I gripped my copy of the 2016 Dalkey Archive edition of Youval Shimoni’s A Room during the most prolonged and intense mortal terror I have ever experienced in my 14 years of living in New York City. I was on the L train early on a midweek afternoon in the spring of 2017, traveling east under the river between First Avenue in Manhattan and Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn. There were maybe a dozen other riders, and in my memory each of us was silent and alone, with vast expanses of empty bench protecting against the physical and psychic nastiness of sharing a city with 8 million strangers. In my memory, I was the only young man.
A vagrant with a mountain bike and the build of a middle linebacker towered at the far end of the car. One of the great mysteries of New York City is its ability to attract, sustain, and perhaps even create a perpetually circulating population of subterranean lunatics, people with a quasi-mystical resistance to any attempt to “help” them and whose apparent role in society is to expose the flimsiness of human sanity and reason. As the train descended beyond the Lower East Side and crossed into the riverbed, the vagrant began screaming threats into a woman’s face and carrying on in uncannily eloquent detail about what he planned to do with the knife he had somewhere on his person. A word of objection from a nearby passenger only made the rantings louder and more severe, and the threats more florid and plausible.
