I had another “New York City first” on Saturday night. It was the first time I saw a dead body here. It wasn’t exposed, luckily. It was in a body bag, on a gurney, being brought up from the L platform to the F platform at the Sixth Avenue and Fourteenth street station.

My friend and I were going to Brooklyn but couldn’t take the L because the cops bad blocked it off. We went down to catch the M instead, but along with a big group of others, chose the wrong entrance. We got all mixed up for a while; had to cross above ground, then go back down and re-swipe our cards. I could hear the small herd of people who did the same thing as us, following close behind and collectively bitching. For a minute, we both wondered what had happened, but only because we wanted someone to blame our buzzkill on. We shared a few dark theories and laughed about them, then came to the conclusion that it was a drunk who fell, or someone who jumped. That was good enough to make us stop wondering and go back to talking about whatever we’d been talking about earlier.

We stopped when we heard police radios and jingling keys coming up from the tunnel to the L platform — it was six cops and a few MTA workers, carrying a gurney with a big orange body bag on it. The body bag had a weird fold towards the middle. Like either there were two short bodies in the bag, or one normal-sized one, cut in half. To distract myself from the obvious answer, I told myself it was two short bodies. I didn’t want to imagine a fat, drunk guy wobbling in and out of the yellow paint, eventually losing his balance and slipping, just as the train approached, and I didn’t want to picture some depressed twenty-something who couldn’t handle a break-up, staring at a photo of his ex on his iPhone as he leapt off the platform. Instead, I imagined a frustrated, interracial midget couple who held hands as they jumped on to the tracks. Because they were madly in love, but their families couldn’t accept it. That was my heartbreaking but pleasant way of explaining the unusually lumpy body bag.

There were people standing all over the platform as the crew came up. Everyone shuffled to clear a path down the platform around to the first set of stairs so the crew could get through with the gurney, but the crew didn’t go up the stairs. They stopped. Under the stairs — one of them unlocked the supply closet, and the crew carried the gurney inside. They set it down, bumbled around for a minute,then filed out and closed the door. 

The emergency crew dispersed, except for one particularly young, gooberish-looking cop, and two MTA workers. The MTA workers went over some paperwork while the cop stood guard. As they left, the cop opened up the closet door, which was totally unlocked, and peeked inside nervously for a second. Like he thought maybe one of the more senior cops was hiding in the body bag, waiting to jump out and scare him. Which would’ve been amazing, but that didn’t happen, so he started to wander around and eventually shuffled up the stairs, leaving the unlocked closet unattended. 

As that was happening, everyone on the platform had gone back to whatever they were talking about. I jokingly said to Lauren, “Hey, I know where there’s a dead body!” She said, “Worst ‘Stand By Me’ sequel ever.” We laughed, then watched a handful of people take not-giving-a-shit to the next level by going down to see if the L was running again. Once our train came, we got on, and had pretty much forgotten about what we’d seen until the next day.

So that’s what happens when you die on the train tracks, on a Saturday night, in New York City. Everyone hates you because you caused the station to close down for a while, and you inconvenienced them. Crowds of people will act as though your death was a personal attack on them. Emergency workers will remove your body from the tracks, showing no more emotion than if they were moving a couch. Then they’ll put it in a bag, and throw it in an unattended supply closet, just to get you out of the way of other subway riders. The ones with cooler heads and/or better balance.