There’s an echoing sort of silence to the Underground, a perpetual noise that can’t be attributed to one thing or another—just the collective whirr of trains passing by at around thirty-five miles per hour.
The fastest an Underground train could reach is 60 miles per hour. I learned this from the nerdy kid who sat next to me for a few minutes when I rode the Grey Line yesterday. He interrupted me from my thoughts with, “Did you know that in some parts of the Metropolitan line, the trains reach 60 miles an hour?”
I had asked him, “Which one is the Metropolitan line again?”
“It’s the purple one on the map.”
“Oh.”
The Underground line I’m riding isn’t actually called the Grey Line, but since I’m too lazy to remember the names for everything, I call the different lines by their given color on the Tube maps that are plastered everywhere. This one happened to be grey. I think other people must do this as well, because no one can remember that they take the fourth stop at the Hammersmith line and transfer to the Clapham Common line and then go north on the Charing Cross line with a switch at High Street Kensington—so we look at the colors. This makes me I wonder how lazy, colorblind people get around on the Underground. Do they get lost often?
It’s the third day that I’ve skipped class at the University of London to aimlessly ride the Grey Line of the London Underground, and while I’m every bit as lost as when I started, I have realized a couple of things.
The first is that even though I know I’m not fit for studying philosophy and ethics, or even one of the two, I somehow feel obligated to continue with it.
The second is that it might be a good plan to stick with philosophy after all, since I have no idea where my life is headed otherwise.
I had never skipped class before this year, and this being my third day in a row, I begin to wonder what had triggered it. I had boarded the Grey Line at the Salisbury station at 7:13 as usual on Monday, which would get me to my first class at 8:00 with a few minutes to spare. But when my stop, West Hampstead, was announced, I felt compelled to stay on the train, and for the rest of the day, rode the Grey Line up and down London, reflecting on my life, having moments of feeling sorry for myself occasionally, and wondering if they’d buy the excuse that I was sick. I’d never let it happen again. Yet on Tuesday, I’d purposefully missed the West Hampstead stop and stayed in that same Underground train until late in the evening. The linoleum floors that reminded me of hospital hallways, the brightly patterned carpeted seats that were always taken by people faster than yourself, the sound of whatever the person next to you was playing on their iPod—this was becoming more familiar to me than my classrooms at the University. Why am I doing this? I’d wondered for the third time. Because I’m in need of simplicity.
I’m reminded of a philosophy question that dealt with trains. Basically, there’s a train on its way, its brakes don’t work, and there are five people on the track who are going to be hit. There’s a lever in front of you that will divert the train onto another track with only one person on it. Do you pull the lever and have only one person die rather than five?
Of course you do! I’d thought immediately. What sort of moron wouldn’t pull the lever? One life verses five. That’s so blatantly simple.
And yet for some people, it was a question worth considering.
A group of college kids get on the train and I glance over, confirming that they’re from Westshire just by looking at them. A never-ending source of interest to me is observing the students who go to Westshire, the liberal arts college in Chattingham. They’re the artsy sort of kids who were doing soft drugs by the time they were 14 in the alleyways behind their parents’ art galleries in north Chelsea, shopping for vintage clothing on the weekends in flea markets along St. Paul’s Square and flourishing in the underground culture of bands like The Vaccines, playing at trashy pubs and dance bars in Morden. I’ve never been to Morden before—my parents would never allow me—but I’ve heard the song by the same name. It talks about a youth who hung himself from the top level of the local supermarket car park. I’m not sure who would enjoy listening to a song about that, but I surely didn’t. In a way, though, it makes me want to visit Morden just once, to see if it measures up.
I only know one guy who goes to Westshire. Actually, I knew him a couple years ago, but I later found out from a mutual friend that he’s studying music theory there. His name was Rob, and I saw him at dance clubs a couple times during my last year of secondary school, when I would dance and drink to relieve the stress of exams and applying to universities. He followed me outside once when I left the dance club to get fresh air. He held back my hair while I puked over the edge of the banister behind the club building, and then told me in a subtly arrogant sort of way, “You shouldn’t drink so much, you know.” It was too dark to see his face clearly, but if I’d bet you anything he was smirking. I wanted to punch him in that moment, for the simplistic way he’d stated what I knew all along, what had got to be so obvious. To this day, though, I’ve never drunk as much as I had that night.
