Gary descended into the L’Enfant Plaza Metro station just after 7:00 a.m., escaping the cloudless, gradiant-sunrise sky that let any semblance of warmth escape into the atmosphere above. He rubbed his mitten-less hands together as a series of escalators carried him down to the platform at the bottom of the cavern carved out beneath Washington, D.C. Should have worn a hat today, he thought. The image of his long-dead, finger-wagging mother brought a chuckle to his otherwise mundane Wednesday.
His black oxfords paced slowly down to the front end of the platform where he always went in order to board the first car of the train. Every day he wondered why more people didn’t figure out that was the quietest spot. They settled for acting out sardine metaphors while Gary had his pick of the many empty seats around him.
“Another day in commuter paradise,” he said to himself as the Silver Line to Reston rolled in. He had half the car to himself, with only four other people scattered about the other side.
Gary flipped open his Washington Post Express and casually glanced from story to story, taking in the basic gist of what had happened in the world since he last checked in the same manner a day earlier. Some kind of court case involving an intelligence officer and Iran. A big snowstorm in Boston. The Patriots and Seahawks expressing confidence ahead of Sunday’s big game.
At Metro Center, the big transfer station downtown, a guy who looked about the same age as Gary’s son Michael boarded the train, selecting a seat on the more popular opposite side, but facing Gary. He was wearing black earbuds with their cable disappearing into a pocket of his puffy black coat. Gary could only look on in envy at the thick Washington Capitals hat on the kid’s head. With ear-warmth jealousy he grabbed a pencil from his briefcase and set to work on the Sudoku puzzle in the back of the newspaper.
A few stops down the line, Gary looked up to catch the young man alternating between glancing his direction and feverishly scribbling on what looked like a yellow legal pad. In his 20 years of taking the train, Gary had seen all kinds of behavior and activities to pass the time, but this wasn’t a common one.
“Why is he looking at me?” Gary thought. “Is he drawing me, like some kind of art school character study? No, that can’t be it. His hand is going like a typewriter — click, click, click, click, DING, and back to the beginning. Definitely writing.”
Gary tried to ignore what he was seeing. He considered the possibility that without his morning coffee he wasn’t quite awake yet. But after filling in just one more number on the Sudoku grid, he couldn’t resist the urge to look up again. He saw the same thing — the occasional glances, the quick passes of the pen across the pad, and most of all, an expression of unmistakably intense concentration.
“This has to be something,” he thought. “Is this a violation of my civil rights? My privacy? My dignity? He could be writing anything over there and I’m just sitting here taking it like a sucker. I’m a boring old guy doing to work. Leave me alone already, you punk.”
Gary paused and exhaled deeply.
“I wonder what he’d say if I went right up to him and demanded an answer. Or what if I went 1815 frontier on him, slapped him with my glove and yelled, ‘I DEMAND SATISFACTION!'”
The incredible desire for that last option quickly faded when Gary remembered he did not, in fact, have any gloves on him.
“Is there a modern way to challenge someone to a duel?” he wondered. “I’ll have to Google that later so I’ll know next time I need to defend my honor against a hooligan.”
Meanwhile, the writer picked up his pen long enough to flip to a new page, something Gary had seen him do at least twice already.
“Whatever he’s writing, it sure is a lot,” he thought. “Huh, maybe I’m more interesting than I knew. It could be a detective story. I always thought I would make a dashing detective. Got the silver hair, the solid jaw. I bet I’m in an interview room yelling at some perp, demanding to know who’s supplying him the drugs he sells next to a school. Scum. Or maybe I’m walking through a murder scene in some apartment, describing to a lieutenant exactly how it all went down: ‘She shot him over there, by the radiator, then dragged the body over to hide it in the closet. Jumped out the fire escape when she heard a knock on the door.'”
His own story took over his mind for a minute, with visions of commendations from the mayor and local newspaper headlines praising his heroism. The cold air at the East Falls Church station above ground snapped him back to reality. Gary’s station was next, so he went through the customary process of stuffing everything into his briefcase and navigating through the swaying train to stand near a door. But instead of stopping at the first one, he continued toward the far end. He had one stop to make before his stop.
“Hey, you,” he said, standing over the young man’s seat. The kid didn’t react at first, but seeing Gary linger there, he pulled out the earbuds and looked up.
“I’m sorry, did you say something?”
“Yeah,” Gary replied. “What are you writing about me?”
“About you?”
“Yeah. I saw you staring at me while you’re doing all your scribbling there. So what is it?”
“Um, it’s just this dumb story about a dragon horse thing I saw on the National Mall.”
“A what?”
“On the carousel, it’s one of the horses I guess you would call it, like the kids sit on. I saw it last night and thought it was a good prompt for a story.”
“So you weren’t writing anything about me?”
“Not unless you’re secretly a dragon horse.”
“Then why were you looking at me so much?”
“Well, you kept staring at me, and I couldn’t figure out why.”
Gary turned away silently as the train stopped and the doors opened. He walked out onto the cold platform wanting nothing more than a warm hat to cover his head.