David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

Anyhow, it was also at this time that my father was killed unexpectedly in a CTA subway accident in Chicago, during the almost indescribably horrible and chaotic holiday shopping rush of December 1977, and the accident actually occurred while he was in the process of weekend Christmas shopping, which probably helped contribute to making the whole thing even more tragic. The accident was not on the famous ‘El’ part of the CTA — he and I were in the Washington Square station, to which we’d ridden in from Libertyville on the commuter line in order to transfer to a subway line going further downtown. I think we were ultimately headed to the Art Institute gift shop. I was back at my father’s house for the weekend, I remember, at least partly because I had intensive studying to do for my first round of final exams since reenrolling at DePaul, where I was living in a dorm on the Loop campus. In retrospect, part of the reason for coming home to Libertyville to cram may also have been to give my father an opportunity to watch me apply myself to serious studying on a weekend, though I don’t remember being aware of this motivation at the time. Also, for those who do not know, the Chicago Transit Authority’s train system is a mishmash of elevated, conventional underground, and high-speed commuter rails. By prior agreement, I came into the city with him on Saturday in order to help him find some kind of Christmas gift for my mother and Joyce — a task I imagine he must have found difficult every year — and also, I think, for his sister, who lives with her husband and children in Fair Oaks OK.

Essentially, what happened in the Washington Square station, where we were transferring downtown, is that we descended the cement steps of the subway level into the dense crowds and heat of the platform — even in December, Chicago’s subway tunnels tend to be hot, although not nearly as unbearable as during the summer months, but, on the other hand, the platforms’ winter heat is undergone while wearing a winter coat and scarf, and it was also extremely crowded, it being the holiday shopping rush, with the additional frenzy and chaos of the progressive sales tax being under way this year as well. Anyhow, I remember that we reached the bottom of the stairs and the platform’s crowds just as the train slid in — it was stainless steel and tan plastic, with both full and partially pulled-off holly decals around some of the cars’ windows — and the automatic doors opened with a pneumatic sound, and the train stood idling for the moment as large masses of impatient, numerous-small-purchase-laden holiday shoppers pushed on and off. In terms of crowdedness, it was also the peak shopping hours of Saturday afternoon. My father had wanted to do the shopping in the morning before the downtown crowds got completely out of control, but I had overslept, and he had waited for me, although he was not pleased about it and did not disguise this. We finally left after lunch — meaning, in my case, breakfast — and even on the commuter line into the city, the crowds had been intense. Now we arrived on the even more crowded platform at a moment that most subway riders will acknowledge as awkward and somewhat stressful, with the train idling and the doors open but one never knowing for sure how much longer they’ll stay that way as you move through the platform’s crowds, trying to get to the train before the doors close. You don’t quite want to break into a run or start shoving people out of the way, as the more rational part of you knows it’s hardly a matter of life and death, that another train will be along soon, and that the worst that can happen is that you’ll barely miss it, that the doors will slide shut just as you get to the train, and you will have barely missed getting on and will have to wait on the hot, crowded platform for a few minutes. And yet there’s always another part of you — or of me, anyhow, and I’m quite sure, in hindsight, of my father — which almost panics. The idea of the doors closing and the train with its crowds of people who did make it inside pulling away just as you get up to the doors provokes some kind of strange, involuntary feeling of anxiety or urgency — I don’t think there’s even a specific word for it, psychologically, though possibly it’s related to primal, prehistoric fears that you would somehow miss getting to eat your fair share of the tribe’s kill or would be caught out alone in the veldt’s tall grass as night falls — and, though he and I had certainly never talked about it, I now suspect that this deep, involuntary sense of anxiety about getting to idling trains just in time was especially bad for my father, who was a man of extreme organization and personal discipline and precise schedules who was always precisely on time for everything, and for whom the primal anxiety of just barely missing something was especially intense — although on the other hand he was also a man of enormous personal dignity and composure, and would normally never allow himself to be seen shouldering people aside or running on a public platform with his topcoat billowing and one hand holding his dark-gray hat down on his head and his keys and assorted pocket change audibly jingling, not unless he felt some kind of intense, irrational pressure to make the train, the way it is often the most disciplined, organized, dignified people who, it turns out, are under the most intense internal pressure from their repressions or superego, and can sometimes suddenly kind of snap in various small ways and, under enough pressure, behave in ways which might at first seem totally out of sync with your view of them. I was not able to see his eyes or facial expression; I was behind him on the platform, partly because he walked more quickly in general than I did — when I was a child, the term he used for this was ‘dawdle’ —although, on that day, it was partly also because he and I were in the midst of yet another petty psychological struggle over the fact that I had overslept and made him, according to his perspective, ‘late,’ there being therefore something pointedly impatient about his rapid stride and hurry through the CTA station, to which I was responding by deliberately not increasing my own normal pace very much or making much of an effort to keep up with him, staying just far enough behind him to annoy him but not far enough back quite to warrant his turning and actually squeezing my shoes over it, as well as assuming a kind of spacey, apathetic demeanor — much like a dawdling child, in fact, though of course I would never have acknowledged this at the time. In other words, the basic situation was that he was peeved and I was sulking, but neither of us was consciously aware of this, nor of how habitual, for us, this sort of petty psychological struggle was — in retrospect, it seems to me that we did this sort of thing to one another constantly, out of possibly nothing more than unconscious habit. It’s a typical sort of dynamic between fathers and sons. It may even have been part of the unconscious motivation behind my indifferent drifting and lump-like sloth at all of the various colleges he had to get up on time every day and go to work to pay for. Of course, none of this entered into my awareness at the time, much less ever got acknowledged or discussed by either of us. In some sense, you could say that my father died before either of us could become aware of how invested we actually were in these petty little rituals of conflict, or of how much it had affected their marriage that my mother had so often been put in the role of mediator between us, all of us acting out typical roles which none of us were conscious of, like machines going through their programmed motions.