I wonder as I sit there watching the Westshire students out of the corner of my eye whether I’d ever run into him again. I wonder if he’d remember me, if he’d acknowledge me, if he’d saunter on over to my corner seat in the train, if he’d ask how I’ve been, if he’d mockingly offer me a drink.
I catch the eye of a girl with matted black hair and an obscene amount of glitter on her eyelids, wearing a psychedelic printed tunic that looks like the sort of thing my mother wore in the 80’s matched with torn black tights I’d seen featured on the cover of some magazine or other the week before. For all of the work they do to stand out, Westshire students sure are good at following trends.
Rather than the cold glare I’m expecting, she holds my gaze calmly for a couple moments and then looks down at her sloppily done manicure, black with white tips, another trend I’d noticed recently. She’s forgotten me already.
It’s a brilliant sort of nonchalance that guides these people wherever they go, that makes them seem a little less trashy: the phrase “saving grace” comes to mind. They carry themselves with an air of something less than superiority but more than impassiveness, something I can’t quite place. It’s in the way they talk at normal volumes when everyone else on the train is silent or speaks in whispers. It’s in the way they stop and listen to the guy playing guitar or accordion at the entrance to the station, wait until the song is finished, rather than hurriedly rushing by like everyone else.
I’ve often thought that I could fit in at Westshire, but it’s nothing I’d admit to anyone. I think I could blend in with the Westshire students if I tried, trade in my lace-up oxford shoes I’ve had for two years with motorcycle boots and get a pair of those awful ripped leggings, take up smoking and listening to music with fewer lyrics than instrumental, date a guy who I’d see maybe once a week, someone like Rob, who follows girls outside of dance bars and critiques them for drinking themselves into oblivion—
The automated voice informs me that Willesden Green is the next stop. Willesden Green is where the Westshire students get off so they can grab coffee at one of the overpriced cafés along Russell Square on the way to their classes. It’s not too late for me to switch lines a couple stops from now, get on the red line and head back to my University and only have missed my first class.
Instead I stand up when the train slows to a halt and the Westshire kids breezily grab their schoolbags and leave; I change seats to one of the rows of five along the middle of the train. Last week a friend of mine forwarded to me a news clip about a group of people who organized a bunch of twins to meet at an Underground station wearing the exact same clothing, and sit with one twin opposite the other, so that other Underground-goers would become confused or think it was a mirror and wonder what was going on. I remember watching the clip, with the rows of identical twins mirroring each other, and trying to think of why someone would go to all that trouble for something as silly as that…I was reminded of a recurring nightmare I had in my early teens in which there would be more than one copy of a family member of mine, and I’d become frightened and confused not knowing which one was real and which was an imposter.
The same friend who sent me that clip has told me a billion times her views regarding doppelgangers. She says that every person out there has someone who looks exactly like them but is opposite in every other regard. Being an ethics and philosophy student, I tried looking at that in coordination with a bigger picture, but could find none. My helplessly rational mind has trained me to search for a wider meaning in the small things, a higher order even though I personally doubt the existence of one: in the end, it’s impossible for me to look at things individually. I can only see them in comparison to something else. I haven’t decided if it’s a fatal flaw yet. Maybe my doppelganger would have a more focused perspective. Maybe, when confronted with the idea of everyone having a double, she’d say, “That in itself is a really fascinating idea. Let’s go out for coffee and discuss it.” (Actually, she wouldn’t go out for coffee; seeing as I love coffee, she would in theory hate it. She’d say, “Let’s go out for a couple pints of lager and discuss it.” Lager is the one thing I won’t drink.) I wonder if she’d wonder about her doppelganger, if she would come across the idea that it was a confused nineteen-year-old with a diminishing sense of self-respect and a dwindling capacity for knowledge, someone who was sick and tired of being sick and tired, someone who couldn’t stand to have her head filled with more knowledge that was all theories and none of it proven, theories that would only grow more and more complex as the world progressed, theories that would ultimately get us nowhere, because after death, there’s really no—
Somehow the train is at the Swiss Cottage stop already and I’m tempted to leave now and wander around the streets like I used to with the first guy I dated my first year at University. I can’t for the life of me remember his name, which is odd because I remember Rob’s name and he was just some Westshire jerk whom I never really liked anyway. I should remember this guy, if anyone, because we spent an inordinate amount of time together looking at the houses around Swiss Cottage, and sometimes drawing them, and sometimes fantasizing about who lived in them when they were first built—but this guy would get bored with talking and we’d complete the remainder of our walks silently, which would bother me to a certain extent, though I could never place why, because philosophy and ethics students are naturally inclined to silence. I still carry around with me a sketch that he did of one of the three-story houses on the corners, near the cafes: the scaffolding that reminded me of a sling put on a broken bone, the slight slope of the windows, the spiral staircase visible through those windows. I fish around for the drawing in my purse, the same one I’ve been carrying around for four or five years now. My doppelganger-obsessed friend told me that since I never get rid of anything, someone who wanted to learn about my life could simply empty out my purse layer by layer the same way a geologist looks at fossils stuck in different levels of rock. That reminds me that last week my philosophy professor mentioned something about geology, but I wasn’t fully paying attention, as usual.
