Firmament

“Second place! How wonderful!”

I must have been dreaming and sleeping heavy enough to drool, as my frigid, saliva soaked hand is what I sensed first, then the shaking of my body - rattling really….I don’t remember getting on the subway though, but I did leave the performance hall right after the competition finished. The rattling gave me a slight headache too. Anthony must have let me go after the judges read out the winners, he knows I can’t socialize with everyone … but I do remember seeing Elizabeth surrounded by joyous conversation and praise for first place. She asked for me, but I couldn’t tell you if we ever talked or if I dreamt that.

For someone who had just woken up on the subway alone, I was pretty proud of myself for being calm. I had my bag with me, resting behind my heels, and despite the openness of being in my practice clothing with only a sheer shawl, I felt no eyes on me. Even the discomfort of my lack of footwear wasn’t a problem, though the tights were beginning to have runs.

The calm feeling died out quickly and the stomach-drop of fear forced me to fall hard on the floor.

The sensations of being on the subway were there of course, I think that’s why I didn’t react at all to them. Them … the businessmen, the mother and baby, the old woman, a homeless man and many more people, they had been chattering indistinctly in the seats next to my own since I woke up and yet I didn’t bother to pay them any mind. They seemed like the normal Manhattan bunch. Minus their heads.

I try to keep that pitfall feeling in my chest in check as a twenty-two year old woman with plenty to be anxious about… but it did hit me very hard when I saw them. Their heads were circles: half white, half black. In the white area there were lines that followed a curve, and some circles were flipped or diagonal in position, others had different lines of size and stroke. When they spoke, if you could call their rhythmic clicking speaking, the circles spun like CDs, and the lines turned to color. Beside them, as they were mostly spread with a seat between, were little black notebooks, which they all rested one of their hands on.

“I’m dreaming. Dreaming, dreaming…” I had to self soothe.

An aggressive grasp at my own face reassured me I did not have a spinning disc head. The competition must have fucked with my sleep schedule even more than I thought for it to be this wild of a dream.

The circle-face people seemed to have no interest in me, I could touch them, even step between them, shout, scream, and whisper. It occurred to me that maybe returning to the bright orange seats and closing my eyes once more would wake me or at least reset the dream or the people. Anything would do.

I tried, Lord knows I did - I shut out all light with my hands and pushed my shoulders up and in my ears multiple times. Each a failure and it seemed like the clicking sounds were more prominent.

Close them and keep them closed, Ada. Only a dream. Ugh, stop it!

The circle people are only on this side of the car. You could sit on the other side. Or you could move cars… but the subway is moving so fast. No… is it slowing?

A bell rang in a gentle set of tones, forcing my eyes open. The loudspeaker bellowed out static and a soft female voice began:

“Please place your journal on the floor. Your evaluation will begin promptly.”

I didn’t even have a journal with me at the concert hall. “Evaluation! For what, insanity?”

The circle people set down their black notebooks in a simultaneous thunk. Another pitfall feeling came, like maybe this was a stunt to tease me or I’d be punished with no journal and I’d be stuck on the subway forever with no human face to look at besides my own. I could have been knocked into a coma. The last thing I remember was talking with Elizabeth. I could have passed out from built-up exhaustion and hit my head hard enough for the latter to be the case.

Really the only thing left to do was to sob, loudly and heavily. I’d be ignored, as I had already assured the circle people could not see me. The tears were fat and hot and I just screamed and shuddered. The crying did me good I think, cause a man appeared beneath the salty blur, on the other side of the subway car. He had the notebooks with him, stacked neatly. He was dressed differently too, in an open, off-white, wide-sleeved kimono with black leaves printed by the hems and dark gray underclothes like that of a calligrapher I had seen in Central Park once. He was looking down, marking up one of the journal’s final pages. A strand of hair escaped its place behind his ear.

He reached for another book after tucking the previous one away with the pile to his left, opened it, and glanced up. It was exciting to see him, to see another person, but he clearly didn’t feel the same. He had been so relaxed and I must have ruined it.

“Where… is your mask? And your journal?”

Mask? Does he mean the circles? No - you ask the questions. This is your coma or dream or whatever.

“Tell me what this place is! Am I dreaming?” I burst out. He seemed so astonished and excited to see me it was almost flattering. I moved on. “Who are you? Why don’t you look like them?”

He looked up and down the car and attempted to hide his joy. “Them? You see them? Everyone in the car?”

