Madison Square Garden sits on top of Penn Station, so maybe that’s it? This sound is bigger, though. It’s a familiar sound, to a degree anyone who’s been to a stadium during a big game has heard something similar. The world pulls inside out and his stomach drops and his ears fill with a titanic, many-voiced roar. Everything in his vision seems to tilt, and the ugly ceiling fluorescents turn stark and the floor kind of… heaves? It happens fast. Which is why it’s so weird when he reaches the top of the escalator, and suddenly-the instant his foot touches the polished-concrete flooring-the whole world inverts. It’s hot on the platform and crowded on the escalator, but he feels fine. They know him as he was, and maybe who he is now. but that doesn’t matter, because they can’t understand. although, in the flurry of the moment, he cannot remember any of those people’s names or faces. He has colleagues and family members who think of this as exile, abandonment. In the city he will be completely on his own, free to sink or swim. The train stops and he’s first through the door. Something about a bridge accident, terrorism, just like 9/11? He’ll be living and working uptown, so it shouldn’t impact him too much-but still, it’s maybe not the best time to move here.īut when is it ever a good time to make a new life in New York City? He’ll cope.
As the train slows to a halt, people are murmuring and whispering, peering intently at their phones and tablets with worried looks on their faces. He’s really going to need those days, too, sounds like. Anyway, orientation is on Thursday, which gives him five days to get settled into his new life in New York.
They’re both going to be grad students at. The other was shipped ahead and will be waiting for him at his apartment up in Inwood, where his roommate already is, having arrived a few weeks before. Too busy with all the stuff people usually do when they’re about to reach their train stop: cleaning up the pretzel bags and plastic bottles of breakfast, stuffing his loose laptop power cord into a pocket of his messenger bag, making sure he’s gotten his suitcase down from the rack, then having a momentary panic attack before remembering that he’s only got one suitcase. He forgets his own name somewhere in the tunnel to Penn Station.
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