The Conveyor
I love riding the U-Bahn. Nowhere else do so many people look so serious at once—reading, staring, making out, fooling around. You could sort them by type. File them away.
Book readers grip something thick enough to hold onto and avoid eye contact. They slouch, feet turned in, shoulders forward, hair tied back tight, shy, never dressed for attention. Newspaper readers pull out the paper at the start of the ride, lips moving along. Button-ups, slacks, fine leather shoes—or on women, that office thing. But they’re faking it. When the U-Bahn lady announces the next stop, they ball up the paper and wedge it between seat and window. Gone.
Cool guys in baggy jeans, bling everywhere, earbuds in, doing the tactical head-nod to the beat. Eyes fixed on the window, somewhere else. Women stand chewing gum, and if you stare too long they stare back, squint, and battle you with their gaze until one of you gets off.
The gossip women are dangerous—you’ll miss your stop if they pull you in, meanwhile their tiny dog is slobbering at you and you’ve completely lost where you are. I won’t explain all the types. I just noticed how many people find the whole thing uncomfortable.
Simon and I got off at Marienplatz. He had a mission and I trailed behind in a purple scarf from some incense-and-bong shop, still smelling like smoke. Then I saw it in Mango. A leather jacket. Not just a jacket—the jacket. I tried it on and looked in the mirror. Fit was perfect. Looked right. Felt right. You know that moment when a piece of clothing clicks, when you put it on and suddenly you’re someone you want to be. Not vanity, just rightness. I bought it.
After that I was gone. Shoes, jeans, a large purple leather bag—I had to walk back in three times before committing to that bag. Simon was satisfied, I was satisfied, about 350 euros lighter. We were fading so we found food.
A sushi place. Ten ninety for an hour of all-you-can-eat from the conveyor belt. The plates stacked up. Tower after tower. From our table we could see straight out onto the shopping street, and there they all were again—the same U-Bahn people, same movements, different context. The sushi moving and the crowds moving outside, one system feeding the other. Shakespeare got it wrong. It’s not all the world’s a stage.
It’s that the whole world is a conveyor belt, and everyone on it is just sushi.
An hour later Simon and I were stupidly full, bloated like the overstuffed U-Bahn people we’d become, dragging ourselves back to the apartment. Pizza in front of the TV. That was the day.