Oblivion

Stand clear of the closing doors, please. 

Lethe pressed herself against the railing that marked the edge of the train’s bench and wrapped both arms around her bag on her lap. Position secured, she leaned her head against the cool metal pole, letting the familiar cadence of subway announcements blur into the background. She immediately regretted the pole, as the train lurched away from the station and her head vibrated painfully against it. 

At least she’d gotten a seat - getting on at Grand Central meant fighting tooth and nail with all the other commuters. She’d already missed one train and had to wait for the next. There had only been room for five people to squeeze into the already packed car when it had lurched open. A kid’s backpack had gotten caught in the doors, causing them to open and close three times while everyone on and off the train growled at the delay. The next train hadn’t been much better, but she’d miraculously managed to claim a seat when someone had stood up to get off at the next stop. Thank God, because standing for the entirety of her hour-long commute was not what she needed today.

It had been another heart-breaking kind of day. The kind where all she wanted was to get home so she could cry without a whole subway car conspicuously pretending not to notice. The only kind of day she seemed to have in this city lately. Living at the end of the line meant she often gave up the struggle halfway through the ride. 

But today she couldn’t give in to the tears pricking at her eyes because her boss was on the train, standing just across the car. She wasn’t sure if he’d noticed her yet, but she cursed her bad luck. Today, of all days, Brett had to go for dimsum with that gaggle of 30-something year old coworkers he always hung around with. There was no other reason someone like him would be riding a train into Queens at 6pm on a Wednesday. 

Lethe knew her coworkers - like all Manhattanites - considered a trip to Flushing as a “day trip” as in, “it’s so far away, let’s make a day of it”. A place they had to recover from, as in “oh I went to Flushing yesterday so let’s just go to the neighborhood bar tonight”. For Lethe, the day trip went the other direction - if you could call work a day trip. And yet here was Brett, making the trek with his posse. How pedestrian of him. They were probably counting on a quick Uber ride back, late at night when the traffic was clear. 

But why couldn’t they have just gone to the same sad, overpriced, midtown bar that everyone in the company frequented in the latter half of the week. For that matter, why couldn’t she. 

Well that was easy. Because she didn’t have the cohort of “work friends” that everyone else at her company seemed to. Maybe also because she had an hour-long commute home every day and the thought of riding the subway after spending her evening listening to vacuous gossip while drinking a $8 can of beer - as everyone around her sipped $15 cocktails - depressed her. 

Maybe she just needed to get over herself. That’s what her sister always said when Lethe called, lonely again on a Friday night. 

The train lurched into 74^th street, causing a few of Brett’s friends to stumble. Of course, none of them were holding onto the polls. Lethe kept her head down as the car began to clear out, pulling up the collar of her coat, as if that would help. 

“Hey - hey Lethe,” a voice said. Brett’s voice. Of course.

She looked up. Brett loomed over her, hanging onto the poll that ran near the top of the train car. He probably didn’t mean to be so imposing, but from her seated position he cast a shadow like a vulture. With the railing on one side and another passenger squeezed up against her left, Lethe thought desperately of seats with false bottoms.

“Hey, Brett,” was all she said.

“Heading home?” 

Yes, obviously yes, what do you think. “Yup.”

“You live off the 7?”

God she hated small talk. “Yup. What are you, uh, up to?” As if she didn’t know. At least her annoyance at the idiocy of their conversation kept her tears back.

“Going to some fancy Chinese place - my friend keeps raving about it so we finally humored him.” 

Well that explained a lot. Brett hadn’t seemed like an adventurous eater, based on the Chic-Fil-A he ate for lunch most days. Lethe looked over and saw the whole gaggle of 30-somethings staring at her. It was mostly men - their whole office, company, industry was mostly men - and they all looked quickly away when she caught them.

“C’mon, it’ll be fun,” he cajoled. “You never come out with the team.”

“That isn’t the team.” 

Brett shrugged. “The whole company is one big team when you think about it. It’s good networking.”

She didn’t want to network. 

Lethe looked down and shrugged, hoping he would go away.

A moment’s pause. “Well, if you change your mind, we’re getting off at Flushing.”

