I had a nightmare once. You were in it.
---
0 - mezzanine
---
The clock on the wall that ticked louder and louder with every second told me that it was 15 minutes to 10 in the morning. It had been telling me that for several hours now.
That wasn’t true, of course. I couldn’t have been sitting here, in this ill-fitting suit that hung off my body at an uncomfortable distance, for much more than a dozen minutes. Quiet voices that insisted on rationality, however, didn’t do much to sway every other sense I had that I hadn’t been slowly boiling in this pressure cooker in the form of a tiny manager’s office hidden behind a train station food court for hours, possibly days. The heat seemed to expand every minute, dragging them out longer and longer, pushing me down into the uneven lump of plastic unconvincingly masquerading as a chair. Every so often, I would try to shift my weight around on it, trying in vain to find a position that felt, if not comfortable, then at least more tolerable, before accepting that the only relief I could find was to let the discomfort turn to pain, then to numbness.
I looked around for any kind of distraction from the endless waiting, but all I could find on the walls that pressed tight around me were motivational posters with faded colours and calendars of years gone by, hanging on off-yellow walls occasionally stained with a different, darker off-yellow, pools of sweat forming on bulbous skin. Closing my eyes only caused the dull, electronic buzz that hung heavy in the air to grow louder and louder, creeping closer to my ears until it began to cut against them.
I looked at the clock. I told me that it was 13 minutes to 10 in the morning, and I tried very hard not to cry.
In that moment, or another very much like it, the door swung open and the manager walked in. In a single motion, I straightened myself up, uncurled my feet from around the chair legs, and strained myself into a smile, giving the best impression I could of an eager, excited, and incredibly employable person, and not a half-cooked corpse. The manager, for his part, lowered himself into the soft office chair in front of me without taking his eyes off the screen of the thick square laptop he held in his hands, a laptop that looked as old as he did.
He glanced up at me, and then adjusted height on his chair so that we were face-to-face, before his face fell back to the laptop’s screen. His immaculately professional shirt-and-tie and suit trouser combo was offset oddly by his bright red baseball cap, emblazoned with the logo of the stall he managed. No – restaurant, I told myself, hoping that the hours of training myself on that terminology hadn’t already fallen out of my head. I tried to focus back on the cap, before my gaze was consumed entirely by his ears, which curved outwards in such an unbelievably conspicuous manner that I immediately noted that the success of the next hour depended on my ability to not stare at and draw attention to them under any circumstances.
I looked down and found myself meeting a gaze that had apparently lifted from the laptop screen at some point. I smiled, and he smiled too. It was obvious that we had both practiced that far too much. He looked down at his screen again and typed a few things.
“So.” The manager said, still typing. I felt the keystrokes pushing down on my back, especially the frustration “Tell me about yourself!” he said, cheerily.
Fuck. I thought. Not that one. Anything but that one.
I hated every single part of this process, every single time I had done it, fewer times than I should have and yet somehow, so many more times than I could bear. No matter how hard I prepared, no matter how many times I rehearsed, I couldn’t fit myself into the part I was auditioning for, a person that resembled me but only through a funhouse mirror, an idiot parody of myself that held utterly psychotic beliefs and personality traits such as “a passion for customer service”. I hated knowing that the person across from me knew – had to know – that everything I said was a lie, and that the real test was how much I was willing to prostrate myself and cut myself open for the sake of this.
Still, the manager stuck to his script, so I stuck to mine, digging out the same answers I had run through my head time and time again.
“What is your greatest achievement?”
“Well, something that stands out is…”
Please give me this.
“Where do you see yourself in a year’s time?”
“I think I’d really like to…”
I’ll be dead. So will you. So will everyone.
“What would you say is your biggest weakness?”
“Honestly, I think I…”
But I’m here anyway, because I have to be. Because I need to work just like you do. Because…
Back and forth, a lazy, routine game of conversational tennis. Being where you’re expected to be and no more, the challenge coming from endurance, remaining in the skin of this completely fake, plastic me, testing the only thing that actually matters for a job about serving chicken in a train station food court stall: how much are you willing to humiliate yourself? How little dignity do you have, and how little relief can you survive under?
I felt sweat run down my fingers, as the heat separating my body from the suit I wore grew heavier. It pressed against my chest, drawing my breaths shorter. When I opened my mouth, I felt the hot air reach inside, heat crawling down my throat and up into my head, feeling it grow lighter as I struggled to remember my script, to keep in time with my cues. I felt myself fall into auto-pilot, my mouth running in time with my thoughts rather than a step behind.
