Night Train

It's nearly 3 a.m. and we're on the homeward-bound Q train.

We finished the book months ago, moved to Brooklyn, and began to forget what it felt like to stay up all night.

Tonight reminds us. The train takes an inexplicable route and winds up at the Pacific stop. A recorded voice says those dreaded words: "This is the last stop on this train." We shuffle out with the other weary night travelers. We wind our way through the Atlantic-Pacific terminal to the Atlantic Q platform to head deeper into Brooklyn. We wait, and wait, and wait. Behind us stand two girls, natural blondes in their early twenties. One has curves, the other an isosceles triangle nose. Someone has drawn a head-to-toe line down the center of the thinner girl, and caked her entire right side in gray-black mud. Or so it seems. For all the odd things we've seen in this city after midnight and all we know about not staring, this tempts us to crane our necks and look closer. Tempts. Before we look again, a man approaches and asks if she's ok. She's been wanting someone to ask this question. She tells him, loud enough for all the curious to hear, that she fell. Staring down the track to see if she could see the oncoming train - as we all do in NYC - she fell. Into the liquid muck that stagnates between the rails. Our train arrives. She limps onto it. Her friend sits. She loudly protests that she cannot; she is in pain. Black mud coats the right side of her hair. Chunks of it hang off her jeans, her jacket, her boots. It covers her face, her hands. It covers her friend's hands.

We spent a year lingering long enough to see such moments play out again and again. Interested less in those who travel through the night than those who labor during it, we rarely followed people like her and instead sought those such as the conductor on that train. We first thought, naively, that we'd interview nightshift workers before or after their shifts. But their shifts are so punishing, we soon learned, that it was cruel to expect them to talk to us afterwards. It was equally unreasonable, we also soon learned, to expect them to cut short their limited sleep to wake earlier and talk to us before their shift began. So we took on the extra burden instead of asking them to do it. We flipped our schedules to stay up nights and sleep days. We're married so it helped a great deal that we were both able to invert our schedules. (Though we did meet folks who said they worked nights because they wanted to avoid a spouse who worked days.) Some nights every conversation turned into an interview with an amazing person who you'll meet in the book. Other nights, we walked miles looking for people who would talk to us and found none. Most nights we waited hours till they had a spare moment. Often we scheduled and re-scheduled and re-scheduled interviews to accommodate them. We suffered (some of) the same things they suffer on the nightshift: weight gain, headaches, difficulty staying in touch with friends and family, sluggish bodies and minds, and so much more.

Back on the Q train, a drunk man unwisely tries to get the muddied girl to see the humor in it. She does not. She tells him she knows she's lucky to be alive, but that she really hurt herself. He goads her. She gets angry. Her friend smiles and promises her they'll get off at the next stop. The train stops. The door opens. And they are gone.