Take My Last

“Beware of pickpockets” rings out as a subway announcement from speakers above me. You know the drill. Don’t look like a tourist. Don’t leave your cell phone in your pocket where it can be swiped. pssshhht. The subway doors close. The announcement repeats itself.

I am sitting on a cushioned seat, half listening to a podcast while I wait for the train to arrive at my transfer station. The podcast series I’m listening to assures me I can visit Paris without learning the language, so I am tuned out most of the subway ride as a girl chatters away next to me, on the phone. The signal here is apparently much better than in New York, where I came from. I catch the pickpocket announcement in English, but I assume it was first said in French first.

It’s not until I transfer to another station, that I wonder if I’m at the right place. I need to take the 3 line east to get to my Airbnb. I have my suitcase--a silver, ribbed carry-on. My purple backpack is heavy with snacks for the 8-hour plane ride, and all my overspill is in two polyester bags. I’m starting to overheat from the large black puffer jacket I have on. It goes past my hips and my two extra bags, which I had to sneak onto the airline wrapped around my stomach.

I figure because I’m thin, I’m justified in sneaking in the extra weight. And because I’ve never made much money, I need to be careful about how I spend it. I don’t want to be robbed by the airline and have to pay those extra bag fees. Still, I had to get an extra ten pounds on the plane somehow. Now I deal with the consequences as I struggle to get my suitcase out of the overhead bins, my bags knocking into a child as I shift my body as a counterweight. On my walk down the jetway, a group of soccer players in uniform carouse behind me. I’m not protected by a group. This is my first time traveling solo.

I don’t think that I’m harmless, but I don’t look threatening either. My hair is long and thick to the point of coarseness. And it’s a little orange at the tips from the last time I got it bleached at a salon, probably over a year ago. I protect my skin from sun damage, so it is pale and free of spots. I get botox every few months to prevent wrinkles from forming. It’s not as expensive as you’d think to maintain my looks. There are groupons for everything.

Before Paris, I lived in New York. I spent my days organizing my apartment while working from home. The data entry job required a little bit of mouse jiggling every few hours, but once I finished an hour or two of mind numbing spreadsheet uploads, I could turn my attention away so long as I could respond quickly to the errant ping. The job paid little, and finally during a period where seemingly every company held layoffs, I woke up one day to an apologetically cold email from the CEO and all my company logins disabled.

So at 26, with enough saved and nowhere else to go, I decided on a more extreme change of scenery. My plan was simple: take the money I would have sunk into rent, plus the unemployment benefits that I had gotten from the last job, and move to Paris.

Why Paris? For starters, my parents decided to name me Paris. My parents felt it was romantic, even though they had never been. Meeting new people, I’d always been asked if I’ve ever gone and acted with dramatized disappointment when I said I hadn’t.

“Never? Haven’t you thought about it though?” men, especially, kept pestering me. If it was an attempt at flirting, it was badly taken. I found their disbelief grating, entitled, and most of all, shaming. As though I should have prepared for such an obvious question much earlier in my life and gone to Paris just to prepare a good response.

Now finally I would have an answer.

♡ 

Already, I am getting overheated. The smell of my own foul breath reeks in my mask. It’s the same one I’ve had for over 8 hours from my flight. It’s black cloth, which matches my outfit. I’m wearing black leggings, a black long-sleeved shirt and I have a big black overcoat because it’s supposed to be chilly still at the end of April.

I get off at the airport bus transfer into the city. The crowd moves in an undulating mass to get to their next subway. Without thinking, my direction matches theirs. The loneliness of traveling alone is alleviated by waiting and being in transit. It feels productive just heading somewhere, even if all that I am actually doing is walking.

Or standing, in this case. I’ve passed the crowds to a relatively less populated area in the middle of the subway platform. Habit has me picking up my phone, swiping through and then putting my phone back into my jacket pocket without having opened any of my apps. My phone hangs like a pendant on a long woven string around my neck. My wallet and passport are in my coat pocket. My hands are in my pockets while I wait, making sure no pickpocket can get to my pockets without me knowing.

