Now what?
The stranger standing on the other side of the platform was staring right at Neela. The man who couldn't walk. And there, between the great divide of platforms east and west, he was expecting a conversation.
She stole a quick glance to the left and then the right. Her fellow commuters were either too self-obsessed or too unhinged to notice the beginnings of her strange interaction with the man on the other side.
"I'm pretty used to the delays!" she said abruptly, in the loud 'outside voice' that was required for this weird conversation.
"What?" he cried out, his face a knot of confusion.
"What I mean is, R-A-T-P basically stands for slow as fuck, amirite?" She laughed for a couple of seconds and then scowled, lost in the memory of the many delays she'd endured at the hands of RATP, the Parisian transportation system.
She looked across the platform now and saw him smirking. "It is not possible for the letters R-A-T-P to stand for slow as fuck," he replied with confidence.
But Neela only laughed in response. She laughed and laughed and no one could stop her.
"What is so funny?" he said.
"Sorry," she said, taking a second to catch her breath. "It's just that after all this time, I still crack up when I hear someone say 'fuck' in a French accent. It's like 'ahhh I'm mad! But I end up sounding adorable! Ahh!'" She laughed again. She was having herself a time.
"So you think I am adorable?" he asked, a flirty smile on full display.
Neela was no longer having herself a time. She looked away.
"It seems you are not a tourist then," he added, still intent on continuing this platform conversation.
"Huh?" she muttered, pretending she was losing interest. To add to her display of apathy, she stared at the platform board so she wouldn't have to stare at him.
"You could not be a tourist if you said you are used to these delays," he explained, his flirty ways getting lost in this conversation's boring left turn.
"That's true..." she said, her will to live fading out right along with the energy of this convo.
He rubbed his hands on his trousers. It was a nervous rub, like he somehow knew that his persona of 'fascinating stranger' was hanging by the thinnest thread.
"Okay..." he said, pacing back and forth now, running out of ideas. He stopped abruptly. "Oh god! Oh no!"
Neela's head snapped in his direction. "What's wrong?!" she cried.
He suddenly had her full attention. And he knew it.
"This injury is worse than I thought," he said grimacing. "I have the feeling of blood coming out."
"Oh my god are you serious?!" She moved towards him instinctively but stopped at the platform's edge.
"Yes, it is at least one liter of blood." He cracked a smile. And she instantly realized.
"You're an idiot," she said, but that didn't stop her from grinning.
"To be serious, the blood risk could be true." He glanced down at his leg. "I honestly have not checked..."
"Then take off those pants and let's see!" She put her hand over her mouth as soon as she said it. Everyone knew that if there was one unbreakable rule about the seedy underground, it was to never suggest that a strange man take off his pants. Not when unsolicited pants-dropping was already such a problem in major cities. And yet, here she was...speaking these scandalous words, and now laughing uproariously right along with this interesting man—who mercifully had not removed his pants as instructed.
They kept on laughing, right until the rumble of the oncoming train killed the moment.
It was coming from his side. And it was already stressing him out.
"By the way I am Antonio!" he blurted out.
She frowned. "That doesn't sound very French..." she muttered to herself.
"And you?" Antonio asked.
The rumble of the train grew louder.
"What's with 'Antonio'?" she said, not answering his question at all. "Is your family Italian? And if so...can I assume that you know how to make pasta by hand?" She was suddenly a high-risk candidate for drool spilling out of the corners of her mouth, a clear sign that her summer in Italy had affected her more than she'd realized. She straightened her collar and tried to be a normal human.
"My mother is from a town not far from Naples," he said. "And my father..."
He lost his train of thought as the actual train rumbled closer.
Their final seconds were dwindling and Antonio knew it. "Perhaps if you meet me on the other side, we can talk about—" Despite his attempt to yell as loud as he could, the train screeched into the station and drowned out the rest of his statement. It also blocked him from view.
"Meet on the other side?" she wondered aloud. "That's it? Like meet when we're dead?" She scowled. "Fuckin' fatalistic French, I wouldn't be surprised..."
