You saw him once on the E train, during a moment of drowsiness. The Hat Man, or—as your abuela used to call him—El Silbón. It was 4 a.m. and you’d just finished your graveyard shift at the 24/7 pharmacy.…
When I first traveled to NYC, I needed to lie.
It was more like an omission of truth than a lie. But my mother believed I was still at my apartment in Pittsburgh, and I let her believe this. I knew that if I told her where I was going, the terror would paralyze me. She would talk me out of it, in that coercive way of hers, convince me that I couldn’t survive beyond a ten-mile radius of her, that I was dependent on her and not the other way around. What if someone robbed me on the subway? What if I couldn’t withdraw money from an out-of-state ATM? What if I got lost, stranded miles from home?
Abuse is not just a physical cage, but also a mental one. Even once you escape the verbal slings, the emotional batterings, and the physical barriers of forced social isolation, there still remains a lingering fear. A self-enforced isolation, because this is all you’ve ever known. Before turning twenty-three, I’d never traveled more than fifty miles from Pittsburgh. Not that I could remember, anyway. It was forbidden.
For me, NYC was another planet. Emerging on the streets, I was struck by the sheer crush of pedestrians, by the clash of languages around me, and quite like Sylvia Plath’s autofictional protagonist Esther, I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. Of course, I knew why I was there: to meet pen pals for the first time in person, to explore a new city together. But it didn’t quite feel real.
Simultaneously, visiting NYC also felt like returning home. Seeing the Spanish-language billboards, seeing the same skyline that three of my grandparents must’ve seen upon arriving in the US (one from Panama, two from Italy) felt like coming full circle.
In “Hat Man Plays the Blues,” Toño says that the subway breathes. This is true. I believe in “setting as a character”—not just a painted backdrop, but an organism that lives and breathes.
This story came to me in bits and pieces the summer after visiting NYC. I’d heard a friend speak about sleep paralysis and their strange visions of the “Hat Man,” and I remembered my own anxiety, the dread that haunted me in New York. I wanted to take readers on a journey through memory, untethered by the restraints of chronology, and what better way to explore the subliminal levels of Toño’s trauma than through the New York subways?
This story is a mix of both the real and surreal. It follows a precisely mapped journey along subway stops, cobbled together from my own memory and Google Maps. Some details are true. Yes, I did stick my arm inside the pharmacy’s pneumatic tube. Yes, some of the characters who populate Toño’s world are impressions of people I know.
Not all is real, though. Some parts are dramatized: not truth per se, but a close neighbor. My ancestors came from Panama and Montserrat—not from Venezuela. But I’ve always been intrigued by Latin American ghost stories, ghosts as a metaphor for trauma—and so I was hooked by the legend of El Silbón. I reimagined him, plucked from the savannas of Venezuela and dropped into NYC. What specter would he take? How would this new setting shape him?
Behind every myth, there’s a kernel of truth. That’s what I’ve heard.
And so I will let you, the reader, decide what is real and what is not.
JULIAN RICCOBON (he/him) is a Latinx writer, editor, and artist and is the managing director of Polyphony Lit. His work has been published in Huizache, The Acentos Review, Flash Fiction Online, Rumble Fish Quarterly, Blue Marble Review, F(r)iction, and Teachers & Writers Magazine, among other places. He is of mixed European and Afro-Caribbean descent and often writes contemporary fiction and magical realism centered around Latinx culture and history, mental health, anxiety, religion, and dysfunctional families. You can find him on Instagram @julianriccobon and Twitter @JRiccobon.
