The Visitor

Liverpool Street Station, empty vacuum of a dent and a women post-pub lost in the chaos...

A six-foot lug of meat bumps into me without saying sorry — just continues walking down the tunnel, arms by his side, like a little soldier. They’re all conditioned this same way, dragging on toward a night well spent, or perhaps unwell; I can’t be too sure. I find myself collecting the bits and pieces in my own wobbly way and attempting to decipher the empty spaces, hoping to feel my foot land on solid ground as the crowd unexpectedly guides me through the station. They sway in unison, as if pre-planned, driving their squirmy bodies downward — down escalators; down long, loud corridors; down dimly lit passageways. I try to find my steps in the in-between moments against the collective tango of bodies that keep pressing me upward. As if lifting me like a weed, plucked straight out of the ground. Wide-eyed, I see a blink in the crowd where I squeeze on through. 

I wonder if Londoners were always this way when it comes to transportation. I can almost picture them with their large Victorian bird hats — the ones with those hairpins so long you could poke somebody's eye out. That was probably the injury of the day — gouged eyeballs and bruised cheeks from bumping into people on those steam train sidewalks. I can imagine boring little men with their tiny monogrammed leather suitcases jammed full of nonsense, wearing the kind of hat that always reminds me of sleazy door-to-door salesmen. I almost laugh at the thought, but with bodies too close for comfort, I don’t have the air to. I squirm my way through the crowd, their electrified, buzzing bodies contributing to the lightning strike of a headache that started forming as soon as I left the pub. Liverpool Street Station is always teeming with people pushing and shoveling their way throughout. Desperately trying to tetris their way onto the Central Line, prepped and ready for the wailing of the worn-down train tracks. London’s screeching siren song. It’s the perfect recipe for a headache. 

I scan the mass for a glimpse of a spot to squeeze into. I see a woman trying to wrangle her kids into place. A drunkard teeters on the yellow lumps at the edge of the train tracks, his friends pulling him every which way. A mysterious sticky-tacky stain on the floor that looks freshly dried and incredibly ambiguous. Next to the glop, I see a lady with too many bags for her own good. The old lady happens to be sitting with an empty chair right next to her. I try to keep a straight line as I hurry to the seat, attempting to program my failing motor skills toward the finish line. A choreography of limbs: left, right, dodge an arm, left, a little more to the left, lift a leg to step over the stain, and then, finally, right. I politely gesture toward her bags on the seat and get a surprised, innocent look with raised eyebrows, as if she had just realized how packed the station had become. 

I see the train’s worn-down nose poke its way through the tunnel, its yellow beady eyes stirring the crowd awake. They inch closer to the edge as if someone were lining a row of toy soldiers for battle, ready to topple their way into the confines of a great big metal box. I can’t be fucked with squeezing through now, and so begrudgingly, knowing no one is waiting for me on the other side, I slump farther into my seat. I move my gaze from the row of plastic green soldiers onto the ad posters lining the walls, only because I caught the eye of a woman who kept staring at me judgingly, and frankly, now isn’t the time to be existential with that shit anyway. The room is split in half. I try to force my eyes to quit acting up, playing cat and mouse with the curvature of objects as their focus slips. Waxing and waning like the waves of an ocean, I see shades in stacks of vibrating color like the skins of lost seashells found after a long day at the beach. I press my fingertips to my eyelids and make small circles on the surface. Colored specs burst behind closed eyes. 

