The Metro Man

There's incredible things happening on the metro.

“I don’t know why I should tell you. It’s really none of your business,” the mousy man sitting across from me in the bar told me while he cleaned his glasses with his handkerchief. He returned the thin frames to his nose, folded his handkerchief into a small square, and tucked it into his back pocket.

“I mean,” he continued, “it’s not just any story. What happened to me today is " well, there’s no other word to use, but disturbing. It was disturbing. And I don’t wish to relive it, thank you very much. And I just met you. I know nothing about you. Do you even ride the metro?”

The intensity of the question gave me pause, causing me to stutter in response.

“Of course not. I knew it. I could tell. I knew you were a four-wheeler.”

“A four wheeler?” I asked, sipping my beer.

“Yes. A dirty, nasty, polluting, inefficient, four-wheeler. A bedraggled, slovenly, ineffectual personal transportation machine user. A selfish, senseless, short-sighted auto-mobile automaton. A car driver. A stupid, stupid car driver.”

“I do drive a car. Every day. To and from work.”

“Jesus,” the small man exclaimed, throwing his arms in the air. “Probably a long commute too. Isn’t it? I bet you drive for at least an hour. And I bet you push. I bet you routinely exceed the optimum speed, with no consideration of the consequences to the rest of us. Burning gas like a boy scout burns wood in his first fire. Just wasteful. One log on the fire after another, for no other reason than to watch them burn.”

“Optimum speed?” I said slowly, struggling to keep up with his rapid fire assault of words.

“Fifty-five? Fifty-five miles per hour? The optimum speed for fuel efficiency? If you’re going to sacrifice our atmosphere for convenient travel, the least you could do is take you time. Give us all an extra few years of clean air before you’ve tarnished it all with your foul pollutants.”

I motioned for the waiter to refill my beer. It was clear I would need another. “So you don’t drive?”

He laughed at me like a cruel brother laughs at his younger siblings when they can’t answer math problems from his homework. “Drive? Like some Neanderthal? No. I bike. I bike to the metro, and then take the red line into work.”

“Oh,” I said hoping to find common ground with my strange drinking companion. “I like taking the metro. It’s nice to be able to read while you travel.”

He gave me a dismissive smirk. “The intricate beauty of metro travel would be lost on you. I’m not even going to begin to explain the wonder I experience every day because I don’t think you could understand.”

“So there’s more to it than being able to read on the way to work?” I said, teasing.

The waiter brought us two new beers. We both took long swigs. I leaned back in my chair as the man leaned forward. “Take for instance, the precision,” he explained with the intense passion of a long tenured professor explaining his life’s work. “When I arrive at the platform at the Woodley Park station there is a sign that tells me how many minutes until my train arrives. And it is always, without fail, spot on. I can trust that if it says four minutes, then a train will arrive in four minutes and take me directly to my destination. Now that, my friend, is precision. Where else can you find that kind of perfection? That kind of perfect precision?”

“When I hit the popcorn button on my microwave, it’s pretty precise.”

The man threw his arms up in frustration. “Did you just compare a work of art that carries hundreds of thousands of people a day to making popcorn? Is that what you just did? It’s like comparing the fourth movement of Mahler’s fifth symphony to Taylor Swift’s ‘Shake it Off.’ It’s absurd. And offensive.”

“Well, when you put it that way.”

“What other way could it be put? Barbaric is what it is. Simply barbaric.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I mean,” he said, leaning forward again. “Think about the dependability. I know exactly where each train begins and where they will end. It’s beyond predictable. Can you say the same for your daily commute in the box-of-death-pollutants? No. No you can’t. But the metro, the metro is reliable. Every ride " the exact same. We dive into the tunnel, emerge at the station, and then up on the elevated track, then back down into the station. It’s like the tide. In and out. In and out. Every day. Always the same. Never changing. There’s comfort in that. Real comfort. Which is why. Today was.” He paused, staring over my shoulder at some horrible memory.

“Come on,” I pleaded. “You clearly need to tell someone. Take a drink and then let that burden go, man. Just let it out. You’ll feel better. I promise.”

He took another long swig of his beer. “Well, I guess it might help to tell someone.”

“It couldn’t hurt.”

“Yeah,” he said taking another swig to bolster his courage. “I guess. I guest is will help. So, sometimes,” he said softly, leaning forward to bring me inside his fear. “Sometimes I’ll take the train passed my stop.” He looked around to make sure no unwelcome spies were listening in. “I’ll take it to the end of the line. Then I’ll get off and take the opposing train back to my stop. I know it’s wrong. I don’t pay for the extra ride because you pay when you leave, but it relaxes me, especially after a hard day of work.”

He took another long drink and looked down into his glass. “Today was a long day. My boss was " well, it’s not important. It was just a long day. Let’s leave it at that. And so, I took the extra ride. I took it all the way to the end. And then, I waited. I waited for the conductor to come on the intercom and say, ‘Last stop. All passengers please exit the train.’ But he didn’t say it. He didn’t say exit the train, or last stop. He didn’t say anything at all. And there was a man still sitting there, down the car from me, reading his paper, like nothing was happening. He had one of those hats on. Like on Mad Men?”

“A fedora?”

“Yeah. That’s it. One of those and a brown trench coat.” He took another drink. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not important. Anyway, the man didn’t get off. So I didn’t get off. I thought that if he didn’t have to get off, then I didn’t have to get off either. And then I thought that maybe the train was just going to switch tracks and head back east. Maybe it was simply going to turn around. But that’s not what happened.”

“What happened?”

“The train started to move again. And we stayed on. And it went down, into this tunnel. I mean, I had no idea the tunnel was even there. It was very disconcerting. Suddenly, there’s just a random tunnel at the end of the line? Who puts a tunnel at the end of the line? Why would it even be there? And then we came to a stop at a new platform. A new platform. Can you believe it? Well, correction. Not new. It didn’t look new. It looked just as weathered as every other platform on the red line, but it was new to me, and not on any map. I assure you. I know the maps. I’ve seen every map. And all the maps end at Shady Grove. So this stop was certainly not on the map.”

“So then what happened?” I asked, sitting on the edge of my seat in anticipation.

“Then the conductor came on and said everyone should get off. So I stood, and the man in the hat folded his newspaper and stood, and we got off the train together at this new, unmapped station.”

“Did he say anything to you?”

“No. He didn’t even seem to notice me. He just stepped right off the train, as if it was something he did every day. And then he went down this stair case.”

“Did you follow him?”

“No. No I didn’t.”

“Where did the stairs go?”

“I don’t know.”

“How did you not follow him? How did you not figure out where the stairs go?” I demanded in exasperated frustration.

“There was a sign, a small sign, above the stairs. It was black with white letters. Very official looking.”

The man sat back and stared into space again, pondering. I waited as long as I could, then the words burst from me. “Well, what did the sign say? Come on, man. What did it say?”

“It said, ‘This way to the new tracks.’”

“This way to the new tracks?”

“Yes. This way to the new tracks. That’s what it said.”

“Well, didn’t you want to see the new tracks? Didn’t you want to know where they'd go? 

I’d think someone who loves the metro as much as you would want to see new tracks. If anyone would want to see new tracks, it would be you. I would think. Right?”

The mousy man met my bewildered eye. There was sadness in him, a deep grief. It radiated from him in waves. “No,” he said softly. “I’m not interested in any new tracks.”

“So what did you do?”

“I got on the opposing train. And I returned home.”

“Oh,” I said, because it was all I could think to say.

“The ride home was wonderfully predictable,” he said, sadly. “Dependable. Reliable. Just as I expected it to be.”