When I get onto the subway, there is an empty seat in a booth, where four seats face each other, two on each side. I’m making eye contact with a group of girls blocking my path. The space that should be opening up for me is not. Instead, the girls crowd towards me. I can’t speak French, I don’t know what they’re saying. It’s like they’re purposely trying to confuse me. My brain interprets their sounds as gibberish, and I am getting overwhelmed. I feel a sinking pit in my stomach--like I’m doing something wrong.

I don’t realize the loud voices and the crowding is actually a distraction until my backpack is already unzipped and my things have fallen to the subway floor. There’s wailing. I hear someone screaming. It’s me.

I’m loud and shouting for someone to help me. I’m expecting a passenger to whip out their phone and start recording. Does this only happen in the US? Instead, the people in the subway are leaning away from me, as though I am the disturbance, not the girls who have somehow reached into my pockets. Because before I was holding onto my wallet. Now I’m clutching at the air. 

My things spill out of my backpack. My bags, which lacked closures to begin with, were loaded with protein powders and homeopathic pain meds in case I got a migraine. I didn’t have an incident on the bus from the airport to the subway, and I’ve ridden subways all around New York before, even in the dead of night with no one around. I’ve never been close to a mugging before. The passengers eye me warily as I zip up my backpack and feel for my things. I feel like I’m the one disrupting everyone’s journey.

And when I turn to chase after those girls, it’s too late. The subway doors are closing, then closed. The wallet that I had fingered on my way onto the subway is gone. My passport along with it. My phone, miraculously, is still on a string around my neck. And the money, I realize. Not just all my credit cards, but a big wad of mixed bills totaling $500 in my wallet. That’s gone too.

The leader is not who you’d expect. I realize after the doors have already shut that the grandmother standing behind that group of girls must have targeted me even before I got on. These girls could grow up to be part of the Kardashian family. They’re nice looking. They’re wearing skirts like it’s a school uniform. They’re grouped together like girl scouts and exited the subway just before the doors closed with the same precision.

By the time I turn, their backs are to me. In another second, the crowd hides them from my view. The train starts moving. The mechanical chug of the train drowns out my initial cries.

♡

For the rest of the subway ride, I’m fighting off sleep. I’ve never had a flight or fight response. My default is freeze. I hunch my back and shove my suitcase in between my knees. The subway gets emptier as we get closer to my destination. I’m glad that I’ve found a small studio in the eastern suburbs, just outside of Paris.

The studio is located within an apartment complex. I punch in the access code to get let into the lobby, but there’s another door to a hallway in between that I need a key to open. The keys are supposed to be left with a guardian. Not quite a doorman in Paris, but someone who is still available during certain hours of the day to help with mail. But no one answers when I press the little button to call the guardian. I know from my host that it’s supposed to be a young girl, who will hand me the keys to my studio rental.

“She is probably still out for her lunch break. She should be back soon,” texts the host. It’s 2:30 in the afternoon.

  It’s too expensive to call my parents, so I text them instead about my passport and wallet being stolen. I can’t call because I don’t want to be charged, but my parents reply with practical advice on replacing what was stolen. No call, no alarm. Not even an “are you okay?” text back. My message gets a thumbs-down reaction.

I consider what friends I can text, but in my last months in New York, I ghosted everyone. To be fair, my friends didn’t try that hard to get in touch either.

My head hurts. There’s a spot at the front of my forehead, above where my right eyebrow begins, that has a sharp pain, almost like a bruise that’s being pressed on. I rummage through my bags to find my homeopathic migraine relief. It’s in a small, semi-opaque bottle. I open it and pour out two white pills that I dissolve under my tongue. In the process, I rearrange what’s in my backpack and take inventory of what I’ve lost. My items lay on the ground around me, in little piles according to their category.

