I've been sitting here for forty minutes trying to figure out how to start this.
That's new, by the way. The sitting and staring part. Before all of this, I could write quickly and cleanly without having to go dig for it. Now I have too much, and the problem has inverted itself, which is its own kind of hell that I'd explain if I thought I had the bandwidth, but I don't, so.
Here's what happened.
Well, hang on, I should say first that Sasha is gone. She's not dead or anything, I mean that she left, which I'll come back to, or maybe I won't, because honestly, that might be the part of all of this I'm least capable of writing right now, and I need to get through the station first or I never will. It's been four days since I went, and I've started twice and stopped twice, and this is my third attempt, and I told myself this morning that third times a charm.
So.
Thursday night.
I got on the train at quarter past eleven at night, which is late enough that I could get a car mostly to myself, which I wanted, for reasons I only partially understood at the time and understand better now than I'd like to, and I sat in the middle of the car, not the window seat I usually take, and I kept my bag in my lap.
I should describe how the memory had been in the days leading up to this, because it's relevant and because the only way I know how to tell this honestly is in order.
It had been bad. Hell, who am I kidding, it had been worse than bad—I'd started losing the floor underneath things, if that makes sense. The stacking upon stacking of memories was getting so hard to handle, so much so that my own day would start to bleed into one I'd never lived, and I'd catch myself halfway through a thought that wasn't mine and have to pull back to the surface, and that pulling was getting harder every passing minute.
Names were coming in. Names of people I'd never met, first and last, arriving fully formed like someone whispering them into my ear, and then faces attaching to the names, and then histories, and I was carrying maybe forty or fifty complete strangers in addition to everyone I'd actually met, and they were as detailed and present as the people I'd known for years, and the math of that was doing something to me I couldn’t feel the bottom of anymore.
The night I got on that train, I had not slept in almost two days. And definitely not for lack of trying. The replay had gotten long enough that a full night wasn't sufficient to run it, and so it just kept going past sunrise, which meant mornings had started arriving mid-yesterday, and I was always behind, always trying to catch up to the present day while the previous ones were still going.
I was on the train for six minutes before the lights in my car flickered and stayed dim.
I want to be precise: it was not OFF, just dimmed, think a power reduction rather than a full-on failure, and the other cars ahead of mine stayed bright; I could see them through the windows in the connecting doors. Just mine was fucking up.
I sat with that for a moment. Then I sat with the fact that I was the only one in the car, which I hadn't confirmed until I looked, but which I'd somehow already known.
Four more minutes.
The train slowed without any announcement.
The doors opened.
I knew the stop. I'd seen the shape of it from the window on the night I'd pressed my face to the glass going past it, which felt like a long time ago now but really wasn't. A platform made of concrete, the same off-white paint in layers, and it was bigger than I'd registered from the window; wide and extending further back from the track than I could see from where I was sitting.
A sign on the wall; the edge of a letter, one more time, just like before.
I got up. I know how that reads. I know what the Ren on the train had said. But I was already standing, already moving, and the truth is that I'd made this decision days prior and I'd only been pretending since then that I still had a choice about it.
I stepped off the train. The doors closed behind me. I turned around and watched the train leave.
It hadn't occurred to me until it was gone that I had no plan past this point.
The platform was abnormally cold, and I could hear the train pulling away through the tunnel until I couldn't hear it anymore, and then what I could hear was my own breathing and a sound beneath it that took me a moment to identify: water, somewhere, gathering and swelling, one drip at a time, before detaching and falling.
I turned to look at the sign on the wall.
REYES LANE
PLATFORM C
I stood there reading it for longer than made sense. The letters were ordinary enough, the station name format identical to every other stop on my line. The paint on the C was a slightly different white than the surrounding wall, most likely painted over, which I noticed right away, and the age of everything around it put that repainting at least three decades back.
I knew this stop. That was the thing that broke through everything else. I knew it. This was inside me, mine, from the version of this city that had been loading into me for fourteen months.
I walked toward the exit stairs.
The stairs went up about thirty feet and let out into a corridor. The corridor was tiled with traditional subway tile, white with a dark green border, but wasn't the tile pattern on any of the other stops on my line, and the lights overhead were the old incandescent kind in caged fixtures, and about half of them were working, so the light came in intervals—bright, dim, bright, dim—all the way down.
There was another platform on the other side of the corridor. That was the first wrong thing. Just the fact that Reyes Lane was not a transfer station. No line crossed here, and it appeared there had never been one, and yet there was a second platform through an archway at the end of the corridor, and I could see it from where I was standing, and it was bigger than the one I'd come from.
I walked toward it.
The second platform was a waiting room, or had been one once, with wooden benches in rows, and most of them still upright, while some had collapsed. A ticket window with frosted glass, with a small half-circle cut out at the bottom for transactions, and something smeared on the inside of the glass that I didn't stick around to examine too closely. The ceiling was high enough that the light didn't fully reach it, and I couldn't tell you what was up there, and I'm going to stay with that and try not to speculate.
A man was sitting on one of the benches.
I stopped walking.
He was wearing the coat.
He didn't look up when I came in, just sat there with his elbows on his knees and his head down, and I could only see the top of his head and his hands, which were clasped together in front of him, and there was something wrong about the stiffness of him, the complete lack of the small involuntary movements that people make, the shift of the body, the turn of the head, even the rise and fall of breathing, and I stood at the entrance to that room for a long time before I understood that what was wrong was that he wasn't doing any of those things.
I said his name—my name.
He raised his head.