I dig around in my purse until I come across the sketch, which despite being folded and tucked away carefully is now stained with years’ worth of God knows what, the ink now smudged. As I glance over the windows and doorframes I remember that his name was something like Mark or Elijah, a Bible character’s name. A die-hard Atheist, I had once commented on the irony that he got a Bible name. He didn’t appreciate my lame attempt at humour and told me that for someone who was afraid of spiders, it was funny that I got the name Charlotte (which I later learned was a reference to the children’s book Charlotte’s Web, which was about that mentally ill pig or something). I had never actually read the book, so I shot back that the spider doesn’t turn out to be a spider in the end anyway; he laughed and told me to check my facts. That “check your facts” had that same air of subtle haughtiness that was in Rob’s voice that one night I was vomiting behind the dance club.
I’m wondering if all guys have that voice in one form or another when the lady sitting on my right sticks her head over the armrest sort of obnoxiously and says, “Well that’s a good sketch, isn’t it. You draw that?”
“No, I guy I once knew drew it.”
“Is that so?”
Well I wouldn’t have said so, if it wasn’t so, would I?
“Yep.”
“You sell what you draw?”
“I didn’t draw it…”
I look up at her now. She’s middle-aged and smart-looking for someone who comes off as so dumb, dressed in a brown business suit, with her hair up in a bun that looks like it would have taken years and years and tons of bobby pins to perfect.
“It reminds me of my house growing up.”
We look down at the sketch together now, and I try to picture her as a young girl growing up in that house. It was a rich part of town; I wonder for some reason if her family had servants.
“How much would you offer it for?”
Only on the grey line, I think to myself, can you pull out a years-old sketch that your crossbuster-bearing boyfriend drew of some half-mansion in Swiss Cottage and have the lady sitting next to you offer to buy it off of you.
“Uhhh…five pounds?”
She fishes around in a small red leather clutch for five one-pound coins and I hand over the sketch. I feel guilty at first charging for something I’d forgot existed, something of no value whatsoever. I feel like I should say something, ask her about the house or her memories in it, or tell her that it was good doing business with her, like it’s proper to say after a business transaction—or I could give the five pounds back and tell her I don’t want it. But college students like me who are too lazy or unskilled to get a job need money, and I slip the coins away into the pocket of my jeans. I sort of want to look over the sketch once more, but she’s faced away from me now and has tucked the paper away in her purse.
