When Did We Start?

by Giuseppe Grassi

                                                                                                                           # Morning

Billy wondered if those caricatured figures drawn in just five seconds might take her back to the archaeology studies she abandoned. But even now that she wasn’t a servant to an alma mater that, one day or another, would haunt her with its dogmas, and with that Student loan to repay, she could call herself free?

Graffiti then, drawn on the subway walls by guys who were more trying to overcome boredom than win a challenge. The platform on 135^th street was pregnant with the silence of the crowd waiting to reach downtown. Someone had voluntarily decided to jump too early on the train, and from the mutterings of the stranded customers, it seemed that the only plausible reason was to annoy the rest of the population.

Lions, almost all of them, those splashed on the walls, Billy noticed, in one way or another. Was there any psychological relevance to draw that specific animal? Some subconscious reminiscence?

Billy didn’t believe so. Freudian or Jungian theories had to be re-examined in the light of the pressure that consumer society has been imprinting on people’s subconscious for decades. Although, Billy remembered an old friend getting excited about a video of a rat-like animal that he said was the smartest of all, but even able to take on a male lion and bite his balls off. Or so he said.

But what would Billy draw instead? Maybe a chicken. Just to provoke. “A chicken descended from a raptor,” she would have told to make those who loved her smile, and send those who wanted to hurt on the wrong track.

But Sunday is not day for this kind of thoughts. A gloomy Sunday, as her namesake Billie kept singing through her earphones. Yep, an anonymous Sunday in May, removed for the fact that the Yankees had won, again.

Something that in the past would have made everyone tirelessly happy, but in times like these gave the same smiles as when the game was lost but the beer was good.

The measure of decay of the society should be that it takes more than someone’s suicide to make us sad and more than a Yankee victory to make us happy.

So, finished with that modern gallery of cave paintings, Billy leaned with her backpack on one of the plasma screens that claimed the exploits of contemporary heroes, not too different from the old ones, only differently dressed.

Through the grates of the ceiling a sleet of dust and petals fell from some cherry trees blooming on Columbus Avenue. But when the loudspeaker announced the arrival of the train everything began to flow again. Nothing strange that the price of a lifetime had been worth only 25 minutes of delay and $3.50 of a ticket. Because Billy was certain, the ticket had been paid.

The suicide, for Billy, was no last act of revenge on society, no last-ditch attempt to be seen, no last act of rebellion. On the contrary, the last act of submission. “I’ll step aside and even pay your fucking ticket, just don’t ask me anything else.” Who don’t pay the ticket don’t commit suicide. And finally, for someone had always paid, for someone like Billy, that fact began to make sense.

                                                                                                                        # Afternoon

“The sun goes down

Like your feeling about this town

Spring you used to call her a day before

And just now you can’t take no more

But if this city is too small for you

What the heaven remains to do

The Paradox, what else?

Or left them drive you to hell

Not a town a city or a Metropolis fits your freedom,

But a roof on your head

In the middle of nowhere”

The time for a pee was long enough for Billy to read that poem written by someone named Roman on the wall of the Bryant Park public restroom. But what struck Billy was not the profundity or the tunefulness of the text, but that itwas written in the women's latrine and, as far as she knew, Roman was a man's name. But a sneeze from a man sitting in a corner, who did not even try to cover his face, who did not even try to avoid involving someone else, brought her back to the present. It’s true, we’re out, in the open, at River Side Park. But it’s also true that we are in the second year of an avian pandemic, resilient, as muchas that fixed thought that Billy carried from the subway. Paradoxical and sweet was the message the subway driver had announced to the crowd: "Optimistic!". It was the word of the day. Paradoxical, given the "incident" that had cost a life;and sweet, like the attempt to discourage and cheer up possible copycats with the analytical definition taken from the Oxford Dictionary.

Billy didn't understand it, just as she didn't understand how that couple sitting down to eat in the same place where others had sneezed could enjoy the shade of the oleanders and the breeze from the Hudson reaching the Upper West Side terrace.

Resuming her walk, Billy thought that, after all, one cannot be bothered by something one doesn’t know. As much as you cannot be frightened by something you know too well. Ignorance and knowledge. At the extreme the eternal salvation?

Perhaps knowing a little, peeking through a doorway without having the means to understand what is going on, makes us hostile, because after all we have no answers, only that something is gnawing at us from the inside.

