Fifty-two steps. He counted the steps up to 34th Street from Penn Station. Most people took the escalator. He took the stairs. It was a way, one way of keeping hold of himself, one very small way.
He hated the city. He hated being back. It felt like defeat. It even looked like defeat. The city was looking dingy again, the way it did twenty years ago, the last time he rode the train into work, dressed in an ill-fitting suit.
He saw a kid running up the steps ahead of him, a skinny kid in a dark suit, an eager, a young kid. He must be a real go-getter, ready to do anything, take any job to build his career. Poor stupid bastard. They were all stupid bastards, miserable. Ask any of them and they'd tell you life was great. Everything is great. The job is great. The career is going great. Tony the Tiger. But he knew. He knew how it was. How they talked to their friends and family when they weren't being watched.
Twenty years melted away. He'd moved back to the city for family reasons, sickness, age, sadness, and now he was riding the train, the train he thought he'd never see again, lining up with all the other ant-men, the cattle, the proles, waiting for the doors to open at a quarter after seven, waiting for the train to take him where he didn't want to go.
He was bad at his job. They thought they were getting something when they hired him, but he'd lost his mind somewhere along the way. He couldn't learn new things. Training him was like trying to teach his father how to use the computer. They tried, and he tried, but he was gone. Something was missing. They'd probably fire him soon. They'd already fired the girl he was hired with, a young girl, for practically no reason at all. They'd fire him soon. The only reason they hadn't already, is that they thought it must still be in there somewhere waiting for them to draw it out, the talent, the creativity. It wasn't.
He counted the steps on the way down. Fifty one steps. What the hell? He'd been careful, he thought he'd been careful. He must have been distracted. There was a girl a few places ahead of him, a girl with strong calves and long brown hair. The girls went barelegged now in the summer. She was too fast for him, twinkling those little feet down the stairs and springing away through the herd like a gazelle. This girl must have distracted him, when he thought he was being so careful. Fifty-one steps! Fifty-one. Tomorrow he would take care, really feel each step, really lay that shoe down. There were fifty-two steps. He knew that. Tomorrow he would prove it again.
He was tired the next day. He'd lain awake a long time, trying to remember Florida, walking along the street, the broad sunny street with flat pastel-painted buildings and palm trees, and sitting on the sidewalk drinking iced coffee, drinking slow. The steps were a fiasco; he got fifty-three steps. He knew there were fifty-two, four flights of thirteen, like a deck of cards. It was a significant number. He concluded that he must have counted two steps on one of the landings. There were landings between each flight. A stupid mistake, one he wouldn't make again.
They had him using a design program, one he'd claimed familiarity with on his résumé. And he was familiar with it, or had been seven years ago. It was all different now, he couldn't find anything. Trying to make things easier, they'd made them worse; just like with Windows. He worked in tandem with another fellow, twenty years his junior, who was nice or pretended to be, like everyone else, but he knew they must all be getting tired of him. He was Nate. The man's name was Nate.
They gave you half an hour for lunch, just time to get down the elevator and into a deli and collect some food from a buffet, with people breathing on you and waiting for you to finish and nipping in ahead of you and you doing the same to them, because it was the only way. The food was good, all kinds of things were available, fresh fruit, caesar salad, shrimp, rice, chicken, hot food and cold, you could make your own combinations, but it was miserable. There were so many people, you couldn't turn around, you couldn't sit down, the cashiers worked fast, next, next, next guest please, and everyone out again on the street and up the elevators, back to their oh-so-important jobs. What he wouldn't give for a leisurely sit-down at a table with empty chairs, a slow bottle of cold beer, and a distracted waitress. He was back at his desk screwing up inside of fifteen minutes, peering at the computer while he lifted the plastic fork to his mouth.
He lost track on the way down, because a man had dropped a contact lens and was blocking the stairs for a moment, circling and scanning the paved steps in a familiar desperation. He had dropped the lens in a swift-flowing stream. No one stopped; he didn't ask anyone to stop. They moved around him, front and back, without ceasing, as if the flow of commuters was some kind of natural fact, as if they were not people who might make the decision to stop and help him. He gave up soon, in a matter of seconds. The disruption was enough, though, to ruin the count.