Of course they were.

She wished she could put her headphones in, but that seemed too much. Maybe if he weren’t her boss. Instead she turned her head slightly away from them and stared very hard at the the woman sitting across and slightly to her left. 

A few more stations passed, and Lethe began to relax. The woman was busy reading a book, turning the pages at a breakneck speed that made Lethe wonder if she was absorbing any of the content. Lethe studied the woman’s face, trying to see if her eyes were moving back and forth as she read. 

Then the woman looked up, caught Lethe’s gaze - what was wrong with people today - and winked at her. Winked. 

The woman said something, but Lethe couldn’t hear over the clatter of the train and the rush of blood in her ears. Mortified, she stared at her lap again, determined not to look up until she was off the train. 

They pulled into another stop and from the corner of her eye Lethe saw Brett and his friends straightening, collecting their backpacks off the floor and moving towards the other side of the car, where the doors would open.

She could sense Brett looking at her, willing her to join them. Willing her to be another piece in the company machinery, one of the “boys”, someone he could evaluate as a “good culture fit” instead of “works hard but doesn’t gel”. She willed him just as hard to keep walking. 

This is the last stop on this train. Everyone please leave the train.

For once she seemed to have won the battle, because he left without saying anything to her. She stayed tense for a few more moments - the winking woman seemed to also be getting off here, and what if she wanted to talk to Lethe. What could she possibly want? Finally, finally she could relax as the woman walked through the doors beside her seat.

The doors closed and the train jerked into motion as it gained momentum out of the station. Lethe looked up to check what stop they were at, and finally noticed the empty car. She’d been so focused on avoiding any interactions that she hadn’t even realized they’d past her stop. Not only her stop, but the very last stop on the line.

Lethe had never missed her stop before. The station for work, sure. Other stops, on the rare occasion she went into the city on the weekends. But those weren’t end-of-the-line stops. It was supposed to be impossible to stay on the train after the final stop. Weren’t there supposed to be conductors who swept through and kicked everyone off? 

Would the train circle back around, allowing her to get off at Flushing before it continued down the line, or would she end up in a train yard? The thought of spending the night in a train yard made her heart race. If the doors stayed closed, there’d be no way to get out - and walking through a train yard in the dark seemed like a terrible idea anyway. 

She began searching the internet on her phone for “what to do if on nyc subway after last stop” and blessed herself for living off of one of the few elevated lines - at least she had service. She could also call someone, but who? Her sister would just laugh herself silly, and besides she was in Chicago and could hardly help. 911 seemed a bit too dramatic. Lethe winced at the thought of an operator screaming at her for wasting precious city resources with her idiocy.

Perhaps she should try to walk through the cars to the front of the train and find the conductor.

The train was still rattling along, gaining speed. They were now on a downward slope and with a whoosh of changing air pressure, the train dove underground. So much for phone signal. The idea of traveling between train cars in the dark, swaying tunnel was somehow even more terrifying than on an elevated track. Lethe eyed the panel near the front of the car which detailed how to work the emergency intercom and full blown stop-this-train button. Did she dare press it?

Before she could commit any truly irredeemable acts, the train began to slow. They drifted out of the tunnel again, into the evening air. Slanting sunlight flashed through the windows. Even though they’d been in the tunnel for only moments, the quality of the light felt different. 

Lethe peered out the window, waiting for an announcement to tell her where in hell she’d ended up. But the doors just opened - on both sides of the train - with their usual ca-chunk and stayed open. After a moment, she poked her head out of the opening, looking around, bracing herself to pull back inside should the doors seem to be closing again. 

There was a platform of sorts, but it wasn’t elevated, rather it was lying directly in the middle of a field. Just the weathered wooden planks on both sides of the track - she checked - and no sign of another track in the other direction. Outside of the train and platforms the surrounding field seemed empty, with only the suggestion of a tree-line in the far distance. 

Pulling out her phone, Lethe brought up Google Maps, trying to see where she was. Now that she was aboveground again, she must have service - but her GPS dot wouldn’t resolve. Her phone was old and often seemed to struggle with GPS, so she tried the usual solution of reloading the app a few times. No luck. Zooming in on the Flushing stop and trying to trace the tracks from there didn’t work either - either the map wasn’t loading or there was no record of this part of the tracks on Google Maps.

