Prick

[wpaudio url=”/audio/4_7/McGill-Prick.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″]

She says it like that. She says: “I know you’re the prick.”

It’s Tuesday, 6 am. Dawn blushes the east as I stand amid a line of commuters awaiting the 6:10 to Emeryville. The sleepy dozen of us are heading west into the dark, over and past the skeletal hump of the I-Street Bridge.

“Excuse me?” The word reminds me of yesterday and Mt. Shasta, a trip with the family: my wife sighing as I commented on the roads and bridges we crossed; our twin boys ridiculing me in the backseat. The word felt like the weekend itself: a deep, injurious prick.

“I’m watching you, prick.” She’s a chunky woman with cratered skin and blister-like pillows beneath her eyes. Not someone I’d have picked for the observant type. As she turns away, her cowboy boots clop upon the platform and her long skirt flutters.

The train arrives. Something about it and the woman make me nearly poke myself with the T-pin tucked in my right palm. It was the ordinary type used for pinning schematics to walls: two inches of nickel-plated steel with a sharp point on one end and a thin, T-shaped handle bent into the other. A simple, effective tool. I’d stolen it from work. Today was to be another morning with it, but not now. Not with a potential witness. The whole ride, my morning, my week—are ruined.

*

The train runs from Sacramento to the Bay Area, a 90 minute trip I take twice a day, three or four times a week. From the Emeryville station, a bus takes me to downtown San Francisco, another 20 minutes. I often work one or two days a week from home, but my job mostly requires being in the office or on-site. Time on airplanes and in cars getting to project sites is trickier to calculate but I’m certain it adds a few weeks to the month spent on the train every year.

My employer is an international contractor, though all my projects are in northern California. I’m a structural engineer. I calculate pressures and strains on bridges—the best configurations of concrete blocks anchored to bedrock or the labyrinth of a million I-beams, braces, rivets and bolts. Every connection is a weakness. My job is to predict that weakness: to know which bolt will shear off or where the concrete will crack.

During the 15 hours a week I’m on the train, I’m still working. I prefer the quiet car where phone calls and conversations are prohibited and where most of the passengers sleep—a calm spot for me to focus and, occasionally, to prick.

I can’t say what makes me to do it, but there’s something about the glint of a man’s cuff link or the fold of a woman’s skirt upon her knee that draws me to sit quietly beside them, extract my T-pin and stab. I’m practiced enough that the action is nearly invisible, like the finger flick of the card wiz I’d seen in Las Vegas who could throw an ace across a room fast enough to slice a melon. My hand and wrist, positioned close-by, scarcely move. When the passenger awakens, the shock of the stab and my calm demeanor confuse them enough that in ten years of piercing people on trains, subways, buses and planes, I’ve never been found out. Sometimes I’m so good I don’t even realize what I’ve done until my sleeping neighbor jolts awake with a shout, clutching a bleeding knee, elbow or wrist.

*

Upon boarding, the woman’s frizzed hair turns toward the front of the train so I head for the back. It’s been months since I’d pierced anyone and the anticipation throbs behind my eyes. Witness or not, I have to do it soon or I fear I might injure myself like my old roommate who burned his arm with lit cigarettes.

The sleeping car gently rocks as I enter. I take a seat near a dozing teen and wait for the conductor to walk through, check my pass and smile. The T-pin curls in my hand and pokes the skin of my wrist, the weakest point in my body. I know this from snowboarding with my sons last winter. They laughed when I fell and couldn’t get up because my carpal bones had shattered.

Wrists are a preferred target, though they’re hard to hit with watches and bracelets in the way. Knees are easier. Thighs, easier still. But I prefer the joints.

As if reading my thoughts in his dreams, the boy next to me shifts so his bright, bony hand falls between us. I try not to look at the willow branch of his forearm, the vellum of skin revealing blue veins like uncharted rivers beneath. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen.

At that age, I was so tall and thin everyone called me Bones.

The woman stands in the aisle. The shock of her suddenly nearby makes me think she materialized.

“I know what you’re up to.” In the silent car, her voice is absurdly loud.

I stand and shake my head. “Keep your voice down. People are sleeping.” I turn down the aisle. She follows.

“I’ve seen what you do.” She’s behind me, her ample hips colliding with the seats, the cheap metal of her bracelets jangling. The T-pin remains in my fingers, and I’m poking seats as I go, thinking I might hit a sleeping ear or eye. I’ve never poked an eye. I don’t know what its resistance might be. Besides knees, wrists, elbows and thighs, the only other place I’ve stabbed is my wife’s breast, which I did several years ago while she slept on the sofa. The effect was not the same as with strangers; there was not that cliff-hanging ecstasy of anticipation, then the quick slip of anxiety when I’m not found out. My wife knew what I’d done because when she awoke with a bleeding breast, I was standing over her with a needle. I said it was a joke but neither of us laughed.

Now we’re out of the quiet section and in that place between cars where the rush of movement and clattering of rails surrounds us. I stop and face her. She’s a lot shorter than me, about as tall as my sons, sixth graders. She clutches the handrail of the stairs. Her thick body sways and bounces but she keeps the points of her eyes on me. I realize I’ve never injured anyone awake, and I’m seized by the wild notion of stabbing her in the neck.

Maybe I even say this because she leans closer until her round face is at my chest, her strange, voluminous body like a balloon of poisonous gas pinning me against the train car’s steel wall. Her eyes close and she angles her head away to expose the fragile pulse beneath her jaw. “Right here,” she says.

Outside, irrigated fields pass by, a landscape of orchards I feel as though I’ve never seen. Even at 80 miles an hour, here and there I spot a single piece of fruit—a peach, pear or plum so ripe it might be dead already and is only hanging on by its weakest point, waiting to burst.