[DRAFT. CURRENTLY UNEDITED]
Ben didn’t get on a homebound seven train until an hour past midnight. Back-of-house was slammed all day and since the new manager, Greg, decided to unceremoniously fire Ricardo after he showed up to his shift only a little more noticeably stoned than usual, they were short one dishwasher. And because god hates service workers, the steam washer quit halfway through the night too. He slumps nearly horizontal against the empty subway car bench. The rain outside is just heavy enough to have dampened his clothes and hair, but light enough to have left the scent of dishwater on his skin. He only looks forward to the shower that awaited him in his overpriced and undersized Queens apartment, if he is able to resist just passing out on his floor mattress first. It wouldn’t be the first night this week he’d slept in the day’s accumulated grime.
Life does not feel great lately, for Ben. It's hard to indulge in the consolation pleasure of self-pity in a city like New York, though. The few other late night riders that share the car with him are returning from their own shitty and shittier jobs. At least he has an apartment to return to. Those without even that are a reminder of why he puts up with the crap wages. Something about a ‘reserve army’ pops into his head from a sociology class he took freshman year of college, before he had dropped out. Maybe that had been a bad decision. That thought intrudes daily these days. Every time he answers it the same. No use fretting about it now.
At least the ride home wouldn’t take long. He opens one of the six apps on his phone that can supply an endless stream of videos and begins the usual mindless scrolling. Nothing catches his attention, of course, the point is not to catch it but to drown it. But then something does. An announcement post from Kat. She’s having a baby.
The knowledge jumps from the screen to his brain and embeds itself like a parasite. She’s having a baby. Ben keeps his phone in his pocket for the rest of the ride. He just stares out the windows at the city and the rain that won’t wash off its filth, just push it around.
As he stares slack and lifeless, another passenger stares at him. A man in one of those knock-off brand shirts they make somewhere in Asia maybe. It bears something like a Nike logo, but not quite. Subway stares are not an uncommon occurrence, of course, but this man’s is unusually focused. The car is nearly empty yet his gaze stays fixed, boring into Ben like a maggot. Another day he might not have cared, but now he feels a rancid boil of emotions, a tangle of things long hidden and long rotted, dredged suddenly to the surface. If he must fester, he would at least like to do it privately. The man is very tall. He fold over his legs with his elbows on his knees, arms extended out halfway across the car like a praying mantis readying a strike. A few times Ben meets his gaze and expects the man to look away. Instead, every time their eyes connect it is him who averts not just his eyes but his whole face. There is something profoundly repulsive in the pinprick focus of his pupils. The man remains undeterred. When finally the train arrives at his station, he exits through the farthest doors from the man.
At home he does not shower. He tries to think about it, but the comfort it promised earlier is gone. Nothing in his empty apartment distracts. He resigns himself to sleep, not even bothering to change his clothes. He can wash the sheets tomorrow, he tells himself. His body is tired enough, but his mind holds out. He lays on the comforter for 29 minutes, each one sinking him only deeper into his festering psyche. He leaps up, fumbles in the dark to find his shoes, and is out the door again.
It is still raining. Good. He wants to get soaked. He walks a few blocks, then breaks into a run. The run becomes an aimless sprint. He leaps in through the highbeams of a car at an intersection. Cold puddle water soaks through his ratty sneakers and his socks and the soles of his feet. As he passes under the subway station he notices a man waiting on the platform above. This man stands out because he is wearing a suit. It's a nice suit, a very nice suit, yet he stands in the rain. The platform is covered just yards away but he stands in the rain. He stands in the rain and stares.
Ben keeps running. He encounters the edge of the park. He had not intended to come here, he had not intended to go anywhere, but now the dark emptiness of the park presents itself. He did not bring his phone, but it is probably nearing four in the morning. He enters the park. He knows there is a hill with stairs somewhere inside. He finds them and throws himself at them. He tumbles up to the top, then spins around and hurdles back down. Over and over again, until he’s gasping for air. It doesn’t take long, he isn’t very active. Still he pushes himself to keep up speed. Up and down, back and forth. Thick saliva trickles off his lip and mixes with the rivulets of rain running down his neck. He read somewhere that exercise spurs the production of dopamine in the brain. He hoped that dopamine might lift him out of the tangle of rotten things reawakened, might let him push it back down again. If brain chemicals didn’t work, then maybe he could run hard enough to tear his body apart, make it come apart at the joints and fling its pieces across the park. Maybe then he would be free of it. Alternatively, maybe, if he kept up this pace he would vomit soon. When he did, maybe he could wretch up more than the contents of his stomach. Maybe all the rotten desires would well up out of him and he could leave them in the sludge. He could walk out of the park purged.
