In yesterday's post I alluded to a happening at a nearby train station in Berlin a few years ago, before the Covid pandemic. These events are true. It happened on a sunny Monday morning, at approximately 8:30AM.
After my usual routine of morning exercise, I took a shower and got dressed, ate breakfast, and brushed my teeth. I collected my belongings and made my way out the door to get to work. The walk from my apartment to the train station is rather brief. On this walk I would commonly use my phone to send a voice message to Asia to give her a morning update before beginning the workday. The length of this message generally corresponds to the length of the walk, and it ends as I approach the train station and begin descending the steps to the underground platform. The street is typically littered with garbage, especially in the late night and early morning hours before the street sweepers arrive. Broken beer bottles, paper pamphlets, magazine pages, streaks of stepped-on dog shit, puddles of spilled white paint and the matching series of white footprints, cigarette butts and bullet shells. A subtle danger pervades the streets there. Not any kind of real danger, but rather the threat, or possibility, of danger. A roaming bum, depraved or disconnected from reality, wildly gesticulating and hissing, or a group of three of four troublish looking Turkish men who walk and talk with a cosa nostra kind of whisper. Never have I seen anything worse than a street scuffle, but there is still the lingering sense that something could happen.
Upon entering the station, once you go down the first flight of stairs, there's a brief passage which leads to another set of stairs terminating down at one of the station's two train platforms. On this morning, I'd climbed down the first set of stairs and, while placing my phone in my pocket and glimpsing an incoming message, I was admittedly distracted and had veered slightly off course, which placed me closest to the wall on my right side. The wall reaches a right angle that connects with the passage to the second set of stairs, so in order to reroute myself and get to where I was going I would have to turn the corner at the closest point to the wall, effectively creating a blind right turn. Glancing up, I noticed this, reoriented myself, stuffed the phone hastily back into my pocket, exhaled in mild annoyance, and proceeded to turn the corner.
Awaiting my inhalation, on the other side of the corner, directly in line with my face, was a cloud of freshly exhaled crack smoke. The toxic plume spilled all over my face and eyes as the bulk of it blew straight into my mouth and nose. Wincing, I staggered back slightly, choking, gasping, completely dazed by what I'd just walked into. The taste was noxious and harsh, like burnt plastic. As the cloud began to clear I saw a homeless man, about my age, slack jawed and holding a smoldering scrap of tin foil. His eyes had the look of hard boiled eggs, white, shiny, swollen. In slow motion, with bent knees, he appeared to be finding his way to an invisible seat, completely oblivious to my presence or what had happened. The convulsive coughs coming from my throat didn't make it to his ears. I stumbled down the stairs past him, hands to my throat, still reeling from the acrid smoke, and a deep panic began to whirl energetically around me - in stark contrast to the blissful calm that seemed to envelop my homeless friend.
I wondered whether I too would soon find myself sinking towards a non-existent seat. How would I explain this to work? The event sounded unbelievable were I to attempt to relay it to my employer, terminable even. The panic, or perhaps the lack of sufficient oxygen, made me dizzy. Not like this, I thought. If I was ever going to smoke crack, I wanted it to be on my terms. I leaned up against a wall and decided it would be good to wait a few moments before walking along the train platform where a fall would prove deadly. Probably, I told myself, it wasn't enough to really give me any sort of effect beyond what I was already feeling. The effects would be immediate, I thought. Just breathe, relax, you're mostly just stunned. I glanced back up the stairs towards the homeless man and he was exactly where I'd left him, commuters taking wide circles around him as they poured into the station.
As the initial shock began to wear off and my lungs and esophagus started to cool down, my composure started to come back to me. I didn't feel so worried anymore. Suddenly what had struck me was the novel humour of the episode. What are the odds, I wondered. I felt myself a character inside an absurdist black comedy, probably written by a French filmmaker. My breathing was much more relaxed now and I felt a sublime sort of smile spread across my lips. Except it didn't. They were placid and calm and relaxed. It didn't matter that I wasn't smiling on the outside, I was smiling on the inside - and that's all that mattered. The smile spread down my spine and into my hips and knees and continued to move all the way down to the corners of my feet and toes.
See, it's not as bad as you thought. You're fine. Take a minute to collect yourself and get back on the horse. Time for work. Yes, time for work. In a minute. A feathery image of being back in bed, under warm blankets, heavy with euphoric sleep, reaching for my alarm to snooze it for just a few more moments, the thrall of dream as intoxicant singing me softly back to sleep. Comfort. Completely adrift. Safe. At ease. Pure peace.
A moment later I was back in the station and it seemed emptier than before. Must have missed the train. Another train had just pulled into the station and I got on. When I got off the train it wasn't light out anymore.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket. 18:00, it said. Below it a series of texts and missed calls.
I turned around and got back on the train to go home. When I got to the station and climbed the stairs I saw my friend was just waking up.
Hey, I said, you don't know me, but I know you. I've got a favour to ask you.
No comments:
Post a Comment