The manager took off his cap, briefly, to fan his ears. And the rest of his head, I suppose.
“So, what makes you want to work here?” he asked.
“I don’t.” a voice said, and it was a couple of seconds, after the Manager reflexively nodded, after the keyboard fell silent and after his eyes fell onto me with a wide stare, that I realized that voice was mine, and my heart fell out of my chest at the same moment clarity rushed back to me.
“Oh.” He said.
I looked down at my hands, fruitlessly trying to wring themselves dry of the sweat that covered them, and didn’t look back up until the undead interview finally ended, long after it had died.
---
I didn’t dare look at the clock as we said our polite goodbyes. Either it would be sooner than I expected and would just underscore what a failure this was that things had wrapped up so soon, or it would be later than that, and I would feel all the more terrible for having spent so much time on something that was completely, hopelessly, doomed. I wondered if the manager thought the same thing, as I passed the other applicants in the corridor, each one looking younger, smarter, and more human than I did: surely interviewing people for a menial job that wouldn’t exist in a year was how they wanted to spend their time. But then, other people rarely seemed as bothered by that question as I felt.
When I stepped out back into the Terminal food court, when I felt the scent of processed food hit my nostrils and pangs of hunger in my stomach reminding me that I hadn’t eaten in around 24 hour, I felt that burgeoning question fall back into the back of my mind. I was, at least, determined not to eat at the place that I had so resolutely embarrassed myself at, and looked around the food court for somewhere else. Unfortunately, in the time that had passed since I went in for my interview and now, morning quiet had exploded into the midday bustle, becoming filled with unfamiliar figures moving with purpose, frantically eating while keeping their eyes on their phones or on the screens around that displayed constantly shifting times and destinations, conversation drowned out under the occasional departure or arrival announcement over the intercom. The only counter in the food court that didn’t have an agonizingly long line was the one I had just left, because of course it was. Given the choice of saving face or having a stomach that didn’t ache, I chose to just rush for a booth that hadn’t been taken by people whose suits fit several times better than my own, and sat down, reflecting that if I had made that choice before the interview, I could have spared myself that time and humiliation.
I wondered how I was supposed to feel. It’s not that I was sad to have missed out on the job – no one working there seemed happy about it, and nothing about it appealed to me. I approached the whole thing like an obligation to be fulfilled, something that I needed rather than wanted. But now that it was an opportunity missed rather than one in front of me, I found myself unexpectedly disappointed. As far as fast-food jobs went, I would have liked to have worked here than other places. All polished concrete and glass that somehow avoided reflecting its drab surroundings, I had always enjoyed lingering at the Terminal, ever since it arrived here around a decade ago. Though it was a train station itself, it was more like a meeting point for a whole bunch of different lines. Most people here weren’t from here or coming here, they stopped here on the way somewhere else. There was no permanency to any impression I could leave on anyone, little chance of any familiar faces, except for the people who worked here. It was somewhere I could be invisible, could melt into and become one with the glass itself. If I had to have a job where I made shitty burgers for people who didn’t really give a fuck about me or the burger, - and the world around me had made it abundantly clear that I did have to have that – I was happy to take this over a more permanent position, where I could become known, familiar, and find people familiar in turn.
I leaned back on the bench and closed my eyes. I hadn’t realized just how exhausted I was until I was able to do that, and the day had barely started. I peeled off what I reasonably could of my oversized suit, dumping my blazer next to me and loosening my tie enough that I could just pull it over my head and leave it crumpled on top of my blazer. As I undid the top buttons of my shirt, I looked up, squinting, through the glass dome of the Terminal’s roof, trying to spot the sky through the blazing sun.
It used to be easier to do that. The sky had changed so gradually that I never noticed it as it happened - every time I looked up, it looked like just how it was yesterday, even if it wasn’t. It was only when I looked at pictures of how it used to be, or remembered how it was when I was younger, that the difference became so agonizingly obvious as to be frightening. You’d think it would be impossible to notice so stark a shift happening, but it wasn’t. It still wasn’t. I looked up and thought that the sky looked the same as it did yesterday, even though I knew it wasn’t. I looked up and saw something so huge, it devoured all thoughts, devoured the sun of my memories entirely, until all I had left was the sounds of an intercom announcing arrivals and departures, while I continued to consider just how badly I had fucked up my interview. The sounds around me fell further away, becoming distant and muted, until I heard his voice.
