Each day a little before noon he walks onto the train with his guitar slung over his shoulder, not in loose or cavalier fashion, not with the swagger of a bard, but stiffly, tentatively, as though he were carrying a small burden.
Commuters look up at him then turn quickly back to their phones or books or some random point in the tiny geometries of empty space that remain in the car in order to forestall the nerve-wracking spectacle of a man they have never seen before singing a song to them in a metal and plexiglass box speeding through darkness.
Once the doors slide shut with a musical bong he positions the guitar in his hands, tilts his head to one side then the other, rolls his shoulders, causing a small pop at the base of his right collarbone, then pauses for a moment to look at his hands as though they were not his hands but a pair that someone had recently given him. He moves the guitar some more then, adjusting it an inch or two this way or that, angling it a few degrees up or down, and never at any point does his entire body come to a state of rest.
The train pulls into the next station and its doors slide open, letting a few passengers scurry off with their heads down. The doors slide closed with a musical bong again and he remains, fumbling with the guitar, mute, staring out at his captive but uninterested audience.
The songs he planned to play are somewhere inside his head — songs by Bob Dylan, by Sinatra, Bob Marley and Jobim, songs he has loved and memorized in the deep swell of his passion, in the privacy of his airless room, and even a few he has written on his own. But every day it is the same: He does not bring his hands across the strings, does not put his two lips together or rouse a sound from his throat, which although he does not know it, is clenched.
After two or three stops the riders’ aversion to making eye contact with a singer of unproven skill who they had not freely invited into their personal space gives way to their growing curiosity about what in God’s name is going to happen here. Because, you know, things happen. And so their eyes turn back on him.
It is always at this point, beneath the tense, curious gaze of the riders, some of them fixing him in hard stares, that he begins to feel the rising tide within, a tide of hot shame flooding his face. And when the train stops at the next station and the doors slide open and a new gust of foul subterranean air rushes in, he turns and walks out of the car and on to the platform and stands there.
The amount of time he spends there each day varies and is measured in trains. On some days one train passes. On others, three, four, maybe two. But always and ever and ever the feeling returns. He gets the itch again, the one in the back of his throat, which he tries to scratch by humming, first a long, low tone, then adjusting up or down, throwing a few more notes in, faintly swinging and jaunty, until he arrives at a sort of pattern, something resembling a melody, until it feels the way it did a hundred thousand times before, as though a song is about to burst the gates and pour forth from him and the next train arrives and comes to a stop and its doors slide open and he walks back in to repeat the humiliating ritual.