THE SILVER MEN

Emily Doak

After New Years, Turner never surfaced. I called for a while and left messages, but they weren't returned—that was nothing new but this time the silence pretty much answered my question. Turner and I were really over. It seemed final because even the silver men had disappeared from the Chrysler Building subway station. By spring I was being asked by Nell's boyfriend Paul over dessert to "tell them about those silver guys." They'd become a dinner party joke in my life. A story, entertainment, my freak value by association. Paul shouted to the other end of the table, "Hey, Hillary knows those silver guys!"

"They used to be at Times Square, right? The ones on the milk crates? No way! In all silver?"

"Yeah, that would be a silver man," I said. The guy was a real bore and Nell'd sat him next to me thinking there was some potential.

"I saw one at Columbus Circle just last week," a voice from the other end of the table said.

"That's nice," I answered. I'd heard of vague sightings before, but nothing was reliable.

"Someone would throw a quarter and they'd move," the bore, the prematurely balding stockbroker set-up on my right said and then he tried to mimic one. He did a horrible job of freezing himself and then moving his arm down in a robotic gesture that knocked his red wine onto Paul's bleached wood table and waterfalling into my taupe, Spring-line, mini-skirted lap. The paychecks from the Chrysler Building had been coming in long enough to get me out of debt and that skirt was the first piece of expensive clothing I'd ever bought.

Nell hopped up to get paper towels. "I'll get it, I'll get it. Don't worry." And then trying to keep the conversational flow or something she hollered from the kitchen, "I saw one at Fourth Street, Monday I think it was."

"What!" I said. "You didn't tell me that?" I got up with the wine running cool down my thighs. "Why wouldn't you have told me that?" I spoke more quietly blocking her into the kitchen. "Which one?"

 

"There will always be that someone." Nell was talking. I was crunching the sugar from the bottom of an iced coffee. We were sitting outside, off Sixth Avenue, one of the first warm days. I'd made some production out of having to stop off in the Village near her job, and asked her to meet me for a drink. Everyone around us was eating huge bowls of pasta.

"You're sitting here eating a plate of spaghetti with your husband and kids and that someone," Nell said, "walks by, and you're getting up and leaving with them. You're leaving the damn spaghetti and the kids with their dirty faces. Let your husband have ’em."

"There's no spaghetti, here," I gestured at our empty table, the salt and pepper, the Sweet n' Low packets. "And certainly no kids!"

"Hypothetical, Jesus!"

She knew.

I of course had only come to check out the Fourth Street station for silver men and I was disappointed that I hadn't run into any.

"I'll go stand down there with you if you want," Nell said.

"No, no. No matter what I'm not doing this again," I said, sucking up the last of my iced coffee, a gravelly mouthful of sugar. I rattled the ice cubes in my empty glass until Nell clamped a hand down on my wrist.

"You sure you didn't like Ted?" she asked. She had started trying to set me up after New Years. I was her resolution, and Ted was the balding stockbroker from Paul's dinner party. I didn't give her an answer.

"He liked you. He was really sorry about the skirt," Nell said.

"What time is it?" I asked, looking down at my own watch. "I've got to get back to Brooklyn before the cleaner closes." Nell was meeting Paul for dinner anyway. I'd just been slotted in.

It was loud and hectic on Sixth. I barely looked up, could see the neon bounce off the sidewalk and smell Gray's Papaya, saw sandals and the vendors' incense wavering in hot clouds. The spring night had gotten cold and I rushed down into the Fourth Street station where it was still warm, bleach water puddled on the steps. I wasn't looking. In fact I almost didn't walk down the platform to position myself closest to my exit in Brooklyn. I almost stayed right inside the turnstile thinking that myself at the end of the ride would just have to deal with myself now because I wasn't interested at all in helping out Little Ms. End-of-the-ride, not interested in planning for the future at all. But the train wasn't coming and I was bored so I started to walk down, and then I saw a crowd.

It was the silver man’s roommate, Finn, and it might as well have been Turner the way my stomach exploded up into my chest. I went up to him all statued out on his crate and I tried to force myself into his eye line. Nothing. I asked him if they'd gotten my messages. Silence.

