This study is inspired by Walter Benjamin’s “One-Way Street.” My contemporary imitation takes place in the subway cars I ride in daily and is much less eloquent.
One day in 2023, an American woman in her early twenties steps into a subway car. Signs, notices, advertisements, announcements, graffiti: in the stretch of time it takes her to reach her stop, she notes everything that catches her eye until the motion blur begins to make her nauseous.
Please Ride by the Rules
Would-you-rather conversation starters sometimes introduce a set of lifelong constraints. Especially the more complex, multi-pronged ones. You have to eat exactly one 12-inch chocolate torte cake every day for the rest of your life, or you have to shatter your own kneecap with a sledgehammer every morning. You can pick which knee, but you have to shatter it fully—and yes, you will eventually die from the cake thing. These tricky quandaries, born of our nightmares and fantasies, are full of whimsical laws. In real life, we choose our own mandates, or at least approximations of mandates: dietary restrictions, personal codes of ethics. We measure ourselves to one another by which rules we are willing to keep and which we are willing to break: I jump the turnstile but I always wear a seatbelt. Perhaps redefining legality on your own terms is a matter of privilege. Recently I watched a friend, another young white girl, swipe an unclaimed sandwich from the counter of an airport Starbucks. I remember feeling impressed by her slickness and inconspicuous courage, but dimly aware that she may not have done this in front of anyone else besides me: the type of person I am beginning to recognize as a morally-ambiguous enabler. To abide by or abide. Yet to ride implies set duration. We are free to run or light a cigarette only once the train breaks, the doors open, and we emerge from the underworld.
Do not hold doors
Chivalry is dead, some say, but I am touched when a stranger exiting the car holds the closing doors when he sees me sprinting towards them. I wonder if this type of good samaritan behavior contributes to every train delay in small increments.
A man who isn’t afraid to ask for directions
I am trying to get into the habit of just saying I don’t know instead of wasting strangers’ time by giving them vague and terrible directions that would involve having a compass. It’s hard to say I don’t know, because it feels very good when I do know, waving my finger this way and that.
Franklin Avenue Shuttle
Which is supposed to be more comfortable: being tucked into a dark, noiseless space or being suspended in the boundless sky, speeding over the geography of one’s everyday life? I believe most of us feel some relief when we are suddenly thrust out of the tunnel, tipping our chin up to catch daylight through the windows. There is ivy on the trestle, and flocks of pigeons making their elliptical descent on the rooftops. We are held briefly by this noticing.
Your Rent Is Too Damn High
Always the constant churn of construction, new high rises for luxury living inching up toward the sky: composed of steel and glass and an infinity of empty, identical rooms. The number for the leasing office remains pasted against large ground-floor windows, which have been tinted to conceal something. Maybe ghosts, tens of thousands of them. The neon cursive in the lobby may as well declare vacancy.
Do not lean on door
Once a very tough-looking man fell asleep on my shoulder in a crowded car. He’d just been counting a thick bundle of one-hundred-dollar bills. I felt at once tenderness and fear. Another morning I witnessed a middle-aged woman suddenly look up from her phone and offer her seat to a man with a cane, and then to someone who appeared to be in so much pain they were sitting on the floor. I wasn’t paying attention, she said with a theatrical apology. We’d been going like this for at least six stops. Inhospitability, or survival of the fittest? Every bench in every station has been designed against rest. The ones on the Brooklyn-bound platform have been removed entirely.
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