A 2004 Edgar nominee for Best Short Story, Shelley Costa is the author of The Everything Guide to Edgar Allan Poe. Her stories have appeared in Blood on Their Hands (Berkley, 2003), The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories (Forge, 2004), Crimewave (UK), The Georgia Review, and The North American Review. She is on the faculty of the Cleveland Institute of Art, where she teaches creative writing.

Back in the seventies, when I was in my early twenties, I was living and working in New York City. I decided to take the train to visit an old friend who had moved to Boston for college, and then stayed. This little trip – maybe four hours by train -- felt kind of momentous, the way things do when you’re old enough finally not to have to ask permission. When you’re a college graduate, a working girl, a friend who makes barely enough money (in book publishing!) to pay the fare to leave town for the weekend, making a statement about the importance of keeping in touch in those days before email and texting. I had thrown my lot in with one of the greatest cities in the world at a time when it was a dirtier, edgier, scarier place.
I showed up at Penn Station at 32nd St. between 7th and 8th Avenues with plenty of time to spare, so I adopted that neutral, self-possessed look you can easily confuse with sophistication when you’re about twenty-two, and went into this little luncheonette on the concourse. In those days, there were still luncheonettes. The one at Penn Station consisted of a counter and a line of chrome and vinyl stools, and a couple of small tables. Clamping my bag tightly between my legs – and it’s hard to maintain that neutral sophistication when you’re wrapped around your luggage -- I took a stool at the counter. The place wasn’t crowded. My sensors told me that three stools away, with no other patrons in between, was a black man who appeared to be squirming and talking to himself. Too late: I had chosen my stool. My snack came, and because I did not want to appear in the least friendly, open to chit-chat or whatever else he might want to propose, I scowled at the offending danish.

Since I have never been able to acquire a hard-ass look that fools anyone for a single moment, he addressed me. And I had to look at him, since that is what nice girls raised in New Jersey did. Nice girls raised in New York would probably have told him to bug off. He was disabled somehow, in speech and body, and explained his name was Byron Jones and he was a very gifted poet. I wanted to yell at him that I was waiting for a damn train and just want to eat my snack in peace, thank you very much. But I didn’t. I felt my neutral look working overtime. He went on to explain that, due to the effects of electroshock treatments, he could no longer actually hold a pen and record his poems on paper, so he relied on others to record his poems for him. Would I be able to do that for him? I realized he wasn’t hitting on me, or mugging me; he was asking for help. But a kind of help that would mean engaging with him in a personal way, listening carefully, reading back to him, responding to expressed feelings and ideas. That’s when all the caveats of girlhood rushed in: don’t talk to strangers, don’t take candy from strangers, don’t get in cars with strangers, and, whatever you do, don’t write down the poems of disabled black men who address you in luncheonettes in Penn Station. Who knows where it could lead? Who knows if it isn’t just a scam? You are not as smart or as safe as you think, so just don’t.

“No.”

I told him no, I had a train to catch, and I beat it the hell out of there.

Here’s where a poem by D.H. Lawrence always comes to mind. In “Snake” Lawrence describes how “a snake came to my water trough today.” The snake was beautiful and peaceable and only wanted a drink, but Lawrence, churned by dark associations that nothing to do with the snake quietly drinking at his trough, tosses a stick at it as it departs. He immediately regrets it as a mean act, as a missed opportunity to offer something easy, generously, to “a king in exile.” And he knows that forever after he has “something to expiate; a pettiness.” And so had I, I knew on some deeper level, even as I boarded the train to Boston, feeling as if I had gotten away, gotten away. But -- from what? It’s never a good feeling to face down something terribly small in our own natures. You then know something about yourself you can never quite forget. It’s there, indelibly.

Five years later.

Much had happened. I had left New York City for graduate school in Cleveland, and life was full of new plans and new relationships and new achievements. Only I knew about the shame of the luncheonette. I found myself back in New York, five years later, and made a plan to meet a friend from graduate school at the New York Public Library at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street. I decided to get out of the hurly burly of the city for a little while and go down to the reading room on the lower level, just to browse the books while I waited for her. And then something truly mysterious happened in a city that then held over 7,000,000 people. Over a distance of 1,825 days and twelve city blocks between the luncheonette at Penn Station and the basement reading room at the NYPL, there at one of the reading tables was Byron Jones. I moved closer, to be sure, and for some mysterious reason, sat down at the other end of the table. He turned to me and said he was a very gifted poet, but due to the effects of electroshock treatments he could no longer write down his poems. Would I be able to do that for him?

Pausing just long enough to feel that mysterious and powerful moment wash over me, I said “Yes.” And as he dictated and I wrote, I believed I had been given a gift I could never fully understand, and I suddenly felt sure that not all strangers have cars or candy bars. At that moment, I understood Molly Bloom’s final affirmation at the end of Ulysses: yes I said yes I will Yes.