My first mistake was traveling light – that is, heavy, but jammed into tiny bags. I sit on my lilliputian suitcase, fumble with the zipper, and listen to the minutes whizz off towards takeoff. The dozen invisible smokers who had shared my bed for the past four days shake their heads in morose unison; my second mistake had been forgetting that in France, “smoking allowed” rentals aren’t just something with which you scare children.
When I finally run out the door, Google Maps tells me to travel diagonally through a locked building. Ten minutes later, I have safely teleported myself onto a train, which grinds to a halt at the next station. “We will be stopped here for some minutes,” the conductor offers.
I pull up Uber on my phone – it looks like I might still make it – and step off the train. Its one pesky passenger safely deposited, it immediately leaves the station. No matter, Uber is faster anyway. I search for the station exit. The underground stretches for miles. Every direction has exit signs, so I pick one at random and follow it up an endless series of corridors filled with moving walkways, all broken.
By the time I reach the surface, I have no phone. Not in my backpack, and not in any of my three pairs of overstuffed pockets – two fleeces and one jacket, none of which would fit in my suitcase.
I catch the next train. I miss my flight, of course, so I book a new one for tomorrow (goodbye, work holiday party), order a new Airbnb near the airport, note down transit directions using pen and paper, and pull up Find my iPhone on my laptop. The phone appears to be lying motionless in a fixed location near where I lost it, scared but unharmed. I decide to return to the station to investigate; I have a day to kill, after all.
The lady at the subway information booth takes down my description of the phone (the very informative “black with a black case”), apparently entering it into some sort of database. “Ah, it’s not here, it’s at the other information booth, the one for the Metro,” she concludes.
At the Metro booth, a stone-faced gentleman raises a skeptical eyebrow. He grudgingly heads to the back of the room, appears to open some drawers, then returns, glaring. “Did you say the phone is here, or just might be?” “I don’t… The lady over there said…”
“It’s always the same story,” he cuts me off. “Every time, you say the lady said there’s a phone, but there is no phone. There is never a phone.”
For a moment, I believe him. I have been wandering through the Paris underground for decades, fruitlessly searching for the one thing, the one phone, that will grant me eternal rest. Every day, I shuffle between the lady on the train side and the gentleman on the Metro side; every day, she says there is a phone and he says there is none.
I snap out of it. “It wasn’t me -” I start, then remind myself that anger rarely works. “Look,” I plead, trying to meet his eyes, “I’m having a really bad day. Could you try to be nicer to me?”
He looks like it’s the first time he’s heard of such a thing. “I guess… I could try,” he responds, dubiously. Then his voice turns to ice again, and he continues: “but it’s always the same story…”
I leave him to his looping life, then buy another ticket – the only way to get through the turnstiles separating me from the first information booth. By the time I return, the lady I had talked to has evaporated, replaced by three people who have never heard of cell phones. At least they show me how to connect to the subway WiFi. Maybe I can use my GPS to find the phone myself? I open my laptop. The location flickers on the screen in the same spot as last time, near the McDonald’s in the shopping center connected to the underground. Then the laptop battery dies.
I decide to search for an outlet at the Macdoe – to use the local term of endearment. “Beware of pickpockets,” the subway PA system warns, belatedly. “Keep electronic devices safely stowed.” So it was probably a thief. But then why is the phone in a fixed location?
I fantasize about using my GPS to ambush the crook at the Macdoe. He’ll be smugly sipping a coffee, so sure of himself that he hasn’t even budged an inch from the crime scene, but my ultra-precise GPS will track him down to that inch. I’ll sneak up right behind him, then pull out the secret weapon: the Play a Sound function. “That man stole my phone!” I’ll exclaim triumphantly, pointing a finger towards the bastard from whose hand will emanate the indubitably incriminating jingle, as onlookers gasp and join forces to surround him…
I have reached the top of the escalator. The Macdoe has no outlets, but suddenly I’m starving, so I stop for a hamburger anyway. Both of my bank cards decline.
I head to the KFC next door. Both of my bank cards decline at the self-service kiosk, but when I come up to the counter to ask for help, it turns out the problem wasn’t the cards at all. They’re just out of quinoa raclette salad. Wait, out of what? Welcome to Kentucky French Chicken. I order a regular salad with chicken tenders on the side.
I find an outlet while I wait, but my charger is burdened with a heavy adapter and keeps plummeting out of the socket. I prop it up with a plastic water bottle, which slows the plummeting to an occasional plop. My phone is still sending out distress signals from the same location. I fantasize about using the GPS to find the Paris underbelly’s secret lair, the chamber where all the innocent phones are bound and tortured, but the uncertainty radius on the GPS spans half a (subterranean) block.
The regular salad is just a pile of leaves, but the dressing – a rich, buttery, deep-bodied reduction with hints of bleu cheese and a bright nutty finish – is a culinary marvel.
I find a website listing a contact number for the station’s lost and found, get $5 worth of Skype phone credits, dial the number with and without the French country code. I get “invalid number” both times. I give up and gather the chicken bones. “We throw compostables to the left, trash to the right,” enjoins the patronizing French trashcan. I throw everything to the right, because freedom.
I head down a handful of corridors – without a moving walkway in sight – and return to the platform. I glance at the station’s name again. Châtelet les Halles. Pronounced Paris Pickpocket Central – plain to see once you ignore all the silent letters.
The phone was stolen but it’s in a fixed location… I imagine the thug examining his bounty – a 5-year-old iPhone with a cracked screen – deciding it wasn’t worth his while, and simply tossing it somewhere. I furtively check out every one of the ten trashcans on the platform, then give up and get on the next train towards my Airbnb.
