AARON STERNS
Aaron Sterns was born in Melbourne, Victoria, in 1972. After studying Shakespeare, the Romantic poets, and Greek tragedies at university, he convinced his graduate school to let him study contemporary horror; his PhD work examines the impact of late capitalism on the works of Bret Easton Ellis, David Cronenberg, Clive Barker, and other exponents of postmodern horror. He has presented academic papers on American Psycho and Crash at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, written non-fiction articles for Bloodsongs: The Australian Horror Magazine, amongst other publications, and is a regular contributor to Hellnotes: The Insider’s Guide to the Horror Field. He is also the former editor of The Journal of the Australian Horror Writers. We were very pleasantly surprised to learn that “The Third Rail” is Aaron Sterns’ first fiction publication.
Here is a searing vision of an archetypically decadent and dangerous city — a place of vigilance and patience and random violence ... a place where knives glitter in the silver-grey shadows of subway stations and everyone is the enemy.
But most importantly, here is a city that takes care of its own.
* * * *
The waitress is missing two fingers on her right hand and he thinks she will spill his coffee. She catches him looking at her and frowns. The viscous liquid slips up the lip of the cup then falls back, swirling like mercury. She is already walking away as he stutters an apology.
He stares after her across the tables and is drawn to a wash of light from the window. The backward-print of the shop’s “Caffé Dante” sign partially obscures his view, but he focuses beyond that, at a couple walking past with a large umbrella coloured with white specks and realises it has started snowing. He looks up, and there is a haze in the air. He stands in a trance and walks to the window and places a hand on the glass. The man at the next table across looks up briefly from his paper and then hunches down in his dark overcoat. A group discussing chess in the corner — they look like regulars — pause, cupfuls of black espresso teetering at their lips, and watch him. He has never seen snow, other than on television. Unless you went looking for it, back home in Australia few people probably had. He can pick out single flakes, falling faster than he had imagined, defined purely and timelessly before merging into the sludge on the ground. Across the street, narrow academic bookshops and row houses blur and blend into the white tapestry. He gazes out at the couple as they pass a derelict in a grey sweatshirt and brown parka huddled in one of the doorways, holding out a paper cup. They stop, the man folding up the umbrella and shaking it off methodically and patiently before stabbing the derelict in the face with the sharp tip.
“‘Sir.” The waitress is standing behind him, one hand on hip. He notices a lattice-work of scars tracing her temple. She self-consciously flicks hair across it and scowls.
“No, I wasn’t leaving ...” Gesturing behind him. “I was just looking out ... at ...” Pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose and looking to the other customers. The man in the overcoat hunches down even further in his seat, long brown hair covering his face. “I think you should call an ... um ...” But she just thrusts the bill at him as he passes back to his table in a daze. The men shake their heads.
He clumsily shuffles the half-completed immigration forms scattered across the table into a scuffed briefcase, and almost forgets to pay in his haste to get outside. Flicking open his wallet he finds himself looking at her face again. At her eyes, light blue, almost clear, framed by the tousle of blonde above. He takes the photo out and runs a finger over her face. After three months of rubbing, her skin is pale and ghostlike. Like the memory of her body. Of her voice. He almost leaves the photo as a tip with the dropped bills, but stops himself. He cannot purge her so easily.
He runs across the road to check the doorway, but there is only a spattering of blood on the concrete step. It looks dried and brown, like a false memory.
* * * *
Although it has stopped snowing, his shoes skid freely on the wet footpath — no, sidewalk, it’s goddamned New York — and he has to concentrate on placing his soles down evenly. How could he mistake the shaking of an umbrella for an attack? He muses on his misperception, barely noticing the chill in the air or the stench of the rangy, skeletal ailanthus trees lining the street, or the pervasive leeching of colour the darkness causes, or the multitude of ambulance and police sirens in the distance. His thoughts gradually drift to the intrusive INS application, however, and he finds himself nervously fingering his thin goatee as he walks, churning over the questions: about how he could list his projected earnings for the next five years when he didn’t know if he could last that long; about when and if he would purchase an apartment; about his intentions to ever leave the city. Whether he was intending to marry. And that makes him wonder whether she would marry any —. But the sudden images of her with someone else are too torturous.
He turns back at the café door’s chiming and thinks he sees a figure slip into the alley next door, but then the footpath is no longer beneath his reaching foot and he jerks and stumbles into the gutter, dirty water splashing at his pants and drenching his cheap shoes. He stands for a moment staring down.
