Going, Going, Gone.

The smoke permeated everything. Doors opened. Then shut. The conductor stomped by, his shell-toed shoes banging down like a gavel as he flogged his feet down the stairs, judging every last one of us – the final car passengers imprisoned on his train. The A/C rattled above me (I was sitting right below the whole unit) like a pair of keys that I heard clanging from the conductor’s hip, and it seemed to have the paradoxical power of blowing not just cold air but his hot breath straight into my face.

“Hey! Can you read? That seat’s taken!” the conductor scoffed, spitting the words out of his radioactive mouth and into an active radio walkie-talkie that was dripping with saliva, or venom, or whatever that stuff was.

“I-I’m sorry,” I stuttered, “I didn’t know we had assigned seating.”

He lifted an angry eyebrow and snatched a small sign that hung just under the stiff armrest alongside where I was sitting. It was a blue handicap sign, rectangular in shape, and emblazoned with a white stick figure in a wheelchair that looked exactly like a skeleton. I couldn’t help but see the conductor, after that, as a kind of grim reaper carrying an ID card on his search for a broken soul. It would explain a lot about his menacing attitude towards me, especially if the only reason for our intense interaction was because he was on a time crunch, forced to collect the bones of his next visible victim – my soon-to-be broken soul.

“Is that right?” he said scornfully, his frigid tone carried by the cold air of the air conditioner – his words turning into icicles as they fell from his mouth. “You really didn’t know?”

I nodded politely, and tried to break the ice with the swift strikes of an audible axe, disguised as multiple warm, fast-descending, “yeses.”

It was to no avail.

He then lifted the sign a little higher – presumably to show me that he didn’t believe I only just now saw it – by a dangling string that was wrapped in between two wrinkled talons posing as human fingers. It spun incessantly for a few moments before it oscillated at a pendulum’s pace, between the space above my head and the space below his hand. It had the visual mystique of an embarrassed puppeteer who was trying to hide a mildly encroaching case of Parkinson’s disease in the spins of his marionette.

Watching the skeleton on that handicapped sign follow in the footsteps of the conductor’s fingers, was almost beautiful, until I began getting the sense that this was all just a really strange, and sinister, hypnotic, choreographed event, scored by the rattling white noise still blasting from the air conditioner above us. Even the rest of the passengers on the train seemed to be falling into a similar trance, most of them too comfortable, too loose, and too unaware to question why and for how long this was really going on.

But then, coincidentally, after having that thought, everything stopped. Completely, and miraculously.

When the conductor finally spoke, every one of those ideas and hallucinations went poof and the music fell flat – and my brain was persuasively persistent in reminding me that the mirages I was seeing were probably just the imaginative results of combining an angry old man, under an annoying old fan, with a sign I didn’t see, and my extreme social anxiety.

After all, my brain thought, you’re also really tired.

But I was shaking now – wide awake – and on the verge of breaking down into tears. At that moment, everything I believed in, shattered before my eyes. There was no God. There was no truth. The world as I knew it was a prismatic grid. A simulation lined by linear latitudes and longitudes, and now platitudes. I could trust no one, I could trust nothing. Not even the machinations of my own mind. Because the “I” I thought was me had truly been corrupted, it had officially compromised itself – it went unquestionably insane. Someone was inside my brain, and I knew it, and that someone wasn’t me. It was like the emotional equivalent of going into your room and sensing something had already been in there before you. The comb, misplaced. The bedsheets, remade. And the door left open. Wide open. Even if the person who left it open thought they didn’t leave so much as a crack. But it was clear to you that whoever came in here didn’t know that to truly close your door, it needed a second “click.”

Because I did see the sign the conductor was holding, long before he approached me, contrary to what my brain had suggested.

“…a sign I didn’t see – ” was spoken with a semblance so strong, I shouldn’t have been able to tell that this voice inside my head wasn’t me.

But no. God no. How could I not have? It was like reading a story when all of a sudden, the word changes to some cursive outline – uʍop ǝpᴉsdn, IN ALL CAPS, red font.

For that split second, the subtle “didn’t” that was added to my inner monologue when I meant to say, “a sign I did see,” exposed everything, like someone else’s handwriting on your own paper. It was like something snatched my voice and relayed it back to me, in the most perfect of impressions, but had forgotten the most important part – what it feels like for the air to pass through my throat when I’m the one saying it.

Yet here they were, in front of me, fake-friendly and bare-faced, smiling as if to say “trust me, my eyes are the honest windows to your soul” – pretending nothing ever happened, pretending to be me – and perhaps even plotting to do it all again.

Was I right all along? Was he after my soul? I had to find out.

“Son, you alright?” he asked, “You’re shaking.”

I was staring out the window, looking at a calmer, almost compassionate, conductor through his ghost image on the glass. Anxiety had struck me like lightning, and it’s entirely possible that because I was thrust to center stage, with all eyes on me, everything was cloaked in an invisibly nefarious, supersized, and time-stopping blanket, and that all this overwhelming overthinking was simply an unexplainable symptom of that spotlight. I do only have three default settings when it comes to my fears and I usually choose the same one. I can’t fight, I won’t flee, so I froze. It’s true. Ding, ding, ding! Besides, I’ve always been a daydreamer and I think it’s fair to say that–

NO. WAKE THE FUCK UP. THEY’RE DOING IT AGAIN. THIS TIME IN PLAIN SIGHT. YOU SAT IN THAT SEAT BECAUSE YOU DIDN’T WANT ANYONE BOTHERING YOU. REMEMBER?

THESE ARE YOUR THOUGHTS. NOW LISTEN TO THEM.

“How could he know I wasn’t handicapped? No one would dare test me.”

DON’T KEEP LETTING THEM INTERRUP–

“Son, you alright?” he repeated, “You’re shaking.”

I winced. “It’s…umm…it’s cold, I think. It feels like I’m los– ”

-ING CONNECTION TO YOUR OWN AUTONOM-

“Y–ou said you’re cold?” the conductor asked, “Well, call me crazy, but I think that’s because you’re sitting below the air condition– ”

–ING YOUR MIND! WAKE UP! THIS IS ALL A SHAM–

“–e on you. You knew exactly what was going on here all along. This seat is reserved for the handicapped only. I’ll be sure to see it remains that way.”

“Yes sir,” I said apologetically, “it won’t happen again.”

“That it won’t,” he replied.

The conductor beamed one last time – his grin reaching Grinch levels, temple to temple, until it dropped off his face as his hand holding a walkie-talkie went up to it, like an involuntary, teeter-tottering, twitch.

I then watched the train’s exhaust smoke permeate everything, as the doors I walked through opened for more people…then closed shut. The conductor stomped by, his shell-toed shoes banging down like a gavel as he climbed up the stairs, judging every last one of us – the final car passengers imprisoned on his train.