My thoughts on the sketch and Swiss Cottage and the Rob and the Westshire kids are wound up slowly in my mind, to be revisited another time. For now, the blank sterility of the Underground train, the slight jolt as it goes around corners, the advertisements for the newest play at Lambeth North, the machinated voice informing wary passengers which stop would bring them to wherever they wanted to go, or didn’t—this envelopes me for a time, and only when the train halts to a stop at Bond Street do I realize how far it’s taken me, and that by the time I could make it back to University I would have had only two classes left for the day, both seminars. I don’t think I’d be able to stand listening to another professor drone on and on about Jacque Maritain’s Essays on Christian Existentialism, or tell us how ethics relate to the world around us, when in reality I think that it’s all complete nonsense and there’s nothing I’d rather do than take the world at face value, and not wonder about how we got here or there and how things work and why people do what they do; I don’t want to know the underlying principle or the ulterior motive, and the only reason I signed up to major in philosophy in the first place was because I had no idea what else to do with my life, and it seemed easy enough to grasp, if you just worked your way through it and where am I now? Having called in sick for the third day in a row, I’m aimlessly riding the Grey Line up and down London hoping for some sort of answer to things, some sort of solitude to get my life in order, when in reality I only feel more connected to things that have no meaning for me…
This is ridiculous. There is nothing I could stand to gain from staying on the Underground for so long except, apparently, bringing back useless memories. I’m reminded of the first thing that my ethics professor asked our class to start off with: “Do you ever wonder why we consider some things right and some things wrong?” As everyone else had nodded yes, or leaned forward eagerly in their chairs, I had thought to myself, “No…actually, it’s never crossed my mind. I did, however, see a café that charged six pounds fifty for a cup of locally brewed tea. Now THAT is wrong.” I think I would have been kicked out of that class immediately if anyone knew that’s what was going through my mind. I just couldn’t take it seriously. There was right and there was wrong, and there was how it related to a bigger picture of the way the world operates, but that was it. You just couldn’t dig any further than that.
A cold sort of emptiness hits me as I walk off of the train, minding the gap between the train and the platform as usual. It’s a hollowness that I find sort of refreshing, as though I’ve thought everything out to the point that I can’t overthink it anymore. It’s almost reassuring that I can’t come to any wrong conclusions if I come to no conclusions at all.
On the way out of the dimly lit tunnel and up the escalator lined with peeling advertisements covered in graffiti, the sounds of a guitar and a hoarse, off-key voice grow louder. I toss the five pounds from the sketch into the open guitar case of some greasy-haired kid my age who’s playing and singing with his eyes closed, as though he’s actually in touch with what he’s doing—a concept that’s new to me. I don’t speculate as to his name or situation or what brand of cigarette he’ll spend those five pounds on. I don’t look back as I head up the flight of stairs to the street level, or wonder if he noticed me. I guess it really is simplicity at its best.
The fastest an Underground train could reach is 60 miles per hour. I learned this from the nerdy kid who sat next to me for a few minutes when I rode the Grey Line yesterday. He interrupted me from my thoughts with, “Did you know that in some parts of the Metropolitan line, the trains reach 60 miles an hour?”
I had asked him, “Which one is the Metropolitan line again?”
“It’s the purple one on the map.”
“Oh.”
The Underground line I’m riding isn’t actually called the Grey Line, but since I’m too lazy to remember the names for everything, I call the different lines by their given color on the Tube maps that are plastered everywhere. This one happened to be grey. I think other people must do this as well, because no one can remember that they take the fourth stop at the Hammersmith line and transfer to the Clapham Common line and then go north on the Charing Cross line with a switch at High Street Kensington—so we look at the colors. This makes me I wonder how lazy, colorblind people get around on the Underground. Do they get lost often?
It’s the third day that I’ve skipped class at the University of London to aimlessly ride the Grey Line of the London Underground, and while I’m every bit as lost as when I started, I have realized a couple of things.
The first is that even though I know I’m not fit for studying philosophy and ethics, or even one of the two, I somehow feel obligated to continue with it.
The second is that it might be a good plan to stick with philosophy after all, since I have no idea where my life is headed otherwise.
I had never skipped class before this year, and this being my third day in a row, I begin to wonder what had triggered it. I had boarded the Grey Line at the Salisbury station at 7:13 as usual on Monday, which would get me to my first class at 8:00 with a few minutes to spare. But when my stop, West Hampstead, was announced, I felt compelled to stay on the train, and for the rest of the day, rode the Grey Line up and down London, reflecting on my life, having moments of feeling sorry for myself occasionally, and wondering if they’d buy the excuse that I was sick. I’d never let it happen again. Yet on Tuesday, I’d purposefully missed the West Hampstead stop and stayed in that same Underground train until late in the evening. The linoleum floors that reminded me of hospital hallways, the brightly patterned carpeted seats that were always taken by people faster than yourself, the sound of whatever the person next to you was playing on their iPod—this was becoming more familiar to me than my classrooms at the University. Why am I doing this? I’d wondered for the third time. Because I’m in need of simplicity.
