Westbound L Train, New York City

Photo: John St John/Flickr

This week you were not the beaming man in the bright yellow dashiki with the bongos who was the subway car’s everything until you got on and stole the show. Or rather, the thing between your feet did.

He, the sixty-something guy with the bongos, was delivering a spoken-word history of drumming to his own, drummed accompaniment, and the whole thing was very loud and fast; an impressive patter, well-rehearsed. So well-rehearsed that I wondered why I’d never seen him before. He rattled through lines about drumming and Africa, drumming and slavery, drumming and protest and by the time he reached this fusillade of names — Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, Walter Scott — a heady, heartbreaking litany, it was all so intense that I shut my eyes for a moment. It must have been in these few seconds that you got on. When I opened my eyes I blinked and then I blinked again, because I didn’t believe the thing I saw. As if the drumming had summoned it from ancestral plains, a mythic nightmare of a thing on an early evening L train. (The apparition of this bird in the crowd/Devil on a wet, black bough, I thought, because it’s always hard to get on the subway and not have Ezra murmur his two good lines. And then remember, glumly, that he was a Fascist, wasn’t he.)

A pair of blonde tourists who seemed to be sisters gave the thing a cautious glance from the pole they were clutching and then raised their glance to you, smiles tepid with fear and the question wtf in their eyes. With your dark blue pants, neatly pressed, and your pale blue button down, all buttoned up, you looked very respectable. You looked, in fact, like a young Mormon, ready to ring a street full of doorbells and speak about salvation, even as the thing at your feet screamed hell.

The thing was a vulture puppet and it was vulture-sized, by which I mean big — tall as a child. It was dense with black feathers that looked both foul-smelling and ready to shed. The most terrifying bit wasn’t the deathy feathers, or the hard yellow beak, or the gristly curved talons, but the furious, bulging-eyed glare. With that glare boring holes in my sternum, staring me down like wrath made flesh (or papier mâché and feathers), I thought of Sam the Eagle, the beaked and stern muppet with the bushy black unibrow, and how, in comparison, this thing made him look like Reese Witherspoon.

Unlike the glaring bird at your feet, you, stranger, were perfectly expressionless, although maybe a human face can never be entirely void of expression because seeing a face, any face, is to invest it with something. I didn’t know what to invest in you, though. Which I think had less to do with the mind-addling thing at your feet and more to do with my prejudice towards tall young white men in business clothes who emanate assurance. But they came together, really, because how could you get on a crowded subway car with that thing and not feel the need to smile a bit or make a joke, or give some gesture of bashfulness, some acknowledgement of the total fright of it and of the space it took up? Instead, you sat erect with your knees spread wide to accommodate the monster, your eyes placidly closed and your lips moving fast. Maybe you were praying. More likely, I think, you were rehearsing your lines for the video camera waiting for you at your destination. I stared at you the whole time you were on the train and you did not open your eyes once. And all this time the vulture didn’t blink once.

You and the bird got off at Union Square and once you were gone and the doors were closed and the train was moving again I felt foolish with relief. Only then, in your absence, did I notice the man with the bongos was gone too. I had no idea when he’d stopped drumming or where he’d got off.

Hermione Hoby writes about culture for the Guardian and others.