I have clothes in a pile: bras, tank tops, and skinny pants. There’s a Ziploc bag, inside of which are even smaller plastic baggies of salt, pepper, and individually packaged electrolyte drink mix. There are nutrition bars that I got for rebate, protein powder which sits in a mass at the bottom of my bag, and then the nutrition supplements: samples of Antarctic krill oil, rosehip vitamins, and digestive enzyme pills. I have Adderall, sleep aids, and homeopathic painkillers. The heaviest item that I take out is my hair straightener. The bulkiest is my makeup and skincare sets, which include a tin can of beef tallow moisturizer, crusty eyeshadow in loose pans, and tinted sunscreen.

The hallway is starting to look like my apartment. I had things all over the floor. The smaller items, like makeup, I’d started grouping together into bags. I’ve seen videos online of hoarders’ homes, and my piles are much smaller than theirs. They stay at feet level, but I know I’m on the cusp. There’s a lot that I can resell, but mostly I keep them in boxes and in bags, because someday I may use the items. Weights for working out, bras that I might wear, and bags of charger cords. We grew up poor in my family, where everything could be used eventually.

I had wanted to address my hoarding tendency by taking items with me on my trip with the intention of leaving them behind when I left. I brought clothes that I planned to discard. I had baggies of supplements that I carried in my spillover bags, which I planned to consume. I hadn’t wanted to need to buy anything, and now I didn’t have the money to do it anyway. My desire to change my bad habits had put me in a worse situation—it had made me a target for the pickpockets. I had made the mistake of looking like a tourist anyway.

My mind flashes back to my decision not to take an Uber, wanting to save money, not expecting to be robbed in the middle of the afternoon. I feel an episode of total bodily shut down coming on. My breath starts coming in sporadic bursts. There’s a loud ringing in my ears. I’m so dizzy that I collapse to the floor. My things are still half out of my backpack, and I fall on little baggies of nut bars that poke uncomfortably at me. While my body is wracked with pain, all I can do I curl into the fetal position and close my eyes while I wait for the feeling to pass.

♡

The guardian’s dog nudges me awake with licks to my face. It’s a golden retriever, off-leash. There’s a disorienting moment where I forget where I am. Then I remember with a queasy jolt that it’s still the same day that I got robbed.

The guardian stands behind the dog, who now sits on its haunches by her side. The guardian looks like she could be in high school. She doesn’t speak any English, but I assume the sound that leaves her mouth means “here are the keys,” because she drops a keychain with three keys into my hands. I use trial and error to deduce which one opens my apartment door.

I can’t be bothered to repack my things from the hallway, so I made several trips to move my little piles from one floor to another. Tired, sweaty, and irritable, I want to drop into my bed, and fall asleep but I need to call my credit card company to get them to replace my credit card.

“Are you telling me this could take up to two weeks? Are you telling me that there’s no shipping tracking number?” I seethe to the customer service agent who handles my case. I’ll need to get cash somehow. 

I had planned to visit groceries stores, go shopping, and slowly look for a job I could do remotely. I was glad that I hadn’t booked any tourist visits. I dreaded leaving my Airbnb to go to a tourist site like the Eiffel tower where I could get robbed again.

I have a return flight a month out. I need to leave earlier.

 ♡

My Airbnb host lets me buy 300 euros off him. I wire transfer to a random European bank the equivalent in US dollars, with the conversion fee. It’s not ideal, but at least I have enough money for the next week, at least until my credit card arrives. He comes by in the evening to drop off the cash, and I meet him outside the apartment so that he doesn’t see how I’ve unpacked. 

I wanted to get away for as long as possible, but the robbery is making it impossible.

  That night, to soothe myself, I decide to update my Tinder location to Paris. If I can’t go to any tourist sites, I might as well spend time with a local.

♡

“I’m sure the girl who stole from you was Roma,” explains my date for tonight. He’s blonde. Skinny. Bad skin. I don’t know why he’s so proud of being Parisian, in this small city so unlike New York. Where everything closes from 2 pm and then doesn’t open again until seven.

“Or maybe gypsies. That’s where the term getting gypped comes from. The grandmother probably gave those girls alcohol before they robbed you. It’s usually young girls too because it’s harder to put younger kids in jail for pickpocketing.”

