PARTNERS
by Wyld Blu
I know other people hate it, but the subway had always been a pleasant experience for me. Heading to work in the early morning or making my way home after a long, tiring day, I’d always managed to chill out and lose myself in a book, a crossword puzzle, or the tunes in my headphones. Then things changed.
I was halfway home when I noticed her, sitting across from me. Brown-skinned, upper 30s, with heavy-lidded, tired eyes and full red lips. Possibly Hispanic, possibly Middle Eastern, it was hard to tell. I was no lesbian, but I admired the full curves of her body beneath the green suit she wore, the graceful brown fingers curled around her black leather handbag.
She looked in my direction, brown eyes deep and large, and we gave each other the cursory glance of all disinterested subway riders and went about our respective business—I returning to my Su Doku puzzle and she arranging items in her handbag. I welcomed the familiar “zoning out” that my subway activities always gave me, the blurry relaxation that slowly seeped into my bones. I probably sighed.
A couple of stops later, I raised my eyes to find that the woman was looking at me. I was as friendly as the next girl, but as far as I was concerned, train etiquette required averted eyes and a tight focus on your own business. I stared back for a couple of seconds, felt a combination of annoyance and embarrassment at her refusal to avert her eyes, and decided to go back to my puzzle.
Only I couldn’t. I continued to stare at her, and she at me, as if we were opponents in a game of chicken and were determined to stare each other down. This was certainly not something I wanted to do, and I could feel my face growing hot with red shame. Why couldn’t I look away? What was odder, the other woman seemed equally uncomfortable, staring at me with a look of helplessness completely at odds with her fixed attention. I could feel every muscle in my body tightening, partly with the effort to turn away, and partly with fear. Blind, unfocused fear such as I hadn’t felt before in my life.
I tried repeatedly to look elsewhere, but without success. We maintained unbroken eye contact for several minutes that felt like an eternity. Then, just as unexpectedly, I was able to snap my eyes away.
I turned my attention vaguely but gratefully back to the puzzle, glad to be doing anything other than continuing that embarrassing staring contest. Mentally I berated myself while absent-mindedly filling in the boxes of the puzzle. What had I been thinking? What was wrong with me? Maybe I’d been working too hard, or not eating right. I definitely needed to make something healthy that evening.
I stopped doodling and looked at what I’d written, and my body went cold.
Instead of the usual numbers, I’d entered letters into the small boxes of the puzzle. They spelled out “SHE AND I ARE PARTNERS.”
Why had I done that? I hadn’t even been conscious of doing it, but it was unmistakably my handwriting.
My heart palpitating, I glanced briefly at the woman. She had taken an electronic organizer from her bag and was typing something into it. She stopped typing and stared at the screen, and her eyes widened in what looked like amazed confusion. She looked at me and I again dropped my eyes to my newspaper, the blood pounding in my ears.
My mind raced. What was going on? Whatever had prompted me to fill in my puzzle with that strange phrase had apparently also caused her to do the same, or something similar, with her organizer, and had probably also been responsible for the two of us staring at each other earlier. But the thought clarified nothing, only made me dizzy with incomprehension. There was simply nothing in my experience that explained what was happening to me. To us.
At the next stop, a sizeable crowd boarded the train. I found myself stuffing the newspaper into my bag and standing up, though I hadn’t planned to. The cold sensation returned, but it was only my own terrified reaction to what I was doing. There was absolutely no sense of being controlled, of being in an unusual mental state. I wasn’t fuzzy-headed or altered-feeling. I was simply doing things that I wasn’t trying to do, and finding myself unable to do what I wanted to do.
It was unsurprising, but still very alarming, that the woman then put her organizer away and also stood up. We both walked to a pole several feet away and stood holding on to it, our hands an inch or so apart, and looked at each other, again maintaining eye contact. We swayed with the rocking of the train, keeping our gazes fixed on each other. The woman’s mouth twitched, and I could see the tips of her brown fingers turning white with strain; apparently, she was trying desperately to let go of the pole, and failing.
Then, in the same instant, we both opened our mouths and spoke the same word:
“Partners.”
