him and into our eyes. He makes no sound himself: the only noise we hear comes either from the background—the pulsing sirens from everywhere, the hum of the vent—or the physical act of his running and burning. His shoes hitting the street at a constant, unnerving rhythm, the melting rubber sticking and then breaking free; and, as he nears, the crackling of the fire, the flickering bursts of skin separating under so much heat. He pumps his arms, he doesn’t scream—like something mechanical, wound up and then released, repeating the same motion until it winds all the way down, and comes finally to rest.
He passes dangerously close—just a few feet from my left side—and the heat feels like enough to break the skin inside my clothes, as if to draw it prickling outward from my body and consume it in the blaze. There’s a sensation like light rain on my sleeve, sparks of him erupting onto me. Something runs down my leg. I can’t remember if it’s blood or piss that comes out cool. He leaves us in his wake.
“This is us,” you say, turning abruptly to a subway entrance on the right, which, miraculously, hasn’t been closed off.
We descend and enter another, deeper chamber. The station is still lit and not completely empty, which surprises me, as if I’d assumed we were the only ones to have sense to go elsewhere, to hide underground. There are people milling around the empty guard booth, down on the platform below; their movement doesn’t indicate disaster or panic. We vault over the turnstiles, not because we have to, not because they don’t work.
We wait on the uptown platform, where the mildly ironlike smell of tuna fills the air, like someone’s broken open the rations early: undercutting this smell, perversely, that of fresh water. The idea of waiting for a train seems ludicrous—if there was any delicate piece of the city’s infrastructure that would collapse first, it was the trains. At this point, though, I can’t tell if what we’re experiencing—the conditioned air, the planned and random fires, the winnowing of all our paths down into one, this feeling of controlled synesthesia—is the work of such an infrastructure crumbling or boning up; falling apart, or testing its limits. On the other side of the tracks, a woman sits hunched over on the platform, her top half hidden in a heavy fur coat, her leggings in a pattern of hundred-dollar bills, legs dangling over the tracks.
“That man,” you say, rocking back on your heels against a tiled column.
There’s still some resistance, some stick every time I open my right eye. I bat my eyelashes to ease away the sting. “What about him?”
“He was a cop.”
I can’t make out what this means—the implications of each action, already, are starting to lose their individual meaning in the collective well of paranoia. “How could you tell?”
You shift and put your hands behind your back, flattened against the column. “It smelled like bacon.”
You mime turning a badge upside down and pinning it to your chest. The train drowns out my lack of response.
We step inside, along with several of the others standing on the platform. They move to empty seats as if prescribed, but we remain standing. It doesn’t occur to me until we’re aboard that the train, too, could be a hostile mechanism, an operative part of the defenses that I intuit around us. As it crawls out of the station, I see through the window, across the way, a drenched figure haul himself up from the tracks onto the platform, water splattering everywhere. The woman in the money-printed leggings struggles to her feet, screams silently, and falls.
The train fills further at each stop, but never reaches capacity. I watch the passengers, but whatever their disguises are, they keep them. A man drums his knee impatiently whenever the doors open; a woman consults the map once, then again two stops later, using the same series of gestures each time. No one exits the train. At the last northern station on the island, we disembark alone. We have to surface outside and go west for a block, to the aboveground trains that travel north more broadly, to other cities and states; it’s been decided, somewhere, that we are leaving, that these are the steps we’re taking. As we walk, the pedestrians surrounding us break off the sidewalk and move determinedly as one group toward the other side of the street, clutching baggage and children, curving in a line and cutting off traffic, as if they’ve collectively decided to change direction, alerted by a signal we don’t have access to, that doesn’t choose us. The implication is always that the crowd knows something we do not, has some deeper, more fundamental knowledge about how to practice life, how to guarantee safety, but here we don’t listen—we go in the opposite direction while the rest funnel back, deeper into the city. Alone, we climb the stairs to the elevated outdoor tracks, and stand on the edge of the platform where the trains go north. The arrival and departure screens are all blank and dead. Again, we ignore the ticket machines, and again, we wait for the train we have no right to expect will ever come; this time, we’re the only people on the platform. I look down the track in both directions, at empty rails.
A few minutes later the tracks illuminate and the train arrives from the south, shamelessly. We board. I pace the empty car up and down, looking for people lying down or slumped in the seats or crouched with a weapon where I wouldn’t see them at first glance, an abandoned child, but there’s no one. The speakers crackle in anticipation of an announcement, then fall silent. We finally slide into the plastic-lined seats. Regardless, the doors close, and the train begins to move. Regardless, we go north, approximately, exactly to where is neither profitable nor known.
*
Gradually, the city collapses and slides from view, and through the window the reddish glow fades, replaced in shades by real, heavy night. I’m unreasonably shocked when, what feels like half an hour later, the train pulls into a station and stops. The doors open, and I inhale sharply, pushing myself down in the seat—the feeling in my gut is that everything is over, they are about to storm the train, we’ll be exposed and forced out, interlopers that we are, that this is where it all ends. You put your hand on my arm, feeling my body tense. No one boards, no infantry arrive. I breathe hard until the doors close again. The train begins its slow acceleration. Forest appears on both sides, occasional stretches of gray water. The towns we pass—visible through the trees, armatured by streetlights—don’t look specifically unpopulated, but I don’t notice any movement within them either. After the first stop I stand and make a show of consulting the map printed on the wall, a mess of primary-colored squiggles spilling in every direction. I trace my finger up the red one and into reaches unknown. “Do you know which line we’re on?”
“I don’t know, the main one.”
Between each station, the panic builds, but as the stops continue, farther and farther apart, deeper and deeper into this endless night, and the train remains empty but for us, my physical reactions lessen. At intervals, we talk quietly about nothing, careful of disturbing the fragile complex of our existence here, of revealing our presence, as if we’re a technical flaw in the system, slipping by and getting out unnoticed.
I lean my head against the window. At some unspecified point in the journey, a force pulses through the landscape outside, jostling everything to one side, a sudden ripple that I’ll only think I saw in retrospect.
The train rolls into another station, without fanfare. The engine shudders to a stop, and the doors open automatically with an empty, metallic sound. There’s no light from the platform outside. I wait for the doors to close again. The lights inside the train blink once, and then go off, too. A new layer of silence pervades the car, an absence of anything mechanical, while the sound of insects slowly wafts through the open car doors. We wait, past the point at which it seems obvious that the train isn’t going to leave the station, that wherever the tracks go, this is the last stop. You clear your throat, uselessly—it’s so obviously a space-filler that I almost comment on it—and we wait a few minutes more. Eventually, we peel ourselves from the seats and stand, shakily, as if we’ve
