The Paris Metro

The love affair does not show itself above ground.

Above ground, life is normal. Above ground, the traffic will feed off its own cacophony, inherent in a giant—indeed global—anarchical system of automobiles and boulevards and traffic lights and horns and police cars. Above ground, the people will live. They will eat, sleep, fall in love, and indeed they will repeat the process until their death, which by that time, the death of one man will equal the birth of two. And above ground, there is sky, there are clouds, and there are stars that will one day exponentially expand humankind’s potential energy. Because above ground, life is normal.

The bells at Notre Dame had just begun their seven-o’clock cacophony when Isabelle’s feet skittered down the flight of stairs into the metro. A right turn into the metro system and Miss Chavanoz would not see sunlight again for half an hour.

As the walkways twisted through U-turn after U-turn, she and her hair were greeted by the cool, mechanical, and somewhat musty underground breeze that was an aspect of subway stations everywhere. They tasted differently everywhere, of course. Tokyo had wheat and no sugar. Madrid had vanilla, and lots of it. In New York, there was more vinegar, and much less salt, until you left Manhattan. In Barcelona, there was olive oil and no canola. Singapore however, was an odd, unexplainable void of sensory deprivation. Indeed, if aluminum and glass had a scent, then Singapore would have been overpowering, but alas, scent was absent in the MRT.

But here in Paris—oh yes, she would never forget the scent of Paris—there was a macabre dissonance to it. It never quite stayed the same for more than a few minutes, and if you wait, you can experience almost every scent known to mankind, from the gag-inducing squalor of the Rafflesia flower, to the comforting smell of old newspaper on a concrete bench, to the lulling and addictive Tuscan meadows captured in the perfume of the nearest bourgeoisie. If you had the misfortune of missing the subway train just as it was rolling out, you know about the full orchestra of odors that shall assault the passenger for a full three minutes—or one hundred and eighty seconds—before you are saved by the fast gust of wind that precedes the subway train and its open doors. Once inside the carriage, however, the odors are still present. If you know what you’re doing, you won’t have caught a train during rush hour, and the only scent you have to put up with is the urinal residue left over by the SDF who had found themselves locked up in the subway train all night with no way out. If you care enough about your nose, you can move away from these areas and often find your scentless refuge towards the middle of the carriage.

But some people, like Isabelle, have no choice but to travel at the heat of Parisian rush hour. In such a situation, the bodily odors inside the subway carriage will make you wish you were back out on the platform: it was as if you had just walked in on a grand orgy of nasal pollution, when suddenly the metal doors behind you cut you off from the rest of the world, and for the next one hundred and twenty seconds, you are drowning.

On her short trip between Cite and the Gare Montparnasse—a trip that shall cost you 1.40 euros—Isabelle’s subway neighbors would all be cubicle-weary warriors, regiment after regiment of black suits, white shirts and red ties. In every new city she visited, she waited for the moment they would simultaneously turn to her with their glowing red eyes, stick needles and tubes into her neck, and assimilate her.

But alas, little that occurred could match such an exciting idea. The cavern of black suits remained nothing but a cavern as solid as the rocks that comprised of it......