On the train, while it had been moving through the tunnel beneath the East River, I’d stood in the carriage that I happened to have boarded, and looked at my phone, though even as I looked at it I tried to maintain some degree of awareness of what was happening around me, in terms of other commuters, though because there weren’t many of them (as the evening rush was leaving the city, not going into it), I was able to see and to sense that there was nothing I needed to be on my guard for just then, though I was also aware how that circumstance could change quickly, before I knew it was going to, as I’d witnessed it do on numerous occasions, when fights or arguments had broken out, between people I’d hardly noticed a moment earlier, and so I didn’t entirely trust what I could see and had sensed, but waited with it in what felt to me like a hopeful and tentative silence.