secret zoetrope

if you can't get on the q train, go here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/01/arts/design/01zoet.html

august in the new york city subway is a form of punishment. for me, mildly paranoid and substantially claustrophobic and not much a fan of my fellowman en masse, it's nearly paralyzing in its ugliness. as you walk down into a station you breathe air that can only be described as chunky and you can taste the varied forms of human waste clinging to what you breathe. you are in a hole under the ground, but unlike natural caves that keep themselves set at nice fall day temperature, these holes under the ground take a 95 degree day and scoot it on up to 100 or so. there is no amount of soap, deodorant, perfume or bourbon that will help you survive a five minute wait underground. everyone smells, but you do too. and of course, on hot days, on high electrical use days, there's always the concern that those air conditioned cars whizzing through the tunnels will shut down because of a power failure. no lights. no air conditioner. no air at all. just the hot breath of the strangers sitting next to you. imagine being mummified in old, unwashed dog blankets. imagine being mummified with 130 other people. dark. awful.

so it was with some amount of trepidation i waited for the q train to take me under the ground, over the bridge and into the city on an 87 degree morning. i got on a nearly empty car and sat down just opposite a large backpack, unattended. now, all over the trains and stations you'll see these posters: if you see something, say something. the hope is we'll report terror before it blows up. the problem with paranoid folk is that everything is something and we see all of it. if i reported every single suspicious thing i saw on the subway, i'd have to move in at the precinct and do nothing else. so i do what i do often, which is simply get off the train and wait for a new one. and i wait. in an underground station with other folks melting there beside me.

when the train arrives i am standing between two cars. two roads diverged in a yellow wood. to my left, a half-empty car full of folks listening to headphones and reading, almost all adults, clutching iced coffees and bags. a laptop or two. solitary. it looks like a starbuck's in there. to my right, a car that has maybe five or six folks reading, but about sixty children in bright yellow shirts. summer camp. the children range in age from five to maybe twelve with the younger ones at the near end and the older ones toward the far end of the car. it is hot. i hate crowds. the largest fear looming in my head is the idea of being trapped in the train in a tunnel for hours. so when the doors open and the screaming of a carload of children washes over me, i get myself right on into that car. i stand there next to where the smaller ones sit, near the adults attending them. they are the kind of loud you hear in public school cafeterias, a loud that can shatter bone, melt spine. i try to knit but i am standing and the conductor is driving this train like a thirteen year old, so i hold to the bar with one hand while my knitting droops from the other. idle. but should all my paranoid fears be realized, i will be useful in this car. i will be needed, which means i won't be able to think about me and how i'm suffocating. this is how paranoid people make decisions. i'm not kidding.

just past dekalb avenue but not quite to the bridge, the train stops. it seems like the trains stop here often, coming and going, to shuffle express trains around locals and so on. but the train just stops and stays there. and more than once i've been there on the train waiting five, ten, twenty minutes. in silence in a dark hole in the ground. and when i look around it never seems to bother anyone else and i want to scream about suffocation, about being trapped but i calm myself down and recall that i'm really the only one suffocating, the only one trapped. so we are sitting still in this train in the tunnel and the children do not even notice, are so busy chatting they cannot feel the difference between motion and stillness.

the train starts up after a minute or two and we roll along until a boy a few feet away from me, five or six and pudgy faced, looks out the window and screams. his eyes get bigger even than in cartoons. the three or four little boys around him turn to look and their eyes pop right out of their little heads. they scream and continue to gaze out the window, mouths gaping. and pretty soon half the train is staring out the window, howling. i am standing by a door. i turn to look at what the children see. the c.h.u.d.s, flushed alligators, the crate of wolverines? i am completely flabbergasted. it's a giant zoetrope. on the walls of the tunnel. as we speed toward the bridge and manhattan, bright shapes swim and fly back past us headed the other way, flickering. and the children, born into so much technology, so much aggressive entertainment, just stare and can not get their eyes back in their heads. look, they whisper all together. they have no other words to match up with what they're seeing. the whole car watches the images float by. the children oooh. the few adults on the train look up from books and smile. then we move out into open air and rumble across the bridge.