Later, in bed, when my date is asleep, I check a Reddit thread about the Roma in Paris. Someone writes “I hate to uphold a stereotype, but for Roma men, it really is true that they really are a blight on society.”

I want pepper spray, I realize. I look it up because I can’t fall asleep, and see there is an armory not far from where I am. I keep having dreams, and in my dreams, I’m so sleepy that I’m trying to stay awake, and fight off falling asleep while I attempt to make my way to some relaxing spa area, but there are lines. And it’s in a desert mountain cave. The path I’m taking is sandy and dirt filled.

When I wake up, I imagine those girls’ faces. In my fantasy, I rush at them clutching pepper spray and spray them in the face.

 ♡

  My credit card still hasn’t arrived so I call customer service, only to find out that the card hasn’t shipped due to an invalid shipping address. Why couldn’t my building have door numbers, like a normal apartment? I am so unfamiliar with French addresses that I didn’t give a zip code the first time and lost three days to this mistake.

“Don’t lose your things this time,” my mom texts me when I tell her I’ve got an appointment at the U.S. embassy tomorrow. Like it was my fault that I no longer have my passport in my possession.

After I close my laptop, I pull up the directions to the armory to buy some pepper spray. Along the way, I text my French date that I’m in his area and if he wants to see me again. This time, when I sleep over at his place, I have pepper spray in my purse.

♡

  On Tuesday, I go to the US Embassy early to get a temporary passport. There’s a long line and I end up getting my credit card rejected from the vending machine to pay for my passport photos. One machine is taking exact cash only, and the other doesn’t take cash at all. I’m holding up the line for 15 minutes, asking if anyone has a bill smaller than a 50 before some kind stranger lets me use his credit card. It’s 5 euros, which he doesn’t ask me to repay.

My whole week in Paris has been spent trying to figure out how I can leave again.

♡

I contact my French date again and ask if he wants to meet me at a speakeasy. I don’t know why Paris would have these, given alcohol was never banned in France to my knowledge, but it’s something foreign expats love to recommend online, so I figure I’ll try it out. It’s the first day that I don’t think about the robbing. My credit card is in my pocket, and I think maybe I don’t need to let this ruin my trip. Maybe I can still enjoy the rest of my time.

“I normally don’t see someone two days in a row,” he confesses afterward, while I’m rubbing my neck where he gripped too tightly.

  “So should I keep texting you?” I ask.

“If you want. I’m not the kind of guy who will ghost,” he says.

I can feel myself falling for the guy already. It doesn’t take much, and it’s been a long time since I had any intensity with anyone. That pandemic took that away from me.

We get to talking about our last relationship. I think it should take a long time to get over someone. “It should take you 10 times as long to get over someone,” I joke. “10 years for every 1 year you were together.”

“That’s a murder sentence, an additional 10 years for each murder,” he exclaims.

I wonder how long it’ll take me to stop thinking about those girls who robbed me. I still don’t feel like seeing the Eiffel Tower. I can see pictures of it online, so what am I going to see, really?

He asks me what it was like to grow up Asian in Texas.

“The bullying wasn’t from white people actually,” I said. “I came into middle school as a fob. If I had known that I would be ostracized by other Asians, I would have just gone to the all-white school,” I said. I wonder if the pickpockets targeted me because I was an Asian woman. I knew to stand with my back against a wall whenever waiting for a subway, to avoid being targeted in the US, and it doesn’t seem any different abroad.

I’m wearing two layers of underwear. My date laughs when he pulls off one layer only to find a second. The second pair has a card holder sown on the inside.

“It’s to keep my card safe from pickpockets,” I explain.

“What about the wallet I saw in your purse?” he asked.

“That’s my decoy wallet. It’s empty.”

 ♡

In the morning, I sneak out of his shoebox apartment at 4am. I’m not jetlagged, but drinking always gets me up earlier. I take the subway out of the 4th arrondissement. There’s a transfer at Republic, where I need to leave the station to walk to a different entrance.

