City/Subway/Gospel
sonya azencott
I don’t think I’ve ever believed in God, but the subway is nothing if not holy. Each subway stop feels like a breath between a prayer, like lighting candles on the menorah: one, then another, tiny flames flickering on thin wicks. Baruch—feel the way the sound twirls in the back of the throat, the tip of my tongue brushing against the roof of my mouth—atah—again, again, the rush of the subway car as it comes to a stop—Adonai: the prayer is cut off, and I have to leave. Still, the whisper is there, too loud to be forgotten. It’s an exaltation of a God I don’t think exists.
~~~
The woman voice ricochets across the entire subway car as she switches between mouthfuls of English and Spanish—the first pulls down on her vocal cords, stretching her o’s taut like rubber bands without a snap, but there comes the Spanish pop: the o’s are released, and her i’s are dotted with the tip of her tongue clicking against the roof of her mouth. She gesticulates frantically, pantomiming her story as she narrates, draws a sweetheart neckline across her clavicles, swirling her hands around her chest—her fingertips linger a bit too long on her breasts, pointing at each other—before she gropes her bosom and stomach, stretching and folding back the bits of fat. It’s like kneading a ball of dough: no shame, just anticipation—to see what sort of magic will come out from the oven once it’s baked, what kind of shape it will take. It makes me think of Golde and her daughters weaving strands of challah for the Sabbath, the fiddle stringing quietly at the back of the stage. The woman laughs; she has that sort of laugh that resonates deep in the chest and doesn’t seem to ever pass through the mouth, rumbling around like the sound in the inner chamber of a cello or a bass, only rich echoes escape through the layers of muscle and skin. I grasp at the words shooting out of her mouth, catching crumbs of language that I try to piece back into meaning but can’t quite, so I abandon that and content myself to listen to the uneven melody of her voice, strings of sound marching to an ever-changing meter. There’s pleasure enough in the sound, like Latin hymns; the language is superfluous.
My mother sits next to me, but I can’t quite see her. I can feel the jut of her hip bone pressing against mine, and it’s comforting—I know she’s watching too. We are both captivated by the woman’s spell, watching the way she twists her tongue in her mouth, the way her language spirals like a tornado, ripping through the fields. She plays her vocal cords like the keys of a piano, the same way my mother runs her fingers against the ivories—tickles them, like people say—caught in a passion that leaves no room for anything else. My mother is the most spiritual of the family: her piano, I think, takes the place of a synagogue; the music is the prayer. I never liked playing piano, but I listen to my mother play in the background of my day, breathing life into the house.
The woman who speaks like a thousand horses running is talking to her children, I think, who listen enraptured. They are silent, not by choice, but by the force of her voice, their mouths trembling slightly, trying to hold back their own. Congregants in the church of the city; she is their ever-devout preacher. I look at her only out of the corner of my eye, caught in her sermon; her arms are opened wide now, and she grabs at some invisible sphere in mid-air, hand passing dangerously close to a man who hugs his black backpack into his chest. There’s a sort of insanity sequestered to her eyes, a mad glint that shines slightly too brightly; you see that kind of look a lot in New York subway cars, if you look closely under sunglasses and behind worn paperback books. It’s a religious fervor with no God but the city.
The woman takes a breath, her chest puffing out as the air rushes into her near-empty lungs. As she prepares to exhale, I feel the rush of the subway car beneath me suddenly stop, lurching back for a moment before the train settles against the platform. My mother taps my shoulder, and we swing through the open doors onto the yellow line where the people outside huddle together, trying to push their way into the car. I weave my way through them to the other side, promised land, homeward bound, glancing back just once at the woman whose voice, which seemed so loud before, is now trapped within the confines of the shuffling tin box.
