FedEx

Gustave Doré. It Was Wondrous Cold. Wood engraving from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1877).

Melo put me on the Newark Airport shuttle, and my alarm startled me at 3:15 a.m. I pulled the coffee close so that the steam melted my face, and I peered through the rusty fire escape and down upon the frozen street illuminated by the menacing florescent signs in the window of the beauty salon. I tried doing pushups, but lay upon the floor without purpose.

I stared at the postcards on the refrigerator that my ex-girlfriend had been sending me from around the country. The first was of the St. Louis Arch, the Iowa Corn Palace followed, and a week later I received one from the Badlands of South Dakota. She simply signed her name, inviting me to guess the details of her journey. Every week, I'd find a new one inside my mailbox, and I picked up magnets at the nearby hardware store and arranged them as if somebody were going to swing by my apartment and view them as evidence of a life that no one had fathomed. Seattle, Portland, Crater Lake, Redwood National Park, Yosemite.

I knotted my steel-toe shoes, and in the mirror I psyched myself up for potential confrontation. I double-checked that my keys were in my pocket and exited my apartment, and I was swallowed by the night. I will bite your fucking face off if you block my path. My need to believe in the ability to perform violence felt futile.

It was fifteen degrees, and I caught myself as I slid on patches of ice. I encountered no people on the way to the train. I descended into the earth, and I was the sole human on the platform other than the homeless man mummified in blankets and propped against the tile wall. Two people were knocked out on my subway car. My legs were spread and my elbows stabbed into my knees in a posture I'd learned exhibited the fatigued confidence of a man who belongs in the city, and I looked up from "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" with annoyed disinterest and held eye contact with the guy in a hooded sweatshirt who stepped onto the train at Atlantic Avenue. Thankfully, he walked to the other end of the car and dropped into the plastic seat. The previous week, Roland showed up on the conveyor belt and said that on the way to work he opened his eyes and some guy was smiling at him and masturbating.

"What did you do?"

"I beat his ass—what do you think? Little bitch was trying to crawl away with his pants falling off. 'I'm sorry. I'm sorry.' You goddamn right you're sorry, motherfucker."

We all burst into laughter. Roland's forearms were monstrous. He was younger than I was, had three kids and said he was waiting to be called back by the MTA for a job as a bus driver.

"I need to get the fuck up out of here."

We all lived it. And beating a subway pervert half to death would have felt like a gratifying counterbalance to the demoralization of working at FedEx. I attempted to stretch out my back, and I returned to Coleridge. At Dekalb Avenue, the doors of the Q train opened, and I swept the platform, and thankfully nobody entered the car. The train crawled over the Manhattan Bridge, and through the window I saw the skyscrapers against the clouds and thought of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and there was a boat upon the East River and the Statue of Liberty in the distance, and then we were pulled down into the bowels of the city. We were dragged through the darkness and jerked to stops where the doors bonged open at the desolate platforms.

By 4:45, I was walking with a handful of keys to select a small Grumman from 33rd Street. You had to be careful because sometimes prostitutes broke...