I had been holed up at the
Piazza Garibaldi stop beneath the main railway station
in Naples waiting for the Metropolitana for
quite some time. Still no train. The passengers —or,
better, the ticketholders who aspired to
passengerhood— reacted variously. Some shuffled
helplessly like bored cattle. Others looked like
zombies playing hopscotch, stiffly lumbering up and
down the platform, their eyes vacantly reflecting the
long dark perspective of the empty tunnels. Many of
them looked used to this ritual. They looked tough.
They looked like Donner Party Survivors. I moved away
from them, down to the farthest end of the platform.
If The Night of the Living Dead Metro Riders
broke out, I would escape into the tunnel itself. (I
made a mental note to avoid the fate of those poor
souls who had perished in the Great Late Train Riots
of The Week Before when they had become enmeshed in
the cobwebs that crisscrossed the tracks.)
I saw that I had
moved right below the mechanical notice board. It had
letters that flip into place to indicate the destination
of the next train. I watched as the letters for my
direction clicked over and spelled out,
'P–O–Z–Z–U–O–L–I'. That was where I was going, so, in
spite of whatever other character defects it may have
had, this was a good sign, though perhaps a mite
optimistic, for time continued to pass, time during
which, I feel sure, the Great Red Spot on Jupiter made
significant progress across the surface of that kingly
sphere, but also a period during which our Metro station
remained as unsullied and pristine and as gloriously
trainless as the Garden of Eden.
My central nervous
system was now so bored that it threatened to
start answering weird ads in personal columns on its own
just for a little action, so I shifted over a bit and
casually, unsuspectingly, looked up at the other side of
the board, the side that would indicate the destination
of trains going the opposite way. It, too, had tiny
individual slots for letters, but they were rightfully
blank, since there was only one more stop in that
direction to the end of the line, Gianturco, which was,
however, closed for repairs. A strange thing then
happened, something that made my skin crawl. The sight
of my skin slithering towards them from the far end of
the platform was so repulsive to the other passengers
that now they moved farther away from me. Above me on
the board, concealed from them, but clear to me, the
blank letter spaces had whirred to life and where there
should have been nothing, no destination at all, letters
had slowly flip–flopped into place and now read:
'NBLKFOPSJON'.
It was only there
for a few seconds and I was the only one to see it, but
I am now convinced that Someone or Something somewhere,
for reasons that may never be known, had given me a
brief glimpse into The Other Side. For those few short
seconds, I, alone, on this planet knew the answer to The
Question: Where the Hell is My Damned Train?! It was in
NBLKFOPSJON. Everyone's unarrived train is in
NBLKFOPSJON! Now it is clear —that is the only place
they could ever be! Surely you don't think there is room
for all the missing trains in Naples to be hiding out
down at the end of the line, maybe catching a quick beer
and a smoke or listening to the ball scores, while you
cool your heels. They are clearly somewhere else.
NBLKFOPSJON is a —call it a 'station,' if you will,
since our language has no real term for places like
this— that lies beyond the end of the line. Perhaps it
is a station in a universe parallel to our own, or maybe
—I haven't quite got all the details worked out, yet— it
is out near those isles of gloom, at the mere mention of
which even the bravest mariners in Viking sagas tremble
and reach for the glühwein —abodes with names
like Fyrlswørth, Llygymmkin, and, yes, Nblkfopsjon.
I'm not sure what
good this knowledge does me. It is almost masonically
arcane; indeed, there must be others out there who
"know," and it has occurred to me that maybe we should
have some way of making ourselves known to one
another—secret handclasps or something. Occasionally I
test this out by quite audibly ordering a metro ticket
for "Nblkfopsjon" and then quickly checking around me in
the line for reactions. I thought I saw a gleam of
"knowledge" in the eyes of a young woman the other
evening, but when I ran over and tried what I thought
was a pretty good secret handclasp on her, she hit me in
the nose. So, what have I learned? Maybe this: don't
fall asleep on the train.
Further entries on
the metropolitana
here