“Of course I do! This is my dream, right?”

He stroked the books to his right and smiled kindly. “No, your life has ended.”

Ended… finished. Nothing after…

Mom… Rhea… Not ever again… I won’t see…

I had cried out everything already. Truly it was astounding; I wouldn’t get to cut and bruise up my feet for the sake of showing a beautiful love written by an old dead man, kiss and hold someone, be strung up in a corset, taste soda and be burned in the nose by it. Nothing more.

“Do you remember before?” He asked. “This is the most excitement I’ve had in hundreds of years. They have all been Benham’s discs since the beginning. We will have to figure this out together.”

Oh, that’s what they are called. I remember now, seeing them in chemistry. I remember almost failing, I remember moving to my performing arts school in Michigan, I remember kissing Joanna after graduation, I remember my professor holding my hair and my wrists in the studio, I remember cutting it all away, the stares, eating only a little, trying to hide away my own organs.

I remember Elizabeth and her story. We trained in the same space, after all.

I remember performing at Camellia Concert Hall and winning the twenty-thousand dollar check for second place over her struggling, fragile, and beautiful cousin. Enough for her to end my life, to poison me. Couldn’t you have killed the judges, Liz? Maybe you did.

I got up, crossed over the subway car's floor and shoved the smaller stack of journals over to give myself space beside the man. He seemed so thrilled still, and it was very calming.

“I remember before. My name is Ada Davis. I think someone killed me cause I won a prize they wanted to combine with someone else.” I slumped down the plastic bench. “Is something going to happen to me without a mask or a book?”

“Hmm, probably. I cannot pass judgement from your own story of your life, it would be too subjective. The mask is there so I am not seen by those who have died and so that I do not make your appearance a factor.”

I had to reach up and touch him by the stubble on his lips. He seemed like everyone else in the world and I just wanted one final feel of skin before the fiery pits of hell or reincarnation as a pet-store fish to humble me.

“Do you have a name?” Maybe I could take this moment with me to the fish tank and relive it til I got flushed away. Maybe I wouldn’t even get to keep it and I’d forget. But I would have made this man or reaper feel something.

His cheeks warmed in a blush. My chest bubbled and I grinned, excitedly, like I had unimaginable power.

“I… I think I am called….Sei-”

The subway began to crack and break. One by one the circle people rose like marionettes, even the small children and elderly ones. I grabbed Sei’s hand - maybe there was more to his name, I still needed to know - and we ran like young children do when they are caught stealing. Amazingly, in the dimension of judgement or wherever this subway was, I could feel the pain of my bandaged feet and sore ankles, yet the desire to steal away Sei was so necessary and important to me that nothing of before mattered. I felt like I was doing something socially wrong and morally right. We dashed to one end of the car and the overweight businessmen and the mothers and little girls and boys reached for us and ran over each other like cattle.

“Sei-what?!” I screamed over the thunder of people and the foundation collapsing. “There is more to your name, right?”

“Seishiro! I was someone! I sold flowers in Edo!”

“So was I! I was a ballerina in New York!”

I giggled and shrieked as we passed through cars. There were other people like Seishiro, all different races and ages and appearances, passing judgement - and more circle people. I was causing a catastrophe and that would probably be what sent me to a horrible afterlife, yet I didn’t give a single fuck. Order deserves some chaos and chaos deserves some order!

The cars continued on, but I supposed they would as long as people kept dying. Seishiro pulled me to his chest when we were between cars, the subway moving at speeds so high it put the rail lines of France and China to shame. I felt my short curls whipping with the wind and Seishiro’s robe was puffed up in the rushes of air. The herd of Benham’s disc people were piling like maggots and we fell into blackness, the infinite subway line continuing its course above us. Our descent sent us so far that nothing could be seen anymore but each other.

“I don’t know!” Seishiro cried and held me tightly. “I don’t know if this keeps going! I’ve never been out of evaluation!”

“Are you going to let go of me?” I caressed his olive, beauty-marked face.

He bawled harder and his tears beaded off of him like a reversed rain. “No, Ada!”

The nothingness did become something. Our falling turned into rising up out of a crystalline lake and we were surrounded by creatures and nature of glorious, indescribable color and welcomed into a bed of woven vines.

My feet healed. The pitfall feeling inside I once had and the actual pitfall would never return to us, and we were happy and glittered like the sun and moon of the firmament.