When I ride the subways without a book, I like to name strangers. I've sat across from Genelle, Charlie (a girl), Julian, and Nicole. I've squeezed my arm between Charlie (a boy) and Alan, while grabbing blindly for a pole during rush hour. I gave up my seat for a pregnant Sam (a girl). I gave money to a homeless Sadia, and I avoided making eye contact with a begging Chuck when he asked for spare change. I play the name game only when I ride the subway without a book, but then I always play it.
     Naming strangers is a godlike business. With a name, I create people and their stories, but with total disregard for the facts of their lives. Once named, the endless parade of anonymous and emotionless faces swaying in unison to the train's lurches and halts are coated in a thin veneer of familiarity.
     In a West Village bistro, I spotted a woman I had named "Mercedes" on the train the previous morning. The breast (buxom), the short curls of hair (black-and-silver), and the lipstick (blood-red) that sat together in a tight booth were unmistakably that same "Mercedes" of the Bergen Street platform.

     The chance of spotting a stranger twice in two days in two different boroughs seemed so improbable that I assumed Mercedes must have been on my tail (never mind that it was Mercedes who had debarked from the subway two stops before me, and that it was Mercedes who left the bistro first). In a double-decker city, where the frantic street-level buzz is mirrored and multiplied underground, the familiar had finally become more unnerving than the unknown.                                  
     Many strangers, I name after people I know and whom they resemble. I possess a set of templates. Now I look around the world and see facsimiles. And like them am I - "Annie" to some, but a girl who resembles "Jessica," "Sasha," or "Rachel," to more. On the uptown 5 express, I sat across from a man I named "Andy" for his resemblance to an eponymous college friend, and he probably looked at me and named me "Sarah" after a girl he worked with at Chili's during high school summers. The only way to keep up with the daily barrage of new stimuli is to contextualize it by comparing it to the old. There are far too many faces to see on the subways, and if we opened our eyes to everyone, we might see no one at all.  To view the subway strangers even as passing shadows, we see them through comparisons, we name them, we make them up.

Annie Karni is a freelance writer and a reporter for The Long Island Jewish World.