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 can hear 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 trembling ground shakes the memories loose from my head and 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. When was the last time I was here?

I step closer to the edge as the train rushes by, expecting the wind to follow, but there isn't any: none of the piercing gusts of the world 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 though passing 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.

I leap over the inch-sized seam that separates the platform from the train floor as if it's forgotten, as if it's 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. A blink of darkness, and when the train riders open their eyes, we're at the next station. As the train brakes, this new world is still spinning into existence: the floor, seats, 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 this route changed 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, 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 dove and arose.

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'd fall over if you ran. It went flat for a third of the way, then climbed back. Returning to the city, I remodeled the BART in that image: the track descending sharply from Embarcadero, the gradient easing, going flat for a long stretch, then turning up, until the entire car slowed, grinding up onto the Port of Oakland. No more changes to BART have been made since. Except the BART has gotten louder.

Summers ago, a friend was 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 visiting 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 fusing to a single feeling.

You can look at your signal-less phone, at the same social media feed frozen since you entered the tunnel, or out at the infinite walls with lights that flash momentarily for the eternity of your journey. As if almost by accident, you're never outside the range of the 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 can't 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 I 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 longer than I know it should, bores through to 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, 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 the city like a hand, gripping the town with wrinkled, swirling fingers, the flesh extending in all directions, splitting and merging, until the 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 body of the unseen hills, stems 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 it, not reduced to a blue circle on a map. The world does not comply with the distortions the train has drawn across 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 looking down into 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 that would feel so unreal, so 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 here to feign.

As the train moves on, the distant hills in Berkeley stay static, pinned at the horizon to hide that nothing lies beyond. The window scrolls past them like an '80s video game: 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 even come to know such people that you go visit. To my mind, living so far from the stations must be not living at all.

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 entire East Bay but I don't need any today. 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 first thought. That's what I think now. That that's all there is to think about.

Another plunge into the earth

Another lunge of the train

I emerge in the middle of Oakland, and it's a different season here. Walking out of the station, I'm surprised that the city is real, that it hasn't disappeared. In fact it's 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 rusts to flakes, 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.