The coming of the new year always brings me a renewed sense of time, of moving forward. But there was a moment — one New Year’s Eve — when I experienced being lost in time.
As a restless teenager, growing up in Brooklyn, New York, I often bolted out of my home, and without informing anyone (which is to say my parents or siblings) what I was doing, set off wandering. No one knew I had gone, which was very much what I wanted. Quite often I did this at night — ten or eleven PM, which enhanced my sense of adventure and mystery. I had no particular goal other than to walk and be alone. On that night — New Year’s Eve — I had no party to go to. I certainly did not wish to celebrate with my parents. Maybe I was feeling sorry for myself. Maybe I just wanted an adventure. I don’t know. But something quite unusual happened.
Living where I did — Brooklyn Heights — it was easy to reach the Brooklyn Bridge, and then head over and across the East River. Walking across the great bridge was always a magical experience. Though I did it often at night, I would see no other person but was acutely aware that there were millions of people around me, all invisible. The random window city lights brought heavens lower, almost in reach. I relished the sense of isolation I felt, taking pleasure in being solitary, of being acutely aware of my senses. Curiously — as I look back at these jaunts — what I did not feel was any sense of danger or fear, the product of youthful folly.
I would not recommend doing it today.
Once off the bridge, I had to decide which way I would turn, north or south. If I went north, the goal was usually Times Square, where I could mingle in the crowds and then take the subway home. On this particular night, I turned that way.
At some point, I heard the horns, whistles, and firecrackers that told me the New Year had arrived. I wasn’t particularly interested; I just kept walking. For whatever the reason — I might have been tired — or didn’t want to deal with the Times Square New Year crowds — when I reached Fourteenth Street, I decided I had enough and went down into the subway. By then it was one or two AM. I would go home.
The Fourteen Street Station was (and is) exceptionally large, with local and express tracks, along with passenger platforms of a very wide and expansive depth and length. Its connections and extensions are such that if you don’t know your way around, it’s easy to get lost. But since I passed through it almost daily on my way to high school, I knew it as well as I knew any place in the city.
That time, when I got down to the platform, to my surprise, I was the only one there. It was as if I had entered a vast and empty cave system, a labyrinth of concrete walkways and iron beams holding up the low ceiling, everything only partly lit by dim white lights plus the blinking red and green that constituted the complex signal system for high-speed trains. On every other beam the number “14” was posted. A wooden bench was there, upon which no one was sitting. It was all completely familiar. But empty.
As I stood there, the only sounds I heard were the occasional drip-drip of water coming from I knew not where, and sometimes the soft scurrying steps of a scrambling rat in search of sustenance. In other words, I was aware of the emptiness of the place, not so much deserted as abandoned. I was, at that moment, acutely aware that I was the only person there. I stood, having nothing to do but wait for a subway train to arrive.
Then, quite suddenly, the world in which I was standing changed. Reality shifted. I did not see functioning, weight-bearing beams, but only iron. I did not see platforms; I saw just concrete. I did not see light fixtures, only light. No rails but ribbons of steel. That bench was merely wood. The number 14 was in the air, everywhere, unattached. It was not a station. I was simply somewhere, nowhere, with nothing under my feet, the space around me no longer enclosed but altogether infinite. That is to say, I was seeing no function, no world as I knew it by name or what it was meant to be or do, but merely material substance, to which I was utterly disconnected. I was drifting, untethered, floating free in a universe I had never experienced or known anything about. All sense of time vanished, as did any awareness as to how much time was passing.
All this was instantly dissolved by a sudden roar as a train rushed into the station. Snapped back to the world I knew, I got into the car. A few people were there: an old woman with five stuffed shopping bags around her swollen feet: A man wearing a bent party hat, asleep: A young couple holding hands, her head resting on his shoulder: A white bearded man reading a Bible. Ordinary New York.
As the train rushed on, I tried to make sense of what had happened. Being (or so I believed) a rational fellow, I told myself I had fallen partly asleep and had been seeing things with only part of my brain. Nothing more.
And yet, and yet……….
This happened some seventy years ago. I remember it with great clarity. I now think of it as the New Year’s Eve in which I slipped away, however briefly — through time and space, going I know not where.
I never got there, and it has never happened again.
This essay was first published 31 December 2024. We’ve reprinted it for those who didn’t see it last year.
1 thought on “Walking on New Year’s Eve”
Good thoughts. Thanks for reposting. I missed this one the first time.