Voodoo for Vector (the stare game on subways)

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Encountering more than one's share of run-ins on the streets and in subways, of course one learns to do all one can to minimize the run-ins. Of course.

But eventually, one discovers avoidance rarely works as the metropolitan population explodes and individuals thus become more desperate for basic human dignities - like six square inches of personal space (or 38.709 6 square centimeters here in the White North). Subway seats and their particular positionings, collectively known as "rocket real estate", are the meat of transit relief for urbanites who live to work. Politely keeping our pale elbows in and our dulling workday eyes to our own inner worlds, we are still all jackals and lions by turn at rush hour - or at any time of the day, really. I fear we may never evolve enough to be meerkats.

What I'm saying is, one can only cross and re-cross the streets and subway aisles so many goddam times to avoid leering, invasive idiots. And then one just becomes real rat-nasty. One wants to play with things a little. Yeah. And if one happens to be the unlucky combination of angry rodent and supernatural magnet to the deluded, one might get vengefully creative in their own reactions to the aforementioned leering idiots.

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Vector

I’m reading a worn magazine on the eastbound subway, in the most isolated seat I can possibly find - a find that is relatively easy at 2:30 in the afternoon. We city rats take the maximum amount of space around us when we have the chance, especially on public transit vehicles. I am a blissful rat in a half a car to myself. I am an unassuming bowl of cornflakes.

A clean cut man gets on at the opposite end of the car. Cereal type: Vector. I peripherally scan him scanning the car. Whistling a tad too merrily, he bypasses a large selection of empty seats along the metallic expanse. Scanning me, he's getting too close to my real estate. Hm. He approaches the seat directly across from mine. A new neighbour. Hm. We are pretty much alone over here, together.

Hmmm.

Vector settles in the seat and of course, immediately starts staring at me like a poor man's Charles Manson. Now, I admit I am looking too fiine today, but.

He bores into me. He does not blink.

A timeless game begun, Vector in the offense, I fake-read my magazine like I’m nearsighted and forgot my glasses. It is twenty more minutes to my stop, and I predict I must defend my 38.709 6 square centimetres the whole way.

In times past I have taken similar circumstances into my loudly confident hands. "Hello there. Do you MIND not staring me down anymore? Yeess, YOU. Get it?" I have frothed at Vectors across aisles, where they shrivel into themselves as curious passenger eyes land on their faces. But at the moment, this ogler and I are the last two checkers on the board. It appears there is not much else for me to do but move to another square.

Five minutes lurch by. I remain. I was here first.

Socially Stunned

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In glances I see Vector's face is scrubbed pink, shaved, and getting 2 o'clock shadow. His expression is a mix of smug knowing and simple tomfuckery. I really deserve to not know these details, I think.

With a rather knee-jerk and tragical assumption of humanity's basic decency, I question motives: is this guy just socially stunned and wanting to "connect" with another soul a la The Celestine Prophecy, or does he really just want me to squirm in discomfort? ...why? I shoot a furtive glance, obsessively, morbidly, re-assessing his intent.

My innocent assumptions withdraw back into their misty crevices. Vector does the exact opposite of what a school of proxemics might instruct one to do upon one 's receiving a stranger's shy glance in public urban environs. His eyes boldly challenge - then I imagine he's not just undressing me with those blinkless orbs, he's draping my clothes on legless mannequins who look like his drunken mother in a secret windowless underground playroom on a desolate farm, listening to Beethoven, mumbling something about the "tasties" in the freezer, with them.

Maybe My Fly's Undone

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I want to nip his bud. I want to show him that I am no longer in flake form - that I stay crunchy in milk - even the curdling milk of creepiness. I line my head square in his sights and take a hard look now, smack! down the barrels of his moony face.

I see he is quite sane. Perhaps too sane, lucidly bumping uglies with my own sanity. Muscling me.

My brain wrestles on a mat of civility, or, on a flaccid inner tube of denial, if you like. Is there some food on my face? I practically finger-painted my snack of hummous and toast before catching the transit. Or...maybe my fly’s undone again - people do stare at that sometimes, it's true. I run through a quick check of these possibilities on my person. Nothing. Vector's gaze drills on, and passengers are not getting on my car to act as my potential witnesses.

I give him a final benefit of doubt: maybe I'm a dead ringer for his last axe victim. I have one of those faces.

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A fat sooty rat crawls into our car between the stale cracks at Landsdowne station, winding between the feet of ethereal schoolchildren who are on a class trip downtown. They are from the Canadian National Institute for the Blind.

Spinning cleansing rites for ocular invasions in my lap, I draw out a long minute with a forefinger and two front teeth. I stretch it languidly on the rattle of the metal, bent against our snaking itinerary. It's chicken blood and skin drums from here on in.

Vector nods emptily, high above underground realities. He seems nonchalant to my curling, rising rhymes, the faint smoke of oil.

The worm of his gaze turns the dark earth of my being.

I hate that.

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