With no one around, I flipped open the cover of the emergency brake.
A wisp of red smoke drifted out from under the cover; a sharp, acrid smell flooded my nasal cavity. It was like someone pushing a bundle of needles slowly into the inside of my nose from the outside. My brain crashed for a few seconds, but I pulled the emergency brake handle anyway, without hesitation.
Sound disappeared. The sullen buzzing cut off abruptly, and I woke as from a dream—though even then, the sound of overlapping conversations still surrounded me on all sides. If the buzz had kept my brain perpetually on the verge of detonating, its absence kept it perpetually on the verge of shrinking. The conversations were too dense, too chaotic, layered on top of each other; I couldn’t find their source. Those sounds were as ungraspable as dark matter in the universe.
No one around. I saw this on a sign above my head that read “No one around.” I didn’t know who had written it. It gave off a faint white glow, setting it apart from the other signs. After spotting it, I immediately turned to look around, walked the perimeter, and confirmed that there was indeed no one. I found myself unexpectedly at ease in such a quiet environment—as if in the middle of a precise behavioral experiment, or at a theme park attraction visited alone. Of course, it quickly occurred to me that this sign didn’t belong in this location, which cast an untrustworthy shadow over it. I couldn’t verify it now; all I could do was keep my suspicion. Even though I’d already looked, the sign’s uncanniness kept me doubting the situation. Was it protesting too much? Or was it just left by some well-meaning person to let me know there was no one around—and if so, why were they telling me?
Its credibility was gone; it was now just a shell reminding me to keep my mind running. It was this sign that kept me from lying down on the spot and going to sleep. The conversations went on; I could vaguely make out financial terminology and political topics. I wasn’t particularly interested in either, but I seemed to know them—they were the first things I’d noticed.
I didn’t remember much of what had come before. My most recent memory was sitting in an office. I still remembered the office was private, mine alone, with a large floor-to-ceiling glass pane behind my seat. I was fond of that glass—it dissolved the boundary between the city’s activity outside and my daily routine. Sometimes I’d stand at the window gazing down at the view below: mostly old buildings, nearly as high as my floor, their facades covered in a mold-like grime, laundry hanging from the balconies. I could barely imagine the lives of the people in those buildings; I could only look on as if at another world—at these things that had survived from before the millennium, standing like slender mountains, wrapped in a Buddhist kind of gravity. For the people living in those residential blocks, my office building was probably equally mysterious. When I looked at them through the glass, were they looking back at me through the gaps between drying laundry? When our eyes might have met, what were they thinking? Admiration? Sadness? Unfortunately I’d never had the energy to think about this—not even now—because the sign reading “no one around” flickered a few times and then began playing a video.
Occasional bursts of white light flashed by; I recognized these as the tunnel lights when a subway departs a station. On the screen were diagonal lines barely visible, constantly shifting left, creating a sense of motion. Floating in front of the lines was my reflection, and alongside it the dark silhouettes sitting beside me. I moved my left arm and found my reflection was captured in real time—but the silhouettes were only visible on the screen; there was no one beside me.
I sat down in the middle of the long bench. The silhouettes beside me shifted closer. I stood up from the seat and approached the screen; the silhouettes drew closer too. When I was nearly pressing my face to the screen, I saw that where the silhouettes’ eyes should be, there was a rough texture unlike the shadows themselves, trembling rapidly.
The conversations from before had continued without pause, but another electronic shriek swelled like a storm, stretching my eardrums to their limit. It was unlike the earlier sullen buzzing—a sharp, piercing pain of a sound. Startled, I stepped back two paces; a chair caught the back of my legs and I collapsed heavily onto it.
No one around.
The four characters reappeared on the screen in large text, then slowly expanded. Two seconds later, the image returned to me and the shadows at my sides. The shriek was gone now. Amid the endless conversations, I faintly heard Chopin.
In the unceasing stream of voices, I caught words related to society and media. But by now my brain had gradually adapted to the sound; it was no longer unbearable—it had blended into the background, becoming part of the atmosphere. I paced back and forth through the carriage, examining its interior. One car’s floor was clean without a trace of dust; another’s was strewn with stains and litter. I sat down in the littered one—at least it gave a sense of life, so the cold machinery wouldn’t take over my entire future. I still didn’t know what had happened. I turned a plastic bottle over in my hands, fingered the threads that had come loose from someone’s clothing.
Some unknowable amount of time later, a door opened.
It startled me.
The inner door of the carriage snapped open abruptly, releasing a sound of metal on metal. But the outer door remained shut—opaque and tightly closed.
The conversations seemed to have grown louder. I stared uneasily at that door, black as an abyss.
The leather surface bore scratches left by years of use; just looking at its unsettling black made me feel I might be sucked into it.
“Click.”
It shifted. A crack appeared in the middle.
That single crack was enough to send a blast of warm air against my face. At the same time, the conversations intensified. I had fully adapted to them by now; I could choose to ignore their continued presence. When I wanted to tune them out, I could easily slide my attention elsewhere.
But now my attention was entirely on the crack. It could have been called unremarkable—so ordinary, so harmless, that I almost wanted to slap a sticker reading “basically harmless” over it. Except that if I did, it would disappear.