Over on the other side, Antonio was caught up in a surge of commuters squeezing their way onto the train. This crowd of human-sized ants had been non-existent seconds earlier, but somewhere between the train arriving and the train doors opening, at least fifty people had scurried down the stairs and converged at the doors in a chaotic mess of bodies.
"Pardon, pardon, pardon." Antonio kept repeating the magical French word for "excuse me," but no matter how much he tried to step away from the doors and stay on the platform, he was inevitably swept up in the current of sweaty bodies.
And the next thing he knew...he was inside the train.
From the other side of the platform, Neela could see the humans piling onto the train from the view of its' dirty windows. Her eyes lit up when she spotted Antonio. When she'd met him he'd been a dude who couldn't walk, and now he was a dude being manhandled by fellow commuters. They pushed him to and fro without any human regard, until his face wound up pressed against the glass.
The next thing Neela did was based on a hundred percent instinct and zero percent logic.
She started waving her arms around like a crazy person.
"Hi!" she cried out for no apparent reason.
He was mouthing indiscernible words. Or saying them. It was hard to tell from the other side of the sealed window, but he was definitely also looking crazy. He started pointing to the door. Vigorously and often. At one point he actually poked a man in the eye. And then seemed to profusely apologize.
"What?!" shouted Neela, utterly confused.
He tried to make his way back to the doors, but there was zero space to move.
The bell for the subways doors did its 'final warning' chime, just as Antonio pressed his face back against the glass. He pointed to his phone. And started to give out his number. With his fingers.
Neela tried her best to follow along. "Three...three..." She rolled her eyes. "Forget the country code, dummy!" She continued to watch him. "Six...five...eight..." Before he could finish, the train rolled away and disappeared into the tunnel.
"Noooo!" she cried out.
The horny teenage couple beside her started laughing. "Nooo!" the girl cried mockingly. "Come back!" added her greasy boyfriend.
From the deep recesses of snark that resided in Neela's soul, she spun around to face the teens, and at that moment she was ready to verbally slay. "One of you for sure has herpes," she declared, "but you think it's all good because it's still in the dormant phase. Except one day, one of you will wake up with a nasty surprise, and the other you will accuse the first you of bringing the incurable blisters into your sweaty, horn-dog relationship." She gestured to the guy. "Probably him."
With the seed of doubt firmly planted in their shocked teenage minds, Neela refocused on her strange yet dramatic plight.
To begin, she started pacing back and forth. Along with muttering. Lots of muttering.
"Who even cares?" she said dismissively. "I don't know him. He doesn't know me. Just some rando who can't even walk." She nodded to herself in agreement. "I mean it's not like he's some oh mon dieu, once-in-a-lifetime type deal." She peered into the darkened tunnel. "But...what if he is?"
As this 'Lord of the Rings' type inner debate between the split personalities of 'Smeagol and Gollum, Neela Edition' raged on, the saner side (Smeagol?) began to win out.
She turned on her heel. "But it wouldn't even matter in the context of actual life; nope! No it wouldn't!"
Despite this logical yet vague truth bomb, she turned in the other direction and sighed. And then checked the time on her phone. She was weighing a big decision. A decision that would determine the course of the rest of her life.
Or at least the next half hour.
"Hmm..." she said. "Okay then; sorry 'reflective stroll along the Seine,' not tonight."
She blew past the teens, the elderly eccentric, and everyone else on the platform, running up the stairs and out of sight.
The teens began to laugh at her expense, but it was obvious there was still some 'herpes suspicion' between them.
A few moments later, an out-of-breath Neela reappeared.
On the other side of the platform.
She glanced up at the screen.
One minute until the next train.
***
[Well...she's going for it! He's SO close, yet so far, haha. Have you ever been on a subway train that's so packed that you can't even get out at your stop? For Antonio it was even worse, he just got lost in the current of bodies and there was no escape!
Keep reading to find out what happens to him...]