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sure that its imprint was still discernible in his hair. He hid each trespass, censoring what he said to his parents. Long ago, he had imagined himself angrily, bravely demanding his right to be his own person, while other times he imagined timidly sneaking the words in as a casual aside at the end of a conversation. All these would-be scenarios took place at far-off future dates, but his father had died before Jeremy could tell him, before he allowed himself to wonder if his father already knew.
    When the subway had come, Jeremy had pushed his way into the crowded car. He could not think about the press of fear, not now. If he forced those feelings into increasingly smaller spaces inside himself, perhaps one day they would disappear altogether. At 96th Street, the passengers rushed across the platform to the express train, which miraculously waited. He’d transferred to the Shuttle, then got on the downtown 6 train. A seat opened, and Jeremy squeezed himself into the valley between two people. With exhaustion the most effective salve against fear, Jeremy closed his eyes.
    After a few minutes or an hour, he’d awoken. An empty car. A black tunnel. A screech of wheels. The car was turning, and out the window he saw a sign for City Hall station. He had missed his stop. Or was on the wrong train. Or survived an emergency by sleeping through.
    As the train curved through the tunnel and quieted, Jeremy had pressed his face to the window to catch sight of a station he hadn’t known existed. It was eerily deserted, yet even in its neglected state, the station’s one-time grandeur was evident. The ceilings were vaulted and arched, lit with skylights held in place by ornate wrought-iron canes. A grand staircase, just visible from the train window, led to the street level. The walls were decorated with bursts of red and green tile that had darkened with age but still revealed their intricate handiwork.
    With Jeremy’s face against the glass, the train had sped up and reentered the dark tunnel. Intent on seeing what was rapidly disappearing from view, he’d craned his neck backward for one last glimpse, and as the subway hurtled forward, a passageway had opened inside him, a vista to somewhere else.

     
     
     
     
    With an hour until he was supposed to meet his family, Leon walked toward home. By the end of the day, he was used up. After he’d stepped inside so many people’s lives, his own family felt farther away and the prospect of meeting them made him weary. His emotional saturation made him wonder why everyone didn’t shut themselves away from the tangle of need, from the inevitable frictions of life among people.
    His mind was still on his last appointment of the day, a woman whom he didn’t particularly look forward to seeing, having to hear each week of her fear of losing her temper with her kids. From the outside, she appeared poised and calm as she diligently recounted her interactions with her twins. It had taken a few sessions to notice that she always sat with her arms tightly folded across her chest, as if holding herself together, and that her nails were digging into her skin. She expended so much effort to sound happy and was so tightly controlled that he couldn’t help but imagine the moment in which the pressure reached such a level that she erupted before his eyes. Until that happened, any admission of a negative feeling felt like a victory painfully extracted.
    As he’d prepared to leave his apartment that morning, Leon had already been thinking about her and the various patients he would see that day. He had padded across the living room and had almost made it out the front door without waking his daughter. But when Emma awoke, she had caught him off-guard, searching his face for an answer to a question she hadn’t posed. Underneath her confident exterior, he glimpsed a scared child. He stepped back into the living room but gave himself away by glancing at his watch. At the wounded look on Emma’s