He sat in the back. His eyes kept closing, and every time they did, he was already downtown. When they opened, he was on the train again. He’d gotten no sleep the night before. He figured he was hallucinating.
He looked down at the bottle he clutched in his hands; 50-proof sharkohol. The SharkCo insignia was clear and bold and it disgusted him. Here he was, twenty years old. Twenty years of life and all he’d done was become a lowlife, an addict, a sharker. Twenty years of life had built up to a train journey downtown to the Intersect, a journey he was taking for reasons he didn’t even understand.
A thought flickered and died in his mind: a sudden, piercing thought that spat and fumed and waggled its finger in his face, and told him, you’re never going to see her again so what the hell are you even doing? He hated the thought and tried to push it away, but he had to admit that it had a point.
The Intersect was a vast place, a towering, glittering sparkle-city of the vacuum-dry future, dry and devoid of vitality, devoid of history, devoid of context. There was no cracked marble; there were no chunks of historical detritus. There were just plastic rafters and steel bars and glass panels.
He thought about this as he sat in that train car. He thought about the Intersect, that suffocating, slick city full of lights and metal and ugly people and ugly things; the thick gauze of a city that wrapped itself around his brain and clogged his thoughts with gunk.
When his stop came, he got off the train and in doing so had to hand an identification card to a man at the turnstile with a frown on his face. The man took his card and held it up and looked at the name on it and nodded, and then handed it back.
Standing in the train station, he could feel its iciness press against his shoes and creep up his legs. He watched the people all around him, always moving, always anonymous, always terrifying, and thought, god, what am I doing here? Why did I even come here? And then he remembered, yeah, he’d come to the Intersect to see someone who maybe wasn’t even alive anymore.
But the months he’d spent in the chaos pit of his mind had dulled him enough that the incoherency in his life didn’t bother him anymore. If he was going to go on long train journeys for shaky reasons, then so be it.
He found himself staring at a puddle of piss in the corner, and at the adjacent wall, covered with verbal diarrhea, with graffiti, weirdly luminescent in the station’s half-light. He wasn’t sure what to feel.
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