Fredric Stern - The Endorphin Conspiracy

Only no one was there.

His gaze was caught by the bag of Cheetos, by its movement. Geoff gave a swift kick at the bag with his right foot, and a huge grey rat squealed in pain and scurried off to some dark crevice by the stairs.

“Fucking rats,” he muttered aloud. He wiped the sweat off his brow with the back of his hand and exhaled. He shook his head from side to side and began to laugh. “Fucking rats in the goddamn fucking subway!”

“What’d ja expect to see down here, buddy? Cuddly little guinea pigs?” boomed a voice from behind Geoff.

Geoff turned around swiftly to see the reassuring, bulky form of a New York Transit cop.

“Never seen a rat that big,” Geoff said. “It looked more like a raccoon.”

“Then you ain’t been in the subways much,” said the officer, whose name tag read Dumbrowski . He raised his left brow, twirled his nightstick. “Where you from, Vermont or somethin’?”

“No. Connecticut. Been living in New York for the last seven years, though. I just stay out of the subways when I can.” Geoff stared at the cop’s deft handling of the stick, the large revolver strapped to his waist. A New York cowboy. A New York ranger riding the rails.

“And you ain’t seen rats before?”

“Just in the lab,” Geoff said with some embarrassment.

The officer guffawed, his protuberant, middle-aged gut twitching. He raised his heavily equipped belt over his jutting abdomen, let it slide back down to its natural resting place. He paused and looked down, then glanced thoughtfully towards Geoff.

“Well, let me give you some free advice. Dumbrowski’s rules of riding the subway. Rule number one: don’t make no eye contact. Rule number two: go about your business as quickly as possible. Rule number three: don’t take the IRT elevator. It’s the most dangerous ride in the whole goddamn city this side of the Port Authority. Patrolman Dumbrowski here’s been around this jungle and survived. I seen things down here you’d never imagine. Stick to Dumbrowski’s rules, you should make out okay.”

“Thanks for the advice.”

“So where you goin’?”

“Uptown, 181st Street.”

“Well, good thing you ran into old Dumbrowski here then, cause you’d be taking this dangerous ride for nothin’ and end up in Fort Apache.” Dumbrowski smiled widely, clicking his gum. He patted Geoff on the shoulder—the good one—with his bulky hand. “IND’s over that way, down those stairs.” Dumbrowski pointed his stick down the corridor to the left.

“Thanks.”

“Dumbrowski. Joe Dumbrowski. Friends call me the Brow. Sure beats the first part of my name, huh?” he said with a chuckle. He slid his nightstick back in its holster. “Don’t forget the rules, now. This world down here ain’t forgivin’ to foreigners.”

Geoff nodded, checked his watch as Dumbrowski walked away, then heard a thunderous rumble in the distance. The floor began to shake. A train was arriving down below on the IND platform. Geoff broke into a trot and along with a handful of people who came seemingly from nowhere, headed to the uptown platform. He descended the stairs quickly. Just as his foot touched the platform, the shrill honk of the train sounded and its twin beacons emerged from the murky depths of the tunnel. The long graffiti-smeared train screeched to a halt and opened its doors, allowing passengers to exit.

Instinctively, Geoff looked up at the sign on the side of the train to make sure it was the “A” train, though he didn’t need to check since no other subway line ran this far north. He entered the second car.

Geoff had his own “rules of the rails,” born of his generally cautious nature. He made it a practice never to get into the first car, since he’d surely be crushed to death if there was a collision, or the end car, since that was the least occupied and presumably the most dangerous. This strategy had worked well for him over the last seven years. In spite of the considerable amount of crime in the subways, not only had he never been accosted, he had never even witnessed a serious incident.

Geoff sat down on one of the long benches just inside the doorway. The car was about half full, mostly people on their way home from work downtown. The neighborhood north of Washington Heights, known as Fort Tryon Park, remained a fairly stable enclave for elderly German Jews as well as those of the Hasidic sect, an ultra-religious group of Eastern European descent whose literal interpretation of the scriptures often put them at odds with the rest of Judaism.

A young, heavily-bearded man with a pasty complexion, wearing a wide-brimmed black hat, a white shirt, the tails of which hung below the border of his drab, black jacket, flew through the doors, large briefcase in hand and horn-rimmed glasses ajar, narrowly escaping the capture of his shirt tails in the double-doors as they slammed shut. The man took a deep breath, adjusted his glasses, and sat down with a loud thud next to Geoff.

“Almost got me that time,” he said with a sigh as he wiped his sweat-beaded brow.

Geoff smiled and nodded. The last thing he ever did in the subway was strike up a conversation. Not that he felt threatened by the man in any way, but conversations attracted attention, and that was not what you wanted to do in the subway, unless of course you were looking for trouble.

Across from Geoff was seated an elderly Italian woman, black kerchief on her head. Protruding out of a Macy’s shopping bag at her feet was a copy of the evening’s New York Post with its usual sensational headline: “Central Park Psycho Explodes.” The caption underneath read, “Girl Hostage Clings to Life,” and was followed by a large, somewhat grainy picture of a man.

It was not the headline so much as the picture that attracted Geoff’s attention. It was obviously an old photo taken in happier times. The man was tall, big-boned, easily six feet plus. He wore a kelly green Parks Department uniform and stood holding a rake in front of the Tropic House at the Central Park Zoo. His dark-skinned face was plump, somewhat pockmarked, and it bore a spirited, broad smile. Hardly the look of a psychopathic killer.

Geoff knew that man. He could not remember the details, nor the man’s name. Geoff was poor with names, but his visual memory was excellent, bordering on photographic. He’d remember soon enough. The specifics about the face would abruptly interrupt whatever else he was thinking about like a flashing neon sign. Simpler yet, he’d grab a copy of the paper on the way out of the station and find out who the man was.

The train pulled away from the station with a great lurch and accelerated, its jerky movements causing the heads of the passengers to sway back and forth like erratic metronomes. The rhythmic chugging of the steel wheels on the ancient tracks created an almost hypnotic beat and set Geoff’s mind wandering. His thoughts raced through the day’s events, a veritable kaleidoscope of visual images. He thought of Jessica clinging to life, tubes extruding from every orifice, a bolt sprouting from the top of her head. All because she had convinced her grandmother to take her to the Zoo that day. All because some lunatic, some lunatic Geoff knew, snapped and went into a murderous frenzy the instant their paths crossed.

Geoff’s mind drifted to bittersweet thoughts of Sarah. She had kept him emotionally honest all the years they were together, in touch with his human side. Geoff had felt torn between his real desire to help people and the analytical approach to disease he was taught in med school and residency, patients readily sorted into lists of differential diagnoses, operative procedures. The gall bladder in bed one, the brain tumor in the ICU. A faceless ward of patients, their lives layed out on three by five cards. Geoff worried that without Sarah, he was becoming the prototypical surgeon, becoming cold and clinical like his father had been.