“It’s an eye.”
The voice was gentle, almost quiet, but possessed of a strange confidence that raised it above the sounds of the station around me as its touch jolted me awake, forcing me to realize just how close I was to drifting off. Trying to get my bearings, I looked across the table to the person who was, quite suddenly, sitting opposite me. Their face, pale and sickly despite looking maybe only slightly older than me, with dark bags hanging under amber eyes that looked even more exhausted than I felt, was being cradled by their fist, as if they had been sitting here for a long time and relaxed into it. They wore a thin, dark brown short coat, covered in pockets and buckles, that remined me of the kind of jackets soldiers wore in old films, only with fleece lining around the neck and hood, as oversized as the blazer I had just peeled off, but seeming to fit oddly gracefully on their bony, almost emaciated frame. Beneath, he was just wearing a white vest, but the jacket still made a phantom heat cling to me.
“Uh,” I finally responded. “...what’s an eye?”
In a languid, deliberate movement, one of the fingers on his fist extended to point to his eye, brushing against messy, dirty blonde hair that fell across his face and just past his chin. I would spend so much time in the days to come wondering if they were joking with that, but in the moment, all I could feel was a heat rushing to my cheeks.
“No. I mean, what did you say was an eye?”
“Oh!” he said, with an aching sincerity that made a pang of strange guilt press against my chest. “The glass dome that you were looking at. It’s an eye.”
I shook my head. I had looked up at that glass dome so many times that it barely registered as something that I was looking at, but that wasn’t what struck me in that moment as the most pressing thing to be corrected.
“It might look that way, but it isn’t.” I said, looking back up, and tracing the lines of metal between the panes of glass up there. “The oval in the centre, that’s this building. And the lines going in and out of it at the top, that’s supposed to show the train lines running into here and into the city. ‘Course, only the train tracks that come here from other places actually got finished but...that was what it was about, when they made it.”
I glanced back down and saw his eyes following my finger as it pointed.
“Hmm. I think I see what you mean. I didn’t know about that. Still,” he said, looking back down and meeting a gaze I hadn’t realized was fixed on him. I frantically searched for something else to fix it on, and saw a rucksack, sitting beside him on the bench, that looked as tattered and worn as its presumable owner. “I’ll keep thinking of it as an eye, if that’s alright with you. It makes more sense to me.”
I shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
“Where did you learn about what it was supposed to be?”
The sceptical emphasis they placed on the word ‘supposed’ was another thing I thought about for days afterwards. I didn’t want to tell them why I knew about their intentions for the thing. I didn’t want to tell him about how I had been here when the Terminal was first opened for business and the proverbial red tape was cut, all the excitement on my parents’ faces for how the town was going to change and grow because of something like this, and how all of the construction died out within the next year when the tiger finally keeled over and died, leaving skeletons made of scaffolding all throughout the town. I didn’t want to tell him that I had been here since I was a kid, and was still here, and was going to be here until the day we all died. So, I changed the subject instead.
“You aren’t from around here, are you?”
His smile widened just a little. “I just arrived.”
“Where are you headed?”
His head tilted in a look of confusion that would appear sarcastic if done by anyone who didn’t always appear so painfully earnest. “What do you mean?”
I sighed, maybe a little too loudly. “...no one just stays here, you know. It’s just a place people stop on their way to somewhere else. A town-sized petrol station.”
He leaned back, looking up at the dome above. “I suppose I’m no one, then.” He said, as his smile widened. “At least right now. There are things I have to do, but right now I’m just...enjoying this. Being here. Talking to you.”
I desperately looked around for something else to look at, and my eyes landed on what I had hoped would be a convincingly compelling floor tile. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw them lean towards me, almost conspiratorially.
“Besides,” he said. “It’s fun, don’t you think? Seeing everyone rushing around, so busy, when you have nothing to do but to sit back and relax.”
“...you like a little schadenfreude, huh?”
He seemed to consider that seriously for a moment. “I hadn’t really thought of it that way. Maybe. I suppose I just enjoyed the...relief. Whatever that person is busy with, it’s not something I have to worry about. When I was younger, I used to go to an airport, where I grew up, before the shutdown of course. Seeing people watching the clock, checking times, rushing through places, like the whole world was running, and I was the only one lucky enough to sit down. Does that many any sense?”
