Many years before the trains divorced themselves from the railways and took to the sky like winding snakes, I find myself on a sparsely occupied subway train rattling through the night. In all of my life this is my first foray onto public transportation without the company of adults. Not that I’m alone; I’m joined by my friends, all dumb thirteen-year-olds like me, as we make our way to the other side of the city. It’s that time of year when each day is just a sliver of daylight in the morning, darkening by the time the hour-hand begins its second 180-degree arc across the clockface, and pitch black before it closes much distance. 

At the time, it’s late in the evening. And we’re alone in the carriage, except for an old man sitting at the far end of the carriage. That’s the first odd thing I notice; the strangeness of three kids being on a subway train in the evening, and only one other person there.

My friends — though if I’m honest, only one of them, Angie, is actually my friend — are standing and sitting directly across from me in the carriage, and have come to a lull in the conversation they’d been having since we arrived at the subway stop. It’s a conversation that I’ve only been half-listening to and am only part of in an ornamental sense. I have said maybe seven words tonight. I’m seated on the other row of seats, hunched over with my elbows resting on my jeans and my fingers clasped together in front of me. Pulsing reds and greens and blues dart past the scar-smudged window, nebulous objects in a miniature grungy galaxy outside the glass. I have a wad of cash in my left pocket, a phone with a cracked screen in the other, and absolutely no idea how to get home from here. My aim that night is to strike a delicate balance of clinging to the gang without letting them see how dependent I am on them.

You may be wondering what thirteen-year-old’s parents let them ride the subway at night by themselves. The question, of course, is loaded; it assumes that our parents knew what we were doing.

“D’you think he’s homeless?” whispers Angie. She’s speaking in reference to the man sitting far away from us in the carriage, who looks less like a man and more like an unoccupied heap of filthy clothes on the seat, only recognizable as human by the slow pulsation of breath and the occasional mucus-clogged snort we hear from his direction.

“Probably just a junkie or something,” said Edwin, picking up one of those words that makes a trademark annoying smirk momentarily play across his face as he delights in how adult he is. “Maybe he’s a pervert. Hey, you got a problem, buddy?” he suddenly yells out. We hiss at him to shut up, but it doesn’t seem like a huge issue. The man doesn’t even twitch in response. He just keeps slowly breathing.

The train ride keeps going. The loud, screeching wailing of the train barrelling forward is all-pervading; the lights flitting past the window are blurred and strange. Looking at them, they remind me of the flying demons from the end of the movie Fantasia; I half-expect them to grow miniature animated wings and groping hands with claws. Among the odd things I’ve noticed about this night, the emptiness of the carriage and the strangeness of that man just sitting there, breathing slowly in and out, something new has added itself to the list. It takes a while to bubble up to the forefront of my brain, and when it does, it takes me a while to say it.

“Guys,” I say. “Is it just me, or is this ride taking longer than usual?

Edwin looks up from his phone. His face is confused, although there’s a flash of something else, like at some point in the past few minutes, he’d dimly thought the same thing. Tom casts me a wide-eyed glance. Angie just frowns. “I don’t think so,” she says. “We got on, like, five minutes ago, didn’t we?”

“I think it’s much more than five minutes,” I said. Truth be told, I’m having a hard time placing it in my mind. I remember meeting at the subway stop, walking down the stairs, waiting by the platform. I remember the train lurching into view, bright eyes exploding the darkness. 

There is something odd about the memories, though. I have read about the Omphalos hypothesis, the idea that all of us came into existence just a week ago (switch out “week” with day, hour, minute, second), complete with all of our lives before that point written into our memories. How could you disprove this hypothesis? How would you tell the difference between a memory of something that really happened, and one which was manufactured, transplanted into your brain to make you think it had happened? But I’m beginning to think I can tell the difference. The last thing I remember which I feel like I actually experienced was leaving my apartment, after telling my parents that I was going to hang out with Angie at her place. The rest has the inarticulable but undeniable impression of being smoke and mirrors.

I pull my phone out of my pocket and turn it on. There’s only a speck of battery life left, and through the cracks, I see what time it is. Exactly 8PM. But it can’t be. I remember it being 8PM before I left, and a significant amount of time has passed since then.

“It’s 8PM,” I say anyway. At that moment, bled dry by the cold of the night, my phone dies in my hand. I stuff it back into my pocket.

“That can’t be right,” says Tom. “It must be like 8:30 by now.”

“I’ve got 8PM too,” says Edwin. “He’s not behind.”

“Maybe you’re both behind,” says Tom.

“Oh yes, Tom,” says Edwin. “Both of our phones are behind by exactly the same amount so that we both have exactly 8PM. How likely is that?”

“Probably pretty likely.”

A sudden screech of metal on metal disrupts the exchange. “Guys,” says Angie, staring across the carriage. We turn around.

The old man at the end of the carriage has risen from his seat. For a moment, he stands, taller than he realized, swaying as if he can’t support his own weight. Even standing up, he still looks like an unoccupied bunch of clothes. Until he turns around and looks at us, and under the brim of his hat we see a hideous grinning face.

And now, I think — this isn’t a memory. I’m not just sitting around, replaying all of this in my mind. The basics are memories. Edwin, Tom, and Angie I knew, and all of them were around for years and eventually disappeared as we went to different high schools, different colleges. But this specific event, sitting on this train that I wasn’t supposed to be on, late at night, en route to some destination on the other side of the city which I suddenly am unable to remember…That’s not a memory. Or it is, in the sense that anything is a memory, our minds experiencing everything microseconds after it happens. I’m on the train right now. Angie, Tom, and Edwin are here with me. We are all thirteen again. Wherever we are, what remains of civilization is far behind us.

And as I think all of this, the screeching of metal on metal grows louder and louder. The lights flitting past the window start going by faster, in larger clumps, breaking up the darkness more and more at the same time that the fluorescents above us flicker, until the inside of the train is a flashing madhouse of red and green and blue.