into the station.
---
Leah stepped into the car that pulled up in front of her and watched the guy from the platform enter the same car. In the far end of the car, she spotted a woman sitting next to a little girl. The child had a book open on her lap and was mumbling something, happily pointing to a picture and then clapping her hands.
“Ladies and gentlemen, because of last night’s blackout, and the resultant delays in the transit system, this train will run express into Manhattan to West 4th St. For all bypassed stations, please transfer to the Brooklyn bound train at West 4th St. Stand clear of the closing doors.”
A wave of relief passed over her body and she felt the tightness release from her shoulders. She checked her watch and realized she might just make it to the audition on time. Maybe there was something to all of this. Maybe, when all was said and done, she was meant to get on this train, to make it to the audition, to get the part even.
She sat down and stared at her own dim reflection in the window of the train. From the corner of her eye she noticed the guy from the platform, leaning against a pole, and turned to look at him once more.
---
Greg would be on time after all. Already he had started forming the excuses in his head, began prepping himself for the barrage of reprimands he would have been bound to endure if he had been late. And now that was all irrelevant. He’d make it to the presentation, no one would notice the things he noticed about his own suit, and everything would be fine. Then he would have to start asking himself the bigger questions about where he was in his life and whether he was happy doing what he was doing.
The girl in the flower dress, he looked at her again. She returned his glance, but then turned her attention to something else, to her own reflection in the window of the train.
There was something odd about her, something that made him anxious once more.
As the train picked up speed and rolled over the tracks, passing crowded platforms in a blur, a sense of urgency began to mount in Greg’s mind.
---
She didn’t understand why, but Leah began to think about him, about his black suit that didn’t seem to fit right but was charming for some reason.
She suddenly found that she wanted him to say something to her.
---
Greg was drawn to her without really knowing why. She didn’t look like the sort of girls he was usually into. But he made a decision – he would say something to her. He began to muster the courage he needed for the approach.
As the train passed more stations he noticed that they were getting close to their first stop. What if she got off at the first stop? He was running out of time.
---
What if he didn’t say anything? Maybe she should be the one to speak up?
But all of this was ridiculous, wasn’t it? She had an audition to go to, that’s what she should be focusing on, not some random guy on the subway.
She didn’t know who he was, and yet she felt compelled to speak with him.
---
The train slowed as it approached West 4th, and then lurched before coming to a complete stop. Sure enough, the girl got up from the bench, but seemed to be taking her time as she strolled over to the door and stood by it just before it was set to open.
Greg needed to act, before she walked out of the train, but he still hadn’t figured out what he would do.
Something tugged at him, and just as the doors seemed to stay closed for a moment too long, he stepped forward.
---
The doors opened and Greg saw the girl, he saw Leah, step out of the train. As she began walking away, heading down the platform towards the exit, she looked back at him and smiled. She seemed to move slowly, as if she was stalling, waiting, hoping for things to play out the way they were supposed to.
---
Greg needed to run up to her and say something, anything. He didn’t know why, but he understood that he didn’t need to know why.
And yet a part of him couldn’t come to terms with the idea of going after her, after a stranger he had noticed on the train. He couldn’t arrange his thoughts in a way that would justify doing something like that. It would be thought of as odd, as weird. Maybe she’d get scared.
And what about his presentation? He couldn’t just miss it to go after some girl.
So Greg, standing at the threshold of the train, his foot hovering right at the edge of the gap, smiled back at her and watched as she finally turned away and disappeared out of view.
The doors closed, the train began to pick up speed, and soon it was back in the darkness of the tunnel.
---
“I should have said something,” Leah decided, shaking her head at herself. “I wonder if I’ll ever see him again,” she wondered as she emerged onto the street and began to walk towards the direction of the studio.
---
“I should have said something,” Greg realized when it was already too late. He sighed and glanced at his watch. “But I’m sure I’ll see her again.”
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