Red Room Where the Writers Are

Issue/Publication: (All rights reserved)

Short Story

November 12, 2005

 The paint wasn’t even dry when Martin moved into the new apartment.  The manager had complained that the apartment wasn’t ready.  Martin didn’t care.  There was much to do.  There were many things to move.  Eight plates; four large, four small.  Five glass tumblers, each with a capacity of ten fluid ounces.  Two soup bowls, six spoons, seven forks, five knives in various degrees of sharpness.  He was considering eliminating half his plates and a third of his cutlery because he never got around to using them and they took up, by his estimates, forty-eight cubic inches of volume.  But until then, he would carefully arrange them in the cabinets of his new kitchen.   

He carried thirty-six boxes one at a time up sixteen steps from the rental van at the curb into the apartment.  His apartment.  His last residence had been a flat he had shared with a slovenly man for two years, four months, and sixteen days.  This year’s raise had elevated his take-home pay by precisely three point two six percent, enough to where he could justify having his own place.   

He carried the next box into the bathroom.  One by one, he removed each small bottle, vial, or box and put them in their place.  He reached into the box and pulled out his toothbrush.  Where other people would see clumps of bristles, Martin saw numbers.  Twenty-five bristles per clump.  Thirty clumps.  Seven-hundred and fifty bristles on the brush.   

He allowed himself five hours of rest that night, but sleep would not come.  Instead, he was beset by swirls of numbers.  The city was two hundred and thirty-four square miles.   Eighty-six people had lost their lives by violent means last year in the city.  It employed four hundred and twenty garbage collectors driving sixty-two garbage trucks.   Staring at the popcorn ceiling, formulae swirled in the crenellations.  Outside his window the fluorescent sign for the liquor store below flickered twelve times per second.  The rate of traffic on the street outside was a normally-distributed bistatic variance with a median of eighty-six vehicles per hour.    

The subway was new.  Actually, the subway was old, much older than him.  But he was riding a new line to work this morning.  It was the same work in the same actuarial firm, but there were different people on the train, different ads, different station layouts.  He had been through it before, on infrequent occasions in the past, and once again the previous weekend as a dry run, but it was still exciting.  He closed his eyes and listened to the click-clack of the seams in the rails.  He noticed things.  He noticed far more than people would believe.  He noticed when his boss got a new tie and changed up his usual 4-3-4 cycle of tie rotation.  He also noticed that his boss tended to introduce a new tie at approximately the same time every year; Martin inferred that date to be his birthday.  He noticed the shoes of the person sitting across from him were worn differently then most people’s, thus inferring a congenital spinal deformity.  He noticed sounds, too.  Like the sounds of the train.  This train sounded slightly different than the trains on his old line.  He found this to be odd.  Trains were not dedicated to one particular line.  The sound was vaguely familiar.  He traced the memory back to high school, where against his wishes he was enrolled in a metal-shop class.  He found it painfully dreary to make ashtrays and ball-peen hammers, until one day the teacher brought in a borrowed numerically-controlled lathe.  Instructions went into it in the form of numbers, and out of it would come precisely-machined artifacts.  And the sound of the tool carving away at the metal was just like the sound he was hearing now.   

When the noise ratcheted up to an ear-splitting shriek, followed by a brittle fracturing sound and then a horrible grinding, Martin was the only one not surprised.  The car lurched and shook, throwing people to the floor.  The lights flickered and died, and by the time the grinding noise stopped and the train ceased shimmying, there was a distinct smell of smoke in the air.   

As might be expected for a group of people stuck in a metal box far below ground without light, most of the passengers began oscillating between hysteria and catatonia.  While the man sitting next to Martin stared glassy-eyed, the woman with the uneven shoes began screaming and running down the aisle, stumbling on and trampling those unfortunates who had fallen.   

The train conductor was not one of these people. After the emergency lights fluttered on, his voice crackled over the intercom. ”Ladies and gentlemen, we appear to have had a malfunction.  Remain calm.  Please open the doors using the emergency latch, exit the train, and walk to the nearest platform.  We have deactivated the third rail, but still please be careful in the dark. I’m going to turn on the emergency lights now.”   A reddish glow suffused the train as battery-powered backup lights fluttered on.  Martin promptly stood, walked to the door with only one stumble over a misplaced shin, and pulled the emergency latch to slide the door open.  The other passengers, sensing a means of escape, picked themselves up and started bustling out of the car, coughing on the growing volume of smoke.   

The passengers stood in the cramped area between the train car and the wall of the tunnel.  The air was better here, albeit only slightly.  A woman said “Which way do we go?”   

“We should go back,” someone said.  People were coughing more as the smoke grew denser, and no one seemed inclined to argue much.  But then Martin spoke up.   

“No,” he said.  “We should keep going forward.”  People turned to him, their eyes glinting dully in the emergency lights.  

“Why?” the woman said, “We don’t know how far it is.”   

“Yes we do,” Martin said.  “From Driscoll station to Amherst station there are two hundred and forty seams in the rail.  After we left Driscoll, we had gone past one hundred seventy-three before the train stopped.  We’re much closer to the Amherst station.”  He looked around, expecting them to agree; it was so clear to him. Instead, he was rewarded with blank stares.  “Besides,” he continued, “Amherst is deeper.  There are seventy-six steps on the staircase in Driscoll, but there are ninety-four in Amherst.  That means the smoke will drift up towards Driscoll.  Come on.”   

He started walking down the tunnel in the train’s direction of travel, no longer caring whether the others had begun to follow him.  He was back to counting.  One hundred seventy-three seams, plus about four more while the train was grinding along the track. Sixty-three to go.  Each rail was about twenty-two feet long, meaning that they were about one thousand, three hundred and eighty-six feet from the next station.  If each pace was about two feet long, that meant six hundred ninety-three paces to the next station.   

After he passed the front of the train, it grew terribly dark, so he ran his hand along the rough cement wall of the tunnel for guidance as he counted off the paces, stepping carefully over the railroad ties.  The air was stale and damp, but at least there was no smoke.  At four hundred paces he began to see a faint glow around the curve ahead, and by five hundred he could make out the details of the train platform.   

He stepped on the utility stair leading up to the platform at Amherst station at pace number six hundred fifty-four.  As he passed firefighters and paramedics racing the other way, he reflected that a five-point-nine percent margin of error was not bad, considering the circumstances.