I see a Tinder ad with a sign that says, “It starts with a swipe,” and it makes me roll my eyes far back, fanning the fire of my already burgeoning hangover. It makes me think of my shitty date, makes me wish I hadn’t drunk so much, and makes me wish I hadn’t swiped to begin with. A long, vaporous sigh escapes me. I didn’t intend for it to, so, self-conscious, I cover my mouth with my hand and stare straight ahead. There’s a Lucky Saint ad where eyeballs land that says, “Lead me not into temptation” in blue Helvetica. At first, it confused me because I thought it was a Lucky Strike ad, but then I remembered they only have pictures of dying babies and gaping canyons in the throat on cigarette packaging here. I notice the corner of the sign flaps up and down, covering and exposing a hidden hole in the brickwork. I try to get a good look at it, but registering the image is difficult. The thick Lucky Saint paper oscillates, the soldiers in front of me shift their stance from one leg to another, swaying in dumbfound unison, and my contacts keep trying to unpeel themselves from my dehydrated eyeballs. It pulses in the distance, forbidden from view. I try to zoom forward, but it seems the gap will only expose itself when all of the above criteria line up precisely. My bladder knocks against my belly to remind me it’s still there. I try to readjust my contacts by blinking quickly, but I stop the moment I begin to feel like a haggard version of Pepe Le Pew’s girlfriend. I close my eyes for a long moment, take a deep breath and wrangle my bladder’s incessant ramblings as I sit deeper into my seat, defeated by the pendulum swing. 

When I open them again, I find they finally land directly in line with the hole — an abyss of brick, dust and darkness. The inside of it is dirty in a way that suggests neglect as if someone forgot to finish the wall rather than an accident ever taking place to cause its indentation. I suppose you can’t really have too many accidents that cause holes like this in a train station anyway. The center of it is a charcoal-black color with a strangely matte core. I wonder if it’s been painted that way. It looks as if it’s trying to disappear, covering itself up with all that dust and deep jet. Me too, I guess. I look down at my black clothes and shoes and snort at the cliche. I hear a sharp whisper from my left, “I’ve always wondered why they don’t just fill that gap,” and whip my head around, surprised by the proximity and the reverberating volume of the words. I glance to see an older man, maybe in his mid-forties, in cream-colored overalls, looking intently at the gap. He moves slowly to gesture to the hole in the wall; so abnormally slow that it makes me think he’s glitching. I mutter a quiet affirmation out of politeness. He’s a stocky man with weathered eyes, looks like he’s earned every wrinkle around them. The cuts on his hands are sore and gaping yet somehow dry, crusted into his knuckle right against his fingers. It’s the same strangely matte tone as the hole. After a while of registering his face and beginning to worry that I look insane with blaring eyes in an uncomfortably long stare, I avert my gaze. “You alright?” he asks, looking at my profile. I can feel his gaze on me. I automatically respond, “Yeah, you?” as if I too had elements of programming. He looks down and smiles slightly before shaking his head. “No, I mean, are you okay?” This causes me to look at him with a furrowed brow, inquisitive, and a bit surprised by the sincerity in his eyes. “Why do you ask? Are you?” I ask in defense. “I recognize that look, that is all. I’ve been there before.”

I shake off his statement by looking anywhere but directly at him, feeling exposed by his words. I suppose I’m not okay, but that’s for me to know and not for some stranger to point out. I think about the horrible date I’ve just had; about the feeling of being talked at and over but never with; about the fact I can’t seem to connect with anyone or any of my thoughts lately; about the way I get stoned and say it’ll spark creativity like I’m John Lennon or some shit, or that I do, I really do, try to enjoy my alone time. I think about the alternative: trying to make friends with people I don’t know and how getting to know them means being more vulnerable than I’d like to be, perhaps more vulnerable than I have the ability to be. I think about the way I think about myself, unconsciously touching the side of my arm as if to cross-section out my midsection. A mid-drift that marks each night I attempt to summon holy artistry but always end up watching something stupid on YouTube instead, on my own. “What do you mean by that?” I ask, irritated that someone could pick up on anything about me at all, angered by the perception. 

