‘Nǚshìmen, xiānshēngmen.’ They try to fix his attention on the recorded message, just audible through the murmurs of waking passengers, but there’s competition. A complaining child, an answering parent, the crackle of plastic. ‘Qǐng zhùyì ānquán,’ they hear, before it switches to English: ‘Dear passengers. We are now arriving at Beijing –’ They send a charge through him. Startled, he scrambles up, making for the end of the carriage. He presses past a woman with a huge rolling suitcase, a man pulling striped bags from the luggage rack. They push his face towards the glass. Outside the light is dim and white, the world slowing as it shutters past. The smooth train barely registers the change in speed, but they feel it in his body, heavier now, and in the atmosphere as everyone on board makes the required rearrangements, each attending to a private story. The rail lines split and separate and multiply. The chambers of his heart work steadily, the breath comes short. The man puts a hand to his stomach. They have all the hunger of a long journey, uncertain what it’s for. What draws them, whether it will meet their need. The train begins to rock to a stop, sliding up against blank cement platforms. A woman out there shakes a garbage bag, opens a cage.
They think of Adam: the figure outside the morgue, the mirror met in the rain, the image of him appearing and disappearing on trains, the way he made an image of them. There’s no reason for them to think he’s here, and yet they do. If they find him, what will they make of him? How will they speak? Fragments of memory, elusive, refuse to cohere. They shimmer at the edges, cruel the man’s chest on their way out, hear the cough from a body’s distance.
They dart from one body to the next. Each with its own life to live, its pre-existence. Shuttered out. None will keep. None will satisfy. They don’t want to hurt anyone, but maybe they will have to.
Hurt. That old fury rises in them, they feel its fuel. A life taken. They disembark and disentangle, rushing into crowds and through them, as careless and determined as electricity. Where, and when, and why them: it almost dissolves in the transitions. In the interaction and exchange. A vast station, crowds shifting towards exits, gates, walking too slowly under the high roof, feeling each step. Wanting the poisoned air in his lungs, tasting it. He can’t resist; they draw it in, until it burns him.
They slip away. A man, neither young nor old, who immediately starts to jiggle one arm, the back of the hand slapping at his thigh. A compulsion he can’t fight. They won’t let him, though the arm begins to ache, its socket twisted. There’s a struggle. The shoulder begins to swell. They feed on his anxiety, move faster, let him go. Through gates and exits, queues and barricades. Bodies push back.
The girl pulls the buds from the soft parts of her ears. The sound that exits her is scrambled: white noise, or tuneless music. The signals are always starting to decay, to collapse, and they hasten the work. She blinks up at the complex map of subway lines. She is completely lost. They can feel it in her wrists. Not freedom, just this awful, undirected longing, this confusion. Some space in her that they might access, use.
Then she finds her place, and her body fixes, turns. Somewhere in that map, a life awaits her. They feel it in her bones.
They take what they need, and let her go.