Riding the Washington Metro

Last Saturday, fighting obstinate nature, I woke up at six in the morning, disinfected myself, descended into a pair of jeans, ascended into a T-shirt, saddled my car and galloped into Washington DC.

And Saturday evening, for the first time in my life, I rode the Washington metro. I plunged into its depths at the Crystal City station on the Blue and Yellow lines. Underground, beneath the station’s brutal arched ceiling, in the dim glow of red lights, human bodies moved about confusedly, like sperms that find themselves in a fallopian tube made of massive concrete. Trains arrived on the left and the right platforms. In the middle loitered around people who refused to board on either side because they were answering Barack Obama’s calls for bipartisanship.

The stations, all identical looking, seem designed in sort of an economical fashion. Helpful information is effortlessly found, but not splattered all over. Instructions on tickets give warm, paternal advice on escalator use. Like: “Do not sit on stairs. They move!” Children who do not hold the hands of an accompanying adult are tenderly reminded that they will be arrested by the zero tolerant metro police and sentenced to three days of community service, cleaning public restrooms with Larry Craig.

Red lights along the platform begin to dance when a train arrives. Public servants coming down escalators see this signal from atop and scramble down to get into the train right in time. In DC, federal officials are encouraged not to waste their time waiting for a train when they could be at work wasting a fellow citizen's time instead. It’s all quite so efficient that even my former communist friend M. Pulickotil, faultfinder of most things Washingtonian, would be moved to say: “function over form, utility over aesthetic, matter over spirit, bend over backwards”.

As I waited, a mysterious train slithered past. Its lights were turned off. It carried no passengers, not even a driver, and it made a short, loud, stern hiss every five seconds, warning those on the platform to keep away from its sinister, scaly cars. Later, I learned that freshmen senators and congressmen, when they land in the capital, ride this serpent from the Reagan National Airport to the Capitol South station, at which point they leave behind the eternal and immaterial part of themselves inside the dark reptile. Conservative natives of the city call it the Soul Train, a nomenclature that has placed liberals in a quandary because they believe in mass transit but not in massless souls.

I took the next blue train and disembarked at Foggy Bottom. At the exit, I fed my ticket to the turnstile. The machine masticated the piece of paper and, as required by the Freedom of Information Act, displayed the ticket’s fate: “Exact fare. Farecard captured, sequestered, and extraordinarily renditioned to Egypt in accordance with its voluntarily expressed desire to die in the land of its papyral ancestors.”

I ran, as Dick Cheney’s soul suddenly appeared at the turnstile, violently gesticulating at the treasonous outing of a state secret.