Under the Bay

The segmented body of the train burrows through columns of air, somewhere deep under the moist soil, wriggling about, sections chasing sections down the entire length of the tunnels. I just heard one now! And then, first as an LED mirage, then as a speeding metallic cream-colored face, the train slides down the tracks, its infinite bogies flashing past.

It is as if only one journey could ever start on this platform, the same train, the same route. The shaking of the ground knocks down the memories from my head onto the platform floor. I can try to recollect them as they decompose, but I have to hurry into the train as it worms to a stop. What was the last time I was here?

I step closer to the edge as the train rushes by, expecting wind in these tunnels, but there is not any: no piercing gusts of above, not even a nightlike breeze. Just stale, sterile air, enveloping and pouring around the pale body of the machine, an invisible film around its corners. Not so much as its breath reaches my face, only an arm's length away. The burrowing beast, as alive as it is, is inorganic, yet its insides bustle with people holding more thoughts than I alone can hold; its lights shimmer and blink at me, and then its doors slide open to swallow me.

I leap over the inch-sized seam that separates the platform from the train floor like it is forgotten, not even there. I find myself a seat and sit. People in here sit to be equidistant from everyone. The doors slide shut, and the world I just left turns blurry through the plastic windows. The accelerating train binds me to my seat as I stare at the outside going dark. Another blink of darkness, and when the train riders open their eyes, we are at the next station. As the train brakes, this new world is still spinning into existence, the floor, seats, and commuters outside unstretch into the right size, and the train sign is finally legible.

I read.

Powel-

"ONCE GREAT AFFECTION FOR YOUR NAME

NOW HEARING YOUR NAME I AM IN THOUGHT"

Onwards.

Our journey to the deeper underground begins. The train moves, and I remain within it, stationary. I have stood by frozen as I have seen this route change over the past five years. When I first came to the Bay, I reckoned the train ran on the lower level of the Bay Bridge, underneath the tarmac of the decks of the bridge, with thousands of cars skidding above it. However, the next year I came across the BART Wikipedia page, with deprecated logos, cars, and cards, and learned that the route had been built under water. That was when the train tracks slipped off the bridge and entered the waters of the Bay, descending deep into the very skin of the earth. For the next two years, BART would remain like this, as I started to perceive the unevenness, the sense of upward and downward motion, and speed changes on the route as the train descended and rose.

Then, suspending this world and disappearing to a different life, in a different place, in Greenwich, I got to see a pedestrian tunnel under the Thames from the 1800s. It was too neatly circular, tiled and tilted, just enough to make you think you would fall over on foot if you ran, that became flat for a third of the way, and then climbed back. Returning back to the city, I remodeled the BART in that image, first descending from Embarcadero sharply downwards, then the gradient lowering, becoming flat for a long stretch, turning up, until the entire car slowed down as it would grind up onto the port of Oakland.

No more changes to BART have been made since.

Except: BART has gotten louder.

Summers ago, a friend got injured and became extremely sensitive to any loud noises. And I woke up one day to find my eustachian tubes blocked. On the return journeys after my visits to them in Oakland, the jitter of the tracks would become a quake, announcing the depths of the bay like doomsday trumpets, popping my ears open... seeming? seeming to become everything, the nausea of the train ride and the only sound you can hear become a singular feeling.

You can look at your signal-less phones at the same social media feed frozen since you entered the tunnel, or out at the never-ending walls with lights that flash at you but never for more than a moment for the eternity of your journey, as if almost by accident, you are never outside the range of their radiating bulbs, one thousand simulations of the sun rising and setting instantaneously, and what you hear erases all your unheard thoughts: not some abstract sound where you cannot tell the air from the AirPods like half the time in waking life, but the feeling of sound rattling through your cheekbones, your skull, and right down into your mind.

That summer was when I had learned the path of the train and that helped, I'd know when we would be in the never-ending middle stretch, and when it was almost over - the journey became less torturous. I learned to anticipate hope.

The train, taking a moment more than I know it should have, bores through overground; which end of this infinitely long train I sit on, I do not know, but the black walls reveal themselves to be grey and concrete. We climb up, the train struggling and stuttering against the tracks, to a plateau above the surroundings. The city I just left becomes visible in the distance.

The trails of fog, descending into the urban canyons and hills of San Francisco, settle over it like a hand, grip the town with wrinkled, swirling fingers, the flesh extending in all directions, splitting and merging, until its translucent nails fade away into colors, forms, and shapes once again. They hold tightly, crushing with the weight of their weightlessness. This hand emerging from somewhere beyond the bodies of the unseen hill is stemmed up into the silver sky, the grey and the white stapled by the dark metallic edges of Sutro tower.

The hand cannot hide everything in its palm: the city is still there, as I remember, not reduced to a blue circle on a map. The world in my window does not comply with the distortions the train has drawn through it, organizing the Bay around station dots and line axes. From in here, the world outside my window is not the world.

Here on the other end of the Bay, I find myself in a game world of the docks below, sections of the city I have never been in. Only game worlds are this organized, this intentional, this well-crafted. Only human hands would cordon off piers and docks so neatly, and only it would feel this unreal, this irrelevant. Through the window, you can see warehouses but no people: plenty of machinery but no one to operate it, endless rows of containers and steely grey cranes grazing over them like giraffes, gripping the earth with four steel limbs, their necks disappearing into the clouds. This container farm is followed by an area of nothing but pickup trucks, then an area of nothing but train tracks, then an area of nothing but more white containers. Fortunately, there is nothing organic to feign here.

As the train moves on, the distant hills in Berkeley stay static. A permanent background pinned at the horizon like a retro game, hiding that nothing lies beyond: picturesque cardboard walls of distant peaks, the houses on them reduced to square, pixelated white and yellow lights on the green treeline, unreachable. I can't really go there and for me there is no reason to go there, and I don't know who I would go there to visit, or what kind of people live there that I would visit, or how you come to even know such people that you go visit. To my mind, living so far from the stations must be not living at all.

It's probably more expensive to live next to train stations, but less expensive to live next to train lines. That's what I had thought on my first BART ride through here. That's what I thought now. That that's all there was to think about. Under the West Oakland stop suspended in the air, it's the same buses always waiting for me - 604, 404, 508, 064 - between them spanning the entirety of the East Bay but today I don't need them.

Another plunge into the earth

Another lunge of the train

I emerge in the middle of Oakland, and it is a different season here. Walking out of the station, it is a pleasant surprise that the city is real, that it has not disappeared. In fact, it is perfectly intact as if not a leaf has moved since you left, if you had been tracking all the leaves in the city. The people are the ones who usually disappear, but the city remains, will remain. It has not forgotten you, but only because it cannot remember anyone.

Memories collapse, but human hands have built things much stronger. Glass shatters to shards, steel bends to rods, bricks grind to dust, but memories dissolve without rubble. All the doorways that held meaning become forever locked, housefronts become screens.

The only faces I recognize are the edifices.