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37
He was surprised at the mental
picture he had just built and he
thought that although he had never
written poetry, if I could develop
that metaphor of leaves and peo-
ple, then, probably he could write
a poem.
A message from his boss on his
cell was reminding him of a meet-
ing with the field managers on
Friday at noon. He got distracted,
and two seconds after reading the
text, he had forgotten his commit-
ment to poetry.
The trip to his job was not too long
from the station that was located
below the Madison Square Gar-
den.
A girl sitting in front of him trave-
ling in the subway ate a hamburg-
er sticking out from inside a small
cardboard box printed with the
logo of a fast food restaurant.
There are in Manhattan many
food chains of junk foods. Where
people eat all the time hamburg-
ers, tacos, enchiladas, hot dogs,
chicken wings, and the inevitable
breakfast with eggs, coffee, jam,
butter, a kind of small hamburger
that everyone insists that there is
a hamburger, orange juice, pan-
cakes with honey, something like
a tiny piece of cramped and fried
mashed potatoes, bread, and in
some cases some fruit salad.
John believed that nobody in their
right mind should such had an
amount of mixing dissimilar things,
but that morning, like many others,
he himself had done. He knew it
was unhealthy but the accustomed
is the enemy of reason.
The train ran like a huge hungry
worm, his belly filled with hun-
dreds of discarded human and
gobble again at each station
where he stopped.
There is always some lethargic
numbness in many of those who
travel on subways of any modern
city in the world. Perhaps due to
the darkness that reigns outside
the cars as they run through the
tunnels, or the fact known in the
insides land in a mixture of grave
and womb, they are isolated and
separated from the city that teem
up there.
John, whose job was to design
complex computer databases, felt
that the time of isolation in the
Metro was to him, what a clean-
ing routine for the system in the
computer was. There, as if by
magic, his memory was cleaning
and throwing out unnecessary
information, just as if they were
wrinkled papers, the recycle bin
any computer on your screen.
During this daily short journey
between the originating station
and destination station, he forgot
what he considered irrelevant, the
“temporary files” that he believed
no longer needed.
However, just as any computer
system is imperfect at times, that
particular day debugging data
also failed and forgotten, without
noticing it, along with other minor
details, the phone call a few days
ago he had sworn would do that
Friday before the short train ride.
When the carriage doors were
opened in the 53 Street station
and Seventh Avenue, John walked
toward the terminal building at
the department store, prevented
his entrance, and began to walk
the long path that took him to his
office.
Although the underground passage
had in many places, a consider-
able space in most of its path the
width averaged was four feet. On
either side there were an endless
succession of all types of busi-
nesses, sprinkled with windows,
lights and colors the underground
avenue.
The gallery was perfectly illumi-
nated by the lights of both the
businesses themselves, and for the
double row of spotlights on the
ceiling like a double spine, run-
ning down those paths. The gran-
ite tile floor, perfectly polished and
shiny, duplicated the brightness of
the place.
Every so often, between two
shops, there were small entrances
with elevator doors that commu-
nicated with the upper floors of
various buildings that rose on that
urban nest. There were also other
less obvious doors in function, unre-
markable, without being too many,
you could see them at some point
during those endless corridors.
John had seen those doors many
times, countless times, without pay-
ing attention.
A thin gray door, ajar, captured
his interest. He realized that he
had not seen it before, or had
done so, he had forgotten. It
looked old, and contrasted with
polished floors and plenty of light
as if it were extrapolated from a
neglected old house.
The man leans out the door from