By Tim Tomlinson

I got on the R seven stops from the film centre. I thought, what will I read? In that short time I probably could not finish an entire—that is, a normal-length—story, but a Lydia Davis story? I could probably do two or three of those, even more. I was surprised then when the Lydia Davis story I opened on my iPhone was longer than one screen. I have the font set fairly large (20-20 days are a distant memory), I thought maybe that's the reason. But I swiped left and the second screen was also full, and the third, each spilling into the next and promising no imminent end. Enjambed, I thought to myself, using the term from prosody. I wrote poetry in college. I made a B in a course called "Setting and Sense". My villanelle had been that close to getting selected for the college literary magazine. These days I don't write poetry, just read, but I think a lot about it. I think this is a time when the world would benefit from more people reading poetry. (A particular benefit would be how much of it you could read on subway rides. You could have a full, a finished literary experience, maybe several, on rides even shorter than the one I was on, as long as you weren't reading, say, The Prelude, or Howl.)

We had gone several stops. Not much had happened in the Lydia Davis story—not much ever does, really. Maybe one thing: a sock is discovered beneath a cushion, a telephone rings and no one's there, someone on an ATM line looks like someone from another ATM line, and then the drilling starts. Or the fracking. The bit goes down, hits a rock, caroms sideways, then just plows ahead horizontally or on an alternate interior angle until it dead ends half-a-mile from the point of entry and leaves you there. Sometimes you wonder how the ending relates to the beginning. Sometimes you know, or think you know. Sometimes you scroll on to the next beginning. And sometimes you discover that you've already scrolled right past a new beginning, you're into an entirely new story, and it's just like the one you thought you were reading only moments before. You do two or three of these, a half-dozen at most, and you're exhausted, a rat in a maze with no exit at the corners, no reward at the center. This Lydia Davis story started with an old woman, then a box of chocolates, some former students, nothing was coming together, and we had three more stops to go. The distance between the sixth stop and my stop near the film centre—that's the longest. I thought, no matter how long this story is—and no Lydia Davis story is long, no matter how many screens—I would certainly be able to finish it on that long interval between stops six and seven. The problem, though, as I foresaw it, was that typically I used that long interval to regroup, to gather up, shut down devices, maybe hitch my pack over my shoulders, pocket the iPhone, even get up and wait by the door. If this Lydia Davis story continued beyond a normal length—and it already had gone way longer than a typical Lydia Davis story goes on, not that I've done a study on her average word counts but I bet someone has, I bet there are stats—I might be rushed once the train pulls into the station, and I hate being rushed. That's the way you lose things. Imagining that as a possibility induced a state of hypothetical anxiety. What would I do, I wondered, if, on the short walk to the film centre, I discovered that I'd left my cellphone behind … somewhere, on the seat maybe, or maybe it had fallen out as I climbed the steps up from the subway, or maybe I hadn't slid it far enough into my back pocket leaving enough of it exposed to make it an easy snatch for even an amateur pickpocket. Then I imagined the discussion I'd have at the box office trying to prove that I'd purchased a ticket but the proof-of-purchase barcode was on the iPhone I lost due to the extraordinarily long Lydia Davis story. I wondered if the box office agent would be familiar with the work of Lydia Davis. I wondered if s/he'd therefore be sympathetic to my dilemma and subsequent misfortune. The staff at this film centre, some of them at least, appeared literary. Once I'd seen one wearing a Baudelaire T-shirt. Another one read a book by Hilton Als — White Girls, I think. I wondered if, while explaining my situation to a sympathetic, culturally sophisticated film-centre box office agent, a line of other ticket buyers behind me would grow, and with its growth, a sense of impatience, in both those on line and in the box office agent. None of this speculation got me any further into the Lydia Davis story. I had the thought: maybe I'd have a better chance of reaching the end of the Lydia Davis story if I pocketed the iPhone now, dug into my pack and retrieved my iPad Mini, a device not much larger than the iPhone really but certainly more generous with views of text, and therefore perhaps providing a less anxious experience of the story, its arc, its sense of proximal terminus. Because if I have anxiety when I read, I find that my reading either a) slows down, or b) the lines blur in the sense that they make no sense and I have to double back and read them again, sometimes double back whole paragraphs, whole screens, even (with Lydia Davis) whole stories, and if that happened now with this extraordinarily long Lydia Davis story, I'd be like a subway train stuck in a tunnel with darkness ahead and darkness behind and no sign of a platform. 

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