5. I Remember a Soldier Sleeping Next to Me...

Hey all. So, (I think) I have started putting ads on here. Because that way I will become rich. At this point I have no idea what kinds of ads will appear or how which ads are picked or by whom. Hopefully there's some algorithm thing where what shows up will have something to do with what I'm writing about or will be interesting to people. I think, if you click on them, I get money? Is that right? Whatever. Let me know if you're getting ads for wang-embiggeners or ads selling Sarah Palin anything. Blech.

        Also, folks who prefer to do their internetting with a mobile device can now read my blog that way. It was super hard to set up, too: I went to a page and clicked a button. They should have that enabled as a default.  Hmph.   Aaanyway, read on. Today I tackle the Metro:

 I am sure that nowhere in all the tales of people moving from small towns to big cities, be it on paper, online, or verbally, has anyone said anything about learning to use the train-based public transport system. I can't speak to the Subway or the Underground, but I can tell you about the Paris Metro. And since no one else has ever talked about it, I shall. But first I need to tell you about my parents' driveway.

What I remember of the thing is that it had obviously had gravel involved with it somewhen in the past, because you'd step on a piece of it sometimes, in the summers when shoes were hateful and lay forlorn in a corner until school started or you had to go to some function like church or out to eat at Red Lobster. Mostly, though, it was dirt and old leaves, a nasty mess that squirted between your toes when it rained with no puddles worth a damn. Just muck.

Then one summer when I was...9? 10?...my parents and our neighbors got together and plotted to buy their way into heaven, because one day a dump truck appeared in our driveway and unleashed three mountains- seriously, almost as tall as me at the time- of sand on it. Beautiful, rich-kid-sandbox grade sand the color of egg yolk and damp like the best snowball snow.

Our driveway became a teeming hive of children erecting structures and waging battles to glut the dreams of a tiny Ozymandias. Great were the lamentations when a backhoe appeared to level the mountains out along the length of the driveway, but even afterward you could dig a hole forearm-deep before hitting the old, vile humus beneath. My GI Joe, Star Wars, and MASK figures suddenly had fortresses the likes of which they'd never had to alternately protect or infiltrate, defend or destroy before. But one thing that Mattel or Hasbro's Death Star or Cobra Terrordrome playsets had going on that the sandforts didn't (besides elevators) was multiple levels.

A fort with good thick foundations could handle my drilling a few tunnels through it beneath the main floor, but they were never more than simple tubes and they inevitably collapsed. Dramatic excavatory missions ensued as soldiers on the surface raced to save those trapped beneath. I just couldn't build a subterranean playset of any complexity.

In this task I would have been well advised to take lessons from the architects of the Paris Metro.

It seems like you could punch a hole ten feet deep anywhere in Paris and fall into a train tunnel or station. At first, looking at a map of the Metro on a wall, all the different colored, numbered, and lettered lines- each one having two different versions, depending on which endpoint it's headed toward- seems like yet another foreign language to learn. But after only a very short time, and armed with a map of your own to refer to, what becomes amazing is the complexity of design that went into making the thing so freaking simple to use.

Paris Metro. Colored lines and destinations.

At some point in the life of every big Star Wars fan it becomes necessary to start trying to apply the rules of physics and natural laws like time and distance to the story. As you do this you begin to run into some difficulties squaring things. For instance, the Death Star has- depending on your source- a x4, a x8, or a x12 hyperdrive (without getting too deep into explanations for those of you that don't know- and hence probably don't care- the smaller your hyperdrive multiplier, the faster you go). And all geekery sources agree that the Milennium Falcon has a x.5 hyperdrive (note that decimal, ladies and gents. And for sourcing's sake: You only need to watch the first few seconds, but hey, why not keep going?). So how, with that crap-ass hyperdrive, did the Death Star make the jump from the Alderaan to the Yavin system  right on the Falcon's tail? It should have taken the Death Star days or weeks, but instead the Rebellion only got enough lead time to give a hurried briefing to its feathered-hair snubfighter pilots. The reason is simple: the Falcon had to leap cross-country (cross-galaxy?), getting there as best it could; the Empire had access to hyperspace routes designed by the same people who designed the Paris Metro.

Star Wars galaxy. Colored lines and destinations. Coincidence?!

In places there are whole malls down there. And for the price of a single metro ticket you can descend and stay down there forever, going all over Paris, as long as you don't come back up into the sun. Or rain (have I mentioned how much I love the weather here?). At stations, behind seats, folks in stained clothing stretch out, surrounded by old clothes or plastic bags, whatever makes up the contents of their lives. Sometimes I think they must be dead, lying face down on ceramic tile.

Take that lifestyle, add a few more years, throw in
a nuclear catastrophe, and...Morlocks.

It seems that there is sanctioned and unsanctioned busking, alms-seeking, and begging. In this one spot there's always a band playing, either a Klezmer band or a string, um, sextet, or a choral group. Once, as we stopped at one station, there was an old black guy sitting in one of the chairs at that stop, playing Bob Marley's “No Woman No Cry.” The chorus was in English but the verses were in French. Megan tells me that this is the sanctioned stuff. Cultural, and good for France. Then there's the guy that hops on the subway car, thanks everyone for allowing him to play, and then plays the violin for us. He switches cars each stop or so. I'm not sure, actually, that he wants money. At least, there's no hat or anything. One night there was a guy in the car with an electric guitar, a headset microphone and an amp, playing "The Sultans of Swing".

