Commuters

COMMUTERS

A short story by Anjali Paul
Copyright by Anjali Paul 2001.

I had a friend who queued.

His job was something to do with computers. He worked nights: all
night, every night. He was what they call a computer wizard, completely
attuned to the perfection of their superbly ordered synapses, their
cool electronic rationale.

I suppose he forgot his heritage as a human being: that social
conditioning which I have sometimes suspected is first absorbed in our
mothers' wombs. He had no frames of reference left for easy
communication. Missing flesh, he developed an obsession with crowds. As
one of the random atoms which form the jostling, anonymous, strangely
clothed and accented mass that is a crowd, he felt wholly human again.
He was, however, choosy. He preferred orderly crowds. Demonstrations,
pop music concerts, scenes of public accidents, were not for him. Hence
queues.

I bumped into him while I was queuing for a tube ticket in the
underground station at Waterloo. He stood in front of me, happily
absorbing the ambience of the early morning bottleneck.
"Why?" I asked, unhurriedly continuing our long interrupted
conversation.
"Why do you queue?"
"Why not?" He answered contentedly.
I should have known better.
He breathed in and answered me meticulously.
"I love their order and futility."
"The odour of futility?" I asked, the roar of the crowd rushing in my
ears.
"That too," he said. "The purpose of a computer smells completely
different. Rather...arid."

He told me there was a society for itinerant queuers. It had been
formed by those who felt the need to demonstrate their resentment
against a society, which had cast them as outsiders. They met every so
often and joined queues outside cinemas, theatres, concerts. Usually in
the West End, as they wanted to make sure that their subtle subversion
was indiscriminately cosmopolitan and not unwittingly directed against
any particular section of a universally abhorrent civilisation. The
object of this concentrated queuing was, of course, to delay the entry
of the genuine would-be audience, often until the performance was
almost over.
"That is not for me," he said. "I do it for fun."
We parted. I left to ritually rush for the tube; he to join another,
longer queue.

I read about him in the newspaper this morning. He had been arrested.
Apparently, he had been overtaken by an urge to communicate with the
woman in front of him in a queue outside a fast food restaurant. I
imagined him pressing his fingers over her body, searching for the
keyboard. She had objected. He, considering that to be the result of a
malfunction, had gently forced her to accompany him to a quiet alley
where he could work in peace. There, with a pocket knife, he had
removed the portion of skin over her heart and attempted to rearrange
the complex circuitry of her veins and arteries.

A week later, in jail, they found him dead. Denied the humanity by
proxy which queues had given him, he had been forced to acknowledge his
computerhood. He had stopped breathing.

I checked the date of the story. He had died a week ago. That was
strange. I had spoken to him yesterday, queuing for a ticket in the
underground station at Waterloo.

I love the 7.52. I love the 18.39. Sometimes I play the exquisitely
painful game of trying to decide which train I love the most, then I
recall the morning tube in the middle of the rush hour and I am lost;
the physical memory of the surge of adrenalin which pushes me inside
it, of those deliciously odorous unknown bodies, unnerves me, leaves me
weak and breathless.

I met my husband on the tube. That first meeting is set into my mind
forever; that tiny flickering image of our eyes meeting across bent
heads, of hand fumbling towards hand between living towers of
unresisting matter, touching behind the protective shield of a
newspaper. I cannot recall his exact features, now.

I look out of the window. The Surrey countryside is shrouded in mist. I
myself am wreathed in the intricate swirls of smoky air which
characterise the smoking compartment. New clusters of cigarette ends
have blossomed on the floor since I last looked; otherwise the 7.52 is
pungently, fragrantly, familiar. Satisfied, I look around. Everyone is
in their place, each seat occupied in exactly the right manner. Their
faces are pleasingly indistinct, as is their gender.

As I browse through my newspaper, a story on the second page catches my
eye. A twenty-seven year old woman was found dead, electrocuted. She
had been attempting to use what was euphemistically described as a
'marital aid' while having a bath. The photograph shows blurred
features, vague eyes, wiry shoulder length hair.

I raise my eyes and smile at the tasteful, comfortable blue and orange
seat in front of me. The figure in it leans forward. As I focus on it,
I realise that it is a woman.
"Do you know what I think?" She says ferociously, her wiry hair flying
around her face. I smile politely, furtively check the reactions of my
fellow passengers, but they are concealed behind reams of ubiquitous
newsprint.

I am alone, and she attacks me with a vengeance.

"I think we change places every day. All of us. With each other. Go to
each others' jobs - do you remember anything about your job?"
I hesitate, because I cannot. Some desks, a corner of an open plan
office...that is all.
She does not need a reply.
"I think we go back to each other's wives, husbands, children, houses,
bedsits, hot dinners...do you remember your family?"
I ponder on this. I know I have a home, a family, but I cannot see the
furniture or the faces clearly. She continues
"I think we're all interchangeable. Like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle with
the rough edges of our individuality worn away... ."

