They see him before he sees them. The face so lost, he could be sleepwalking. They have a chance to watch him, while he doesn’t know they’re watching. A rare pleasure, not unlike a mirror.
The boy lets them look, but they can feel resistance building. A long fringe covers one third of his face. His lips pursed, perhaps in thought. He blinks, and they enjoy the shadow cast by lashes. They feel close to him, help him lift a sleeve to push the hair from the eyes so they can see. He accepts this much, as the train turns. When it straightens, they send his eyes down the row of people, crowds of businessmen and -women, teenagers, traders, readers, screens; they look restlessly on, past a woman staring at her phone, sucking absently at a corner of her collar, past a bald head, a scarfed one, a hunk of curls, until it all becomes impressionistic, a kaleidoscope of body parts in motion.
There he is. Still there. They could almost laugh.
They could hold his breath. Shut down the autonomic override. Seize the diaphragm, the lungs, until he dizzies, falls. Until the oxygen doesn’t get to the brain, his body gives out, the system collapses. They could stop everything; they could fall with him. Let rage drift away, let it dissolve into the air. And maybe this is what they were always supposed to do. They are tired of flight.
His gaze catches.
The train turns a corner, and while it does all distance disappears. The vertical lines concertina closed around the vanishing point. The train straightens, begins to pick up speed, and his skin prickles lightly on the back of the neck. The palms emit a little sweat. They know the signs, but not how long it will take. A minute or two, and he will start to go.
Still uncertain, they cast his eyes down the spine of the metal reptile. It’s like looking into a doubled mirror at an infinite regression of selves. Of course they are strangers. His vision is beginning to spark as the cells fire, panicking. They feel his fight and override it. They make him look. They hold his breath, hold him upright, maintain the pressure on the wound. Until they fix on a still point, the animal in shadow. Their gaze will wake him.
At last, two familiar eyes look back. Smooth, like polished stone.
Dim concrete whips past in the dark. The face has changed a little, but the gaze is just the same. That slight unhinging in it, the need. It isn’t beautiful; it wasn’t ever beautiful. Some private damage, private hope, kept secret from himself. Did he think he could escape it?
They find they pity him. Maybe they always did.
They watch as Adam rolls aside for the people pressing past him. He isn’t comfortable. He looks too heavy for himself, too bulky to stand up properly, his skin ill-fitting. His body is awkward here, uncultured, rough; it hasn’t learned how to be. A few of the other passengers watch carefully, as if he might do something strange or inappropriate at any moment. A woman in a yellow cardigan, a man in a cheap blue suit, and this youth.
Adam checks his reflection. Adjusts the collar of his jacket. They can see where the fake lambskin has rubbed away like mange. An animal innocence, hardly aware of itself as predator, as prey.
The train turns, and they lose him, but that doesn’t matter. They let go of the young man’s body, hear it gasp for air behind them. They swing from wrist to back to chest, a breeze passing down through the passengers, tickling skirts, triggering sneezes, pimpling the skin on forearms. Each hair has its own muscle. The train seems a looping creature, a curved snake circling back into itself, and they are a phoretic organism passing through its body, using these human forms for strategic dispersal, seeking out the rare host in which they might transform. They know that Adam will not have moved. His body will not let him get away. He is weak, and they are strong now. They have been waiting a long time for this. They know he has been waiting too.
They want to tear him apart.
The thought shocks them, as life once did. It seems a terrible violence, a desperate risk. But where does desire end, and violence begin? Which of them is the parasite, and which the host? They only know the need to climb inside that singular body, cross its borders, crack its glass. Enter the space in him and pull it open, until he breaks apart like a flower. They pause to watch him from up close, they tug one sleeve of the yellow cardigan over this chilled and slender wrist. His face is undefended. There it is again, the heaviness that could be light, that simple, annihilating need. He has come all this way to put history behind him, to be relieved of his own weight. A white boy’s fantasy. He could not leave them alone, and of course he can’t escape.
He glances at her, and catches there. His eyes go wide, as if he’s falling from a great height. The carriages unwind behind him, and they feel the pull of recognition, but nobody falls. Gravity holds them. They grasp the gaze, reach through it. The fury in them balled up for release like lightning. It leaps across the train. The windows shimmer, a glittering mirror. All this glass might shatter.
They want to destroy him. Make space to hold a self again. The elusive image, formed in the body’s private world, worn pale by a thousand acts of seeing, telling, wanting, forgetting. Burned in one act of violence. Ashes now, and yet persisting.
The body opens. Lets them in.
I flicker through.