And that is perhaps why the bearers of awareness have been mistreated by crowds and ridiculed by power since the beginning of time, as opposed to those who bring hope.

Hope is talking about optimism just after a suicide, mindfulness is realizing that the umpteenth life severed by the rush of an express had the same weight in this world as any other that irretrievably decides to wait for their natural stop to jump down and say goodbye.

Would those sneezes have dented the young couple's serenity? Billy didn't know. But soon after, passing in front of the docks of Hell’s Kitchen, Billy noticed a young cyclist who had taken a seat to read her book. Trying to find the right position that some yoga class must have taught her, she had begun to sneeze too. But although she was alone and isolated, she had been careful to do so inside her T-shirt. In times like these, was this enough to feel surrounded by a feeling of conscious hope?

Billy didn’t know, and in the end she didn’t care.

She just wanted to reach the banks of the Village to enjoy the sunset lulled by Sinatra's voice. And so, the song started, and around her a void opened up. That saving emptiness that made her forget, just for a moment, that everyone was all at the center of a project. A design willed by others who thought, and were convinced, that they were in a position of sure victory. That at any moment they could say: " Everything we did was for your sake" - Just in case someone came out of that frame of mind of being a predestined victim. Or, with the same participation, they could say: "Well, at least we tried" - In case the most didn't make it.

One way or another they were going to win. The equation was clear and written long before those who had inherited it were born. Billy had to choose: stay in that equation or write one of her own. Not to change the system or any such bullshit. But as someone on USA Today had suggested that morning: "one should not come up with ideas saying the system needs to be changed, but with solutions so that the system fits everyone's needs." Because Billy, like so many others, knew that the authors of the equation that promised salvation were the same ones on the subway platform complaining about how that suicide was taking up their time.

After all, they were all committed to saving someone else, possibly on the other side of the world and without really getting caught up in it. Or ready to ask you to take the hard job, but ready to step in and take credit for it only and when by chance it had worked out. But woe of getting too close. Taking Covid from an Upper West Side family was allowed, but not to be infected by humility.

Humility leads to weakness. A weakness that leads to loss of privilege, the privilege of being part of the commonplace.

But even worse was admitting that You were only trying to save yourself. Woe! Sincerity is, in this world, as huge dimensions had been for dinosaurs: an evolutionarily disadvantageous characteristic.

As a failed archaeologist, Billy understood this well. And even though she listened to Sinatra, and even though she was now in front of Hoboken, with the hope that the town would amplify the voice that in the past had succeeded in soothing her thoughts, here she was again with her bitter, banal critique of the mores of petty-bourgeois society, of which She was ultimately a part.

Except for one fact. She continued to see herself standing still, poised, on that yellow line on which authority put her on watch to stay away at every train crossing. That line of thought from which it was enough to take one false step to exhale the last breath, or one backward to gain one more. That same golden line that the sun painted on the waters of the Hudson River and which, if followed, would lead her back, at least with her eyes, to the shores of Hoboken.

Perhaps that was the point: not to cross the threshold or step back, but to continue on, remaining poised like an acrobat. The acrobat of the collection of Indian poems she heard about just the day before at Lincoln Center. Or the acrobat who Fellini made eat spaghetti on a suspended wire in La Strada, and who knew he didn't have much time left, but maybe not that the one that would be taken away from him was the same bully he loved. That acrobat Billy had been trying to be all her life, trying not to hurt anyone, ending up being ostracised by those who hurt her and by those who, in good faith, did not understand how she couldn’t want to retaliate and therefore calling her a fake.

Perhaps that line, that line that was hers alone, like that thread the Fates wove in ancient Greece for every man, just had to be followed. Not fought, like a spider web, or avoided, like an alarm that reveals our frailties to the world. But a line that on the screen of an electrocardiogram sharpens for the beat of a heart, or that through a synthesiser takes the form of a tone, and from tone a voice. A voice that leads us home. A voice that becomes that golden bridge that the sun of that afternoon cast over the waters of the Hudson River, just before going to sleep, behind Hoboken and his Voice.

Written for the Creative Writing Workshop sponsored by Roundabout Theatre Company at Countee Cullen Library in Harlem, Manhattan, NYC.

All rights reserved Giuseppe Grassi