After Dire Straits he switched over to Bobby McFerrin briefly, which was not as well received.

There're ladies that sit in the corridor, head down, arms holding out a bowl. At one station the lady was sitting beneath the kiosk for buying tickets, holding up her hand for the change from the machine. She also had her son over at the other kiosk, doing the same. I was silently judging her harshly for making her son do this. But when it was our turn to buy tickets, the process baffled us. There's a little wheel you're supposed to spin, but we couldn't figure out where it was. The lady sitting on the floor, almost right beneath us, walked us through the whole process of how to buy a ticket. She earned her change from us.

I should say something about the smell. Around lunch time or so, it's not so bad. But toward the end of the day, as more people are coming home, having been out there doing it all day (whatever it is), the cars get more fragrant. The very first time we rode it we went to a mall. At least, I think it was a mall. It may have just been a large Metro station complex; there was an outside courtyard, but it only led back into the mall, and I never saw a door out into the larger world. On the Metro going home that Sunday afternoon, the air was a soup. A stinky soup, thick and rich. I couldn't decide if I wanted to breathe through my nose or mouth, couldn't tell whether it was worse to smell or taste the air. Most days, however, it's merely unpleasant. And you all stand there, not making eye contact, only talking to people you're with. When one of the stinky homeless people (I suppose they're not homeless; they've got the Metro, right?) comes on asking for money, the way to get them to go away is ignore them. At least, that's what I see people doing that is most effective (besides, I guess, giving them money). Also works: ignorance. One guy came up to me and I said, haltingly, “Je ne parle pas francais.” He was moving on before I got to parle. Megan laughed; so did this other cute girl sitting near us. Bonus.

 Sometimes, as we rattle through the dark, the trains abruptly stop for a while, then continue. No reason is given and people take it without comment. More alarmingly, sometimes the lights cut out and the train starts to slow. At first being able to clearly see the tunnel around us without having to peer through the glowback from the interior lights is cool; I wish the trains could always run dark. So do the people that sleep on them. And the hordes of pickpockets that would appear, I bet. But the slowing of the train catches up to you, and you imagine sitting there, still and dark on the tracks when the next train comes hurtling through. So you're glad when the lights flicker back on and the train lurches into motion, an electrical generator somewhere whining up like a proton pack.

The most intriguing part, though, is not the stations, or the people, or the smell (definitely not the smell). It's the interstices between stations. The tunnels. 
As the ride begins, the train plunges from the slightly soiled fluorescent lighting into darkness. But you can still see the walls rushing past you, flashes of maintenance lighting illuminating thick bundles of wire and cable. And graffiti. Graffiti covers almost the entire length of each tunnel. Pretty good, too, which makes sense because an artist couldn't do anything elaborate in the station itself. But I wonder where they find the time between trains; there's never a lull of more than a few minutes. Maybe they rush into the darkness as the place closes down for a few hours between midnight and early morning, do their work and hide out until things grind back into motion again. And who is it for? The trains go too fast for their riders to make out more than that it's there and is more than just one-line tagging; there're words with outlines in multiple colors, though everything is dirty and blackened. But I have a theory.

At times the walls of the tunnel plunge away from you and it opens up. Sometimes it's a place where another track merges with the one you're on. Sometimes it's just an open area, places that look like fragments of a skate park, a quarter pipe whose apex would send you against the wall or onto the third rail. In places it looks like the camp of a race of urban Rockbiters (remember Pyornkrachzark from Michael Ende's Neverending Story?), chunks of concrete pillar and stacks of weathered cinder block arrayed in a half circle, the 'Biters themselves perhaps fading back against the wall as the train hurtles by so that we remain unaware. I swear we pass through ghost stations, a confluence of two or three tracks, landings along the edges and in the middle of the tunnel, dark doors leading off into deeper blackness, all done in the same sooty black concrete/stone as the tunnels themselves. Who- or what- on earth is waiting to finally board? But the train never slows and we plummet past before I can find out. And sometimes there are just corridors, gone in a flash so that I'm not really certain I saw them and have no idea where they lead.

Things like Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and even Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass whisper to me about what's going on down there. That's who the graffiti is for.  Maybe the graffiti is really directions for the underdwellers, telling them where to go or which passages work at what times. But then things like Stephen Kings' "Night Shift" (the short story, not the movie) or C.H.U.Ds, or those good old Morlocks (H.G. Wells kind, not X-Men kind), warn me of the dangers. Maybe I can't read the graffiti tags because they're sorcerous wards against the Things Below, keeping them from ascending to the surface and going all Godzilla on Paris. I want to explore down there. I want to see the hidden world that lies among and beneath the Metro lines between stations. But it's more than the worry about cops that keeps me from wiggling past the pretty half-hearted barrier at the top of each staircase leading down into the tunnels. I also don't want to get eaten. And Megan has forbidden it. She gets mad whenever I start to talk about the tunnels, afraid that I won't be able to resist their siren song.  I've promised her that I won't go down there alone. Alone, ladies and gentlemen. All I need to do is find me a White Hobo and follow him.