It did. There was a familiarity to the words that caused the tightness in my chest to spread to the pit of my stomach. I suffocated again, like back in the interview. I wanted to be sick – no, that’s not right. I wanted to ask who this boy was, why he was talking to me, why he was saying things like this to me. I wanted to tell him to go away and leave me alone.
But that wasn’t right either. I wanted to want those things. They were the wants that made the most sense, the most natural, for how I felt. But I found that I couldn’t. I looked across from him, at the beads of sweat running lines down the soft definitions of his face. No matter how hard I tried, I found that I couldn’t stop looking, watching for every single moment his eyes glanced above, every time he looked through the dome and saw what was hanging above it. The thing everyone else seemed to pretend not to see.
“Are you alright?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I’m fine. I’m just...it’s just stuffy in here.”
He nodded, slowly, and as he did so, his gaze seemed to harden. Despite the bags under his eyes, he didn’t seem tired anymore.
“Would you like to do something about it?”
“...what?”
“Pardon, I said-“
“No, I heard you, I just don’t know what you mean. Do something about what?” I was getting angry, but I didn’t really realize it back then. I still don’t know what – or who – I was angry at.
“The heat. The fire. The burning. Would you like to do something about it?”
I was in disbelief, but his expression hadn’t changed a bit. Still that same look of total sincerity, like he had never told a joke in his entire life, but without the easy, distant confidence he had before. There was a seriousness now that wasn’t there before, and I found myself mentally flinching at it.
“What are you talking about?” I hissed.
“I think you know.” He said, gently, pulling away from the harsh edges of my words, as he brought a hand to his chest. “I thought you might from when I first saw you, looking up. Because you weren’t looking up at the dome. You were looking at what was beyond it. The eye was yours. And it couldn’t look away. It’s not strong enough to look away. Like mine.” He pulled his eyes away from me, and looked out, into the throngs of people around us. “I thought you might have wanted to do...something. About everything. I thought you might be...like me.”
The words hung in the air like string wrapped around both of our throats. I looked down, at my shirt, covered in patches of sweat from the heat, the blazer that lay crumpled in a heap beside me. I thought of the manager who interviewed me, and how unfazed he was by the pressure cooker that was the room in which he worked every single day in. I looked around, at the dozens of people wearing the exact same suits and businesses dresses, all of them looking blissfully unaffected by the blaze that pressed against my skin – from the inside-out. And I looked across the table, to his hands, to the beads of sweat running down towards uneven fingernails, droplets that seemed to almost shine against the pallor of his skin. He was a stranger who had sat down next to me for no reason at all, that I should have told to go away, except he looked like how I felt – how I always felt, every line of his features that I could see drawn with a kind of honesty that was completely absent in every single part of my life, an honesty I found myself badly wanting – badly needing. Nothing about him pretended like we had anything more than a few months to live, if that, and that we should be anything other than terrified. And yet, here he was, betraying that honesty, telling the most ridiculous lie at all, that there was something we could do, that we could ease or even put out the burning inside my head. Worst of all, he believed it. Like every single word that seemed to pass through his mouth. There was no pretending, no plastic self around him like there was around me and the interviewer both. It was a perfect, immaculate contradiction, and I wanted to pull it tight towards me.
I opened my mouth to speak, but the words died in my throat, hot air filling my mouth and drying it out. Without thinking about it, I reached my hand across the table, but the tiny distance between us now felt for all the world like a titanic canyon, and my hand only made it about an inch across the table before it found another wrapped around its wrist.
I looked up, and saw his eyes, wider now than I had seen them before, looking into mine.
“Can I show you what I mean?” The confidence in his voice had all but fallen away, as if it was never there. What was left was something quiet, vulnerable, and desperate, drowning out every other sound around us.
I didn’t know what he meant, and I couldn’t even begin to think of what he would show me. Crackling voices inside me yelled at me to pull away, to run from this strange person. Ancient warnings about ‘stranger danger’ ran through my mind. It’s not that I ignored them – I couldn’t. But there was another voice there too, at once unfamiliar, but still sending pangs of recognition through me, a voice that urged me to look at this person, to learn what they had learned, to hold the end of the world in their hands, to see it in their eyes, and still walk with a light, practiced, confident step.
