The train rattled away, wheels rolling, brakes giving a last snort, and a section seemed removed from the platform, revealing it for what it was: a concrete bier among many others, -- dirty gravel and tracks down below. She had left him, as the train turned from something long to a simple ending getting smaller as it left the shed, and he felt a shading of relief colour his sadness at the parting. He loved her, that was certain. Jennifer was a fine person. Yet for the rest of the day, and indeed for the weeks to come, he felt free of judgement, of the need to behave in a certain way. His body relaxed, surprising him because he had not known it was tense. His shoulders seemed to move more easily. What was this effect she had on him, he wondered?
There was nothing here which would give him the answer, so he shrugged his shoulders and turned away. Concrete and frosted glass cut off the world of the inside of the station from the cavernous core. He found himself padding down wet concrete stairs, under other tracks, following the signs which would bring him back to the world. no one else was around him, which he thought strange, as he walked along an underground alley, with stairwells reaching up to what he assumed were other gates, because the numbers told him so. 14, 43, 30 . . . there was no order in the numbers he could discern. They were in sliding brackets which could be changed. He looked for the exit. Obvious signs with big arrows had directed him for the first part of trip -- the part which took him down -- but now, none could be found. He blamed himself in this matter. Obviously the way out was plain to see, it was only his stupidity which prevented him from finding it. Ffurther down he wandered in the concrete maze. Right turns, left turns, took him away from any discoverable direction, and for all he knew he could have been entering further in rather than finding the escape he desired. All of the ways looked the same to him.
He stopped for a moment to regain his bearings. His footsteps, which were the only sounds besides his breathing he could hear in this place, seemed to stop a second after he had taken his pause. What a curious effect, he thought. Was it some artifact of an echo, or something more sinister? Truly, he was in a labyrinth.
Ahead, were five different ways, each shadowed and forboding. None of them seemed right, yet all could somehow reach to the freedom of open air and the high ceilinged shell of the station which he desired. What happened to those signs which he had trusted? Now, in slots on the wall, were metal signs of numbers, interchangeable, unreadable. He chose 23 and padded down the way. Nothing had really determined this choice besides blind desperation. He was in that frame of mind where any route he took he thought necessarily must be the wrong one, and if he changed his mind about it, then that was the wrong one and the one he had chose first was right. It was not a productive way in which to find one's way home. Despite this, he went on. Nothing about these concrete walls was reassuring. They stayed as blank as all the other walls had been before. He went on despite the disquiet which was building in him to such a pitch he was afraid he would stop at any moment and give out a SCREAM a scream of hopelessness and fright, of not being able to do anything, of being caged in a cage with no ends, which is more frightening because you do not know whether you are trapped. Still he carried on, running now, hands outstretched as if winning a race, he hardly even looked ahead to see where he was going, it did not matter now, it could only be someplace else than where he had been. Then a sound touched his ears, a different sound than his breathing and the deceptive patter of feet. It was not a choate sound, rather something like a continuous breath or static, still it was something other than what he had heard and this made him glad. The sound grew stronger, becoming a babble of voices, and he knew he had found his way. At last, a double stairway, two wings branching out and a big sign painted on the wall with no fooling, "This way to the concourse" mirrored arrows pointing up. He wondered why he did not take the first stairway up, for at least that would have given him some orientation in this maze of a station, but the underground and aboveground of the station were two different parts, and one did not entirely belong to the other. Who could imagine air and blue sky when one is in a cave?
(c) Jack Ruttan, 1998