I’m reminded of a philosophy question that dealt with trains. Basically, there’s a train on its way, its brakes don’t work, and there are five people on the track who are going to be hit. There’s a lever in front of you that will divert the train onto another track with only one person on it. Do you pull the lever and have only one person die rather than five?
Of course you do! I’d thought immediately. What sort of moron wouldn’t pull the lever? One life verses five. That’s so blatantly simple.
And yet for some people, it was a question worth considering.
A group of college kids get on the train and I glance over, confirming that they’re from Westshire just by looking at them. A never-ending source of interest to me is observing the students who go to Westshire, the liberal arts college in Chattingham. They’re the artsy sort of kids who were doing soft drugs by the time they were 14 in the alleyways behind their parents’ art galleries in north Chelsea, shopping for vintage clothing on the weekends in flea markets along St. Paul’s Square and flourishing in the underground culture of bands like The Vaccines, playing at trashy pubs and dance bars in Morden. I’ve never been to Morden before—my parents would never allow me—but I’ve heard the song by the same name. It talks about a youth who hung himself from the top level of the local supermarket car park. I’m not sure who would enjoy listening to a song about that, but I surely didn’t. In a way, though, it makes me want to visit Morden just once, to see if it measures up.
I only know one guy who goes to Westshire. Actually, I knew him a couple years ago, but I later found out from a mutual friend that he’s studying music theory there. His name was Rob, and I saw him at dance clubs a couple times during my last year of secondary school, when I would dance and drink to relieve the stress of exams and applying to universities. He followed me outside once when I left the dance club to get fresh air. He held back my hair while I puked over the edge of the banister behind the club building, and then told me in a subtly arrogant sort of way, “You shouldn’t drink so much, you know.” It was too dark to see his face clearly, but if I’d bet you anything he was smirking. I wanted to punch him in that moment, for the simplistic way he’d stated what I knew all along, what had got to be so obvious. To this day, though, I’ve never drunk as much as I had that night.
I wonder as I sit there watching the Westshire students out of the corner of my eye whether I’d ever run into him again. I wonder if he’d remember me, if he’d acknowledge me, if he’d saunter on over to my corner seat in the train, if he’d ask how I’ve been, if he’d mockingly offer me a drink.
I catch the eye of a girl with matted black hair and an obscene amount of glitter on her eyelids, wearing a psychedelic printed tunic that looks like the sort of thing my mother wore in the 80’s matched with torn black tights I’d seen featured on the cover of some magazine or other the week before. For all of the work they do to stand out, Westshire students sure are good at following trends.
Rather than the cold glare I’m expecting, she holds my gaze calmly for a couple moments and then looks down at her sloppily done manicure, black with white tips, another trend I’d noticed recently. She’s forgotten me already.
It’s a brilliant sort of nonchalance that guides these people wherever they go, that makes them seem a little less trashy: the phrase “saving grace” comes to mind. They carry themselves with an air of something less than superiority but more than impassiveness, something I can’t quite place. It’s in the way they talk at normal volumes when everyone else on the train is silent or speaks in whispers. It’s in the way they stop and listen to the guy playing guitar or accordion at the entrance to the station, wait until the song is finished, rather than hurriedly rushing by like everyone else.
I’ve often thought that I could fit in at Westshire, but it’s nothing I’d admit to anyone. I think I could blend in with the Westshire students if I tried, trade in my lace-up oxford shoes I’ve had for two years with motorcycle boots and get a pair of those awful ripped leggings, take up smoking and listening to music with fewer lyrics than instrumental, date a guy who I’d see maybe once a week, someone like Rob, who follows girls outside of dance bars and critiques them for drinking themselves into oblivion—
The automated voice informs me that Willesden Green is the next stop. Willesden Green is where the Westshire students get off so they can grab coffee at one of the overpriced cafés along Russell Square on the way to their classes. It’s not too late for me to switch lines a couple stops from now, get on the red line and head back to my University and only have missed my first class.
