Beijing draws them into its system, accommodates them easily, churns on undisturbed. It feels familiar, known, a body patterned after bodies, a generous host. It loves and welcomes all forgotten things. They slip quickly through the city’s surface, travel safely beneath its skin. They are glad to be on the crowded subway, to have won some ease of motion, recovered from flight. They are gaining power.
They leap with the air, enter with breath and rise with blood. They are strong enough to let the bodies push back at them, reform them. They bend with shoulders that bend the way their bodies make them. Whole lifetimes have been lived in each of these bodies, places known as superficially, as deeply, as cities.
Even at night, when the trains stop, they don’t need to travel far. They linger with security guards. They stay as long as they like; some of these bodies are tired, caught in routine, they don’t fight hard. Once, they spend the night in a woman who scuttles past the platform to sleep in the gap beside the rails, curled into the nest that she has made there, and they keep her awake until the trains start up again, leaving her in the morning as shaken as a lover is by violence.
Down here, everything is simplified, separated and divided into a web of rails, stations; there are tracks, procedures, rules. There’s a centre and a growing periphery. It’s like the games people play on their tiny screens, their bodies burrowed into them. Little functions, small rewards. They feel the movements in the bodies as they play. Running endlessly, dodging obstacles, poised in battle, they are twitching in the shoulders, feet. The mind’s commands so simple, pre-intellectual. They feel safe in that lapse. They run through the bodies in the same way: ghost impulses, quashed reflexes, crimes thought about but not committed. They make rupture. They play too.
This woman, an ache in her heels like fire. She shuffles to an empty seat but too late to take it, frowns down on the balding winner – she could smite him. TV screens bleat cartoon instructions, happy cops jumping. The line is new-built and skips stations. Each announcement holds a name they don’t recognise. It’s all new, a new city that sprouted in this city’s place, but it didn’t displace the old one; they found ways to live together.
The woman clicks her jaw and mutters something. Her mouth tastes dry and stale. They will never not wonder at how bodies work, how each act cascades into the next; they will never be able to simplify the infinite stream of messages, or understand how people manage to live while ignoring so much of what being alive feels like. Maybe ignoring most of it is necessary. All these desires and hurts, signals and impulses, it’s too much to integrate with one awareness. Sensations flare and are extinguished like hot ashes falling on water. No-one could manage full consciousness of a body, of dying, and believe in their own singularity.
She moves a little closer to the door, checks her station, resting one heel then the next. Her eyes trace along the line of glinting lights; the next stop beckons. They switch the signal in her feet, reroute the tracks for her, and she steps lightly from the train, the pain forgotten.
There is joy in these small interventions. A musky scent, his face down at a screen, the thumb trembling from its use. Flicking through videos, lightning attention, holding his breath. A spasm runs up his arm. They unstitch the thumb, yank at the muscle. The body is returned to awareness. It meets itself, closes the space that had been open, and they slide out at the next station. Any body could be theirs, an infinite palace of human rooms.
Here, folded over. Shrunk by migraine. She looks up, catches her reflection in the window, flinches. They shift her gaze away from the moving mirror and into the distance, the train ahead, which for a moment gives the illusion of infinity: a paradox of receding possibility. Just looking at it hurts her, but she can’t look away. They hold her there against her will, the headache bursting. They want to feel the wound in the back of the skull. They want to remember.
She’s so tired. There is pain, and then there is the boredom of pain. The bodies will all be like this. There will be an endless repetition of the same injuries, the same aches and fears and tensions. Their fury can’t sustain them, any more than grief sustains the living. There’s nowhere to land. They should have gone a long time ago.
She blinks back tears.
They flee her shadow. They must keep moving, stay with the looping circle line. They feel its vibrations in the bodies, bodies that all seem to think they are safe. They flicker quickly, carelessly.
In the next man something wants to snap. The energy at half capacity, a body in struggle. He’s holding on against the flow of crowds, the roll of the train, his own fatigue. They cling to him, a possibility. Afraid of signs, he shrinks from the proliferation of instructions. Smells of country, horse-work, leather. Worn hands slip against the steel railings. He mutters something, a prayer or a list of stations. There’s comfort in the pattern in his mouth. He gets off at a transfer station, follows the crowd. Tiles crack down one wall. Stops at a poster for wolves, fascinated. The animal shape of his want does not belong here, it wants to break him. The crowd flows past. They return to its river.
A woman rolling a suitcase with one broken wheel, the blouse confining, sweat against her sides. She drags the case downstairs. Halfway, the weight lifts behind her; someone has picked up one end, and her face lights up, ‘Xièxie nǐ,’ as she turns. The girl nods, serious and strong, and answers in a hushed Beijing purr, ‘Méi shìr.’ When they reach the bottom she lets go and they go with her, brushing the sweat from the carrying hand against one thigh, walking steadily away, the lifted weight of a small kindness.
She touches the watch on one wrist, twists without consulting it. She doesn’t pause, she knows her way; they like her easy intention. Her muscle, her strength. She does not hesitate before the opening doors, but strides in. There are seats but she stands with her arms folded, legs set apart. Knows how the train moves, no need to hold on. The rhythm of place lives in her body, it has entered her. They want her confidence, her power.
She watches another woman across the aisle, seated. A pulse of desire, hidden below skin. Her face doesn’t change. They release her control a little, and she shudders with pleasure, then looks away.
There’s no space for them. They give her what she wants, and leave her.
A boy writhes in the other woman’s lap, homework open. She begins to read the signs aloud and point to the characters, teaching him the mother tongue. He isn’t listening, and her flat hand lifts, tensed. They stop it in the air. Her mouth hurts inside, where she has gone uselessly over the words too many times. They soothe the ulcers, soften the hand, restore a little patience.
Stronger and more careful now, capable of kindness.
And what of their own desires, their own need? They’re looking for something impossible.
But they feel it there, just around the corner. The trains turn their wide circles, make their exchanges, the bodies breathe each other’s air. It’s sometimes a scent that pulls them forward, sometimes an image: the back of a head, the motion of a hand. There is a way through. It’s so close. Take this young man, his awareness. He is tall, slender, a little androgynous. A curve of hair touches one cheek. A glimpse at the periphery. He looks up:
And there is Adam. Like he’s been waiting for them all this time.