I'm going to try to describe his face, and then I'm going to say one more thing about it, and then I need to move on because I've started over twice at this exact point, and I can't do it a third time.
It was my face. All of it was my face. The jaw, the nose bent left, the hairline, everything I know from my mirror and more than my mirror, because when I was close enough I could see things you can't see in a mirror, like the way the skin sits under my eyes when I'm exhausted, or—or, the specific compression at the corners of my mouth that I didn't know I made until I saw him making it.
–My face—
But his eyes were his, and they were full. That's the only word I have. Full. Full in the way that an overfilled glass is full, or full in the way that a room crammed floor to ceiling with objects is full—in the way that leaves no room for anything else; full to the absolute capacity of something that had been filling for a very long time, and whatever was filling it had been filling from a source that never stopped. He looked at me, but I was not what he was looking at, because there was no space in him for anything new.
I could tell he had been here for a while.
I don't know how long, and I didn't ask. I think asking would have required an answer, and I think an answer would have required him to locate himself in time well enough to give one, and I don't think he could do that anymore. I think time, for him, had become what my days had started to become—layered and non-sequential and getting harder to navigate toward any particular point.
"You shouldn't have gotten off," he said. His voice was my voice.
"I know," I said.
"No," he said, like he was clarifying. "You don't know yet."
He looked back down at his hands.
I stood there, and while I stood there, the memory thing did what it always did, which was accumulate, and I started to understand that accumulation here was different from accumulation on the street or on the train, because what was in this room felt... different than the things above ground. I could feel the walls. I don't mean I was touching them. I could feel the age in them, and with the age came the things that had been down here in the dark for however long this place had been down here in the dark, and I could feel them arriving.
I want to tell you I left immediately. I want to tell you I turned around and walked back to Platform C, caught the next train, and came home, and that was the end of it.
I was down there for three hours.
I don't have a full accounting of all three hours, which is new, and which terrifies me more than I know how to say, because in all of this, the one constant I had, the one thing I had been able to depend on, was that I could remember.
But I do not have a complete memory of those three hours.
What I have is this:
I sat down on one of the benches, and I don't remember deciding to do that.
At some point the other one said something to me that I couldn't fully hear, or couldn't fully understand, or both, and I want to write down what I caught of it and at the same time I'm afraid to, because I said earlier that writing some things down feels like doing something I can't take back, and that is still true, maybe even more now than before. So I'm going to write one part of it, and the rest of it I'm going to leave where I can't examine it, because I've already been at it for four days and nothing good has come from that and the thing about a perfect memory is that you can feel the gaps in it in a way that ordinary people probably can't, which means I know the size and shape of what I'm missing even if I can't see inside it, and the size and shape are bad enough.
What I caught was: "This city doesn't lose anything."
That's it. That's the piece I can write down. The rest is the gap, and the gap has a specific size, which is the size of about an hour and a half.
I came back to myself—came back is the right phrase, I believe—sitting on the bench with my hands in my lap, and the other Ren wasn't on his bench anymore.
I was alone in the room.
I don't know where he went. He was between me and the exit when I sat down. I checked the platform, the corridor, all the way back to Platform C, and the station was empty, and I waited there on the cold concrete for another train for approximately forty minutes by my count, and approximately eleven years by the count of whatever was in my chest, and when the train came, I got on.
I got home at a quarter to three in the morning.
Sasha was still up.
I'm not going to write about the conversation that followed because I can't hold it in the right way yet, and because she deserves better than being rendered in a horror story, which is what this has become, and the specific look on her face when I sat down across from her is not something I'm going to commit to the record unless I understand what I'm doing better than I currently do. I'll say this much: she looked at me, at my face, for a long time without speaking, and then she said she couldn't tell anymore if she was looking at me. Not in a supernatural way. She said it very plainly, like something she'd been sitting with for a while and finally decided to say out loud.
She's staying with her sister.
She left the day before yesterday.
I haven't posted in a while, and I know how that reads, especially given where the last part ended, and I want to be clear that I'm fine in the basic ways. I'm still going to work, I'm still eating. The memory is—the memory is what it is. It hasn't gotten worse since the station, but it also hasn't gotten better, and the hour-and-a-half gap sits in the middle of me like a tooth that isn't there anymore, the kind of thing you keep accidentally finding with your tongue.
I haven't seen the others in four days.
I don't know if that's good.
I looked up the Office of Special ████████ again this morning, and I found something I hadn't found before. I don't know if it's always been there or if it went up recently—I'm aware, by the way, of how that sentence sounds, that not being sure if something has always been there is a fully deranged thing to say, but my ability to care about how I sound has taken some hits lately, so, excuse me.
There's a form. I found the form. It has a name and a processing address, and the processing address is in this city, and it is not very far from Reyes Lane.
I'm going to fill it out.
I know, I know.
But here's the thing I keep coming back to, the thing I've been circling for four days without landing on: I went to that platform to find out what was there. And I found it, or, at least, part of it, and then I lost an hour and a half, and whatever was in that hour and a half, I can feel it—and the city has a memory that never loses anything, and somewhere down there, in that room, in that gap, is the piece of what I'm becoming that I'm still missing.
And I can't live with a gap.
That's the thing about people like me. That has always been the thing.
I cannot live with a gap.
My name is Ren. I have lived in this city for fourteen months, and I will still be here tomorrow, and I will still be carrying everything I have ever seen and heard and touched and passed, and I still do not know what any of it fucking means.
But I think I'm starting to...
The form has twelve sections.
I've already filled out eleven.