Given where I was, it deserved to be called a crack, like a fissure in the road. I’d been living as I lived, had adapted to riding the subway listening to piano music with dark shadows for company, even if they weren’t particularly willing company. But now a visible crisis was bearing down on me with unstoppable force. I envied its authority—it seemed to contain a blazing core capable of tearing open everything dark about me. I looked back at everything dark behind me, then at everything dark on either side of me on the screen.
Maybe it was time to say goodbye to all of it…
Wasn’t it?
I stepped forward.
Pleasure surged straight to my head.
The piano lingered while the other sounds faded. Was I acting recklessly? But I felt I no longer needed to consider the consequences. Sometimes I wanted to hold onto what I’d gained. Did that mean now? Possibly. But I felt I didn’t need to think too hard about it anymore. Sometimes I wanted to add a touch of absurdity to my life—an absurdity I could watch, like everything I’d once laughed at while looking at that building across the way. My life had too many secrets; absurdity, secrets, and happiness were always bound together. Some secrets I’d already forgotten! Ha—could they still be called secrets? Or was there no longer any “them”—had they fallen into the realm of death, dismembered, devoured clean? That, too, gave me pleasure.
I reached forward.
At that moment, my old relationships with people surged over me like static, and I realized I’d been ignoring this for a long time. How long had I been on this subway? I didn’t know. There were no clocks inside, and the lighting barely changed—it was impossible to tell day from night. But I didn’t feel particularly tired, so it probably hadn’t been more than twenty hours since I woke up. And in all that time, I hadn’t once thought about my parents, my colleagues, my friends. Was it because the situation had left me no time to? Or maybe because I’d been in a daze earlier and forgotten everything.
But there was no time to think about it now. I’d said it many times—I didn’t need to think too hard. I pressed my hand hard inward, trying to force the crack shut.
“Ah—!” I cried out in pain. At the same moment the door swung open with a crash, the heavy weight of its metal mechanism flinging both sides apart in an instant. Face twisted, I looked furiously at the fingers whose nails had been pinched away to nowhere. The skin on my fingers had been torn open; blood kept dripping down; the whorls on my fingertips curled in, trembling and wailing. The blood throughout my body seemed to have been activated and began to surge. But when I lifted my head, the sight before me was strange enough that I had to feign calm even if I couldn’t feel it.
In front of me were hundreds of people with all manner of faces, crowding around me, talking at me nonstop. Their desire to express themselves was like water floating in space, moving toward me slowly and unsettling me. Heads bobbing up and down, rising and falling—it made me instinctively nauseous. Some had blank expressions, some had wild looks; they pressed as close as they could, yet an invisible membrane seemed to prevent any of them from ever touching my body. Actually, it might not have been a membrane—it might have been a mass of unseen fog. Looking at this crowd of figures that seemed sketched with a stiff brush, I suddenly thought of that mythological residential building. I didn’t know anyone in that building, but I had the feeling that some of the people now in front of me must have come from there. Why had they come here? How had they gotten here? Chatter, chatter, chatter. All the endless conversations had originated here. Each person was talking about something different, one thing after another with no coherence—either dismissing things in a cynical tone, or asserting in a righteously cheerful voice the correctness of various things, especially themselves. My brain’s folds started to writhe. Noise, noise, noise! The intense vibration in the air permeated my skin, jostled my blood; I felt wretched all over. I knew this was the moment to keep walking forward: if I stopped at the door, I had the feeling they’d quickly swarm over and gnaw me to nothing. I concentrated, working through memory to suppress the conversations’ hold on my consciousness. I thought of many things—things that leapt and jumped, things I’d never surfaced from my consciousness before: clumps of earth, bone dust, ukiyo-e, gleaming curved blades, an enchanted island, a fuzzy stick, dead wood shaped like a human hand… I’d plunged into a domain that had no conceivable connection to my reality. This turned out to be the right move. I felt—actually I wasn’t feeling anything at all—the noise growing smaller, thinner; the countless lips before me, flapping like butterfly wings, gradually emitting only the faint buzzing of swarming mosquitoes, until I could only see the droplets of spit that flew unconsciously from their mouths, and the world lost its sound.
Then: endless silence.
I didn’t think I was deaf. I walked steadily forward. The dense crowd parted unwillingly to make a path for me; I could still hear my own unhurried footsteps. A foul smell drifted up from behind; I turned and saw a dark gelatinous mass pressing along the subway tracks. I couldn’t make it out clearly, so I walked a few steps closer. By the time I looked back again and saw, amid the smeared demonic ooze, human heads that still retained something of their shape, I had a rough idea where the smell was coming from. And by then I also had a rough idea of what I had once done.
The stairs to the station were just ahead. I hadn’t expected the subway to stop at an actual stop, but since it had, I couldn’t complain. Suddenly someone came rushing up with eager strides, extended a hand as if to shake mine—but couldn’t touch me, so stood there puzzling over their own palm. After a moment, someone spat in their face; a scuffle broke out; the people around them suddenly chose their enemies and started fighting each other. A sour smell rose to my nose. I watched with a kind of sorrow as people scuffled and cursed, while still automatically making way for me to pass. The path stretched all the way to the stairwell. There was no one on the stairs; the escalator wasn’t running.
Until I reached the edge of the stairs and stepped up onto the first step, the escalator beside me abruptly lurched into motion. The people near me toppled in all directions, letting out silent screams; the escalator forcibly dragged them along, wrecking the order of their lives. Then a high, piercing shriek split the silence, and the subway behind me—with all its expected lurching and dim reverberance—thundered into motion in the breaking dawn.