"Is it his?" I asked.

It was the summer before when the silver men had moved underground, out of the sun, must have been roasting like hotdogs in their foil cookers. They were a duo—Turner's roommate, Finn, and their friend Josh. They'd split up and practice their art of stillness all over the forty-second street stations. I had just started working in the Chrysler Building and every day, up at nine and down at five, the marble stairs from the lobby ran past the shoe repairman and the photo developer into the 4/5/6 subway station at Grand Central. I never knew around what vomit-filled corner I might find one of them. Silver spandex and paint from head to toe, frozen in a pose, they struck many trains before I showed up. As always I was trying to get over Turner, a perpetual and unsuccessful effort that I'd been working on since that April when a girl named Elsie claimed he'd knocked her up. She'd run down to Georgia to her parents’ house to wait it out and I couldn't help but be secretly thankful it wasn't me.

But every day up and down those stairs it felt like the damn silver men were harassing me about Turner and Elsie's love child. It didn't help that a coworker at the end of the hall in Events Planning was pregnant too, and the crowds swarmed in the coffee room over crib catalogues and nursery paint chip samples. Even my boss, Susan, was wrapped up in the baby madness. She'd complain daily about the milk that was meant for everyone's coffee and how it disappeared from the fridge like someone was drinking whole glasses full.

Susan sat in her window office directly behind me, so I looked straight at a wall, and so Susan could look out her office anytime at exactly what was on my computer screen. June, the middleman, in the windowless office to my right, was fighting her resemblance to the old maid Susan and sadly losing. June was one of those people who went to events advertised in the papers: shows, public space openings, discussion groups. She gave me reports of her weekend Mondays before Susan showed up.

The wall in front of my desk creaked, a squeaking like baby mice trapped inside the plaster. I didn't know what to make of the noise and I finally interrupted June to ask. But she started telling me about her piano. A piano in New York City. A baby grand that took up her whole living room. She told me the walls and ceiling had been specially soundproofed for her neighbors. A complex layering of foam and then another layer of wallboard that made the room even more snug around her and the piano. I had to ask again about the wall and she said:

"Oh, that. The steel."

The wind way up top moved the building down through the steel columns, creaking like unoiled parts, breaking ice, bones. The steel was girded and still deep down at its anchors in the subway somewhere, but here in front of me on the 18th floor it moved. I would get dizzy trying to follow the creaking up through my ceiling, imagining the displacement of the beams growing as the floors climbed until at the top people were holding on for dear life, a mighty pendulum swaying, seasick on the 70th floor.

Down in the subway where nothing moved, the silver men waited for me to get off work. Still and strong, there they would be. But I swore they moved. They seemed to turn toward me when I walked by. It was slight, an oscillation. They wavered like they were tuning in and out, not quite real, a hologram, an oil slick, light against the side of a distant building. I looked at everyone else in the horseshoe crowds they'd attract. No one else seemed to see it. But I did. I swore I did. And always the whites of those eyes bore down on me like a head-on. A head-on with Turner. So in September when it started to get cooler and the silver men seemed to be gone more days than most, I made the call and Turner and I were back together in our way.

Who could blame me? Turner and the silver men were a tight trio back then and anyone would have been seduced by them. They wrote like Whitman, Keroauc, praised the body electric, went to Nuyorican's to read their own stuff and left not listening to anyone else's shit, howling at the dumpsters, pissing on the deserted streets. They did hard drugs and had left families in other states they never spoke of and none of them seemed to have to work. They got by on wads of ones. The silver men getting dollars thrown in front of their milk crate pedestals at which point they would break their frozen pose with a robotic gesture and say, "Thank you."

