A lifeless cigarette butt lay on the subway station floor. How many minutes or hours ago it had been carelessly tossed there, by a hurried or a waiting passenger, was unknowable and, for the most part, uninteresting. It was a part of the changing yet constant decor of this underground social room, and no one gave it a second thought. Even the men who came, nights or mornings, to clean, would only sweep it as carelessly into a pile, and then into the trash, where it would disappear. And this dance continued daily or weekly, as each cigarette fell, stayed, and was swept into oblivion only to be replaced with its twin, hours or minutes later, by another careless flick of the fingers.
The station was emptying, it was late, and those who could afford it used taxis or their own cars at this time of night. Those who remained tried carefully to avoid attention. The gazes fixed on the walls - white, here and there smeared with graffiti that was unintelligible to those not versed in its own peculiar underground language - or on the ads that smiled with false charm on the dismal, hopeless grey station. Test the West! This was the West, the tired, bowed heads of the waiting ones seemed to say, and now we want to go home.
|
One of the ubiquitous West posters, though not the same one I saw that night. |
Here and there were larger groups, younger people who did not care, or were
too drunk to care, if others noticed them. Perhaps some preferred to be noticed,
preferred that to the silent, closed refusal to even see the world around them.
This refusal had something negating in it, something that forced them into a
challenge. Claiming their own existence in the face of these gazes that were
fixed on the walls, the floor, anywhere but on the faces of the others in the
small space of waiting.
The silent battle was part of the neverending dance: the battle between those
who made themselves noticed and those who upheld the socially necessary charade
that the noises, the speaking, the songs did not exist, and there was nothing
to do but stare at the posters selling soap and beer. It was impossible to tell
if they recognized the ridiculousness inherent in the situation, the untenability
of their refusal to admit the existence of the intrusions to which they were
subjected. Perhaps years of training now did not allow them to admit to any
other possibility save that one: look away, for looking is always more dangerous.
Was it something they had learned in the years since, or was it a remainder,
left over from those times before the war on the outside began?
The train
came and with it came escalation, the battle moving into a smaller room,
making the efforts of those who wanted the world to simply disappear into a
more and more desperate struggle to shut everything out. Or so, it seemed to
the observer, it ought to be - it must be: here, in the small subway car, sitting
across from one another, how could one continue to simply and calmly deny the
existence of another human being, particularly one intent on erasing just that
denial? But the strain did not show in many; the gaze, out the subway windows
at the dark walls rushing past, or again at the floor, at the walls, was so
trained, so subconscious, perhaps they were so deeply within their denial that
they truly did not hear what it seemed they must have strained to overhear.
It was a mystery, that behavior, and a fascinating show to watch, staring at those who were marked by their refusal to ever stare back. One wondered, too, if they, before they had learned this denial, had fought it in the way they were now fought. And if those who were loud and who tried to wrest the eyes away from the walls and the floors, if their gaze too would one day look around and find that all it knew of this place were those same floors and those same walls.