Instead I stand up when the train slows to a halt and the Westshire kids breezily grab their schoolbags and leave; I change seats to one of the rows of five along the middle of the train. Last week a friend of mine forwarded to me a news clip about a group of people who organized a bunch of twins to meet at an Underground station wearing the exact same clothing, and sit with one twin opposite the other, so that other Underground-goers would become confused or think it was a mirror and wonder what was going on. I remember watching the clip, with the rows of identical twins mirroring each other, and trying to think of why someone would go to all that trouble for something as silly as that…I was reminded of a recurring nightmare I had in my early teens in which there would be more than one copy of a family member of mine, and I’d become frightened and confused not knowing which one was real and which was an imposter.
The same friend who sent me that clip has told me a billion times her views regarding doppelgangers. She says that every person out there has someone who looks exactly like them but is opposite in every other regard. Being an ethics and philosophy student, I tried looking at that in coordination with a bigger picture, but could find none. My helplessly rational mind has trained me to search for a wider meaning in the small things, a higher order even though I personally doubt the existence of one: in the end, it’s impossible for me to look at things individually. I can only see them in comparison to something else. I haven’t decided if it’s a fatal flaw yet. Maybe my doppelganger would have a more focused perspective. Maybe, when confronted with the idea of everyone having a double, she’d say, “That in itself is a really fascinating idea. Let’s go out for coffee and discuss it.” (Actually, she wouldn’t go out for coffee; seeing as I love coffee, she would in theory hate it. She’d say, “Let’s go out for a couple pints of lager and discuss it.” Lager is the one thing I won’t drink.) I wonder if she’d wonder about her doppelganger, if she would come across the idea that it was a confused nineteen-year-old with a diminishing sense of self-respect and a dwindling capacity for knowledge, someone who was sick and tired of being sick and tired, someone who couldn’t stand to have her head filled with more knowledge that was all theories and none of it proven, theories that would only grow more and more complex as the world progressed, theories that would ultimately get us nowhere, because after death, there’s really no—
Somehow the train is at the Swiss Cottage stop already and I’m tempted to leave now and wander around the streets like I used to with the first guy I dated my first year at University. I can’t for the life of me remember his name, which is odd because I remember Rob’s name and he was just some Westshire jerk whom I never really liked anyway. I should remember this guy, if anyone, because we spent an inordinate amount of time together looking at the houses around Swiss Cottage, and sometimes drawing them, and sometimes fantasizing about who lived in them when they were first built—but this guy would get bored with talking and we’d complete the remainder of our walks silently, which would bother me to a certain extent, though I could never place why, because philosophy and ethics students are naturally inclined to silence. I still carry around with me a sketch that he did of one of the three-story houses on the corners, near the cafes: the scaffolding that reminded me of a sling put on a broken bone, the slight slope of the windows, the spiral staircase visible through those windows. I fish around for the drawing in my purse, the same one I’ve been carrying around for four or five years now. My doppelganger-obsessed friend told me that since I never get rid of anything, someone who wanted to learn about my life could simply empty out my purse layer by layer the same way a geologist looks at fossils stuck in different levels of rock. That reminds me that last week my philosophy professor mentioned something about geology, but I wasn’t fully paying attention, as usual.
I dig around in my purse until I come across the sketch, which despite being folded and tucked away carefully is now stained with years’ worth of God knows what, the ink now smudged. As I glance over the windows and doorframes I remember that his name was something like Mark or Elijah, a Bible character’s name. A die-hard Atheist, I had once commented on the irony that he got a Bible name. He didn’t appreciate my lame attempt at humour and told me that for someone who was afraid of spiders, it was funny that I got the name Charlotte (which I later learned was a reference to the children’s book Charlotte’s Web, which was about that mentally ill pig or something). I had never actually read the book, so I shot back that the spider doesn’t turn out to be a spider in the end anyway; he laughed and told me to check my facts. That “check your facts” had that same air of subtle haughtiness that was in Rob’s voice that one night I was vomiting behind the dance club.
I’m wondering if all guys have that voice in one form or another when the lady sitting on my right sticks her head over the armrest sort of obnoxiously and says, “Well that’s a good sketch, isn’t it. You draw that?”
“No, I guy I once knew drew it.”
“Is that so?”
