Specters

From a Moving Train

Being a college student brings with it a number of freedoms. Such freedoms, however, often find their boundaries in the form of severe economic limitation, you know…being broke. Such a predicament lands the university Young in the nervous space between Urban Professional and Urban Poor. We may dress in J Crew and pretend that our PDA fiddling is really important, but our cheque books and ATM cards are not replenished nearly as well as our white collar buddies. In fact, in your average working week, the Spanish-speaking lady behind the counter has added more to the national GDP than most of us. And so it is that somewhere along the short-track to the chunky paycheck and all the right professional circles, the DC student reluctantly meets the backroom crowd behind the show-curtains of the city.

A casual visitor might be slightly curious as to why her late-night fellow train-carriage passengers look so very different compared to those power-stepping suits she spent the day people-watching with fascination. But more often than now, she won’t be. Rather, she’ll dismiss their weary, furrowed brows for that of TV President Martin Sheen on “West Wing” marathons back at her room. Or for the picture of the Capitol building which caught the pigeon, just as it flew off!, offering a satisfying action shot for her amateur flickr album her friends will eye at work. Nobody takes pictures on the metro. That is, except for artsy blurred shots of the approaching train, or when “I was, like…sooo wasted.” And yet the metro is perhaps the last remaining major point of contact between the owner class and the owner-servicing. These are the specters Marx once wrote of, haunting the City of Grey Suits through long graveyard shifts and bleary-eyed commutes.

It’s always struck me as ironic how people bicker about what’s going on “over there” (by which I mean on CNN), and how the Bruckheimer school of movie-making always involves protagonists resolving their problems by making the big, aerial-pan-over the-Capitol shot –worthy trip to DC. All the while, the majority of Washingtonians: Black, struggling, neglected – remain essentially invisible to the world at large. While streams of well maintained, over-committed professionals enter the Northwest quadrant between mid-morning and have fled for the comforts of over-priced condominiums by six, this hidden service class operate on a less traditional schedule.

If one pays close enough attention, the soul of the DC specter reveals itself on weekday evenings, becoming increasingly tangible as the period between trains lengthens. For 12-minute spans, it is present, if still largely hidden, as if the quiet giant of power-wielding Washington, whom almost all of them serve, may suddenly turn angry. At 16 minutes, the specter fleshes out, and at 20 minutes plus, it’s unveiled in the dangerous open, letting down its ever-present guard as midnight approaches. Scanning the carriage, one begins to see further into the wells of despondent, vacant eyes, normally so closed off and resilient. We see through ragged uniforms and unwashed faced, into the struggles of the silenced.

One look is a window into a world many of us have never known. There are 70-hour weeks, children with worrisomely weak immune systems, drug-infestations and incarceration. In two laborer’s eyes I taste the hollow hunger of economic pittance. They eye other passengers with a gaze filled with a thousand moments of glass ceiling taps, heard by no one, from phone calls home to tumultuous Salvadoran towns, they whistle the tune of millions of fringe-dwelling star-chasers.

They depart at their inner-suburb stations, flickering images becoming transparent once more. Before tomorrow’s rush, other shadows shall slide slowly through the aisles of each carriage, mopping spills, trashing newspapers.

And as daylight breaks, they rise with their demons already descending upon their shoulders, to greet another toil-filled day in the shadows of the visible.