It Didn't Really Stop Raining

It has rained nearly everyday.

Today, on my way to work, a man not much older than the age when you'd stop calling him a boy, fainted on my subway car. It was rush hour. The car was crowded. I had been reading a red hardcover book on the platform and it was still in my left hand. I was holding a handlebar with my left. It was an older brownish colored subway car. I remember the sound, but I didn't know what it was when I heard it. People started moving away from the sound. This had happened once before -- this phenomenon where people quickly start moving in one direction or the other in a subway car even though its nearly equally distant from the stop you just left and the one at which you have not yet arrived. That time it was different. People had reason to move away then.

He fell to the ground with a thud. I hear the sound now and I know what the sound matches up to. "What happened?" people murmured. "He just fell," someone else said. From what I could see in my squeezed little corner, most people just left him lying there. I should have pushed my way against the oncoming people and done something. He wasn't traveling with anyone that spoke up for him. Someone yelled for a doctor, but everyone I could see just stood there staring at this space on the floor that must have had a real person in it. I was pushed into a corner and I couldn't tell what his body was doing. I told someone to pull an emergency switch, to get him some help, "isn't there an emergency call button?" I asked. As far as I could see no one even crouched down to be sure he had a pulse. Some people banged on the window to try to get the conductor's attention. She finally understood. At the next stop, the man was up and seated. Other travelers encouraged him to get off and maybe get water or get checked out. I don't think they wanted to be late for where ever this train was taking them.

I'm no doctor. I don't even know CPR. I wouldn't have known what to do even if I'd not been squeezed into the corner. I would have done something though, I hope. The only thing I could think to myself was, what if that had been me? What if I passed out in a subway car, or on the sidewalk? Would anyone make sure I was breathing? Or would everyone just back away?

People ask that question: "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" But what if people are around to see it and just close their ears?