Bleecker Street is empty and he crosses against the light, expecting as always a yellow taxi to round a corner and run him down. He hurries up MacDougal, hoping to quickly get home uptown — not that he would want to sit in the cramped bedsitter listening through the thin walls to his neighbours argue and fuck, but if he hurried he could fill out the 1-140 forms and still mark a few of his students’ woeful papers. They wouldn’t appreciate his effort, of course. He remembers their laughter at his arguments for the contemporary relevance of The Bacchae or The Oresteia, telling him the old myths were dead. They called him The Tourist. As openly contemptuous as everyone else in this city, though at least they paid him some attention. The Faculty had all but abandoned him. They’d head-hunted him back home, courting him with the position and with assurances there’d be no problems with the INS, that he’d slip through under the Priority Worker scheme. Now that officious bastard Johnston wasn’t even sending a representative for his petition hearing tomorrow. They should have filled out the I-140s for him; his research profile was on file, so it wouldn’t have taken them long. He’d spent years amassing his academic “points” and convincing international journals to publish his Crash and American Psycho papers despite ingrained opposition, hoping to attract one of the better institutions over here. Which he finally had. Yet all that pain and struggle and poverty for what? So some suit could refuse his Priority Worker argument tomorrow, sneering while saying, “You research what?”.
As he hurries up the street he imagines the University clock framing the Square disappearing behind him, swallowed by the mad-Lego skyscrapers hunched beyond. Suddenly unnerved by the silence he stops, staring up at the drab brickwork enclosing the streets, wondering where everyone has gone, if it was that far past peak hour. There weren’t any roaming cars; even the ever-present sirens had died. Glancing behind and up at the World Trade Center’s massive twin towers jutting like some split phallus he catches a flicker of movement at the corner of his eye, a darkness like a flag or billowing coat flashing across his retina and disappearing behind a building. Denuded tree branches sway soft and frigid above. He knows this has happened before, but perhaps it’s just a flash from one of the movies he’d endlessly studied — Jacob’s Ladder perhaps. She had hated that movie: too depressing. As was anything that meant something.
Turning forward again he stops. Crowded around the entrance to the station on Sixth and Spring they stand, laughing and wrestling mock-playfully. Unconsciously he clutches the briefcase with both hands and stares at them. His stomach churns. He remembers other sneering, hateful faces, the sharp crack to his head, hands ripping the watch bloodily from his wrist. The pure helplessness. And promising himself as he lay in the gutter of some deserted Footscray sidestreet whimpering like a whipped dog: never again.
He veers into Prince Street and heads past the contemporary art museum for the next subway, risking a last glance at the youths. They are silent, watching him. He starts to walk faster and then sprints up the street, ducking down an alley to his left, footsteps ringing on the cobblestones. Tiny cafés and splinter houses blur on either side and seem to shy away from his mad pounding. He realises he is over-reacting and slows down. The enclosing buildings seem familiar, and he recognises the little street as Wooster. A while back he had seen a small-scale dance performance here, set in a little warehouse replete with exposed wires and crumbling bricks. While waiting for the show he had noticed a young couple a block down taking turns photographing the other in a rubbish skip. The girl had glanced over at their waiting group and exposed a breast to her boyfriend’s lens. He sees one of the rubbish bins now and considers hiding behind it, but instead he stops, head throbbing with blood and chest tight and vision blurred. He rests hands on knees and listens to his panting fill the alley. At least he is alone. Cracked, weeping cobblestones gradually coalesce between his feet and then cloud over as his glasses fog. He raises his head to clear them and sweat snakes into his eyes.
The youths round the corner. They fan out across the street in formation, ten at -least, faces in evil shadow beneath their red bandannas, emerging from some ghetto spaghetti western. They seem deformed, as if missing — or with too many — limbs. He sees one casually reach a scar-flecked hand into the rip of his jacket pocket. Another diverts his attention by suddenly loping close to the ground like an ape. Then they are on him. He stands up and grips his briefcase impotently, trying to stare into their eyes, to offer some small act of defiance, to understand, but instead they part and move on, brushing against him almost lovingly. Heads swivel as they pass and one, a faltering moustache like shit on his lip, coos softly: “little fishie”.
* * * *
A faint scent of urine washes over him and mixes with his relief as he descends the steps into the subway, losing himself in the crush of commuters. Dark patches stain worn concrete beneath his feet; the worst a large black birthmark spreading out beneath the turnstiles. It looks fresh. Realising he doesn’t have a token or correct change, he fights his way back to the token booth, keeping an eye out for leather and denim descending the steps. The booth’s thick perspex sheet is dotted with flaking sheets of paper: fluttering Transit notices and wanted posters. The perspex is murky and he can barely make out a face beyond, above a speaker cut in the window.
A burst of static and he stands for a moment.
“Ah... hello?”
Another burst.
“What?”
Sudden clarity: “... fucking turista.”
“Oh ... ah, shit ... eight tokens, please.” He shoves two crumpled bills through the basin and scoops up the silver coins. Last month someone poured lighter fluid through one of these basins and incinerated the attendant, an immigrant fresh from Pakistan.