Slowly, without being entirely aware of it, I found myself nodding. He smiled, and with it, his eyes tightened just a little, tiny strains emerged from where his cheeks rose towards them, and those same pangs of recognition intensified with a gentle pain.
“Ok.” He whispered and pulled his hand away from my wrist. I brought my other hand over to it, and ran my fingers where his were, just a few moments ago, and stopped just as quickly, when I realised what I was doing.
He stood up, picked up the rucksack next to him, slung it over one shoulder and went to leave the booth, and I only now realized he was slightly taller than I was. My throat pulled itself tight again, as I watched him take a few steps away, and a hundred thoughts ran through my head in the few seconds before he turned back around.
“Are you still coming?” he asked.
“Oh.” I said, like an idiot. I looked around, as if there was anything here I cared about taking with me. I saw a train station food court, sterile, without warmth despite the heat, empty despite the throngs of people walking and sitting and eating in it, and for some reason, I found that it strange that I was still here, as if I had been somewhere else. I saw the blazer crumpled on the bench beside me, and then I didn’t.
I looked back up at him and nodded. It took me far too long to realize why.
---
I followed him back towards the centre of the Terminal, the central concourse with the busiest foot traffic. I didn’t have any idea where we were actually going, and, unfortunately, the boy whose name I realized now I needed to ask for only seemed to be slightly more sure than I was, as he scanned the surroundings, looking up and down as if taking in the Terminal for the first time.
“What are we looking for, again?” I asked, trying to follow his gaze and his footsteps as best as I could without bumping into every single person who walked by with far more purpose than we clearly had.
“It’s just around here, I think.”
“You think?” I winced as I felt my voice rise. The impulse that had led me to follow him had strained with every moment we wandered around, feeling like we looked ridiculous and out of place, replaced with ever louder imaginings of having to explain why I lost a blazer that didn’t even belong to me. “Sorry I-“
“There it is!” they said, loud enough to catch a couple of heads turning our way, and I winced again. I followed with quickened steps to where they were jogging towards, before the stopped in front of a sculpture, slightly off the centre of the foyer. It was a dark slab of thick glass, segmented into pieces of equal size, each one holding a fresco inside it. It was surrounded by little pebbles, the universally understood signature of “don’t stand here”, and I felt my cheeks go a little bit redder as the sounds of crunching echoed around us. Re was standing right in front of the slab, drawing his fingers along it.
“What are you-?”
“What is this?” he asked.
I realized I didn’t know and said so. “A sculpture, I guess. It was brought in a couple years ago, I think. I never really paid much attention to it.”
“This will work.” He said, his voice wavering with...excitement? Nervousness? I couldn’t be sure, but when he turned around, he looked just as at ease as he had at the table. “I’ll be just a minute. Would you mind holding this?” he asked, holding out his rucksack.
“...why? What are you doing?”
He opened his mouth, as if to respond, but closed it shortly after, as their face fell into earnest thought.
“I...it’s hard for me to explain. You’ll see, once I show you. I promise.”
That word struck me, and I felt the phantom weight of the blazer I left behind fall heavy on my shoulders.
“Ok.” I said, and held out my hand to take the rucksack. It was light, as if there was almost nothing in it at all.
“Thank you.” He said. “Keep an eye out, will you?”
“...for what?”
“Just...if you see anyone, tell me.” He said, as he disappeared behind the sculpture. I looked around, at the dozens of people walking around us, and sighed.
After, generously, about twenty seconds of lazily looking around us, I turned my attention to the sculpture itself. Some of the frescoes inside were recognisable as parts of the town, but with images of buildings that didn’t belong, and some of them shifted away, like a smaller, parodic version of it, downsized to fit onto a postcard. One fresco showed a fish – which looked like it had other, tiny frescoes embedded within itself – swimming around buildings I recognized. A woman in a green dress reached out to hold the hand of an astronaut, floating among stars. And in the final one, darker than the rest, I saw my own face, cradled by half a dozen hands, pulling me upwards towards those same stars. I knew I was just looking at my own reflection, but telling myself that didn’t stop my stomach from crawling, nor the dull ache that I felt around my neck.
“Why this?” I whispered, almost to myself.
“Because of what you said.” Came his voice, from the other side of the sculpture. “It’s something you notice every time you come here, but you don’t see it. It blends away, into the background, into the foundations. You don’t see it because you always expect it to be there.”
“...so?”
“So what if it wasn’t?”