She says to him, out of the blue of her square sunglasses, "What are you thinking?"
He answers, "In the background is this twitch in my leg. I need to know what it means, but I can't let myself think about that because I'll obsess over it and that leads to the Internet and doctor visits and my life just vanishes. So I think instead about this R.E.M. concert at the Wang Center and this red-haired girl who danced next to me. I think she was the one, you know. I just can't shake that feeling. I was only twenty-two. Ten years ago. I don't know. And I'm not a huge fan of subways. It reminds me of the state of my life, of being buried alive. So I'm riding it to the end and back and somewhere my therapist waits for me. This is what I'm paying her for. Crazy, huh?"
Across from each other in the swaying subway car, they roll in opposite synchronicity, neither one holding on. It's early afternoon. No one sits near them. "And what am I thinking?" she asks.
"I'm not sure. I'm not really fond of those free-spirited, eccentric women like Isadora Duncan or Ben Franklin. And what else but that kind of woman would ask a stranger on a subway 'What are you thinking?'"
"I was thinking this would be such a cool story to tell our kids when they ask us how we met."
"See. There you go."
"And there you were, thinkin' the same thing, a soul mate stranger lost." She pulls the tiniest black I-Pod out of her pocket, presses buttons, and it throws a bluish-gray glow between them. She pushes it toward him so he can read the window. The lights of the subway flicker. Her finger circles the I-Pod wheel, spinning through song after song, all R.E.M.. The I-Pod disappears back into her pocket.
"The other thing my OCD desires is perfection," he says. "Not in me. In others. Like a wrinkle on a sheet, your imperfections would drive me insane."
"To love wrinkles or find an unwrinklable sheet. Those are your choices?"
"Yes. Only those."
"Is that another thing you got?" she asks. "Either-or thinking?"
"And a million other things."
Her blue lenses catch his face, freeze it, and that's the truth of him there, moving on subways and going nowhere. "My stop is coming up," she says. "Don't go back. Leave that therapist with her arms crossed and her foot tapping at the platform, okay? Come with me."
"Leave her? What's in it for you? I don't get it."
"You. If I could make you love me, then . . . ."
"Then what? I have no idea what you are thinking. With your questions. Your offers."
"Did your therapist ever say to you `vague treatment goals, vague outcomes'? No? Hmm. Love is like that. The men I meet, well, I never know what leads to love with them."
"That's not an answer. You must want things."
"Yes. Come with me. You are buried alive here. There will always be something you are afraid of, always be that therapist waiting. I know. That track is never-ending. You're so honest with me. No one is like that. No one." She stands up; the subway slows. "Come on. We can hold hands. Think of that, of rising into the light." She holds out her hand.
He doesn't reach for it. "You wear sunglasses in the subway," he says.
"The better to stare and not be noticed."
The doors open. She sings R.E.M. with perfect pitch. She's backing up through the doors. "This is it," she says, still reaching.
He takes it. She pulls him through the doors. This is how they met. The subway's whoosh leaves an absence that's filled with the echo of its leaving, a flush of wind. He gulps at the air, looks for the stairs and the shafts of dusty light. She holds him there, turns him toward her, removes her blue sunglasses. She has the tiniest features that come to elfin points—her nose, her ears, the corner of her mouth; her eyes flicker from a dark green to brown, back again. He's forgotten the underground crypt that pushes against him, crushing breaths and life. And she wrinkles his hand in hers, the fingers bent against each other. She wraps her arms around him, and he does not remember how much he hates to be held; instead, whenever they embrace, he finds that same flush, the same sense of one life rushing away and another other one coming to grab hold.
