Nathaniel was alone with his thoughts in a cramped apartment safe house for three weeks before he was set free. Speaking to the neighbors was out of the question. Calling in friends was out of the question. The television only worked sometimes, a big fat box in a slim flatscreen world, but he could only loop Sportscenter and the news for so long. Working out was pointless. He’d start in on crunches or push-ups and find his mind wandering more than he wanted it to, causing him to lose count and start over.
Nathaniel did a lot of sitting and a lot of thinking. He always found himself thinking about dying, so he tried reading. He tried sleeping. He tried smoking, despite the fact that it made him think about dying again. He tried everything, and none of it worked. His mind kept cycling back around to two things: the dumb look on an old man’s face when a bullet struck him dead between the eyes and the idea that he might die in the exact same way.
Late on a Saturday night verging on a Sunday morning, the final day of his stay, he opened the door to the apartment, took the shaky elevator down four floors, and stepped outside for the first time in nearly a month. He breathed deep, inhaling the smells of exhaust and concrete and metal. The air was cool and he could taste the city on his tongue.
He lit a cigarette almost immediately, idly listening to the town while trying to make his janky Bic catch. There were sirens in the distance, no surprise there, and the street around the apartment was mostly empty, save for the cluster of hoodies and low-slung jeans on a stoop half a block down. Nathaniel pulled his knit cap lower on his head, down around his ears, breathed out a mix of steam and smoke, and walked toward the train.
The outer line of the elevated train system—locals called the line the O, the Loop, the Orange—circled most of the city. It wasn’t a perfect circle, but it wound its way south past the docks in the northeast, cut west through a few neighborhoods in a long-forgotten part of the south side, and eventually snaked its way north and around the west side before turning east toward the Neon, where the finest of clubs and restaurants did their best to put a kind face on the otherwise cold and grey pallor of the city.
Nathaniel didn’t have a destination in mind. He just wanted out of the apartment (mission complete) and out of his head (still pending). He knew that it was a dumb idea, but barring an outright catastrophe, he could ride the train for a while, find something to do, and then make his way back to his own apartment on the south side of town. At the station, he realized that the old man’s jewelry store was on the west side of town. If he went round-trip, he’d pass it anyway, but no reason to rush. He took a northbound train, trading the bleak environs of the south side for the algae smell of the docks and the bright lights past that.
He chose a seat in a corner at the back of the car, far out of anyone’s way, and watched and listened to the city some more. It took the train an hour to make a complete circuit of the city at this time of night, passengers coming and going in bursts of noise and heat, each of them headed toward a party or toward their beds. He watched the people on the train out of the corners of his eyes or their reflections on the windows as he listened to their conversations.
The closer the train got to the Neon, the more it filled up with girls. That’s how he thought of them: “girls.” He’d never been good at guessing ages, and he was long past the point where he particularly cared to. They were loud, they were pretty, and they were young enough to make him feel old. They were girls.
He only caught snatches of their conversation as his focus wandered in and out. When he heard something about a house party and a fistfight, cops and an ambulance, he tried to tune back in, but it was too late. They moved from topic to topic with a hummingbird’s intensity, and he soon lost the flow of conversation entirely. He half-listened and half-watched them for a while before eventually deciding that they were high school girls, maybe early college. They didn’t seem ground down and they didn’t have any hard edges. They hadn’t lived yet.
The girls got off as soon as the train hit the Neon, headed for some club or another. He figured there was no way they all had fake IDs, so maybe there was an all-ages show or something on. He didn’t particularly care, but it was something to think about that wasn’t that thing he didn’t want to think about.
A couple stops past the Neon and into the west side, a familiar face got on. Nathaniel had never seen the man before, but he recognized the type. The guy was built like a football player who was just a few years past his prime, definitely solid enough to be a problem but flabby enough to make you wonder if you stood half a chance. He looked up and down the train like a predator, sizing up the audience, before his gaze finally settled on Nathaniel.
He grinned, revealing an upper jaw covered in gold teeth from canine to canine. Images flashed through Nathaniel’s head—gold and ivory smashed together and tinted red, the smell of copper, the chatter of a spat tooth, a low moan—as Nathaniel grinned right back. His grin was wide, but his eyes remained cold. The man was a no-name goon, some legbreaker out looking for some extracurricular cash. No discipline, and judging by the way the man’s eyes narrowed at the sight of Nathaniel’s grin, no heart, either. He couldn’t tell what crew the man belonged to. Signifying was verboten after a police crackdown maybe ten years ago when things got really bad in the west, and only idiots advertised their membership in the Network, anyway.
