The Subway Stops at Bryant Park by N. West Moss
Leapfrog Press, 2017
Did you ever have the feeling that you knew someone, really knew someone, when you met them, but you had never laid eyes on them before? Like you could understand their fears, their dreams, their need for empathy just by standing beside them, overlooking the park on a sunny day? That’s how I felt reading N. West Moss’s The Subway Stops at Bryant Park—as if I had known these characters intimately, and that maybe we would find each other again some day.
It all starts with Omeer. The protagonist of Moss’s opening story, “Omeer’s Mangoes,” is a doorman whose life is the stuff of collective ignorance. The world strays from people like Omeer, forgetting that doormen are people too, with lives, families, and disappointments. Reading about Omeer, I felt like I was part of his life. I felt his desperation to hide his lack of promotion from his father, his sadness when he realizes that his wife has no respect for him, his fear when he sees that his son only has him for a male role model.
This is what Moss does. She makes you believe in these characters, as if you can stroll through the park one day and find Omeer at the door of the apartment building across the street, Timothy, struggling at the start of “The Absence of Sound” to finally remember the name of the birds, and silent Benny, the hero of the engrossing character study, “Milagro,” sitting with his closest companion, a chicken acquired unexpectedly. Benny is a silent man, and his loneliness offers a perfect insight into what someone might think alone at night after being left by a partner:
When she left, it felt like the natural conclusion to their story. Part of Benny was relieved. Being incapable of making her happy had worn his heart down, like she had been an empty glass he’d been unable to fill, the never-being-enoughness of their relationship had exhausted him. On the other hand, he missed the sound of her chatter. At night, in bed, he used to roll over and go to sleep, listening to the sounds of her whispers against his back, telling him everything that had happened that day.
And then there’s the park.
Bryant Park, an evolving and elusive character all its own, is Moss’s tiered and honest history lesson. We can see what it was like before gentrification—“… the park was dangerous, avoided… some people called it Needle Park”—and what it is like now—“The park became a testament to progress, to how things got steadily better over time, about humanity.” In the midst of the lives that are touched by this setting, we become part of its history, making a pilgrimage to the Gertrude Stein statue just to check to see if we’re still alive.
Sarah Ghoshal earned her MFA from Long Island University, and her work can be found in Red Savina Review, Cream City Review, and Reunion: The Dallas Review, among others. She lives in NJ with her happy family and her faithful dog, Comet, who flies through the air with the greatest of ease.