A Bit More Detail

Because I stayed up far too late Thursday night and Friday morning and I put in a full day at work, I briefly lapsed into sleep while westbound on the Bloor-Danforth subway. I woke up to find the car deserted, the train shunted off into a dead end as other trains rumbled past. It wasn't long before I ran into a conductor, a middle-aged woman who wondered why I didn't hear the announcement to leave. I apologized, I blushed, then I indulged my curiosity.

- What happened to the train?

A moment passed, and then she spoke.

- We'll be going eastbound to Christie in ten minutes.

What else was there to do? I sat down and read, in someone's discarded copy of The Globe and Mail, an approving article on Casino Royale's rebooting and scanned the latest installment of the Economist's annual, The World in 2007. A dozen or so minutes later, I disembarked and headed west on foot.

It's common knowledge in Toronto, I think, or at least a common assumption, that the largest number of unexplained train diversions and schedule delays on the subway lines are caused by suicides, but that the Toronto Transit Commission doesn't publicize the actual causes of these delays for fear of bad publicity and copycats. I've no way of knowing what happened, and I can imagine that there may be other reasons for not being told (irritation at the lone straggler, perhaps?). I can't quite imagine what they are.

If last night's delay was caused by a jumper--in front of my train, perhaps in front of another train--that would be the second such incident in as many weeks. Last Thursday, the Eglinton TTC station was closed down for two hours between 3 o'clock in the afternoon and 5 because of an unspecified "medical emergency" that required shutting down that stretch of subway and assembling new fleets of Yonge Street shuttlebus. Heading home that day--actually, heading past Christie station--I heard someone a foot away from me, a thin blonde man with glasses and a receding chin, talking to his girlfriend about the closure.

- This usually happens once a week, he said to her, but they don't like talking about it. It happens more than anyone says. A friend of mine saw someone jump at St. George station and he couldn't go into a station for a few months, or he'd shake and start to pass out.

I got out just as he started telling his girlfriend, no segue at all, about the flowers that he would have bought her if he had the time.