M

A meditation on elections, time, and people

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I’m thinking of the morning after the 2016 presidential election. What I remember most clearly is the mechanical whoosh of the M Train outside my window. I used to live under a bridge, not unlike a troll. It was a sound I was accustomed to. But it struck me as quite scandalous that morning, what with its bureaucratic nonchalance, the way it continued to run like nothing was out of the ordinary. It seemed an inappropriate intrusion from a separate universe.

I also recall lying in bed next to Ivan after having not slept. The bed was a mattress on the floor in my apartment in Ridgewood, Queens. I was a young journalist, which is why I didn’t have a bed frame. Ivan was a guy I met, somehow. I don’t remember how. I don’t even remember if his name was Ivan. I do remember that this, spending the morning after the election together, was our second date of sorts, and that it had happened by chance. He’d run into me at the coffee shop I used to write in every day. He was wearing a thrifted knit sweater that featured an enormous tabby cat made of yarn stitched into it, and had called out “Fitz!” from across the room, turning all the heads. He was a theatrical person, Ivan. 

Ivan called me Fitz, short for Fitzgerald, because I’d told him I was a writer. I was not convinced at all by this nickname. Like most people on earth, he hadn’t read anything I’d written. Was it a bit mocking? Well, I didn’t contest it. As a gay man in New York City, I was used to flings of a few months, weeks, or days having their little inconsequential quirks that at least distinguished one from the other. I figured we wouldn’t be seeing each other again after this day (and indeed, we wouldn’t), so I would simply be Fitz for another six hours or so. 

Ivan? He was a handsome, platinum blond with rosy cheeks and warm hands from Russia. Like the other handful of Russians I knew, he spoke English without a detectable Russian accent. I liked the spacing between his teeth and his eyebrows that were darker than his hair. Russia either was or wasn’t a major talking point at the time, so we either made election interference jokes, or we didn’t. The point is, I liked Ivan just fine, we’d had a good if not forgettable first date. But running into each other on Election Day lent us a greatly enhanced affinity for each other. I recall lying on my mattress with him, clinging to each other like flotsam after a shipwreck. There are days when the nebulous concept of “being a person living through history” becomes painfully, physically acute, days that can inspire unease and even outright panic in some individuals, not naming any names, days when acquaintances are more likely to regard and speak to each other like lovers or old war buddies, or both. 

I’m thinking of that morning, of Ivan, of me not sleeping, of the M Train’s dutiful halting and lurching from the Seneca Avenue Station, because it was eight years ago, a fact that beggars belief, because I think about the gentle (yes, it was gentle despite the metallic nature of it) sound of the M Train from that morning quite a lot, it having become the sound of time moving along despite whatever protestations or outrages might be happening below or within it, and because Ivan and I were small; we were small people living small lives, a fact that was incredibly apparent that morning, and was not overall enjoyable to experience. 

“Whatcha working on, Fitz?” Ivan had asked me after announcing his presence to the coffee shop, and I didn’t want to tell him I was working on a column for The Guardian about how the so-called “Latino vote” had failed to materialize to save us, so I’d said, “Eh, election stuff,” and he’d said, “right,” and we’d left it at that. It was my job at the time to be outraged. I didn’t really know who read these pieces or if they accomplished anything. That wasn’t really something I thought about. I thought about getting new bylines, making rent that month, answering emails, things of that nature. I figured I had my job, and I was to do that job, and at some point perhaps this, the doing of the job, would eventually yield me a bed frame.

There were days I enjoyed being nobody, and days I did not. At night, in my apartment that was sort of under a bridge, the M Train would hum me to sleep. It was comforting to imagine the people in it at late hours of the night on weekdays, other nobodies, imagine who they were and where they were going. 