I shrink into myself when I don’t get the response I was waiting for. “Disappearing is not all it’s cracked up to be,” he says. “You think you’ve been through the same phases in life as everybody else and...” Trailing off. “Not 100 yards from where I was born, I could trust everybody I knew,” he mentions, suddenly reanimated. “I could trust myself with any one of them; if I wanted a meal, I’d get a warm meal with any one of them. I didn’t recognize it then, but I could have. Can I now, no.” He gestures to me. “I recognize it,” and he shakes his finger toward me, going up and down unexpectedly. “I could trust myself with any bleeding one of them. I coulda had a wife, a little one running around a house.” I can see tension in his forehead as he remembers, his hands squeezing into themselves and pressing against his knee. His cream-colored overalls look worn with fraying edges and his hands squeeze themselves red. “I've gone and sodden’ done it,” he says, looking me straight in the eye. “I recognize it.”

A speculative gaze looks on at a dwindling crowd through a cubic pixelated TV. It zooms into the figure of a woman sat gesturing widely with a joystick ride of the thumb along a console of buttons and blinking lights. She stares animatedly at an empty seat to her left. The CCTV cuts to another section of the train station. A rat scuttles by. 

I look around and find we’re alone, the floor of the station suddenly clear of passengers. I’m surprised by the heavy silence left over after our uncomfortable exchange, so I look down at my feet, moving my ankle in an anxious wiggle. I notice the stain on the floor is gone. I whip my head up to look around and find the station looks strangely clean as if someone sponged it spotless in the span of our conversation. The air begins to feel humid, weighed down by some invisible force that I cannot see or recognize. My shoulders tense up to my ears as if they wanted to cover the silence with each jut to prevent it from passing through me. I look back at the man in overalls and see him staring at me intently. I can feel him peering into me, exposing my insides. “Who are you?” I ask, quieter than before. “I’m nothing now,” he says, shaking the words out of him. “We’re past all that now.” I can see his arm lift toward me, the air denser than before, as if the skies could open up any second now and downpour inside this station. Cover every crevice with rainwater. Maybe it would finally clean the dust off the hole, fill it up with a big gulp and clear away the darkness. 

A big red streak pulls across my purview as the train bursts into the room with puffs of air coming from its movement. It cuts through the heavy silence. I run into the train, jolted by an unsettled feeling and look back toward the overall-clad man still sitting against the wall. He waves back at me through the closing doors, and as the train prepares to leave, it jolts, knocking me toward the red bar off to the side. I can hear laughter and turn to find the cart nearly full. I inch toward an empty seat and sit down. A woman in front of me has a bewildered look in her eyes. I stare closer and recognize myself in the image. Embarrassed as I realize I’m staring at my reflection in the plexiglass, I look down toward my hands, which are shaking slightly. I become sensitized to the kaleidoscope of sounds around me and glance around in measured strokes to prevent looking like even more of a madwoman than I already am. A man stands over a younger man, looking at him with kindness, his slender body reduced to a long linear pixel, blending into the pole behind him. A family from somewhere else speaks another language, mixing sounds I don’t recognize with those that I do. I’m conscious of the gentleness of their exchange, regardless. I look down at my feet to find a Wotsits wrapper crumpled beneath my shoe. I see the blue of the seats with their grayish lines, making fractured circles and little jutting structures that look like temples. A hint of red, or it would be red, but it’s been worn down to the point of pink. I see a woman to my left putting on makeup with pale mauve nail polish on her fingers. The mascara keeps her eyes wide open and her lips twitched off to the side. 

“See it, say it, sorted,” comes from the loudspeakers as the train slows to a stop at Bethnal Green station. A couple of people step out with their bags in hand, hands in hands. I lay my head back against the seats and stare up at the curved plexiglass. Bodies are distorted to shapes in the reflections, upside-down vignettes of another life. A man adjusts his cap and the glass warps his head into a long cone. Like a little Martian man or like those conehead people in that movie, he fixes his gaze on the book in his hands. I see drunk friends laugh as they ride in unity. One of them puts their arm over another, and they chuckle, turning inward, nearly facing one another. The plexiglass melds them into one. A couple kisses in the corner of the cart, arms on one another, over each other. The train screeches on.

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Originally published in Sunstroke Magazine’s 7th Print edition — Glory and Gore, Oct 2023