"Yet," says a figure opposite me to my right, "The puzzle remains the
same, and is continually completed."

I regard the man with gratitude, being at a loss for conversation,
polite or otherwise. He beams at us both, crossing his legs under him
on his seat and folding his hands over his glistening, naked belly;
briefly unfolding them to pat his bowler hat firmly onto his head. The
woman snaps her head down to her newspaper. The man fixes me with his
mild, compelling eyes.

"One must commute," he says "to transmute." I fold my own newspaper
regretfully.
"Commuting," he says ponderously, "is a fitting metaphor for the
transmutation of souls - popularly misrepresented as the transmigration
of souls - is it not? Or vice versa. One must, of course, be well
versed in vice in order to distinguish the exact position of the
extraordinarily fine line between vice and virtue. It is an area that I
have spent my life investigating, suffering the persecution of the less
enlightened among us. After all, given that everything in the universe,
through a continual process of change, inevitably becomes its own
opposite, virtue must necessarily become vice. And versa. Or even
verse. Opinions conflict as to which would be worse. One tends to
become ensnared in semantics, doesn't one?"

"Yes," I reply, hoping that I have given the correct response. It is
not satisfactory.

He continues his discussion with himself, shifting his shape to that of
a sardonically wrinkled man; excessively thin and possibly ulcerated,
in order to do so more conveniently. He holds forth in this guise
"I have observed that the fundamental cornerstone of the human psyche
is not an obsession with sex, but with eggs. This regrettably
indigestible food has influenced mankind's subconscious tendencies by
producing subtle, potent symbols which are darkly interwoven through
the whole fabric of human intercourse."

"Please expand," he replies to himself, while shifting shape in order
to burp more appropriately while massaging the impressive rotundity of
his altered ego's naked stomach.

I soon realise that this supremely philosophical and dual natured being
has forgotten my existence. I thankfully shake out my newspaper.
Turning to the centre pages, I casually peruse the exclusive inside
story of a schizophrenic professor of the Philosophy of Language, as
told by his wife. After practising numerous tortures on her
- and on himself - "It must be admitted," she said "that he was a fair
man," he died when one of his own experiments (a research into the
precise nature of the distinction between pleasure and pain) killed
him.

On finishing, I cannot resist glancing at the woman opposite me.
Unfortunately, her eyes capture mine. "Believe me," she whispers. "Help
me."
I cough, courteously. She misinterprets this as a signal to continue,
and leaning forward, says
"Touch me."
I look away. She moves towards me slightly, without leaving her seat.
Her tongue flicks once, twice over her lips. "Go on. Do it. Touch
me."
The urgency in her voice quickens my breathing. Looking out of the
window, so as to disavow my actions, I lift my right hand. Slowly, I
reach towards her, touch the tip of her nose. She moans and from the
corner of my averted eye, I see her writhe with gratitude.

"It's been so long," she screams. The windows shake with the noise, but
I pretend not to hear, my right hand long ago back where it belongs,
clasping my newspaper, having briefly scratched my head on its return.
She goes so far as to touch my shoulder.
"That was so good. Thank you."
I nod politely, refusing to meet her eyes, though I notice that tears
are beginning to trickle from them, building into a steady
stream.

I contemplate offering some sort of consolation, concealing
my vague intention behind the newspaper, as she draws a small pearl
handled revolver from her handbag. "Thank you again," she whispers.
"Goodbye."

The shot, not as loud as I had anticipated, crisply ruffles the sheets
of my paper. I feel a spurt of blood spatter onto it, denting it
slightly. I concentrate on the weather report.

Later, when I look up after a respectful interval, she is drawing
circles around the ragged-edged hole in her temple with her index
finger. I raise my eyebrows sympathetically. She shrugs her shoulders,
smiles faintly and quizzically, and says
''Sorry about your newspaper.
"Not at all," I reply, turning a page with difficulty, as it has stuck
to the one following. The bloodstains do not, thankfully, obscure the
newsprint.

A story catches my eye, on the edge of a large stain. It concerns a
woman who, on coming home from work, prepared the dinner, called to her
husband and children - she had two, a boy and a girl - to come and eat,
then killed them all with an electric carving knife. After cleaning up
the mess so as to leave the kitchen spotless, she sat down to her own
meal, but instead of cutting her food, she cut both her wrists. Police
found the family of four seated glassy eyed around the immaculate
dining table. A neighbour commented
"It was completely unexpected. She had everything - looks, health, a
loving husband, children, a wonderful job in the city... ."

For a second, something in the back of my mind gives me a chill. I
can't quite catch the thought. For a second, I don't even know what day
it is. I check the date of the newspaper. 13th November 1987. I sigh,
relieved. I'm back in the present again. Turning the page contentedly,
I briefly look up and around the carriage where everything and everyone
is in their allotted places; and happy, because this is real, this is
all I want, this is how it should be, I carry on reading while the
sluggish grey-brown blood from the gaping slits in my wrists runs
freely and naturally down my naked arms.

Copyright by Anjali Paul 2001.