The New York City subway is sort of a miracle, isn’t it? I grew up in rural Oklahoma, a state where the only people without cars are children, the utterly destitute, or the wildly eccentric. It’s been the case in more than one American city I’ve visited that my guide, whoever it happened to be, would explain how they nearly built a subway system here, but the bus lobby or the automobile industry had killed it in its cradle. Not so in New York City, which boasts the most-used public transit system in the Western world, ferrying millions of lives every day to wherever it is they’re going

I remember the very first day I arrived in New York City as a resident, I’d gone down into Union Square Station, and a reporter had shoved a microphone in my face and asked me, “How do you feel about the L Train shutdown?” and I stared dumbfounded into the camera and said, “I’m new here,” an interaction that immediately affirmed how special and stupid New York can make you feel. 

But, yes, the New York City subway, it’s wild that it exists, isn’t it? I’m trying to imagine such an ambitious undertaking today, trying to picture our government announcing it, trying to picture workers digging up sediment, trying to picture something as beautiful and good as the New York City subway system taking shape over many mornings and afternoons, and I simply can’t do so, the muscle in my imagination for such things having well and truly atrophied, and so I’m left to marvel that, at some point in history, we allocated mammoth time and resources to build something worth building in this country. Yes, some of the stations look like shit, but nevertheless. 

Ivan and I ate Thai food for lunch, after we finally scraped ourselves off the mattress. Out in the real world, huge questions burdened the air. Where are we headed? What’s going to happen? Will we be okay? There wasn’t room for much else, and even people silently plodding along on the sidewalk seemed to be saying something about these questions with their hunched shoulders. It was anxious, dreary, unacceptable, at times even thrilling in its uncertainty. All together, an unpleasant melange of sensations. 

“It’s so fucked up.”

“Yeah.”

On the internet, talk was much loftier, grandiose, impassioned. Solidarity. Organize. Voters. Coalitions. Demographics. Class struggle. Terms that contained many, many lives within them, but lives that nonetheless seemed not quite tangible, like there was no dirt under their fingernails, and all I could picture was amorphous masses with plights, moving like schools of fish with some unifying grievance animating them. Either way, there was no shortage of answers on social media about what should happen, about what went wrong, about how to feel. I had some of them, too. Answers. That was part of doing my job. 

Today, in a different coffee shop in a different neighborhood from eight years ago, I’m thinking of the morning after the 2016 election. I’m not sure if it’s a comfort or an act of self-flagellation. I only know there’s something in it I’m supposed to think about, even if I can’t quite locate what that something is. Perhaps I’m meant to revisit some of those huge questions. If I could go back to that day, how would I have answered them? Will we be okay? Yes and no. 

Perhaps I’m meant to consider Ivan and I, two little people clinging for dear life to each other for a few hours in the riptides of forces larger than us. It’s a defining sentiment that strings together multiple calamitous events: people in the wake of social upheaval desperately reaching for each other, the exchange of I love you texts between friends, or, How are you holding up? I’m thinking of you. I’m here. These are tender moments, but also reminders of how much of recent memory has felt like a spectator’s affair. We watch, we react, we include lines like “hope you’re doing well, all things considered” in emails, smile and offer false little laughs over Zoom to statements like, “I’m hanging in there!” Sure, sure.

Or maybe, and this is the most likely case, I think, I’m supposed to decipher what the gentle whoosh of the M Train is saying to me, that sound I’ve kept over the years and return to so often as the audio motif of the times I was born into, times that, in the scope of human history, I suppose aren’t more or less turbulent than other times, with the difference being that these times are mine, and they are happening to me, one of the many little people trying to live in a house with giants stomping furiously about, and I have the opportunity to register my complaint, and so I do so. 

After lunch, Ivan boarded the train. We hugged and kissed, “take care of yourself,” and left each other to the next eight years of our lives, years we couldn’t quite picture then, and I returned to the coffee shop I always sat in where I doubtlessly stared at a blank document for some thirty minutes before packing up, and where, as in my apartment, the intermittent whoosh of the M Train could be heard, a sound I really do think of quite often, a sound that means many different things to me (how frustrating, there never seems to be a clean, unifying significance to anything): the sound of the world betraying you by lumbering on, the sound of bureaucratic human designs, the sound of what we can accomplish when we decide to accomplish it, the sound of small people like me, going somewhere. 

What a system.