Eventually Lethe gave up and pocketed her phone. She stepped off the train, glancing at the quickly sinking sun. If the train was going to stay here all night - and it showed no sign of moving even now, after ten minutes - she would be better off trying to find a street where she could catch an Uber. It would cost her a good chunk of her grocery budget, but it was better than spending the night in a subway car. 

Praying that getting out from under the car’s ceiling and moving around would jog her GPS back to life, Lethe began walking through the field, following the tracks back the way she’d come. This was a great strategy up until the point where the tracks sank down into the ground, entering the tunnel. She cursed Brett and his stupid friends, and her work, her apartment-mates, and her sister, who was always happy to chat but never to truly listen to anything Lethe had to say. There was no evidence from the unvariegated field of lush grass which way the tracks might turn underground. The best she could do was continue walking in the same direction, and since her GPS still didn’t work, that meant guessing by the sun. 

The field stretched on and on, and Lethe began to get nervous. Fear lengthened each minute into an eternity, until she wasn’t sure whether the sun had even moved in the sky. She must have been walking for over a half-hour, yet her phone said only a few minutes had passed.  

She debated whether it was time to cave and call her sister. Maybe even time to call the MTA help line - or 911. Her idea of quickly finding a road or neighborhood where she could call an Uber seemed, at this point, misguided at best. It hadn’t felt like a long ride from the Flushing stop, but the train must have veered off into some area of desolation. Lethe turned around, trying to sight where the tracks reappeared out of the ground so she could get back to the train. 

She could see across the field to the tree-line, but there was no tracks, and no train. No matter which way she looked, she was in the middle of a field ringed with distant trees, no side any closer than the other.

Lethe whined, deep in her chest, and at the end of it the tears she’d been holding back the entire day finally burst through. Her quick shallow breaths of panic made her light headed, but she couldn’t seem to slow her lungs’ gasps. The thought of being stuck here forever was terrible. But somehow the thought that she could run all the way back through the field and not find the tracks, or the train, or anything besides a carpet of grass, was much more terrifying. 

She had to get home. She had to get home and - and what. Watch Netflix alone until 10, the hideously early bedtime she had to maintain to get on the train by 6:30 in the morning? The thought made her pause, made her lungs finally catch and hold. 

This was the first place she’d gone besides her tiny room, and work, since she’d move to the city. And with every moment the sky seemed to be lightening, as if the sun wanted to be the dawning to her realization.

Lethe looked around for the first time - truly looked around - and finally noticed the flowers. The grass which had been a uniform green a moment ago was now bursting with color. Something fluttered at the edge of her vision and she whipped her head around. Whatever it was disappeared, but instead she found that the trees had come close. The woods loomed large in front of her, dappled in sunlight that was now filled with the warmth of afternoon.

A bird chirped, like the birds of her suburban childhood might have, only with a foreign accent. That one call seemed to break a dam of silence, and the woods were suddenly full of birdsong. 

She took a step into the woods. 

This was a terrible idea. She had to get home, it should be almost fully dark by now - something the bright sunlight seemed to be in denial of - and someone would worry. Who, though? She was the one who worried. What would happen if no one was left who worried? Lethe had a suspicion that everything would be just fine.

Another flutter across her vision pulled her further forward. Something sparkled like a jewel, and it wasn’t just the glittering thread of water bouncing down a pile of mossy boulders. She could swear it had wings.

Stand clear of the closing doors, please. 

Close by she heard the familiar announcement. If she turned her head, the train would be there - just a few feet away, as it always had been. She could get on the train, get off at Flushing; she could go to work tomorrow. Like always. She felt a pang of grief for her sister. But she didn’t need Lethe any more than Brett did. Everyone around her fit into the world so much more solidly, more certainly, than her.

Lethe barely noticed the announcement the second time, or the sound of the doors closing and opening again as the train prepared to depart. How could she hear them? She was already so far away.

She was already deep in the woods.