Free This Side of Brightness by Colum McCann Page B

Broadway–Lafayette, a subway station, a hundred yards from the platform, with trains going past every few minutes, no light from grills, all noise: a vicious tunnel, the most vicious of tunnels, the worst in Manhattan.
    She was there for six months, sleeping on a rain-bloated mattress. Vials were crumpled into pieces in the pockets of her jeans. One night she fell asleep on the mattress in a walled-off hole by the edge of the tracks, no more than five feet from the trains. The noise had become nothing; it was like the sound of her own rhythmic breathing. She sucked down the steel dust that hung in the air. While she was sleeping four men with bicycle chains came down from the Broadway-Lafayette end. They kicked her awake and dragged her up by the hair. She’d never seen them before. She screamed and one of them shoved a sock in her mouth. They ripped her T-shirt and wrapped her arms with the bike chains, tightened them so they left a bracelet of oil on her wrists, bent her over, and took their turns. They whispered a world of obscenities in her ear.
    When Angela gagged, they took out the sock and vomit streamed out after it, but they kept on going. She remained silent after that. One of them licked his tongue at her lobe and stole a gold earring with his teeth. He leaned down in front of her with the little hoop of gold on his tongue. She didn’t have the energy to spit in his face.
    Bent on all fours, she pleaded for mercy, closing her eyes to make them anonymous. When they finally left they threw down fifty cents each and told her to buy some candy—a Mounds bar, they said—and they laughed all the way out of the tunnel.
    Angela couldn’t walk for two days. The mattress stank. She used a stuffed elephant for a pillow. Its pinkness was ribboned with blood. In the subway trains, commuters rushed by, shadows in the windows. She looked at the shadows and watched them go and reached up and twirled the one remaining hoop in her ear.
    She was found by a man named Jigsaw, who said, “Shit, Angie, I’ll kill the motherfuckers did this to you.”
    Jigsaw leaned down and held her real tight and he stank, but she let him hold her anyway. He had ropy arms. Later he bought her some hot coffee and a sandwich she couldn’t eat. He stood in front of her with his tongue lolling around in his head—she called him Jigsaw because his mind had gone to pieces.
    â€œLeave me alone, Jiggy.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œI don’t want to talk to nobody.”
    â€œYou’ll die here like this, sister.”
    â€œThat sounds nice.”
    â€œShit, girl.”
    â€œI mean it, it sounds lovely, I’d like to die, it sounds like strawberries, it sounds delicious.”
    â€œYou gone crazy, girl.”
    Jigsaw let Angela be and melted into the yellowy darkness—the tunnel punctuated with electric lights—and she came topside through the emergency manhole, out onto a traffic island in the middle of Houston Street, stumbling along in the snow with her body parched and her head imploding. She sat weeping in a bus shelter until a teenager with a nose ring took pity. He put his arm around her shoulder and took her to a police station in the Bowery. She was surprised at his smell of aftershave. It was alien to her, deep and sweet and lengthy.
    A cop brought her inside a small interrogation room with the brightest of desk lamps. The room was warm. She sat with her hands limp and asked for the desk lamp to be turned off; it was hurting her eyes. A second cop twisted the neck of the lamp and pointed it at the floor, and a yellow spot of light remained imprinted on her retinas. She couldn’t sit for longer than five minutes on the chair. She tried to write a report, but the cops said she had been asking for it, that’s what you get for being a whore, that’s just the way it is, you were looking for it, sister, why’re you wearing a miniskirt and thin little panties?
    â€œI