It was about eight o'clock on Sunday. Still rubbing the sleep crusties out of my eyes and unaccustomed to the early morning commute, I passed through the mechanical doors. An ominous voice cracking behind me: “Stand clear of the doors.”

I wandered to the middle of the metro in search of a relatively unblemished seat with as many vacancies on either side as possible. Flopping down, I succumbed to my own mental hypnosis only to be interrupted midthought
by an unshaven, fifty-something man staggering down the center of the car.

Walking as if he was trying to stay upright in a severe earthquake, he stepped on several toes. With his index finger and thumb artillery extended, the toxic man pointed in people's faces and saying, “Click.” The monosyllabic man repeated, “Click, click, click.” He was a good shot and managed to destroy everyone on the train, including me. Typically my tolerance for unorthodox behavior is pretty high but this was not the case for the woman in the pink galoshes sitting across from me.

The man tirelessly made his way to one end of the car and proceeded to make his way back to his seat still clicking. Pink Galoshes, stabbing at his back said,
“What are you doing? You can't just do that to people!” Everyone heard her. She went to the end of the car and attacked the red emergency button to proclaim her distress. Half-peeved, the conductor heard her stern complaint
and then loudly replied, “Thank you.”

With the doors sealed at the next station, the train came to a full stop. On a system that prides itself on quick response times, it took the metro police twenty minutes to arrive to the station—a station supplanted in the middle of a poor neighborhood. The passengers on the train started to express restlessness, especially the elderly Frenchman with the grey mustache. He reminded himself four times, audible enough for other passengers, that he was late for a meeting. To ease the situation, the ominous voice boomed, “There is a broken train ahead of us. We'll be underway in a few minutes.”

The monosyllabic man was lifelessly unaware. Pink Galoshes felt the anxious flames from the other passengers. Light-heartedly, I poked at the situation, “They sure do take their sweet time!” Her scrunched brow and squinty
eyes were unaffected. The police, after some council, located the man and plucked him from the car. Bumbling for handcuffs, the police secured the man on the platform. Pink Galoshes followed them with mentally prepared statement ready to pour off her lips.

Both white officers re-entered the car scratching their heads as if they had forgotten their keys. Suddenly remembering, they began questioning the passengers for witness accounts of what happened. Everyone was uncomfortably silent; a few were persuaded to speak. The officers scrawled names and phone numbers on miniature pads. The Frenchman squealed, “Let's go already.”

The doors chopped closed and the ominous voice came on one last time, “Thank you for your patience. We had a situation in one of the cars where a passenger identified some suspicious behavior. If you see anything that doesn't look right, please report it to the closest subway official. Thank you for all those that helped.” The voice revealed itself from behind a door as a white-haired troll woman. Wide-eyed and awkwardly loud, she individually thanked everyone on our car.