As I enter the station, I see two men standing at the end of the tunnel, before people turn left or right to get to the platform. I clutch my bag closer to myself and walk faster, maintaining my eye contact with one of the men. They’re tan, fit, and tall. They’re ethnically ambiguous enough to be models for a high fashion campaign, but I have the feeling that something is off. I don’t know why they’re glancing at each other.

When I pass, I purposely stay close to the walls to give the one closer to me a wide distance. Reaching the platform, I walk as far down as I can go. This week’s experience has taught me to sit as close to the conductor as I can.

Before I reach the end, I hear footsteps pounding behind me. When I turn around, it’s one of the men that I passed sprinting on the platform opposite me. I’m confused, trying to register what’s happening when I hear shouting. A woman runs not far behind, screaming something over and over again that begins with ‘R’. She has short black hair. Blunt cut with bangs, which flies in little tufts with the velocity of her run. She is wearing all black, with a puffy black jacket. Her black flats slap the platform.

On my side, another man starts running. He is white, with short sandy brown hair and moss-colored cargo shorts. I wonder if it’s a good samaritan or someone that knows the woman. I realize she must have been robbed, and is chasing after the first running man. I’m debating if I should start running too, head up the stairs and cut off the thief or if it would be more helpful if I took out my camera and recorded what happened so she could share it with the police. What if I posted it on Reddit and asked if anyone could help identify the thief? How good was the vigilante justice in Paris?

In the span of all my thoughts though, all three people had already run up the stairs in the opposite way of where they came, and it was too late for me to take any action at all. My subway arrives, and I get on.

I stew as I sit. The girl was likely a local. Did the pickpockets expect such an aggressive response when they targeted the girl?

She didn’t look Asian—mixed if anything. But I wonder if I would have been targeted on the subway even if I hadn’t been a tourist—just the fact that I was small. You might assume that I’m quiet. That I wouldn’t fight back. In that case, they were right.

I’m too angry that I couldn’t do anything. The pepper spray in my bag didn’t even occur as an option in that moment. It’s only been one stop but I have to get off. I need to find my way back to where I saw that girl running. I don’t know what I’ll do when I arrive, but I need time to think. I start pacing, and then I just begin walking east, in the direction I came from.

♡

I pass a duo of pickpocketers at one of the alleyways that I go down. They are eating outside. It looks like steak and onion soup. I am not sure it’s the same two girls from the subway, the first day I arrived in Paris, but they’re young. I watch one pickpocket a woman while she signs a petition for them. They’re professionals.

  No wonder I didn’t feel anything when my backpack was unzipped and when they reached into my coat pockets, which were also zipped up. I had my hands on my wallet the whole time, I thought. Maybe that’s why it was so easy to take.

I follow those little girls, and I check that I still have my pepper spray. They don’t notice me following them through a smaller alley, and around the corner towards a building with construction going on around stone pillars. I stake out a doorway to watch the girls from a safe distance. Not a lot of people came around, and when they do, they say ‘bonjour’ and move on. Much friendlier than what I’m used to, but also more passive. No one gives me side eye.

The two girls open a door and then reappear later with four more girls, looking about middle school age and ethnically ambiguous. The older grandmother woman trails behind them. Do they always travel in packs? I wonder. When they leave, I follow them until I see them go down into a subway stop, then I sprint back to the house where they came out.

I attempt to enter from the front door. The door is locked. It’s not like I can just ram it with my shoulder. Or can I? I try twisting the door handle uselessly.

It reminds me of the time I stayed in a hotel, during a college tour visit to Cornell. The door opposite my hotel room had yellow caution tape wrapped around it, and there were cracks around the door handle. But the door handle was intact. Someone had tried hard to break in, but they hadn’t succeeded. The door must have been reinforced with something.

I search for a key to their door underneath the mat. Of course, there is nothing there. There are steps going into a basement, with ground-floor windows. I look through the window. I can see stairs, the corner of a bed, and another corner of a closet. There are no bars on the window, so I take a rock and hurl it as hard as I can towards the panes.

