Potting I

We said our goodbyes on the platform way up above that weird unlit park-plaza that looked like a DMZ/no-man's land thing stuck in the middle of the city even during the day and drifted away from one another to our respective trains. The three Gerlicht boys moved confidently with their respective female hangers-on down a level and under the double track to reemerge on the westbound side, waving ironically over the bored crowns of the dates. I smiled, barely, already half-turned away towards wherever I was supposed to be going. The rumpled foldmap I clutched at in my pocket was almost useless, a wild spaghetti rainbow covered in laughably fine print made more absurd by the crunchy multisyllabic all-caps words they spelled out. I knew where I was and I knew where I was going but the paper was too small to fully express the tangle of lines meeting any one of the several stations which formed the city's main transit hub here in this handsome central district and the blow-up sidebar that was supposed to help in these situations must have been torn off in a drinking accident sometime earlier in the week. Frustrating, frustrating, and they made no effort to heat these above-ground venues with their high ceilings. But there was nowhere to be until sunup, and no one to help anyway at this late hour (not that anyone would have been particularly keen to), so I wandered heavily down one of the criscrossing escalators, immobile now, that bridged the huge empty spaces at the core of this leviathan towards some neon lights shining out into the void from the third level down--and past them, still down, and though there was no one around and I could almost touch a sister escalator that would have brought me to the correct level my knees buckled when I looked into the gap and saw the miniature potted plants way down below and I sighed and proceeded, a little heavier, to the bottom, where I found the correct riser and began to partially retrace my drudges. The trip back up would have been measured in minutes no matter how slowly or quickly I'd moved; coming on top of the cold, weariness, isolation and of course the unforced escalator error it threatened to continue through the grey-sky arrival of the first commuters from parts unpaved.
When it ended and I stood at the top, sucking air, a dormant McDonald's, so quiet inside that the buzzing of its fluorescents echoed off the escalator web, looked to be my reward. Some scruffy men in coveralls waited in complete silence for the lone counter employee to return from the washroom; one impertinently sipped coffee from a steel mug, mischief in his eyes. A long clang, a metal-on-metal reverberation of the sort one hears often wherever groggy kitchen employees work graveyard shifts, emitted from deep within the prep area and played itself out into the void. Buzz again. I felt the tingly stomach sadness that one feels when nearly alone in big, quiet, well-lit spaces, the feeling that replaces fear when all the sightlines are clear and there's no immediate sense of danger other than the vague uncertainty of unfamiliar surroundings uncoded by noise and activity. The cold magnified the feeling, which I had come to enjoy at times as long as it didn't come too frequently (in which case it lost its novelty and shaded towards anxiety) and so I stood reading the useless menu from out in the big hall, a stray shiver of chilly excitement whispering its way through my lumpy insides. There was something else too, a sour sensation like when the first gulp of coffee finds its way down to the lower digestives after a big fatty meal the day before and makes its disagreeable presence felt, but I'd been there too many times before, especially after a rough night like tonight, to pay much attention. And it certainly wasn't going to get in the way of the snack I'd finally settled on, an overstuffed meat croissant that fairly sweated grease through the menu board. The line had disappeared, the men filtering silently past and up to the trains. It was to happen now, in the last hour of serenity before the din filled the hall once again, if it was to happen at all.