Bleeding Fiction

Cell phones have spread across the country like a disease or a meme or zombies. There's no avoiding them, especially in the city. But the city holds other dangers and you can't always be sure that cell phones are the answer to all of the little idiosyncracies of city life. They have these things now, these tiny little things that you stick in your ear. They're like the bugs out of Dune or Star Trek II, only they connect to your cellphone and let you use it without using your hands. Oh, and they're not alive. But they are hard to see when they're up against dark clothing, and almost everyone in the city wears dark clothing. It may well be a law. So what happens is you get people walking down the street and having a conversation with thin air. They may, they just may, be talking on their cell phone. But this is the city, so it may just as easily be a dangerous lunatic walking right next to you instead.

Today on the train home I was treated to another fun cell phone experience. There was a woman sitting next to me, about my age, not entirely un-cute if you're into the blonde, salon-tanned, Lerner-wearing look, which I am decidedly not. But I don't think my saying she was "next to me" does justice to exactly how close we were. There were individual molecules gasping for breath between our hips. Another man say on her opposite side. I could feel tectonic shifts when they brushed against each other. This was a crowded train. And this woman had the projection of an opera singer. Her voice really rang out.

For half an hour I heard the woman talk. I heard her talk about her new job (she's an assistant marketing director for Elle). I heard her talk about the new apartment she and her fiancee, Jeremy, are hoping to get (on the upper east side with a wonderful view and a lovely alcove in the dining room, all for only $2,500 a month). I heard her talk about how supportive her mother has been, unlike her father that prick. I heard her say, and this is a direct quote now, "I've been so busy I haven't had time to shave my pussy in two weeks, so Jeremy's just going to have to suck it up."

Go and read that last line again. I don't want to repeat it.

I heard her say this and I said "lady, please! I did not need to hear that."

And the woman looked at me, looked at me as if I'd burst into her living room or her office, and said "excuse me, I'm trying to have a conversation here."

The conductor announced my stop a second later, so I was spared whatever else she had to say, but the experience left me feeling... funny. Are we becoming, are cell phones making us, a society where privacy is assumed in public? A society where it's acceptable to say whatever you want and people will ignore it to leave you with your dignity? Pre-modern Japan, with its tightly-packed, paper-walled houses had a very similar thing going on, where it was almost impossible not to overhear conversations and so the Japanese created an elaborate system of metaphor to indirectly talk about whatever they wanted and not embarass each other. But we don't have that. Strange days we live in...