Dawn. The subway. A carriageway of slumped shoulders and headphones leaking tinny beats. A toddler points at him, before the mother shushes, pulls her close. He is a lesson in avoidance.
Above ground, billboards hawk cologne and Eros: Smile wider. Stand taller. Buy this. Be loved.
Pigeons, their heads bobbing mechanized. Men, ash-grey, their limbs ticking like overwound metronomes, perform the zombie shuffle through turnstile confessionals. He becomes another drop in the sidewalk’s flow, their footsteps compiling toward destinations not chosen but absorbed.
The office elevator mirrors his face twelve times. A colleague side-eyes his wrinkled shirt. “Rough night?” A smirk. He nods, the lie weighing his tongue. At his desk, the computer screen blinks. His productivity is declining.
The office cubicle. Fluorescent glare. Colleagues orbit like satellites, exchanging memes and carrying mortgages. He wears a tie, noose-tight, and smiles. He files reports.
At lunch, he hides in the stairwell, chewing sandwiches of dry bread. A janitor passes by, whistling a tune from a dead century. Their eyes meet. Guilt is the tax of cowards.
Freedom. Beneath the neon, where the city’s ribs curve like a question mark, he walks. A man without a shadow, or the shadow itself, at the edges of brick. The streets here are assembled — cobblestones of discarded hours, mortar mixed from the ash of the dead.
Turn your face to the wall, the shopfronts leer, their glass eyes cracked. Confess. He looks away.
He counts his breaths in increments of three, a ritual to outpace the silence. His name? A half-remembered joke. At the café where waitresses hum Tchaikovsky off-key, he orders coffee black as the gaps between stars. The steam rises. Laughter clatters like tin. The room contracts. A woman sits nearby, reading Rilke. She glances up, and quickly down.
Home again. The eggs crackle in the pan. The yolk bleeds. He eats standing, staring at the smoke detector’s Cyclops eye. On the wall, a calendar is still open to February. Someone once told him time is a river. But here, it is a fistful of rust.
The apartment yawns tiredly — a mausoleum of IKEA furniture. He peels the silence like a scab, fingers grazing the phone (no missed calls, never). The walls whisper in palimpsest: Your fault, your fault. A moth batters the lampshade; its wings, translucent.
On the screen, pixels flicker. A comedy. Laughter tracks swell, synthetic and cruel. He wonders if the ancients carved their loneliness into monoliths, or if they, too, swallowed it raw, and let it calcify in the gut.
Midnight. The bathroom mirror. His reflection draws a Francis Bacon grotesque. He meets the stare of eyes averted on trains, the relentless tick of an unwound life. His voice is a fossil. Because he was taught to build fortresses, not bridges. Because every outstretched hand feels like surrender.
He is a passerby in the procession of another man’s history.