I remember, hurrying through the platform’s crowds, that I saw him turn sideways to shoulder his way between two large, slow-moving Hispanic women who were heading towards the train’s open doors with twine-handled shopping bags, one of which my father’s leg jostled and caused to swing slightly back and forth. I don’t know whether these women were actually together or were just forced by their size and the surrounding crowds’ pressure to walk so closely side by side. They were not among those interviewed after the accident, which means they were probably on the train by the time it happened. I was only eight to ten feet behind him by this time, and openly hurrying to catch up, as there was the idling downtown train just ahead, and the idea of my father just making it onto the train but of me lagging too far behind him and getting to the doors just as they closed, and of watching his face’s expression framed by holly decals as we looked at one another through the doors’ glass portions as he pulled away in the train — I think anyone could imagine how peeved and disgusted he would be, and also vindicated and triumphant in our little psychological struggle over hurry and ‘lateness,’ and I could now feel my own rising anxiety at the thought of him making the train and me just barely missing it, so at this point I was trying to close the gap between us. I still, to this day, do not know whether my father was aware then that I was almost right behind him, or that I was nearly butting and shoving people out of the way myself in my hurry to catch up, because, as far as I know, he did not look back over his shoulder or signal to me in any way as he made for the train’s doors. During all of the litigation that followed, none of the respondents or their counsel ever once disputed the fact that CTA trains are not supposed to be able to begin moving unless all of the doors are completely closed. Nor did anyone seek to challenge my account of the exact order of what happened, as at this point I was a few feet at most behind him, and witnessed the whole thing with what everyone conceded was terrible clarity. The two halves of the car’s door had begun to slide shut with their familiar pneumatic sound just as my father reached the doors and shot out one arm in between the halves to keep them from closing so that he could squeeze his way in, and the doors closed on his arm — too firmly, evidently, to allow either the rest of my father to squeeze through the doors’ gap or to allow the doors to be forced back open enough to let him withdraw his arm, which it turned out was caused by a possible malfunction involving the machinery that controlled the force with which the doors closed — by which time the subway train had begun moving, which was another blatant malfunction — special circuit breakers between the doors’ sensors and the train operator’s console are supposed to disengage the throttle if any of the doors on any car are open (as one can imagine, we all learned a great deal about CTA trains’ design and safety specifications during the litigation following the accident) — and my father was being forced to trot with gradually increasing speed alongside it, the train, releasing his hold on his head’s hat to pound with his fist against the doors as two or possibly three men inside the subway car were now at the slight gap in the doors, trying to pull or pry them open further enough to at least allow my father to extract his arm. My father’s hat, which he prized and owned a special hat block for, flew off and was lost in the platform’s dense crowds, in which a visibly widening gap or tear appeared — by which I mean it appeared in the crowd further down the platform, which I could see from my own place, trapped in the crowd at the platform’s edge at a point further and further behind the widening gap or fissure that opened in the platform’s crowds as my father was forced to run faster and faster at the accelerating train’s side and people moved or leapt back to avoid being knocked onto the track. Given that many of these people were also holding numerous small, subdivided packages and individually purchased bags, many of these could be seen flying up in the air and rotating or spilling their contents in various ways above the widening gap as shoppers jettisoned their purchases in an attempt to leap clear of my father’s path, so that part of the appearance of the gap was the illusion that it was somehow spurting or raining consumer goods. Also, the causal issues related to legal liability for the incident turned out to be incredibly complex. The manufacturer’s specifications for the doors’ pneumatic systems did not adequately explain how the doors could close with such force that a healthy adult male could not withdraw his arm, which meant that the manufacturer’s claim that my father — perhaps out of panic, or because of injury to his arm — failed to take reasonable action to extricate his arm was difficult to refute. The male subway riders who appeared to be attempting so forcefully to pry the doors open from within subsequently vanished down the track with the departing train and were not successfully identified, this due partly to the fact that the subsequent transit and police investigators did not pursue these identifications very aggressively, possibly as it was clear, even at the scene, that the incident was a civil and not criminal matter. My mother’s first lawyer did place personal ads in the Tribune and Sun-Times requesting that these two or three passengers come forward and be deposed for legal purposes, but for what they claimed were reasons of expense and practicability, these ads were quite small, and were buried in the Classified section towards the rear of the paper, and ran for what my mother would later claim was an unreasonably brief and unaggressive period of time during which all too many Chicagoland residents left the city for the holidays anyhow — so that this eventually became one more protracted, complex element of the litigation’s second phase.