 

The first ultrasound was already on the fridge, but I wouldn't see it till morning. When I'd called he came right over in his old, gray Bimmer, The Mercurial, and picked me up. Grabbed a few slices on the way back to the apartment and jumped right in his bed. He was never fussy about crumbs. In the morning I sat in the one chair jammed into the tight corner on the far side of the fridge. Only I could see the ultrasound from where I was sitting. Turner paced around his kitchen. He couldn't sit still anywhere. They couldn't afford to do a paternity test in vitro so it would be three more months waiting, and Turner wasn't giving me any reassurance for why I was there. I wanted a simple, I don't think it's mine. But the baby hid itself down in Georgia, not letting us know who it really was, and I knew my life was on hold then, waiting till the birth.

"I thought they only did these when something was wrong," I said.

Turner didn't choose to hear me, acted like he had no idea what I was looking at tacked to his fridge.

"I heard these can permanently damage hearing," I raised my voice, flicking the photocopy on the fridge. But he was talking about something else: the fellowship of the frozen, the real social message I just couldn't understand. How radical, how divine. It sounds ridiculous and it was. He was sort of annoying, a guru type, but I always forgot that the second I left his presence. I could only remember how beautiful he was. Not perfectly beautiful: his hair was too thick and fell forward in a huge tidal-wave helmet, he was ill proportioned, skinny chicken legs too short for his tall, broad torso, and his eyes sat too tight around his nose. He always looked slightly cross-eyed in pictures. But everything and everyone he looked at became special. The world revolved around this intense focus he had, pacing around that little kitchen, no doubt scared shitless, but how could I not just sit silent and be there for him. Hope at some point he might look over towards the refrigerator and see me.

His roommate, Finn, came into the kitchen in silver face, and silver unitard with a black suit coat and jeans on for the subway ride. "Got to meet Josh at eleven," he said. "Did you still want to meet up later? I think we're doing South Street Seaport till they kick us out." Finn's coat was crumpled in his milk crate and he had set the yellow crate down on the table in front of me to pull his coat out. It had silver grease paint smudged along the collar.

Turner had tried to be a silver man, but his unitard hung sloppily inside out in his closet from the last time he took it off. He loved the idea. He worshipped the concept of stillness that the silver men practiced. Practiced was his verb, like it was a religion. But he was a failure. The most manic person I'd ever met, leaping out of bed for the day, shower water on for a mere minute, rarely stopped for meals. He could talk about what it meant to stay frozen for hours, but it was all talk with him.

I remember the day he quit. We were up on the roof of his building looking out into the traffic on the elevated BQE flying toward us. The sun rose at our backs reflecting light in the windshields shuttling fast at us, flashing, taking off, about to hit us, and then suddenly curving toward Staten Island. The silver makeup was still stuck like sleep in the corners of his eyes and the silver men were in the kitchen waiting on us to get Middle Eastern food on Atlantic. We'd just gotten out of bed. Turner was building up the courage to tell them his decision or so he told me.

I can remember how quiet it had seemed on the roof, how far away the shining silver Chrysler Building, how still it looked from that distance, a monolith catching sun. I had no idea I'd work there, that I'd climb up inside the bones of that building and hear them move.

The future. It was out there in those rooftops, in those cars barreling close, looking like they could take it all away, take us down and then turning, turning right before they ran us down. Silhouettes beside one another. I felt honored he'd wanted me with him on this day.

 

But it would slowly sink in over couscous, that Finn and Josh had actually asked Turner to quit and the meal on Atlantic was to make sure they could still be friends. Turner had called me the night before knowing this meal was happening. He'd only acted surprised when the silver men suggested food. His friends wouldn't embarrass him in front of me, so Turner would get to live in his own version of the events.

"So, I'll catch you later," Finn said to Turner. "Bring the camera." Turner was now filming a documentary of sorts about the silver men. "Hillary, I'll see you soon, I hope." Finn ducked around the side of the fridge, always the polite one.

I was looking at the picture of the baby plastered between its two magnets. Sonogram. I heard a high-pitched whirr like I had supersonic dog hearing. It revved up and seemed to bounce out at me louder from every bright white curve. I was left cringing at the deafening static in the grey pixels and then the motor on the fridge whirred on and all I heard were Turner's rhythmic footsteps clicking on the linoleum and Finn's going down the stairs.

"I've got to go too," I said and tried to kiss Turner, but he kept on pacing.