Crack. I grab another rock by their front steps. Another crack. My fingers curl tighter around the rock. The window is starting to look like a spider web, and I smash the rock in my hand again at the center of the web of cracks.

Finally, I am through. I climb through the window, grateful that I have chosen to wear tight jeans today, even though it normally gives me acid reflux. When I land, too late, I hear rustling. Too late I realize the lump in the bed was one of the younger girls who were on the subway. She leans over and throws up into a bucket next to her bed.

She says something. From the lift in her voice, I’m guessing it’s something about who I am, but I have no clue what she is actually saying. Her eyes have dark rings under them.

At this point, my fingers leap onto my pepper spray. This is my chance. The fantasy that I had the whole time. In a way, I had been hoping one of my pickpockets would have remained behind. But then again, pepper spraying some girl who is clearly sick was not how I imagined it would go.

She isn’t sick enough to stay in bed though, because she gets up groggily and stumbles over to the door. I realize also that if I do pepper spray her, then I have to leave through the window, and I don’t know if this time I’ll be lucky enough to avoid the broken glass. Already, suspect I’ll wake up the next morning with bruises.

I look around the room. There’s a pile of wallets in the corner, a pile of clothes on the floor, and a backpack on the ground. What am I going to do? Take the wallets and return them to their rightful owners? That’s not realistic, and besides, what if the police get involved somehow? The floor is also covered in bags. It’s not so dissimilar to my bedroom, with all my rebate buys laying around, organized into little groups and contained in bags.

I grab a handful of wallets anyway, and then a nice music box that I see on the girl’s table. More gibberish is spoken, really yelled at me. I pull up the pepper spray, but instead of pressing the button, I wave her towards the bed, out of my way. She doesn’t comply---she actually gets out of the bed in her nightie.

Her voice is getting louder, and I’m realizing that she might actually try to stop me. Sick, maybe. Weak? Maybe not. This time, I hold up the pepper spray and shift the cap to the left to move it out from underneath the cap. Now if I press down on the red trigger, it will actually shoot out pepper.

Before the girl can rush at me, I run towards the door. She gets an elbow to her shoulder as she tries to block my way. In the shuffle, I do hit the trigger and the pepper shoots down towards the floor. When I look down, I get an eye full of the stuff. My eyes water, and the girl yelps.

The stairs are to my left, so I head up them, and then out the front door. I see a bus pull up and I run on it.

♡

When I get home, I’m breathing hard. My acid reflux is kicking in. I have a cramp in my side. I down some protein powder, and then throw it up. I try to heat up my dinner, a pound of raw meat in the microwave, but the microwave won’t turn on. If I try to plug it into the outlet, all the lights turn off. The smell of meat, which I usually don’t notice, overpowers me.

  I’m still sweaty and overheated from my puffer jacket. My mask can finally be discarded. When I rip it off and toss it towards a wastebasket, it lands limply on the floor several feet away. Then I grab a towel from the bathroom and unfold it, using it as a cover for my pillow. I need to sleep away the events of today. A few moments after I drop onto the bed, I pass out.

I look at the spoils of my haul. I had thrown it on the floor when I got home. Now it’s spread out like a fan.

There’s no money in these wallets, I realize. I suppose the first thing the pickpockets would do is strip the cash, but what about the ID cards? How about the credit cards which are easily traceable back to the pickpocket, and that everyone knows to cancel right away anyways? Those are mainly still here. I realize that even throwing a pile of wallets into my trash can would be too suspicious.

I am forced to make time to take out the trash, which is something I’ve been criticized for in past reviews. This time I have no choice. I hope my Airbnb guest rating improves from this trip. I need that win, at least.

♡

The flight has landed in my home town in Texas. I’m staying with my parents until I get another job.

When I get home, I find that my parents have decided to redo the flooring in my room, and my things have been moved into the basement like I never lived there at all.

 ♡

September 21, 2024