Forty-eight steps next morning. A disaster without explanation. Too many steps could be explained by counting extra steps on the landing. Too few? Had he not counted the first step or the last on each flight? He became agitated and carried the feeling with him all day. In the bathroom, he looked out the window thirty stories down at the tiny figures and the little prop cars, inexhaustible and meaningless, and a great longing for the beach came over him, for his feet over the sand and into the warm salt Gulf. He wouldn't need money. He could live simply. He could live on the beach, it was warm winter and summer. He looked down at the hated tangle of ambition and fear below him. Only to go back.
"I'd eat sand," he told himself, "I'd eat sand."
"Dude, are you OK?"
He was not alone and he had spoken aloud. He could not summon an excuse or an explanation, only a series of ambiguous sounds in a parody of speech. They would have to fire him now. For what reason would they keep a crazy person?
But by some improbable turn of events he rallied and produced a flyer, an excellent flyer, for a new promotion they were working on, in versions print and online both. He lived. Perhaps he was an eccentric genius. He would not be fired that day. Was he glad? He needed the job. Was he sorry?
Forty-nine on the way down. He hurried away from the bottom of the steps as if in fear, without looking back, and almost took the wrong train, going to Track 21 by habit. At the last moment he stepped back out of the car, warned by the announcer. His train left from Track 17 that day. 21 + 17 was 38. That told him nothing.
He stayed awake again, walking the sand and chipped shell shores of the Gulf at sunset, where people brought wine in coolers to sit and watch the sun go down. He recovered the whitewashed walls of his little apartment, never repainted over the years, where he watched his tiny TV and lay in bed at night listening to the booming air conditioner kick in and cut off. He even took the garbage out again in the warm wet evening, slinging the bag into an open dumpster in the palm-shrouded shelter.
He had an idea in the morning and rode the escalator up to the street, but that was no good because when he looked over he couldn't see the stairs to count, what with all the bodies and legs scuttling across them. It was bad at work. He emailed the draft of a press release to a number of interested parties, but when he started one of the email addresses cdanforth@, a helpful drop-down list appeared so he slid down the list and selected the name but his computer had all sorts of hitches and delays and instead of cdanforth@hiscompany he had selected cdaneels@somewhereentirelydifferent which was a major disaster because cdaneels worked at a newspaper and this was an important press release that was supposed to be vetted, edited, and released according to a proper schedule. They yelled at him, and what could he do but listen?
The way down was ridiculous. There was a bottleneck before the entrance, because vendors had set up tables along the sidewalk near the station, and the throng was so thick that he walked into a stanchion and forgot to start counting until he was halfway down the first flight and even then he came up with fifty two, which was impossible. Tomorrow would be the day, he was sure of it.
On his way up the stairs the next day, a middle-aged woman with an English accent and a middle-aged husband asked him for directions. He told them walking, and only noticed at the top that they had two children following behind them, hanging back as if embarrassed to be seen with these two old coots. They were nice old coots, and he chatted with them before he let them go. It was a pleasant, human interlude, but the stairs still needed to be counted. The rising river of humanity was in spate and the down escalator was broken, so to get back down to the lower level he actually had to walk around the block to the main entrance, go down a functioning escalator, then down another flight of stairs and force his way through the crossed and tangling traffic back to the base of his steps again. Fifty-five. He didn't even try to explain it.
He got to work late, but it didn't matter, because they fired him as soon as he arrived. It made sense; someone's head had to roll, and roll publicly. He looked at them without expression, without interest. This disturbed them. It was payday, and they had his check ready for him. When he got out and back down to the street the rush was already subsiding. He was happy to leave Manhattan behind him, happier than he had been for a long time. Soon he would leave New York behind him, too. He hugged the right rail and the stair climbers made a channel for him. He counted fifty-two steps. There had never been anything but fifty-two steps. He checked the big board for the next train home.
Terence Gallagher was born in the Bronx and lives in Queens. His novel, Lowlands, was published by Livingston Press in 2017. He has published short stories in Rosebud, The Rockford Review, and Nth Degree, as well as poetry in small magazines including Candelabrum, Snowy Egret, and Hrafnhoh.
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