JULES VERNE DIDN’T KNOW

Three sets of escalators for nine flights from the subway tracks up to the surface. Jules Verne didn’t know you could actually go this deep. They say the tracks are at a level below that of a river – a river no one recalls any longer, it too flowing underneath the city. So cell phones have no reception, and as the flow of passengers gushed out at rush hour slides up in single file – The Train Terminates Here; The Train Terminates H… – the beeps of messages and missed calls come back to life. Some start at the seventh flight up, some at the eighth; so the silence in the bowels of the earth strikes with no awe anymore. And the owners of older models shake their phones convulsively to get them to pick any signal back at all.