Lone Hero

It was a day like every other. On this day, though, the rain over the city was fierce. Harold approached the entrance to the subway station with a quickened pace, like all the other commuters congregating there. As if in a synchronized waterfall, he collapsed his umbrella along his decent down the stairs as part of the perpetually cresting wave. Reaching the turnstiles below, he passed through and walked along the subway platform toward its far end. Harold was not one for crowds, and city life did not suit him well. But as the city’s chief subway system architect, his career left him limited choice. And over the years he had come to cope with his quietly misplaced existence.

There he stood, waiting on the periphery for the train. As the minutes ticked by, the sounds of construction from the adjacent track and the clamor of the growing crowd receded from Harold’s attention. Instead, his mind began to wander, focusing elsewhere. It was subtle at first but quickly grew more pressing. He realized he could clearly discern the soft but violent buzz of electricity. Listening closer he could hear it accompanied by a sporadic crackle. From years on the job, the sound was familiar to him. His eyes darted toward the metal edge of the subway platform along the tracks. There he could see subtle wisps of smoke gently rising. Almost instinctively his eyes darted to the other end of the platform. To his horror, he could see evidence of the smoke wafting along its entire length. In his years of experience, this could mean only one thing. When the train arrived and passengers stepped from the car’s metal interior, they would contact the electrified metal edge and be killed. His mind now raced into unfamiliar territory. Could he somehow find a call station? Could he possibly contact the construction crew nearby? He knew the car would pass into the station from his end of the platform. Could he somehow flag the driver and give warning? By this time, Harold heard an ominous sound. The train was approaching, and approaching rapidly. The old man’s heart raced and his throat clenched. Public spectacle was not a part of his identity, but he knew that he had to act. With a startling jolt, the train whizzed past, decelerating as it went. Harold jogged toward the arriving train. His palms sweat as he raised and oriented his umbrella en route. Then in an elegantly fluid motion, he thrust the umbrella at the subway cars rushing past. Its metal tip landed on the electrified platform edge as the handle found its mark against the metal side of the train. In an instant, the scene changed. The umbrella disappeared into a brilliant electrical flash. Roiling smoke hurriedly leapt from the brilliant light, twirling along the air currents of the track. The blinding and deafening arc filled the station. After a moment, the dimmed lights of the train car cut out and the arc extinguished. The train began breaking more suddenly, with an unusual grinding sound that finally brought it to rest.

Harold sat decidedly upright in his chair. After a day of missed work and a hellishly prominent return home, he found himself a continued center of attention. This was terribly unwelcome. The television was tuned to the news, and the main story featured a train car with a long ugly scar along its side. It then showed a coiled wire lying sloppily across a scorched railing. And finally it showed what poor Harold dreaded most of all, the footage of himself refusing to grant an interview. He read the caption beneath, “Humble Hero.” The story went on to elaborate as the image from his city ID badge was then emblazoned across the screen. The caption continued, “Harold Minor, Hero of Crossroads Station.”

The next morning, Harold walked to another nearby subway station. He hoped for a calm day like any other, knowing he could take no more. He entered and found the quiet end of the platform where few bothered to venture. There he waited for the train to arrive.

The first indication of the train’s approach was the familiar chirping sound emanating from the rails. It sounded strangely frenetic, though, for a train preparing to a stop. These sounds were more like those of an express, somehow on the local track. With eyes tightly closed, Harold wished this not be so. He did his best to squelch the nagging thoughts of disaster from his mind, as he basked in the cacophony of the squealing rails. And then the breeze from the tunnel began. It grew stronger and stronger, to a level that was clearly too extreme for a station stop. He opened his eyes to see hoards of travelers pressing up to and beyond the yellow safety boundary at the platform’s edge. His mind’s eye flashed an image of panicked commuters pushing each other into the irregular edges of the cars speeding past. And the feeling for action grew, pressing Harold to rise to the occasion. With only seconds before calamity, he began running along the edge of the subway platform, his arms outstretched and flailing.

“Get back! Get back!” he screamed. The flagrant action immediately caught attention as he advanced along the crowd. Elements within the horde could be heard in affirmation of the “subway guy,” and the group began to retreat in an orderly flow from the edge. Just as the crowd had yielded the space for him, Harold moved from the subway cars now shooting past the stop. In a blaze of spiraling dust, whirling trash and the crush of the mob, the train whizzed through the station with no damage done.

Harold stood next to the television. As the tube warmed, the image of an aged transit worker appeared on the screen. Gus was often guilty of mistakes on the job, though never before this severe. And then appeared Harold’s picture, the same forced grin on his badge that had graced the screen the night before. Harold left the volume knob inaudibly low as his shoulders sagged.

The next morning, Harold started the day with a conscious break from his routine. Wearing a wide-rimmed hat and avoiding the subway completely, he walked some blocks from his eastside apartment to a major thoroughfare. There he expected to catch a taxi for alternative transportation to work. At the corner already stood two well-dressed men, who were engrossed in conversation as they also waited for their own taxi.

