“What time do we leave tomorrow?”
“Well, the train is at 12:16 and we have to walk to place d’Italie to take the ligne 6 to Montparnasse. Let’s say 11 a.m. just to be on the safe side.”
“That late? Oh, and mommy, remember to put the liquids in your backpack.”
I stopped packing, puzzled, then I got it.
“It’s a train, Mark. We don’t need to show up three hours ahead, check in bags and go through security. We just get to the station and hop on with our backpacks. It’s pretty straightforward.”
“You’ve done it before?”
“Only about a million times. You can trust me on that one.”
“Wow.”
Mark has questions this year, sometimes surprisingly insightful and sometimes really funny comments. He finds French drink a lot and should probably go to bed instead of shouting in the street at 3 a.m. (I agree). When I explained the Panthéon is where famous people are buried he asked me whether Michael Jackson was there. He found Notre-Dame looked just fine for a burned cathedral until I showed him the “before” pictures.
But there’s one Paris moment I didn’t explain or even mentioned because it made no sense to me in the first place.
It was around 5 p.m. and we were getting tired. We had made it to the Champs-Élysées, time to go back to the hotel and rest for a bit. We got on the subway at Champs-Élysées—Clémenceau. Line 1 wasn’t too busy. Mark and I were sitting side-by-side on the strapontins, the “jump seats” by the door. I started checking my phone, Mark just counted stations as usual.
I turned around when I heard something that sounded like an argument. I’m not sure why I did, I guess I’m used to paying attention to my surroundings. After all, this is usually how I managed to make it out of travelling alive.
Hearing people shouting in the subway is hardly noteworthy. I mean, we’re talking about century-old tin boxes running underground and taking over four million passengers to their destination every day. You see all kinds of people in the subway, from exhausted to high, from careful to careless, from nice to creepy.
The shouting was coming from the other door just behind me—three lanky white guys in their late teens or early twenties. Nothing special about them, they looked a bit posh actually. They were arguing or maybe teasing each other, I couldn’t tell. Lots of pushing and shoving.
Something about them made me uneasy because I wasn’t sure they were arguing for fun. I went back to my phone, then turned around again. One of the guys reach to his friend’s belt and pulled out a gun.
I froze.
I blinked.
“Must be a toy gun,” I told myself.
I noticed other passengers also saw it. The same thought seemed to be going through their head—just three kids playing with a toy gun. Yet, like me, they weren’t sure it was a toy gun.
Those who had noticed sat suddenly straighter, eyes on the door.
I did too.
Mark was still counting stations. “Two more!”
Should we just exit at the next station?
I turned around again. The kids were now passing the gun to each other. I really wasn’t sure it was a toy gun—it seemed heavy, the way they were holding it made me doubt.
Above all, I had the gut feeling the situation was dangerous. I was shaking, I had this stomach drop sensation. I was wondering how I could protect Mark if…
The subway stopped. We got off quick.
They got off too.
A few metres further, we were stopped by the fare police—random check, no problem, I showed our subway cards. “I’m not sure what I saw,” I said, “but three guys were playing with what seemed to be a gun.”
“What? Where?”
“In the subway. They just got off. I’m pretty sure it was a toy gun but…”
“The guys over there?”
I looked. “Yes.”
“Thank you.”
This was the end of the story as far as I was concerned. Sorry, I have no idea what happened next.
But I had nightmares that night. I know what I saw and the gut feeling I had signalled fear, which isn’t something that happens often to me.
I held once a XIXth century gun replica (functional, but not loaded at the time), it was pretty heavy, but wouldn’t be really usable in real life because even if it has a barrel, there is no ammunition for it, each chamber has to be loaded with a projectile and powder. And it seems there are BB guns looking and weighing the same as real guns.
No harm, which means you did the right thing.
Remember a few years ago, the guy who saw a man with a rifle in a theater in France, and was able to neutralize him (he had martial art training, though) ?
Waving a gun in public is not normal.
Yet, in the USA :
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/is-this-lego-gun-real/
I’m not sure why I reacted this way. I mean, it’s not okay to wave a gun around, fake or not, but it was like my brain was telling me “danger”. The way the kids were holding it made me think that it was heavy and it looked quite real. It’s also completely NOT a common thing in France. I’ve seen people carrying guns in Central America or in the US, it’s part of the landscape I suppose. In a French subway? Yeah, no.
Do you often see people carrying guns in the US?
Rarely. But it happens sometimes to see a guy with a penian substitute in a holster at his hip.
Yep, that’s what I meant. I remember seeing a few in Texas. It felt weird the first time…
Oh My, it was so scary! Glad you trusted your feeling given you’ve see and experienced many things.
Few years ago I took train to home, it was noisy, I heard arguments from the compartment behind me, later many passanger moved to mine. Later I found, two men was arguing and one stabbed another with a knife! -___-
WHAT??? Wow, that’s crazy!
You did well, I think, better safe than sorry. Sometimes, you just know. A long time ago, as a kid, I was in a summer camp and we were having supper. Suddenly, a young man in front of us, who was eating too, at another table, jumped on his feet. The twenty of us stood up and started running to leave the place. The next thing I knew, the camp counsellors were trying to restrain the guy and to take… the knife he was holding. I remember, later, one of the camp counsellors (who must have been barely 20 years old but seemed to me super old at this time!) saying to the police “ils ont bondi sur leurs pieds comme un seul homme”, talking about us, the kids. I think we reacted to the way he was looking at us, his eyes were suddenly crazy. There is something super animal about this instinct which makes you feel like you are in danger.
Your story sent shivers down my spine. This is exactly what I’m talking about, reacting to danger you didn’t even know existed two seconds earlier. And it’s funny because I’ve been in seemingly more dangerous situations before where I still felt safe, whereas this time I still don’t know whether the gun was a fake or not.
Was the guy with the knife another camp participant? Do you know what happened next?
wow that was scary (the guys with the gun)
Yeah, a weird moment.