The guy sat down a few rows up, in one of those seats that’s positioned perpendicular to the rest of the car. Nathaniel was already running scenarios in his head, and knew that the man sat at that exact spot because he could see Nathaniel out of the corner of one eye and the door out of the other. Maybe he thought he was being subtle as he kept stealing glances at Nathaniel’s face. Maybe he was continuing to size Nathaniel up, gauging whether or not it was worth it to try and strong-arm him. Nathaniel knew that he was tired, thin, exhausted, and looked it. He probably looked like an easy mark. If the man went for it, then Nathaniel knew that he was going to draw attention or get arrested. Both scenarios were unacceptable.
He did his best to radiate hate. Nathaniel caught the man’s gaze every time he sneakily glanced back, but kept his face blank and bored. He let every bit of poison in his head run through him. He thought of death and dying and killing— guns dropped in paint buckets, covered over with concrete, and dumped in the lake. A blowtorch applied to joints and cartilage. A family funeral on Sunday morning, a mother wailing at the loss of her entire family in one accident. Nathaniel dwelled on these thoughts as he watched the man watch him.
A thought passed through Nathaniel’s mind: what if this was the guy the Network sent to kill him? Three weeks of detention and then an anonymous, random death on the train. He’d been that guy before. This guy didn’t have that look, but things change.
The guy was big. Bigger than Nathaniel. The guy would be a problem if things got physical, but if he was stupid enough to start something on the train, then so be it. Hurt him in a way that feels permanent and makes him stop in his tracks. Use the keys on his throat. Go for an eye first. Find his weapon and take it. Shatter his patella. Destroy his grill. Step on his windpipe.
Nathaniel’s eyes glazed over as he thought. They snapped back into focus when the man stood up. Nathaniel’s body tightened. His eyes narrowed. He cocked his head and watched the man stretch as the train rolled into the station. The man flipped him the bird, sneered, and stepped off the train halfway into the west side. Nathaniel watched him walk down the stairs of the platform and part of the way down the block before the train started moving again. Nathaniel glared at his reflection and closed his eyes for a moment. He needed to get off the train. He wasn’t thinking of dead old men, but he that was because he wasn’t thinking at all.
Something was going to happen to him. It wasn’t a matter of if. It was a matter of what and when. Another goon, eager to make his name, might recognize him. A cop could get a hunch, or recognize his face from some file somewhere, and play the odds. Some minor stickup kid might pick the wrong target. Face caught on camera. Angry ex-girlfriend. Panhandler. Something. Better to stay in. Better to stay safe. Better to be home.
As the O swept through the west side and began moving toward the south side, a group of gangly teenagers boarded. The car was mostly empty now. There was a half-asleep couple idly making out when the shaking of the train jolted them awake, hands clasped and his head on her shoulders. There was a group of teens having a low conversation at the front of the train. And there was Nathaniel, still at the back of the train, barely conscious, but still taking it all in.
Nathaniel watched as the shortest of the teens, a girl, stood up with a marker hidden in her hand and tagged the window. She signed “RUIN” in tall black capital letters that were more edges than lines in no time at all. The letters ran from the bottom of the window to the top, so straight Nathaniel wondered how often she’d practiced those exact motions. She threw a large five-pointed star after the N, a period, before adding two vertical lines and a half-moon into the belly of the star—a smiley face. Nathaniel scrunched up his face. The tag and the happy face, what was up with that?
The juxtaposition bothered him enough that he spoke up and asked about it. “Hey,” he said, his voice quiet and raw from the days he’d spent not using it. “Yo!” he said, and the teens turned as one to look at him with blank faces. He knew that look. He’d practiced that look when he was their age. “What’s up with the face?”
“I like how it looks, man. Why?”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
Nathaniel shrugged, the kids turned away, and he was sure that they began talking about him. He zoned out and paid them no never mind. He was almost home. He was sick of the train, sick of the anxiousness, and ready for something else.
He got off a few stops later, the first stop into the south side of the city, before the blight but nowhere near the opulence of the Neon, and they watched him leave in silence. Nathaniel was still a few stops short of his apartment. He walked the rest of the way, and even took the stairs when he got back to his place. He paused at the door to his building, rested his head against the gate, and breathed deeply, wanting to absorb the night air as best he could before entering yet another cage.