~~~
Two young boys, maybe eighteen, float into the subway station on their skateboards, spiked afros encircling their heads like fiery halos—Micheal and Gabriel on their chosen chariots. They remind me of figures from Renaissance paintings, sprung directly from the Sistine Chapel into New York City. It isn’t so strange; Graffiti, I think, is the new fresco. I don’t know how they got down the stairs that lead to the station; I imagine they flew, weaving effortlessly through the crowds painfully climbing up and down. Even when the boys descend from their boards, they continue to hover; their feet never seem to touch the floor. One swings over the turnstyle, pressing his hand into the metal side and swinging his legs across—his baggy jeans follow his motion just a few milliseconds behind, like an afterimage or an old flipbook. Time itself becomes ephemeral, and I leave too quickly up the stairs to watch the subway angels go.
When I was very young, some friend of my mother—I can’t remember who—gave my brother and me two flipbooks filled with sequential photos—time slowed down in a paperback form. His was black and white: “Big News,” it was called. Mine was in poppy, hyper saturated colors like an album from the 80s, psychedelic. I can’t remember the title now. The story struck me deeply though: a boy in a black and white striped shirt, like a prisoner trapped within the pages, was blowing hot pink bubblegum bubbles. As I flipped through the book, thumb pressed against the bottom right corner to make the pages speed through, the bubble got larger and larger until the boy started floating, rising up the image—then disappeared. The final image frightened me: the boy, out of frame in the too-perfect blue sky with its starch clouds, then black.
When the subway moves, lights flash through the windows every couple seconds, interspersed within the darkness. They go red and blue and yellow through my vision, collapsing into darkness every other second. Time passes more slowly in the darkness, though the train moves as fast as it did before. It’s as if nothing exists outside of the bounds of the fluorescently-lit car, the passengers trapped within the void. The flipbook is the same: the color flashes quickly as the pages move, but the final black pages linger on. Still, I played with the flipbook religiously, until the pages began to fall apart and the movie became spotty and chopped—I couldn’t keep my eyes off it, caught in the frantic motion of the pages.
~~~
I have a picture book from when I was quite young called Subway Sonata. It has watercolor washed pages with colored pencil sketches delineating the figures and their environments—light, pastel colors that have faded further with time, almost like stained-glass windows in an old Italian church. It tells the story of four creative passengers in the same subway car, each inspired by the people they see there. The artist paints a portrait of a woman preaching in the car; the choreographer creates a flamenco dance inspired by a Spanish man singing; the composer creates the titular “Subway Sonata”; and the writer creates a novel based on a young Russian boy chastised by his mother. I was always torn between the writer and the artist as my favorites, though I didn’t really have to choose. My mother used to read it to my brother and me when we were too young to read it ourselves, and when I learned to read I would make her read it anyway. My mother has a timbre to her voice that lilts and falls as she puts on each character like a mask, switching between them and gesticulating as she reads, acting out the story. There’s a special sort of acting only parents know how to do, the kind that enraptures a child so thoroughly that they fall into the world of the story, if only for the couple minutes it takes to get through a picture book. Still, there was a deeper connection with this book. I saw my mother reflected in each of the pages. She too liked to people-watch, staring out of the corner of her eye when we rode the subway or eavesdropping on the conversations of the people dining next to us at restaurants. I modeled myself after her and the book, glancing at my fellow passengers in the subway cars—the man with the strange hat that looked like a stuffed pheasant, the girl who had just lost an acting gig to her next door neighbor, the preacher who tried to sell “Metrocards for Jesus.” They became figures in my mind to be plucked out at a moment, certain saints to be revered at a distance, recreated on a page. I cherry picked people like passages from the Torah or the Bible, creating a holy book of the city, of the subway, of my own.
When I started to draw, I began to examine the way people were built: the curve of their jaw, the way that calves join to the knee, the triangle formed by jutting out clavicles. I brought a tiny sketchbook—Moleskine, a gift from my aunt—onto the subway with me, and chose a subject to draw, turning strangers into saints in the tiny prayer book of my own making.
I’d press pencil lightly against paper, steeling my grip against the force of the moving train that bumped and jolted along the tracks, my eyes darting up and down at my chosen model. I could always tell when they were about to get off, from the slight wiggle in their leg to the way that they started staring at the subway car doors as if it would make the car arrive faster. I’d rush then, my sketch becoming looser, grabbing pieces of their silhouettes—the angle the legs formed against the void under the subway seats, the lump of a backpack stealing the place of another human, a large cross necklace banging against a man’s chest—until finally my model’s wish came true, and the train sped to a stop, and the car doors opened, and the flood of people rushed out onto the platform with my model among them.