Instead he slipped on the wet stone halfway through one of his trips up. His palms skidded across the rough surface of the stairs. A jagged edge opened a shallow gash along the length of his calf. He just lay there for a moment, wallowing in the pain and his soaked filth. Suddenly being in the park alone in the middle of the night felt like a stupid thing to do and he wondered why he came. But he knew why. The knowledge that compelled him remained stuck like a barbed arrow in his skull. She’s having a baby. And I’m here.
Something shifts at the top of the stairs. Ben remembers that parks can be dangerous at night in a city like this. A shadow cast against the streetlight grasps towards him as a figure stepped into view.
“I’m alright.” He says, quickly rising to his feet. He hopes this is only a concerned passerby.
No response comes. Ben looks closer and discovers that it’s a woman, and the shape of her hair backlit by the yellow beams is eerily familiar. Ben takes a few cautious steps towards her.
“I’m alright. Just scraped my leg.” He repeats, just in case she really is some stranger. He steps closer again. She says nothing, she does not move either. It’s like she is waiting for him. The way she is angled between him and the light makes her face a dark spot on a sharply lit silhouette. She’s the same size and shape as… “Kat? Is that you?” The words slip out of his mouth and immediately he feels embarrassed, because of course it's not her, not here, two thousand miles away from where he left her. He decides to just turn around, walk away from whoever this is and go straight home. But before he can she steps towards him and the light shifts. It illuminates her nose and mouth. It’s Kat.
He rushes up to her. The stinging pain in his leg barely registers. “How are you here?” He suspects this is all a dream.She remains motionless, waiting for him. He reaches to her as he gets close enough to make out her details. His childhood best friend stands a few stairs above him, staring down with wide eyes and an expression that is neither a snarl nor a smile but somewhere in between. He stops. Every detail matches his memory of her, except the eyes. They are the right shape and color, but when he looks into them something inside him contracts and urges him to flee. But he cannot flee, nor can he approach. The icy shock of horror captures him as he tries to lurch away from those eyes and finds his ambulatory control completely vanished. He cannot even wiggle a toe or a finger, even the muscles behind his eyes are locked in place. His focus is fixed on her, forced to meet her terrible gaze. They are not her eyes. They are not even human eyes. Viewed from any other angle they would be perfect imitations, but in this most intimate position, pupil to pupil, they overwhelm with otherworldliness. They are so unlike human eyes because they lack their essential feature, they do not see. As Ben’s gaze travels into them, they yield nothing in return. They reciprocate nothing. There is a reflection received from everything and most especially from the mutual gaze of another person. This reciprocation occurs everywhere, between all things, so universal that Ben could not have really noticed it until his current misfortune of gazing into the two dark spots where only a vast and terrible void threatened. These eyes may very well take in light and process its energy, but they can only process. They do not see. And to be truly unseen is a more terrible feeling than Ben has ever felt. It is a feeling of inescapable dread, of total solitude, of the enormity of dead space between planets, of severance from the greater design. It is hell. Every fiber of his quickly fraying consciousness screams at the simple muscles in his skull to twitch even a millimeter in any direction, to look anywhere but into this monstrous gaze that does not see him. They will not budge.
The false Kat is coming towards him now, her unblinking eyes locked perfectly to his as she closes the gap between them. At the edges of his vision he sees the skin of her face split into a hundred segments that unfold into a radial pattern so alien in design it is incomprehensible. From the center a long hollow needle like a wasp’s stinger extends towards Ben’s face. Its tip is aimed right at his eye. Yet these observations do not frighten him, not while he is captured in the far worse torture of the eyes that do not see. The stinger lances into him and if it causes pain he does not feel it, or else it is insufficient to distract him from the stomach-churning gaze that still will not release him. In the isolation of the eyes that do not see he is reduced to nothing but a writhing clump of fear and sorrow and loathing. He belongs to nothing.
Then the stinger retracts and it is over.