He feels eyes turn to him as he passes through the steel gates out onto the platform. Cold clings to the walls and drips into the air. He keeps his eyes on the ground and moves over to a gap by the wall, planting his back against its moist solidity. He looks up, and the eyes turn away. He begins picking faces out of the crowd, plastered with that familiar disinterested sneer. They seemed practised at taking anything the city could throw at them into stride, and his presence is as easily assessed and dismissed as a car accident or drive-by-shooting. About a month before he was due to come here he had read a news report about a rape in the Park. Sunday afternoon and kids on swings and a group playing ball by the nets and lovers walking hand-in-hand. And a jogger pack-raped. He remembered she had been a European exchange student hoping to join one of the modeling agencies here. Coming up East Drive by the trees of The Ramble in her black tights and baggy sweatshirt, puncturing the air with white billows with each step, and passing her one of the guys had punched her — hard — in the face. The other had ripped off her tights and calmly planted his knees on her arms. A couple of tourists had reported other joggers stopping and helping the guys hold her down, and still others shouting out encouragement as they passed. Kitty Genovese ‘90s style. The police had dismissed such claims as fanciful: foreign xenophobia. The student had survived the attack however and had become a minor celebrity, being deluged with modelling offers. He remembers with a flash her disgust when he told her and wonders how he could have hoped to justify his decision to come here.
One woman standing by herself to his right is missing an arm. She carries a couple of bags with the other and has to constantly shift her weight from foot to foot to compensate. As she stares up the tracks expectantly, he notices one eye is milky and sightless. A man to his right is wearing a scarf wrapped around his neck. The scarf droops down enough to reveal a grinning white slash underlining the man’s jaw. So many scars. For some reason he remembers a derelict — dressed with some weird conformity almost identically to the one outside the cafe — smothered with dirt and breathing harshly through a clogged nose outside a cinema, pleading to the people in line. No-one was paying him any attention. He had offered the man one of his bagels, thinking he might use money for alcohol, but the man had pointed to his rotted teeth and mumbled that he couldn’t eat anything hard. He had stopped at the corner, looking back at the pitiful figure. When he had returned to hand over a dollar, ignoring the scowls of some in the line, the derelict had started to cry, saying over and over: “Thanks man, thanks so much ...” A teenage girl, all racoon-kohl eyes and designer-Grunge clothing, had grasped his arm as he strode past. “Don’t align with them,” she had said, and he could only gape at her in confusion. “The city only wants desirables.” One of her friends had dragged her away, glaring at him. Walking past the cinema later with The Post under his arm he had encountered only the blank stares of those in the queue. And, again, the derelict had disappeared; funny that he only remembered that now.
He hears arguing and looks over to the toilets, noticing a group of youths emerging, eyes flat and dead. He tenses to run but it is not the gang and they don’t even wear the same colours. He moves to the other end of the platform anyway when they start to hit each other and bump into waiting travellers.
The train is due and he makes his way to the edge of the platform, looking around warily as he thinks of reports of people being pushed in front of oncoming trains. Cautiously he looks quickly over the edge, drawn to the tracks. As bland and dirty as ever. But out by itself, partially covered with a thin strip of wood, snakes the electrified third rail; a purveyor of casual death in such close proximity to everyday life, so necessary as to be banal. Like the city itself: prosaic life streaked with violence and death. Yet again he wonders whether he made the right decision, trying to picture their last conversation: his apartment half-packed and the rest in shambles, her stifled tears and calm resignation a focus for the shifting codes of his guilt. Wondering if she would forgive him, take him back. Calling her, telling her that he didn’t belong here and that he really wanted —
Then the air jolts out of his lungs as a huge weight slams into his back and his chest feels displaced and the air somersaults around him in a confusion of brick and swirling colour. He hits the tracks heavily. Groggy and winded he peers up from his grave at the blurry faces peering over the edge. Rumbling beneath and he scrabbles to the edge of the platform, lifting himself up. One of the expressionless faces, a woman in a grey business suit, moves towards him and a high heel stamps down on his fingers. Broken fingers scream as he hits the gravel. As cold wind rushes in a wave up the tunnel from the incoming train a thin brown-haired man, all flowing overcoat and crazed eyes, launches out of the crowd and lands awkwardly next to him. The world turns red with blood as the man jumps on his chest, and the rock in the man’s hand suddenly becomes his only focus, vision narrowing like some hokey near-death hallucination. It slashes again, smacking into his temple and knocking off his glasses. Groping for them in dirt and gravel he clasps a handful of the stones and grinds his attacker’s eyes. He easily kicks the flailing, screaming man off over his head. Crawling again to the platform and lifting himself up with broken fingers like pure slices of agony coursing through his arms, looking back briefly and as instinctively as Lot’s wife and seeing the jerking, screaming shape frying on the third rail; this time the crowd parts in acceptance as he clambers over the lip of the platform, but the train is a huge onrushing blur of movement and metal. It hits. He spins lazily along the platform as his leg seems to expand and disappear.
