Deep Sea Vent

The signs at the concourse all say the same thing: Pardon our appearance while we undergo deconstruction. It feels less like a renovation and more like a confession. We stand beneath the flickering arrival boards, ignored by the booths selling $10 circus crap—t-shirts destined to become rags before the car ride home is over. We are the experts. We don’t buy the junk. We wait for the announcement, or we watch the glass doors for the silhouette of a conductor we recognize.

I was leaning against the pillar near tracks 5 and 6 when the itch started. It’s a tight pang in the tips of my fingers that smells like the subway—metallic, ozone-heavy, and ancient. They called the rush train two minutes early. The herd broke into a frantic, silent run.

I found my spot on the 6:15. It is a popular train, the “Salem Fright,” packed with a mix of weary regulars and the “Yahoos”—drunks in white hoodies and women with corn-patty faces and eyelashes like plastic spiders.

I stood in the aisle, feeling the many atmospheres of commuter fatigue pressing down on my shoulders. I am small, albino in the gloom, my eyes vestigial and blind to the world above. But then, I looked down.

She was sitting where the books open. She was a large woman, lonely in her scale, with a face like a bright, open meadow. As she crossed her legs, her skirt parted—a “vent,” I think they call it. For a moment, I wasn’t on a train to the suburbs. I was a mile down in the Atlantic, staring at a marine trench. She was the deep-sea vent, gushing hot, sulfur-laced life from the bowels of the earth. I was blank. I was a specimen. I wanted to be breathless again.

Then, she looked up.

She had been smiling at her book, but I saw the half-life of that smile begin to tick away. In a nanosecond, it would crumble into fear or disgust. I had to recover. I conjured a “parabolic smile”—a perfect, reflexive curve designed to bounce her own energy back at her. It was a glitch in the dark, a warping of the light. It worked. The feedback became invisible; she returned to her book, unperturbed. The specimen remained in the dark.

The train lurched toward Highlands. I watched the “experts” prepare for the docking. They are the scavengers of travel. They know exactly where to stand on the platform so the door aligns with the best seat. They know the conductor, Mike, by his first name. They treat the commute like a science, trying to fit the universe into the elegant spheres and boxes that Copernicus promised us.

But Copernicus was wrong. We don’t get circles; we get crazy shapes. We get liquid gears and disappearing teeth.

I looked up again and saw another woman. Her hair was a rust-colored halo. She tried to give me that same parabolic smile I had used earlier, but I couldn’t process it. My “fish eyes” failed me. I’m a sieve, a membrane with no memory brain. Under the hood of my skull, there is no hard drive, just a potato. A pink spot where a person used to be.

The 6:15 ground to a halt. The “Fatality on the Tracks” was announced over the speaker with the solemnity of a prayer. The Yahoos grumbled; the experts checked their watches, calculating the delay in heartbeats.

I stepped off at Malden Center, following the woman with the high-tech running shoes who was already swapping them for pumps. We moved in our “pristine orbits,” coming and going, a motion devoid of motive.

I walked toward the parking lot, the half-mile trek to a car that would take me to a house I would forget by morning. I am an omnivorous, permeable membrane. I don’t return the way I came. Going and returning are different motions, even if they end in the same dark room.

I just need to stay down here, under the pressure. Don’t yank me to the surface. I’ll explode.