It was funny chatting with a silver man on the subway. People looked at us oddly. Silver men are not supposed to talk, but he was not on the clock yet. On a curve I bumped forward into him and got silver on the tip of my nose.

"Here, let me get that," Finn said, his thumb pressing into the bridge of my nose, wiping off the paint. The empty silver hands of his unitard that he would put on later flapped like mittens at his wrists, brushing smooth and cool against my chin.

"He is so preparing himself to be devastated," he said, "And she's lying. I know she is."

"He wouldn't talk to me about it," I said.

"Well he's the best catch of all the trash she ran with."

"Does he even like her?" I asked.

The train jerked inside the tunnel, brakes squealing. We could feel the wheels locked underneath us, sliding along with no traction to stop. People grabbed for the poles and pulled against them—locking elbows—like this would make it stop.

"He's slowly talking himself into it," Finn said over some arms that had snaked their way between us to find a pole.

The train stopped and the arms dropped. "You guys must think I'm a fool," I said.

"With you around he gets to be his old self which is nice to see, but for you, this couldn't be good."

People started shifting, a general din of bags and coats rearranging themselves, uncomfortable down in the black tunnel.

"I wish the punk would never come out," I said. "But I guess I can't take this much longer either."

People started fanning themselves, unzipping coats.

"It's happening in our house," Finn said. "Whether it's his or not in there. This is happening for him for real. Even you can't get him out of it this time."

The conductor came on the speaker. "The emergency brake has been engaged. After we've walked the tracks and assessed the engagement we will be moving. Please be patient."

Finn said, "Time to get to work." He started undressing, grabbing my shoulder for balance as he pulled off his shoes. He smiled at me knowing passengers were watching as he unzipped his jeans and hopped around still clinging to my shoulder, shimmying his pants off one leg at a time.

"Now, what would you do if I wasn't here?" I asked.

He didn't say anything. I could tell he was holding back a smile, in character already. His jeans and blazer and coat got shoved into his milk crate and then he pushed his way to the center of the car with his crate out in front of him as a shield. Putting it down, he turned back in my direction and froze himself.

Of course, Turner and I had an unhealthy relationship, volatile. Not even really a relationship. There were no titles, we'd never been on a date or to a restaurant as a couple even though we'd known each other for at least five years since a brief semester at a mutually transferred out of college upstate. Our meeting happened after a huge ice storm—perfectly silent, glittering, sheathed. Then that slight creaking started. The electric lines in their skins trying to move in the wind, or to melt. The trees just pissed as hell down in their warm heartwood to be frozen and trying to get their branches to shake, to expand inside their silvery hides. It was when this icy battle started creaking. He was there, hooting like an owl and throwing empty beer bottles all over the apartment complex. They shattered, their warm brown shards a mosaic with the ice slipping in silent leaves from the holly bushes and cracking like glass.

It had been on again and mostly off and a lot of waiting in between, but then I'd get the call and I was invited along on some adventure: trespassing on the cliffs of the Palisades, a Friday in Red Hook at Sonny's, the illegal, no-liquor-license bar that gave you rules to break like it was the Roaring Twenties. In this old longshoreman's house you kept your own tab with pencils and small cards. Mixers in two liter bottles, slash marks settled up at the end of the evening, and the party extended out the front door of the house, where beyond chain link and a prairie of a field, you could smell the ocean, see the dock lights and bridge lights and ship lights like stars. And sometimes that beat up 1980 silver BMW would find me. It was gray, but he called it silver, The Mercurial. I'd be walking down the street scanning all the cars for his, thinking I was absolutely foolish and so far gone to see old Bimmers around every corner, in every VW and Audi. It'd been two and half weeks. Two weeks and four days, rounding up it had been three weeks. And the steps got harder, fists clenched in my pockets and then there he'd be with a silver man in the front seat and one in the back.

 

"Where you going?"

"Didn't you say to meet you here?" I'd say playfully, completely forgetting about the three weeks.

"Get in already!"

The moments were fierce.

