Subway
Metal is a rather peculiar thing. There’s that scent –
you know, when you hold a dime in your palm for too
long and it gets sweaty and all and it starts to stink. The tokens are like
that, too, but they also have that ugly, dull brassy look to them that is more
pallid than antique, although I suppose now that they’ve phased out the tokens,
they may as well be antiques, beside those old torch-lights and
slightly-tarnished menorahs and wrought-metal weeping willow sculptures that
probably would cut your hands before you could wind them up enough to play back
that old tune your grandfather used to hum to your mom when he would sit her on
his lap on the front porch.
I have a token in my pocket at this moment; it is
pressed between my index finger and my thumb. I can feel the impressions on
each side, the asymmetry of it all. It’s awkward. I flip the coin around with a
quick half-turn of my fingers, over and over again, like lovers opposite one
another in a revolving door with no exit.
I keep this token in my pocket for good luck. Or
rather, more on that unlikely glimmer of hope that maybe one day, time will
turn back. I’ll know because the proximity readers will be replaced by those
little tin cartons with the slits in the top. I’ll know because there’ll be a
person sitting in that booth again, listening to the radio, reading a book,
doing anything but giving you tokens – and even then, counting your change
wrong, to your dismay. They don’t listen. But then again, neither does the
empty booth that’s there now.
The subway is full of relics of times gone by. Even
the trains themselves are getting kind of old. Only one thin little ring around
the wheels stays that pristine, paladin-armor silver. The rest of the wheel is
some strange shade of mauve that looks kind of like rust that it is, but
without that sickly peeling that seems to always peek through abandoned
buildings and really old cars.
Still, the trains have a function; my token does not. As my left hand swipes the card, my right hand stays firmly in my
khakis, turning the warm coin over and over. I walk out onto the
platform, steering abruptly to the right when I see that bright yellow slab
that you’re not supposed to step on, although a couple guys are playing some
sort of game of chicken on it.
I wait, leaned up against the wall, the tiles on this
narrow mosaic of sorts squeaky clean, the whites shining brightly to create an
effect something like seeing an wrinkly, scruff old man who nevertheless has
some pretty spanking new dentures in his mouth. I’m leaning against the
subway’s dentures.
The wait is kind of long, not agonizing, just long. There’s a fan nearby, although it’s pointed the
wrong way and blowing the heck out of this little kid, who’s jumping up and
down and up and down, his red-and-blue jacket swaying about and coming off til it’s barely clutching his elbows.
My spot, with the clean tiles, has some rather
stagnant air. The wait is really getting long. There must be a crowd at the
previous station, holding up the train or something. Or maybe they just don’t
have the right number of conductors to run the system anymore – I hear the
transportation authority’s pretty far in debt these days. The fare hikes
certainly are complicit in that conclusion.
The times change; my valueless token is an artifact;
the trains will break down and be serviced; that fan will be replaced by a
bigger one; the kid will grow up and become a man; these tiles will grow old
and dusty and chip off in the middle to reveal the cement behind them. But the
subway isn’t about any of that. The subway is about waiting, and that’s
something that will never change.