We continued staring, and her eyes showed all the terror and bewilderment that I was feeling. I wanted to scream for help, push myself away from the pole, run through the crowded car, but all I could do was stand there. And look. Something had us in its grip, had us trapped and helpless and frightened beyond belief, and no one around us was even remotely aware that this was happening.
With a look of terror in her own eyes, the woman leaned forward toward me. I flinched inwardly, but outwardly I stood completely still. She put her mouth to my ear and whispered in a deep throaty voice, “We’re partners.”
The simple statement, repetitive as it was by this point, filled me with a cold dread worse than anything I’d ever felt before in my life. The total mystery as to how and why this was happening made the situation infinitely worse. All sorts of little incidental things that I couldn’t even process added to my confusion and fear, like the way the “sss” at the end of her statement hissed in my ear.
I found myself leaning forward in turn and whispering into her ear, “We’ll always be partners, from now on.” My own words thudded in my ears like a gong. I could feel the woman’s face stiffening as I said them.
I was still wrapping my brain around what I’d just said when she leaned in again and added, “For the rest of our lives.” With this, her fingers and mine slid and brushed together on the pole, and remained touching. I felt an almost laughable desire to look around and see whether any of the other passengers had noticed that we were now practically holding hands, but our gazes were locked and would not be deflected in the slightest degree.
We stood staring into each other’s eyes for the next four stops, the woman’s face a mask of utter fear, which I certainly felt myself. At the fifth stop, the woman leaned close again and whispered, “We’ll see each other again, very soon.” Then the doors opened, and she seemed to panic. She gasped, tore her hand from the pole, clutched her bag, and bounded away from me. Other passengers glanced at her with puzzlement but parted to let her through.
Practically sobbing, she rushed through the closing doors and across the platform. I still couldn’t move.
As the train pulled away, I saw the brown legs disappearing frantically up the stairs as my “partner” fled the station.
“Very, very soon,” I said aloud, and suddenly had total control of my body again. I gasped, dropping my hand from the pole and putting it over my mouth. I was totally speechless, totally lost, totally without the ability to react to the experience. What had happened, what she and I had said and done, what was implied by our unwilling words to each other was simply too huge to absorb or deal with.
My legs didn’t stop shaking for hours.
Back at home, I stumbled through the door, threw down my bag and keys, and burst into the bathroom. I splashed cold water on my face and stared at myself in the mirror. I looked even more terrified than I still felt, and this only scared me more. And somehow I felt instantly convinced that I would not be able to tell anyone what had happened, not be able to write it down even for myself. I just knew.
I slept, but poorly. I didn’t dream about the encounter on the train, but my dreams were dark and disturbing all the same. In each of them, I either couuldn’t move or found myself moving in a way I didn’t wish to, or I was saying things I didn’t want to say. I didn’t remember, on waking, what I had said in the dreams, but my words had terrified me.
Several days passed without incident. I went to work and came home, and though I felt uneasy and was filled with a sense of dread, nothing out of the ordinary happened, until one morning I found myself leaving the train a few stops before my usual work stop. Why was I doing this? Where was I going? I naturally feared the worst, but could do nothing to stop myself.
I slowly left the train station, walked north for two blocks, and went into a big chain book store. I stepped on the escalator, rode up to the second floor, walked through the children’s books section, and headed into the women’s restroom. I entered an empty stall, leaving the door unlocked, and stood facing the door.
For what must have been ten or fifteen minutes, I simply stood, silently, doing nothing.
Then steps echoed on the restroom floor. My heart pounded and my whole body went cold.
The brown-skinned woman walked into the stall, her eyes widening with fear as she saw me. She locked the door behind her, turned to face me, and raised her hands so that her palms were facing me. I made a painful effort to prevent my own hands from rising to meet hers, but rise they did, until our palms were touching. Our eyes, as before on the subway, were locked into an unbreakable mutual stare. I screamed wildly in my mind. I stood silently in the stall.
We laced our fingers together, gripped each other’s hands, leaned our heads forward so that our foreheads and noses were touching, and at the same moment spoke the same words aloud:
“Let’s get started.”