Ultrasound two showed up and Elsie had put exclamation marks and smiley faces after her scrawling phrases written all over it. Elbow! CuteJ Fatsy watsy! A girlJ! The images were crackling white and gray up through the black. Impossible not to see the motion, the life in the shading as parts pushed closer to the surface. Turner's footsteps now paced down a steady pulse, heartbeats. I moved a large Chase Bank magnet. Got her Daddy's good looks! was written underneath in her loopy, girl cursive. I felt ill in my dirty underwear I'd had to unmake the bed to find before we went out for the evening.

Sonny's was loud and I was exhausted and when I went to find him to leave, The Mercurial was turning the corner at the end of the block. Revelers poked out the windows, packed tight, on their way to Cokey's, an after hours in Williamsburg, where they served what else but mounds and mounds of coke. I was left looking at the empty field, all the way to the water, a wasteland where nothing could grow. I walked myself home through crumbling Red Hook, too sad to be scared of the groups of men in their puffy coats hanging in doorways or the rats that ran across the deserted blocks in chains like ants.

Then came month eight and oddly enough with the newest ultrasound displayed on the fridge came Turner's pleas to be with me. He called crying that it had always been me. He realized all the support I'd given him through the years being there for those calls every three weeks or so. It was a real breakthrough I thought.

We ate out in a restaurant for the first time. He showed up in the snow under my window with a huge econo-size bottle of wine in his knapsack. He'd stolen it from a party in my neighborhood where he'd gone MIA with stolen goods specifically to come find me. He stood inside my gate and cried up, "I'm starving. I've got vino. Let's go!"

The bottle was so big. The waitress laughed about how we were getting our money's worth out of the uncorking fee. Her hands were too small to hold it around while she tried to open it.

The early Thanksgiving blizzard was ending outside. There was knee-high snow and he had moved aside, gesturing for me to walk first through the narrow inlets cut sharply for single-file walking. He kept a hand on my back, and once he circled me around the waist from behind when I started slipping forward, him noticing before I even felt my balance off. He was becoming the kind of man I'd always wanted him to be. I sat facing the window watching over his shoulder the silent snow come down—busy, golden sparks in the streetlight.

 

He told me he was going to marry her.

He'd taken a millennium job with Chase Bank to save money. He could talk his way into anything. His degree was in theatre, unfinished even, and now he was flying off to train people on the software switchover for the year 2000. Around the big moment he was going to be in a bunker somewhere under Wall Street for seventy-two hours. The baby was of course due in those seventy-two hours.

So he'd come up to the surface and he wouldn't be living as this great new man with me. I picked up the economy size wine bottle and poured another glass. None of that evening was going to go to waste. I felt like a mistress, a figment mistress for this figment wife, and no one was stealing my night. But the wine ran out eventually and I tried to feel generous. I was giving this man out to the world. A great man.

No call came from him after that dinner and the typical three weeks between our meetings went on like nothing had changed. But it had. It was only a couple weeks before the due date, and impossible for me not to keep track because of that coworker in Events Planning. Her name was Marge and her not-so-surprise baby shower that I'd been hearing about for months rolled around. Susan, June and I were the only people on the 18th floor not invited. Susan flipped out when she realized what was going on.

"You have to go down there and find out what's happening," Susan told me, ignoring June, who had gone back into her office obviously hurt she wasn't invited. I could hear the clicks, her fingers pounding out a song on her keyboard. "Go!" Susan said.

Walking down the hallway I realized it was deserted. Everyone had stolen down to the conference room at some point. We were the only division left. The conference room doors were shut, but noise bled out into the hallway. A loud static. A din of conversation, china and cutlery, ice cubes in tumblers. One whole wall was smoked glass and I watched the shadows move, gray shapes breathing and pulsing across a screen. It might not be the office in there. It could be anything, anyone, a huge baby slipping through its amniotic fluid.