Then I’d flip to a new page in my Moleskine sketchbook and start again.
~~~
I can feel the pole digging into my skin—it was cold when I first pressed my arm against it, but it is unpleasantly warm now, with that strange smell that metal emits when it is touched for too long—and I let my eyes wander aimlessly into the corner of the subway car. Next to the doors there is a poem locked behind a glass panel covered in graffiti: “___ was here”, a crude drawing of a skull, and a couple of scratch marks in the form of a claw. The poem is about owls or summer or the sidewalks in the city, but I can’t say for sure because my eyes only linger on it—they don’t read. I let my eyes unfocus as we roll into the subway station; my fingers linger softly on my thighs, pressing gently in and out to pass the time.
Suddenly, there is music blaring out; it is wordless, deep electronic drum beats forming the melody. I look up at the man standing next to my seat—he has knock-off airpods hanging from his ears—and I wonder if I should tell him his music is leaking. I don’t have the time though; another man steps out from the shadows behind him and begins to rap to the beat, and for the first time I can see the boombox next to him. The man’s voice is coarse, but he wraps his consonants with his tongue before releasing them from his mouth, so they travel softly through the air. He blends his os with his as, so they all make one rounded sound, coated in his sandpaper voice. I can’t make out everything he’s saying—something about Jesus and God and salvation—he raps gospel and my Jewish ears listen in. The god being worshiped is irrelevant—the city accepts all prayers indiscriminately. She is a benevolent god.
The man’s eyes are pulled taut, and he looks like the statues of Jesus on the cross that used to scare me when I passed through the Medieval Art gallery at the Met as a child, with the never-ending agony etched onto their faces. I used to pull on my mother’s hand to try and pass the room quickly, feeling the gray gargoyles’ stares on my back. They made God look synonymous with pain, never quite conveying the emotional fervor that carried across the man’s voice—music carries worship on wings more powerful than an angel’s in a Michelangelo painting, for all their veins and carefully detailed musculature. I’ve only been to synagogue a couple times in my life; the only thing I remember was the way the rabbi played guitar. He wasn’t very good at it. It wasn’t like the prayers I sang on holidays, as we lit the candles. There was something about how the light and the music flickered together, the same way that the man’s voice merged with the blinking outside of the subway car. It all breathes life into the city and her people, into me, whether or not it is addressed to some God. As soon as it began, though, the music ends, and the man’s face returns to its resting position, his voice drifting off.
He walks through the subway car with a baseball cap, saying “God bless you” even as everyone ignores him. Some people nod along, but others avert their eyes, searching intensely for something new in their purses or their phones. Finally, he comes back to our side, and a large older man in an orange shirt stands up and hands him a dollar bill. The man has an enormous silver crucifix dangling from his neck, and his mask hangs at his waist, untouched. I had noticed it before, but I was too nervous to confront him about it. Now, it seems too late.The subway car jolts as it stops at the station, and the rapper picks up his boombox, leaning his arm preemptively against the car doors. Just before they open, a lanky young man rushes over and presses a small wad of cash in the rapper’s hand before rushing back off to his side of the car. Alms for the music or the message, I can’t be sure, but it's a sort of worship anyway.
The doors open wide; the rapper leaves, and I watch the new wave of people walk in: new worshippers filing into the church of the city.
~~~
The crowds come in and out of the subway doors, each worshiping in their own way to their own god and the city—though I can’t say for sure whether it’s Heaven or Hell they think they’re praying to. I’m not really sure who I’m praying to myself, though it certainly isn’t God. All I know is, when the subway trains start rolling, the whole city and I begin to breathe.
Sonya Azencott is a junior creative writer at Kinder High School of the Performing and Visual Arts in Houston, Texas. She has been previously published in The Weight Journal and received a regional Gold Key from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. She enjoys writing nonfiction and magical realism, drawing inspiration from Greco-Roman mythology and Jewish folklore. She also enjoys drawing in her free time.