On the train home:

The express and the local raced side by side for a good few seconds so I could watch, through TV-screen windows flashing by, life in the other capsule. For a moment, we were twin submarines.

There was a girl with a laugh like a motorboat starting up. Maybe a cartoon motorboat. A cartoon motorboat driven by a woodpecker with a captain’s hat and a rakish grin.

A young woman got on at Fourteenth Street and asked for change in a strange murmuring half-spoken, half-sung chant. Then she stood, unmoving, and cried. Object, abject. I didn’t know where to look, what to do.