It’s dark inside. The reds and blues on Tom’s dashboard freckle his face, and he checks his speed; 40km/h, good, he has time to decelerate before he approaches the next station. He rests his hands on the window ledge of the conductor’s booth. He closes his eyes. Light lifts his eyelids as the train sinks deeper down the tunnel, and it’s Tom’s cue to start the recorded audio: doors will open on your right. Spadina. The train decelerates, eventually stops; the doors open, eventually close; the train moves, the platform left behind, and a few who didn’t make it inside.
The train embarks again. In these interstitial moments between station and station, Tom is buoyant, fetal in the damp underground beneath the city, burrowing in quiet interludes as he prepares to emerge at the end of his shift, until he returns after one sleep, again. Again.
You’re here, Tom’s mother would have whispered as she cocooned her son for the first time. Tom doesn’t remember his infancy, but he remembers its warmth. My boy.
In utero, Tom was bound to his mother via their umbilical cord, and their togetherness let him grow peacefully, such that he could depend on her, she would supply for him. He knows the camphoric smell of rosemary oil on her pregnant belly, or the humid wafts of chlorine permeating her skin after the pool; routine practices to ensure he would develop properly, even when she didn’t yet know who Tom was.
The next station frames his periphery and Tom pulls the lever to brake. St George. He salutes a kid who hops on the first car every Wednesday, pressing his nose against the mirrored window veiling Tom’s conductor room, even though he shouldn’t be so close in case Tom needs to get out quickly. Every week, it’s the same. Every day, it’s nearly identical, Tom thinks.
He lives alone, and some days his speech is faint for not having spoken to anybody the whole day. Cash or card, asked the grocer one evening, to which he croaked, cash. He called his mother occasionally, but not enough. How old was he? Forty-one now. He recently saw a bald spot on his lunch break in the bathroom mirror, alopecic with stress or age, he didn’t know. Tom ran his fingers over the smooth crown and wondered how he could have possibly missed it. Later that evening, he bought rosemary oil at the pharmacy to promote his hair regrowth. He misses some spots he can’t see, since he has nobody to help him.
But he returns the next day unchanged, in his uniform, with the same salad he packs for lunch every day. Again. It’s been two decades, he thinks, and he chews the insides of his cheeks in looping circles. His mannerisms are “nineties,” his eighty-year-old mother says, where he’s been stuck since he started his job, underground, by himself.
Museum. He wants to stay here for an extra minute, just to see what would happen, but doesn’t. He departs the train.
Queen’s Park.
The light barrels towards him – Queen’s Park feels bright to him as he goes Southbound, since Museum is dimly lit – and he remembers how it felt to be under the overhead hospital light examining him for any defects, his first time seeing properly, in the hospital right outside this station. Light filled in the brown of his eyes. The umbilical cord had been cut, and the doctors made sure his navel area looked normal.
He watches as the St. George boy walks towards the exit. Tom has finished providing for him.
Not another delay, he hears a patron in the first car, and he realizes it’s time for him to go. He’s two minutes behind, now three – Tom watches the clock – now three-and-a-half. His toes grip inside his shoes, as if to suction himself in place.
He waits: four minutes.
He accelerates: 45km/h.
Each eight-hour shift brings only repetition. He is one of many organs on the train, and he performs mechanical tasks to propel the vehicle — or halt it — according to its circadian rhythm. The train is a body moved by its internal clock: timed wake-ups and rests, arrivals and departures, day and night.
He endures sameness. Semper anticus: always forward, down the track.
But there’s a togetherness in my life, Tom thinks as he closes the door. Line 1 – Cord 1 – his umbilical cord, joined and cut every day as people enter or leave; they depend on me, my routine. Even though he doesn’t know his patrons, he’s punctual. They know Tom by his wrinkled loudspeaker voice, the occasional waves when he’s feeling friendly, or the dim human warmth that crawls through the walls of his cot-like booth. In Tom’s imagination, I trust you, they say as they onboard the train.
He gives birth every day, Tom laughs softly, feeling the still-smooth patch on his head. Pregnancy, he knows from his mother, can cause hair loss.
He pulls into St. Patrick where light frames his vision again, and the train screeches to a halt; nascent cries, first breaths as exhaust releases shyly from the back.
Header Image source: pxhere