The rental is blessedly sterile, but the twelve chain-smokers have all hitched a ride in my suitcase, bundled up in my clothes. I shove them into the washer-dryer, but I can’t find detergent. I’ll just text the Airbnb host… Shoot. I feel a pang of pain in my phantom phone. Ok, I’ll use the WiFi on my laptop…
If only I had jotted down the WiFi password.
“Tides Will Turn,” prophesies a decorative sign on the wall – ominously, considering my heretofore nice life. I decide to wash the clothes with plain water. Proud of my modicum of French, I set the machine to the laver et sécher cycle and lock the door. It’ll have to run overnight, but no matter. I’ll start an extra drying cycle in the morning if I have to, after my alarm goes off.
My alarm! My phantom phone howls in anguish. There’s no offline clock on my computer either, no physical alarm clock…
In a moment of inspiration, I realize that I can just make my own timer, out of driftwood and flint – ok, no, out of the magic of computer programming. import time, I type into my code editor, feeling a powerful current rise up to my fingertips. If only I had had that incantation in the morning… I tell time to sleep for nine hours, then schedule a repeated chime – eternal, unless commanded to stop. The thing sounds like all the phones in the Paris underbelly skinned alive at once, but it’ll do.
In the morning, the clothes in the washer-dryer are wet. The machine has sixteen different settings, illustrated with pictograms which require a PhD in hieroglyphics to decipher, but none of them say simply “sécher.” There is a separate “sécher” button, but that only emits an offended beep when pressed. I put the soaking clothes in the suitcase and hope for the best.
The first bus to the airport appears on the street perpendicular the bus stop. It doesn’t slow down when I run after it. I set up an ambush for the second one, outsmart it, and pounce.
The departures board says the flight is delayed by 12 hours.
I laugh a long, hearty laugh.
An email from the airline explains that there is a strike at Keflavik airport, which I’m connecting through. They’re giving me several options, they say. The options are all different paths towards a 24-hour delay. To sweeten the deal, they have bestowed me with a 12-euro food voucher, loaded right onto my boarding pass. I make my leisurely way to the nearest café, balancing my laptop in one hand, open to the only boarding pass I have. I feel a twinge in my phantom phone.
The barista won’t take my payment method. I gesture at the list of eateries accepting the vouchers, which very clearly includes the present café. By way of response, he bares his fangs and foams at the mouth. I’m about to make my retreat, when a fellow passenger standing in line behind me explains that I’m supposed to get a physical voucher at the check-in counter.
The lady at the check-in desk says she doesn’t work for my airline. “So where do I go?” “My colleagues,” she explains, gesturing at a series of empty counters.
I buy a coffee (with my own money), then take a seat in the waiting area and start booking another night at the same Airbnb. I suddenly notice that my backpack is lying in a puddle. I curse the airport’s incompetence, then locate the spill’s epicenter – directly beneath my dripping suitcase.
A blessedly familiar sound distracts me from the flood. “And all the airline staff are on strike, so there isn’t even anyone to ask!” I hear next to me, in lovely plaintive American English. I meet the eyes of the suffering soul – the mother in a family of four – and make sympathetic gestures. “Are you dealing with the same thing?” she asks. “We never got the email with the link to our options after the delay… But the airline staff are all on strike, so there’s no one to tell that to.”
“Have you tried logging into your account on the airline website?” I offer. “Nothing works anymore,” she replies tearfully. “I can’t even connect to the WiFi.” “Try turning it off and then on again… No good? What about typing in captive.apple.com into the navigation bar? That sometimes tricks the browser into giving you the WiFi login screen…” “It worked! But now the website is in French…” she continues, her voice dramatically rising and falling with the narrative arc of her utterances. “Try putting /en at the end of the URL. No, forward slash.” “Are you an engineer?” she asks, a notch calmer and brighter.
Once I know for sure that I’ll never get out of this airport, I decide, I’ll feed myself by providing tech support to frazzled expats. They’ll pay me hundreds of euros for my expertise and, especially, my humanity. I snap out of it. “I am – how did you know?”
“I only learned to code a couple of years ago,” I continue, with all the gregariousness of someone freed from the burden of verb conjugation. “I was studying philosophy before then – you know, trying to figure out if I even knew I existed.” “I get that!” My new friend has completely perked up by now. “Sometimes my life is so repetitive, just the same tasks over and over and over, that I wonder if any of it is really real.”
An airline staff member appears out of nowhere and offers us vouchers. I mop up the spill beneath my suitcase again.
“It seems you travel a lot?” my friend inquires. I think of delayed flights and missed connections: the day in Santiago; two days on the wrong island of Cape Verde, without luggage; the day in Lisbon, twice. “I was born in an airport and I’ll die in an airport,” I reply cheerfully.
On the bus to the Airbnb, “Stop Requested” lights flash periodically. There are no stop-requesting buttons anywhere. The driver refuses to let me out without the special signal. I plead with him for several blocks before he halts, sulkily, and opens the door.
My suitcase laughs so hard it pees itself. In a torture chamber deep beneath the streets of Paris, my phone sends out its final distress call.
This post is obviously a little hyperbolic at the the sentence level (e.g. the people at the information booth had, in fact, heard of cell phones), but the sequence of events is 100% accurate.
Sometimes moving to a new place means noticing more. You appreciate everything, take in the smallest details — the light falling on the river, the split-second delight on the face of the children passing by, holding ice cream. Your vision sharpens; you catch every nuance you would have missed at home.
Eve Bigaj 