Meanwhile, I have Sean Paul's Temperature playing on repeat in my head.

There’s only one place where everything calms down. The only place that forces me to leave my home to go to work—and where there’s air conditioning—is the subway. Faced with the isolation created by the constantly closed shutters, the only way to escape loneliness is to reassure myself by watching the other passengers in the wagon or through the window. With my fingers sticky with sweat (since I haven’t bought a small pocket fan—an accessory I find as useful as it is ugly), I take note of a few of them.

A young man dressed entirely in white (linen clothes) who sits down across from me. He’s holding three boxes of bandages; his hands are covered in wounds, and he’s taking pictures of his pants and shirt, which are covered in blood. He’s my age—in his thirties. He is clean-shaven, his face is unblemished, and while his body is in a terrible state, his mustache is impeccably trimmed.

A woman says, “If this is an escape from reality, perhaps we should blame reality rather than the escape.”

A man in a suit is sitting on the ground next to his scooter, on the Carrousel Bridge, working on his computer in the shade.

A man with only one arm carries his bed, tucked under his arm, and dashes into the subway tunnel to hide his belongings. He disappears into the darkness for a few moments. No train cars pass by. Then he comes back out and returns to the bright light on the platform, as if nothing happened. I wonder what is going on in the dark of the tunnels, under the city. I wonder if the air is fresher.

People sleeping on the train. All those bodies slumped in their seats, relaxing because the air is cooler and the wagon rocks gently as the parched landscape rolls by. I’ve only managed to sleep on a train once, on the trip back from Naples to Paris.

One thing that stands out to me from this event is the Parisians’ perseverance in living through the Apocalypse. They were an army of ghosts undulating across the asphalt, like the beginnings of a mirage deep in the heart of a parched desert. Filling the bars every night because it’s always cooler there than at home, swimming in the Canal Saint-Martin while knowing that an eye might sprout on their foreheads once they emerged from that greenish, seemingly radioactive water, hesitating on their phones between placing bets on the World Cup or the weather (neither of which was profitable). In this collective ordeal, accompanied by pain and helplessness, a sense of excitement and solidarity emerged. In a way, the more surrounded we felt, the less we depended on others. Can’t wait for the next one? Probably not.