Through a haze he sees some of the waiting passengers jump onto the tracks. Others board the train and wait patiently inside, staring out beneath the fluorescent glare. Hands on him and he looks up into the face of the woman who stamped on his fingers. She smiles briefly, like a false reflex, and then pins one arm down like a vise. Others similarly grasp his limbs, and another — familiar leather and shit-lip — grabs his head. Panicking, he looks down at the mangled flesh of his right foot and up at the approaching train driver, a peaked cap perched atop his balding head. A fireman’s axe rests casually on his shoulder. Despite the screams and thrashing they amputate his foot, cauterising it with lighter fluid and a match handed to them by the toll-booth attendant, a small bearded man in a blue uniform.
Drifting in and out of consciousness, he sees nightmare delusions of the burned and mangled body of his attacker dragged up onto the platform and set upon by the waiting passengers. Flashes of teeth and snapping of bones. Flesh ripping and tearing like cheap cloth. Acid tapeworm sounds sinking easily into his flesh and huddling within. The attendant brings out a hose when they are finished and washes down the concrete, whistling a tuneless high-pitched whine. Someone hands out towels to the bloodied commuters.
Two businessmen pick him up underneath the arms and help him into the carriage. His right leg sways uselessly above the ground. They let him pause in the doorway to vomit into the gap between the platform and the train before placing him carefully on an aisle seat, one of them sitting beside him to prop him up. The other sits opposite and plants the familiar battered brown briefcase on his lap, silently dialling in its combination and taking out the sheaf of INS application forms. As the man begins filling in the uncompleted pages the other signals to the toll-booth attendant waiting on the platform who waves to the front of the train.
He feels the bile and saliva wiped from his chin and turns to his companion, vision blurring and wavering. The smell of charred flesh fills his nostrils. The train’s side-to-side buffeting hastens his feelings of nausea.
“Welcome,” says the businessman, an intense and soothing smile plastered across his face. “You played well. The city desires those as strong as you. And don’t worry: you won’t be needing this anymore.” He feels a hand reaching into his jacket and removing his wallet. The man takes out her photo, placing it in his own pocket before replacing the wallet. “You can forget her now. We will find you someone else.” Again the smile and a hand clasping his arm. “The city looks after its own.” The man hands back his glasses, and he puts them on even though one of the lenses is cracked and specked with blood.
The train continues on its passage. The gentle rumbling seems a steadying, soothing mantra. Passengers leave; others take their place. Darkened concrete and skeletal steel, wet glass and sculpted stone flash past in waves like some impossible pre-existent landscape. He sinks his head back against the seat, noticing a raving, bearded derelict in a dirty suit ahead in their carriage sit by himself near the door, glancing nervously around at the other passengers. The derelict carries a scuffed briefcase similar to his own, though only shredded newspaper overflows from gaping holes in its side. The man clutches it to his chest and starts screaming at a young girl who stares at him steadily and unblinkingly. As he watches the two, someone in a dark jacket slips through the closing doors and calmly slashes the man’s throat with a thin knife. The screaming cuts off abruptly, descending into a soft gurgling. The child starts to imitate the sounds and is rewarded by a smile from her mother. The man in the jacket continues up the aisle towards him and stops at his seat. He looks up at the man, and then reaches into his own pocket and takes out a handkerchief. The man wipes the blood from his knife and hands back the handkerchief, thanking him before continuing on.
At the next station two Transit police board the carriage. One looks up at him and nods as they remove the body.
* * * *
AFTERWORD
Although this is probably apocryphal, “The Third Rail” emerged, I now like to think, from a fever-induced daydream I had on a New York subway train, while I miserably blew my nose and stared out the grimy windows at the passing world-weary commuters waiting at the platforms. I had spent the past few weeks holed up in the libraries of Columbia University, and although I loved the city I was also constantly on edge, feeling every bit the stereotypical naive and paranoid outsider trying to conform to a society where all the rules and conventions are assumed, and any clumsy deviation meant opening yourself up to its casual violence. I remember staring blankly out the window as the rocking of the subway train sent waves of nausea through me and hallucinating the events of the story. I didn’t take the subway again.
It’s a bit more complicated than that — the story coalescing from a number of actual experiences, my obsession with news reports, myth and ritual, and the memory of Harlan Ellison’s “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” playing like a mantra in my mind throughout my stay — but essentially “The Third Rail” is the dreaming of a lonely Australian amidst the dirt, destitution, and death of the archetypal city.
— Aaron Stems