The New Commuter Finds The City

The next day was, as Derrida might say, purely supplementary. 

I got up early in our hotel room in Jersey City, and before the rest had even gotten to breakfast, I got dressed and made a quick cup of coffee i in the room. Then left the room, by myself, and using the elevator, went down to the reception area on the second floor, which had a great view down the river. Then I used the escalators from there down to the ground level of the pier, where I went through the glass revolving doors and out on to sidewalk that runs in front of the buildings along the river.

I was carrying, slung over my shoulder, a plastic tube, about three inches in diameter and about twenty-four inches long. It was turquoise with a turquoise cap, and a black strap over my shoulder. I had carried it with me as luggage on the plane from Arizona, and then in the car up to Jersey City into the hotel room. Finally it was time to put it into action.

I took it with me as I found the entrance to the PATH station, with its glass doors lobby. It was quite a line at the ticket machine. It took me five minutes to get a ticket, but I waited patiently---no point in being egotistical about the waiting that all of us were enduring. Nobody is better or worse than anyone else, when you are standing in a line like that, waiting for the machine to process the credit and debit cards.

Finally I got my ticket and went down the escalators to the platform, finding the one to go into the city, and not the one go towards Journal Square in Newark, although I have nothing against Newark. Today I was going into the City. I was commuting. Just like everyone else. It wasn't even play acting. It was real, bona fide, just like the old days. It felt beautiful to do that, and come up out into the station by the Oculus, like everyone else, and make my way up the small steps into the main sunlit cathedral area. Without lingering---lingering would have broken the flow---I kept going with the people around me and crossed the Oculus in laminar flow, and went into the hallway that led to the Number 4 Train.

I went down the long hallways, the succession of them, following one sign up and down stair cases like through a maze and finally got to the Number 4 train. I found the platform for the direction leading down to the tip of Manhattan, and I caught the train. It was half full, and easy to find a seat with the turquoise plastic tube. In a few stops we had come to the tip of the island. But I didn't get off here. I was going to a new place, on this new commute. It was a place I had never commuted to by subway. For this one day at least I was commuting into Brooklyn.