index

Time is negotiable, a currency whose value fluctuates.

Each morning I arrive at the terminal to find the same pristine carriage waiting for me. I have been operating this equipment for longer than any reasonable person would consider healthy, yet it shows no signs of wear. The upholstery remains unmarked. The windows are spotless. The floors are so clean they reflect the fluorescent lights like a mirror.

This strikes me as implausible.

—

The routine never varies.

At exactly 0600 hours, I begin my first run. The tunnels receive me like a warm inhalation; the lights bloom and fade. The announcement comes automatically: “This is Line 7 East.” My voice echoes through empty carriages. I wonder if I am the only person left, or if there are others like me, operating through tunnels connecting nothing to nowhere.

I open the doors to an empty platform. The tiles are cream-coloured with blue geometric trim — a pattern that reminds me of something I cannot quite place. Perhaps a hospice lobby where I once waited for someone. I keep the doors open for exactly forty-five seconds, counting silently. I close them with mechanical precision.

The City, above ground, has not changed in all this time. Grey sky, empty streets, buildings arranged with an obsessive attention to harmony. Every structure follows the same design principles, planned by a committee that has achieved consensus.

I think often about the passengers who used to ride this line. Not specific individuals, for I cannot recall any faces, but the general sense of human presence that once filled these cars. The rustle of newspapers. The murmur of conversations. The shuffle of feet moving toward exits. These sounds have been replaced by mechanical rhythms — wheels, hydraulic doors, the steady hum of ventilation systems maintaining consistent climate control.

At the end of the line, I conduct my turnaround inspection. This involves walking through all six carriages, checking for anything out of the ordinary. I never find anything out of the ordinary. The seats maintain their factory appearance, the windows remain transparent, the floors show no scuff marks despite the thousands of kilometres this train must have traveled under my operation.

Entropy, I think, has been suspended.

During the layover, I stand on the platform and listen to the silence. It is not complete silence — there are always the background sounds of electrical systems, air circulation, distant mechanical processes. But it is the silence of a world running itself, maintaining its functions without intervention or human purpose. I find this oddly comforting. Whatever else has happened to the City above, whatever has emptied the streets and platforms, at least the schedule persists.

—

The return journey follows the same sequence in reverse. At each stop, I announce the station name and open doors to platforms that are stage sets. The performance continues, whether or not anyone is watching.

It is during one of these return trips that I notice the irregularities. Small things at first — shadows that fall at angles inconsistent with the lighting, reflections in windows that show spaces different from those I was traveling through.

Then: a thin ribbon snagged on the arm of a seat. A crescent of salt. The faint smell of violets. A smear on the window, the height of a child’s forehead.

Finally, the sounds: voices speaking just below the threshold of intelligibility, footsteps in empty corridors, the distant chiming of bells from places that do not appear on my transit map.

I find a letter folded beneath the seat nearest the rear conductor’s desk. It is written on the stationery of the Ministry of Circulation, stamped in purple with the image of a hand holding a key. It instructs me to continue my duties, with particular attention to punctuality and the appearance of purpose. Absence requires a schedule, the letter says; absence has its own commuters. It does not bear a signature. On the envelope, instead of my name, there is a small, careful drawing of a keyhole.

The first night the announcement refuses me is a Wednesday, which I recognise from the quality of its silence. I lift the microphone and say, “Meridian Nine, next,” but the speaker makes a chiding sound and the words come out as, “Nine Meridian, next.” The reversal is small, almost elegant, and yet it alters the track. We pass the familiar tiled column that now says NM and enter a tunnel that converges upon itself, as if laid down by a hand that had forgotten it was drawing a line rather than a spiral.

It is my job to shake my head where necessary and accept where necessary. I redraw the schedule in my log, write, “Nine Meridian,” and fight the urge to apologise.

The machine is old and the City older, and there are channels of sympathy between old things. I have found only a few.

—

The maintenance crews work at night, I assume, though I have never encountered them. Each morning the system cleaned, serviced, ready for another day of carrying no one from nowhere to nowhere. The efficiency is remarkable. Whoever designed this operation understands that true success lies not in serving users but in maintaining the flawless execution of process itself.

My shift ends, but I remain in the operator’s booth for an additional period, completing paperwork that no one will read and filing reports that will disappear into systems whose purpose I cannot fathom. The forms ask for passenger counts, incident reports, service delays. I fill them out meticulously, recording zeros in every category, scrupulously noting the complete absence of events worth documenting.