“I don’t believe it. Too convenient for one guy to be at the right place twice in a row,” one of the men was overheard to say.

“Yeah, it’ll turn out to be a ploy by a cab company to drum up ridership,” replied the other sardonically.

“Or just another disgruntled city employee,” the first followed, with a self-acknowledging guffaw.

Meanwhile two cabs had approached. Harold approached the second and got in. After announcing his destination, he hoped to relax in the presumptive solitude of the back seat. But the portly driver at the helm failed utterly to appreciate that.

“I tell ya, I’m having a day you wouldn’t believe.”

Harold did his best to ignore politely.

“It’s been such a busy morning with all the problems on the subway. And the stress is getting’ to me. It’s like King Kong’s got me in his fist. … All mornin’ my chest is aching and I fell, well, like absolute crap.”

On and on the one-sided conversation went, until, to Harold’s surprise, it ended suddenly. The increasing strain in the cabbie’s voice just prior sparked worry in the passenger’s mind.

“Hey, you ok? You ok up there??” Harold pleaded. Rather than a long-winding answer, instead came only a sickly gasps for air.

“Hey! Hey!” Harold screamed from the back, as the cab continued rolling down the road.

Slowly gliding across lanes of traffic, the car gently scuffed against the median barrier between opposing lanes as it continued barreling forward. The impact jostled a cane from the front passenger’s seat to within reach of the small port between the driver and passenger compartments. Thinking quickly on how to respond to the incapacitated driver, Harold reached his arm through the port and grabbed the cane by its handle. He firmly swung it over into the driver’s side foot well. Despite the rough travel as the side of the car continued dragging against the concrete center divider, Harold carefully oriented the cane along the driver’s limp leg and onto the brake pedal. Certain that it had landed on its mark, he pressed sharply. The car came to a sudden, screeching halt. Having braced for the jarring deceleration, Harold next flipped the cane upward and unlatched the door lock. In full view of astonished onlookers on the bustling sidewalks, he then hurriedly jumped from the back seat on the passenger’s side. Now in the street, he opened the front door and lunged into the car. And once inside, he grasped the gearshift and slammed the slowly crawling car into park. Its advance came to an abrupt final stop. And the flabbergasted crowd burst immediately into a round of cheer and applause.

That night, Harold watched only briefly as the familiar sight of his badge’s portrait again appeared across the city.

The next morning, Harold made his way again to the Crossroads Station platform. Wearing another hat, he again waited for the train. A slight consolation to his good deeds was the anonymity of city life. Doing his best to remain out of sight, Harold quietly waited on the secluded end of the platform, behind the other awaiting passengers. He carefully hovered out of their view.

Seconds passed, stretching into minutes. Harold’s paranoid stance relaxed. Today was calm. No disaster was emerging. No mishap was to unfold. No one, today, would swarm around him, squawking questions, flashing pictures, shouting his name. Today was back to the normal routine.

Harold’s easy glance swept along the people on the platform. It was out of the corner of his eye that he saw the motion. At the platform’s far end, a disheveled mother stood staring intently at a wall-mounted subway map. The baby stroller directly behind her, meanwhile, had inched its pivoting wheels forward and was now beginning to roll. With the station’s construction, the temporary steel plating on the floor carried a slight pitch downward toward the tracks.

Again Harold’s old heart raced. Again he could feel the burden to act. But as he struggled to cope with this situation, he was consumed with an inner exhaustion. The social fatigue had weighed heavily on him.

“Look!” he cried out. Facing the stroller, he meekly raised an arm.

“Hey!” a voice called out.

“Hey, it’s Subway Man,” shouted someone else.

“It’s that guy from the news.”

“The hero!”

As the stroller continued unseen, a murmur shot across the station. Harold recoiled at the attention now focusing his way. He choked in his next attempt to cry out. Meanwhile, erratic cheering had broken out among the crowd, which soon grew to a unanimous applause.

Harold wheezed, feebly pointing toward the rolling stroller. The oblivious crowd continued their rambunctious ovation, as the stroller only gained speed. Harold watched, his eyes unflinching from the bouncing bassinet, as it continued at increasing rate toward the open tracks.

Soon, another sound began to compete within the station. The train’s approach was now discernable above the roaring crowd.

Harold struggled. He set his mind to focus on what he knew he must do. He pushed the crowd from his thoughts and mustered the wherewithal for a moment of composure.

“Look!” he shouted again, reasserting his arm to point in the direction of the lost stroller. The crowd’s attention, almost in unison, refocused on the impending tragedy. The stroller was now rolling at a speedy pace and beyond the reach of any bystander. Its left wheels first snagged the metal edge of the subway platform, before the right wheels briefly swung around to catch up. The stroller then toppled end-over-end onto the rumbling tracks.

“Go!”

“Get it!”

“Hurry!!!”

“What are you waiting for??”

That night, Harold did not turn on the news.

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