I gave Susan the report. It was all fine. No one was talking about us. They were wrapped up in the shower, swapping baby stories. I closed the door to her office behind me and she didn't protest. Marge was walking up the hallway with a piece of cake for the receptionist Charlie who couldn't leave the phones. The cake was up so high to get above her belly that the icing almost skimmed her chin. Her husband ran up to help. The coworkers must have brought him in on the surprise, gotten him to take the afternoon off work to come in from Long Island. Her belly was huge for her small frame and the Velcro support belt she wore had caught the fabric of her shirt up above her waist. Right outside our division, the husband stopped Marge, tenderly trying to pull down her shirt. I ducked into my desk, staring straight ahead at the wall. She wasn't coming back after the Christmas holidays. Her due date was the twenty-seventh and she was taking her full three months. It had been impossible for me not to see Turner's baby growing in Marge. Recently, it sounded like crying in the wall in front of my desk.

Forty-eight hours to the event, still no word, and I knew Turner had gone underground. He'd stay there until twenty-four hours after New Year’s. Nell and I were going to a party in TriBeca. We got off at WTC. It was starting to snow; we walked up Chambers. It was a New Year’s Eve's Eve party I'd been invited to because the silver men were "performing." They'd been hired to stand still on either side of the loft for eight hours. A thousand bucks. The couple was a documentary producer and dot-com I think. Something like that. Everyone was acting like they weren't really nervous that the whole city could collapse in twenty-four hours. There had been reports that the electricity could stop, Metrocards for the subways were rumored to quit, water treatment plants could malfunction. But the party went on.

Nell got involved early in some conversation about the ethics of documentary. She could be a real film whore. The first guy in his Barney's shirt that talked to me, I dragged over to what I called a quieter corner, but what was really just directly in front of silver man Finn. And I flirted as hard as I could with that Barney. I emptied my drink and he retreated to get me another one.

The party goes on.

"Bottoms up!" I slapped Finn's silver shin. "Did you see that? He wants to get me a drink."

They had the silver men up on pedestals on either side of the room. I had to back up to see his face. There was no expression. He didn't even blink. "He wants me!" I yelled up at the statue, hoping it would get back to Turner. "Me!"

The Barney came back with my drink and stood alongside me looking up at Finn like we were in a gallery. "I hate performance art," he said. "What a fuckin' sissy." He passed off my drink and when I looked back up the silver man's pose and his eyes had switched—they always did it when you weren't looking. Finn wasn't registering us, but he was looking straight down now.

"Yeah he is a sissy!" I said to those eyes, the only part that wasn't silver. I left the Barney with a curt, "Nice meeting you," and rushed down the hallway to the bathrooms.

Silver fingers wrapped around the door before I could get it shut.

"It happened already," Finn said opening the door. "We got the call before we came over."

"Did you call Turner?"

"I'm not sure his cell works down there, but we called him, left a message." Partygoers had started looking in at the silver man animate. Finn shut the door. "I thought it might help you to know. They can get the test and it'll all be over pretty soon."

It didn't feel like a relief at all, and I had been counting on the baby to make Turner all over for me. I was pretty sure it was his and so I told myself, the birth is where I draw the line. But Turner might not know yet. And if he didn't, it was like it didn't happen. There was still time. So I made Nell walk with me down to Wall Street. I had gotten myself quite sauced and all I wanted was to be near him, to know he was down there under me. Nell was good with my whimsies. She always went along with me, didn't judge me. At first I thought Trinity Church would make a great place for this Chase Bank secret bunker, this control room. Under the graveyard. No. We walked down the cavern by the stock exchange. Past honest George up above his steps with a snow beanie crowning his ringlets. The buildings rose steep and windowless on either side and this, this is where I decided it must be.

"We're in trouble, Nell. Tomorrow," I said, kicking the snow in the middle of the street, "It's over." My voice was the only noise. "The water plants are going to get contaminated and power stations burned and nuclear power plants—forget it. Melt down. And Turner, oh he'll be safe. Chase Bank's money'll be safe. Safe and sound. Hiding." I screamed up at the buildings, "Can you see me?"

"Let's get out of the street, okay?" Nell said.

"You know they've got to have cameras so they can watch while we all fry up here. Watch us till the camera feeds fry too."

