So one day on his way to work this guy takes a dive in front of an oncoming train. Maybe he's fallen asleep mid-step (reasonable in the early rush) or given up (reasonable on way to boring job as a middle manager). What's certain is that the guy comes to and he's a ghost floating above this black and white sign that reads Broadway-Lafayette, looking at himself dead smushed split apart on the ground.
The guy floats up off the track and past the platform where folks are already gathering to gape and freak, floats up out through people toward the exit. From a pedestrian perspective, he's glad to discover, New York subways properly accommodate those who float. It's something he hadn't noticed.
The light hits his eyes like he's hung over but also like it won't stick, like it's going through him. When he gets home no one's there and he hangs out in the kids' rooms a while, thinking how their eyes light up unconditionally when they see him, thinking about his wife when she has something teasing to say to him that reads him too well to deny but still cuts a little but in the end is mostly just funny and goddamn when someone gets you. It hits him what he's done and he tries to conjure some way to get back to life with them but he-of-course-cannot reverse-the-cruel-ravages-of-time-Janus-though-he-may-be.
No one's ever home and every day the guy tries to occupy himself with something different, turns on the radio to listen to that bitch Imus and thinks about the off-season moves of the Yankees or those other jokers, thinks about football and hockey and what a poor substitute they are for the timeless evening of a decent ballgame and the kids arguing through the walls of their adjacent rooms. The leaves are everywhere, instant bullshit metaphors that they are and he makes himself a sandwich, puts on an old Billy Joel record (Piano Man I think), watches daytime TV. But no matter what he does, he's back to thinking about his wife and kids, wondering if their purgatory (if necessary) will be the same as his and how to occupy that time in the meantime. And sometimes his old friends, his mom, his brothers and sisters.
No one ever comes home and whenever he goes out it's fun, I mean, he can go to the movies and see concerts or Yankee games for free, sneak into people's hotel rooms while they're sleeping and watch them sleep or fuck or fight undetected. He can float above the city, its lights curving effortlessly into the sky at night like staccato pounding through Billy Joel's fingers, out over the cold fuck Atlantic, out into space. He's a master, he's in control, like Joe Torre or Derek Jeter or the Babe, or even Billy Joel himself.
It's always bothered me, man, that you turned out to be the token friend who's dead. It bothers me because your work track reminds me so much of my own, because your detachment from the day-to-day is something I find so intuitive. It bothers me because you were trying to cut your cholesterol, because you had little ones to live for, because there was so much that you seemed into, even though there was obviously so much you couldn't even pretend to give a shit about.
It bothers me because you gave me your records, and I just thought you'd given them up for CDs.
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