—

At irregular intervals, I notice something new: signs pointing to destinations I do not recognise. These stations, each named for a minor regret, carry the weight of places that might be real in some other version of the City. They mark territories adjacent to ours, bleeding through at the edges where oversight grows thin.

I record the details in my logbook, ink my name, draw a neat line under the entry, and then, because the line looks like a track, I draw a second, running parallel.

The City’s jurisdiction encompasses all mapped territories. It specifically addresses geographical consistency and the importance of maintaining clear boundaries between administered and… other… areas.

—

Shadows fall differently; distances seem to shift depending on the direction I face. I mark these areas on Council maps with diagonal lines and the notation “Pending Administrative Resolution.”

I do not know how to negotiate with forces outside municipal planning.

—

There is something peaceful about being the only conscious witness to a system that operates with such perfection. My empty carriages, my punctual schedule, my adherence to protocol — these things have a purity that would be compromised by the unpredictable demands of actual passengers.

I imagine what would happen if someone did board my train. How would I react? Would I remember the correct procedures? Or have I become so adapted to solitude that the presence of another human being would strike me as a violation of natural law?

From time to time, a passenger almost occurs. In the reflection of the glass I see a gentleman with a salt-white umbrella nodding gravely, though the seats are bare. In the vestibule I find a coin whose inscription is eroded to the first letter of my name.

After this I begin to mislay parts of myself. To mislay is not to lose. I could have found the parts, no doubt, if I had known where I had placed them. I begin to write my log in careful lowercase, an apology dressed as good manners. My voice acquires a reserve it had not previously possessed, and my patience — former object of my pride — becomes porous. Beneath that porosity, however, lies something like joy.

One night I wake, standing at the junction between cars, sunken into the rubber, holding the rail in each hand, and I knew that, whatever lay ahead, I would keep walking the cars, open and close the doors, and beat my brass punch softly against my palm like a heart.

—

The thing happens as such things happen — without permission, during the last hour of a shift. I step out onto the platform, recently washed and still drying under the yellow lamps; the tiles reflect the train in a way that suggests there are two trains, symmetrical and inverted, one inside the earth and one inside the reflection.

I see a conductor in the other train, walking the empty cars. He is not me, but I recognise his uniform and the way he holds himself as if his ribs were a coat rack on which he is careful not to hang anything heavy. I lift my hand. He lifts his. The train starts with a soft voweling sound. The other train starts, too. We move toward each other and away.

I make a plan then. I decide to revise the timetable so that the stops would spell out a sentence — nothing dramatic, only a statement in the grammar of arrival and departure — and then to run it one night, quietly, as a test. The sentence is: I AM HERE. It is not a remarkable sentence, but it has kept men alive on islands, and sometimes that is the sum of things.

—

We run the sentence. I announce the stops. The microphone behaves; it gives me my words in the order I chose. The lights cooperate. At East Return, which is the last stop and the first depending on your perspective on circles, I open the doors. The platform is not empty, although it contains no one. There is, instead, a quality to it that I hesitate to name. It is like the room before a conversation begins between two people who love each other and do not know it yet. It is like a field before the first footprints. It is like the first page of a book on which a careful reader has laid a bookmark in anticipation. I step across the threshold with both feet and stand on the platform like a man pretending to be made of stone.

It is an old story to say I do not know whether I stepped back onto the train or remained on the platform. The truth is simpler than that. On some nights I am moving; on others I am still. The timetable accommodates both.

In the logbook, which I keep with ridiculous care and in which I do not, as a rule, write in the margins, I draw a map of the line. It is a circle, and it is not a circle. The stations are named and unnamed. There are arrows that point in, and arrows that point out, and a few that shrug. On a blank page I write the hours between midnight and one and leave them open like a pair of cupped hands. Between those hands there is a small object that is not a key. When I close my eyes, I can feel it resting there, weightless and obligatory.

—

I will say this much for the empty train: it is never empty of its purpose. The city needs a corridor through which all the unborn errands, unopened letters, unsent apologies, and unchosen roads can pass on their way to becoming nothing more than the possibility of themselves. Someone must stand at the doors and open them and close them. Someone must announce the stops, even and especially when no one listens. Someone must mark the ticket that will not be presented, with the punch that makes a keyhole that admits nothing and opens what has already been opened.

And if, on certain nights, a gentleman with a salt-white umbrella should incline his head on the far side of the glass, I incline my head, too, and take his silence as payment. I return to my car. I check my cap. I walk the length of the train, counting no one, and in this, as in much else, I am on time.