"I don't see any cameras," Nell said. "Nothing is going to happen tomorrow."

"Who cares now," I said and started wandering down the middle of the street. I knew Turner was under there, and I was down on the street with my ear to the cold snow.

"Were you into the tequila? Jesus!" Nell was trying to pull me up and when I wouldn't come, she went back to the sidewalk crossing her arms, hopping along the curb like it was the bank of a river she couldn't wade into.

I could feel the snow down into the warm hollow of my ear, freezing across my sinuses. Far, far away. Gas mains, electric, asphalt, concrete, steel, sewer, fiber optic. I knew he was down there. Computers ticking off time zones in the sterile, climate controlled bunker. A pocket too far down for cell phones to work. And up here, the baby was out. I was digging in the snow, sweeping whole arm lengths away till I came to pavement.

"Oh, come on. There isn't a trap door. I'm cold," Nell yelled.

Right then a car rounded the corner onto the very short block. The streetlights flashed off its clean roof, a garaged car. To me it looked like The Mercurial of course, and so I was not scared as it came at me, that car I was always looking for came at me. Headlights like eyes. Nell shrieked. I heard her wailing over there on her riverbank, Move, Run, Get up! But from my view I saw the wheels lock, saw the tires solid as rocks sliding on the snow toward me and I flattened out. My instinct was to lie still. It was loud and very dark like I had been turned inside out.

Then Nell was tugging me. Tugging at me to get up. I saw her footprints across the tire tracks and the shape of my body cocooned out of the snow in the middle. The tracks, I followed forward. Two red brake lights fishtailed to a stop at the end of the block.

"Is it his?" I asked again.

It was just Finn and I on the Fourth Street platform. His crowd had all left on the last train. "Come on. We're the only ones here."

I got silence. Finn didn't break his pose. Silent.

There was the rumbling of a train above us and a flood of transferring passengers was starting down the stairs.

"Just tell me it is!" That was what I wanted because then I couldn't go back. "It's his, right? Right!"

There were people all around now and they snickered as they walked by, silly girl talking to the silver man. Somebody laughed and muttered, "Good luck." So I reached out and I grabbed his silver balls and I squeezed as hard as my one hand allowed. He was down off that milk crate and he'd gotten me on the ground. We rolled over to the yellow plastic warning track at the edge of the platform and some man with a long umbrella poked us to go the other way. I got up on my knees and pushed him down, pulling the silver unitard from around his face, his black curls falling out. I grabbed hair and an ear. He tossed me on my back and rolled me into the crowd that had gathered. We bounced off their legs and rolled the other way. He had me tight to him, his hands clamping his elbows on either side, and I heard a whisper close to my ear.

"It isn't Turner's."

I fell limp inside Finn's silver arms then and I admit it wouldn't be the last time I'd go back to Turner, but it was closer to the end than I'd ever gotten before. So I like to think that was when I stopped fighting that statue. After all, Turner's silver unitard hung empty inside his closet.

Finn, that rush hour before the silver men left us in New York for California, got me on my feet and turned us to the gathered crowd. He was going to turn this thing around. He clasped my hand in his warm silver one and raised them high, then pulled us down into a waist deep bow. Everyone applauded and many a bill was dropped in his crate. It seemed like an exciting new beginning in that moment.

Then coats flapped open and hair shifted as wind started pushing through the tunnel and light ticked along the tiles until it reached to the end of the station and the train was there, clattering up and in, growling to a stop. The applauding crowd disappeared, replaced by folks transferring to the A/C/E upstairs. And by the time I looked back, Finn—all his hair hidden away, all but his eyes back to silver—was up on his milk crate frozen again.

I'd missed the last two trains and stood now waiting, watching Finn. Slowly one by one a crowd gathered around him. I slipped myself backwards into them. Hiding in their oh-ing and ah-ing about how anyone could be so still, I concentrated on the silver man's ribcage. And like a secret, watched his silver chest slowly rise and fall.

People stared as I got on my train. A woman on a seat opposite me gestured at her face in the way that meant look at your own. And I felt it like grease. My fingers came away silver