Saturday, February 23, 2008
i saw a stranger on the train
Okay, so I'm going to write an I-saw-a-stranger-on-the-train story, because I associate stranger-on-the-train stories with Nora (and actually can't remember why, but let's let it stand). Now, I hardly ever see strangers on the train like she does, really SEE them - I'm usually limited to disbelief that such-and-such person has been talking on their cell phone from, like... the Howard stop all the way down to Cermak and Chinatown, which is at least 45 minutes of cell-phone-talk, and it's been about the new styles of ballet flat the whole time, or about how short to trim one's eyebrows before or after one plucks them. But for some reason, when Nora gets on trains, there are all sorts of mysterious, intriguing strangers, just sprawled out across the seats and lounging on the piss-soaked floors, wrapped around the grab bars, hanging from the poster-covered ceilings. Their eyes burn when they look up, which they hardly ever do, because they all have moleskine notebooks or thick texts about obscure topics like the role of opium production in the Vietnam War or details of Richard Brautigan's final years and subsequent breakdown and suicide. They have beautiful hands and tapping feet in torn shoes and their images beg to be photographed and written about later.
This is apparently what happens when Nora gets on trains. When I get on a train there are twenty identical businessmen and four hobos, one of whom is spitting up phlegm every ten seconds. But I'm not really a train-rider. The motion makes me nauseous. I fly. I have always flown. So:
I saw a stranger in the airport. I was there to pick someone up from their trip to Mexico, because they had drank the water and didn't think they'd make the bus ride home. There was an electrical storm outside and although flights were landing basically on schedule, through the lightning and all, the arrival/departure screens were fizzling like melting butter and the lights, despite what must have been a million emergency generators, were flickering on and off, plunging the whole airport, and the masses, into darkness.
My place was amidst a pack of panicking people, who every three minutes would rush from one tram exit to the other, across a huge arched ballroom-shaped entryway with a giant fountain in the middle, because they weren't sure which tram their passenger would get off, and they didn't know when they were even landing. People were yelling their targets' names, squeezing through each other on their journeys, a sea of 'pardon-me's and 'excuse-me's and stepping on feet. We reminded me of a terribly polite and clumsy school of fish. I was in the middle. People had made welcome back signs out of the daily newspapers and ballpoint pens pressed hard and outlined fifty times, but I had nothing, and instead chose to use my height and my hair to my advantage. I gathered it into a ponytail on the top of my head, a swinging beacon for my sick companion, and strained my eyes for someone coming off the tram clutching their stomach.
Instead of him (and incidentally he didn't show up until two hours later, when the room had cleared and me and my 80's ponytail looked ridiculous in a sea of empty, rumpled chairs), I caught sight of someone leaning up against the edge of the fountain, backwards - I mean that instead of looking out she was looking in. The crowd kept surging around her on their wild journey every three minutes and she would take no notice. I couldn't see what she was looking at. No fish in the airport fountain. Just coins. Her hands were flat against the edge and she was spellbound, like this coin-filled fountain was the octopus room at the Monterey Bay Aquarium or something.
Because I am me, and can't let crazy sleeping dogs lie, or just observe them and write conjectures about them later, which is perhaps why trains never bless me with intriguing strangers, and only bless Nora, I asked her what she was looking at. Without even turning her head, or cringing against the coming onslaught of crazed airport patrons with newspaper signs, she said loudly and unmistakably angrily:
"I...$14.29... AM... $14.36... COUNTING... $14.46... THE MONEY... $14.51... IN... $14.76... THE WATER... $14.77... $14.82... $14.83."
Oh.
No mystery here.
(posted by Hannah)
11:02 AM
5 comments
5 Comments:
this was an awesome guest post!<3
It really was. Yay, Hannah!
You make me want to post about Mine/Nora's trip to NYC. I can't believe I never blogged that.
Thanks! I vote for a post about NYC, for sure.
oh, also, hannah, you realize that during my stint of taking-pictures-of-people-on-the-train-and-writing-about-it, i was making up the writing, right?
I don't know, I didn't remember! I only had this vague idea of you and train strangers. I didn't know if maybe I had even made the whole you-train-strangers thing up. But I'm happy to know that I didn't, and that entry wasn't therefore really weird and out of place.
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