The subway ride may be the longest time New Yorkers inhabit the same area at once. Of course there are few places in the city where one is not sharing space with others, but the subway is the only place where one is forced to stop moving and just be, along with everyone else. The pause provides an opportunity to make an impression. Normally New Yorkers are too focused on their own journey, traveling at their own pace. But on the subway, they are bound up with each other just long enough to notice other people. Jonathan Lethem describes a “right” of “invisibility” that every subway rider assumes he has. But the assumption stops in the subway, because eventually one will realize that he is being noticed as well. Below ground, one doesn’t try to be invisible so much as one tries not to stand out. The “irritation and panic [of the passengers] rises at each sign of oddness…” Lethem says. This oddness doesn’t need to be typically bizarre behavior; it doesn’t even need to be connected to insanity or danger. Oddness is just standing out.

For that bit of time on the subway, the New Yorker is stationary and allows something other than himself to take him to where he needs to be. In that time, he is able to look at the faces that make up the crowd around him. One can wonder about others, who they are, where they’re going, as long as one can remain under the guise of indifference and self-involvement. Oddness comes in when the silence is broken, when eyes meet, when one is witness to a part of someone else that should be hidden. That’s when people try to access their invisibility again. If one pretends the homeless man asking for money isn’t there, maybe the feelings that he drags in will go away too. If I stop looking, the subway rider thinks to himself, then maybe the others will disappear and maybe I can as well.

There is one more important rule to the subway, the most important one. The subway rider must be going somewhere. To “use it wrong” as Lethem says is to use it as observation or study. Even the homeless man traveling from car to car has an agenda that fits with the subway; he’s trying to get to a different place. The subway is just a means to an end, and anyone riding it must always appear to be operating under this rule. The last thing anyone wants is know that he is being studied. The unspoken agreement is that everyone is allowed a bit of awareness on the way to their destination, as long as you forget the importance of it all when you step off the train. If someone is going to break this rule, make the journeys of others his own objective, then he must be careful. To reveal his true plan would let in the tension of oddities, and all he would see is the whole subway trying to be invisible.