subway glances

Three men and an attractive blond woman shared the pole on the subway car with me this morning. The three other men were checking out the blond, while I, unnoticed, checked out each of the men: a handsome 20-something who looked uncomfortable in his Wall Street suit; a middle-aged man with a mustache, balding pate and thick hair on his knuckles; and a pudgy pale-skinned schmoe in a jumpsuit with a boiler maintenance company's logo embroidered above the breast pocket. They all stood motionlessly, staring at the blonde who frowned dully at the Poetry in Motion poster above the door. She was taller than all of us.

A small brown hand broke the stillness, reaching around the back of the blond to grasp the pole tentatively. A tiny dark-skinned boy of 12, maybe15 at the most, squeezed between the balding man and the blond, his eyes darting cautiously around the group of us who ringed the pole. I imagined that his prepubescent curiosity had drawn him to move in closer to the tall blond at his back, but I soon came to the distinct impression that he was checking out each of the men around the pole, especially the balding man and me: sneaking peeks up and down our coat fronts, or pants, our hands, our faces and then looking away. He looked a little frightened. He also looked as though he wanted something from us, especially from the balding man with the mustache to whom he moved closer in increments, and it didn't seem to be our wallets. I imagined that his burgeoning sexuality compelled him, and it made me uncomfortable. He was so young and appeared to be from a Middle Eastern culture that might not allow him to speak about such feelings. The time on the subway display read 8:56 a.m., which made me wonder why he wasn't in school already and if he road the trains daily checking out the mature men he found there.

At the next stop, the balding man took a seat and I moved over near the door away from the boy. The boy then spotted a seat next to another man with a dark mustache and slid into it cautiously. The boy's feet barely touched the subway floor and his knee bounced nervously, rubbing against the leg of the man next to him. His eyes darted back and forth from the newspaper of the man next to him to me, his brows knit, his knee bobbing like a piston.

On the boy's bouncing knee thumped a briefcase that I had not noticed when he was standing at the pole. His tiny hands grasped the sides of a big, overstuffed leather briefcase, the kind a Wall Street executive would carry. It made no sense for the boy to carry a briefcase of this kind. It was inappropriate for a junior high student's needs. It was too large and packed full for this boy in particular.

The boy continued to glance nervously from the man at his side to me to the briefcase and I began to wonder if it was instead the briefcase itself that was causing him concern. For months, I hadn't thought of the MTA's worries about packages and bombs on the subway. But now the small nervous Middle-Eastern boy with the overstuffed adult briefcase and a look as though he desperately wanted to ask for some kind of help from the grown men on the subway around him instantly terrified me. As quickly as the man next to the boy could flip the page of his newspaper, I imagined the child being sent on an inescapable mission, set to be discharged exactly at 9 a.m. or as the train passed into the tunnel under the East River, ending with the subway car engulfed in a ball of flames.

The subway doors opened at Wall Street and I leapt off. Many of my friends have gotten off subway cars in a bout of the post-9/11 willies, but it's never happened to me before. The train passed into the tunnel before I could think to notify a conductor or the subway policeman in the car behind the boy. I waited for the next train to arrive and road it anxiously just two more stops to mine.

Now two hours later, nothing tragic on the radio or the web news pages, I can presume that the boy was no suicide bomber and that his briefcase was either an eccentricity of adolescent who was indeed cruising the grown men on the train, or maybe that of his father who had called him to bring it to his office downtown in a hurry, or something he had stolen on a different train, quickly transferring to ours before he was caught. Or a phantom sent to spook us with the daily worries of living in the City.