Well I wouldn’t have said so, if it wasn’t so, would I?
“Yep.”
“You sell what you draw?”
“I didn’t draw it…”
I look up at her now. She’s middle-aged and smart-looking for someone who comes off as so dumb, dressed in a brown business suit, with her hair up in a bun that looks like it would have taken years and years and tons of bobby pins to perfect.
“It reminds me of my house growing up.”
We look down at the sketch together now, and I try to picture her as a young girl growing up in that house. It was a rich part of town; I wonder for some reason if her family had servants.
“How much would you offer it for?”
Only on the grey line, I think to myself, can you pull out a years-old sketch that your crossbuster-bearing boyfriend drew of some half-mansion in Swiss Cottage and have the lady sitting next to you offer to buy it off of you.
“Uhhh…five pounds?”
She fishes around in a small red leather clutch for five one-pound coins and I hand over the sketch. I feel guilty at first charging for something I’d forgot existed, something of no value whatsoever. I feel like I should say something, ask her about the house or her memories in it, or tell her that it was good doing business with her, like it’s proper to say after a business transaction—or I could give the five pounds back and tell her I don’t want it. But college students like me who are too lazy or unskilled to get a job need money, and I slip the coins away into the pocket of my jeans. I sort of want to look over the sketch once more, but she’s faced away from me now and has tucked the paper away in her purse.
My thoughts on the sketch and Swiss Cottage and the Rob and the Westshire kids are wound up slowly in my mind, to be revisited another time. For now, the blank sterility of the Underground train, the slight jolt as it goes around corners, the advertisements for the newest play at Lambeth North, the machinated voice informing wary passengers which stop would bring them to wherever they wanted to go, or didn’t—this envelopes me for a time, and only when the train halts to a stop at Bond Street do I realize how far it’s taken me, and that by the time I could make it back to University I would have had only two classes left for the day, both seminars. I don’t think I’d be able to stand listening to another professor drone on and on about Jacque Maritain’s Essays on Christian Existentialism, or tell us how ethics relate to the world around us, when in reality I think that it’s all complete nonsense and there’s nothing I’d rather do than take the world at face value, and not wonder about how we got here or there and how things work and why people do what they do; I don’t want to know the underlying principle or the ulterior motive, and the only reason I signed up to major in philosophy in the first place was because I had no idea what else to do with my life, and it seemed easy enough to grasp, if you just worked your way through it and where am I now? Having called in sick for the third day in a row, I’m aimlessly riding the Grey Line up and down London hoping for some sort of answer to things, some sort of solitude to get my life in order, when in reality I only feel more connected to things that have no meaning for me…
This is ridiculous. There is nothing I could stand to gain from staying on the Underground for so long except, apparently, bringing back useless memories. I’m reminded of the first thing that my ethics professor asked our class to start off with: “Do you ever wonder why we consider some things right and some things wrong?” As everyone else had nodded yes, or leaned forward eagerly in their chairs, I had thought to myself, “No…actually, it’s never crossed my mind. I did, however, see a café that charged six pounds fifty for a cup of locally brewed tea. Now THAT is wrong.” I think I would have been kicked out of that class immediately if anyone knew that’s what was going through my mind. I just couldn’t take it seriously. There was right and there was wrong, and there was how it related to a bigger picture of the way the world operates, but that was it. You just couldn’t dig any further than that.
A cold sort of emptiness hits me as I walk off of the train, minding the gap between the train and the platform as usual. It’s a hollowness that I find sort of refreshing, as though I’ve thought everything out to the point that I can’t overthink it anymore. It’s almost reassuring that I can’t come to any wrong conclusions if I come to no conclusions at all.
On the way out of the dimly lit tunnel and up the escalator lined with peeling advertisements covered in graffiti, the sounds of a guitar and a hoarse, off-key voice grow louder. I toss the five pounds from the sketch into the open guitar case of some greasy-haired kid my age who’s playing and singing with his eyes closed, as though he’s actually in touch with what he’s doing—a concept that’s new to me. I don’t speculate as to his name or situation or what brand of cigarette he’ll spend those five pounds on. I don’t look back as I head up the flight of stairs to the street level, or wonder if he noticed me. I guess it really is simplicity at its best.
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