What, does he think I’ll stop to chat with the first person I stumble across? “No problem.”
“No one else,” he repeats sharply, talking loudly to make himself heard over the engine of the train as it slows to a halt in front of us. “Keep your heads down. Do not look anyone in the eyes.” He glances at Christian. “Try to maintain physical contact with your friend, but any outward sign of affection or connection between you will be noticed, and you do not want to be noticed. Stay close to me, but do not touch me. Do not look directly at me. Do not speak to me in public. If I am to stay with you, you must do exactly as I tell you, when I tell you, without question. Do you understand?”
I nod mutely.
The train shudders to a complete stop. Samjeeza takes two golden coins from his pocket and drops them into my hand. “For passage.” I pass one to Christian.
“Your hair,” he says, and I pull my hood up over my head.
The doors hiss open.
I step closer to Christian so that our shoulders touch, take a deep breath of what is all at once oily, stale air, and let go of his hand. Together we follow Samjeeza into the waiting car. The doors close behind us. There’s no going back.
This is it.
We’re going to hell.
It’s dark inside the car. I’m immediately overpowered by a claustrophobic feeling, like the grimy walls are shrinking, enclosing us, trapping us. It’s not helped by the fact that there are people crowded around us like shadows, insubstantial and ghostlike, sometimes immaterial enough that I can see right through them or they seem to overlap one another, occupying the same space. There’s an occasional moan from one of them, the sound of a man who’s coughing wretchedly, a woman weeping. The lights over our heads are red and flickering, buzzing like angry insects. Outside the window is nothing but black, like we are passing through an endless tunnel.
I’m scared. I want to clutch at Christian’s hand, but I can’t. People would notice. We don’t want to be noticed. We can’t be noticed. So I sit, head down, eyes on the floor, my heart going pump pump pump, and every now and then my leg brushes his, and his anxiety in this situation, his own fear, pulses through me and mixes with my own until I can’t tell who’s feeling what exactly. The train shudders and rocks, the air inside heavy and stifling and cold, like we’re underwater and slowly freezing into a solid block of nothingness. I have to fight not to shiver.
I’m scared, yes, but I’m also determined. We’re going to do this, this impossible task that lies before us now. We’re going to rescue Angela.
And I’m thankful, in that moment, full to the brim with gratitude that Christian is with me. He’s here. My partner. My best friend.
I don’t have to do this alone.
If I had my gratitude journal on me now, that’s what I would write.
We stop, and more people get on. A man in a black uniform passes through the car and takes the gold coins. I wonder where the gray people get them, if there’s some sort of coin dispenser for the dead somewhere out there in the world, or if someone gives it to them, like the coin is a metaphor for what people want to take with them from one life to the next, only now they must give it to the man in the black uniform. Some of them seem reluctant to hand it over. One guy claims he doesn’t have a coin, and at the next stop the man in the black uniform takes this guy by the shoulders and hurls him off the train. Where will he go, I wonder? Is there a place that’s worse to go than hell?